Five Wounds: Dogs

 

Dogs occupy a prominent and sinister role in Five Wounds, partly because of events in the autobiographical backstory to the novel. But there are other reasons for this canine presence. Dogs are ubiquitous in modern Venice, which is actually quite baffling given the lack of parks in the city. Hence Venetian streets are notoriously littered with dog shit, which no-one ever bothers to clean up. Considering this, I imagined a variation on Kipling's animal tales ('How the cat got his tail', 'How the camel got his hump', etc.), in which a child might ask her father, 'Why are there so many dogs in Venice, daddy, and why are they so spoilt?', and the answer might be, 'Well, daughter, once upon a time, the dogs ruled this city, and they still have their ancestral privileges, although they have no real power any more'.

Below I review a menagerie of fictional and literary dogs, many of whom were barking away down in my subconscious as I wrote. I am just listing the ones that come immediately to mind now as I write. I didn't ever make a comprehensive list, and I omit here several relevant examples already mentioned in Dan's post about the Black Dog.

The most explicit historical reference to dogs in Five Wounds is to a passage from the Hierogylphics of Horapollo, which is quoted by Crow in the chapter 'A Meeting of Minds', as follows (I may have tweaked the text slightly to fit the context; I don't have the original in front of me):

When the Egyptians wish to indicate a scribe, or a prophet, or an embalmer, or the spleen, or a judge, they draw the hieroglyph of a dog. A scribe, since he who wishes to become an accomplished scribe must bark continually and be fierce and show favours to none, just like dogs. And a prophet, because the dog looks intently beyond all other beasts upon the images of the gods, like a prophet. And an embalmer, because he looks upon the bodies which he has taken care of naked and dissected. And the spleen, since the dog alone among other animals has a very light spleen. If death of madness overcomes him, it happens because of his spleen. And a judge, because as the dog gazes intently upon the images of the gods, so the judge of ancient times contemplated the king in his nakedness.

Horapollo's treatise is a neo-Platonic interpretion of Egyptian hieroglyphs from the early Christian era. It was very influential in the Renaissance, but it is based upon almost entirely erroneous premises, a fact that was not proved conclusively until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in the nineteenth century. Horapollo therefore fits the theme of interpretation / misinterpretation that runs through Five Wounds, which is why I was reading the treatise in the first place, but then I came across the passage on dogs, which could be made to fit my five protagonists.

Other dog references are less openly acknowledged, like the famous last line from Kafka's The Trial, 'Like a dog', which is quoted above in a comic-strip version of the novel, adapted by David Mairowitz and Chantal Montellier. The phrase is Joseph K.'s final reflection upon himself, and upon his treatment at the hands of the law, as the executioner's knife descends. Here the dog is a figure of the abject, of the pariah, who is excluded from human society, like the outlaw of medieval legend, whose figure is the wolf.

Several dogs in Dante's Inferno are rendered below in William Blake's illustrations. The first image is of the three-headed Cerberus, the guardian of the underworld from classical mythology (Dante's text, like Five Wounds, jumbles its mythological and historical frames of reference). In the Inferno, Cerberus torments the souls of the gluttonous, whose fate is elucidated in Dorothy L. Sayers' commentary, as follows (p. 107):

The Gluttonous: The surrender to sin which began with mutual indulgence leads by an imperceptible degradation to solitary self-indulgence. Of this kind of sin, the Gluttons are chosen as the image. Here is no reciprocity and no communication; each soul grovels alone in the mud, without heeding his neighbours - "a sightless company", Dante calls them. .... [Cerberus] is the image of uncontrolled appetite; the Glutton, whose appetite preyed upon people and things, is seen to be, in fact, the helpless prey on which that appetite gluts itself.



Later in the Inferno, Dante and Virgil travel through the Wood of the Suicides, in which the souls of the inhabitants are imprisoned in sterile trees. The trees cannot speak, unless their branches are broken, whereupon they bleed, and they can whistle through the coagulating blood, until it clots, when they are once again condemned to silence. Also trapped in the Wood of the Suicides are the Profligates, who run through it, pursued eternally by black dogs (aha!), and in fleeing, they tear the branches from the bleeding trees as they pass.



In the Inferno, dogs are therefore associated with the gluttonous and the profligate, and the latter group is also associated with suicide: All these ideas can also be linked to the theme of addiction.

At the beginning of the Inferno, dogs are also associated with avarice via the figure of one of the three beasts that terrify Dante in canto 1 (see illustration below): the She-Wolf, who can only be vanquished by the prophesied Greyhound, the Master-hound. Here is Sayers again on this image (p. 75):

The Beasts [Leopard, Lion and She-Wolf]: These are the images of sin. They may be identified with Lust, Pride, and Avarice respectively, or with the sins of Youth, Manhood, and Age; but they are perhaps best thought of as the images of the three types of sin .... The Greyhound has been much argued about. I think it has both an historical and a spiritual significance. Historically, it is perhaps the [p. 76] image of some hoped-for political saviour who should establish the just World-Empire. Spiritually, the Greyhound, which has the attributes of God (“wisdom, love, and power”), is probably the image of the reign of the Holy Ghost on earth – the visible Kingdom of God for which we pray in the Lord’s Prayer.



The following passage from Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 152, refers to Albrecht Durer's engraving of Melancholy (which features a sleeping - no doubt dreaming - dog), and which 'portrays the dangers of excessive study', a highly relevant theme for Gabriella and Crow:

One of the properties assembled around Durer's figure of Melancholy is the dog. The similarity between the condition of the melancholic, ... and the state of rabies, is not accidental. According to ancient tradition 'the spleen is dominant in the organism of the dog'. This he has in common with the melancholic. If the spleen, an organ believed to be particularly delicate, should deteriorate, then the dog is said to lose its vitality and become rabid. In this respect it symbolizes the darker aspect of the melancholy complexion. On the other hand the shrewdness and tenacity of the animal were borne in mind, so as to permit its use as the image of the tireless investigator and thinker. 'In his commentary on this hieroglyph Piero Valeriano says explicitly that the dog which "faciem melancholicam prae se ferat" [bears a melancholy face] would be the best at tracking and running'. In Durer's engraving [of Melancholy], especially, the ambivalence of this is enriched by the fact that the animal is depicted asleep: bad dreams come from the spleen, but prophetic dreams are also the prerogative of the melancholic.

 

Coincidentally, Dan also discusses Durer's Melancholy in relation to another illustration for Five Wounds, although it was not a reference that either of us ever mentioned to each other.

Another source I came across in the British Library in 2006, while I was researching Goya, is an English translation by Abraham Fleming of a Latin treatise by Johannes Caius, On English Dogs, first published in 1576. The following passage is from p. 17:

Of the dog, called the Thievish dog; in Latin, Canis furax.

The like to that whom we have rehearsed, is the Thievish Dog, which at the mandate and bidding of his master fleereth and leereth in the night: hunting conies by the air, which is leavened with their savour; and conveyed to the sense of smelling by the means of the wind blowing towards him. During all which space of his hunting he will not bark, lest he should be prejudicial to his own advantage. And thus watching and snatching in course as many conies as his master will suffer him; and beareth them to his master’s standing. The farmers of the country, and uplandish dwellers, call this kind of dog a Night Cur; because he hunteth in the dark.

I took one of the running heads in Five Wounds from this passage: 'Leavened With Their Savour'. Interpreted in the context of the novel, this passage might also be a way of linking the character of Cur, the dog-man, to that of Magpie, the nocturnal thief.

Finally, the barking of dogs represents the idea of non-sense or 'noise' (as opposed to 'signal' in information theory), as in the following passage from A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower, in which an expert witness testifies in court during an obscenity trial that serves as the novel's climax. The book on trial here is Babbletower, an allegory written by one of the characters within Byatt's novel, excerpts of which interrupt the frame narrative, along with several other competing, interpolated texts:

Well, let us start with the title. La Tour Bruyarde translates as the noisy, or shouting, or howling tower – the word ‘bruyard’ suggests the noise made by hound dogs. It is an image of the Tower of Babel which was constructed to displace God from Heaven, and was punished for its presumption by having a spirit of discord sent amongst its members, so that their languages were confused, they could no longer understand each other.

Inspirations: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

“[I]f one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours”. 

Donna Tartt, The Secret History, p. 184

“He thou dost gaze on, pierced by the triple stake, Counselled the Pharisees ’twas expedient One man should suffer for the people’s sake.

Naked, transverse, barring the road’s extent, He lies; and all who pass, with all their load Must tread him down; such is his punishment.

In this same ditch lie stretched in this same mode His father-in-law, and all the Sanhedrin Whose counsel sowed for the Jews the seed of blood.”

Then I saw Virgil stand and marvel at him Thus racked for ever on the shameful cross In the everlasting exile.

Dante, Hell, canto 23, lines 115-26, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers

I read Dante as an undergraduate, in the Penguin translation by Dorothy L. Sayers, who is better known as the writer of a series of detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, but was also an accomplished scholar. She not only translated Dante for the Penguin Classics series, but also the early-medieval French chanson, The Song of Roland.

The Sayers translation of Dante is aggressively odd, because, rather than writing in idiomatic English, she used conscious archaisms. It’s not quite cod-Shakespearian, but ‘dost’ and ‘twas’ were verging on the ridiculous even in 1949, when ‘Hell’ (as the first volume was bluntly translated) was first published. The odd locutions were further exaggerated by tortuous syntax, which was the result of Sayers’ ambitious (some would say foolhardy) decision to retain the terza rima structure and stress patterns of the original verse as far as was possible in English.

Terza rima is an Italian verse form of great elegance, which uses the rhyme scheme ABA BCB CDC DED etc. I always think of this interlocking structure in visual terms as being like a dovetail joint in woodwork. Rhymes are ubiquitous in Italian poetry, which is one of the reasons why English poets have always felt obliged to use them, i.e. because of the influence of Italian models like the sonnet, and in spite of native Anglo-Saxon precedents that were instead based on alliteration and assonance, but – for technical reasons it would be tedious to explain here – it is actually much more difficult to find rhymes in English than it is in Italian. In an epic work like Dante's, this is a serious problem, and one that becomes progressively more difficult for a translator to resolve satisfactorily.

Thus Sayers’ sets herself an impossible task, in the pursuit of which she frequently ties herself up in lexical knots, but, even so, I find her translation more compelling than most of the modern editions, which abandon the attempt and therefore inevitably render the verse as elevated prose. Sayers’ translation instead treats the text as something alien, something fundamentally other, that can only be expressed in English via a series of violent and artificial transformations (a pity she never had a go at Ovid). Some of it is truly risible, like her decision to render the sections of Provencal dialect as Scots brogue, but even there, you have to admire her chutzpah.

The crowning glory of the Sayers translation is not, however, the verse itself, but the extensive commentary, which takes up as much space as the poetry. Sayers has a great advantage over other editions here, in that she was a committed Christian who took all the theology very seriously, as, if not necessarily the literal truth, then certainly an essential truth, which is inseparable from the allegorical cast of mind that informs The Divine Comedy. In the Introduction to Hell, Sayers quotes Dante’s own explanation of allegorical interpretation.

The meaning of this work [The Divine Comedy] is not simple ... for we obtain one meaning from the letter of it, and another from that which the letter signifies; and the first is called literal, but the other allegorical or mystical. And to make this matter of treatment clearer, it may be studied in the verse: “When Israel came out of Egypt and the House of Jacob from among a strange people, Judah was his sanctuary and Israel his dominion”. For if we regard the letter alone, what is set before us is the exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt in the days of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, we are shown the conversion of the soul from the grief and wretchedness of sin to the state of grace; if the anagogical, we are shown the departure of the holy soul from the thraldom of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory. And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may all be called in general allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical.

The subject of the whole work, then, taken merely in the literal sense is “the state of the soul after death straightforwardly affirmed”, for the development of the whole work hinges on and about that. But if, indeed, the work is taken allegorically, its subject is: “Man, as by good or ill deserts, in the exercise of his free choice, he becomes liable to rewarding or punishing Justice”  

(quoted in Hell, ‘Introduction’, pp. 14-15).

(The last term in this schema, ‘analogical’, means using the literal event to figure a spiritual reality, or sometimes more specifically a truth relating to the fate of the soul after death.)

In the 1949 Penguin edition, the translation and the commentary are two sides of the same effort of interpretation, in which re-enactment is both the enabling technique and the goal, an endeavour to which Sayers is willing to commit herself, because, for the most part, she shares (or believes herself to share) Dante’s presuppositions and beliefs.

Sayers applies Dante’s four-part interpretative schema to the passage quoted above, which describes the fate meted out in hell to Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest who decided to seek Christ’s execution, who is crucified eternally (the same punishment he wished upon Christ). He is also laid on the ground to be trod underfoot by the Hypocrites, whose step is heavy indeed, since they are all wearing lead cloaks. (Such efficiency is common in the moral economy of Hell, where, for example, the Profligates run through the Wood of the Suicides, pursued eternally by black dogs, and in fleeing, they tear the branches from the bleeding trees in which the souls of the Suicides are imprisoned.) With regard to Caiaphas, Sayers explains:

This image lends itself peculiarly well to Dante’s fourfold system of interpretation ... (1) Literal: the punishment of Caiaphas after death; (2) Allegorical: the condition of the Jews in this world, being identified with the Image they rejected and the suffering they inflicted – “crucified for ever in the eternal exile”; (3) Moral: the condition in this life of the man who sacrifices his inner truth to expediency (e.g. his true vocation to money-making, or his true love to a political alliance), and to whom the rejected good becomes at once a heaven from which he is exiled and a rack on which he suffers; (4) Anagogical: the state, here and hereafter, of the soul which rejects God, and which can know God only as wrath and terror, while at the same time it suffers the agony of eternal separation from God, who is its only true good (Hell, p. 217).

I have only read through The Divine Comedy once, and only in Sayers’ translation (although I can at least claim to have read all of it, i.e. I did struggle through the Purgatory and Paradise after Hell). Several passages and images from it have remained with me, but, with all due respect to Dante, it is through the force of Sayers’ imagination that his original lives for me. It is the relationship between the translation and the commentary that is truly compelling. It is her effort to understand, and to communicate that understanding, which moves me as much as anything in the poem itself.

Sayers’ relationship with Dante is therefore quite different to the relationship between Eric Newton and Tintoretto, as I described it in a recent post. She proves that it is possible to collaborate with someone who has been dead for hundreds of years (something I also tried to do in Pistols! Treason! Murder!). As a postscript, I might also mention two artistic ‘collaborations’ with Dante: the first is a series of watercolours by William Blake, to which I may dedicate a subsequent post; the second is another edition of the Inferno, now long since out of print, which was both translated and illustrated by the artist Tom Phillips, whose work in A Humument is also an important precedent for some of the features of Five Wounds.