This is a very brief post with very little content; think of it as a ‘bonus’ if you will, regular programming resumes Monday. Minor spoilers for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Disco Elysium, but at the same time this post probably won’t interest you if you’ve not finished either of them.
One of the most tragically underrated products of scholarship is the mere observation of an influence or a borrowing that has not been noticed before. Douglass Adair’s fabulous 1957 article on Madison’s tenth Federalist is 18 pages long, but in an ideal world would need only to have been one sentence: ‘The argument of Federalist 10 is mostly taken from David Hume’. Merely to notice this sort of thing, or have it pointed out to you, is already to understand the borrower-text more deeply, and it opens up so many more opportunities for exploration. Yet public observations like this are rarer than they should be, for reasons of scholarly incentive: you are unlikely to get a peer-reviewed article just out of ‘look at this!’, so little observations like this (at best) get packaged as brief asides to larger arguments or (at worst, and too often) are just left sitting in someone’s brain. Observations of borrowing are, to get economics-y on you, undersupplied relative to their benefits.
It is in this spirit that I offer this brief note. I finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell recently, following the advice of my wife and the strength of Susanna Clarke’s subsequent novel Piranesi. It’s a really good read, one that I think would be especially appreciated by anyone interested in Englishness and the north-south divide, though (looking around at criticism and analysis) I have a very different read on what the novel has to say about these themes compared to most reviewers. Anyway.
Chapter 67, at the very end of the book, opens with John Childermass (a minor magician and servant to one of the title characters) coming across the body of Vinculus (a street-magician Childermass had briefly met before), hanging from a hawthorn tree. Two things strike Childermass: first is just the grotesqueness of a hanged man’s corpse, the disfiguration and discolouration; but second is the intricate pattern of tattoos across the whole of Vinculus’ body.1 I quote at length:
In the middle of the moor a misshapen hawthorn tree stood all alone and from the tree a man was hanging. He had been stripped of his coat and shirt, revealing in death what he had doubtless kept hidden during his life: that his skin bore a strange deformation. His chest, back and arms were covered with intricate blue marks, marks so dense that he was more blue than white.
As he rode up to the tree, Childermass wondered if the murderer had written upon the body as a joke. When he had been a sailor, he had heard tales of countries where criminals’ confessions were written onto their bodies by various horrible means before they were killed. From a distance the marks looked very like writing, but as he got closer he saw that they were beneath the skin.
He got down from his horse and swung the body round until it was facing him. The face was purple and swollen; the eyes were bulging and filled with blood. He studied it until he could discern in the distorted features a face he knew. ‘Vinculus,’ he said.
Taking out his pocket-knife, he cut the body down. Then he pulled off Vinculus’ breeches and boots, and surveyed the body: the corpse of a forked animal on a barren, winter moor.
The strange marks covered every inch of skin—the only exceptions were his face, hands, private parts and the soles of his feet. He looked like a blue man wearing white gloves and a white mask. The more Childermass looked at him, the more he felt that the marks meant something. [pp. 967–968 in my copy.]
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was published in 2005. In 2019, ZA/UM (an Estonian video game developer / art collective)2 released Disco Elysium, which I played last year on the strength of my friend Henry Shevlin’s recommendation. (It is absolutely incredible, strong recommend.) A couple of influences on Disco Elysium are well-known, openly discussed by the developers: Planescape Torment and Baldur’s Gate, The Wire, Émile Zola, Arvi Siig, and Marx and Engels. I don’t want to assert that Clarke’s novel had an influence on Disco Elysium comparable to these works and authors. But I do want to observe that the above passage was very likely known to at least some of the developers (perhaps subconsciously), and that recollection of it very likely influenced one crucial aspect of the game.
At the start of Disco Elysium, the player character (a police officer) is tasked with investigating a body that is hanging outside the Whirling-in-Rags cafeteria in the fictional city of Revachol; the murder investigation forms the central thread of the plot that all else branches out from, and the crime isn’t fully solved until the ending. Two things are immediately notable about the corpse. One is that it is disgustingly disfigured and discoloured. The second is the immense mass of blue tattoos stretched across the torso.
The corpse looks at you with bulging white eyes. The face around them does not look human, it’s swollen and ready to burst. His lips are fishlike and his tongue like a ball gag in his mouth.
An intricate web of blue lines stretches across the torso. From the right shoulder to the solar plexus, each time they intersect a small white star is formed in their crossing. Hundreds of fading asterisks riddle his skin, their concentration is highest around his heart.
The player character’s partner notes the tattoos in the autopsy report:
The upper torso is covered in a single, continuous tattoo resembling a map of the night sky. It reaches from the right shoulder to the heart. The ink is blue and white.
In Disco Elysium the player character and his partner are left with one abiding impression, the same impression that Childermass had when he saw Vinculus in Strange and Norell: the blue marks meant something.
YOU: What do we need this photo for?
KIM KITSURAGI: It contains insight into the victim’s person… The story he wanted his body to tell was important to him. It is his letter—to us. Someone should decipher it. We’ll need to show it around.
The player character does indeed later learn what the tattoos represent. The hanged man was a killer, a brutal mercenary guilty of savage crimes. He was from a country far from Revachol, and had travelled farther still to engage in violence before he came to Revachol and his death. The tattoos were a record of his mercenary service—a confession of his crimes. Unlike the stories Childermass had heard in Strange and Norrell, the confession was inked onto his skin by the mercenary himself, not by his killers. But the correspondence with the stories described described in Clarke’s passage is still remarkable; as is the largest overarching correspondence, meaningful blue tattoos covering the body of a deformed, disfigured hanged man.3
Maybe there is some Reichenbachian common cause here that I’m unaware of? The main possibility I can think of is that the traditional ‘Hanged Man’ tarot card wears blue4—but that’s a blue shirt, not blue tattoos. Alternatively, maybe there is some intermediating influence: someone who borrowed from Clarke and was, in turn, borrowed from by ZA/UM. But Strange and Norrell was a literary success, relatively speaking; any work borrowing from it is likely to have been less successful (just by regression to the mean), and so on priors there’s less chance that ZA/UM had come across any possible intermediate work, compared to the chance of them knowing Strange and Norrell.
Google suggests that nobody else has remarked on this correspondence before. So, in the absence of anything else, I am willing to provisionally assert that Clarke’s description of Vinculus was a direct influence on Disco Elysium’s description of the hanged man. There you go: ‘look at this!’
Well, not necessarily tattoos, just markings; but to pick up this thread of intrigue would be to cross the line from minor to major spoilers.
Which has since become embroiled in some confusing and frustrating legal nonsense following the firing of central creative figures after a commercial takeover deal. Ah well.
There are smaller correspondences too: the player character in Disco Elysium has the opportunity to pull off the hanged man’s boots, like Childermass in Strange and Norrell. Likewise, it comes out that the hanged man learned the tattooing technique from sailors, as with the stories Childermass heard.
In Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Childermass deals tarot, so I am certain that Clarke was thinking of this.