Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Review from History Australia

The following is another archive review of Pistols! Treason! Murder!, by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, from History Australia 5.1 (2008):

REVIEW OF JONATHAN WALKER’S PISTOLS!
TREASON! MURDER! THE RISE AND FALL OF A
MASTER SPY, MONOGRAPH AND WEBSITE

According to Iain McCalman, Jonathan Walker’s Pistols! Treason! Murder! is the ‘first true work of “punk history”’. If what is meant by ‘punk history’ is carefully stage-managed historiographical defiance, McCalman’s description is apt. At first sight, the focal point of Pistols! Treason! Murder! is Gerolamo Vano, a self-fashioned Venetian ‘general of spies’ whose life unravelled into a noose in 1622. A closer look at the text and its accompanying website, though, reveals that the work is as much about Walker’s ways of composition and historiography as it is about the shaping and pathology of self in seventeenth-century Venice.

Walker’s acknowledged sources of historiographical inspiration include Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, microhistories ranging from Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre to McCalman’s The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro and Walter Benjamin’s unfinished posthumous work, The Arcades Project. Chief among these sources perhaps is The Arcades Project, for Pistols! Treason! Murder! has the form of an apparently random series of quotations, observations, notes and interviews. Between chapters 16 to 20, for instance, we pass from excerpts from the chief source of information about Vano – file 636 in the Venetian archives – to an analysis of the meaning of ‘honour’ in seventeenth-century Venice, to the purported transcript of a conversation between Walker and two other historians in an Irish pub, to Walker’s testing of Vano’s geography from a report dated 10 April 1622 and eight possible readings of it, to a comparison of the material fabric of Venice with the chief archival sources.

The ‘arcades’ flavour of the book is reinforced by the related website, which offers browsers information on the historiographical and popular cultural sources for Walker’s writing – including songs by Johnny Cash and The Afghan Whigs – vivid colour pictures of the textures of Venice and most usefully, ‘deleted scenes’. The ‘deleted scenes’ include the papers Walker published on the project prior to the book, and excluded chapters on the spy as flaneur and intellectual history. These segments of the website, in combination with the marvellous central image by Hallett of the project as a tree of knowledge – and even temptation, given the representation of the link to file 636 as an apple – and the flip book sequence in chapter 28 of the book show that Walker’s project is as much a homage to and revisitation of visual as well as print culture.

Readers more accustomed to the conventional arrangement of biographical material according to a chronological or thematic scheme may find the book and accompanying website jarring. That, Walker would probably insist, is a good thing, for Vano’s activities cannot be rendered coherent. Archival gaps will not allow it, but moreover, as Walker claims:

Each story in Vano’s reports contains or opens up the possibility of another
that undoes or reverses it. Each collapses as a direct consequence of attempts
to shore it up. No possible scenario accounts for everything. As I read the reports,
I ‘crashed’ repeatedly: irretrievable error; the system has shut down. I
could not leave Vano alone, but he offered no answers to any questions that a
respectable historian might want to ask. Instead he demanded a more daring
and radical response, in which obsession itself becomes a strategy (p. 7).

This quote is important, for it highlights the differences between Pistols! Treason! Murder! and The Arcades Project. Many commentators have noted that Benjamin’s Project can be arranged and rearranged, and read and re-read in any number of different ways. Almost entirely absent from Benjamin’s Project are the motifs that individuals use to connect and therefore render their experiences meaningful. In Pistols! Treason! Murder!, there are at least three meaning-makers: Vano, Walker and the illustrator Dan Hallett. The Vano of Pistols! Treason! Murder! is engrossing and somewhat akin to the character of Tony Wilson in 24-Hour Party People, ascribing, erasing and re-ascribing meaning to peoples’ actions in order to place himself in a past that delivers respect and financial reward. In his world, a cough might signal betrayal and the promise of recognition and reward. Or it might simply be a cough. We can never be sure. The patterns of Vano’s rhetoric are intriguing, but ultimately only hinted at in the text. As Richard Evans noted in Kneipengespräche im Kaiserreich, the rhetorical form of intelligence reports is an important part of their meaning, not an obstacle to a ‘real’ individual. A closer look at Vano’s language, and the comparative analysis of other informants might suggest a more conventional individual than we can currently see.

Arguably, Walker is sketched in more depth than Vano: literally in graphic-novel illustrations provided by Dan Hallett and figuratively in his self reflections on his ‘obsession’ with Vano. Early on, for instance, he eschews Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties in favour of the multiple typefaces pioneered in works like Richard Price’s Alabi’s World. In so doing, he affirms a world in which boundaries between fact and fiction and primary and secondary sources matter. Moreover, the historiographical metaphors that he employs – the historian as pathologist and psychic – are now quite conventional and in the latter case, rest upon the problematic reading of historical understanding as an epistemological rather than conceptual activity. Has he, like the protagonist of the Radiohead song, 2+2=5 (the title for chapter 23 of Pistols! Treason! Murder!) succumbed to historiographical ‘doublethink’?

Even if the answer to that question is yes, Pistols! Treason! Murder! is still a stimulating and provocative read. It is punk history, but probably more in the tuneful style of The Jam than the manufactured chaos of The Sex Pistols.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Textual Realism and Reenactment

I recently contributed a chapter entitled 'Textual Realism and Reenactment' to a collection of essays on Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (Re-enactment History), edited by Paul Pickering and Iain McCalman, which has just been published. In part, this chapter is an explanation for the presence of the illustrations in Pistols! Treason! Murder! In it, I discuss pastiche as an activity related to reenactment, under the broader theme of realism (although in retrospect it would have been better to structure the argument around the idea of mimesis). There follows an extract from this essay, which is also a commentary on the illustration reproduced below.

Above: The Arrest of Antonio Foscarini (click to enlarge)

This illustration is the centre piece of a strip that summarises Gerolamo Vano's fall from grace, which was connected to the arrest of a noble named Antonio Foscarini. The charges against Foscarini were not proclaimed publicly, which provoked a great deal of ill-informed gossip, a state of affairs that is dramatised in the illustration. The background is the Great Council Hall in the ducal palace, where the entire noble class met for debates and elections.

An argument that is never explored directly in the text of the book is dramatised visually in this illustration. At the same time that the Venetian state was beginning to mount systematic surveillance operations targeted at individuals, Galileo was busy up the road in Padua, observing the surface of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter, and drawing some startling conclusions. By 1622, the year of Vano’s execution, the first microscopes were circulating among curious cardinals in Rome. Moreover, the first question raised by Galileo’s critics was the same one asked by Vano’s readers: How can you be sure of what you have seen? So there is an obvious connection to be made between the spy and the scientist. As Foucault would argue, power—in the form of surveillance—and knowledge —in the form of scientific observation—were intimately connected. This argument is alluded to directly by the ‘signature’ on the telescope at upper left.

The motif of the flies serves more than one function. Flies are not just examples of a preferred subject for early microscopic observations. They also refer to a linguistic metaphor introduced in a much earlier chapter. In the relevant passage I am addressing the reader directly in the portentous voice of ‘The Historian’.

The living body does not exist for us, cannot speak to us, even if the corpse still hosts a different kind of life that has nothing to do with the consciousness that once inhabited it. Rather, this life is parasitical—a swarming mass of signs, continually multiplying, crawling across the page. Their buzzing is loudest around the body’s wounds, where the text is most ‘corrupt’, as the philologists put it. The ligaments and cartilage that once articulated it have rotted away.

This passage foreshadows a later throwaway comment about Foscarini’s trial, in which ‘No one ever originated rumours; no one confirmed or denied them. They were generated spontaneously, like flies in rotten meat’. The illustration echoes all these previous allusions to flies. Finally, I suspect that these overdetermined insects are also direct descendents of Mosca, the buzzing parasite from Ben Jonson’s play, Volpone.

No doubt I’m already testing your credulity, but there is yet another argument implied by the contents of the other two telescope bubbles, in which the ‘thing’ being observed is actually a written text. This apparent paradox raises a point about the relationship between eyewitness testimony and hearsay and their respective evidential value in law—an issue that was crucial in the trial, condemnation and execution of Antonio Foscarini. The same point is also hinted at by the frieze of alternating eyes and ears, which have temporarily migrated to the panel border from Vano’s cloak, where they normally reside (because Vano is not in control of the flow of information in this panel). Theoretically, evidence based on sight (the most noble of the senses) was of greater value that evidence based on hearing, which was frequently dismissed as mere gossip. However, in practice that distinction was virtually impossible to maintain, as the outcome of Foscarini’s case demonstrates eloquently. Again, this issue is not discussed explicitly in the text.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Punk History

Iain McCalman described Pistols! Treason! Murder! as 'punk history'. I suspect he was simply free-associating (Pistols! = Sex Pistols = punk), but in the spirit of 1977 (or 1976 for purists), I decided to pre-empt the inevitable question - what exactly is punk history? - by inventing a post-facto manifesto for this non-existent movement. 

The manifesto has four points. 

1. We mean it man. Total cynicism towards the conventional pieties of historical writing combined with passionate commitment to a particular subject. 

2. Boredom. Get it over with as fast as you can: maximum speed, maximum aggression. Why use eight thousand words when eight hundred will do, or eighty? If anything gets in the way of the forward momentum of the story, including contextual information, feel free to ignore it. Cut until it bleeds. (Alternatively, lavish attention on details that other writers would dismiss as irrelevant. This inversion of the rule is equally important. Why use eighty words when you can use eight hundred, or eight thousand?) 

3. Do it yourself. Why should you be limited by someone else’s lack of imagination? You don’t have an unlimited budget. So what? Script the illustrations yourself. Supervise their production. Provide a design brief. Tell the typesetter what you want. Don’t try and do other people’s job for them – they’re better at it than you are – but be involved. Have an opinion. Be prepared to justify it. 

4. No future. Write as if your career is already over. You have nothing left to lose, so it doesn’t matter who you offend. Gerolamo Vano is the ideal subject for such a history. Vano stands not only for aggressive indifference to pious convention, but also for unlimited cynicism, maximum exploitation of a limited talent by ruthless opportunism, an almost ascetic indifference to the suffering of others, and a willingness to exploit the fear and credulity of his employers for his own gain. Unique among his contemporaries, Vano understood the uselessness of all sectarian rhetoric in the brave new world of espionage. He confined all references to such trivial distractions to the one place where they might serve some purpose: requests for money. Only when pleading for more ducats did Vano adopt the guise of a patriot. For Vano, the only thing that mattered was keeping the audience’s attention, by any means necessary. 

I admire him tremendously. I hope to emulate his success. 

 

I DON'T LIKE MOST OF THIS NEW MUSIC. I DON'T LIKE MUSIC. I DON'T LIKE MOVEMENTS. 

N.B. Some of these points were discussed in an interview with Phillip Adams on Radio National's Late Night Live.