Five Wounds: The Art of Grief

[N. B. When I originally wrote this post, the essay referred to below was available online, but I have since removed it.]

Five Wounds is a parable as well as a fairy tale. Throughout, it refers to an invisible, suppressed source: ‘The Art of Grief', an abandoned essay on the deaths of my parents, but this essay is never acknowledged directly within the novel.

‘The Art of Grief’ is a key, which unlocks hidden meanings in Five Wounds. However, the relationship between the two texts is more complex than that of a riddle to its solution or a joke to its punch line, because Five Wounds has an independent life of its own. Its characters act according to their own natures, and make their own choices. They are not mere ciphers, condemned to act out episodes of my biography in a disguised, pathological form. The characters may be fantastic, but they are real within their own world, even when they unknowingly refer to events beyond its borders. 

In this case, then, one text does not solve the other. Rather, Five Wounds places stolen fragments of ‘The Art of Grief’ in a new setting, which transforms their meaning, as the Venetians studded the façade of the church of San Marco with pieces of marble looted from Constantinople. Here, however, the arrangement is reversed. It is not the loot that shines brightly, but the container, within which the quotations are safely hidden away, like bones in a reliquary.

Five Wounds: Archetypes

We often think of fairy tale characters in terms of archetypes, but many such characters – the werewolf, say – are now so over familiar that they have been tamed imaginatively. They have lost their teeth. One way around this problem is to retrace the genealogy of a particular figure, and return to its primitive prehistory rather than use its domesticated modern variant.

For example, Five Wounds features a character, Cur, who is not a werewolf, but is nonetheless animated by the same conflicts that drive the character type of the werewolf (human vs. animal, reason vs. instinct, free will vs. involuntary response). Cur is not affected by a full moon; nor is he ever physically transformed into an animal. Rather, he has a mutant strain of rabies. This links his condition to very old ideas about the physiological origin of anger, which was once thought to be caused by the heating of the blood. That’s why ‘in cold blood’ is still a synonym for ruthless premeditation, as opposed to reactive, spontaneous violence, which is by contrast ‘hot-blooded’. Anger was thought to make men brutish, and in particular to make them canine, so rabies was understood as an acute case of infectious anger in its most concentrated form. [1] 

 [1] These ideas are explained in more detail in Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta and Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance.

Five Wounds: A Fairy Tale

I'm reposting below and in several subsequent posts a cache of material on my first novel, Five Wounds, which I am about to re-publish in a revised second edition. It's a dark fantasy told in the mode of a fable or folk tale.

Traditional fairy tales have a kind of casual viciousness entirely alien to modern sensibilities, which distinguishes them not only from comic books (with which they otherwise have much in common), but also from the lavish gore of modern crime fiction. In fairy tales, there is never any attempt to ‘explain’ cruelty in psychological terms. It is not motivated by trauma and it does not result in trauma. It is simply there, an accepted part of the fictional world, just as starvation, premature death and casual violence were an accepted part of the lives of those who first listened to such tales in pre-modern Europe.

The violence in fairy tales is described in a matter-of-fact tone or (even more scandalously) is relished for its comic possibilities. Its cruelty is thus doubled. The narrative not only subjects the characters to all manner of ghastly events, but it refuses to acknowledge their right to be psychologically damaged, or to grieve.

This use of violence underlines the fact that fairy tales are not 'realistic,', by which I don't just mean that they feature magical plot devices. In general, their events do not occur as a result of modern, scientific relations between cause and effect; their characters are not explicable according to modern, post-Freudian notions of personhood; and the context in which their narratives occur is often composed only of a few isolated and impressionistic details. To put this last point in terms familiar to consumers of modern science-fiction and fantasy novels, fairy tales are not at all interested in 'worldbuilding.' Connections - between successive events, characters or apparently separate contextual details - are often made according to the same principle that links the two terms in a metaphor: i.e. by means of a violent imaginative leap.

Style is not just a matter of how you write. It is also a matter of what you miss out: what you do not feel it necessary to explain. Fairy tales take this principle to an absurd extreme. The wild imaginative leaps they make, and the gaping holes in their narrative logic, are another kind of cheerful violence that matches on a formal level all the amputations and violent transformations and deaths that occur in the content of their stories. These absences, taken together, constitute their distinctive voice, but that voice, judged according to the more familiar terms of a realist narrative, sounds like that of an affectless sociopath with a tenuous grip on reality.

Five Wounds takes the disturbing contradiction between fairy tales and realist narrative as its starting point. The five protagonists begin the story as irredeemably traumatised, and this trauma manifests itself physically, as deformity, but this is their natural condition, which they take for granted, and which in turn defines the world they live in and the limits of their choices. Those choices do not change their natures, but rather reveal them. Everything is simultaneously overly literal and overly symbolic. Everything is fixed in advance and everything is subject to arbitrary reversal.

This should not be taken to imply that Five Wounds is cold or detached. On the contrary, it is a boiling pot with the lid pressed down tight.

Inspirations: The Night of the Hunter by Charles Laughton (1955)

Charles Laughton's film The Night of the Hunter (1955) has thematic concerns in common with another of my inspirations: Ray Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962).





To fully appreciate the second clip above, you have to know from the outset that Mitchum is the villain, from whom Lillian Gish is protecting the orphaned children sheltering in her house by means of the shotgun cradled across her lap. Laughton represents the conflict between these two characters (or rather, archetypes, who are defined in part by their opposed notions of God) by having them harmonise with each other while singing the same hymn, which they obviously understand in radically different ways. It is a brilliantly counter-intuitive dramatic strategy.

Simon Callow's book on The Night of the Hunter is an excellent introduction to this unique film, the only one directed by Laughton. On the film's tone and aesthetic, Callow explains (pp. 43-44):

From the beginning, Laughton had been insistent on conveying to all his collaborators the essential fairytale-like quality of the story. Everything, he told [art director Hilyard] Brown, should be seen from the boy's point of view. He accordingly designed the sets 'from the position that only children see certain things.' .... There was little pretence that a real world was being filmed, the shapely lines and symbolic details creating a highly stylised environment in which expressive power was achieved by painterly or sculptural means ....

On Mitchum as the villainous Preacher, Callow has this to say (pp. 65-66):

The performance is almost two-dimensional; both the actor and the character seem to be giving conscious performances, which lends a highly original dimension. At the risk of introducing an over-used and devalued tag, this is a Brechtian performance in the technical sense of the word - it is a demonstration of a certain kind of behaviour which promotes an analytical and critical attitude from the audience. .... Character becomes a kind of conjuring trick: the fascination comes from watching the way in which Preacher works his effects. The more naked the contradictions, the more chilling the effect.

Truffaut's initial review described the film as being like 'a horrifying news item retold by small children.' All of this recalls to me the following comment by Will Self on the worlds created in the fiction of Roald Dahl (quotation from The Guardian, 17 October 2009):

[T]here are big white spaces in Dahl-world where any realistic detailing might well be shaded in by a lesser writer; and again, in common with [Quentin] Blake’s vision, Dahl-world is at once lurid and curiously ill-defined. The passions are strong and clear – fear, hatred, avarice, love, greed (especially for sugar) – but they are played out against a backdrop that is only wonkily apprehended.

Dahl mimicked to perfection a believable child’s-eye view, that, looking up from below, sees the adult realm as foreshortened, and adult foibles as grossly elongated.

IT'S A HARD WORLD FOR LITTLE THINGS.

Five Wounds: Review in 'The Spit Press'

The Spit Press is 'Sydney's Creative Newspaper', aimed at readers who work in, or are interested in, the creative industries. Their latest issue has a review of Five Wounds by James Scott on p. 20. It's a bit difficult to locate the text in the online version, so I have copied it below. But do check out the rest of the newspaper: it offers a unique perspective on life in Sydney.

Graphic Novels, Not Just for Geeks?

Five Wounds by Jonathan Walker and Dan Hallett is atmospheric, grotesque, thrilling and tender. Certainly unlike anything else we've ever stumbled upon, this illustrated novel is a disturbing delight. Book lover James Scott had a read.

With a beautiful hardcover this 'illuminated novel' is a fantastic book to plonk on your lap in any public place, even if only to enjoy the sideways glances of passersby who seem to suspect you might at any moment turn to them, eyes dark, and incant at them in some frightening, grunting language.

Upon opening the book I was startled and initially annoyed by what at first struck me as a pretentious and over the top way to lay out the text. That is, rather like 'The Bible', complete with verse numbers. However before long, I was totally won over by the hypnotic and addictive rhythm that reads almost like poetry.

The story is set in an imaginary Venice and chronicles the complicated intrigues of five disfigured protagonists. Gabriella is a mutilated angel who struggles to decipher her prophetic dreams. Cur is a rabid `Romulus' and aquaphobe, who knows nothing other than the cult of canine mercenaries and the ghetto in which he was raised. Cuckoo is an orphan, obsessed with chance and cards, who can reshape his wax face (less weird in context than it sounds here) to resemble another's, however cannot smile without a mirror, a candle and some time. Magpie is a sickly thief and photographer, who fears direct light for blindness and yearns for a model to surrender to him completely. Undoubtedly my favourite however is Crow; a leper alchemist. Deliciously reprehensible, Crow is ruthless and fantastically clever in pursuing his extremely ambitious goals. The stories and studies of these characters intertwine with increasing intricacy as the novel builds to an immensely exciting, haunting, heartbreaking and ultimately satisfying conclusion.

The depiction of this alternative Venice is dreamy and surreal, but the author paints a world that feels completely authentic. The illuminations by Dan Hallett are a joy, and bring a lot to the book. Sometimes striking and colourful, and at other times comical and cartoonish, they reinforce the idea that this is a fairy tale for grown ups.

The writing is extremely capable and the author cleverly uses patterns and shapes modeled not only on The Good Book but also on Grimm's Fairy Tales to give the story a familiar feel that plays well against the darkness of the plot and the sometimes slightly uncomfortable, but impressive depth in characterisation. Five Wounds is also saturated with references, saturated.

All in all, a very handsome book and a story that is symphonic in its poetry, breadth and cohesion. It is tempting to think that the author lives by the same motto as one of his characters; "Either Ceasar, or nothing."

Five Wounds: Review from The Age, 15 May 2010

Review of Five Wounds from The Age, 15 May 2010, by Owen Richardson.

The template suggests an old-fashioned children's classic: handsome proportions, elegant print, fancy chapter headings, centre plates on shiny paper. But a virus has gotten in there: the illustrations are nightmarish and hermetic, calling on the Tarot, Escher, psychotic heraldry, and the text here and there is scribbled through, the nice fonts mocked by scrawled block capitals. And the story likewise takes the blackness that underpins traditional fairytales and brings it front and centre.

The last book writer Jonathan Walker and illustrator Dan Hallett collaborated on was Pistols! Treason! Murder!, a "punk history" about the life of a 17th-century Venetian spy and rogue. This book breathes something of that atmosphere, while taking the properties into a fantastical realm.

In an imaginary city-state five outsiders, each with their wounds and powers, become involved in an obscure conspiracy, five cards being played by unseen hands. There's eclecticism in the writing as well as the illustrations: the X-Men and the Bible are both here, Heart of Darkness, Calvino, and although the book is too text-based to be a graphic novel, it's in the vein of comics that happily steal from all over. This makes for instability, and the writing has its flat spots, but the book takes you places, and the illustrations are wonderful.