How do you edit an image?

During the production of Pistols! Treason! Murder! and Five Wounds, a curious discrepancy was apparent. The text was subject to minute editorial supervision. Every word choice and aspect of the storytelling had to be justified. By contrast, Dan and I received very few critical comments on the illustrations.

One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that Dan and I work the illustrations over thoroughly before anyone else sees them: that is, we edit them ourselves. Whereas I need an outside perspective on the text, which is supplied by the publisher, for the images Dan and I provide that perspective for each other.

In practice, therefore, editing an image might mean changing the composition so that so that it exemplifies broader themes that run through the book as a whole. In other cases, we adjust stray details so that nothing detracts from the overall effect: as below in the transition between the first draft of what is now Plate 2, Cur's first murder, in Five Wounds, and the amended, final version underneath.

These two kinds of adjustment - to the underlying structure of the image and to particular details - correspond roughly to the structural edit and the copy edit of the manuscript. In other words, you edit an image according to much the same principles that apply when you edit text.

Terry Gilliam explains his animation techniques

Fantastic archival footage of Gilliam.

Inspirations: Zabriskie Point by Michelangelo Antonioni

The rest of the film is very badly dated (and is therefore not worth explaining here), but this final sequence, seen in isolation, is perhaps the best music video of all time, even though Pink Floyd's 'Come in Number 51, Your Time is Up' doesn't actually start until about two minutes in. That's okay, because the preceding section is taken up by multiple camera views of an actual exploding house (you would make the most of that footage too, if you had blown up an actual house).

The title chapter of Pistols! Treason! Murder! could be seen as a homage to this sequence.

Inspirations: The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tony Richardson (animations by Richard Williams)

Above is a compilation of several animated sequences (created by Richard Williams), which appear in Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). The film in general, and the animations in particular, were a big influence on my first book, Pistols! Treason! Murder! In the film, these sequences punctuate the live action sections, and provide a satirical commentary on events. Below I discuss these animations in an extract from the chapter I contributed to Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn (Re-enactment History), edited by Paul Pickering and Iain McCalman (see here for further discussion of this chapter).

Consider Tony Richardson’s underrated film, The Charge of the Light Brigade, made in 1968 and set during the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth-century. Richardson is immediately faced with the challenge of authenticity. Is telling a story set in the nineteenth century by means of modern media (that is, moving pictures intended for projection upon a cinema screen) an anachronism? Most complaints on the issue of anachronism concern questions of content or mentality—the latter usually involving the attribution of modern attitudes and beliefs to historical characters. The idea of formal anachronism is rarely raised.

The Charge of the Light Brigade is punctuated with animated sequences—made by Richard Williams—that are its most brilliant coup. These are very obviously not realistic at all, at one level. On the contrary, they consist of moving allegorical tableaux that dramatise relations between the European nation-states (the English lion and bulldog, the French cockerel, the Russian bear). However, their style is realistic in the sense that it invokes the satirical cartoons from the magazine Punch or the etchings that Phiz created for Dickens’ novels—and also perhaps their eighteenth-century forebears, William Hogarth and James Gillray. Considered as pastiche, the animations are lovingly detailed, and their tone faithfully reproduces the imperialist rhetoric of the mid-Victorian era. But they are not just pastiche. Something has been added to the original sources: most obviously, the simple fact of animation, but with it has come a different attitude, a kind of detachment and self-conscious manipulation of hindsight that is (by definition) absent from the primary sources. Very quickly, the integrity of the representation is (deliberately) undermined, as unified tableaux disintegrate into collaged fragments in a way that anticipates techniques later used by Terry Gilliam in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Anachronism is deployed as a critical technique.

For Fredric Jameson, the unwillingness or incapacity to acknowledge anachronism is one of the fundamental characteristics of pastiche. To put this in positive rather than negative terms, one of the achievements of pastiche is to actively suppress the concept of anachronism. By contrast, deliberate use of anachronism, and especially of formal anachronism, is a central feature of The Charge of the Light Brigade, in which the tension—even the contradiction—between modern methods of storytelling and the very different narrative techniques used by people in the past is a creative tension. The only unforgivable error would be to pretend that this tension did not exist–as pastiche does. History exists to map the fault lines between the past and the present, rather than to paper over the cracks.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Interview on Radio National's Late Night Live

Another one from the archives: This interview was originally broadcast on Radio National's Late Night Live, in February 2007, for the Australian release of Pistols! Treason! Murder!



The interview refers to my facetious manifesto on 'punk history', as discussed here.

Article on The Revenger's Tragedy

A while ago, I wrote a post on The Revenger's Tragedy, which is the source of my title, Pistols! Treason! Murder! I have just found this fantastic article on the play, in The Guardian, by Gary Taylor. (It's two years old, but better late than never.) An excerpt below:

The cover of Harold Bloom's best-selling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human features a painting by Michelangelo, whose images of titanic individuality have long been recognised as a visual correlative of Shakespeare's great tragic heroes. By contrast, the Italian artist whose vision most resembles Middleton's is not Michelangelo, but his darker, more realistic successor, Caravaggio - who, like Middleton, was celebrated in his own time, but then ignored or disparaged by centuries of critics uncertain of his canon and shocked by his style.

Caravaggio's sympathetic, sensual Mary Magdalen could be the protagonist of Middleton and Dekker's comedy The Honest Whore. Middleton's tragedies can be as lurid, brutal and demystifying as Caravaggio's Judith and Holofernes. Caravaggio's torn, furrowed-browed Doubting Thomas, caught red-handed in that electric moment when scepticism thrusts its finger into faith, could be doubting Thomas Middleton's Timon ("I must ever doubt, though ne'er so sure") or Vindice ("O, I'm in doubt, whether I'm myself or no"). Caravaggio's Saint Jerome, alone, writing at a desk dominated by a skull, could be Middleton's morbid, isolated, intellectual revenger.

Five Wounds: Review from The Age, 15 May 2010

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

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

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

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

Inspirations: The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

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

Donna Tartt, The Secret History, p. 184

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!: Review from Library Journal

The following is extracted from Library Journal, January 15 2010:

Strip away the whiz bangs here—comic-strip sequences, chapters in which the author and friends meet in cafés to talk over their obsession with the past, time-sequence photographs of a flintlock firing—and this is first-rate history, just of a different kind. The flashy stuff works here, with an effect similar to that of Michael Lesy's groundbreaking 1973 Wisconsin Death Trip, where Lesy's pictorial editing forced the reader to look at events a second time, catching nuances that might otherwise have been missed. Walker (research fellow, Univ. of Sydney) describes an incident of spying in 1622 Venice. A master spy, Gerolamo Vano, presents evidence that leads to a Venetian nobleman's hanging on charges of espionage. Five months later, Vano himself is executed for falsifying evidence, and the nobleman is absolved posthumously. But this book isn't just about Vano, about whose machinations the evidence is spotty. It's as much or more a reflection on how one approaches the historical record: how to exhume a coherent narrative from uneven, desultory, and usually self-serving reports. VERDICT This book will infuriate as many scholars as it excites, but it is original, well written, and good. It should intrigue anyone who likes reading history.—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: The Illustrations

Above is a slide show of selected illustrations from my first book, Pistols! Treason! Murder! These illustrations were a late addition to the manuscript. They were created by Dan Hallett, in a rush at the end of 2005, concurrently with my final edits on the text. At this point, our collaboration was still rather haphazard, and my instructions to Dan consisted primarily of scribbled notes and doodles on the backs of hundreds of pages photocopied from early modern source books.

Dan and I had first met in Cambridge in 2001, and we had worked together there to create four sample comic strip pages as an experiment. Subsequently, I had moved to Australia and Dan had moved to Spain, so when my editor at Melbourne University Press, Elisa Berg, asked if we could add more illustrations like the sample pages, I said yes, without actually being sure what that would entail.

In the event, Dan and I were able to renew our collaboration entirely by e-mail, and in a much more effective way than before, resulting not only in a new set of illustrations, all in the style of seventeenth-century woodcuts, but subsequently in an even more ambitious project: that is, our illuminated novel, Five Wounds (on which, more anon).

Pistols! Treason! Murder! at Rorotoko

This week, Pistols! Treason! Murder! is one of the featured books at Rorotoko, an online discussion venue. My article for Rorotoko can be found here. Below is a short extract, which explains one of the illustrations in the book.

Above: The Wounds of Giulio Cazzari, created by Dan Hallett.

This illustration accompanies the title chapter of Pistols! Treason! Murder! It depicts in allegorical form the assassination of Giulio Cazzari, one of Vano’s numerous victims.

Vano’s costume here is taken in part from that of the figure of “The Spy” in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, a ubiquitous visual source book of the period. Note the cloak of eyes and ears, and the winged boots of Hermes, messenger of the gods, who was also patron of “revelation, commerce, communication and thieving” (Vano’s activities fell under all four categories).

The cup is filled with ink, but obviously alludes to the Holy Grail, while the imagery as a whole also suggests the iconography of the wounds and sacred heart of Christ. However, in the context of the book, there is a more explicit reference to a passage from an earlier chapter, “Idiolect,” in which Vano’s words, read aloud, “taste like red wine—or, to be more precise, bad red wine: acidic, furring the tongue, lips and teeth; intoxicating, yet also prone to induce sore eyes and jabbing headaches. The more of them you speak, the more they numb the mouth and brain, and induce slurring.”

Intoxication as a response to Vano’s words is a recurrent theme in the book, underlined elsewhere by another image in which I am shown drinking from the same cup into which Vano dips his pen here.

In the image above, intoxication is further associated with a kind of knowledge based on vicarious participation in historical events through exemplary re-enactment, that is with the stigmata, and with holy communion, in which a Christian devotee respectively receives the wounds of Christ, or ingests the blood of Christ. But here the sacred meaning is violently profaned. The secular grail that Vano holds aloft is therefore the elusive, unattainable goal of every historian’s quest: direct, unmediated access to the past.

Finally, the disassembled corpse of Giulio Cazzari, the victim whose remains lie within the heart at the image’s apex, also alludes to the fragmentary nature of the sources recounting his death, which cannot be stitched together into a single, coherent narrative.

To be absolutely clear, this image makes no claim to be a literal depiction of anything. Although it is composed of elements adapted from early modern sources, I have no idea what Vano or Cazzari looked like or wore. And while Cazzari certainly was assassinated as a result of Vano’s reports on his activities, his dead body was not in fact dismembered. This image is therefore a kind of diagram, one mapping arguments and elaborating subtexts rather than describing events.

None of the ideas outlined in the discussion above are expressed directly in the text of the book. Such explanation would be redundant: the argument is all there in the illustration itself, and in its implied relation to other elements of the presentation, both visual and linguistic. So another of my arguments is, in effect, that we should take images seriously as independent vehicles for complex and abstract ideas.

[There will be more on the illustrations for Pistols! Treason! Murder! in future posts ...]

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Judges' Comments for the 2008 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

The following is not very topical, but I'm posting it here as a form of indexing. In 2008, the Australian edition of Pistols! Treason! Murder! was shortlisted for The Prize for a First Book of History in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. Below is the judges' report:

Pistols! Treason! Murder!
Jonathan Walker
(Melbourne University Publishing)

This deeply satisfying book takes readers into the world of seventeenth-century Venetian master spy, Gerolamo Vano. In the process, Jonathan Walker reveals how he creatively made history, out of a newly discovered and fragmentary archive in the form of Vano’s surveillance reports. Closely reading these documents, Walker constructs a spell-binding tale of people and place, in a book that reflects on the practice of history-making and poses large questions about the compact between historians and their readers, and what counts as a trustworthy version of a past.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Review from The Guardian, 10 October 2009

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Plausibility, Part 2

[Continued from the previous post:]

The distinctiveness of Vano’s reports will become clearer if we compare them with two chronicles that describe the downfall of the Venetian traitor, Zuan Battista Bragadin.[1] Neither of these chronicles mentions Vano, whose evidence was in fact crucial to the prosecution (the case is described in some detail in Pistols! Treason! Murder!).[2] On the contrary, the chronicle accounts explain Bragadin’s downfall in such a way as to avoid any mention of spies, paid informants, or the Inquisitors of State, whose existence presupposed a world in which spies were an essential instrument of statecraft.

According to the chronicles, then, Bragadin was generally despised for his [poor] character.[3] His election to the Senate, on whose deliberations he supplied information to the Spanish, only came about because of a massive electoral conspiracy. This conspiracy also resulted in the elevation of a number of other highly unsuitable candidates. It was exposed by the Ten in 1620, shortly before Bragadin's arrest. These events are outside our area of interest, but the fallout from this conspiracy caused a huge scandal, and the resulting arrests and prosecutions occupy a great deal of space in the Ten’s criminal register for 1620.

Again according to the chroniclers, Bragadin left notes for the Spanish secretary to collect in a dead-drop in the church of the Frari. This suspicious behaviour was observed by one of the friars attached to the church, who reported the matter directly to the doge by means of a petition. Bragadin’s fellow senators then tricked him into writing a letter, so that the writing could be compared with that on the notes. When presented with the evidence (by these same fellow senators), Bragadin said simply, I deserve to die.[4]

Possibly the friar was an actual, independent source, who was used to corroborate Vano’s evidence. In any case, this ‘official’ version of events shows that the chroniclers had a quite different understanding of treachery and spying to Vano, and consequently a different notion of what counted as an adequate or plausible account of events. Unwilling or unable to enter Vano’s world, they offered a comforting fable whose silences betray an anxiety about the role of spies in Venetian political life. The chroniclers seem to be critiquing Vano, however unconsciously, but we can turn this around and use Vano to critique them. There are four complementary elements to this mutual critique.

(1) For the chroniclers, the traitor was corrupt from the beginning, and he was understood to be so before he ever committed an act of treachery. His election to the Senate was irregular, and he was therefore unrepresentative of its membership. Since he was different, he could be judged and condemned without anxiety. For Vano, by contrast, the identity of the traitor was difficult to establish because he looked just like everyone else. Also, many spies had divided or shifting loyalties, so the person who was condemned one day might turn out to be a useful informant the next.

(2) For the chroniclers, the traitor was discovered by a concerned but neutral observer (the friar), who was representative of all those who played no direct role in Venetian government but benefited from Venetian justice, and therefore wished to be good subjects. For Vano, by contrast, the traitor was uncovered by paid specialists, whose loyalty could not be relied upon.

(3) For the chroniclers, the traitor was trapped and publicly exposed by his peers, who thus symbolically repudiated him as unworthy of being a noble. In the world occupied by Vano and the Inquisitors, the traitor was sentenced secretly, and those who (unlike Bragadin or Foscarini) managed to escape into exile remained in contact with family and friends. The traitor was not exceptional, because there was always someone else waiting to take his place.

(4) For the chroniclers, the traitor condemned himself spontaneously when confronted with the truth of his guilt. For Vano and the Inquisitors, if the traitor confessed it was only because he was compelled to do so by the threat of torture, and some men – Antonio Foscarini for example – went to their deaths refusing to confess.

I would not wish to exaggerate Vano’s sophistication, but his account is still more convincing than that of the chroniclers.[5] Whatever the local definitions of plausibility, the best writers are capable of escaping from them by creating a self-contained world, within which their characters become not only plausible, but necessary manifestations of the internal logic of that world. Vano’s minimalism then becomes a sign of his control over his material rather than his lack of insight. The success of his accusation against Foscarini is proof of this.

[1] The two chronicle accounts of Bragadin's case can be found in the Marciana Library, Venice, Italian manuscripts, class VII, 1664 (7542), Miscellanea, fos 98-107; and class VII, 121-2 (8862-3), Gian Carlo Sives, Cronica Veneta, book 4, fo. 185r.

[2] Most of the relevant documentation is in Archivio di Stato, Venice, Inquisitori di Stato, busta 1214, no. 57.

[3] He was elected indirectly, since he held a judicial office that conferred ex officio Senate membership.

[4] The Mantuan resident’s despatches also mentioned the friar, and insisted that Bragadin had confessed spontaneously, but he put the case where it belonged, under the supervision of the Inquisitors.

[5] Vano’s analysis is considerably less subtle than that offered in many of the despatches sent to the Venetian Senate, the Ten and the Inquisitors by ambassadors stationed abroad. However, in certain respects his ‘voice’ resembles that of the Inquisitors’ secretary Roberto Lio, in the reports the latter sent from Mantua during a rendezvous with a potential informant in July 1621. The skeptical, sardonic and unruffled manner adopted by Lio is implicitly contrasted with that of his contact, who is depicted as shifty, easily offended, and prone to emotional outbursts and melodramatic statements, which he used to cover the holes in his story. This contrast – between a detached narrator who stresses his own emotional self-control, and a narrative subject whose lack of self-control reveals more fundamental character weaknesses – may therefore be regarded as a standard device. For Lio’s ultimately fruitless trip to Mantua, see Archivio di Stato, Inquisitori di Stato, busta 157, various letters to Milan dated 17 July to 7 Aug. 1621, along with a letter to Mantua dated 24 July 1621; and Inquisitori di Stato, busta 449, letters from Mantua dated 23 July and 26 July 1621, plus various letters from Milan from 14 July to 11 Aug. 1621.

Pistols! Treason! Murder!: Plausibility, Part 1

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the arrest, execution and posthumous exoneration of the Venetian noble Antonio Foscarini. Gerolamo Vano supplied (at least some of) the evidence against Foscarini. Given the eventual outcome of the case, why were the Council of Ten (the prosecuting magistrates) initially convinced of Foscarini’s guilt? In other words, why did Vano’s accusations initially seem plausible to them?

To answer this question, we need to begin by distinguishing the plausible from the true. Even if truth is absolute, plausibility is not. It is always defined by reference to a particular context because it depends on shared expectations and preconceptions about normal behaviour or probable outcomes. For example, in Venice, what we might call the ‘threshold of suspicion’ was very low after the exposure of the so-called Spanish conspiracy in 1618. The Council of Ten were expecting to find traitors, and specific accusations are always preferable to diffuse anxiety in such circumstances. And, while both Foscarini's arrest and the sentence against him were unexpected, none of the foreign ambassadors present in Venice who initially reported on the case doubted that he was guilty as charged. There were no cynics suggesting that the Ten had been deceived or that there were political motives behind the prosecution.[1]

The legal notion of indizii, ‘clues’ or circumstantial evidence, was undoubtedly crucial in Foscarini’s trial. Indizii were physical or other signs that permitted an investigating magistrate to make inferences in the absence of direct eyewitness testimony. Most such ‘clues’ fell under the category of what we would now call circumstantial evidence. For example, in a murder case, if the accused fled, or had previously threatened the victim, these were indizii of his guilt, whilst the presence of multiple wounds on a corpse served as evidence of deliberate intent to kill, and was therefore an indizio of premeditation. Theoretical discussion of this matter dwelt at inordinate length on the possibility of poisoning; that is, on circumstances that were by definition difficult to establish by eyewitness testimony.[2]

The biographer Girolamo Priuli, writing a few years after Foscarini’s death, explicitly tells us that Foscarini was suspected – the word used is inditiato, that is, ‘rendered suspect by indizii’ – on the basis of testimony from witnesses who had been corrupted by the wicked man [that is, Gerolamo Vano, although he is not named in Priuli’s account], since matters of State are so important and sensitive, that circumstantial evidence [indizii] has the force of proof [in such cases].[3] This last point was in contrast to normal criminal procedure, in which indizii alone might justify an arrest or investigation, but not a conviction.

Vano’s reports are indeed full of details that could be classed as indizii of treachery or deceit: attempts at disguise, signs of emotional disturbance, and so on. However, many of these involve the sort of crude emotional signposting that only children and bad actors resort to nowadays: stamping feet, foaming mouths, and so on. To a modern reader, they seem highly implausible. How could the Ten possibly have been taken in? The point is that plausibility depends on local definitions of appropriate behaviour, and these in turn depend on the threshold of embarrassment (the phrase is Norbert Elias') regarding open displays of emotion. Vano lived in a world in which melodrama was part of the texture of everyday experience. Moreover, part of the point of Vano’s reports was that he was showing men with their guard down, when the demands and controls of civility had been relaxed.

This whole issue is further complicated by the fact that some of Vano’s characters actually were bad actors. His informants lived in the space between appearance and reality, whilst their real intentions always had to be subject to plausible denial. This posed an enormous psychological and cultural problem for them, just as it poses a retrospective interpretative problem for us, since people learn how to feel by acting their feelings out and having them validated by the response of others. By contrast, one learns to spy in the same way that one learns to lie.[4]

The difficulty of acting a part was compounded by the fact that, even in private, the word ‘spy’, like the word atheist or traitor, was usually applied to other people. Thus Vano used it exclusively to describe Spanish and Imperial familiars.[5] Like executioners, spies were necessary instruments of government, but the men so employed were considered infamous by others.[6] As a result, it was difficult to explain one’s actions to oneself by adopting the role of spy. It was of course necessary to admit what one had done in certain circumstances – notably when asking for money from employers – but polite euphemisms were always observed: ‘loyal subject’ and so on.

The issue of infamy brings us to what plausibility meant in court, because evidence offered by infamous people traditionally carried little or no weight. A thief’s testimony always counted less than that of a gentleman. It was morally implausible. The get-out clause for the Council of Ten in using Vano’s testimony was the notion of ‘reason of state’, which justified a temporary suspension of normal moral and/or legal standards for political reasons. In other words, reason of state justified a redefinition of plausibility in light of a redefinition of morality, or in light of secret knowledge of statecraft.

On what basis were distinctions and legal judgements made? Thomas Cohen has argued in a recent article that witnesses in sixteenth-century Italian courts attempted to convince the judges by staking a claim to jeopardy. As he puts it, men with something to lose will flaunt their risks to prove serious intent. [7] He identified three forms of jeopardy invoked by witnesses. These were:

(1) Physical vulnerability: I cannot resist you. Torture me if you do not believe what I say and you will see that my story remains unchanged. Under torture, or faced with the threat of torture, I am incapable of dissimulation.
(2) Empirical proof: I am being so specific that it will be easy to prove whether I am lying by checking the details of my story.
(3) Honour: How dare you take this thief’s word over mine? May I lose my reputation if I am lying.

What then was Vano offering as a ‘stake’ to guarantee the truth of his information, the thing that he would forfeit if he was proved to be a liar? Not honour, obviously. As a spy, he was outside the honour code. He invoked empiricism most explicitly, apparently offering a rich accumulation of detail. However, there was a radical physical vulnerability behind this apparent empiricism. Vano staked himself and threw the dice, over and over again.

[Discussion continues in the next post:]

[1] There were four abstentions (out of seventeen votes) in the resolution on Foscarini’s condemnation, but since no one actually voted for absolution, the abstainers were probably just squeamish about getting noble blood on their hands.

[2] Antonio Barbaro, Pratica Criminale, Venice, 1739, pp. 41-6; Lorenzo Priori, Prattica Criminale, Venice, 1644, pp. 17-18, 123.

[3] Museo Correr, Venice, Codici Cicogna, 3782, G. Priuli, Pretiosi Frutti del Maggior Consiglio, fo. 29v.

[4] In light of all this, it is actually Vano’s restraint when faced with persistent threats to his life from the Spanish that is more difficult to explain. In other words, to reverse the terms of our original question, is it plausible that he should remain so impassive in a culture where stamping feet and foaming mouths were considered normal? There are two possible explanations for this. Firstly, his sang-froid might make more sense if we understand anger as a response triggered more by wounded honour than physical threat. Since Vano’s honour was not engaged, then he never got angry. Nor did he feel the need to justify or explain himself, since he could take the tacit support of his audience (i.e. the Inquisitors of State) for granted. Secondly, and more obviously, his role as narrator gave him a distance from the events he described.

[5] This generalisation is based on the use of the word spia in Italian sources. I cannot say whether it applies to the use of analogous terms in English or French. Venetian sources do sometimes refer to men in their own employ as spies. For example, the expense claims submitted by the Ten’s captain of police, Francesco Ongarin, and extant in Archivio di Stato, Venice, Inquisitori di Stato, busta 953, refer thus to individuals employed on an ad hoc basis for surveillance operations. The fact that no-one referred to Vano as a spy in his reports is actually rather suspicious. The single exception was an anonymous letter dropped off at Vano’s house, included as an insert in Inquisitori di Stato, busta 636, which (significantly) was written by an enemy.

[6] For example, this is how the spy is described in Tomaso Garzoni, La piazza universale, Venice, 1616, p. 306r, although spies were not considered ‘infamous’ in the technical, legal sense that a convicted felon was.

[7] Thomas V. Cohen, ‘Three Forms of Jeopardy: Honor, Pain, and Truth-Telling in a Sixteenth-Century Italian Courtroom’, Sixteenth Century Journal, vol. 29.4 (1998), pp. 976, 987.

Thomas Cromwell and Gerolamo Vano

The following review of Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning novel about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall, is quoted from Abigail Nussbaum's excellent blog, Asking the Wrong Questions (although it begins with a passage that Abigail takes from another review by Dan Hartland). It is a long extract. I have set it in Arial to indicate the extent of the quoted text more precisely, and readers are encouraged to consult Abigail's original review here:

As Dan Hartland points out, Mantel makes a virtue out of Cromwell's lack of conviction:

Those around Cromwell are characterised by an allegiance to a system: More’s Catholicism, Norfolk’s feudalism, Wolsey’s royalism. Cromwell, on the other hand, has an almost Nietzschean approach. “I distrust all systematizers, ” wrote the philosopher, “and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” Mantel’s Cromwell likewise believes in personal respect and education, a fully humanist perspective which sets him at odds with the medievalised England to which he is born. Mantel sees his meritocratic rise – from smith’s son to soldier, trader to merchant, lawyer to Lord Chancellor – as a symbol of the birth of our modern age.

I would go even further and say that Mantel makes a virtue out of Cromwell's lack of integrity and sense of personal dignity as well (the latter is presumably linked to his humble origins, which leave him, unlike the nobles around him, indifferent to his family's honor). Several times over the course of the novel, Cromwell visits prisoners condemned for their words--the heretic John Frith, condemned by More; the self-proclaimed prophetess Elizabeth Barton, who had threatened Henry with divine retribution for casting off Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn; and finally, More himself. Each time, he counsels the prisoners to lie, recant, and compromise their principles in order to save themselves. "I would advise anyone to get a few more weeks of life, by any means they can," he tells Barton, advising her to 'plead her belly' in order to delay her execution, and the final conflict of the novel, between Cromwell and More, hinges on More's refusal to compromise his immortal soul by swearing an oath acknowledging Henry as the head of the church in England and the legality of his marriage to Anne. What in A Man for All Seasons was treated as the crowning glory of More's saintliness is, in Wolf Hall, described as the epitome of his arrogance and self-regard, with Cromwell, instead of the devil trying to tempt More away from righteousness, portrayed as a humanistic angel trying to save More from himself.

This description of Cromwell as an avatar of modernity, and moreover of a very particular - we might call it Nietzschean - idea of modernity, is reminiscent of my own characterisation of Gerolamo Vano in Pistols! Treason! Murder! as a man who 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 (see here). I do not mean to imply that my book is the equal of Mantel's. Rather, I have 'prefigured' or 'emplotted' the past (or more accurately, the relationship between past and present) in similar ways to Mantel.

The will to a system is a lack of integrity: this criticism applies to historians as well as to the subjects of their enquiries.

Zoë Sadokierski

Last year I met Zoë Sadokierski to discuss how the illustrations and design of my first book, Pistols! Treason! Murder!, might relate to Zoë's research for her Ph.D. thesis. Zoë is also a freelance book designer. In particular, she has worked on several titles in Allen & Unwin's new graphic novel imprint, notably Nikki Greenberg's adapation of The Great Gatsby. It was through Zoë that I first met Erica Wagner, the publisher at Allen & Unwin who eventally bought my novel Five Wounds, on which Zoe is - of course - the designer.

On her blog, Zoë explains that:

Books that use graphic elements as a literary device are not a new phenomenon: ... In fact, it could be easily argued that historically, books have been more heavily illustrated than they are today. However, these illustrations have generally been decorative embellishments, rather than conscious interruptions, to the written text. By contrast, Zoë is interested in books that use photographs, illustrations, diagrams, experimental typography. .... in a manner intrinsic to the writing; where the visual does something more than simply reflecting the text.

How does the use of graphic elements affect book production? Zoë explains:

There are designers who write, just as there are writers who design and illustrate. Generally, these people are the exception to the rule rather than the norm. I don’t think merging the two disciplines is a realistic future. I think it’s collaboration. To explore this narrative style in a way that won’t render it a passing trend, writers and book composers (to borrow El Lissitzky’s term) need to reconsider their relationships.

If it’s appropriate for a novel to include graphic elements for narrative, rather than decorative purposes, the writer and the book composer must consider the book’s graphic elements from the initial stages of the process, rather than cake decorating a manuscript once it has cooled. In the tradition of literary pairings from Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake to Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman, I think writers and book composers need to develop closer working relationships; they need to understand the way each other work and think. It’s something that graphic novel writers and illustrators do well.

Parenthetically, it is deeply dispiriting that the area of publishing where a total absence of 'closer working relationships' is most glaringly apparent is that of mainstream photography books, where the authors of forewords and introductions often make no reference whatsoever to the images contained within, or, if they do so, discuss them in a manner so crude and reductive that one wishes they had kept silent (some negative examples are discussed here). This is a problem with the incompetent incorporation of text into a predominatly visual presentation rather than the other way around; but the consequences of this failure to conceptualise (that is: to design) the entire book as an integrated whole are even more catastrophic.

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.