Notes on Photography: The Uncanny Double and Photography

We should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope, or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a place inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. 

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams 

Freud compares consciousness to photography several times. And in his essay on the uncanny, he famously analyses ‘The Sandman’, a tale by E. T. A. Hoffman named after a mythical figure who steals children’s eyes. In the story, the character who represents the Sandman has two identities: Coppola and Coppelius. In the former guise, he’s an optician, who also makes eyes for automata; in the latter, an alchemist. In Italian, coppo means ‘eye-socket’, while coppella means ‘assay-crucible’: a white-hot orifice, overflowing with molten light.

Self-knowledge is a prize I pursue through a labyrinth, towards its centre, where I wait for myself. I’m both Oedipus and the sphinx; Theseus and the minotaur. But who lays out the labyrinth? Who carries out the act of repression that banishes an idea to its underworld? In other words, who maps the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious? He’s a censor who controls access to consciousness. He’s an invisible homunculus who watches a screen inside my head at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. He’s my double, who, in the essay on the uncanny, troubles Freud in the form of mannequins and automata, and is initially identified as an avatar of the id: primordial narcissism, which seeks, in duplication, a defence against annihilation.

As is often the way with Freudian concepts, and the effect is especially appropriate here, the double also stands for its opposite (just as unheimlich may also mean heimlich): having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death. In this guise, it doesn’t affirm my existence; it usurps my place. And is thereby revealed as an avatar of the superego, which performs the function of self-observation and self-criticism, and which In the pathological case of delusions of observation ... becomes isolated, split off from the ego, and discernible to the clinician.

The double is the child of both Coppelius and Coppola: alchemy and optics. He’s my shadow, and my reflection. That is to say, the double is the child of photography, which uses alchemy and optics to combine shadows and reflections. Photography is an attempt to conjure and bind this hidden double, the ghost in the machine. I force him to manifest inside the frame, like a genie released from a bottle. He escapes: not out of the image, but into the image. 

Photographic Inspirations: The Phaidon 55 Series

‘The illiteracy of the future’, someone has said, ‘will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography’. But shouldn’t a photographer who cannot read his own pictures be no less accounted an illiterate? Won’t inscription become the most important part of the photograph?

Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, 1931

The first part of this quotation was cited by the art publisher Phaidon as one of the inspirations for their 55 series, a set of small monographs, published in pocket-sized paperback editions c. 2000 (I believe the concept was the brainchild of Chris Boot). Each title in the series was dedicated to an individual photographer and features fifty-five images by him or her, with separate commentary for each image, and an introductory essay. The format and design for each book in the series was identical: it opened with a photographic portrait or self-portrait of the subject, followed by the introduction in continuous text (i.e. with no interpolated illustrations or 'figures'), followed by a series of 55 commentary / image layouts, most of which had a short passage of text on the left page (verso) and a photograph on the right page (recto). At the end of the book, there was a chronology for the subject’s life and work, followed by a final page with biographical notes for photographer and commentator / editor.

The initial price of each volume was £4.95 in the UK. The idea was to provide affordable, portable introductions to the work of key photographers, to enable people to acquire a library of such works, in much the same way that Penguin Classics encouraged engagement with the literature of the past in postwar Britain. They were readable not only in the sense of being written for non-specialists, but in the sense you could slip them in your pocket and take them out to browse on the bus or train.

There were of course other, related publishing initiatives (besides my collection of Phaidon 55s, I have several volumes from the Photo Poche series by Delpire, published originally in French, but acquired by me in various languages, depending on where and when I was able to get hold of them). However, the Phaidon series seems to me to have been the most imaginative and ambitious because of its use of text, which was, incidentally, typeset in light grey (with black for the headings). In skipping from photograph to text, the grey therefore served as a sort of calibration for the tonal scale of the image.

While the design and production of the books was uniform, the protocol for the selection of the images and the nature of the commentary differed from title to title. In most cases, a curator chose the 55 images and wrote both the introduction and the commentary. In some cases, a critic wrote the introduction, but the photographer made the selection and / or wrote the commentary. Some of the chosen writers contributed rather dull, pseudo-academic introductions that occasionally lapsed into artspeak, but in other cases the combination of writer and photographer was inspired: for example, in the volume on Walker Evans, where the text is by Luc (now Lucy) Sante.

The direct commentary on the photographs was usually evocative and incisive, since it was almost always less than one hundred words per image, and it also avoided technical information (these were not 'how-to' books). But it otherwise varied greatly, both in tone and in what we might call its terms of engagement with the images. The commentary for the Eugene Richards 55, for example (by Charles Bowden), is a sort of continuous rolling jazz riff on the circumstances and characters of the human subjects of the images, cut into 55 short segments that run on into one another, like a Beat poem.

I own almost all of the paperback 55s, and in acquiring them I encountered many photographers about whom I previously knew nothing, so from my point-of-view the concept was an unqualified success, their only flaw being that the binding and glue tends to fall apart with extensive use (a problem that may be attributable to the paper, which is necessarily thicker than that used for most paperbacks). However, Phaidon significantly revised the project in the mid-2000s, when they started to issue new titles in the series (along with selected reprints of popular earlier titles) in a larger, hardback format, and at an increased price. So, perhaps, from Phaidon's point-of-view, the initial concept did not prove to be cost-effective. 

The newer iteration of the project was still cheaper than many photographic monographs or exhibition catalogues, but not by much - their 55 title on Edward Curtis was initially advertised at £22.95! At that price, I'd only buy a volume if I had a prior interest in the subject, and even then I'd have to consider it carefully. The increased price and page size also discouraged browsing and continual use, whereas, because of the cheap price, I didn't much mind if the original paperbacks became dogeared or worn from carrying them around. 

The 55 series was not only an essential part of my visual education, but also a primer for the second part of Benjamin’s comment above (along with the work of John Szarowski): they taught me how to write about photographs in a concise and meaningful way. 

Since most of my photography books are currently in boxes in a shed in Melbourne, I re-bought many of the most relevant 55 titles secondhand on ebay in 2020–1 as I started taking photographs again, and as I rewrote the manuscript that became Push Process. I found them just as useful then as I had twenty years before – and there's been no successor line. Even in 2021, the secondhand copies were still the cheapest way to obtain an overview of the work of many photographers.

Five Wounds: Video Trailer

Five Wounds Trailer from Jon Walker on Vimeo.

The video above is an extremely abstract trailer for my novel Five Wounds. It consists of a sequence of twenty short phrases, which are displayed via twenty successive screens. Each screen uses two colours, out of a total of five: one for the text, and one for the background. In the book, and thus in the trailer, each of these five colours represents one of the five protagonists: blue for Gabriella; red for Cur; black for Cuckoo; silver for Magpie; gold for Crow. 

Amateur statisticians may note when viewing these screens that the entire sequence represents every single possible combination of two of the five colours (excluding those combinations in which the same colour appears twice). The first few screens run through these combinations according to the order that they appear in the Five Wounds hand, after which the sequence progresses systematically. The lettering on each successive screen is in the same colour that appeared as the background in the previous screen. The logic of this progression is therefore not entirely dissimilar to the terza rima rhyme scheme used by Dante, which I described in a previous post. 

The entire sequence of twenty screens is as follows: 

1. Blue text on a red background: Get out while you still can. 

2. Red on black: Don’t turn back. 

3. Black on silver: You have to choose. 

4. Silver on gold: Don’t move. 

5. Gold on blue: You can’t win. 

6. Blue on black: Run faster. 

7. Black on red: I can’t keep up. 

8. Red on blue: He’s right behind you. 

9. Blue on silver: I don’t understand. 

10. Silver on red: It’s your funeral. 

11. Red on gold: It’s eating me up. 

12. Gold on silver: I’m not your friend. 

13. Silver on blue: Cut it off. 

14. Blue on gold: I’m not like you. 

15. Gold on red: Give up. 

16. Red on silver: Dust to dust. 

17. Silver on black: No-one will help you. 

18. Black on gold: I’m not afraid. 

19. Gold on black: Don’t scream. 

20. Black on blue: Bet everything. 

These short phrases - mottos or slogans - are rather banal when taken individually, since they are entirely without narrative context here, and they also use a restricted vocabulary, which is deliberately inexpressive. Individually, they are flat and affectless; but collectively they should give a sense of increasing menace and claustrophobia. This echoes the style of the book, which similarly lapses into flat, affectless tones during the most violent or disturbing episodes. 

The sequence itself is also a coded message. Each screen represents one of the five protagonists 'talking' to one of the other five, and, in doing so, revealing the way in which they understand their relationship to that other person. So the first screen, which says 'Get out while you still can', in blue letters on a red background, represents Gabriella talking to Cur; the second screen, 'Don't turn back', in red letters on a black background, represents Cur talking to Cuckoo; and so on, until the final screen, 'Bet everything', in black letters on a blue background, which represents Cuckoo talking to Gabriella. Like the heraldic coats-of-arms at the beginning of Five Wounds, the sequence is therefore a coded map of the book's contents. 

The schematic nature of this exercise caused some problems. The sequence is in part derived from heraldry, but it ignores the heraldic 'rule of tincture', which forbids placing, for example, gold against silver, because with this and similar combinations it is difficult to distinguish the foreground from the background. However, since the sequence here must by definition include every possible combination of two of the five colours, it follows that it must break this rule. Moreover, the cross-hatched patterns under the pigments sometimes 'interfere' with the letter forms, making it difficult to read the text. The (imperfect) solution to this problem was to display the text for each screen in two states: first in empty white, with the letters reversed-out, and then in the relevant tincture, on the theory that at least one of these two states would be legible. It's not perfect, aesthetically, because of the legibility issue (compounded in this version by a noticeable image deterioration). 

Nonetheless, the sequence gives a flavour of Five Wounds, which also includes puzzles, riddles and allusions. Both the trailer and the book use text visually, as an element in the design, and both are structured according to hidden principles. But the trailer probably works better as commentary for those who have already seen the book than as an introduction for neophytes. 

[Video credits: Painted textures by Dan Hallett; video created by Sarah Lyttle and Adam Hinshaw; concept and art direction by Jonathan Walker. Thanks to Peter Newman for permission to use an edited extract of one of his compositions as the soundtrack.]

Tintoretto's Paradise

The version of Paradise that Tintoretto painted for the Ducal Palace in Venice in 1592 is reproduced above. It is referred to several times in the text of Five Wounds (although I never name the artist in the novel). It is also quoted visually in a diptych on pages 28-29. In the standard scholarly biography of Tintoretto, by Eric Newton, there is a long passage on the painting, which I sent to Dan as reference material. Starting on p. 198, this passage reads as follows.

The finished painting is, as it were, a colossal three-dimensional wall-paper, a vast pattern representing space itself, marked out in dark patches, between which one’s eye [199] seems to penetrate into a radiant, crowded infinity, as though innumerable groups and clusters of figures had arranged themselves like galactic systems one behind the other in the interstellar void.

At first glance this absence of formalized planes and, in particular, the lack of a base with a firmly established foreground, confuse and bewilder the eye, but gradually the brave pattern, with the noble silhouettes of Christ and the Virgin as its climax, asserts itself. One begins to see it as the only possible solution to the problem. .... The finished painting is ... governed by none of the normal optical laws. The effect is not of standing in this world and gazing into the remote distances of the next but of seeing through a glass wall into a celestial aquarium in which both light and distance mean nothing. Single figures and groups of figures float through this supernatural ether, towards or away from the glass wall, in a ceaseless rhythmic movement, not under the spell of gravity but in obedience to the magnetism that radiates from Christ and the Virgin who bend gently towards each other above them. The gaps between them are not areas of radiance but glimpses of interstellar space, and that space is not so much occupied by the myriads of the blessed as composed of them. The radiance in which they have their being has become interchangeable with their being itself. The world of visual experience with its vocabulary of ‘near,’ ‘far,’ ‘upper,’ ‘lower,’ ‘towards,’ ‘away from,’ no longer exists. This, in purely practical terms, gives Tintoretto the immense advantage of being able to enlarge or diminish any figure at will without contradicting the laws of perspective; it retains the medieval system of scale by importance without abandoning the Renaissance system of scale by distance.

Newton’s insistence on seeing the Paradise as the crowning achievement of Tintoretto’s career (he died in 1594) seems misguided, given that the painting is now usually attributed jointly to Tintoretto’s son Domenico, a much inferior artist, and to the workshop. With this revised attribution in mind, the peculiar composition seems less the result of unconventional artistic genius and more like incompetence, but this illustrates a more general point about the nature of interpretation, which is always the result of a series of enabling preconceptions. As Gabriella concludes in Five Wounds, an illegible message was easier to transcribe if one already had some idea of what it might say.

Newton starts with the presumption that the painting is by Tintoretto, and Newton knows that Tintoretto is a genius. Everything in his account follows from that basic premise. My own, admittedly uninformed, first impression was that it was rather turgid, whoever painted it, but that makes Newton's achivement in this passage even more impressive. It is a brilliant piece of creative writing, insofar as it succeeds in reinscribing this apparently mediocre work as a masterpiece. Even so, Newton's approach seems rather old-fashioned now (the biography was published in 1952), and not only because it is based on obsolete research.

Newton is a late descendant of a tradition of conoisseurship that goes back to Giorgio Vasari, who founded art criticism as an academic discipline in the sixteenth century, and in the process suggested what it is that critics should be doing. Vasari’s purpose was three-fold: to provide clear descriptions of paintings that, in an age before photographic reproduction, could often only be viewed in situ; to establish a set of criteria by which one could distinguish great painting from good, and good from bad; and to establish a canon of painters who, collectively, embodied those criteria.

Vasari was perhaps the first major theorist of Western art, but one of the first important art critics in the same tradition was Pietro Aretino, whose literary output was far more varied and whose ideas on art were far less systematic, but whose letters and sonnets about Titian helped to establish the latter as one of the most successful painters in Europe in the middle of the sixteenth century. For example, Aretino described Titian’s portrait of Eleonora Gonzaga, Duchess of Urbino (above), painted c. 1536-8, as follows.

The union of colours laid in by Titian’s brush expresses, besides the concord that reigns in Eleonora, her gentle spirit. Modesty [modestia] is seated with her in an attitude of humility, purity resides in her dress, consciousness of her virtue [vergogna] veils and honours her breast and hair. Love fixes on her his lordly glance. Chastity and beauty, eternal enemies, are in her likeness and between her eyelashes the throne of the Graces is seen.

The flattery is obviously aimed at Eleonora as well as Titian, but its effect depends on the assumption that Titian’s painting displays her character rather than merely representing her appearance. According to Aretino, the painting opens a window into Eleonora's soul. Eleonora, the painting, Aretino's description: each of these things is, in some sense, identical with the others. There is no mediation. Everything is transparent.

Aretino claims to be ‘reading’ the portrait, but what he’s actually doing is interpreting it, and, as with Newton's description of the Paradise, reinscribing it: that is, writing meaning over it. I defy anyone to look at this picture unprepared and say, ‘I see the concord that reigns in Eleonora, her modesty, purity, etc., etc’. Aretino is trying to influence the way we read the portrait by annotating it, but at the same time insisting that his annotations add nothing that is not already there.

One way of clarifying this problem is to reverse the terms of the relation between word and image. Would someone who only had Aretino’s description of Titian’s portrait – or Newton’s description of Tintoretto’s Paradise – be able to visualise the paintings in question accurately on the basis of the description alone? The answer is surely, ‘No’.

I am interested in this question for practical reasons, because my collaboration with Dan involved writing descriptions of pictures that did not yet exist, which Dan then used to bring these potential pictures into actuality. In this case, the description generated the picture, rather than the other way round, but that actually makes the role of interpretation more explicit. Dan’s illustrations were always a loose translation of my instructions, inevitably, because they were rendered in a different medium by a different process and via a different sensibility. They always added something to the written description, no matter how exhaustive my instructions aspired to be. So I could never predict what they would look like.

One might argue that Dan was doing the same thing that Newton and Aretino were, but in reverse. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. We may see Tintoretto's and Titian's paintings in a new light as a result of their efforts, but Newton and Aretino are not actually attempting to open a conversation: rather, they aim to have the last word. The painter, or rather the painting, has no right of reply. In the classic version of connoisseurship, the definitive interpretive act is an attribution: 'Yes, this painting is an authentic Tintoretto'. But the authority of that attribution derives not from Tintoretto himself, who lacks the insight to understand his own talent (Tintoretto does not know what it is that makes him Tintoretto), but from the disinterested mind of the connoisseur.

What I was doing, by contrast, was inviting Dan to alter the meaning of my work, to divide the responsibilities of authorship with me (quite literally in the case of Five Wounds).

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: Cuckoo and Lacan's Mirror Phase

When I read the Icon Books title Introducing Lacan, I was struck by the description of Lacan's theory of the 'mirror phase', an elaboration of Freud's ideas on ego formation in the infant. The description corresponds exactly to (it mirrors?) the characterisation of Cuckoo in Five Wounds. Cuckoo is a man with no face, or rather a face made of wax, which he reshapes constantly in imitation of those whose identity he wishes to steal. He is also obsessed with his reflection, with which he can never fully identify.

Now here are some passages from Introducing Lacan (pp. 21-23):

The child identifies with an image outside himself, be it an actual mirror image or simply the image of another child. The apparent completeness of this image gives [him] a new mastery over the body. .... 'But all this at a price [says a picture of a child standing before a mirror in the Icon book]. If I am in the place of another child, when he's struck, I will cry. If he wants something, I'll want it too, because I am trapped in his place. I am trapped in an image fundamentally alien to me, outside me'. .... Lacan shows how this alienation in the image corresponds with the ego: the ego is constituted by an alienating identification, based on an initial lack of completeness in the body and nervous system.

There is a broader point here about how symbolism works: I mean symbolism in a general sense, rather than Lacan's more technical definition of what he calls the 'symbolic register', which for him complements the 'imaginary register' ('imaginary' from 'image'). For Lacan, language is the essential element that distinguishes the symbolic from the imaginary, so that in the symbolic register, the relation to the image will be structured by language (Introducing Lacan, p. 47). Cuckoo, by contrast, remains in the pre-linguistic, imaginary register, where the reflected image of his face cannot be described (in words or otherwise).

What I mean by 'symbolic' is rather the way in which Lacan's theory of the mirror phase describes an ongoing process (of ego formation) via an abstraction. It uses a single, signifying idea - the child looking at its own reflection - to stand for that broader process. The fictional character of Cuckoo then reverses that operation. I mean that Cuckoo's predicament takes Lacan's symbolic abstraction, and makes it both literal and definitive, so that it actually excludes other possible ways of understanding the nature of ego formation.

N.B. I am a big fan of the Icon Introducing series, which I am interested in for theoretical as well as pragmatic reasons: i.e. I am interested in how these unique attempts to present abstract ideas through a comic strip format work, beyond the information actually conveyed in any specific title. In this, they are natural successors to seventeenth-century emblem books. More on this in a future post perhaps ....

'Interpreting Dreams' by Sigmund Freud

Dreams feature prominently in Five Wounds, where they are prophetic messages, as they are in the Bible. 

I want to draw attention to the passage below on p. 300 of Freud's Interpreting Dreams (in the new translation by J. A. Underwood), referring to what Strachey had previously translated as 'overdetermination' in the dream-work, rendered by Underwood as 'multiple determination':

Each element of the dream-content turns out to be multiply determined - represented in the dream-thoughts several times. .... So I see what sort of relationship exists between dream-content and dream-thoughts: not only are the elements of the dream determined several times by dream-thoughts: individual dream-thoughts are also represented in the dream by several elements.

No doubt the same principle underlies all imaginative writing, as Freud states explicitly on p. 279:

Like every neurotic symptom, in fact (like dream itself, which is capable of repeated interpretation, at a deeper and deeper level - even requires it if the dream in question is to be understood), every genuine poetic creation will also have proceeded from more than one motive and more than one stimulus in the poet's mind and admit of more than one interpretation.

The principle of multiple determination is, however, particularly useful for interpreting internal relationships between textual and visual elements in a multi-modal text, such as Five Wounds, which also (perhaps not coincidentally) includes numerous accounts of dreams.

In fact, I didn't read Interpreting Dreams while composing Five Wounds. I should have - and I even bought a copy at the time, but it lay unread on my shelves while I was revising the novel. The role of dreaming in Five Wounds is therefore influenced more by early modern ideas on prophecy and divination. In fact, it was one of Freud's major insights that the meaning of dreams could be found in the dreamer's past rather than her future (p. 636):

For it is from the past that dream springs - in every sense. Granted, even the age-old belief that dreams show us the future is not wholly without truth-content. By showing us a wish as having been fulfilled, dream does in fact lead us into the future; however, the future that the dreamer takes as present is moulded by the indestructible wish into a mirror of that past.

As an additional point, I note that Interpreting Dreams uses a metaphor I thought I'd invented for the introduction to the 'The Art of Grief' (an autobiographical essay that provides several unattributed quotations in Five Wounds, and therefore relates to the novel as latent content relates to manifest content in a dream). On pp. 508-9 of Interpreting Dreams, Freud writes (in a variation of the archaeological metaphor for analysis of which he was so fond):

Like dreams, [daydreams] are wish-fulfilments; like dreams, they are largely based on the impressions of childhood experiences; like dreams, they enjoy a certain relaxation of censorship as regards their creations. Looking closely at how they are put together, one becomes aware of how the wish-motive that operates in their production, seizing the material of which they are constructed, has jumbled that material up, rearranged it and assembled it to form a fresh whole. To the childhood recollections to which they hark back, they stand in something like the same relationship as some of Rome's baroque palaces stand to the classical ruins whose columns and dressed stones provided the materials for their reconstruction in modern forms.

I would argue that in it, the unconscious is structured, not like a language (as Lacan famously insisted), or like an image (as Freud states explicitly within Interpreting Dreams), but rather, like a comic strip – or an illustrated novel.

Five Wounds: The Proverbs Sequence in 'A Meeting of Minds'

The only scene in which all five protagonists of Five Wounds are in the same place at the same time occurs in the chapter 'A Meeting of Minds'. On this momentous occasion, they all spout banal proverbs at one another. The implication is that they do so in a quasi-trance-like state, perhaps under the hypnotic influence of a divine voice that intermittently interrupts them with the refrain 'MeNe MeNe TeKeL UPHARSIN'. They speak as follows.  

1 ‘MeNe, MeNe, TeKeL, UPHARSIN,’ the voice said. 

2 ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ Crow said. 

3 ‘Freedom exists only in the kingdom of dreams,’ Gabriella said. 

4 ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him,’ Cur said. 

5 ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ Cuckoo said. 

6 ‘Every bird thinks its own nest fine,’ Magpie said. 

7 ‘MeNe, MeNe, TeKeL, UPHARSIN,’ the voice said. 

8 ‘One must howl with the wolves,’ Cur said. 

9 ‘Better to be a knave than a fool,’ Magpie said. 

10 ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ Cuckoo said. 

11 ‘The devil can quote scripture for his own ends,’ Gabriella said. 

12 ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ Crow said. 

13 ‘MeNe, MeNe, TeKeL, UPHARSIN,’ the voice said. 

14 ‘The cowl does not make the monk,’ Cuckoo said. 

15 ‘Love me, love my dog,’ Cur said. 

16 ‘Either Caesar, or nothing,’ Crow said. 

17 ‘Tell me who your friend is, and I’ll tell you who you are,’ Magpie said. 

18 ‘A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wise man,’ Gabriella concluded. 

This passage is illustrated by a plate, which is reproduced below.

There are several things going on in this image, which also relates to another plate, Initiation, but it receives its immediate textual justification from another passage in 'A Meeting of Minds': Crow imagined all the heads in the room separated from their bodies and floating in jars, dumbly, waiting for the inscription of ulterior motives upon them. 

Obviously the particular proverbs that each character 'chooses' to declaim tell us who they are, but the precise sequence is also important, and relates to the plate. The sequence breaks into three groups of five, within which each character speaks once (if we remove the three interjections of the disembodied voice, which are null characters in this interpretation). If we assign a letter to each protagonist according to the initial order in which they speak, and break up the sequence accordingly, it looks like this: 

 a (Crow) 

b (Gabriella) 

c (Cur) 

d (Cuckoo) 

e (Magpie) 

c 

e 

d 

b 

a 

d 

c 

a 

e 

b 

If you take this list, and use it as if it is a set of vector instructions for a diagram - as if the sequence is actually a program, as I also described the language of heraldry in a previous post - then you get the following layout, which I have scanned in its three successive states, to clarify how it is constructed.

So, if you follow the sequence, and fill in every line accordingly, you progressively build up the figure of the pentacle, as illustrated in Plate 12 above (and in Plate 1, for those who think to make the comparison). 

Some lines are drawn through twice as the sequence doubles back on itself, but never in the same direction: for example, the fourth transition runs from Cuckoo to Magpie, and the seventh goes back the other direction from Magpie to Cuckoo, but the rule is that once we have traced both directions, we can't then return to this arm of the diagram. 

This isn't perfectly logical. In that case, every possible direction would be represented (as it is in the video trailer, using a different set of principles), and for every possible direction to be represented, there would have to be twenty lines rather than fourteen. But this was the best version I could create that also allowed me to construct the pentacle line by line, which is what I was trying to do. I also tried several other ways of arranging the sequence of speakers, but this was the only variant in which I managed to trace all fourteen vectors as unique and unrepeated. 

I used a pentacle as the basis for this diagram because it represents the five wounds of Christ in medieval iconography, notably in the poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I read as an undergraduate (and which features a talking, severed head!). 

As for the mathematical games, either you are the sort of person that thinks in these terms, or you aren't, in which case the whole exercise probably looks insane. But even if it is insane, it does relate to the worldview of the protagonists. In particular, Crow and Gabriella, who are the intellectuals of the group, and who therefore appear as the first two points in this sequence, are inclined to think in these terms. 

[Plate by Dan Hallett; illegible sketches by me.]

'Gouge Away' by the Pixies and the Alternative Endings to 'Five Wounds'

[Continues from the previous post:]  

To be chosen, to be condemned: two possible outcomes of the same process. .... The Trial and The Castle share a premise: that election and condemnation are almost indistinguishable. .... The main difference is this: condemnation is always certain, election always uncertain. Roberto Calasso, K. 

In the last post, we moved rather abruptly from Blade Runner to Robert Bresson. Here we make another abrupt cut to the song Gouge Away (jumping over Franz Kafka as we go), from which we shall return to the multiple endings of Five Wounds. 

 

Gouge Away is the final song on Doolittle, the breakthrough 1989 album by the Pixies, which Ben Sisario describes as:  

among the most violent pop albums ever recorded, if not in body count then in the starkness of its calamities. It features rape, mutilation of the eyes, vampirism, suffocation, smothering by tons of garbage, and the chaos of blind gunfire; for the punchline, everybody gets crushed to death. When not killing or maiming, the album turns to depraved sexual loathing and visions of apocalypse. ...

Sisario describes Gouge Away’s subject in the following terms (I quote his discussion at length because there is little I can add to it):  

The song is another bloody biblical adaptation, this one the story of Samson and Delilah from Judges 16. .... The story mingles sex and politics on a small scale with gigantic divine retribution, as Samson the seduced and ruined becomes Samson the instrument of God’s fury. [Songwriter Charles] Thompson’s 100-words-or-less summary: “Big strong Samson, toughest guy in town, partying with the Philistines – he’s got this Achilles’ heel thing, you know, with his hair. Somehow he lets some girl [the prostitute Delilah] know what’s up. That’s how the Philistines capture him. She goes in and cuts his hair. He becomes weak. God takes his strength away from him. There he is, chained, his eyes gouged out. Made a mockery by the pagans, you know. Chained there to the pillars. He asks God for strength one more time, to avenge these sinners. Pulls the columns in, causes the building to collapse on everybody. Pretty great story.” .... The recurring chorus suggests that all along Samson knows what’s coming to him. It’s no surprise. .... ‘It’s a taunt,” Thompson says. “Go ahead, have your fun. Gouge away, because something’s going to happen. No one here gets out alive.” Retribution rocks: Chained to the pillars A three-day party I break the walls And kill us all With holy fingers In the Bible, of course, Samson really does mean “kill us all” – he knows that he only has one chance to get back at those nasty Dagon-worshippers, and offers God the kind of prayer that might come from John J. Rambo. “And Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’ And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life” (Judges 16: 30).  

[Quotations from Doolittle by Ben Sisario.] 

The world conjured by the lyrics and the sound of Doolittle is one familiar to me (I also listened to albums by Larry Norman, the Christian songwriter whose slogan ‘Come on pilgrim’ was used as the title for the Pixies’ first release). Here I want to draw out the relevance of the Samson story for the two alternative ending(s) of Five Wounds, and to relate this story back to the concept of the deus ex machina. 

Election and condemnation are almost indistinguishable. Samson invokes both: his divine revelation is an act of destruction. This story reveals (or perhaps hides) an essential truth: Forgiveness, like judgement, is always violent. It destroys the coherence and autonomy of everything it touches. I conceived the two endings of Five Wounds in these terms. The 'happy ending' is only possible because of an act of narrative violence comparable to that invoked by Samson, an arbitrary event that brings the fictional world crashing down around the ears of the protagonists because its occurrence violates a fundamental rule, a rule that - so we have been led to believe - is necessary for this fictional world to make sense at all. 

In Five Wounds, this event is not obviously catastrophic (unlike the mass murders that occur just before the book's climax, which are perhaps a more obvious comparison for Samson's apotheosis). Indeed, the final event hardly happens at all, the narrative barely acknowledges it. It is described only by the last sentence in the book, because nothing can continue to exist after it has taken place. Are you willing to pay Samson's price for a happy ending? Are you willing to bring the temple down around yourself by invoking the deus ex machina? Are you willing to be judged, or to be forgiven? You have to make a choice.

'Blade Runner' by Ridley Scott, and The Cinema of Robert Bresson

My novel, Five Wounds, has two alternative, and mutually-exclusive, conclusions. One is a ‘happy’ ending, and the other is a ‘not-so-happy’ ending. In the next two posts, I’m going to discuss some of the implications of using multiple endings, and of imposing a happy ending on a story that does not seem to support such an interpretation.

There are several precedents for alternative endings in literature, most notably perhaps The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, but the most obvious example from my own personal artistic canon is actually a film: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. In this case, the two alternative endings are never present together in any single iteration of the film, but rather belong to two different ‘cuts’: the initial commercial release, which imposed an explanatory voiceover throughout, and a happy ending, and the subsequent ‘Director’s Cut’, which removed both. The latter did not, in fact, ‘change’ the ending as such: it just removed from the first version the final couple of minutes; but, in doing so, it radically altered the tone of the film.

SPOILERS FOR BLADE RUNNER

Above is the ending of the initial release. The Director's Cut simply stops instead at about 0:12, and removes everything that follows.

Having seen the initial version of Blade Runner in the 80s, and then the Director’s Cut on its release in the early 90s, there was some debate amongst my friends as to whether the revision actually constituted an improvement. We were all familiar with the story, but would first-time viewers have any idea what was going on without the voiceover? It not only clarified events; it also clarified Deckard’s role as protagonist. Without it, he was a much more morally ambiguous character. Indeed, everything was murkier and more confusing.

In the video above, Frank Darabont puts the case for removing the voiceover, but it was also clear that the original ending was an arbitrary addition, not least from the contemptuous way in which Harrison Ford intones the relevant voiceover text, as if he can barely bring himself to say the words. But for some of us it was necessary to relieve the unmitigated gloom of the film up until that point. The original ending was like opening a window onto Scott’s fictional world, and letting light enter into it from outside.

The original version of Blade Runner is a classic example of a deus ex machina ending. Deus ex machina literally means ‘god out of the machine’. It originally suggested the introduction of divine intervention as a story device to resolve intractable plot complications. The phrase refers to the stage machinery that was used to frame such divine characters in theatres, where they descended (literally) from above, and the implication is that this kind of resolution was entirely alien to the logic of cause and effect that governs the succession of events within a realistic narrative mode. The gods descend from above: that is, from outside the sphere of the story itself. Thus the deus ex machina is a cheat, by definition, and the last resort of a desperate writer. While modern stories rarely resort to divine intervention, they do introduce such related, arbitrary devices as outrageous coincidence, or, in the case of the initial release of Blade Runner, the hitherto unsuspected revelation that Rachel, the android replicant with whom Deckard has fallen in love, is ‘special’: that, unlike all other models, she has an open-ended lifespan.

This is a deus ex machina move because absolutely nothing in the story thus far has prepared us for this eventuality. Indeed, the rules that give this fictional world its integrity would seem to actively preclude this possibility; and thus the revelation destroys the credibility of everything that precedes it. This impression is only reinforced by the visuals in the tacked-on ending, which reveals vistas of unspoiled nature, whose existence is similarly inconceivable in the polluted city that has been so meticulously constructed over the previous two hours (the final longshots were, in fact, borrowed from outtakes of Kubrick’s The Shining).

The whole concept of the deus ex machina implies a secular world view, in which divine intervention can never be the real subject of a drama, and so its introduction is always evidence of a failure of human imagination. But what if you actually want to say something about the nature of divine grace? By definition, it is arbitrary; by definition, it violates the laws of cause and effect; by definition, it is unmotivated and unforeseeable. Its true manifestations never provide closure. Rather, they radically destabilise narrative logic. That is what is implied by a conversion experience: that the entire story is rewritten retrospectively.

And this brings me to the films of Robert Bresson, which almost always conclude with some kind of deus ex machina. Or rather, the ending invokes divine intervention without dramatising it explicitly, as in The Trial of Joan of Arc. God does not actually appear; the contradiction is not actually resolved. It is up to the viewer to complete the story by making the requisite leap of faith (or not, according to one's personal beliefs). In Bresson’s earlier films, this invocation is presented as, generally, successful. Whether or not we choose to believe in it, the protagonists of his films experience that transformation as real.

This is a kind of negative theology. God is not a presence in Bresson’s films. He does not appear as a character, wheeled in from above, and therefore inevitably trivialised. He is instead manifest by His absence. He is arbitrary in cinematic terms as well as in narrative terms: that is, he is a non-diegetic effect, and as such, is associated with similarly non-diegetic cinematic effects, notably music, which in Bresson is often confined to the climax of the film.

This sounds like a radical Augustinian, Protestant theology, and Bresson’s background was Catholic, but perhaps of a Jansenist persuasion: that is, from a group within Catholicism that emphasised the unmotivated nature of divine grace, and the consequent inability of man to ever earn it. This allies him with Pascal, among others, for whom divine grace can never be an effect with a human (or a scientific) cause, and thus divine intervention can never be necessary in narrative terms.

In Bresson’s later films, this negative theology is taken to its pessimistic conclusion. These films are about failed attempts to invoke transcendence, most obviously in Lancelot du Lac, which begins with the return of Arthur’s knights from their unsuccessful quest for the Holy Grail. Here the Grail is, like the ritual of communion (itself, in Catholic theology, a miraculous, inexplicable transformation), a kind of metonymic substitute for the Body of Christ, and thus a symbol of divine immanence. But in the world of Lancelot du Lac, as in Bresson’s subsequent films, the divine presence is always out of reach.

[Continues in the next post:]

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.

Five Wounds: Heraldry

In a previous post, I showed some of the sketches for the heraldic shields in Five Wounds. To create these shields, Dan and I had to learn the visual code of heraldry, which is governed by strict rules about how its various elements may be combined. These rules are analogous to a grammar. Indeed, heraldry is one of the few instances where this analogy really works when applied to a visual code. Heraldry is therefore a highly distinctive semiotic system, one might even say a uniquely pure semiotic system, and as such it represents one of the earliest historical examples of a coherent system of graphic design. 

According to the classic analysis of Ferdinand de Saussure, the signs that make up any given semiotic system can be broken down into two elements: the signifier (the actual sign, e.g. the word ‘dog’), and the signified (the concept that the sign represents, e.g. the dictionary definition of the word ‘dog’). A third possible element is the referent (the thing to which the concept refers, e.g. an actual dog), but for Saussure, language actually makes more sense if you think of it purely in terms of the relationship between signifier and signified, and exclude consideration of the referent altogether. 

What makes heraldry ‘uniquely pure’ is that it anticipates this conclusion. Nothing in heraldry claims to represent anything external to the code itself, or at least the referential aspect of the system is attenuated, as if heraldry has already evolved beyond this primitive function, which remains only in a vestigial form, like the tail on a human skeleton. 

How, then, does heraldry work? It is best understood as a code, like a computer code, which is used to generate shields or coats-of-arms. The sine qua non of heraldry is therefore the shield itself, but the most basic elements of the code, which are combined to create the shield, are the heraldic tinctures, which are split into two basic groups: colours and metals. The colours are blue (azure), red (gules), black (sable), and green (vert), although the last is used far less frequently than the first three. Some versions also add purple (purpure) to the colours, but it almost never occurs in actual historical shields. The metals are silver (argent) and gold (or), which may also be represented by white and yellow respectively. 

Every shield has one of these tinctures as its base or field, onto which are laid successive layers of additional elements – like layers in Photoshop – all of which are also assigned a tincture, and which cumulatively make up the shield. Thus the shield is always viewed as a single, combined image, but its component elements can always be broken down into a series of two-dimensional layers laid on top of one another in a predetermined order. From top to bottom, this order runs thus: field, ordinaries, subordinaries, charges. 

Ordinaries consist of geometric devices such as a bend (a diagonal stripe across the shield), a pale (a vertical stripe down the middle of the shield), a fess (a horizontal strip across the middle of the shield), a cross, a saltire (a diagonal cross), a chevron, and so on. These are all laid on top of the field, and one of their functions is to subdivide it, so that their proportions in relation to the total area of the shield are therefore strictly controlled. For example, a pale or a fess should occupy roughly one-third of the shield’s area, while a chevron should occupy roughly one-fifth. Subordinaries are also geometric devices. They include the chief (a horizontal strip across the top third of the shield), the canton (a small square in the dexter chief, i.e. the top left from the viewer’s perspective [1]) and the bordure (a thin border around the shield’s outer edge). 

The final layer is that of pictorial charges. The most common of these are lions and eagles. Charges do have a notional referent, but they are always rendered in a highly abstract manner, and their relation to actual lions and eagles, or even to the symbolic meanings conventionally associated with lions and eagles in medieval bestiaries is, in effect, ‘bracketed’: it is irrelevant for how the pictorial code actually functions. 

The field is not always an undifferentiated, single tincture. It can also be divided in various conventional ways. For example, a shield divided ‘per bend’ has its field split in two diagonally, whereas a shield divided ‘per pale’ has its field split in two vertically. 

The ‘rule of tincture’ governs the way in which tinctures may be assigned to the various layers of a shield. It states that a colour cannot be laid directly on top of another colour; nor can a metal be laid directly on top of a metal. So if the field is a metal, any ordinary laid on top of it must be a colour, while any charge laid on top of that must in turn be a metal. There are, however, some exceptions to this rule, notably that it does not apply to subordinaries, or to divisions of the field. [2]  

In heraldry, blue represents only the idea of blue, and red the idea of red, and it does not matter which specific shade of blue or red is used to embody that idea. Indeed, in the seventeenth century, when it became common practice to print compilations of coats-of-arms in black-and-white reproductions, a system of cross-hatchings was invented to represent the tinctures, and these cross-hatchings represent their respective associated pigments perfectly: that is, in heraldry, a regularly-distributed pattern of dots signifies the idea of gold just as adequately as any particular yellow or gold pigment can do. 

As I have described it thus far, heraldry is a purely visual system, but – to return to our metaphor of computer code – it has a written analogue, whereby a description of a shield can be created, which serves as a programme, whose output is the visual representation of the shield.

So, for example, the shield above is encoded as ‘gules, a bordure argent’, which means ‘a red field with a silver border’; whereas the shield below is ‘Per pale sable and argent, on a chief vert a canton or’, which means ‘a field divided in two vertically, with black on the left and and silver on the right, which is surmounted by a green strip occupying the top third, which is in turn surmounted by a gold square in the top left corner’.

Any written description should allow you – if it is parsed correctly – to generate the output of a correct shield with total accuracy. And as with computer code, any ambiguity in the initial command constitutes a fatal error, while any elements or aspects of the output that are not predetermined by this code are by definition irrelevant. Minute variations in the written code may have larger consequences when it is translated into a shield. For example, the first shield below is ‘argent, a bend sable’; conversely, the second is ‘Per bend, argent and sable’; the third is ‘Per bendy, sable and argent’; while the last is ‘Per bendy, argent and sable’.

According to Shaun Tan, an image only works insofar as it can't be reduced to a written description (an argument that recalls Robert Frank's insistence that a photograph should nullify explanation), but heraldry is based upon the opposite assumption. As such, it offers one possible way of exploring the relationship between word and image, which is both a recurrent theme and a practical challenge in Five Wounds.

So why did Dan and I use heraldry in Five Wounds, and to what ends? 

When I was looking for a way to represent the book’s structure visually, I needed a system with seven elements, but that in practice only made use of five them regularly: because there are five protagonists in my book, but two other characters whose status is sometimes brought into question. Moreover, of my central five characters, I needed to be able to subdivide them into two groups, of three and two respectively, because this is how their various relationships play out. 

All of this found an analogue in the heraldic code, in which there are seven basic tinctures, but only five that occur with any regularity, and of those five, there are three colours and two metals. 

This sounds suspiciously convenient. It is possible that, at an unconscious level, I was already thinking of how to relate the structure of the book to that of heraldry right from the start, so the correspondence may not be entirely coincidental. 

In any case, thinking that the heraldic code could perhaps be converted into a map of the book’s structure, I began to develop this idea by assigning a tincture to each of my protagonists: blue to the mutilated angel, Gabriella; red to the man of blood, Cur; black to the amorphous man with a wax face, Cuckoo; silver to the daguerreotypist, Magpie; and gold to the alchemist, Crow. These designations loosely follow traditional colour symbolism, so they have a logic of sorts, although such symbolism is not part of the heraldic code. 

My next step was to design five shields, one for each of the protagonists, each using the schema outlined above: that is, Gabriella’s shield has a blue field, while Cur’s has a red field, and so on; and the addition of other elements (ordinaries, subordinaries and charges) onto the field in other tinctures would then, in each case, map the various relationships between the five protagonists.

  

Above: Gabriella’s and Magpie’s motto shields

Along with these ‘motto shields’ (designated thus by Dan and I for obvious reasons), there is an entirely separate series of smaller shields, which open each chapter (in the first edition of the novel, there were more of these: one for each layout). These serve as a visual index of which characters appear in the chapter in question.

There are important differences between the motto shields and the index shields. The former use pictorial charges to help define the protagonists: wings for the angel, Gabriella; a wolf for the rabid Cur; the moon and stars for the nocturnal daguerreotypist, Magpie; and so on. By contrast, the index shields are purely abstract, consisting only of the field, ordinaries and subordinaries. And, whereas the motto shields use only five tinctures to refer to five protagonists, the index shields use all seven tinctures, which therefore refer to seven different characters. 

There are therefore two overlapping but separate indexical colour systems in Five Wounds: one with five elements, and one with seven elements. 

Every index shield is unique. When different chapters involve the same group of characters, and thus use the same tinctures, each of these is represented by a different shield design. And even for the chapters in which only one character appears, and which are therefore indexed with an undifferentiated shield of a single tincture, I had Dan repaint the shield every time we used it, so that the patterning of the pigment would be slightly different. 

Having gone to the trouble of learning the language of heraldry, it may seem perverse that the first thing I decided to do with it was to violate its integrity by forcing it to describe something external to itself: that is, my five (or is it seven?) protagonists. In Five Wounds, then, the language of heraldry is persistently construed wrongly. Dan and I deliberately created ‘ungrammatical’ visual statements, which are the inevitable consequence of forcing the code to express things it was never intended to express. 

There are, for example, several index shields that violate the rule of tincture by combining colour with colour and metal with metal, depending on which characters happen to appear in any given chapter: that is, according to a criterion that is entirely irrelevant to the internal logic of the code. 

Forcing heraldry to perform such an unnatural function creates interesting problems, which were highlighted for me when I tried to encode the motto shields I designed for the five protagonists in written descriptions thereof. Below is the horrific result of this exercise, which illustrates the impossibility of trying to describe a series of (deliberate) mistakes using a code whose entire purpose is to eliminate ambiguity. It can’t be done.

  

Above: A failed attempt to provide written descriptions for the five motto shields

This unreadable attempt at definition is not included in Five Wounds, but it inspired one of several handwritten annotations added to the text of the first edition of the novel, in which a garbled representation of the five motto shields (drawn by Dan) is accompanied by the cryptic note, The problem with a perfect notation system: It can’t describe an error. Of course, this observation has much broader implications in the context of the novel than its application to heraldry.

  

Above: annotation from the end of the first edition of Five Wounds

However, I've cut this from the second edition, as, besides being beyond my powers to incorporate when I re-typeset the text, it also seemed a little too cute.

If a work is to be coherent, then certain ideas have to present in its DNA: they have to run through every aspect of its narrative and presentation. In Five Wounds, these ideas include: translation, garbled transmission, insecure attributions of meaning, the relationship between signal and noise, the nature of interpretation, and what constitutes a misinterpretation. It should be obvious how the book’s use – and abuse – of heraldry helps to dramatise some of these themes. 

If the colours represent the book’s protagonists, they also necessarily oversimplify their interactions by rendering them in diagrammatic form. Thus the colour coding is not only a misinterpretation because it makes improper use of heraldry: it is also a misinterpretation because, in doing so, it reduces each of the characters to a single, deterministic attribute. 

None of this would be of any interest, of course, unless the heraldic shields communicate something to the viewer emphatically and immediately, as images; but that is the advantage of using a visual code designed to do exactly that. 

Postscript: At some point, I'll provide a separate explanation of why Dan’s colour renditions of the shields are painted (deliberately) incompetently, with the paint spilling over the borders indicated by the underlying patterns. Also, see here for another short analysis of heraldry as a semiotic system.

[1] ‘Dexter’ actually designates the right-hand side of the shield, and ‘sinister’ the left-hand side, but these are determined from the point-of-view of the fictional person holding the shield out in front of them towards the viewer. I have therefore simplified matters by sticking to the viewer's point-of-view here. This account of heraldry is also simplified in other respects.  

[2] It does not apply to divisions of the field in theory. In practice, I have never seen a divided field that does not alternate a metal and a colour for the division.

Five Wounds: An Anti-Historical Novel, Part 2

[Historians] have always … written in the mode of magical realism. In strictly formal and stylistic terms, a text of social history is very closely connected to those novels in which a girl flies, a mountain moves, the clocks run backwards, and where (this is our particular contribution) the dead walk among the living.  

Carolyn Steedman, Dust, p. 150  

This was a psalter in whose margins was delineated a world reversed with respect to the one to which our senses have accustomed us. As if at the border of a discourse that is by definition the discourse of truth, there proceeded, closely linked to it, through wondrous allusions in aenigmate, a discourse in falsehood on a topsy-turvy universe, in which dogs flee before the hare, and deer hunt the lion.  

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, p. 69  

In an earlier post, I described Five Wounds as an ‘anti-historical novel’. It relates to early modern Venice, the subject of my historical research, in much the same way as the marginalia in an illuminated manuscript relate to the sacred text that they accompany: except that in this case the sacred text, which alone justifies the marginalia, is absent or has been rewritten in a profane form. Here, then, the marginalia are promoted to the centre of attention, where they blasphemously assume the outward form of Scripture (I mean that the text is typeset in imitation of the Bible). 

In the quotation from Umberto Eco above, the topsy-turvy world in the margins is related to the central reality of Scripture through the lens of mockery. Mockery also has a central place in Five Wounds, but violence is an equally important organising principle. So the novel literally describes a violent world, in which mutilations and murders are commonplace, but that violence is not restricted to the events described in the plot. The novel’s mode of representation is also violent, in that it deliberately misrepresents historical sources: it forces them to say things that they did not intend. 

The action of Five Wounds is set in an unnamed city that is obviously a version of Venice, but is equally obviously not the historical Venice. Rather, it parodies selected aspects of that historical context, in a manner that sometimes draws upon the so-called ‘anti-myth’ of Venice, in which the Venetian state is portrayed as a corrupt, disguised tyranny rather than a virtuous, transparent republic (the anti-myth also underlies my first book Pistols! Treason! Murder!, which is a biography of a Venetian spy). In Five Wounds, there are also numerous garbled references to Venetian topography, including (notably) the Ghetto, which is here occupied by dogs, and is on the site of an abandoned foundry, this last taking up an etymological speculation about the origin of the word, ‘Ghetto’, and rendering it literally. If Five Wounds is set in several different historical periods simultaneously, as I suggested in that earlier post, then perhaps we might ask, Which, and in what proportion?

Much of the setting seems to be, roughly, mid-nineteenth century: dagurerreotypes, gas lighting, top hats. But some people wear eighteenth-century-type clothing. And the city's constitution parodies that of the Venetian republic, which ceased to exist in 1797. With regard to the book’s conceptual universe, there are references to theoretical arguments put forward by a variety of early modern thinkers, for example Machiavelli and Paracelsus; to early modern theories about the physiological origins of anger and rabies; to Neoplatonic debates on the meaning of hieroglyphs (which are garbled interpretations, based on erroneous premises); and so on. Moreover, a large painting of Paradise in the ducal palace, based on one created by Tintoretto (or his son and workshop) in the late sixteenth century, is newly painted and installed in the novel.

Similarly, some of the more complex illustrations (the plates, which appear at the end of selected chapters) incorporate photographic elements and textures into images that otherwise resemble etchings: that is, they superimpose two quite different image-making technologies.

This game of historical mix-and-match bears some resemblance to what anthropologists and cultural theorists call ‘bricolage’, a sort of ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude to culture, in which a world is made out of borrowed odds and ends, which are put to use without much interest in their original or intended function. Bricolage replaces the idea of misinterpretation with that of appropriation. Misinterpretation presupposes an original meaning that retains priority over all subsequent readings. It excludes unbelievers and heretics. By contrast, appropriation permits anything. It knows no sin. Its only law is, 'Do what thou wilt'. 

I remain committed to the idea of misinterpretation, if only because a world without sin - without laws - is profoundly boring. We are told that it is possible to deconstruct any literary text: to force it to the point of self-contradiction. But Five Wounds positively invites you to do this. It it does not really make sense, and in particular it does not make sense when considered from a historical point-of-view, but it is not even internally consistent. 

This superimposition of contradictory references is also apparent in the plot, which culminates with two alternative endings, a state of affairs that is foreshadowed throughout the book, especially in the illustrations. Thus the hand icon on the cover, which is inspired by an illustration from a seventeenth-century treatise on palmistry, presents to the viewer mutually exclusive readings: that the bearer will live long, and die young; that he will die by fire, and by drowning; and so on.

Above: the Five Wounds hand

This doubling  to a character named Cuckoo, who is, in certain respects, the central figure in the book. He is a gambler with a face made of wax, which he manipulates freely. It is his fate that is at stake in the two different endings, and he is therefore represented as doubled in several images, i.e. as a copy of himself. At the heart of this fictional world, then, there is a vacuum. Everything it requires to sustain stable meanings has been erased, or is ‘under erasure’ - simultaneously asserted and denied, like a phrase that is crossed out but still remains visible - a condition that is again alluded to in the person of Cuckoo, who is always represented in the illustrations with his face scratched out.

 

Above: Cuckoo the trickster

What is the point of all this? It is an attempt to explore the limits of historical explanation by violating all of its essential preconditions. It is also an exploration of the nature of interpretation. As such, Five Wounds opposes a book like The Da Vinci Code, which does not admit the possibility of error in interpretation. In The Da Vinci Code, this means this, and that means that; therefore this, with all the seductive inevitability of a false syllogism. In Five Wounds, mistakes are what drive the plot, or rather, the characters never know whether or not their interpretations are correct.

Even blasphemy admits of too much certainty. Self-contradiction is the only honest strategy.

[All illustrations are by Dan Hallett.]