The Spit Pressis 'Sydney's Creative Newspaper', aimed at readers who work in, or are interested in, the creative industries. Their latest issue has a review of Five Wounds by James Scott on p. 20. It's a bit difficult to locate the text in the online version, so I have copied it below. But do check out the rest of the newspaper: it offers a unique perspective on life in Sydney.
Graphic Novels, Not Just for Geeks?
Five Wounds by Jonathan Walker and Dan Hallett is atmospheric, grotesque, thrilling and tender. Certainly unlike anything else we've ever stumbled upon, this illustrated novel is a disturbing delight. Book lover James Scott had a read.
With a beautiful hardcover this 'illuminated novel' is a fantastic book to plonk on your lap in any public place, even if only to enjoy the sideways glances of passersby who seem to suspect you might at any moment turn to them, eyes dark, and incant at them in some frightening, grunting language.
Upon opening the book I was startled and initially annoyed by what at first struck me as a pretentious and over the top way to lay out the text. That is, rather like 'The Bible', complete with verse numbers. However before long, I was totally won over by the hypnotic and addictive rhythm that reads almost like poetry.
The story is set in an imaginary Venice and chronicles the complicated intrigues of five disfigured protagonists. Gabriella is a mutilated angel who struggles to decipher her prophetic dreams. Cur is a rabid `Romulus' and aquaphobe, who knows nothing other than the cult of canine mercenaries and the ghetto in which he was raised. Cuckoo is an orphan, obsessed with chance and cards, who can reshape his wax face (less weird in context than it sounds here) to resemble another's, however cannot smile without a mirror, a candle and some time. Magpie is a sickly thief and photographer, who fears direct light for blindness and yearns for a model to surrender to him completely. Undoubtedly my favourite however is Crow; a leper alchemist. Deliciously reprehensible, Crow is ruthless and fantastically clever in pursuing his extremely ambitious goals. The stories and studies of these characters intertwine with increasing intricacy as the novel builds to an immensely exciting, haunting, heartbreaking and ultimately satisfying conclusion.
The depiction of this alternative Venice is dreamy and surreal, but the author paints a world that feels completely authentic. The illuminations by Dan Hallett are a joy, and bring a lot to the book. Sometimes striking and colourful, and at other times comical and cartoonish, they reinforce the idea that this is a fairy tale for grown ups.
The writing is extremely capable and the author cleverly uses patterns and shapes modeled not only on The Good Book but also on Grimm's Fairy Talesto give the story a familiar feel that plays well against the darkness of the plot and the sometimes slightly uncomfortable, but impressive depth in characterisation. Five Wounds is also saturated with references, saturated.
All in all, a very handsome book and a story that is symphonic in its poetry, breadth and cohesion. It is tempting to think that the author lives by the same motto as one of his characters; "Either Ceasar, or nothing."
It is a sad day for light entertainment. The great Frank Sidebottom has died. RIP.
Photo: ITV / Rex Features via The Guardian website
For those of you not privileged to have seen Frank in his heyday at Liverpool Polytechnic c. 1990, giving lectures on 'Space', 'Puppets', etc., performing in one-man pantomimes, such as 'Bobbinson Crusoe', or singing his inspired version of Bohemian Rhapsody, this newspaper feature, first published in 1991, may explain things.
For conoisseurs only (because the audio and video are both terrible), below is a feature from Granada Reports on Frank, featuring both Tony Wilson and Richard Madeley as presenters! Maybe c. 1987, I would guess.
I first saw Terry Gilliam's Brazilin Liverpool, in maybe 1986, on a microscopic screen in a private cinema at the Bluecoat Chambers, which was the only place you could see it in 1986 (this was before the rise of commercial arthouse cinemas, and before home video was readily available). I've seen it on a giant screen since then, and now I have the Criterion 3-disc DVD edition, but that crowded weird little space - in which I also saw The Return of Martin Guerre, Alan Parker's Birdy, and probably several other films I no longer recall - seemed somehow apiece with the distorted relationships of scale visible within the film.
I knew almost nothing of the legendary story of Brazil's production, in which the film was withheld by the studio in charge of production until Gilliam finally took out a full-page ad in Variety asking them when they were going to release it (in the absence of a Variety subscription, there was no way to find out such things in Liverpool in 1986).
It was because of films like Brazil that I lost my unquestioning allegiance to books. After Brazil, the novel was no longer a privileged art form, no longer D. H. Lawrence's one bright book of life. Five Wounds is written in the light of that revelation.
(Gilliam's earlier Jabberwocky is also a big influence on the black humour in Five Wounds, and on the book's pseudo-medieval aspects.)
The five senses are a common theme in Five Wounds and it seems fitting then, that it appeals to the senses in such detail. I have literally tried everything short of licking the book. The hardcover, thoughtful selection of paper stock and red ribbon page-marker makes the book seem like an artefact; it is a privilege to hold it. .... The scribblings peppered through out the book add to its mystery. I feel as if I am reading a diary, a draft, a spell book; something personal that was not meant for the eyes of others. .... [They] lend the book a desperate sense of urgency.
A man's work is nothing but the long journey to recover, through the detours of art, the two or three simple and great images which first gained access to his heart (Albert Camus)
Who knows why certain films stick in the memory? From my childhood, I have peculiarly vivid recollections of a handful, many of which are predictable, like The Wizard of Oz, because it was on every Christmas, or Star Wars, because it was a cultural phenomenon. In other cases, the memory is not of the film itself, but of some particular aspect of the experience of watching it, as is the case with Woody Allen’s Sleeper, for example, which is the only film I can remember my mother laughing at, when we watched it on television together late one night.
For me, one of these Proustian films is The Great Waldo Pepper, released in 1975, although I saw it a few years later, again on television. It was a pet project of its director, George Roy Hill, who was finally able to get it made because of the success of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, and because one of the stars of those previous films, Robert Redford, was also committed to Waldo Pepper. It is sometimes described as a box-office flop, although Wikipedia says that it made $20,000,000 on a $5,000,000 budget, which doesn’t sound like a flop to me (having said that, the film is almost unknown now and difficult to obtain: my DVD is a German edition).
The Great Waldo Pepper tells the story of the titular character, played by Redford, who is trying to make a living as a pilot immediately after World War 1, when aeroplanes were still sufficiently novel that aerial circuses could draw crowds regularly. This way of life is coming to an end, however, as the film progresses (it starts in 1926 and ends in 1931). In fact, the plot is based upon familiar tropes of modernisation, in which bureaucracy, technological advancement and capitalism (in this case the establishment of a regulatory body that issues licenses for pilots and the growth of modern airlines) marginalise the individual and the pioneer spirit, a story structure that is instantly recognisable from the canon of Sam Peckinpah, although Hill’s milieu and characters are much more benign than Peckinpah’s.
This is all fairly predictable (although probably not to the pre-teen version of myself), but the film’s great strength is its commitment to reenactment. There are very few special effects shots or blue screen work used for the flying sequences. Rather, almost all of them involve pilots performing incredibly dangerous stunts in replica aircraft, whose accuracy to period standards was immediately apparent to me, since I was an enthusiastic assembler of miniature model aeroplanes.
Waldo arrived too late to participate directly in the air war in France, so he attempts to relive it vicariously by inserting himself into his retellings of historical incidents: in particular, a famous dogfight in which the German ace Ernst Kessler (probably inspired by Ernst Udet) shot down four out of five pursuing Allied airmen, before letting the fifth go unharmed when his final opponent's guns jammed. This too is a familiar trope: the heroic (because individualistic) ‘knights of the air’, whose chivalric treatment of their opponents contrasts sharply with the indiscriminate industrial death meted out below.
In Waldo’s retelling of the story, he of course takes the part of Madden, the only Allied survivor, and it is not until he crosses paths with someone who was actually in France that his charade is revealed. From Waldo’s point-of-view, the lie is justified because, 'It should've been me'. One might say that Waldo upholds Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry: history is inferior because it is limited to what actually did happen, whereas poetry concerns itself with the loftier subject of what should or must have happened.
SPOILER ALERT IN WHAT FOLLOWS
There are two sequences in this film that stuck with me as a child, and then again later, when I rewatched the film on VHS as an undergraduate in the early 1990s. The first is when Waldo’s friend and colleague Ezra, attempts to perform a demanding stunt, the ‘outside loop’ in a monoplane of his own design, a plane and a stunt that were intended for Waldo, who is forced to watch from the ground due to his temporary suspension from flying after an accident in which a woman died. The outside loop involves tipping the plane into a vertical dive, and then levelling out halfway through the manoeuvre upside down, then climbing back up to the original starting position. It is much more difficult than a conventional ‘loop-the-loop’ (an ‘inside loop’), because the G-forces are much greater, as is the required engine power and the resulting stress on the plane’s wings. After several abortive attempts and near-misses, Ezra stalls out in the last phase of the manoeuvre, as he attempts to push the plane back up over the top, and plummets to the ground. Before Ezra has even hit, Waldo is off running to the crash site, but he is followed closely by the excited crowd.
Ezra is alive, but trapped in the wreckage. As gasoline spills, and Waldo tries to get him out, Ezra becomes hysterical. ‘Waldo, they’re smoking, they’re smoking!’, he shouts at the rubberneckers around the plane holding their cigarettes, and then, as the inevitable happens and the gasoline ignites, ‘Waldo! Don’t let me burn! .... I'm burning, Waldo!’ Waldo knows it’s too late. He can’t get Ezra out now, it’s impossible, there’s nothing he can do, so he picks up a piece of wood, and brings it down, hard. Then he pushes through the crowd and makes for a plane. Furious, he takes off and swoops down low, right over the heads of the crowd, who are now gathered around a funeral pyre. Waldo’s impetuous behaviour seals his fate. He has flown without a license, and moreover, in a deliberately reckless manner, so now he is banned permanently. In a bitter coda, we learn that Kessler, who is now working in America as a stunt pilot, has successfully performed an outside loop with another flying circus.
Ezra's death illustrates the role of empathy and catharsis in dramatic performance, or rather the idea that a certain kind of performance – the spectacle – does not permit true identification, but rather encourages voyeurism, a debased kind of pseudo-empathy. As we watch a war film – say, the opening of Saving Private Ryan – we are, according to this critique, little better than the spectators surrounding Ezra’s crashed plane. Our pleasure is derived from how closely these simulated deaths resemble actual deaths, but unlike the participants, who commit their whole bodies to the experience, and who risk injury and death in doing so, we do not really have anything at stake, existentially, and that is why our voyeurism is immoral. Ezra’s death in The Great Waldo Pepper is not a reenactment, but it does teach us that true empathy requires us to be involved directly. Among the spectators, only Waldo really feels Ezra’s predicament, and the consequence of that identification is that he must kill Ezra. 'Waldo! Don't let me burn!'
After this debacle, Waldo moves to Hollywood to join his friend Axel, who is working there as a stuntman. But temptation arrives in the form of a film about the famous dogfight with Kessler, Eagles Over France, perhaps inspired by Howard Hawks' infamous Hell's Angels, in which Kessler is flying his own stunts in a replica of his black and yellow Fokker Triplane. Axel, who still has a license, will play the part of McKinnon, the fourth Allied pilot to be shot down, whose plane caught fire, and who jumped without a parachute rather than burn to death (the parallel with Ezra is obvious and intentional). Waldo, under a pseudonym, and at Kessler's particular request, takes the role of Madden, the man whose story he had previously appropriated.
On the night before before the staging of the climactic dogfight, Waldo reviews the film’s props, protesting – like any good military reenactor – that they are inaccurate. The director, Werfel, replies loftily, 'Anybody can supply accuracy. Artists provide truth'. On the set, Waldo runs into Kessler, who confesses that his post-war career, so successful on the surface, is really only a series of distractions from a deep-rooted sense of failure. Kessler is heavily in debt (for gambling, we presume), and he drinks too much. He can barely remember the events of the famous dogfight, which was over in a few minutes, even though he lives his entire life now in the shadow of that brief moment of pure, immediate impulse.
This too is a trope: a sort of inverse version of trauma, in which a character can never return to the moment of his origin, to that which makes him who he is, or rather to the moment in which he was most himself (precisely because he was not aware of being so), and is therefore condemned to live out the rest of his life as a series of increasingly inauthentic attempts to recapture (to re-enact) that experience. Kessler’s disillusionment both complements and puts the lie to Waldo’s sense of temporal dislocation. Waldo arrived too late: he lives his life in the knowledge that his exemplary experience, the event that should have publicly confirmed his sense of himself, actually happened to someone else, before Waldo could get there to claim it. Kessler’s exemplary experience also happened to someone else: that is, to a version of himself that he no longer recognises, from whom he is alienated irrevocably ('Aren't you playing yourself?', Waldo asks him, but a handsome younger actor takes Kessler's place on the ground). In Waldo’s case, the original experience is doubly lost, because his participation in it is a fiction.
MORE SPOILERS
The second clip that stuck with me from The Great Waldo Pepper is excerpted in the video above, and it shows the climactic re-enactment of the dogfight between Kessler and Madden, the latter played by Waldo. This dogfight is, however, preceded by Axel’s big moment, in which he reenacts the crash dive of the doomed McKinnon, the pilot of the fourth plane that Kessler shot down.
Axel’s scene establishes clearly what is at stake in the more elaborate confrontation that follows. Axel has a parachute of course, but he is instructed by Werfel, the director, to wait until the plane is 'really on fire' before jumping, and not to pull the cord until the last possible moment, so as not to ruin the shot. 'Of course, you could not pull your chute at all, that way he'd be sure to get the right effect', Waldo comments sarcastically. Axel obeys Werfel's instructions, and, as a result, breaks his leg upon impact, but he is alive, and Werfel is delighted at the footage. Axel therefore reaps the monetary reward for his successful reenactment of McKinnon’s death. Everyone wins, but the message is clear, as Waldo's remark indeed suggests.
Battle reenactment is the exemplary form of reenactment because a battle is an exemplary event, which is why histories that are invested in the idea of the event tend to concentrate on wars. There is, however, one crucial difference between a battle and its reenactment: in the latter, the intention is to mimic the effects of the battle, that is, fatalities, as closely as possible, but without actually replicating them. If someone dies in a battle reenactment, then it has failed, but the measure of its success is in how close it can go up to the edge of killing the participants, without actually killing them. Authenticity is the primary value in reenactment, but in a battle reenactment, authenticity equals death. Reenactments of battles are therefore not entirely dissimilar from the aerial spectacle in which Ezra died, in which the attraction is similarly related to the risk of death. It is no surprise, then, that the confrontation between Waldo and Kessler is staged as a sort of gigantic game of chicken, in which the two dare each other to see who can go furthest.
This experience is only available to men (they're called 'dogfights' for a reason). Women are marginalised, and indeed trivialised, throughout The Great Waldo Pepper. Just prior to the clip above, Axel’s girlfriend asks stupidly, ‘What’d they do that for?’ when Kessler and Waldo throw their parachutes away before takeoff, and she later repeats, ‘I don’t understand. What are they doing?’ Kessler and Waldo, by contrast, have now reached a point of perfect understanding, where silent gestures are sufficient (see here for another discussion of silent masculine communication).
What Waldo and Kessler realise is that, to truly commit to their reenactment, they have to commit to its logic. They have to try to kill each other. Since the director has unfortunately failed to provide them with ammunition, the only way they can do this is to use their planes as weapons. Thus their reenactment departs significantly from the literal truth of the original events that give it meaning, but this is not important. What matters is their implacable understanding: their joint suspension of disbelief. If the audience is in fact composed of voyeurs, who cannot truly identify with the participants in a reenactment, then the audience is completely irrelevant to its success or failure. Waldo and Kessler therefore begin their game by turning their back on the audience, as they leave the camera plane far behind (although they are nonetheless being followed by another camera plane, the one directed by George Roy Hill).
In an actual battle, the participants are compelled to kill each other by the logic of their situation, but one of the distinguishing features of a reenactment is that the participants cannot be compelled to do anything. If they choose to risk death, as Waldo and Kessler do, then, precisely because they choose freely, their actions are more meaningful, existentially, than those of the participants in the original events. (This choice finds its exact equivalent, however, in the original battle, in which Kessler chose not to kill his helpless opponent.) Kessler can therefore relive the most intense moments of his life, but this time consciously, in the full knowledge of how meaningful they are; Waldo can finally prove that this is who he was meant to be. But this time, the ending is different. McKinnon (Axel) lives, whereas Kessler and Madden (Waldo) are going to die.
But while the film understands this, its staging of the dogfight is also tied up in the underlying paradox. The film can’t show the deaths of Waldo and Kessler, because Hill, like Werfel, does not actually want to kill his stunt pilots. Indeed, this climactic dogfight is the only sequence in the film that obviously incorporates blue-screen inserts for the close-ups. Even so, Hill takes considerable risks. That plane in the air really does have damaged undercarriage, and the stunt pilot is therefore really going to have to perform a controlled crash-landing to bring it down. As with Werfel and Axel, Hill has asked his pilots to go right up to the edge – not to pull their parachute until the last possible moment, metaphorically – but he can’t ask them to step over it.
Thus the film does not end with the deaths of Waldo and Kessler. Rather, it adopts what I call the ‘Butch Cassidy’ gambit (after Hill’s earlier success). It freeze frames just before the point of no return: just before Butch and Sundance are riddled with a fusillade of bullets, just before Kessler’s damaged wing finally disintegrates. The film is an arrow pointing towards that which it can never represent directly: death, or perhaps, the lived experience of that past encounter with death, whose singularity is irretrievable, because by definition what is singular can never be repeated. In dramatic terms, therefore, the real climactic moment is not death, but the recognition of solidarity in the face of death: the salute that Kessler gave to the helpless Madden pounding on his jammed guns, before peeling off into an unknown, and therefore free, future. In Kessler’s case, his fate leads him back inexorably to that same moment in the future, where Waldo is waiting for him.
Dramatically, therefore, death is not sublime. Instead, it is an anti-climax. As the music comes in on the soundtrack, as Waldo and Kessler separate, and Waldo is left completely alone, we cut to a board of photographs of famous aviators (the clip above ends just before this cut), which we have already seen at the beginning of the film. This time, however, we linger on Waldo’s portrait, where, if we are really paying attention, we can see the dates listed after his name: ‘Waldo Pepper, 1895-1931’. Parenthetically, I might note that I couldn’t be sure that I remembered this detail correctly when I rented the VHS tape in the early 1990s, so one of my goals in doing so was to pause it to confirm that Waldo had indeed ‘died’ in the dogfight with Kessler.
I don’t mean to imply that any of this was going through my head the first time that I watched The Great Waldo Pepper. I probably experienced the film in much the same way that Kessler experienced the dogfight on which his fame rests. But as I grow increasingly interested in the idea of reenactment, I try to explain the source of its fascination by looking back at the films and books that drew my attention as a child. Perhaps I too, like Kessler, am condemned to reenact an original (in the literal sense of the word) experience; but, like Waldo, my ontological priorities are reversed: the fiction comes first, and it is only the resulting reenactment that confirms the truth of the fiction, which in this case means rewatching the film repeatedly and trying to work out why its conclusion still moves me.
A. The illustrations for Pistols! Treason! Murder!were completed in a rush on a very tight deadline. That had its advantages: it means they have a certain crude aggressive energy to them. It’s punk history, after all. For Five Wounds, I had the chance to think things through, and to theorise it more. And there are several different kinds of illustration, several different layers, which involved different methods of working. So Pistols! was more like the first rush of discovery, live on stage, and Five Wounds is more like tinkering around in the studio for months overdubbing. Pistols! is an amphetamine book; Five Wounds is a morphine book.
Thanks to Paul Burman, who conducted the interview and wrote the review.
The cover of Harold Bloom's best-selling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Humanfeatures 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.
When I pitched the idea of an 'illuminated novel' to Erica Wagner of Allen & Unwin in late 2008, I used the example of William Blake's 'illuminated books' as a historical precedent: editions of Blake's poetry, in which the words were incised calligraphically on engraving plates, where they were accompanied by Blake's own illustrations. In many cases, the printed copies were also painted by hand afterwards in watercolour. However, when Dan and I were working together to create Five Wounds, I found Blake's illustrations for Dante's The Divine Comedyand The Book of Job more useful, perhaps because these raise the issue of collaboration and interpretation more explicitly, but also because (to be honest) I find much of Blake's own poetry unreadable.
The following are from the illustrations for Dante's The Divine Comedy. The first is Dante running from the three beasts (the Leopard, Lion, and She-Wolf respectively from the bottom up); the second is the Wood of the Suicides:
The following are from Blake's illustrations for The Book of Job. The first is Behemoth and Leviathan; the second is the original watercolour of the same on which the engraving is based; the third is Job's Despair; the fourth is The Lord Answering Job out of the Whirlwind:
We did consider framing the Plates in Five Woundsin a similar manner to the way that these engravings for the Book of Job have been surrounded with text, but in the end we felt that it might have been too much in the context of the novel. It is, however, an idea I intend to return to.
The literary magazine The View From Here has just posted a review of Five Wounds, written by Paul Burman. Below is an extract. Dan and I also did a joint interview for them, which will be available in a few days.
Jonathan Walker’s delight in playing with words, names, images, extends to Dan Hallett's wonderful illustrations. There’s the sense that each picture adds extra detail to the story – beyond the words. Take, for instance, the description of the public servant’s half-eaten salami sandwich when Cur is receiving instructions for an assassination. The reader is invited to question exactly what the salami is constituted of and then presented with an illustration of the salami-bound pig in question feeding on the entrails of an earlier assassin's victim. Certainly a case of what goes around comes around.
Below is my interview on Canvas, the arts programme on FBi Radio, 94.5FM in Sydney, which was originally broadcast earlier this month. I sound reasonably coherent for a Sunday morning, although I am obviously trying to set a record for how many times I can use the words 'weird' and 'garbled' over the course of twenty minutes. Thanks to host Anna Burns.
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-Menand 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.
“[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 Humumentis also an important precedent for some of the features of Five Wounds.
This new database is on trial at the University of Sydney Library until mid-June (sadly only available to staff and students). It includes scans of many classic titles, such as American Splendour, and some lesser-known curiosities from the underground comic scene of the late 60s and early 70s, such as the charmingly-titled Bum Wad (1 issue, 1971, sample strip, 'The Regurgitate Raga'). From the 80s, there is an almost complete run of Flaming Carrot Comics, a title I remember being bemused by in a fusty comic shop in Liverpool c. 1984 when I came across it as I rummaged around for books by Cordwainer Smith.
The database is probably available via your local college / university too. If it's not, you're at the wrong institution.
This Sunday, 9 May, I shall be one of the guests on Canvas, the arts show on FBi Radio, 94.5FM, Sydney, after 10.30 a.m. Canvas also has an archive of podcasts, so the show may be available for streaming for those outside Sydney, probably a few days after broadcast.
I also did an interview recently for the Faster Than Light show, which is broadcast first in Perth, and then syndicated to community radio stations all across Australia. Not sure when that will be available, but I'll let you know.
My apologies for all the short, bitty entries. I shall shortly be posting some substantive discussion of Five Wounds, via guest posts at Spike, the Meanjin blog (on collaboration).
Come and say hello at Kinokuniya in Sydney, above Town Hall station, from about 1-4 p.m. There are copies of the book for sale, and I have free postcards and stickers to give away.
There are also definitely copies available at my local book store, Better Read Than Dead, in Newtown, Sydney (thanks Karen!). Check in the window. Postcards there too.
Also available in all good book stores throughout Australia, probably from Monday-ish.
Also available direct from the publisher, Allen & Unwin, here.
This Saturday, 1 May, is the official release date for Five Wounds, and in the afternoon I shall be appearing as part of the Zine / Craft fair in the Sydney branch of Kinokuniya book shop, directly above Town Hall train station. See here for more details.
I'll be there to sign copies from about 1-4 p.m. I'll be the one not dressed as a Star Wars character.
There will also be a Dalek in attendance (no relation).
There will be a discount on the cover price of Five Wounds for anyone buying on Saturday.
The designer of Five Wounds, Zoë Sadokierski, recently finished a Ph.D. on VISUAL WRITING: A critique of graphic devices in hybrid novels, from a Visual Communication Design perspective, i.e. how to read books with pictures in them, for those of you not fluent in Ph.D. speak. The thesis is now available for download via Zoë's blog.
Dan Hallett has just released Issue 1 of his comic, El Globo. I'm not sure how useful this information will prove to Australian readers (especially since the comic is in Spanish), but I thought it was worthy of commemoration.
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.
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.
'No such place as Heck. But hell's right here under 'A' for Alighieri'.
'Allegory's beyond me', said Jim.
'How stupid of me,' Dad laughed. 'I mean Dante. Look at this. Pictures by Mister Dore, showing all the aspects. Hell never looked better. Here's souls sunk to their gills in slime. There's someone upside down, wrong side out'.
'Boy howdy!' Jim eyed the pages two different ways and thumbed on. 'Got any dinosaur pictures?'
UPDATE: Hello to visitors from raybradburyboard.com. I first read Something Wicked This Way Comeswhen I was 13 or so - about the same age as its protagonists Will and Jim - and my paperback is a very yellow copy of the tie-in edition from the (rather disappointing) film version of 1983, although I had already read a library copy several months before buying it, appropriately enough, given that Will's father is a librarian, and the town library is the setting for a crucial scene. It is one of only two books from my teen years that I read through a second time immediately upon finishing it (the other one will be the subject of a subsequent post). I remember being particularly delighted by the one sentence chapter 'Nothing much happened all the rest of that night' (which I quote from memory, so I may have got it wrong). Fahrenheit 451 also made a big impression on me, and, although I have never been a big short story fan, I read several volumes of Ray's short fiction on the basis of my enjoyment of the novels.
In addition, the quotation above may be the first place I ever came across the name 'Dante'.
This year I shall be appearing at the Sydney Writers' Festival on a panel with visiting writer / artist Josh Neufeld (who was the subject of an article in this weekend's Herald). The panel is on 'Graphic Novels vs Illustrated Texts', and the chair is Zoe Sadokierski, who designed my novel, Five Wounds.
The event takes place on Sunday May 23, 1-2 p.m., at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where there is a Zine fair taking place at the same time, so there should be a well-informed audience. Entrance is free.
All contents of this blog are copyrighted (apart from elements attributed to others). I DO NOT CONSENT TO USING THIS BLOG TO TRAIN AI. The companion website for this blog is jonathanwalkerwriter.uk.
I am the author of Push Process, a novella set in Venice and illustrated with my own photographs, published by Ortac Press in 2024. Also: The Angels of L19, a work of weird fiction set in an evangelical church in 1984 Liverpool, published by Weatherglass Books in 2021; and other books.
I am currently working on a novel with fantastic elements set in Glasgow in the early 1990s.
I'm on Bluesky and Instagram as @NewishPuritan. My website as a writer is jonathanwalkerwriter.uk; my website as an editor is jonwalkereditorial.co.uk.
Most of the photographs displayed on this blog are my own. A few, however, are by other, more famous photographers (always credited), and are displayed for discussion purposes only under fair use guidelines. If any copyright holders object to their use here, I would be happy to remove them on request.
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