The design of Five Wounds: An Illuminated Novel

I

Let’s start with the broadest possible theme: the relationship between life and art. In philosophical terms, we might put this as the correspondence theory of truth versus the coherence theory of truth. In the text of Five Wounds, it plays out as the relationship between realism and allegory. Does the plot describe a world in which things and characters stand only for themselves? Or is it a map for a symbolic system, in which characters carry ideas in the same way that they bear heraldic coats-of-arms? ⁶ In the illustrations, it plays out as the relationship between the picture space and the picture plane. Is the image as a window onto a virtual world? Or is it best understood as a marked surface, which records the traces left by the artist upon it? In the design, it plays out as the relationship between the book as an interface, and the book as an artefact. Is a book simply a delivery system for content? Or is it a work of art that draws attention to its own status as an object? It is not a question of choosing between these alternatives, but rather of alluding to both terms simultaneously.

How are these questions addressed within the novel’s world-building? Consider the character of Cuckoo, one of the novel’s five protagonists, who can manipulate and reshape his wax face at will. His identity remains forever provisional. In Cuckoo’s existence, as in a metaphor, every ‘is’ is also an ‘is not’. He is therefore ‘under erasure’ (Derrida, 1976). Thus the plot of Five Wounds has two alternative endings, in which the crucial difference specifically concerns what happens to Cuckoo (Walker and Hallett, 2010: 170–171, 172–174; compare Fowles, 1969). Moreover, this double ending is prefigured visually in several images in which Cuckoo is represented as a double of himself. Figure 2 shows a pair of these images, in the form of a diptych, in which all five protagonists appear, but the two panels are split in such a way that the central area overlaps, or is doubled. Cuckoo therefore appears twice.

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Figure 2.

Cuckoo doubled.

In the illustrations, Cuckoo’s face is always shown as scratched-out, as in both Figures 2 and 3. The latter returns to the theme of doubling via Cuckoo’s relationship with his reflection, with which he is obsessed, precisely because he cannot identify with it. The accompanying text for this image explains that

1 AS Cuckoo angled his mirror, the candle flame flared off the blade, obliterating his reflection.

2 He imagined the glass as a recording device, which would retain only the movements of the knife’s point and edge across his face, reducing his efforts to a simple pattern of lines.

3 What was his face now but the summation of these tiny, accumulated motions? (Walker and Hallett, 2010: 60–61)

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Figure 3.

Cuckoo’s reflection.

There is a paradox here: Cuckoo is doubled by his reflection, but his reflection is unrecognisable. As he reconstructs his formless face, he obliterates his own history, or rather the history of his face is a history of violence. Its surface consists only of scar tissue, but the wound is always fresh. Cuckoo’s manipulated face is both a picture space and picture plane – both a virtual sculpture and a marked surface – and its (non-)representation signals this, since the scratches are represented as marks laid on top of the picture plane; as such, they stop us from entering the picture space.

Figure 4 shows an alternative mode of (non-)representation for Cuckoo’s impossible face. Here the protruding eye, which is drawn in perspective, represents the picture space since the laws of perspective obtain their effect by mimicking the way in which images are formed on the retina; while the fingerprints, which are pinned to the flat surface of the page, represent the picture plane.

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Figure 4.

The picture space and the picture plane.

The design of Five Wounds embodies the same theme of doubling via a series of handwritten corrections that are scribbled on top of the typeset words, which are therefore, like Cuckoo’s face, under erasure (see Figure 5). One might say that Cuckoo’s face is the sublime or the other in the novel’s symbolic order: the thing that cannot be described or represented directly, but which is necessary to make sense of everything else. Figure 4 also suggests another binary opposition: sight versus touch, or abstraction versus sensation.

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Figure 5.

Corrections. Designed by Zoë Sadokierski, reproduced by permission of Allen & Unwin.

As the example of Cuckoo shows, we can follow a single theme across the text, the design and the images. The page is the matrix for this semiotic exchange.

II

If the page is a meaningful unit of design, then turning the page must be a meaningful action. In Five Wounds, therefore, the page breaks are not random interruptions in a continuous stream of data, but are instead an essential element in the semiotic system introduced above. This applies most obviously to the book’s use of heraldry, which is used to map its structure by means of colour coding.

Some general remarks about heraldry as a historical example of a semiotic system: the composition of a coat-of-arms (or shield) is governed by strict rules about how its various elements may be combined. Indeed, heraldry is one of the few instances where the analogy of grammar applies to a visual code in a systematic manner. ⁷ The most basic elements of the code are the heraldic tinctures, which are split into two basic groups: colours and metals. Every shield is constructed on a base (or field), which is usually made up of a single tincture. Additional elements in different tinctures are then superimposed on the field, like layers in Photoshop. Thus the shield is always viewed as a single, combined image, but its component elements can always be broken down into a series of two-dimensional layers laid on top of one another in a predetermined order. ⁸

Five Wounds introduces an alien element of signification into this closed system because it assigns a heraldic tincture to each of the five protagonists: blue (azure) to the crippled angel, Gabriella; red (gules) to the man of blood, Cur; black (sable) to the amorphous man, Cuckoo; silver (argent) to the daguerreotypist, Magpie; and gold (or) to the alchemist, Crow. The first five pages of Five Wounds therefore depict five shields, one for each of the protagonists, using the schema outlined above: that is, Gabriella’s shield has a blue field, while Cur’s has a red field, and so on; and the addition of other elements onto the field in the other tinctures then maps, in each case, the various relationships between the five protagonists. Figure 6 shows Gabriella’s shield.

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Figure 6.

Gabriella’s shield.

What does this have to do with the page as a unit of design? Well, along with these five ‘motto shields’ (designated thus for obvious reasons), which are placed at the beginning of the book, there is an entirely separate series of miniature shields, which are distributed throughout the book, one on each layout. These serve as a visual index of which characters appear on the layout in question. Thus, if Gabriella and Cur feature in the text on a particular layout, then the accompanying index shield will combine blue and red. ⁹

Index shields are visible at the top of Figures 1 and 5. Their internal structure is perhaps difficult to make out in these doubly-miniaturised examples, so a compilation of several such index shields is provided in Figure 7. The point is that every index shield is unique; that is, every successive layout has a different shield, which is assigned to that particular layout alone. When successive layouts involve the same group of characters, and are therefore encoded by the same combinations of tinctures, each of these layouts is represented by a different shield design. And even on the layouts in which only one character appears, and which are therefore indexed with an undifferentiated shield of a single tincture, the shield has been repainted every time it is used so that the texture of the pigment is slightly different. So, to repeat the essential point in relation to Figure 7: the last three of this sample set of index shield designs combine blue and black. Hence these shields apply to layouts in which the events described in the text feature Gabriella and Cuckoo only.

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Figure 7.

Selected index shields.

Thus the index shields reinforce the idea that each successive layout is an independent unit of meaning. The same idea governs the use of the running heads, which appear at the top of the left (verso) page in each layout. In most novels, the running heads simply repeat the book’s title, or sometimes the chapter or section title. In Five Wounds, each running head is unique, and consists of a short phrase, usually a quotation from a literary source or from the text on that layout, which serves as commentary upon the contents of that particular layout. And by ‘contents’, I mean the illustrations as well as the text: that is, particular running heads may draw attention to either or both. They may also refer to or cross-reference previous running heads. ¹⁰

For example, one group of running heads consists of a series of alternative dictionary definitions of the verb ‘to lick’ (the word is therefore overdetermined, like the characters and fates of each of our five protagonists). These alternative definitions collectively elaborate on the predicament of the dog-man Cur. The first of this group of running heads, which is shown as part of the layout in Figure 1, is a quotation from Stong’s Concordance of Bible words, which gives a possible definition of the word ‘worship’ as ‘To kiss, as a dog licking his master’s hand’ (Strong et al., undated: 61). ¹¹ In Figure 1, this serves as an implicit title for the accompanying illustration on the opposite page (also reproduced separately in Figure 8), which flip-flops the terms of the quotation. Or rather, the running head is a riddle to which the illustration proposes a possible solution. This solution is not definitive, however, because the illustration depicts a pseudo-event: that is, an event that never actually occurs in the plot, and which is only invoked implicitly at the end of the relevant passage in the text, as quoted below.

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Figure 8.

Cur and the Black Dog.

15 ‘You can deny me,’ Mr X replied. ‘You can’t deny yourself. And you can’t survive outside.

16 If you leave, you’re not a dog. You’re a wolf.

17 Anyone can kill you, rob you, insult you. You don’t exist.

18 And you know you can’t leave the city. You can’t cross water.

19 So your only choice is dog or wolf. That’s it.

20 You can’t be a man.

21 Kneel. Acknowledge your place.’

22 Cur knew that Mr X was right. (Walker and Hallett, 2010: 22–23)

Implicitly, the illustration depicts what Mr X commands in verse 21 and Cur is thinking about in verse 22, but that is left for the reader/viewer to infer.

The full set of running heads describing Cur’s predicament via variations in the meaning of ‘lick’ is distributed as follows (all page references are to Walker and Hallett, 2010): ¹²

[p. 22:] WORSHIP: TO KISS, AS A DOG LICKING HIS MASTER’S HAND

[p. 42:] LICK: TO FLICKER OR MOVE LIGHTLY OVER OR ROUND (SOMETHING)

[p. 124:] LICK: A SUDDEN HARD STROKE; A BLOW

[p. 126:] LICK: TO DEFEAT OR VANQUISH

[p. 150:] LAMBENT: FROM THE LATIN ‘LAMBERE,’ ‘TO LICK’

The last running head listed here is a sort of postscript to the sequence, and it therefore has a particular significance, which I shall return to below. The more general point is that this small group of running heads serves not only as a series of subheadings or intertitles based around the page divisions, but as a series of cross-references linking the contents of separate layouts.

So the precise distribution of the index shields and running heads, and to a lesser extent the distribution of the illustrations in general, depends upon the precise position of the page breaks in the typeset manuscript. All of this is unique to the design of Five Wounds; and it explicitly relates the contents of the text to the illustrations and the design: that is, every layout invites the reader/viewer to consider the relationship between these elements.

III

I want to turn now to the historical aspect of the page as a unit of design in Five Wounds. For hundreds of years, the Bible was the exemplary book. It was not only the source of authoritative content; it was also the model for how to read other books (Norton, 2005). Subsequent theories of interpretation in general and of translation in particular also derive from the tradition of biblical exegesis, as does the concept of literary criticism, which is a secularised descendant of that tradition.

By returning to this sacred prehistory of the novel, Five Wounds therefore applies Brecht’s famous ‘estrangement effect’ to book design (Jameson, 1998). Or, putting this once again in terms of world-building, we might think of Five Wounds as a variety of alternative history (Hellekson, 2001; Rosenfeld, 2005): a genre that usually involves reimagining crucial political events (‘What if the Germans had won the Second World War?’). Five Wounds instead imagines a counter-factual cultural universe in which the King James Bible is still the exemplary book, but the boundary between sacred text and perverse marginalia has somehow broken down.

The history of the King James Bible highlights the connections between design and orthography. It is a truism that writing is not simply a notation system for speech (Ong, 1982; compare Derrida, 1976), but this has interesting consequences in biblical scholarship because modern punctuation is not, of course, part of the original texts, and adding such marks therefore constitutes an act of interpretation (Norton, 2005: 149–164). But biblical scholars did not stop there. They also added divisions into chapters and verses, which are a kind of superstructure intended solely to facilitate written analysis. It is therefore impossible to indicate such divisions when reading the text aloud. Or rather, it is only possible to indicate their presence at the cost of rendering the spoken text incomprehensible, and the verse divisions are therefore suppressed during readings in church.

As one might expect, the chapters and verses were relatively late additions in the tradition of biblical exegesis, at least in their current form. They date only from the late medieval period (chapters) and the 16th century (verses), and they seem to be intrinsic now only because of their ubiquity in subsequent English translations, beginning with the Geneva Bible of 1560. In translation, the logic of their placement is not always entirely clear. One chapter does not invariably equal one paragraph and one verse does not always equal one sentence. The latter variation is more common than the former, so that all of the earliest English translations retain paragraph break marks that sometimes occur mid-chapter, while verses often include two or more sentences; alternatively, one sentence may be spread out over multiple verses. It is possible that the divisions in the original (or rather in the Vulgate, the Latin translation used by most medieval scholars) are more consistent, but whatever the reason, the apparatus of the chapters and verses phases in and out of synch with the paragraph and sentence divisions. ¹³

The chapter and verse divisions in Five Wounds are more rational in that they are linked more consistently to paragraphs and sentences. Nonetheless, the text of the novel does replicate the irregular phasing effect in the King James Bible by partially randomising the verse breaks. In the novel, this has a different meaning than it does in the King James Bible because in the former it is quite artificial; whereas in the latter it probably derives from the hidden logic of the original text. In other words, the King James Bible has a kind of linguistic referent, which the translation relies upon to justify its idiosyncrasies. Adopting chapters and verses in Five Wounds implies that an original text exists for the novel as well, and that the version you have in front of you has been mediated – or corrupted – in some unspecified way. It implicitly has a missing, invisible original that it alludes to, but which can never be reconstructed accurately on the basis of the novel alone. The text before you is apparently authoritative but, since it is littered with handwritten corrections, is also somehow suspicious and unreliable, like any bad translation (Derrida, 1991).

How do you distinguish a correct interpretation from a misinterpretation in such circumstances? Several episodes in the plot raise this question. For example, Gabriella’s ability to receive messages from God is severely compromised by poor reception. Every interpretation she offers is therefore based on a corrupt text. Similarly, Five Wounds actually includes several direct citations from the Bible, but all of them are recontextualised in disturbing ways, and indeed the title of the book is already a blasphemous recontextualisation of a Christian concept. Similarly, for the Protestant reformers, the Catholic Church had enshrined misinterpretations into its theology, and disguised them with ritual hocus pocus: the liturgical equivalent of flashy illuminations in a manuscript. ¹⁴

On some occasions, however, the verse divisions in Five Wounds are used in a different and perhaps more original manner, which is related to spoken rhythm: that is, they function as an intermediary subdivision in the punctuation between a sentence and a paragraph. Consider the passage below, which is accompanied by the running head, ‘LAMBENT: FROM THE LATIN “LAMBERE,” “TO LICK.”’ It describes Cur, the rabid dog-man, who is being shaved by a barber. It illustrates a more general theme in the book: that of addiction played out as compulsion. Here there is a symbiotic relationship between pleasure and pain: that is, between intoxication and hangover, or high and comedown. Another relevant feature of addiction is the way in which it is controlled or structured using private rituals: in this case, shaving. Below I have indicated the chapter divisions in the original text by a hard line break.

1 AT the wrong moment, precisely, he moved backwards, abruptly, catching against the razor’s edge.

2 Then he bled, but with restraint and grace, as a fencer should.

1 A lambent drop moved over the surface of the soap, red on white, without mingling, as a raindrop moves down a windowpane.

2 Cur willed it to swell and fall: to escape, and thereby fulfil itself.

3 He breathed.

4 In.

5 Cur kept the side of his neck and face steady, to avoid interrupting the trail now making its way over his jutting cheek and chin.

6 Out.

7 He moved to alter its trajectory. It left a fraying thread in its wake.

8 In.

9 Tributaries collected in the sculpted lather.

10 Out.

11 The remnant ran onwards and downwards, towards the lowest point of his chin, where it gathered, waiting to fall, away and into nothing.

12 In.

13 It would assume the perfect form of a sphere in midair, until impact broke it.

14 Out.

15 For a few moments, it would be free: free to obey the law of gravity, whose operation was purest within the element of air.

16 In: he held the breath.

1 AS the drop separated itself from him, the barber moved to contain the spreading stain on Cur’s face with a moist cloth.

2 Cur reached out to arrest the man’s movement, but he succeeded only in intercepting the drop’s descent.

3 He heard it hit his shirt cuff, but it did not bounce off.

4 Instead, it penetrated the cheap cloth, as rain penetrates soil.

5 Out, finally: with a snort of irritation. (Walker and Hallett, 2010: 150)

The rhythm as well as the sense of this passage depends upon the chapter and verse divisions, which therefore acquire a new purpose here: that is, the text makes more sense if you actually articulate the numbers when you read it aloud.

The use of chapter and verse divisions in Five Wounds is therefore another estrangement effect, which is here applied to the process of reading itself. It is perhaps similar to that described by GK Chesterton:

Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as ‘dog,’ thirty times? By the thirtieth, it has become a word like ‘snark’ or ‘pobble.’ It does not become tame, it becomes wild by repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan. (see Walker and Hallett, 2010: 53) ¹⁵

In the shaving scene, however, we have a further estrangement of this estrangement effect, which functions like a double negative in grammar. I mean that incorporating the chapter and verse divisions into the rhythm of the prose when it is spoken aloud makes them a ‘natural’ part of the text as speech.

Like Derrida’s concept of différance, the chapter and verse divisions in Five Wounds therefore occupy the space between speech and writing; between the sensible and the intelligible (Derrida, 1976).

IV

The tradition of biblical interpretation contains a central conflict, which has broader implications. What makes certain texts – sacred or literary – intrinsically more valuable or more worthy of our attention than other texts? One answer is that such texts are inspired (Moffitt, 2005). An inspired text is conceived of as a single, spontaneous, seamless utterance, which cannot be edited, corrected or abridged. It is immaculate because it is linked to the divine, which speaks through the author, who in this case is merely a proxy. Because it is always in the process of coming into being, it remains eternally present. It is immune to obsolescence. Although all sacred texts are understood in this way, there are also secular examples in post-Romantic literature (Clark, 1997). ¹⁶

The problem is that the apparatus that accumulates around such a text actually undermines this idea, just as the evolution of the church as an institution, with its own internal hierarchies and ideas of orthodoxy, might be said to betray its original principles: its divine ‘inspiration’. The accumulated tradition of interpretation gives the Bible a history, and in the Catholic Church that history explicitly becomes part of its meaning. The biblical text can only be approached through a succession of commentaries upon it, which actually determine its current meaning. Gadamer (1979) would refer to this as a ‘fusion of horizons’. By contrast, the publication of the King James Bible in 1611 was an attempt to restore the eternally present aspect of the Bible. According to its Protestant translators, the Bible was quite capable of speaking for itself, direct to its readers in every present moment, because it still carried within itself its original spark of divine inspiration.

As a young reader of the King James Bible, however, one of my difficulties was that this presumption was patently false. Many biblical passages felt like the opposite of inspired: especially in the Old Testament, which includes long genealogies, and repetitive and incredibly detailed descriptions of obscure ritual objects, whose physical form remained utterly unimaginable despite all this detail. It is undeniable, even to the most ardent Protestant theologian, that such passages require interpretation to explain their significance: that is, they require some historical context, which therefore must locate (part of) their meaning in the past rather than in an eternal present.

There is a potentially disturbing contrast here between a textual apparatus that marks content off as divinely inspired, and the fact that some of that content, taken on its own, reads as profoundly banal: the equivalent of an instruction manual. The elaborate design of Five Wounds similarly frames a lowly exercise in genre storytelling as an object of fetishistic devotion, and thereby suggests an even more cynical response. Perhaps you can make anything ‘sacred’ simply by framing it in a certain way, just as you can call anything ‘art’ if you stick it on a gallery wall. One should be sceptical of such obvious rhetorical gambits, but one should also be suspicious of Romantic prose that tries to seduce the reader by trumpeting its inspired status.

I want to return now to Cur in the barber’s chair, bleeding, and to relate the content of the passage I quoted above to the page design in Five Wounds (Walker and Hallett, 2010: 150). ‘Lambent’ means ‘illuminated by flickering light’, one definition of the word ‘flicker’ being, metaphorically, ‘licked by tongues of light’. The presence of ‘lambent’ in the running head suggests that this word might be a key to the scene. Cur wants to be cut, but he is apparently unable or unwilling to perform this action himself. Why? Perhaps because he is excited by his own blood, but is disgusted by this response. Hence a very obvious Freudian reading of the passage quoted above, to do with blood flow, deep breathing and physical stimulation.

Shaving presents itself as an obvious solution to Cur’s problem, but one usually visits a barber in the morning. Why then would a shaving scene be ‘illuminated by flickering light’, meaning artificial light: that is, why would a shaving scene take place at night? Only if it somehow inverted the normal significance of shaving. What does shaving signify? In Hinduism, it is a purification ritual (Knipe, 1992: 811). Maybe in Cur’s case it also represents his assertion of his humanity, his denial of his animal self. At night, drunk, it is instead a ritual of defilement; a parodic act of despairing resignation; a self-consciously failed attempt to deny his animal self: the failure signified by his urge to bleed.

Cur is drunk, but the passage I quoted above also invokes the idea of linguistic inspiration as metaphorical intoxication. In this case, however, the text is a bit overblown, a bit overwritten, as if it does not quite believe in its ability to conjure this effect. It recalls the Sartrean figure of the waiter in Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1958: 59–60) who is a little bit too insistent, a little bit too deferential, who can never quite shake the sense that he is only playing at being a waiter. Equally relevant, perhaps, is Philip Thody’s characterisation of Mathieu Delarue, the hero of Sartre’s The Age of Reason. Thody describes Delarue’s predicament in these terms: ‘However much alcohol I consume, I always remain conscious of what I am, and of the choices confronting me’ (quotation from Thody and Read, 1999: 53; see also Sartre, 1947). Both Delarue and Roquentin (the protagonist of Sartre’s Nausea) experience ‘the body as contingency, as a facticity imposed on the individual, a mere givenness in whose creation he had no share’ (Douglas, 1962: 41). In response, Roquentin wounds himself in the hand with a knife (the allusion to the stigmata is obvious, as it is in the title of Five Wounds). ‘By sticking his penknife into his hand, Roquentin in a sense … redeems his body, founds it, gives it to himself.’

This final affirmation is not available to Cur, who cannot bear to cut himself, but otherwise the description above perfectly fits his experience, in which intoxication and hangover are not only symbiotic, but occur simultaneously. However ‘poetic’ the language aspires to be, the pages on which the words are printed do not and cannot disappear; nor does Cur’s self-consciousness. His dilemma is the same as that of the post-Brechtian reader, who cannot lose himself or herself in the text, who remains aware of the particular layout of this passage on page 150 of Five Wounds. The page design is intended to heighten this estrangement effect.

To return to our theme of inspiration and interpretation, the division into chapters and verses locates the meaning of the text of Five Wounds in the past: it already has a history of interpretation attached to it. By contrast, the addition of handwritten corrections to the typeset text locates its meaning in the present: the novel is still (always) in the process of coming into being. Even conceived of in these latter terms, however, the text does not represent a perfect and singular moment of inspiration, like a photograph (since it is annotated with corrections, which must, logically, come after the typeset prose). It is more like a painting that has not yet dried: unfinished, and therefore still subject to possible revisions. ¹⁷ A painting that has not yet dried: or a blood trail that has not yet clotted.

V

The book is not a natural object. In the current state of confusion as to what a book is or should be, it might be an opportune moment to review the sacred prehistory of the novel. The publication of the King James Bible was supposed to mark a definitive break with the medieval (Catholic) past, and a return to a renewed apostolic present through a pentecostal dispensation, in which each man and woman would hear the gospel in their own tongue: in this case, English.

Even so, Five Wounds is not a natural object either. Its format is the result of numerous artificial choices – gratuitous choices, we might say – which can only be justified in relation to its particular content. If form exemplifies content, there is no universal design solution. Design is instead a dramatic element, which forms part of the fictional context: part of the novel’s world-building. However, in rethinking the history of the book for particular dramatic purposes, Five Wounds also ‘remake[s] the grammar of communication by discovering structures and patterns within the material media of visual and verbal writing’ (Lipton and Miller, 1996: 23). In particular, Five Wounds reaffirms the relevance of the King James Bible to modern storytelling, but its ‘illuminated’ format also draws on medieval traditions that were erased in 1611, just as the novel erased its own sacred origins. In Five Wounds, words and pictures are not separate entities. Each bleeds into the other on the page. The blasphemous marginalia of medieval manuscripts cannot be separated from the pure Word of God. History is therefore our greatest resource for innovation, but only if we are willing to reimagine what actually happened.

The theoretical ideas described in this article are characteristic of many other postmodern works of fiction. However, their instantiation in Five Wounds raises questions about the cognitive function of art: how it makes such ideas present to us (Gadamer, 1979). Take, for example, Lacan’s notion of the ‘mirror phase’, an elaboration of Freud’s ideas on ego formation in the infant, in which the child’s self-knowledge is mediated via his awareness of his mirror image (Lacan, 1994). The description of this process exactly corresponds to (it mirrors?) the characterisation of Cuckoo in Five Wounds (Figure 3). In theoretical terms, therefore, Cuckoo’s predicament seems merely to be a gloss on Lacan. However, Lacan’s theory describes an ongoing process (of ego formation) via an abstraction. It uses a single, signifying idea – the child looking at its reflection – to stand for that broader process. The fictional character of Cuckoo then reverses that operation. Cuckoo takes Lacan’s symbolic abstraction, and makes it both literal and definitive so that it actually excludes other possible ways of understanding ego formation. Cuckoo therefore allows me to think by doing: to manipulate Lacan’s idea, not only dramatically, but emotionally; to run a fictional experiment with it. ‘World-building’ is simply a way to set the parameters of that experiment; and in Five Wounds, those parameters are visual as well as linguistic.

In all the examples reviewed above, an emotional question precedes and generates the technical questions. In the case of Cur in the barber’s chair, the question is, ‘If blood is a “trigger” for this character and represents uncontrollable passion, then how would he respond to the smell of his own blood?’ In the case of Cuckoo, the question is, ‘What does it feel like to have no face of your own: to be irrevocably alienated from your own body and your own emotions?’ This last question is primal: that is, Cuckoo’s formless face is a constitutive element of the fictional world in Five Wounds. It cannot be explained; it cannot be represented. It is in that sense pre-theoretical (like Lacan’s imaginary register). But it can be dramatised. It can be exemplified. And that process of dramatisation and exemplification is thinking. It is criticism. It is intellectual as well as emotional work.