Melbourne Writers Festival Blog

This year the Melbourne Writers Festival has a blog, which is already up and running. One of the contributers is Angela Meyer, who wrote to all the participating authors in the festival a while back and asked them to send her short pieces that might fit under one or more themes chosen by Angela, who would then post anthologies of these pieces under each heading on the blog. I wrote something on 'Passion', 'Time', 'Mornings', and 'Listening' (though there's no guarantee that all of these will appear: Angela has editorial control, and may choose to omit particular entries depending on how everything fits together).

The first two sets of themed posts have already appeared: The first is on 'Passion', and it includes some observations of mine on Paul Schrader and Robert Bresson. The second group is on 'The last film you saw ...' (Kathy Charles on Alan Parker is particularly good). I'll post links to future entries in this series too (whether or not I appear in them), because I think it's a great idea. Kudos to Angela for putting it all together.

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

The video trailer for Five Wounds is not the only time I used mathematical principles in thinking about the book. The only scene in which all five protagonists are in the same place at the same time occurs in the chapter 'A Meeting of Minds', at p. 113, ch. 6, v. 1-18. On this momentous occasion, they all spout banal proverbs at one another. The implication is that they do so in a quasi-trance-like state, perhaps under the hypnotic influence of a divine voice that intermittently interrupts them with the refrain 'MeNe MeNe TeKeL UPHARSIN'. They speak as follows.

1 ‘MeNe, MeNe, TeKeL, UPHARSIN,’ the voice said.
2 ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ Crow said.
3 ‘Freedom exists only in the kingdom of dreams,’ Gabriella said.
4 ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him,’ Cur said.
5 ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained,’ Cuckoo said.
6 ‘Every bird thinks its own nest fine,’ Magpie said.
7 ‘MeNe, MeNe, TeKeL, UPHARSIN,’ the voice said.
8 ‘One must howl with the wolves,’ Cur said.
9 ‘Better to be a knave than a fool,’ Magpie said.
10 ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ Cuckoo said.
11 ‘The devil can quote scripture for his own ends,’ Gabriella said.
12 ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ Crow said.
13 ‘MeNe, MeNe, TeKeL, UPHARSIN,’ the voice said.
14 ‘The cowl does not make the monk,’ Cuckoo said.
15 ‘Love me, love my dog,’ Cur said.
16 ‘Either Caesar, or nothing,’ Crow said.
17 ‘Tell me who your friend is, and I’ll tell you who you are,’ Magpie said.
18 ‘A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wise man,’ Gabriella concluded.

This passage has a marginal cross-reference to Plate 12, 'A meeting of minds', which is reproduced below.

There are several things going on in this image, which also relates to Plate 1, Initiation (insofar as it is only possible to make sense of several of the elements within Plate 1 by reference to this subsequent image: you can figure that out for yourself), but Plate 12 receives its immediate textual justification from another passage in 'A Meeting of Minds', at ch. 4, v. 3: Crow imagined all the heads in the room separated from their bodies and floating in jars, dumbly, waiting for the inscription of ulterior motives upon them.

Obviously the particular proverbs that each character 'chooses' to declaim tell us who they are, but the precise sequence is also important, and relates to Plate 12. The sequence breaks into three groups of five, within which each character speaks once (if we remove the three interjections of the disembodied voice, which are null characters in this interpretation). If we assign a letter to each protagonist according to the initial order in which they speak, and break up the sequence accordingly, it looks like this:

a (Crow)
b (Gabriella)
c (Cur)
d (Cuckoo)
e (Magpie)

c
e
d
b
a

d
c
a
e
b

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

So, if you follow the sequence, and fill in every line accordingly, you progressively build up the figure of the pentagram, as illustrated in Plate 12 above (and in Plate 1, for those who think to make the comparison). Some lines are drawn through twice as the sequence doubles back on itself, but never in the same direction: for example, the fourth transition runs from Cuckoo to Magpie, and the seventh goes back the other direction from Magpie to Cuckoo, but the rule is that once we have traced both directions, we can't then return to this arm of the diagram.

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

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

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

Melbourne Writers Festival: Modern Dystopia

I shall be appearing at this year's Melbourne Writers Festival, on a panel with Booker-Prize winning author DBC Pierre, whose new novel Lights Out in Wonderland is about to be published. The panel is on Modern Dystopia, and it takes place at 4 p.m. on Sunday 29 August at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Tickets are on sale now.

Open Day at the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts

This coming Tuesday, 20 July, I am one of the guests at the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts Open Day. Their current theme is Mystery and Crime Stories, and I shall be talking about my book Pistols! Treason! Murder! in that light, and reading some extracts. Also appearing are Gabrielle Lord, Michael Duffy and Sulari Gentill. The Open Day is on from 11.00-1.30. Admission is free, and all are welcome. See here for how to get there.

Five Wounds: Video Trailer

[Painted textures by Dan Hallett; video created by Sarah Lyttle and Adam Hinshaw; soundtrack by Peter Newman; concept and art direction by Jonathan Walker]

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

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

The entire sequence of twenty screens is as follows:

1. Blue text on a red background: Get out while you still can.
2. Red on black: Don’t turn back.
3. Black on silver: You have to choose.
4. Silver on gold: Don’t move.
5. Gold on blue: You can’t win.
6. Blue on black: Run faster.
7. Black on red: I can’t keep up.
8. Red on blue: He’s right behind you.
9. Blue on silver: I don’t understand.
10. Silver on red: It’s your funeral.
11. Red on gold: It’s eating me up.
12. Gold on silver: I’m not your friend.
13. Silver on blue: Cut it off.
14. Blue on gold: I’m not like you.
15. Gold on red: Give up.
16. Red on silver: Dust to dust.
17. Silver on black: No-one will help you.
18. Black on gold: I’m not afraid.
19. Gold on black: Don’t scream.
20. Black on blue: Bet everything.

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

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

Like the heraldic coats-of-arms at the beginning of Five Wounds, the sequence is therefore a coded map of the book's contents.

The schematic nature of this exercise caused some problems. The sequence is in part derived from heraldry, but it ignores the heraldic 'rule of tincture', which forbids placing, for example, gold against silver, because with this and similar combinations it is difficult to distinguish the foreground from the background. However, since the sequence here must by definition include every possible combination of two of the five colours, it follows that it must break this rule. Moreover, the cross-hatched patterns under the pigments sometimes 'interfere' with the letter forms, making it difficult to read the text. The (imperfect) solution to this problem was to display the text for each screen in two states: first in empty white, with the letters reversed-out, and then in the relevant tincture, on the theory that at least one of these two states would be legible.

It's not perfect, aesthetically, because of the legibility issue (compounded in this version by a noticeable image deterioration: the silent version is much cleaner visually). Nonetheless, the sequence gives a flavour of Five Wounds, which also includes puzzles, riddles and allusions. Both the trailer and the book use text visually, as an element in the design, and both are structured according to hidden principles. But the trailer probably works better as commentary for those who have already seen the book than as an introduction for neophytes.

[Thanks to Peter Newman for permission to use an edited extract of one of his compositions.]

Interview on 'The Comic Spot'

I will be a guest on 'The Comic Spot' radio show on 3CR in Melbourne this Thursday afternoon (15 July) at about 5.30 p.m. You can listen in Sydney via streaming (as I do!).

Five Wounds: Various Reviews

A round-up of several different reviews of Five Wounds:

A very positive assessment at M/C Reviews by Samantha Hagaman (an extract below):

It really is a case of mirrors within mirrors and themes upon themes in Five Wounds; even the very riddle-like nature of the novel’s illustrations relates to Gabriella’s stunted ability to read prophecies of the future. It requires a great scope of imagination to create an artwork such as Five Wounds, and it’s well worth taking a look and being inspired by Walker’s and Hallett’s collaboration.

A mixed review in The Big Issue by Jen Breach (online version at her site; extract below):

Jonathan Walker has successfully created a grubby and brutal otherwordly tone reminiscent of Patrick Suskind's Perfume. Dan Hallett's illustrations are either beautifully detailed and constrained or loose and distrubing, but always in synch with the text.

And finally, at Radio National's The Book Show, a (more or less) negative review from Simon Keck, but one that includes the irresistible description of Five Wounds as 'nerdy historian fan fiction'.

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.

Five Wounds: Photographs and Etchings

[The discussion below continues from several previous posts: one on 'Tone and Line', and two on 'The Making of Five Wounds', the latter being copies of my guest posts on Spike, the Meanjin blog ]

Because of my experience as a photographer, when I came to write instructions for Dan for the illustrations for Five Wounds, I had a default aesthetic in which maximum definition of detail, low contrast, and a long tonal scale were important values. This photographic aesthetic led me to misinterpret certain aspects of Francisco Goya’s etchings, which Dan and I used as a common point of reference in the early stages of our collaboration (a couple of examples from the series Los Caprichos are reproduced below).

Etchings are a reproduction technique based upon drawing, but Goya’s also use acquatint, which deliberately introduces random ‘noise’ into their backgrounds. Areas that might, in a different kind of image, be represented as an undifferentiated, empty field, or as cross-hatched, murky shadows, are instead broken up by the application of acquatint, which creates an irregular textured effect, as in the examples above. I did not actually know what acquatint was when Dan and I began to work on Five Wounds, but I could nonetheless see that Goya had flattened the tonal scale by breaking up the backgrounds of his images with the visual equivalent of static. The only analogy I could think of was film grain in photography.

It did not help that the editions of Goya I consulted were printed at a lower contrast than the original etchings (this is not the case with the samples above, which are more accurate reproductions). Getting thick blacks in a printed book requires heavy paper to hold the requisite amount of ink, and multiple passes through the press to build up the densities. Hence ‘duotone’ reproductions have gone through the press twice to permit stronger tonal separation and heavier blacks, whereas the much rarer and even more luxurious ‘tritone’ process means three separate passes. Conversely, the white end of the tonal scale is represented by whatever the paper base is, and in cheap editions this is invariably a dirty grey rather than a bleached pristine tone. Cheaper, mass-produced images therefore almost always sacrifice accurate representation of tonal values for budgetary reasons, but I did not realise this, and so I thought that the flat contrast was an effect intended by Goya.

The first set of images that Dan created for Five Wounds were the ‘Plates’, and my scripts for these were heavily influenced by my misinterpretation of Goya, as mediated through my experience as a photographer. I therefore asked for an oppressive, clinical accumulation of detail, almost like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, except with the opposite emotional effect, and I wanted a flattened tonal scale that corresponded to a flattened emotional response: that is, to the experience of trauma, which results in an inability to organise memories effectively (that is, an inability to suppress irrelevant information, to forget).

I also conceptualised the desired compositions in photographic terms. So I often asked Dan for either ‘telephoto’ or ‘wide-angle’ effects. The former implies a flattened perspective, a compressed representation of space that makes it difficult to separate near from far; the latter, by contrast, implies that space is opened up via abrupt recessions and violent changes in scale between the foreground and background. Wide-angle compositions are inherently melodramatic; telephoto compositions create a feeling of constraint. Mostly, I wanted telephoto effects. But the most explicit manifestation of this collision between two different aesthetics was that I asked Dan to incorporate pseudo-photographic textures into his drawings.

Many of these textures are used to suggest that the physical integrity of the image itself is breaking down, but in a radical sense: that is, in these images, the medium of drawing itself cannot maintain its integrity as a specific technology of representation, and it is therefore 'contaminated' by photography. Hence my scripts for Dan jumbled up picture references from works on the conservation of etchings, and those on daguerreotypes (an early photographic technology that is referenced extensively within the text), but – somewhat perversely – in both cases I only copied those images that illustrated what happened when things went wrong.

Several of the Plates therefore have pseudo-acquatint effects as well as pseudo-photographic textures, and they have a long, soft tonal scale, with minute accumulations of detail. Ideally, I wanted the viewer to be able to go over them with a magnifying glass.

For example, Plate 14, Dust, dynamic, above, includes acquatint effects in the background, which are here given a kind of diegetic justification within the picture space by analogy to the event depicted in the foreground, which shows Crow blowing a handful of dust towards the recumbent Magpie. In the novel, the dust represents the relationship between signal and noise in information theory (among other things). In fact, there are two 'clouds' of dust in the image here, representing the exhalations of the two characters shown, one cloud contained within the other, and both contained within the surrounding aura of the textured background. In other words, there is no clear conceptual separation between object and field, an idea I took from photography, and from Goya's use of acquatint.

The figure of Crow on one knee from Plate 14 is cloned and placed at the centre of the subsequent Plate 16, Bang!, reproduced below, which depicts the destruction of the ducal palace in Venice by means of an explosion, in a development inspired by Guy Fawkes. The use of concentric circles in the composition is a reference to Tintoretto's Paradise (which is also alluded to in several other illustrations). The reproduction of the pose from Plate 14 draws a visual analogy between the exhalation of breath in Plate 14 and the violent, massive displacement of air in the explosion of Plate 16, an analogy that is underlined via two handwritten annotations underneath Plates 14 and 16: 'I'll huff and I'll puff ...' on the former; '... And I'll blow your house down' on the latter (these annotations are not visible on the versions of the Plates included here).

The level of detail and the minute variations in textural effect that Dan worked into the Plates is probably not apparent in these online reproductions, but it may be observed from a magnified detail from Plate 16, appended below.

As might be expected, the photographic aesthetic I had in mind sometimes 'clashed' with Dan's instincts as an artist. As a result, he sometimes ignored (or perhaps creatively misinterpreted) my instructions. Dan seemed to prefer chiaroscuro effects and what I would describe as wide-angle compositions, but in editing these images, I would often ask him to break up areas of undifferentiated tone with noise, or to add additional layers to an image, to build up a sense of compression.

The final version of Plate 2, Cur’s first murder, followed by the draft, reproduced below, indicate this conflict – or rather ongoing dialogue – clearly. Note that, in this image, as in several others, the ‘effects’ (the textures that mimic picture damage) are both ‘inside’ and ‘on top of’ the image: they exist in both the picture space and on the picture plane, and, as I suggested above, one of their purposes is in fact to obscure this conceptual distinction, as the accompanying text obscures the distinction between realist narrative and allegory. The 'effects' therefore apply most visibly to areas of the image that would otherwise be rendered as either pure white or pure black.

When we moved on to the later stages of the collaboration, and in particular to an entirely separate set of illustrations, which are integrated into the page layouts, Dan switched techniques. In contrast to the Plates, these later images embrace the limitations of drawing, and revert to its binary system of black line against a white field. This was a logical extension of my intention to give Dan greater creative autonomy in this phase of the collaboration: that is, he was no longer under any obligation to mimic photographic effects, or to conform to my aesthetic expectations. Below are a couple of these 'pure' drawings, which have a quite different feel to the Plates, emotionally as well as technically.