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TRANSCRIPT
4. Drown before Reading: Liquidating Books in The Tempest
What does it mean that Prospero says he will drown his books? Why does he say
“drown” rather than burn them? This question arises not only because “drown” is
usnual and even enigmatic but because Caliban has told Stefano and Trinculo “burn
but his books” and, along with driving a nail through Prospero’s head, they be the
sovereign rulers of the island. The question concerning drowning books is our
point of departure for reading the Arden three edition of The Tempest and Juliet
Taymor’s Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books in this chapter. We first
engage the Arden’s notes on Prospero’s books and then examine both the sequence
showing Prospero drowning his books in Prospero’s Books and to books “drowning”
in the end title sequence Taymor’s film not by comparing these films to the
“original” text but by considering each films as yet another edition of the play,
editors and directors being comparable in rendering more or less readable the
play’s cruxes regarding books. These cruxes include the contradictory references to
Prospero’s “book” in the singular and his “books” in the plural and the a between
references to Prospero’s cloak and staff as props but not to his book or books. For
us, the interest of both films lies in their response to a less familiar crux regarding
the preservation contradictory modes of the destruction of Prospero’s library.
Despite Caliban’s instruction to “burn” Prospero’s books, Prospero says he will
“drown” them. The endings of both films indirectly return us to a question about
media raised in “original and true copie,” or first edition of The Tempest, a question
about what Derrida calls the end of the book (Grammatology) and the survivance of
the book: how does a book to die? how does its biographical destruction differ
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from the destruction of bios, of a human corpse? What does it mean to drown books
that are divisible, singular plural, and have no referents on stage? What happens
when books are no material, not props? What kind of library contains books that
have no paratexts, no titles and authors? What does it mean that Prospero
effectively promises to drown his books at some indefinite time in the future, to
promise destruction without delivering it? And what does it mean that The Tempest,
a play in which the main character says he prizes his books above his dukedom,
does not include a scene of reading or of writing, as does a play to which it is often
compared, namely, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus? Why do books and
libraries go missing in The Tempest?
New Historicist and New New Historicist criticism of the play missing these
questions and alternately tries to fill in the missing book with a hallucinated prop
somewhere present off-stage or with a copy of an early modern book stored now in
a research library, say, the grimgoire, and thereby close off the singular plural of
book(s) in the play. Prospero has a book, not books, even though the book is a
composite of pages taken from multiple grimgoires, or it tries to imagine the
destruction of the books exclusively in Caliban’s terms, as burning, skipping over the
oddity of Prospero’s destruction by drowning and displaced by a more general,
characterological question about Prospero: why does he abjure his rough magic?1
Our formulation of drowning books as a crux will orient our reading of The
Tempest: the island is more of an archive about to come to an end that it is a
utopian space, and archive management involves what Michel Foucault calls
biopower, about the management of life and death. The question of what counts as
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life The Tempest cannot be reduced to human life, however, as Foucault does.
Shakespeare floats, so to speak, questions about life as questions of biobiblio(auto-
thanato)graphy and questions about species of life, about the indeterminacy of the
borders between spirits, humans, animals, and monsters. In short, questions about
life are raised as questions of what Derrida calls sur-vivance, not so much survival
or living on or even as living death but as living on in a way that cannot be thought
in terms of life and death. Sur-vivance is a resistance to reading, as we saw earlier.
The Tempest radicalizes unreadability by linking sur-vivance to a past that never
becomes fully textual, that can only become paratextual, a prologue, and thereby
prolonged (or infinitely “prolougened”). If, as Derrida says, the archive is oriented
to the future and hence always incomplete, it follows that the condition of the
archive, as we will show more fully in the next chapter, is “incompletemess”; that is
to say, the archive is always something of a disaster, a wreck even before it is
wrecked, a wrecking of reckoning and recognition. In The Tempest, books are
fauxsimiles, blanks waiting for a reading that can never arrive. 2
One last signpost before we move on to the Arden Three Tempest and the
Taymor and Greenaway films. Our reading of The Tempest differs from avowedly
neoFoucauldian historicist readings and new new historicist readings primarily in
not psychologizing and not being Prospero-centric. The survivance of the archive
involves an economy of repeated destructions, loss, mourning, repair, storage, and
restoration. Prospero-centric readings of the play lead to a series of dead end
questions we take to be ruses that provide an alibi for the play’s excessive economy
of archival repetition and re-enactment: why doesn’t Prospero not recover his
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dukedom immediately? Why does he abjure his kingdom? Why does he want to
leave the island? At the risk of being somewhat dogmatic, we think these are the
wrong questions. Our focus on film adaptations of the play and on media in the play
asks a series of new questions about The Tempest, the archive, editing, and the book,
but we will not provide the reader with the kinds of hallucinogenic hits and
convenient comforts of elisions on offer in historicist criticism and book history.
Attention to drowning books in The Tempest foregrounds a tension in the kind of
book history scholars of early modern culture write, a tension between the so-called
material book and the book as medium. When does the history of “material” books
become a question about the book as a medium, as a textual support and an
impression? We maintain that book history and the any history of the book (or of
books) cannot be written without being haunted by spectrality and eschatological or
messianic time, by deconstructive questions raised by Maurice Blanchot and Derrida
about the end of the book and the book to come. Consider The French title of Henri
Lefebrve’s L’apparition du livre, translated as The Coming of the Book. The French
word “apparition” means “appearance” and “ghost” (an “apparition” in the English
sense of a ghost derives, of course, from “appearance”). The English title as The
Coming of the Book has clearly messianic connotations, even if those connotations
are not intended. And of course books do not serve as media for the dead, just as the
occasion for humanist pathos and sometimes irreverent piety, whereas for Derrida
the survivance of a text leaves open the question of telepathy, of the last word, in a
variety of media and technology because technology cannot, as we have maintained,
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properly be opposed to organic human life (as an inorganic prosthetic tool or
equipment for living).3
Undrowning the Book
We wish turn now to the Arden Three Tempest as one edition among others
that constitute the history of the play’s reception history of its cruxes concerning
Prospero’s books. To our knowledge, The Tempest is unique in the history of
literature in destroying books by drowning them. All other literature and drama in
which manuscripts or books are destroyed involve burning.4 Oddly, enough,
Prospero’s use of the “drown” to destroy his books does not invite editorial
commentary. The Arden 3 edition does not comment on the phrase, though it does
comment extensively on roughs in the famous speech that ends with Prospero’s
announcement.5 Destroying books by drowning them is all the more remarkable
that their destruction is different from Prospero’s plans for his staff: “I’ll break my
staff, /Bury it certain fathoms in the earth.” Prospero’s burial of his staff provides
the second most common form of destruction: inhumation and cremation. These
are the only two forms of the preservation and destruction of corpses, according to
Derrida in Beast and the Sovereign vol. 2. But burial in Prospero’s phrasing also
anticipates drowning in that “fathoms” measure depth of water (as in in “full fathom
five”), not earth.
We want to consider its future tense, a dramatic economy (the actor never
has to show the books being destroyed just as the actors who have been
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shipwrecked do not have to appear in we clothing because Ariel has dry-cleaned
them) but this invisibility is itself worth comment.
Editors Vaugns in their introduction to te Arden observe that the Tempest
has fewer cruxes than do the other plays in the First Folio, and the section of their
Introduction devoted to “Cruxes,” they include only two, leaving the rest to the
notes. Strictly speaking, the first crux they include regarding the assignment of lines
in 1.2. to Prospero or Miranda is not a crux at all but an aspect of the play’s
performance and editing history. Restoration dramatists like Dryden and editors
like Theobald had no textual evidence to reassign Prospero’s lines. We read the
Arden 3’s classification of this reassignment as a symptom, however, not simply an
error of classification. The number of cruxes is less important than the way cruxes
in the play do or do not become visible and the way editors and critics efface them.
“Book” versus “books” is one. The shift from burning to drowning might be another.
Is Prosper rather than Prospero a crux? Is it related to Caliban’s inverse self-naming
“ban ban Ca Caliban.” Under what conditions does something become a crux rather
than a general critical problem. We suggest that the issue of books is related to a
wider, recurrent structure in the play related to survival and safety. In our view, the
play does not present a choice between an authoritarian, colonialist reading or the
critique of same or mix; rather, it shows that Foucault’s account of the prison is on a
continuum with his later accounts of pastoral care. Shipwrecks give rise to
philosophical reflection, according to Lucretius in De Rerum Naturum. But in The
Tempest, the ship wreck operates only as a supposition. What looks like a wreck,
we quickly learn, is not a wreck at all.
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Propsero consoles Miranda
But oddly, Prospero asks Ariel for similarly assuring answers.
Ariel gives both a fuller account of the shipwreck than what we have gather
from the boatswain scene in 1.1. and a fuller account of its repair. The same
potentially traumatic vision is repeated, as it were traumatic even though it never
happened.
Dialogue about Ferdinand being drowned or undrowned occurs twice.
Dialogue about Caliban and Tricunclo being “dead or alive?” varies the same pattern,
in this case based on a mistakenly supposed monster (Trinculo and Caliban onder a
cloth).
Fredinand hears that his father lies full fahtm five below—sea change and all
—but Antonio imagines Ferdinand buried:
Although this lord of wak remembrance – this
Who shall be of little memory
When it is earthed 2.1. 232-34
The King’s son’s alive,
“’Tis as impossible that he’s undrowned
As he that sleeps swims. 236-38
Antonio: Will you grant me that Ferdinand is drowned?
Sebastion: He’s gone. 233-34
Alonso:
O thou mine heir
Of Naples and Milan, what strange fish
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Hath made his meal on htee?
Francisco: Sir, he may live.
I saw him beat the surges under him
And rid upon their backs. He trod the water . . .
The surge most swoll’n . ..
I doubt not
He came alive to land.
Sebastian:
We have lost your son,
I fear, for ever. Alonso: No, no, he’s gone. 2.1. 112-34
Stephano: I took him to be killed with a thunder stroke.
But art thou not drowned? 2.2.107
Stephano: Here, kiss the book.” [Trinculo drinks] . . .
Come swear to that. Kiss the book. I will furnish it anon with new contents. Swear!
2.2. 127; 139
Wlt thou detroy htem then? 3.2. 113
Alonso uses same phrase as Prospero does
Thereofre my son I’th’ooze is bedded, and
I’ll seek him deeper than ever plummet sounded,
And with him lie there mudded. 3.3. 100-02
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
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I’ll drown my book. 5.1.55
Calbian’s sleep and sleep again “isle is full of noises’ picked up Prospero’s dreams
made on rounded with a little sleep after he recalls the plot and beraks off the
masque 3.2.140; 4.2. 155-57
cloudy, 2.1. 143
Dead or alive? 2.2. 25—another scene of “traumatic mirecgnition—Trinculo of
Caliban.
I have not ‘scaped drowning to be afeared nw of your four legs, 58-59
The Tempest is of interest to us, however,
The film does not show the beginning of the book or the end of the book.
No paratexts at any point, so there’s a precursive and recusrsive elippsis of the book
that keeps it by drowning it. Taymor makes explicit a pre-cursive economy of the
book that differs from other economies of drowning in the play; drowning by the
numbers—characters seem to drown but do not. This is a cycle of reassurance; lots
of scenes of reassurance that more or les repeat each other. Prospero even lies
about the drowning of his daughter to Alonso to manufacture a symmetry between
Prospero’s loss and Alonso’s, as if Alonso’s repeated Prospero’s.
Melting sand castle between the opening title for The Tempest, rain begins, camera
dollies back and pans right as we se it begin to melt in a hand that belongs to
Miranda. (use of the words “melt,” “dissolve pace,” and so on in the play) There’s a
storm before the storm. Even before the shipwreck she sees, there is a sandcastle
wreck. Miranda first when she enters the play after the boatswain scene. 1.1.
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Melting sand, dissolving sand anticipates Prospero’s
The book’s irreconcilable singular and plural forms in The Tempest marks a certain
exception with regard to the book that bears on its survival: it is both singular and
divisible. And this exception is sustained by a larger suspension between two
moments in he play, one near the beginning Prospero’s tells Miranda of the
undrowning of his books when he is put with Miranda on a boat and the other when
Prospero promises to drown his book. That promise is never fulfilled in the play
(something Mowat does not comment on). In short the book / books are never
destroyed in the play; they appear to be as indestructible as they are non-existent.
The “book” / “books” contradiction or crux is exceptional in respect to survival.
Scenes of destruction by shipwreck are resolved into scenes of reported recovery
occur in multiple ways and multiple times. But even the norm established by the
shipwreck, about which he have more to say, is exceptional. For the ship is not
actually not wrecked. And no one dies in. Indeed, no one dies in the play. (Not even
the witch Sycorax is killed; she is exiled.) Prospero is potentially vulnerable
(“destroy him”; “drive a nail into his head”), as are Alonso and Gonzalo during a brief
sleep from which Ariel awakens Gonzalo who in turn awakens Alonso. But the
play’s shipwreck differs from the book undrowning in that the promise to drown my
books implies their destruction but muddies its exact nature.
In shipwreck scenes, characters are let to imagine the fate of corpses, which may
or may not be destroyed. Ferdinand imagines his father’s dead body—turned to
coral. Something artificial and unburied. Other corpses suffer other kinds of
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changes, one of which bleeds into Prospero’s promise to drown his book. Alonso
wonders what kind of fish eat his son but then says that he will himself dive into the
bottom of the sea until he is buried. He uses he very same line Prospero does but
adds mud at the end. Cite. Alonso imagines Ferdinand and he buried. Other burial
in the earth. Prospero calls up the undead that have been buried. No cremation, but
incineration of books by Caliban. The play floats, as it were various ways of sinking
corpses into oblivion while assuring its characters and us that all of the characters
have survived. The spacing of book into book and books does not allow us to
imagine the end or the beginning of the book. The real issue is not what the book or
books are (their referents) or how many there are but the manner of their
destruction. We don’t know if they will fall to the bottom in the mud or be
scattered, decheminated, as Derrida puts onto distinerrant paths. Nor are the book
ever threatened with destruction in a scene like the shipwreck. The survivability of
the book’s bios differs from the survival of biological, then, in that the book is
divisible and indivisible, both a “book” and “books.” The problem of the referent
raised by the missing prop is more radical than it may seem at first sight. The issue
of referent is not reducible to fauxrensics—to a genre, much less a single book. “The
book” does not have an empirical material referent, nor is it a metaphor (as when
Stephano tells Caliban twice to “kiss the book,” the bottle of liquors from which he
drinks).
There is no media ecology in the play whereby either corpses or books get
recycled. No food chain. There is predation (fishes eating Ferdinand) and there is
not, just veganism (Caliban seems to be a vegan—shows plants of the island). And
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then there is the banquet from which no one eats. The banquet itself is not
produced as a special effect. Ariels appearance is.
Derrida does not consider animots in relation to corpse disposal in The Animal That
Therefore I am. Says that there is only burial or cremation in Beast and SOv 2, yet
does ot talk about burial at sea. Misses cannibals being both cremated and buried.
Syntehsize the two works. Animals disposing of corpses? Only humans? But how
do humans do it? Is there a human way to waste, or what Alonso calls “infinite
loss?” Is mourning about the tropics of formerly human waste disposal? [in All
Quiet on the Western Friend, a soldier says his friend is dead (just killed in combat).
That’s not your friend,” the sergeant barks, “that’s a corpse. Move it back ther.” And
the other soldiers move it away.] some one who has just be
Ariel’s bee song transposed from 51. 87-94 to just before Prospero’s “ My Ariel,
chick ,’That is thy charge.” 5.1. 316
Taymor cuts “Please you draw near.”
Crux of lack of a stage exit for Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, p 305, Arden 3.
Miranda: The sky it seems, would pour down stinking pitch
But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek
Dashes the fire out. 1.2.4-5
Gonzalo: Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him—his
Complesion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging; make the rope of
destiny our cable 1.1.28-20
I would fain die a dry death.67-68
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Alonso: That they were, I wish
Myself were muddied in that oozy bed
Where my son lies. 5.1. 150-52
Upon this shore when you were wrecked, was landed
To be king on’t. 5.1.161-62
Ariel says he “landed” the survivors; the passive contrusciotn here is rhater odd
—“who landed” could easily work—but “was landed” is not just “naded” but implies
a missing agent—someone or some force“landed” Prospero.
Gonzalo I prophesized, if a gallows were on land
This fellow could not drown. 5.1. 217
Drowning as something to be read—Gonazlo reads the “drowning mark” upon the
boatswain as a prophecy in 1.1.
Sleep versus awake is a strong binary opposition in 1.2. Miranda put to sleep and at
the end when the boatswain is awakened but his sailors are asleep.
There thou shat find the mariners asleep
Under the hatches. The master and the boatswain
Being awake, During the play, sleep and waking blur, sleeping and death, even
sleepy language.
Taymor’s audiocommentary
When you do the play onstage, the cell is off stage, so you never see it. But when you
do a movie (on sequence before A, A, S and G wander (they awoke earlier).
She says the set by the pool is like “an open book,” the white walls like pages.
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[PBS Masterpiece] montage of turning blank pages with faces of stars superimposed.
Red cover and blank pages, open book at the end of the logo sequence]
No books in Prospera’s flashbacks, just alchemy and the funeral of her dead
husband, the duke. She now inherits the post. Taymor says that “in the original
play, Prospero reads his books and therefore loses control. Seems like a good
reason, but we . . .”she stresses alchemy because as a witch you could be burned;
you could be burned for alchemy—“set to sea presumably to die”
Is there a book or not assumes we know what a book is. We want to ask a different question Gets at hunatotexuality og Prospeor’s Books, not their resumed materiality.Burn but his books versus I’ll drown my books. The book is and is not there, but it is imagnined takes two very different forms. Spectrality takes us ot bio—different notion of the island—mangaement of life and eath—ut with a n economy of loss without loss.Fake death in Much Ado About Nothing—not directed at the female body, purification.Chief focus will be on Taymor’s tempest in art because tshe shows the books “drowning in the end title sequence. Made me think that Prospero too is among the living dead—every third thought shall be my grave—kind of like Robinson Crusoe for Derrida—not fear of being buried alive, but fear of burying alive or burning alive. Drowning as neurotic compromise formation. He can live on only because he is as spectral as he is human. His wife died in childbirth—embryonic fluids? Miranda’s birth as another kind of shipwreck?First, Derrida makes the title the condition of the archive. In “Title to Be Specified,” he writes: “the noun titleer would signify two things. In Old French, a titleer (titrier]—was a monk responsible for the archives of a monastery. He was an archivist, the archivist par excellence, for if every archivist must prevail over the order of titles—how can there be an archive without a title [pas d’archive sans titre]—what is to be said of the guardian of titles?”6 7 Second, translation complicates ableit in microscopic ways, the philological task of determining what is to be glossed and how it is to be glossed.8 A kind of enlightenment at work, but perhaps closer to what Derrida says about phantasm and sleep being more vigilant than waking5.1. Boatswain’s return“rigged as wen / We first put out to sea. 223-24The “strange noises” of the isle awaken the sailors:
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I were well awake, / I’d strive to tell you. [sleep compromises capacity to retrieve form the archive, to tell—] We were dead of sleep . . 229-230We were awaked 235Even in a dream, were we divided from them / And brought moping hither. 238-89 boatswain goes back to the beginning—we first set out to sea—and skips to the end—when they were awakened—so they have no story to tell]And more diversity of sounds, all horrible, 234 (Horrible horrible, most horrible?)
Ariel leaves the crew of the ship asleep, as if in a cryonic state. Echoes the way Prospero has put Miranda asleep. “Lie there, my art”—ambiguous referent (another crux) of “art” as either Miranda or his cloak and staff, his daughter or his props.
Ferdinand asking Miranda if she is a spirit or a human; Miranda asking if Ferdinand is a sprit (Geist in German translation).Miranda: What is’t, a spirit? . . . It carries a brave form. But ‘tis a spirit.” 1.2.410; 412
Prospero: No, wench, it eats and sleeps and hath such sensesAs we have—such [anticipates Prospero’s “Dost thou think so spirit? And Ariel’s response “Mine would, sir, were I human.” Prospero: And mine shall. / Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeing . . . 5.1.19-23] This gllant which htou seestWas in the wreck, and he’s something stained With grief. . .413- 416Prospero addresses Ariel as spirit a few lines later Spirit, fine spirit, / I’ll free thee 1.2. 421.
Ferdinand: My prime request / Which I do last pronounce, is (O, you wonder!) / If you be maid or no?Miranda: No wonder, sir. But certainly a maid 426-28
The question devolves into a question of whether Miranda is a virgin or not.The German is Jungfrau.
Ferdinand “Weeping again the King my father’s wreck” 1.2. 391Ferdinand wonders if he is dreamingWhen Alsonso and Gonzalo are put to sleep, so to speak, they survive a near death experience after Gonzalo is awakened by Ariel.
Mourning is given time yet being skipped over—drowning means there’s no corpse. Lost at sea. No burial. Just storage. Even Alono’s body is not really a corpse, just rich and strange. It’s already been turned into a sort of monument, turned into the subject of a song which is and is not a requiem.(For Ferdinand, it seems to be requiem.)
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In addition to the skipwreck in Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, there are also the ships (Antonio’s) that are to have sunk in The Merchant of Venice but then turn out miraculously to have survived and come to harbor. The Merchant of Venice is yet another revenge tragedy turned comedy / romance.
Re-zones the island form a utopian space to a living dead border also a human and spectral and human monster—
Assumed I am the king Ferdinand and Alonso mourning, the mistakenly assumed deaths. Every third thought will be grave.
Why is the book the vessel that cannot be presented—why is the library the space that enables
Not is it real or not, but what kind of real? Should I be mourning? How should I take up my relation to this thing I am now archiving? That we are talking through and should I keep this? Or is it just a dream—Prospero. a retrieval the island becomes an archival space. In 1.2. Prospero brings back stories, he is the database and that search engine. He’s the software designer, not the hard drive. The play is a revenge tragedy. The book –I’ll drown my book—how is the story of P’s being set adrift in his books and for him to drown his books thereafter? How is that story told in Milan?
Hear spirits in two ways—magical utopian space and as a grave, as archive, because it is coded by P’s books, then what is the relation between being setting adrift and generic crossing and conversion from revenge tragedy to romance? How does that play with the shipwreck with a romance motif that is coded as tragic, as total loss? Alonso forced to live as if his son is dead, then have him returned to him by Prospero—letting live or letting die—sovereignty becomes the management of life. Foucauldian biopolitical moment at the end. But the book will be drowned? To do what to separate from the ship? From the ship Prospero is going to get back on?
Remember me—remember—Prospero as Hamlet.
Speech argument doesn’t work because people aren’t sure if they are speaking or hearing speech.
The book would have drowned to begin with if they had met their intended fate.
We never see the ship after the shipwreck even though it is restored—Ariel says to Prospero.
Abandon ship narrative, not a shipwreck.They take their chances with drowning. They’ve decided to risk drowning. He decides to drown his books. What does it mean to drown a person as opposed to drown a person? A figure of an archival oblivion: forgive and forget. Forget about it.
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Crimes to be pardoned. Pardon and perjury. Forgiveness. Hostipitality. Friend and enemy. Witness, testimony, and archive. Engage the Foucauldian moment at the end of The Tempest with the end of Beast and Sovereign Vol. 2
Also a species difference because Caliban is left on the island with a story that the lay is not even interested in writing because it is not interested in telling, just a sort of
Spirits as alcohol—bottle—alcohol—drowning your years in booze. Another liquid oblivion. Putting out the fire the books, so the fire is put out.
Turns into a the narrator of lost opportunity—Caliban narrates the misfire when A and S stop for the trumpery. It’s too late to get to the books.
Propsero’s hour is now at zenith—there’s an exipiration on his power. Extradition.
Youtube toy Tempest video and the toyboat tempest in a bathtub scene in Prospero’s Books.Prospero's Book as a life preserver
book as boat.Book / boat / bark / bottle?It’s like the threat of an archive whose time is up, the moment when the archive becomes a crypt.
Ahead of its time. Still of the obsolete past in the future from Bernard Tavernier’s science-fiction thriller, Death Watch.http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film4/blu-ray_reviews57/death_watch_blu-ray.htmThe idea of a burial at sea strikes me as being so odd. Shouldn't
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there be a word for it? Cremation, inhumation (buried in the earth),and "marination?" Right, that one's taken.
Btw, when Derrida discusses cremation and inhumation in The Beast and theSovereign, 2, he doesn't mention burial at sea.
Derrida’s notion of a text’s “sur-vivance” on what Derrida calls “unreadability”: sur-vivance involves various media transfers, various material supports, or subjectiles, as well as various tropes for not/non/un/reading. We can think about Ariel's full fathom five in relation to survivance, use The Beast and the Sovereign, 2, to talk about "sea change" and drowning books. The dead not dead fantasy seems to depend very specifically on water--on a shipwreck that isn't, on a father drowning who didn't. Are all of these nearly immediate recuperations necessary for the book to be absent as a prop, to be drowned off stage, to be diverted by a bottle from Caliban's desire to burn but his books? Strange economy of survival, the corpse, and the book without embalmment, the book as balm, not blame, here.
Survivance—as a structuring strucutre that genrates a series of
differeneces that matter or don’t accrding to at various
historical moments, what copy you have, what lanuguage it is
in, what edition, hardcover or apperback, paper used, etc. and
revivified by the reader. Wetwares storage notion of the
archive. Diffference betweenarhcival materials and their
publication—recursive since new editions can be published.
Assumption is that paper only is paper once it is written on—only papers with
writing in the ordinary sense can be archived. But move from archive to publication
introduces media that remediate the archival materials.
Sur-vivance of living dead book.
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From corpus of book to corpse of author, reader on the side of live. Turn to account
of survivance and posthumous publication.
What is commonly called the “afterlife” of a book is given a more technical meaning
whereby survival as a metaphor for preservation becomes a notional term, “sur-
vivance.” The translators of Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 leave the
French neologism untranslated and without annotation apart from informing the
reader the “words ‘living on,’ ‘to survive,’ and ‘survival’ are in English in the text.”
(131,n30).
Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a
sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death.
(130). The book is not exactly a corpse that continues to live, as it were, as it
decomposes or is put to various medical uses before being buried or cremated.
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks
and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might
have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive
Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe . . . . Now this survival, thanks to
which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read,
interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by
millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed
with any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed
up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of
any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each
time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or
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deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality
virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and
the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful
death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the
dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in the
sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not
thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is
not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or
fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something
sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor
indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends
itself to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer
the middle voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive”
or the substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-” is without
superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or
sovereignty. It does not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something
from it, any more than it cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor
and its necessity, what one could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its
erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is
something other than life death, but a groundless ground from which our detached,
identified, and opposed what we thing we can identify under the name of death or
dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-called as opposed to life properly so-
called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is where there is some other that has me
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at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is
what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the
very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and that I call the other
inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my survivor, not my
survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-
dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns,
drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates
each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other
breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it,
like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Koerper), a body
proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality.
(131)
This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to
engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at
work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the
archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living
experience is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living
experience,” but “tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors
and derails “tissue” skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like
death in life or life in death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more
originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked
under this this clothing. For, on he contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance,
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comprehended, they live and die, they live to death as the very inextricability of this
weave. It is against the groundless ground of this quasi-transcendentality of living to
death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one hand, one can say that “Robinson
Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the book, were, according to a
first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and desire attested to by this
book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or metonymy, [were all]
buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can and one must, one
must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and like the
experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-
anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson
Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like
ours, I mean in the present modernity of a Greco-Abrahamic Europe, wonder what is
happening . . . in the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the
family and/or State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132
Course called “Living to Death”
in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family
and / or the State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in
the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized
manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . .
. deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare
ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying
dead (132)
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Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies
created by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-
vivance.
Sur-vivance is not exactly new. Derrida in “Living On: Borderlines” (reduced to
“Living On” in the second edition of the book in which it was originally published)
and Derrida on death would be difficult to catalogue. Also livance.
The DVD menu is worth discussing (will match Anonymess discussion).It begins and ends with Prospero and is all shown as if underwater.There are two shots of books "drowning." There is also shot of theship burning in the distance.
The ship also burns as it is wrecked by Ariel, and there's a shot ofit fully restored in a harbor.Anyway, I am taking notes as I watch. O am a half hour into the film.
The film is good for us in that it highlights the play's not soobvious opposition between burning and drowning.The fantasy you identified is operative all over the play, I amrealizing. Like Miranda freaking out when the ship goes down andProspero reassuring her; but then Ariel has to reassure Prospero, whocontradicts her own reassurance of Miranda and is similarlyreassured--almost the same words--not a hair on their heads harmed.Ariel just gives a more detailed account of what happened to thesurvivors. Ariel also talks about the ship burning (in the play)--Ihad forgotten that.
Interesting too what gets a flashback and what does not--there's noflashback for Prospera getting few books with Gonzalo's help or of herlibrary WE see no books in a flashback of Prospera and Miranda (baby)on the boat in which they are set adrift.
Just wondering f the issue of the book not being a prop and being bothsingular and plural is related to drowning as a figure for thedisappearance of the prompt book in production--or its being a prompt(there, but invisible, off-stage).
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So The Tempest as a kind of tele-prompter / ing?We might want to discuss the invisible blood writing in Faustus too,by way of contrast. No book burning there, but also no bookdestruction, no tearing up a book, or tearing out a page; nofigurative desire, as in R and J, to "tear" a "name" ("Had I itwritten")
Julie Taymor’s The Tempest; opening title over a sand castle—begins to melt in the rain, Miranda is holding it; cross-cutting between ship and Miranda running; The bed catches fire; ten cuts to Prospera, then Miranda running to her, ship burning in the distance; as inside of ship catches fireShot of Prospara in the menu is shot when she turns the clouds back after the storm and after the ship as sunk.No flashback of knowing how I loved my books, furnished with me”Ariel merges form watery reflection and makes a splash, literally, as his entrance.Flashback after he merges to the shipwreck—ship on fire, Airel surrounded by fire too. Citing lines about sulpherous ship—so there is textual motivation for showing it burning.
Boat burning versus book burning.Ariel quotes Ferdinand mockingly “o devils here” (sounds like Caliban)But are they safe?Not a hair perished.
Look. The ship is hidden. So we see the ship in harbor completely restored. Taymor wildly accelerated what we learn only in the final scene of the play, giving us even more reassurance, defaulting the audience to her Ariel-centric reading of the play, as if the audience were Ariel.
Ariel is transparent, moves around with a sound effect in a kind of fastforward tracing.Flashack of Ariel being trapped in the pine; cut back to Prospera with background of forest splashing down the screen as the new background comes into view-a variation of the wipe, or inversion of it.“invisible to every eyeball else”
Porspera on Caliban. We cannot miss him. He does make our fire. Fetches in our wood.Caliban gets no flashbacks when he tells the story of showing Prospera the island.
Miranda gets the abhorr’d slave . . . I taught thee language” linesProspera so slave hence—the actor was in Amistad, playing a slave; also in Gladiator.
Ariel sings full fathom five under water, superimposed on shot of Ferdinand hearing ad looking around to find who is singing, in a series of shots,
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“Where should this music be?Follow it or rather it has drawn me, it begins again. Falsetto—a bit like Greenaway.Full fathom, under water, but also in a forest (through which Ferdinand is walking—close ups of both Ariel and FerdinandThe ballad does remember my drowned father.The film’s diegesis separates “realism” from “magical” special effects, and also combines them, overlaps, in some sequences, differentiating the spirit Ariel from the “real” human characters.
Myself am Naples, ever since my father.
Ariel appears only in shots with Prospera—not in sots of Ferdinand and Miranda. “I charge thee that thou attend me.”(Prospera telling Miranda the tale—would cure deafness—doe’st thou mark?”—Prospera thinking her call doesn’t trough? Tat she has to keep replacing it, redialing? As if Miranda were not there, as she couldn’t tell by looking to see if Miranda is listening or not?
Ariel’s pine-trees and paper? Pre early modern, I guess. Rags, not ood pulp as source of paper.
Cut to fire in Prospera—“so lie there my art”
Prospera didn’t harm a hair of any crew member, she tells Miranda.Lots of chemical bottles full of liquids in her cave, out of focus in and in soft focus or in focus with racking focus.
Flashback montage cross cut with Miranda’s speech—and to Prospera. Flashbacks in bluish hue. Shot of Gonzalo given her a “package,” a sheet covering something square (the books?) here is also a chest in her boat.Boatswain is blackMusic sounds a like Nymanish
Foul water shalt thy drink
Prospera’s Books
DVD menu loop shows everything happening as if underwater; the ship is shown burning; there are two separate shots of books “drowning”; begins and ends with Prospera; she is in close up at the end, eyes closed, then open, as if it had been her dream; begins with low angle shot of her in her cloack with her staff—she never holds her books, no library.
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Or garments are as fresh (Gonzalo repeats what Ariel has already said). Same economy of destruction and restoration—through “made wet”Burns cross over from prop to non prop from burning to drowning. “drown my books” last se of “drown” in the play?
Dream/Re/Work
End credits:Books fall—music—then a woman sings the epilogue to a minor key song—afer producer credit Visual effects supervisor Kyle Cooper“which was to please”followed guitar—then “now I want spirits to informcast members show
to title The TempestA Julie Taymor filmAnd cones to below the end the line credits books have Laurence Sterne marble covers“let your indulgence (repeated)last book disappearssets me freeNow I want spirits to inform” and the epilogue repeats released by prayerMore guitar—also a lead guitar-builds louder, same loopNow I want spirits begins over againBy prayer . .which pierces so, pierces that it assaults, mercy itself and frees . . PauseA’as you from faults from
Coda Betha WilliamsLet your indulgence, let your indulgence set me free as final credits appea adnd copyright.
One last book—big—with extra pages, then sound, then an icon with a page, three more icons, then warning,Antipiracy warning
Gallagher never did back to me, btw, after he got back to me about notgetting back to me. We could start with our different reading of thesame passage from Marlowe’s Faustus, if we wanted to do.
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Greenaway’s piss streaming Ariel versus Marlowe’s blood-streaming?
Hi Lowell (and Julian),
I taught your ELH essay today, and had a few more thoughts after rereading (I like it even more than I did before) regarding blood writing. Julian and I have discussing your essay on the phone. I have two sets of questions. If you have left the essay behind and have no interest in what I am writing, please feel free not to respond. :) Julian, please contribute at will. :)
The first set of questions bears on the streaming of blood (live streaming avant la lettre?). You note the connection between Faustus streams his blood to write / sign the deed of gift and Christ's blood-stream. I was thinking about the relation between congealing and dropping. The drop of blood, or half a drop Faustus longs for is, I think, an alternate response to the congealing of his own blood, a kind of after reading of the "homo, fuge" invisible ink inscribed on his arm. He can divide the blood as a way of streaming it and also stopping it. But is the drop going to go into Faustus or on him? Is he going to drink it? Or is it supposed to wash him clean? The drop seems to me not to fit into Faust’s topography--leap up, hold me down, hide in the earth, etc. Nor does it fit into his temporality (time is running out; my time is up). When is the drop going to drop? Why, exactly, doesn't it drop? What is the economy of the drop? Why can it be divided? God kicks in as he is stopping it--but if he is, then he is like Mephistopheles (esp in the B text). What de Man would call the formal materiality of inscription seems to have the kind of uncanny effect you discuss within the blood-streaming of time. The drop is another instance of blood writing, but a writing that does not write, or cannot write off, Faustus’s sins.
The second set of questions I have bear on how the uncanniness of material / messianic time is compressed in the signing / Homo, fuge scene itself. The congealing precedes Faust saying the same line twice. This is just reiteration one could rightly say. However, the scene of blood writing here is already uncanny before the blood congeals. The blood letting directed by the text ("cuts his arm") would not happen on stage. Nor would the actor actually do what Faust says: “I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood” And even if one were to try to use squibs to fake the cut, one would still be pretending to cut one's arm, not cutting one's arm, which is what the stage direction directs. And it is hard to imagine how the actor could fake cutting his arm and then fake the blood congealing. (Julian has talked about this with me.) So the language of the play and the body of the actor are already dislocated. Disabled, even. "I can write no more." I realize, btw, that I am not asking any questions. :) When we get to the "inscription" of "Homo, fuge," we have entered further into the uncanny. We do not know what inscription means here. Who wrote this? With what? blood? Ink? Invisible ink? The medium is not specified. Then "Homo, fuge" is repeated just as "Faustus gives to thee his soul" was repeated earlier. And mirroring or echoing the congealing and clear again of the blood, we get an inscription with visible / invisible ink / blood/ tattoo?
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So my quasi-question bears on the centrality you give to congealing (and blood writing) as the caesura that derails ethics. Isn't the signing a problem as soon as we get "cuts his arm"? And doesn't uncanniness in various forms (para-deja vus, repetitions of structures, kick in before the signing is over. I am quite sure I am far for the first person to notice this, but Faust’s elision form the line he cites twice is not included in his reading of the contract / deed of gift. Blood is a medium as well as material. Faust cannot upload himself, cannot broadcast himself. He cannot receive Jesus.
In relation to the economy and medium of blood, I was wondering about the paradox of a deed of gift. The gift cannot be contracted. It is not a debt. Faustus is "given time." Yet not really. The deed inscribes a gift exchange: "I, John Faustus . . . , by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer"
Body and soul is a phrase that is also repeated, btw.
So the uncanniness of the signing--congealing and inscription, gets sorted out, sort of (not), in the deed of gift. It becomes just a deed after he reads it out: Mephistopheles says "Speak, Faustus, do you deliver this as your deed?"
Odd that he is asked to speak since he has just been speaking. But then Faustus us uses "give" in his response:
"Ay, take it, and the devil give thee good on 't!"
"Deed of gift" has devolved into a kind of semic deed and asemic gift.
You suggest that blood recalls ink (pitch burned, sacrificial, etc). But I wonder if Marlowe’s notion of blood streaming changes our understanding of writing of texts (which you appear to be entirely semic) and ironizes or activates a more or less latent ironization of materiality and messianic time as always already uncannily uncanny. The spectral “precedes” the material. The text itself is a specter, a record to be repeated and (not, when it comes to blood) re-enacted or even shown (only Faustus sees the blood stream). The text does not know anything. Not even that. At least not for sure.
P.S. The hopeless inadequacy of Drucker’s binary opposition between matter and non-transcendental writing (Derrida’s trace?) makes itself apparent.
Faustus will never end, but he will not die. So the requests Faust makes us are non-sensical. A character contemplates its own end, it is not human.
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Theater as transcendental object. Inventory moments in which the play letters on setting in motion a direction that make the diegesis collapse. “Homo fuge” moment. All moments are in a play world, not part of the real world. You’re watching a kind of living death, character between Marlowe’s live and the character’s lives or actor’s reanimation.
Prospera’s Bu(t)chdrowning books burn in Greenaway's P's Books Water is all over the film. The shipwreck is written in bluish waterthat is supposed to be ink.Toy boat. Water is all over the film. The shipwreck is written in bluish waterthat is supposed to be ink.Toyboat.
The shot above of the book is rather theological—apocalyptic but in a perverse way—Amen.
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The word “creature”—Ferdinand called creature by Prospero to Miranda. “Thing od darkness” Caliban. Animal and Ariel—where the bee sucks there suck I.Lacan on bees reading in Seminar Book XX, chapter 4. [A;lo bees disappearing due to isecticides that mess up the pollen and hten disorient the bees so that they can’t make it back a-hive. Puts the B in Bare life.Speech—taught me language—Ferdinand—you speak my language. Man as speaking animal—but animal also speaks—so do spirits.
Ariel talks about the ship on fire—burning—rather than sinking, getting overwhelmed by waves.
Le Livre Ivre
Caliban as drunken Symbolist poet—ban ban ca ca caliban. Kissing the bottle as kissing the book.
In German TV Der Sturm, Ariel comes out dressed in the identical clothes Prospera is dressed in when Ariel says in English—modernized, not Shakespeare—the bit about how Prospero should forgive his enemies.
“We could isolate the flashbacks . . . color of blue and force perspective and
miniatures in the flashbacks to separate them from the present, in which we used
naturalistic colors.”
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Ariel on shipwreck “I divide and burn in many places”
In the published screenplay,
“INT. LIBRARY – DUSK
The room is filled with Prospera’s books. In the center of the small space the young
lovers play chess . . .” 160
Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth
By my so potent art.
EXT. HIGH PROMONONTORY OVER LOOKING THE OCAEAN – NIGHT
As promised, PROSPERA throws her staff of the cliff and watches it shatter into
millions of pieces on the rocks below.
Prospera’s books sink slowly one by one into the deep, black sea as the main credits
begin. A haunting female voice sings Prospera’s last speech.
Miranda to Prospero, I.2.
“Wherefore did they not that hour destroy us?”
Caliban: “Nor lead me, like a firebrand in the dark,” 2.2. 6
Boatswain: “We were dead of sleep.”
Stephano: Com on your ways, open your mouth. Here is that which will give
language to you, cat. 2.2. 81-82-echoes Caliban’s “you gave me language” to Miranda.
Trinculo: I should know that voice. It should be—but he is drowned, And these are
devils. 2.2. 86-87
Alonso speaking about Ferdinand: He is drowned
Whom we stray to find, and the sea mocks
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Our frustrate search on land. 3.3.8-10
Ariel as harpy:
The never surfeited sea
Hath caused to belch you up3.3.55-56
Thee of thy son, Alonso
In film, magic banquet has animals and fruits and then leaves follow out from it and
then crows or ravens and then Ariel.
Audiocommentary over chess scene—the board is made of sand, meant to recall the
sandcastle at the beginning; the chess pieces are made of rock and coral.
No books are visible in these shots of M and F playing chess, contrary to the
published screenplay.
Miranda no longer wearing leggings but a dress (to indicate her return to Europe,
according to Taymor.
“Lava dogs, the bees are not in the original script but you can see better how Ariel is
doing P’s bidding from scene to scene.”
Usually, she doesn’t have the confrontation between Caliban and Prospero—he is
looking directly at the stick. Shot reverse shots in close ups—“he leaves and does
not look back, forever free,” cut back to extreme close up of Prospera (like rough
magic sequence).
“I rearranged where this song happens.”
Another long take until “there I “ and see kaleidoscope in one of her earlier visions
so that he would just become water again.
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“And do the murder first” 4.1.432 The part about burning Prospero’s books drops
out.
Ariel as harpy:
But remember
. . that you three
From Milan did supplant good Prospero,
Exposed unto the sea, which hath requite it,
Him and his foul deed” 3.3.68-72
Prospero “When I have decked the sea with drops fall salt” 1.2. 155
Mine eyes, ev’n sociable to the show of thine,
Fall fellowly drops. 5.1.63-64
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.
The se-change is a form of encrustation—what dissolves becomes permanent-dones
coral, eyes, pearsl. Almost like a sonnet. What is the tense of “are”? Have been made
(as in “are now changed completely”)? Or present? As in “are now being changed, in
the process of”)
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We broke the staff and the movie ended here. Create a song; Kyle Cooper would
shoot these drowning books
It realy is about the end and of books.
Leads singer is Portishead. And htt is the movie.
Aliban is not naked,a s the screenplay says—he wears a loincloth—and the boos do
not fall one by one but sometimes fall in groups.
Ariel shot in slow-motion—Ben W had to reloop his voice so that iw ould match the
Cut back to Proserpa—you can see a book on her table, but she is turned away from
it. slow motion.
on table—omnivorous. Ariel’s harpy sequence activated by shots of Propsera
dropping a black feather in a glass calchemical bottle. Which turns blue (like ink)
and hten close up of he bottle as water explodes out of it.
They hath bereft thee, and do pronounce by me,
Linger’ng perdition, worse than any death 3.3-75-77
Like supposed destruction a means of speculation on disposal of corpses, sleep is a
kind f suspended animation or cryonic freezing. Prospero puts Miranda asleep.
Ariel later makes Gonzalo and Antonio sleep. Ariel has the men in the ship sleep.
Caliban questions most acutely the border between sleeping and waking.
Sebastian’s a “very sleepy language.”
Repetition of you gave me language.
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Even language is not awake.
No print of goodness take versus printless feet.
Mannoni mentions The Tempest in connection to Robinson Cruose, but nt the
footprints.
the destruction of the ship itself is both water and fire.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits andAre melted into air, into thin air:And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolveAnd, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind.
Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'dThe very virtue of compassion in thee,I have with such provision in mine artSo safely ordered that there is no soul--No, not so much perdition as an hairBetid to any creature in the vesselWhich thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. Sit down;For thou must now know farther.
Bring in Lucretius on the shipwreck?
PROSPEROBut are they, Ariel, safe?ARIELNot a hair perish'd;On their sustaining garments not a blemish,But fresher than before: and, as thou badest me,In troops I have dispersed them 'bout the isle.The king's son have I landed by himself;
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Whom I left cooling of the air with sighsIn an odd angle of the isle and sitting,His arms in this sad knot.PROSPEROOf the king's shipThe mariners say how thou hast disposedAnd all the rest o' the fleet.ARIELSafely in harbourIs the king's ship; in the deep nook, where onceThou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dewFrom the still-vex'd Bermoothes, there she's hid:The mariners all under hatches stow'd;Who, with a charm join'd to their suffer'd labour,I have left asleep; and for the rest o' the fleetWhich I dispersed, they all have met againAnd are upon the Mediterranean flote,Bound sadly home for Naples,Supposing that they saw the king's ship wreck'dAnd his great person perish.
Ariel repeats Prospero’s reference to a “hair.”
FERDINANDWhere should this music be? i' the air or the earth?It sounds no more: and sure, it waits uponSome god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,Weeping again the king my father's wreck,This music crept by me upon the waters,Allaying both their fury and my passionWith its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.No, it begins again.
PROSPEROHow? the best?What wert thou, if the King of Naples heard thee?FERDINANDA single thing, as I am now, that wondersTo hear thee speak of Naples. He does hear me;And that he does I weep: myself am Naples,Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheld
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The king my father wreck'd.
ALONSOIf thou be'st Prospero,Give us particulars of thy preservation;How thou hast met us here, who three hours sinceWere wreck'd upon this shore; where I have lost--How sharp the point of this remembrance is!--My dear son Ferdinand.PROSPEROI am woe for't, sir.ALONSOIrreparable is the loss, and patienceSays it is past her cure.PROSPEROI rather thinkYou have not sought her help, of whose soft graceFor the like loss I have her sovereign aidAnd rest myself content.ALONSOYou the like loss!PROSPEROAs great to me as late; and, supportableTo make the dear loss, have I means much weakerThan you may call to comfort you, for IHave lost my daughter.ALONSOA daughter?O heavens, that they were living both in Naples,The king and queen there! that they were, I wishMyself were mudded in that oozy bedWhere my son lies. When did you lose your daughter?PROSPEROIn this last tempest. I perceive these lordsAt this encounter do so much admireThat they devour their reason and scarce thinkTheir eyes do offices of truth, their wordsAre natural breath: but, howsoe'er you haveBeen justled from your senses, know for certainThat I am Prospero and that very dukeWhich was thrust forth of Milan, who most strangelyUpon this shore, where you were wreck'd, was landed,To be the lord on't. No more yet of this;For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,
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Not a relation for a breakfast norBefitting this first meeting. Welcome, sir;This cell's my court: here have I few attendantsAnd subjects none abroad: pray you, look in.My dukedom since you have given me again,I will requite you with as good a thing;At least bring forth a wonder, to content yeAs much as me my dukedom.Here PROSPERO discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess
ANTONIOThus, sir:Although this lord of weak remembrance, this,Who shall be of as little memoryWhen he is earth'd, hath here almost persuade,--For he's a spirit of persuasion, onlyProfesses to persuade,--the king his son's alive,'Tis as impossible that he's undrown'dAnd he that sleeps here swims.SEBASTIANI have no hopeThat he's undrown'd.
Prospero’s books do not need to exist materially in productions of The Tempest. ; or
if they do exist, they need not appear on stage. There are references in
Shakespeare’s text to his staff and to his cloak as required stage props, but not to his
‘book’ or ‘books’ as necessary stage presences: these exist exclusively through
references to a significant but unseen book or books elsewhere. The Shakespeare
text therefore makes no provision for us to see Prospero’s books, much less to
drown them.9 The seven-minute-long end title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest,
designed by Kyle Cooper, however, gives expressive form to the moment when
Prospero ‘drowns’ his book: as the credits roll and the camera is submerged under
water, we watch Prospera’s books (in plural form) fall slowly through the ocean
heading toward the bottom musically accompanied by a haunting version of
38
Shakespeare’s epilogue scored by Elliot Goldenthal. Taymor originally cut
Prospero’s epilogue from the film script but ended up restoring it. In The Tempest,
the book published as a companion piece to the film, Taymor writes:
The film’s last image of Prospera on the ocean cliff, her back to the camera,
tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks below, and the staff’s subsequent
shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut and timed and scored and
mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete. I asked
Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the epilogue] and set
them to music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence. And to that
haunting female vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and we
drowned the books of Prospera in the deep dark sea. (21)10
Taymor enlarges authorial agency beyond the individual in the ‘Rough Magic’
preface to the book, writing that ‘we drowned the books of Prospera’). (p. 21) Yet
this enlargement of cinematic authorship depends on not only shifting Propsoero’s
“rough magic” speech to the end of the film as Prospera’s ventriloquized “Coda,”(p.
21) but on the final credits. Because “the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete, I
asked Elliot [Goldenthal] to take those last great words and set them to music for
the seven-minute-long end title sequence” (21) during we witness the visualized
consequences of Prospera’s declaration of her intent to ‘drown’ her ‘books’ . . I read
Taymor’s film as an allegory of the immersion of the book into a residual paratexual
storage space, sending off her film and accommodating a readerly and spectatorial
desire for an authorial force by encrypting and spectralizing the absent writer of the
39
book. She accompanies this allegorical depiction of displaced authorship with a
speech-turned-requiem sung by a female extra-diegetic voice identified only in the
end credit sequence rather than spoken by Helen Mirren (Prospera). The authorial
specters of the film are re/called at the end of the tie-in screenplay book. The last
two pages of the book show a still taken from the film’s closing credit sequence of a
book opening up after it has been plunged into the water with the production and
cast credits superimposed over the left-hand page. (Figures X.1 and X.2 [the verso
and recto pages].)
Figure 0 (verso page) Figure 0.0 (recto page)
In a paratextual space usually left blank, namely, the inside back cover and facing
page, the film credits for the director and actors are printed just to the left of an
‘uncredited’ book falling though water, little bubbles surrounding it. The book of the
film thus showcases a book displaying neither title nor author while simultaneously
recording Taymor as the film’s ‘author’ (asserted via her writer, director and
40
producer multiple credits here in combination with the ‘Julie Taymor Adapted from
the Play by William Shakespeare’ authorial designation on the volume’s front
cover): the interstingly double move in which Taymor claims a kind of hybrid
authorship - crediting Shakespeare as her source - appears and disappears as one
turns the page and then, presumably, closes the book. By focusing on the books
opening as they fall underwater, Taymor invites us to ask a new question, namely,
what does it means to ‘drown a book’? Phrased another way, we might ask: Why
does Prospero not follow Caliban’s instructions to Stephano and Trinculo - ‘burn but
his books’ - in order to destroy them? Taymor quietly insists on the drowning
Prospera’s unidentifiable books makes them unreadable even though the pages are
open.
Taymor’s protracted endings. The last shot of the books underwater is a very long
take. Long takes for end title sequences are not unusual. But Taymor’s recalls two
earlier unusually long takes in the film, the first when Ferdinand sings “O Mistress
Mine” from Twelfth Night” to Mirnda, while both are in close-up, she with her head
lying on his shoulder; the second is of Prospera at the end of “our revels now have
ended.” Special effects for the speech end just before “This rough magic,” when the
film cuts to a straight on shot of Prospera. As she begins to deliver the rest of the
speech, the camera gradually dollies in on your face in what becomes an
extraordinarily tight close-up of her face: one can no longer she her mouth just
before she says “I’ll drown my books.”
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Propsera is literally cut off from her voice, her promise already made off-camera
nad fulfilled, after, the end of he the film, also in a voice-over. The “O mistress mine”
shot has a different kind of incongruity that nevertheless makes the : the sining is of
coure dubbed in post-production, but it’s not clear whether the voice is the actors;
at points, it look like he is lip-synching. This Across the Universe moment has
includes some superimposition. But the real oddity is that the song is taken from
another play that of course has a parallel (the shipwreck and mistaken believe that a
loved one has drowned) but Feste makes no sense in context since Ferdinand has
his mistress.
O Mistress mine, where are you roaming? O stay and hear! your true-love’s coming That can sing both high and low; Trip no further, pretty sweeting, Journeys end in lovers’ meeting— Every wise man’s son doth know. What is love? ’tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; What’s to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty,— Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty, Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III (1602)11
Rough magic follows her creating a ring of fire around her as she says “Ye elves” and
also has some superimposed flashbacks in montage form.
The film ends with a series of liberations also not in the play:1. After the Europeans exit, Prospero lets Caliban go. No dialogue. Just lots of cutting back and forth until we see Caliban walking up the steps of the cell and getting away.2. Propsera then lets Aerial go.3. She then fulfills her promise, as if letting herself go--throws staffAnd then "dissolve" into end titles and books.
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If one reads the sung epilogue with the paratextless books, you can hear the referent
of "me" and "I" as the books (floating down one by one). It is certainly not prosper
singing. The books are being preserved a way as if in an aquarium, swimming
around like jellyfish “biobiblianimots”, and they are also being destroyed. The
disappearance of Propsera—along with the absence of paratexts could be as
evidence of their liberation. No one, not just Prospera, owns them, no one has title
(unlike the end titles), and their "voice" is anonymous. Sets up anonymess.
Outline:
1. Set up reading of the text—question of book dying, missing prop, drowning
versus burning, and the recursive fantasy it sets up.
2. Then go to the Taymor film,
3. Begin with DVD menu as partext, then end title sequence (create a pattern
we will follow in readin of Anoymess.
4. Discussions / excursions of related films, like Prospero’s Books, can be
integrated and subordinated to the discussion fo Taymor.
5. End with difference between Tempest bok burning / drowning economy and
invisible bloodwriting of Faustus—different notions of survivance related ot
the indestructibility of writing, of the support that supports even when it is
not empirically there (or spectrally not there).
Youtube toy Tempest video and the toyboat tempest in a bathtub scene in Prospero’s
Books.
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Finally watching the Taymor film. It's actually a lot better than I
thought it was. Not great, but still creative.
O just ordered the DVD so I could take screen captures.
The DVD menu is worth discussing (will match Anonymess discussion).
It begins and ends with Prospero and is all shown as if underwater.
There are two hsots of books "drowning." There is also shot of the
ship burning in the distance.
The shop also burns as it is wrecked by Ariel, and there's a shot of
it fully restored in a harbor.
Anyway, I am taking notes as I watch. O am a half hour into the film.
The film is good for us in that it johlights the plays's not os
obvious opposition between burning and drowning.
The fantasy you identified is operative all over the play, I am
realizing. Like Miranda freaking out whenhte ship goes down and
Prospero reassuring her; but then Ariel has to reassure Prospero, who
contradicts her own reassurance of Miranda and is similarly
reassured--almost the same words--not a hair on their heads harmed.
Ariel just gves a more detailed account of what happened to the
survivors. Ariel also talks about the ship burning (in the play)--I
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had forgotten that.
Interesting too what gets a flashback and what does not--there's no
flashback for Prospera getting few books with Gonzalo's help or of her
library WE see no books in a flashback of Prospera and Miranda (baby)
on the boat in which stye are set adrift.
Just wondering f the issue of the book not being a prop and being both
singular and plural is related to drowning as a figure for the
disappearance of the prompt book in production--or its being a prompt
(there, but invisible, off-stage).
SO The Tempest as a kind of tele-prompter / ing?
I have not ‘scaped drowning in order
You did not drown? Stephano and Trinculo when “swum ashore like a duck”
Swear to that. Kiss the bok. Swear [the book here is the bottle Caiban drinks that
Stephano offers him]
Stephano “Rest drowned, we shall inherit here.”
Prospero on inherit in “These are the stuffs that dreams are made on”
My mother is hard at study.
Kiss means drink (kiss by the book in Romeo and Juliet)
No specia effects when Prospera spes on Miranda and Ferdunand .
A kind winter light on the location—lots of long shadows.
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Special effects when Ariel comes in and spies on Gonzalo etc and puts Gonzalo to
sleep. Then Alnso goes to sleep. Only bried shots of Ariel and then just music.
“strange drowsiness” dowsi and drown?
sleepy language
Ariel appears only when Sebastian ad Antonio draw and prepare to murder.
[The film gets boring once we get to Caliban, en trinculo, then Stephano. Turns into
filmed theaer. Convesation betwenS and A cots reverse shots gradually cutting into
closer and closer close ups. The editing is supposed to intensfy the drama.
Ariel shows up “thou liest” behind Trinculo. He appears and disappears.
When he sleeps thou cans’t knowck his [Prospero] head down. Fhaving irst seized
her books. But remember first to possess her books first.
Burn but her books and that most deeply consider is the beauty of her daughter.
SHOTS OF ARIEL SEPRATE FROM SHOTS OF HUMANS.
Calbian isle ful of noises—sleep and sleep agan hwen aske I cried to dream again.
Between S,T, and C abd A,A<, G, and S, shots of Prospero’s in cell—controlling the
weather—a cn ecipse
Soeical effect for the banquer, but small part of the scree.
Prospera puts a faterh ina glass, it bursts,a bird dlies out, turns into Ariel as harpy
with small boobs. His cloak is like Propserra’s. But remember.
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Featers fall in the baclground, kind oflike books in water. Special effects as Antonio
and Sebastaian and Alnso try to fight off the crows that Ariel turns into—then
Psorepero corws “they are all within my power. Go brng the rabble.
Fredinnand sings “O mistree mine” long take—like Taymor’s Universe movie.
Ariels’s head on frog that leaps out after Trinculo falls int a oool.
No tongue all eyes be silent
Prospero waves her staff toward the sky—starrs / consetlations sequence also a
background behind M and F
Like a kadeliscope/ Superimposed over Prospera. SO there is no masque in th film.
Twelfth Night song displaces it.
Our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Prospero does not make eyecontact with Ariel most of the time.
Burnng dogs chance down Caliban—Ariel also seen with fire behind him.
Shortly shall all my labors end.
Shot of eclipse again.
Their senses I shal restore. And they shall be themselves
“printless feet”
Sets a ring of fire around her after sot of the eclipse passing. The fire becomes faking
—back screen fast-forward montage, time-lapse photography of clouds, ends at “by
my so potent art.”
Burning dogs and burnng firearound Ariel’s face and burning of the ship and the fire
around Ariel’s face. In the shipwreck (seen twicein the film, the second as a
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montage and flashback) the ship catches on fire. But the play references fire only
when Ariel tells Prospero about it.
Prospera’s books are covered ina white sheet. GOnazalo hands them to Prospera as
he sails of f with Mrana. So they are never dentifiable. Economy of special effects in
the film. Saved for Ariel and Prospera—only Ariel and other charades when he hers
tehem into the cell nead the end of the film.
No special effects for rough magic; almost one for O Mistress mne; and peraps none
for the last shot.
The books not drowning—I’ll drown them and given by Gonzalo at offs with the
widesrpread ansy characters hae of a noter character dwoning. A character thought
drowned we know is alive. Repeition of reasrnace—drwning, then no hardm:
Prospero of Miranda, then of Proserpa by Ariel.
Then close up of Mirren “But this rough magic I here abjure Camera dollies in to a
tighter and tighter close up I’ll drown my books. You can only see her eyes.
Shot of Ariel in special effects lead A, S G to the burnt circle. She freezes them )
freeze tag) . The burnt circle still operates—A and S find that they cannot step ver it.
She addresses them as the are frozen. Hey come awake with “Their understanding
begins to swell.
Ge ties the back of her dress, black zipper in front. Back is like corset.
Behold Prospera—frst shot of her where we can see her entre dress.
Er dres—black and zippers, matches Gonzalo’s, and also S and A’s. They have to stop
at the edge of the ring.
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Rack behind
Wracked upon this shore.
When did you lose your daughter
Drown reference characters make leave out any mention of burning.
In the Dr/ink
Propsera never writes. In Greenaway film, Gielgud in a bathtub with a toy boat, also
an inkstand containing what seems to be blue water. Water drips can be hear
<iranda I wonder form close up of her to fast folly out, then cut to Prospera tis new
to thee.
Ariel speaks from pool , same as we saw in the early.
Set Caban and his confederates free. Unite the spell.
Then special effects of Ariel made of bees throwing and blowing out bees at C,S and
T, who end up at the cell.
Prospera’s library books are hidden—never ID’d in the film. They are blanks. The
bookcovers are covered by a sheet over them in ehivh thyey a package tat Gonzalo
gves Prospera. That number does not square with th e more nermerou book falling
in the eater.
Ater every thrd thought shall be my grave, several shot reverse shts of Caliban and
Prospera. She lets him go.
She lets Ariel, then sequence as he sings where the bee sucks there suck I all in
water with kaleidiscopic patters,
Vut to her
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Characters in the play refer to “drowning” make no reference to the ship burning.
Only Ariel, when he describes the shipwreck to Prospero.
The play is about “unwrecking” (the ship is rebuilt; no one harmed; clothes not wet.
We might want to discuss the invisible blood writing in Faustus too,
by way of contrast. No book brining there, but also no book
destruction, no tearing up a book, or tearing out a page; no
figurative desire, as in R and J, to "tear" a "name" ("Had I it
written")
Gallagher never did back to me, btw, after he got back to me about not
getting back to me. We could start with our different reading of the
same passage, if we wanted to do.
Hi Lowell (and Julian),
I taught your ELH essay today, and had a few more thoughts after rereading (I like it
even more than I did before) regarding blood writing. Julian and I have discussing
your essay on the phone. I have two sets of questions. If you have left the essay
behind and have no interest in what I am writing, please feel free not to respond. :)
Julian, please contribute at will. :)
The first set of questions bears on the streaming of blood (live streaming avant la
lettre?). You note the connection between Faustus streams his blood to write / sign
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the deed of gift and Christ's blood-stream. I was thinking about the relation
between congealing and dropping. The drop of blood, or half a drop Faustus longs
for is, I think, an alternate response to the congealing of his own blood, a kind of
after reading of the "homo, fuge" invisible ink inscribed on his arm. He can divide
the blood as a way of streaming it and also stopping it. But is the drop going to go
into Faustus or on him? Is he going to drink it? Or is it supposed to wash him clean?
The drop seems to me not to fit into Faust’s topography--leap up, hold me down,
hide in the earth, etc. Nor does it fit into his temporality (time is running out; my
time is up). When is the drop going to drop? Why, exactly, doesn't it drop? What is
the economy of the drop? Why can it be divided? God kicks in as he is stopping it--
but if he is, then he is like Mephistopheles (esp in theB text). What de Man would
call the formal materiality of inscription seems to have the kind of ucanny effect
you discuss within the blood-streaming of time. The drop is another instance of
blood writing, but a writing that does not write, or cannot write off, Faustus’s sins.
The second set of questions I have bear on how the uncanniness of material /
messianic time is compressed in the signing / Homo, fuge scene itself. The
congealing precedes Faust saying the same line twice. This is just reiteration one
could rightly say. However, the scene of blood writing here is already uncanny
before the blood congeals. The blood letting directed by the text ("cuts his arm")
would not happen on stage. Nor would the actor actually do what Faust says: “I cut
mine arm, and with my proper blood” And even if one were to try to use squibs to
fake the cut, one would still be pretending to cut one's arm, not cutting one's arm,
which is what the stage direction directs. And it is hard to imagine how the actor
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could fake cutting his arm and then fake the blood congealing. (Julian has talked
about this with me.) So the language of the play and the body of the actor are
already dislocated. Disabled, even. "I can write no more." I realize, btw, that I am
not asking any questions. :) When we get to the "inscription" of "Homo, fuge," we
have entered further into the uncanny. We do not know what inscription means
here. Who wrote this? With what? blood? Ink? Invisible ink? The medium is not
specified. Then "Homo, fuge" is repeated just as "Faustus gives to thee his soul" was
repeated earlier. And mirroring or echoing the congealing and clear again of the
blood, we get an inscription with visible / invisible ink / blood/ tattoo?
So my quasi-question bears on the centrality you give to congealing (and blood
writing) as the caesura that derails ethics. Isn't the signing a problem as soon as we
get "cuts his arm"? And doesn't uncanniness in various forms (para-deja vus,
repetitions of structures, kick in before the signing is over. I am quite sure I am far
for the first person to notice this, but Faust’s elision form the line he cites twice is
not included in his reading of the contract / deed of gift. Blood is a medium as well
as material. Faust cannot upload himself, cannot broadcast himself. He cannot
receive Jesus.
In relation to the economy and medium of blood, I was wondering about the
paradox of a deed of gift. The gift cannot be contracted. It is not a debt. Faustus is
"given time." Yet not really. The deed inscribes a gift exchange: "I, John Faustus . . . ,
by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer"
Body and soul is a phrase that is also repeated, btw.
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So the uncanniness of the signing--congealing and inscription, gets sorted out, sort
of (not), in the deed of gift. It becomes just a deed after he reads it out:
Mephistopheles says "Speak, Faustus, do you deliver this as your deed?"
Odd that he is asked to speak since he has just been speaking. But then Faustus us
uses "give" in his response:
"Ay, take it, and the devil give thee good on 't!"
"Deed of gift" has devolved into a kind of semic deed and asemic gift.
You suggest that blood recalls ink (pitch burned, sacrificial, etc). But I wonder if
Marlowes notion of blood streaming changes our understanding of writing of texts
(which you appear to be entirely semic) and ironizes or activates a more or less
latent ironization of materiality and messianic time as always already uncannily
uncanny. The spectral “precedes” the material. The text itself is a specter, a record
to be repeated and (not, when it comes to blood) re-enacted or even shown (only
Faustus sees the blood stream). The text does not know anything. Not even that. At
least not for sure.
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Best,
Richard
P.S. The hopeless inadequacy of Drucker’s binary opposition between matter and
non-transcendental writing (Derrida’s trace?) makes itself apparent.
Faustus will never end, but he will not die. So the requests Faust makes us are non-
sensical. A character contemplates its own end, it is not human.
Theater as transcendental object.
Inventory moments in which the play letters on setting in motion a direction that
make the diegesis collapse.
“Homo fuge” moment.
All moments are in a play world, not part of the real world.
You’re watching a kind of living death, character between Marlowe’s live and the
character’s lives or actor’s reanimation.
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Julie Taymor’s The Tempest; oepmong title over a sand castle—begins to melt in the
rain, Miranda is holding it; cross-cutting between ship and Miranda running;
The bed catches fire; ten cuts to Prospera, then Miranda running to her, ship
burning in the distance; as inside of ship catches fire
Shot of Prospara in the menu is shot when she turns the clouds back after the storm
and after the ship as sunk.
No flashback of knowing how I loved my books, furnished with me”
Ariel merges form watery reflection and makes a splash, literally, as his entrance.
Flashback after he merges to the shipwreck—ship on fire, Airel surrnded by fire too.
Citing lines about sulpherous ship—so there is textual motivtionfor showing it
burning.
Boat burning versus book burning.
Ariel quotes Fredidanda mockingly “o devils here” (sounds like Caliban)
But are they safe?
Not a hair perished.
Look. The ship is hid So we see the ship in harbor completely restored.
Ariel is transparent, moves around with a sound effect in a kind of fastforward
tracing.
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Flashack of Ariel being trapped in the pine; cut back to prospera with background
dof forsest slapshsing down the screen as the new background comes into view-a
ariation of the wipe, or inversion of it.
“invisible to every eyeball else”
Porspera on Caliban. We cannot miss him. He does make our fire. Fetches in our
wood.
Caliban gets no flashbacks when he tells the story of showing Prospera the island.
Miranda gets the abhorr’d slave . . . I taught thee language” lines
Prospera so slave hence—the actor ws in Amistad, playing a slave; also in Gladiator.
Ariel sings full fnathom five under water, superimposed on shot of Ferdiand hearing
ad looking around to ffind who is singing, in a series of shots,
“Where should this music be?
Follow it or rather it has dawn me L, it begins again. Falsetto—a bit like Greenaway.
Full fathim, under ater, but aslso ina forest (through which Forst is walking—close
ups of both Ariel and Fredindnand
The ballad does remember my drowned father.
The film’s deiegessis separtes “realisim” from “magical” special effects, and also
combines them, overlaps, in some sequences, differentiating the spirit Airiel) from
the “real” human characters.
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Myself am Naples, ever since my father.
Ariel appears only in shots with Prospera—not in sots of Ferdinand and Miranda.
“I charge thee that thou attend me.”
(Porpserora telling Miranda the tale—would cure deafness—doest thou mark?”—
Prospera thinking her call doesn’t trough? Tat she has to keep recplaing it,
redialing? As if Miranda were not there, as she couldn’t tell by ooking to see if
Miranda is listening or not?
Ariel’s pine-trees and paper? Pre ealy modern, I guess. Rags, not ood pulp as source
of paper.
Cut to fire in Propsera’s cave—“so lie there my art”
Propsera did’t harm a hair of any crew member, she tells Miranda.
Lots of chem bottles full of liquids in her cave, out of focus in and in soft focus or in
focus with racking focus.
Flashnack montage cross cut with Miranda’s speech—and to Prospera. Flashboacks
in bluish hue.
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Shot of Gonzalo given her a “package,” a sheet covering something square (the
books?) here is alsoa chest in her boat.
Boatswain is black
Music sounds a like Nymanish
Foul ater shalt thy drink
Prospera’s Books
DVD menu loop shows everything happening as if underwater; the ship is shown
burning; there are two separate shots of books “drowning”; begins and ends with
Prospera; she is in close up at the end, eyes closed, then open, as if it had been her
dream; begins with low angle shot of her in her cloack with her staff—she never
holds her books, no library.
Or garments are as fresh (Gonzalo repeats what Ariel has already said). Same
eeconomy of destruction and resoration—through “made wet”
Burns cross over from prop to non propr from burning to drowning. “drown my
books” last se of “drow” in the play?
Dream/Re/Work
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End credits:
Books fall—music—then a woman sings the epilogue to a minor key song—afer
producer credit
Visiual effects supervisor Kyle Cooper
“which was to please”
followed guitar—then “now I want spirits to inform
cast members show
to title The TEpest
A Julie Taymor film
And cones to below the end the line credits boks have Laurence Sterne marble
covers
“let your indulgence (repeated)
last book disap
sets me free
Now I want spirits to inform” and the epilogue repeats lreased by prayer
More guitatr—also a lead guitatr-builds louder, same loop
Now I want sirits begins over again
By prayer . .which piecres so, piereces that it assaults, mery itself and frees . .
Puse
A’as you form faults from
Coda Betha Williams
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Let your indulgence, let your indulgence set me free as final credits appea adnd
copyright.
One last book—big—with extrapages, then sound, then an icon with apage, three
moreicons, then warning,
Antipiracy warning
Kindle
The Tempest
Terminating a medium, burning versus drowning. How do books die? What will it
mean to have ended the play by drowning books?
Fauxsimile done away with Prospero—techno-magical fantasy of seeing with a
master eye done away with but conserved because it’s done away.
The Post Card, burn; The Aspern Papers;
Murnau film, Faust throws his book into afire; destroyed by insects; acid-free paper
again in Greenaway film.
Figure of the library at the beginning, when he’s on the boat, not drowning of
Prospero and Miranda or the books (Gonzalo’s help); the end of the play is a self-
authored return to a possibility to a possibility that the narrative has suggested but
not allowed that reverberates vis-a-vis Caliban’s desire to burn P’s books. For
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Caliban, it’s about the substituability of the bottle and the book; drinking the bottle
and drowning the book.
in Prospero’s Books.
PROSPERO
To have no screen between this part he play'd
And him he play'd it for, he needs will be
Absolute Milan. Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough: of temporal royalties
He thinks me now incapable; confederates--
So dry he was for sway--wi' the King of Naples
To give him annual tribute, do him homage,
Subject his coronet to his crown and bend
The dukedom yet unbow'd--alas, poor Milan!--
To most ignoble stooping.
Wherefore did they not
That hour destroy us?
PROSPERO
Well demanded, wench:
My tale provokes that question. Dear, they durst not,
So dear the love my people bore me, nor set
A mark so bloody on the business, but
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With colours fairer painted their foul ends.
In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,
Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepared
A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
Instinctively had quit it: there they hoist us,
To cry to the sea that roar'd to us, to sigh
To the winds whose pity, sighing back again,
Did us but loving wrong.
MIRANDA
Alack, what trouble
Was I then to you!
PROSPERO
O, a cherubim
Thou wast that did preserve me. Thou didst smile.
Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt,
Under my burthen groan'd; which raised in me
An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.
MIRANDA
How came we ashore?
PROSPERO
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By Providence divine.
Some food we had and some fresh water that
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, being then appointed
Master of this design, did give us, with
Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,
Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
MIRANDA
Boatswain
Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower! Bring
her to try with main-course.
A cry within
A plague upon this howling! they are louder than
the weather or our office.
Re-enter SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, and GONZALO
Yet again! what do you here? Shall we give o'er
and drown? Have you a mind to sink?
SEBASTIAN
A pox o' your throat, you bawling, blasphemous,
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incharitable dog!
Boatswain
Work you then.
ANTONIO
Hang, cur! hang, you whoreson, insolent noisemaker!
We are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.
GONZALO
I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he
hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is
perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his
hanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable,
for our own doth little advantage. If he be not
born to be hanged, our case is miserable.
Exeunt
GONZALO
I'll warrant him for drowning; though the ship were
no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an
unstanched wench.
GONZALO
The king and prince at prayers! let's assist them,
For our case is as theirs.
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SEBASTIAN
I'm out of patience.
ANTONIO
We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards:
This wide-chapp'd rascal--would thou mightst lie drowning
1 Mowat; Greenblatt “Martial Law in the Land of COcaigne” Strachey tells the story of a state of emergency and a crisis of authority” 149Greenblatt’s reading is also characterological and psychologizing (novelizing)—about inwardness and self-fsahioning, but especially about Prospero’s inwardness:
The entire action of the play rests on the premise that value lies in controlled uneasiness, and hence that a direct reappropriation of the usurped dukedom and a direct punishment of the usurpers has les moral and political value than an elaborate inward restaging of loss, misery, and anxiety. Prospero directs this restaging not only against others but also—even principally—against himself.” 144Goes to subversion and containment: “The ideological effects of The Tempest are ambiguous” 155. The play supports Prospero’s authority and raises troubling questions about it.
Grenblatt ends his chapter by quoting at length Stanley Livingston’e story about how he offered his copy of Shakespeare to saved his notebook from being burned by African natives.
After Stanley’s death, the notebooks . . . were for many years presumed lost. But they were rediscovered. . Their publication revals something odd: while the the notebook entry for his stay at the Mowa records tht the natives were angry at his writing . . Stanley makes no mention of the burning of Shakespeare. Perhaps, to heighten the general interest with which he was concerned, he made up the story. 162-163
For Stanley, Shakespeare’s theater had become a book, and the book in turn had become a genial companion . . . . The anxiety in his account . . is relieved only when , as Caliban had hoped, the book is destroyed. But the destruction of he book only saves another, more practical, more deadly. And when he returned to London or New York, Stanley could always buy another copy (Chandon edition) of his genial companion.
2 So something at stake in book and books other than a contradiction—something like the divisibility of the book, like the letter. Not original versus copy, but like the Folio, the “true original copies.” Foldlio? As well as Fauxlio? The spacing or blank
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The washing of ten tides!
GONZALO
He'll be hang'd yet,
Though every drop of water swear against it
And gape at widest to glut him.
Derrida talks about in Mallarme and later in Instant of My Death. We should look at Murray’s chapter on Greenaway in his book, The Digital Baroque.
3 Move to the history of the book means that the book is made material at the
expense of reading it. The Book as figure, history as figured, goes unread in the face
of interst in used books, who have in short n surplus valuebut whose traves, either
regarded as damaged (marked up) or added it (marginalia, doodling) can be traced
back to the writer / readers. Explicitly Catholic move in the case of Eamon Duffy.
Turning the book into the Eucharist—we get to metabolize it; the thing reading is
not just feel good reading but guilt free reading—evidence like a crime scene (DNA,
radiodendochronology, etc, can be used to track down users without there being a
crime. It’s like the purloined letter without the purloining, though obviously
librarians feel differently and would not allow Eamon Duffy to mark a medieval
manuscript nor does it seem to occur to him to do so. A certain piousness about the
artefact kicks in automatically, as if a library were also a tomb, books a chance to
speak with the dead.
4 Burned mansucripts are a staple of literature: see Henry James, The Aspern Papers; Wilke Collins, The Haunted Hotel. Even Shelley’s death by drowning is never connected to his posthumously published poem, “The Triumph of Life.” of In The Post Card, Derrida’s correspondence is burned; elsewhere he refers to ash, cinders, and cremation.5 Check other editions to see if “drown” gets any attention from editors.6 Ibid; 198-99; Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986, 219-47; to 227.
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A confused noise within: 'Mercy on us!'-- 'We split, we split!'--'Farewell, my wife and
children!'-- 'Farewell, brother!'--'We split, we split, we split!'
FERDINAND
Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?
It sounds no more: and sure, it waits upon
Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,
Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.
No, it begins again.
ARIEL sings
Full fathom five thy father lies;
7 Derrida’s practice of using “faux-tires,” of “half titles” in The Post Card. Peggy Kamuf
has a footnote on "faux-titres" in Derrida’s Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, trans.
Peggy Kamuf, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 198) 94 n. 16: “In typography, a
‘faux-titre’ is a half title or bastard title. (Trans.)” Transliterated into English, “faux-titre”
means “false title.”
8 On Derrida’s interest in the archive and the shift from print to electronic media, see
Richard Burt, "Life Supports: 'Paperless' People, the New Media Archive, and the Hold
of Reading," in New Formations special issue on "Materialities of Text: Between the
Codex and the Net," eds. Nicholas Toburn and Says May. Forthcoming, 2013.
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Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Burthen Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them,--Ding-dong, bell.
FERDINAND
The ditty does remember my drown'd father.
10 Julie Taymor, The Tempest, Adapted From the Play by William Shakespeare (New
York: Abrams, 2010). Peter Greenaway’s tie-in book, Prospero's Books: A Film of the
Shakespeare's The Tempest (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991) serves as a
paratextual commentary on the film, providing information about the sources of
each the twenty-seven books shown in the film and giving their titles once again as
they are drowned (see pp. 161-62). The Secret of Kells blu-ray edition includes a
comic booklet version of the film.
11
These lines are sung by Feste, one of the more complex comic foils to appear in a Shakespearean work. He is something of a jester, of course, but he has an unmistakably philosophical underside (“Better a witty fool than a foolish wit”), pressing
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This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.
SEBASTIAN
I have no hope
characters to abandon their self-pity, to recognize that life always brings its burdens — but pressing them also to seize the moment of love, which brings life’s rewards. All of this is very much the message of this sweet, simple, and yet poignant song, which attained celebrity in its own right in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Part of that celebrity was owed not to Shakespeare, however, but to the man who composed the music by which the words came to be known.
Listen to the setting of “O Mistress Mine,” one of the last works composed by Thomas Morley, a student of William Byrd’s who died shortly after the play opened, in the fall of 1602. Although he was an organist at St Paul’s Cathedral and he attempted to write some serious church music, Morley is best known for his perfection of the consort style (the introduction of the “broken consort,” in which wind instruments are added to the conventional strings) and of the English madrigal.
It’s likely that Morley knew and worked with Shakespeare — they lived close to one another in central London and worshiped in the same parish church — and it’s possible that some of his
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That he's undrown'd.
ANTONIO
O, out of that 'no hope'
What great hope have you! no hope that way is
Another way so high a hope that even
Shakespearean songs were actually commissioned by the Bard, though this has never been firmly established. What’s certain, however, is that Morley was a great admirer of Shakespeare’s writings.
Morley’s works are known for their light style and their conscious importation of folk melodies (such as his amazing setting of “Under the Green Linden” in the The First Booke of Consort Lessons (1597)). They are less ponderous and downbeat than works by such contemporaries as William Byrd and John Dowland, and so are well suited to Shakespearean comic romances. First, listen to a non-vocal broken-consort rendition of “O Mistress Mine” by Stockholms Barockensemble, then to a traditional theatrical performance by Ensemble Chaconne, with Pamela Dellal as soloist. A superior performance by the great Alfred Deller can be found here. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/09/hbc-900082129 See Barbara Mowat, ‘Prospero’s Book’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001): 1-33.
The Tempest refers, Mowat notes, both to a singular book (‘I'll to my book’; ‘I'll
drown my book’) and to plural books (‘books I priz'd above my dukedom’; ‘burn but
his books’). Mowat insists that Prospero’s book is present even though there is no
stage direction for it in the text: ‘Prospero's always-offstage book’ is the ‘one book
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Ambition cannot pierce a wink beyond,
But doubt discovery there. Will you grant with me
That Ferdinand is drown'd?
STEPHANO
What's the matter? Have we devils here? Do you put
tricks upon's with savages and men of Ind, ha? I
have not scaped drowning to be afeard now of your
four legs; for it hath been said, As proper a man as
ever went on four legs cannot make him give ground;
and it shall be said so again while Stephano
breathes at's nostrils.
TRINCULO
I should know that voice: it should be--but he is
essential to his magic, the one that he goes offstage to consult before the series of
spirit spectacles begins in Act 3, the same one that near the end of the play he
promises to drown as he abjures his magic.’ (p. 1) Prospero’s strangely singular
and clearly spectral singular-plural book/s ‘appear’ only as phantom referents in the
printed script of the play. It makes no sense at all to make a prop for the actor
playing Prospero to consult off-stage. What are we to make of a phantom prop that
is referenced both in the singular and the plural without ever being shown on stage?
What is the relation between the book/s and the spirits Prospero commands?
Greenaway and Taymor address these questions in very different ways by
materializing what is missing.
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drowned; and these are devils: O defend me!
TRINCULO
I took him to be killed with a thunder-stroke. But
art thou not drowned, Stephano? I hope now thou art
not drowned. Is the storm overblown? I hid me
under the dead moon-calf's gaberdine for fear of
the storm. And art thou living, Stephano? O
Stephano, two Neapolitans 'scaped!
STEPHANO
I prithee now, lead the way without any more
talking. Trinculo, the king and all our company
else being drowned, we will inherit here: here;
bear my bottle: fellow Trinculo, we'll fill him by
and by again.
STEPHANO
My man-monster hath drown'd his tongue in sack:
for my part, the sea cannot drown me; I swam, ere I
could recover the shore, five and thirty leagues off
and on. By this light, thou shalt be my lieutenant,
monster, or my standard.
ALONSO
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Old lord, I cannot blame thee,
Who am myself attach'd with weariness,
To the dulling of my spirits: sit down, and rest.
Even here I will put off my hope and keep it
No longer for my flatterer: he is drown'd
Whom thus we stray to find, and the sea mocks
Our frustrate search on land. Well, let him go.
ARIEL
You are three men of sin, whom Destiny,
That hath to instrument this lower world
And what is in't, the never-surfeited sea
Hath caused to belch up you; and on this island
Where man doth not inhabit; you 'mongst men
Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad;
And even with such-like valour men hang and drown
Their proper selves.
PROSPERO
Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou
Perform'd, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring:
Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated
In what thou hadst to say: so, with good life
And observation strange, my meaner ministers
Their several kinds have done. My high charms work
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And these mine enemies are all knit up
In their distractions; they now are in my power;
And in these fits I leave them, while I visit
Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drown'd,
And his and mine loved darling.
CALIBAN
The dropsy drown this fool I what do you mean
To dote thus on such luggage? Let's alone
And do the murder first: if he awake,
From toe to crown he'll fill our skins with pinches,
Make us strange stuff.
But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
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GONZALO
Be it so! Amen!
Re-enter ARIEL, with the Master and Boatswain amazedly following
O, look, sir, look, sir! here is more of us:
I prophesied, if a gallows were on land,
This fellow could not drown. Now, blasphemy,
That swear'st grace o'erboard, not an oath on shore?
Hast thou no mouth by land? What is the news?
Boatswain
The best news is, that we have safely found
Our king and company; the next, our ship--
Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split--
Is tight and yare and bravely rigg'd as when
We first put out to sea.
EPILOGUE
SPOKEN BY PROSPERO
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
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And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
Bringing back materiality and book history not in a kind of boring way but in an
interesting way. Nice way to shift the question that Mowat is asking—what is the
book? To what is the fate of the book? The destruction and fate “Unpacking My
Library,” Destination and Drowning; or destinerrance—destructibility of the letter
—divisibility versus destruction (defaults to the trope of burning or tearing the
paper or the support up). In coming back to Materiality and the prop we also to the
question of the support for Derrida.
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What is drowning a book?
Writing the Endings of Cinema:
Evocations of authorial absence and the saving of film authorship in the cinematic
paratext
Richard Burt
My chapter examines the appearance of books and illuminated manuscripts being
written/produced in the closing sequences of two adaptations of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest - Julie Taymor’s Tempest (2010) and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books
(1995) – and of The Secret of Kells (dir. Tomm Moore, 2009), the animated feature
film about The Book of Kells. I analyze these films, all three of which are concerned
with the process of writing medieval and early modern books, in relation to two
developments in the history of the cinematic paratext: first, opening and end
sequences that show the credits printed on turning pages of a book; and, second, the
increasing expansion and development of end credit sequences since 1980.12 I take
note of some specific developments that increasingly both co-ordinate and
differentiate the opening and end title sequences to shed light on i) why cinema
turns to textual media for the paratext and ii) why books remain ideal filmic multi-
media referents in digital cinema, particularly in animated feature films, as much as
they have been in celluloid cinema.
Before discussing these three films, let me make some preliminary remarks on
the ways in which the cinematic paratext and the medium of the book bear on
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writing in film. Why has the book become such a commonly used medium for
opening title sequences? In large part, I suggest, because it provides a solution to a
problem of authorship specific to film. As Georg Stanitzek observes, because
filmmaking involves a comparatively large division of labor, a film cannot be
attributed to one author . . . the opening credits (or génerique) constitute a
paratext that uses a number of the paratextual forms found in books - as a
kind of imprint for film - but so in a specifically filmic way. . . . Just as the
book has two covers, a title, an imprint, and so on, a film . . . has opening and
closing credits, and so on. A book can function as a filmic organizer of
communication, as a kind of natural delineation of the entire work.13
The homology Stanitzek finds between book and film paratexts allows, I will
maintain, for a typographical regularization of film authorship by singling out the
12 The date 1980 has to do with the legal history of film production as it turns on
union negotiated contracts over title sequences. Dating in this manner is somewhat
artificial, however, since graphic design developments in the cinematic paratext are
never fully standardized and innovations can be dropped or become the norm
decades later. For examples of innovations in opening title sequences that were
never adopted elsewhere, see the opening titles of BBS films from the 1970s such as
The King of Marvin Gardens (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1972) and A Safe Place (dir. Jack
Nicholson, 1971). For a similarly exceptional innovation, see the last shot of
Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971). See also the parody of the rolling end titles
during the epilogue of Strange Brew (Bob and Doug Mckenzie, 1983).
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director in the credits as author, or auteur, in a number of ways: the director gets an
entire frame (whereas the screenwriter(s) tend to share a frame with other people
who have worked on the film); a large size font, and is usually the last credit of the
opening title sequence. As ‘a kind of imprint’, the film paratext defaults to an auteur,
director-as-writer notion of film authorship.
Because opening title sequences of films begin (and sometimes end) with the
studio logo (much more prominently than the publisher of a book appears in in a
book paratext) and typically end with the director, one might conclude that film
author and film are more strongly conencetd paratextually than are book author
and book. e .14 The publisher’s ‘introduction’ of a book, which is usually overlooked
by readers, cannot be skipped over or fast-forwarded by film viewers when
projected in movie theaters or played on DVD/blu-ray players. Moreover, by the
1950s, credits began to be integrated into the film, often as a prologue. A viewer of a
DVD or blu-ray edition of a film will therefore be forced to ‘read’ the entire paratext.
The peritext of a book may be said to have been written in a kind of invisible ink; the
peritext of a film, the alphabetic text, however, is engraved, as it were, on the image.
No wonder, then, that the succession of credits could appear, and often has
appeared in film, through the analogy of turning the pages of a book.
Yet if the medium of the opened bound book proposes answers, by way of
analogy, to major questions of film authorship (Do films have authors? yes they do.
Who is the ‘writer’ of the film? the director), it also opens up new questions about
film authorship. Title sequences are almost always outsourced, and their ‘authors’
are frequently not credited. In some exceptional cases, the opening title designer is
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credited (Saul Bass in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1955) and Kyle Cooper in David
Fincher’s Se7en (1995), to note two famous examples). More often, the outsourced
agency such as Pacific Title Company gets a corporate credit. The design of the very
sequence (the vehicle for the credits) that guarantees the film’s authorship is,
therefore, most often done by an anonymous, corporate agent, and thereby re-
inscribes, albeit in a barely noticeable way, the problem of determining who is the
film’s author (a film being the product of a collaborative team) that the imprint of
the book (with the author on the furthest margin of the peritext, the book’s spine)
would otherwise appear to have resolved.
Stanizeks’s important insight that the film paratext tends to default to the
medium of the book misses the way a bibliocentric notion of film authorship
depends on a spectralization of the writer of the cinematic paratext, a
spectralization already happening in books: as Gérard Genette points out, ‘the
author’s name is not necessarily always the author himself’ (46).15 The author’s
name is put on the title page and cover outside the text in a way that creates a
mutually legitimating relation between writer and publisher:
[W]ith respect to the cover and title page, it is the publisher who presents
the author, somewhat as certain film producers present both the film and
its director. If the author is the guarantor of the text (auctor), this guarantor
himself has a guarantor - the publisher - who ‘introduces’ him and names
him. (46)
This ‘introduction’ provides for an opening, but not necessarily for a smooth entry
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into the book. The most exterior parts of a book’s paratext - the cover and title page
- paradoxically unify writer and publisher by splitting the author from himself. The
publisher’s ‘introduction’ is often followed by another paratext, namely, the author’s
preface. As Genette notes, ‘one of the normal functions of the preface is to give the
author the opportunity to officially claim (or deny) authorship of his text’ (46). I
consider this supplement to the publisher’s ‘introduction’ to be a way of saving not
only the writer of the book but the book itself: the supplement serves as a
paratextual back-up loosely analogous to auto-recovered ‘saved’ digital documents.
William H. Sherman has usefully offered a corrective to Genette’s work on the
paratext as focused almost entirely on the introduction of the book.16 Sherman
explores how the paratext shapes the ways in which we finish reading books. Work
on the cinematic paratext has followed Genette in focusing on opening title
sequences and ignoring the endings and end credit sequences of films.17 The
analogy of front and back book covers with opening and closing film sequences (an
analogy specifically evoked by film endings in which the book that opened the film
closes just before ‘The End’ appears), has further broken down or been reworked in
ways that turn the closing credit sequence into multiple, individuated stories about
the main characters. As I will show at the end of this chapter, Disney’s hybrid
animated and cinematic feature film Enchanted (dir. Kevin Lime, 2008) begins with
a book much as Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) and
Sleeping Beauty (dir. Clyde Geronimi, 1959) do but ends with a sequence that serves
as a mini-sequel. For the moment, let me note the impossible way in which the
ending of Sleeping Beauty recalls the beginning. After the opening title sequence, the
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film begins conventionally enough with a copy of a book entitled Sleeping Beauty, its
illustrated pages turning automatically with writing that is also heard in voice-over. The
camera zooms in on a particular image of the book and passes into the narrative of the
animated film. (Figs X.1, X.2, X.3, X.4.)
(Figs X.1, X.2, X.3, X.4)
With predictable symmetry, the film reverses this transition at its close, showing the
inverse passage from an animated image to that image on the last page of the book,
with ‘And they lived happily ever after’ at the bottom of the page. (Figs X.1, X.2.)
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Figure 17
Yet, quite impossibly, the book does not close from right to left to arrive at the back
cover of the book, as one would expect. No, instead, the book closes from left to
right so that we return to the front cover upon which ‘The End’ and ‘A Walt Disney
Production’ are then superimposed, or ‘written’. Even the most conventional
manner of using the medium of the book to frame and shape the film’s narrative
could, therefore, produce bizarre results.
Since the 1990s, end sequences have expanded beyond rolling credits in a
markedly wide variety of ways that include epilogues, interviews with characters in
the film while still in character, experimental ‘aftershots’ that some viewers will
undoubtedly miss since most viewers leave the theater or turn off the DVD or blu-
ray when the end credits begin.18 The end of the film does not bookend the opening
so much as it opens new pages of a new book. The differences between the writing
of the opening and end sequences are also formal. Stanitzek writes:
when watching the film at a the cinema or on video or a DVD, viewers see
several minutes of carefully prepared closing credits presented in the same
typography as that found in the opening credits, and music is provided to
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help viewers exit the film narrative.
Yet Stanitzek is hardly describing the norm. To be sure, Universal shows the exact
same cast members in Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931) and Bride of
Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1935), headed the end with the line ‘a good cast
bears repeating’, but even in the end credits of The Bride of Frankenstein, a question
mark appeared after Bride instead of Elsa Lanchester, the actress who played (and
Mary Shelley in the film’s prologue). More often than not, the typography of the
closing credits differs completely from the font of the opening titles. So does the
music. The studio logo did appear in the same way at the beginning and end of the
film for a long period of time, but more recently, logos have become film sequences
in themselves (Dreamworks is a good example). The animated logos typically play at
the start of the film but not at the end, whereas matte painted logos of films made
from the 1930s often appeared both at the very beginning and very end of the film.19
I now turn to the endings of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films. Here I
examine specific ways in which the closing sequences adapt the book written and
the book being written in ways that both unify the film and yet also complicate a
sense of the ending of film, of how complete a narrative film is, of when the
narrative stops and the closing paratext begins, and so of when one can legitimately
exit the cinema or turn off the disc player. Can one still afford to write off the end of
film when the end credits begin? Or is one compelled, for fearing of missing
something, to stay seated and keep watching even after ‘The End’? Such
announcements of seeming completion can sometimes, of course, be duplicitous,
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acting as teasing herald to further moments in the textual / paratextual endings
beyond ‘The End’ that loop back the closing paratext to the earlier text of the film. I
address these questions and others in a necessarily tentative manner by discussing
the extent to which the end sequences of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films
paradoxically save the film author as a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or
disintegrating the book (auteur, you will recall, means ‘author’ in French and has a
much higher cultural status than the more everyday écrivain, or writer).
Greenaway performs a very different kind of salvage operation in Prospero’s
Books. Cataloguing and displaying twenty-four books (twenty-five if we include The
Tempest, far less; in any case, the total falls far short of the thirty five plays
published in the the First Folio) of Prospero’s library in separate sequences, the film
has an epilogue but no closing sequence beyond that. In the final shot, ‘The End’
appears at the bottom of the screen and remains there with additional logo
information as the shot fades to black. The opening title sequence consists of one of
Greenaway’s characteristic tracking shots, the camera moving at a steady pace as it
tracks right in one long take. The sequence unfolds much like a scroll; a huge book
being turned by a naked man in the opening title sequence is just one of many
bizarre and heterogeneous scenes. By contrast, the interpolated serial book
sequences that interrupt the dialogue from The Tempest are all set up and set off
with the use of a digital paint box. Greenaway visualizes the (extra-textual and
sometimes theatrically staged) book drowning in the film's final tour de force
montage which ends with the two final book sequences. Prospero’s last books
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prove to be exceptions: Shakespeare’s yet to be completed First Folio and The
Tempest. All of the plays have been printed in the Folio, the narrator tell us, except
for The Tempest, which is written in a bound book the same size as the Folio. The
first page we saw Prospero writing on in the film’s prologue returns first as a blank
space in what is a facsimile of the Folio and then as a film prop, a bound, completed
manuscript of The Tempest we saw Prospero begin to write in the prologue.
The permanently blank pages of the Folio become an empty yet potentially
redemptive allegorical space. ‘There are thirty five plays in the book and room for one
more,’ the narrator says; ‘nineteen pages have been left for its inclusion right at the front
of the book, just after the preface’ as the camera shows the First Folio page with the
poem entitled “To the Reader.” (Figures X.1-X.4.)
Figure 1 Figure 2
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Figure 3 Figure 4
As Caliban surfaces from the water and recovers the floating books, the narrator
offers the ostensibly reassuring comment that ‘We still have these two books, safely
fished from the sea.’
Of course copies of these two books are extant, but the two books in the film exist
only as props, as referent effects. Shakespeare’s safely fished books both expand
and diminish Shakespeare’s authorial presence: on the one hand, the collected
works are completed; on the other, their completion means splitting the manuscript
of The Tempest from the printed thirty four plays (and implicitly superimposing
Prospero on Shakespeare as author of The Tempest). In any case, the drowning of
Prospero’s books but not Shakespeare’s is only part of Greenaway’s rewriting of the
play. Prospero ends by liberating Ariel and delivering the epilogue, his close-up
talking-head shot increasingly shrinking into a smaller frame until it occupies only
its centre and is surrounded by black. In an extratextual epilogue, Prospero’s image
then becomes a photograph of Gielgud on a stage set, and as the camera dollies back
at a smooth pace in what Greenaway calls “a single, bravura take” (163), we see
Ariel (played by three different actors) running towards the camera as a text begins
to be superimposed over the applauding audience of courtiers. This last shot of the
film ends as Ariel is shot in slow motion and then jumps off the screen and over the
camera.20
In a moment of what Latour and Wiebel term ‘iconoclash’, or uncertainty about
whether this liberation from the page is creative or destructive, the manuscripts of
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The Tempest and First Folio are saved only insofar as the collected works are split
into different print media (handwriting and print).21 This differs markedly from the
more symmetrical ending in the screenplay.22 In Greenaway’s unscripted epilogue,
the book returns as an unreadable work of art: a single, unbound page looking like
an abstract multi-media painting (fig X.3). The film sequences with ‘Prospero /
Shakespeare’s’ (164) books had already begun to make them partially unreadable.
The Folio is submerged even before it is drowned so that the date cannot be read on
the bottom of the page. Similarly, the shot of the page with Ben Jonson’s dedicatory
poem in the first Folio omits ‘To the memory of my beloved’ at the top of the page,
showing just ‘The Author MR. W I L L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E: A N D what he hath
left us.’ The Tempest is similarly defaced: the manuscript is shot in such extreme
close up that the film frame cuts off the top and bottom parts of the page (fig X.3).
Writing becomes automatic. A close up of the word ‘boatswain’ we saw Prospero
write in the prologue returns in the First Folio sequence, along with Gielgud’s voice
pronouncing it (and ‘master’) off screen. But this time an question mark is added
after ‘boatswain’ not by the hand of a visible writer which we by now know well, but
rather through the apparently agent-less processes of animation (figs X.1-2).
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Figure 5 Figure 6
Figure 7 Figure 8
Similarly, in the final shot, unreadable letters are written backwards in the upper
right of the screen through animation and run right to left, some letters disappear as
others appear in a recursive cycle (fig X.3). ‘The End’, the date of Prospero’s Books,
and the film’s production companies appear first on bottom of the final page but
then only on the otherwise black screen (fig X.4). Genette’s account of the
publisher’s introduction (consisting chiefly of the author’s name on the book cover
and title page) is transformed by Greenaway into an ‘exit’ that involves reading
one’s way out of his film.
Materiality of the book—not a stage prop.
Spectrality of sovereignty. But question of biopower and also destruction of the
book.
And question of burial at sea versus cremation and inhumation.
Ranciere, Names of History Philip II writing desk—death of the king
Prospero never writes in the lay, nor does he ever read.
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Derrida Post Card—Love of Lcan why only what he would have said? Why not
would he wold have written? Why does Derrida reverse Lacan, who Derrida says
went from speech to writng without acknowledging Derrida, by going from writing
to speech? What s=is the differencebetweenthe future anterior of what will or
would have been said after Lacan’s death in “For the Love of Lacan” and the Pascal
note?
Scene in The Amateur with Christopher Plummer, a secret agent, giving a lecture about Bacon being the author of Shakespeare using Prospero’s epilogue, projected on a screen, as his evidence, before a small crowed and the hero, also interested n the Shakespeare authorship debate, escapes from the lecture hall from a would-be assassin. Prospero’s Books as a film adaptation outside the play—leaving the play text blank, a future state of being a book to come, a book that never arrives.The text is written and erased.Water both a medium of writing and of erasure of writing.
Going on Record: PanoptichronPanchronicon—Phoebe demonstrates that one can record one’s voice by citing passage about Bacon being the true author of Shakespeare’s works and is told the cylinder to the phonograph will “talk back.”
The facsimile and prop are like hidden text, the invisible that is incarnated, in the
physical material of the book, but still yet to be read, terra incognita that can
never be recognized except as dirt or ureadable ink. Yet textual critics are no
less empirical than are editors. If there is no lost manuscript to recover, as many
textual critics maintain, just a desire for it, the lost manuscript, if recovered would
be an always already edited manuscript. As McLeod puts it, it would have layers.
The origin is a palimpsest and the untextual book as material thing becomes a
palimpsest. Editors think they linearize the process like CSI. Textual critics think
there is only an infinite regress. One could go back to the mystic writing pad and
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celluloid. The unconscious would take one back to arche-writing. Question
concerning technology in textual criticism, editing, and the history of the book.23
To Derrida, biblion and subjectile and facsimile in the text itself—a kind of back
up visible of the back up, but as a ghost matter, at one remove or more, a kind of
immediacy. A kind of anrchivology n the archival effect not recognized as such.
Facsimile poses a problem of narration—materiality and referent—and
historicism.24
And the appeal rather than command or decision at the end takes us to WB’s Trauerspiel (see Sam Weber on Hamlet) with Prospero now a slave, a prisoner, but also returns us to the letter, difference between singular and plural. Christopher Plummer and Jon Savage action film The Amateur (dir. Charles Jarrot, 1982) in which Plummer is a CIA agent who also reads the epilogue as a cryptogram of Bacon’s signature that he wrote the play and, by extension, all of Shakespeare’s plays. John Savage plays Charles Heller ,a cryptographer in the employ of the CIAThe missing author (Shakespeare, prospero as Shakespeare in his farewell to the stage play—the drowning of the book and breaking of the staff his farewell, or Bacon as Shakespeare) keeps getting reinscribed at the vanishing point of force reading (Malvolio) between law and justice, each making the same totalizing, integrationist move on the complete works.Book or books? Magic book?
The future anterior of Prospero’s epilogue, as you would me set me free.
23 The edited world is not going to disappear just because it is revealed to be
wrong. Indeed, which of our abiding wrlds is no innocent as not to be edited
already? Textual criticism is important to imp on editorial practice . . not as
deliverance form its mistakes, but because it an vivid shapes to the problematic,
mythy errors that we shall contiue to fly by.
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Request and a command.
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,And what strength I have's mine own,Which is most faint. Now, ’tis trueI must be here confined by youOr sent to Naples. Let me not, (5)Since I have my dukedom got,And pardoned the deceiver, dwellIn this bare island by your spell;But release me from my bandsWith the help of your good hands:(10)Gentle breath of yours my sailsMust fill, or else my project fails,Which was to please. Now I wantSpirits to enforce, art to enchant,And my ending is despair,(15)Unless I be relieved by prayer,Which pierces so, that it assaultsMercy itself, and frees all faults.As you from crimes would pardoned be,Let your indulgence set me free.The epilogue installs a future anterior of who will have written “Shakespeare’s” plays. The referent of “me” is no longer Shakespeare. See Looney on The Tempest as NOT autobiographical. And all of the Stratfordians who read it as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. The pay-off of imagining a reading yet to come is double: you get to sign for the writer while reading his signature and you get to be mute while doing it. You are merely a kind of medium without a medium. Desire for muteness, See Barbara Johnson. All you have to do is breathe: “Gentle breath” Also compare applause being asked for by Prospero to Agamben’s Power and the Glory and lauding / applauding the sovereign. His last chapter on media.
Also seems like the doubling of authorship allows for the possibility of forgery, that someone else wrote it and forged a signature. There is no paper work in the play, no contract, nothing to sign. Just recognition. So the play becomes a cover, a cover story, an alibi, just sleep –think but this and all is mended, that you have slept
Homeland episode 2, Claire Danes as comparative philogist using split screen and them boxes around hands in each to show pattern. Crtptologist does not see it, however.But her boss does. Her idea ocmes form watching a jaz group play and watching he
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ifingering on nstruments.
Not a book or not a book. Crux is abot the fauxsimile. Mowat has attended to it in a curious way—she does and does not establish the Grimgoire as the referent. And she says the book exists, even if only off-stage.But there is a an additional, more enigmatic crux to which she does not attend and
which is not generally recognized as one, namely, the distinction between burning
his books and drown my books.
NOTES
A reading of Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, drowning the books is like throwing
them into acid; Caliban rescues the Folio does not have the open book, a re-opened
book. The end after the interruption of the masque and before the end, which is
really a long epilogue before the epilogue. Anti-climatic last Act.
(Derrida on the signature in Van Gogh—link up to signature in Tempest in Peter
Greenaway Prospero’s Books and the film with Christopher Plummer about Anagram
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of Prospero in the epilogue in The Amateur (also has more Shakespeare near the
beginning; compare to Three Days of the Condor—“reader”).
Heading for Taymor film
Prospera’s Books
Having recalled the library’s uncanniness, we may now turn, at last, to an
unidentified crux concerning Prospero’s library in The Tempest.25 The singular
plural book goes missing, becomes a phantom
in the script of the play.
In an essay alluding to the title of Peter
Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, cleverly
entitled “Prospero’s Book,” Barbara Mowat
claims to have found the “real” book that is
Prospero’s magic book. She reproduces seven
facsimile of the manuscripts in her essay.
Mowat undertakes in fact sophisticated philological operation, though unrecognized
as such. Beginning with a set of what she refers to as “assumptions” that she does
not critically examine, Mowat initially uses grimgroires, as they are known,
essentially magic manuscripts rather than magic books, as a supplement to The
Tempest, making book into a magic book—a grimgroire—and thereby rendering
question of his book or books meaningless: the book is a magic book contained
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among the books of Prospero’s library. The crux disappears without ever having
being identified as a crux; once the traces of a yet to be read crux have disappeared
and The Tempest restored after having been exorcised, the grimgoire may disappear
(The Tempest is not a grimgroire, she declares, near the end of her essay) and the
play may be folded back, along with Greenway’s film, into its dominant post-colonial
reading. 26 Mowat undertakes, without saying so and possibly without knowing so, a
reordering operation: attached the grimgroire to the play, to repair a gap, a leak in
the text, then detach it, leaving the text more securely self-sufficient, never even in
need of repair, deferring further work on manuscript culture and Shakespeare’s
print culture, but it keeping the specter of manuscript culture to remain in recalling
distance (All one has to do is flip back to any of the full page black and white
facsimiles of seven pages from seven different grimgroires.) The point is not to read
Shakespeare, as philologists prepare with a book in mind by repairing but not to
read it, to reread it the same way not by clearing it up but by cleaning it up, leaving a
residue of “the real” in the form of the facsimiles. What we may see here in Mowat’s
operation is not the typical bad faith of philology, presenting a text as open while in
fact closing it, but an avoidance of the decision to read and the decision to stop
reading, both of which are highly dangerous moments because they are, on the one
hand, violent moments, cutting open and cutting off the text to begin and stop
reading, and because, on the other hand, opening and closing are moments when the
text’s read –ability may be missed, overlooked as so much static to be removed,
much the way digital sound recording eliminates his hisses and related noise from
LP records, even concealed by a sleight of hand, a feat of prestidigit-aliza-tion.
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Mowat’s essay evinces a kind of stalling effect one finds frequently in materialist
historicist criticism of the book, a way of keeping the canonical text on hold and in
(its) place, as if storing it for retrieval meant being able to locate it but never to read
it.
Greenaway puts in what's not there,
but then leaves the Folio missing The Tempest, which is then contained
in a separate volume as a manuscript. So there is interesting
oscillation between library and book as storage unit / collection in
which the book takes spectral form (the book or books never appear/s
on stage) as it supplements (and doesn't). I'm using a book by
Georges Didi-Huberman entitled La resemblance par contact to talk about
the book / books as a contact zone that makes mimesis possible as chain of iterable
and endless substitutions (a writing of writing, a doubling, mirroring in repetition);
the
failure to transfer the text from one medium to another (in Benjamin's
the failure to translate, language itself being a medium) because it
would appear, there is no medium specificity to the book).
Precisely because of the twofold moment of writing and affixing in a collection
(archiving)
Arche-writing versus the archive. Doesn’t relate them.
So in P’s Books, its is the spectralization of the book, its going missing , its storing
being singular and plural that allows for and disables a totalized, closed recollection,
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and final interiorization. Instead, the end is a gesture, hands clapping, as a liberation.
Mowat says what is to be expected—but that makes the missing text all the more
remarkable.
Also, the closing of the book allows for closure, again spectral—an epilogue, which
opens itself to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Who wrote the books? Tiles and
authors are missing. No paratext, no index. So the epilogue can be read as
Shakespeare’s farewell, autobiographically, or coding as his confession that Bacon
wrote the play.
P Books the "s" goes missing in the play; G goes with the plural.
Because it marks "We split we split moment in the play as storage until
(library as shipwreck ), the Shakespeare corpus has something missing
it, a tear in the mss, something missing incomplete, that has to be
veiled, covered off, even by shocking amounts of nudity. Play seems to
lay the body bare, even Prospero's. But it multiplies / ages Ariels
as shelf-helpers.
closed and open books, scenes of unreading, reading by heart, of textual incarnation,
attachments, casings, and textuality versus signature:
The missing author (Shakespeare, prospero as Shakespeare in his farewell to the
stage play—the drowning of the book and breaking of the staff his farewell, or
Bacon as Shakespeare) keeps getting reinscribed at the vanishing point of force
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reading (Malvolio) between law and justice, each making the same totalizing,
integrationist move on the complete works.
Book or books? Magic book?
Set up con-spirational—spirit in conspiracy theory—as in the comic book version as
well as Rembrandt J’accuse
Framing, like framing in Prospero’s Books (also a book of the film).
Becomes a question of missing author who frames and gets framed.
Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books
Singular versus plural, books get voice-overs. We don’t get them in Prospero’s Books
book. In the film, The Tempest is blank, Folio edition is the 24th book, not destroyed
but found by Caliban. Greenaway has a notion of seriality involving closing and
opening the book.
The boatswain scene (1.1.) is really interesting--all about drowning--and of course,
no one drowns and the ship has been rebuilt, according to the boatswain at the end
of the play. I also found a bunch of stuff I had forgot about we could use to make the
transition form The Tempest to Anonymess regarding Prospero as Shakespeare (in
a spy film film called The Amateur--only Prospero is Bacon).
It's hard to tell whether "drown my book" is drawn into the whirlpool of other
mentions of drown / undrown'd, etc or, more likely for us, "drown my book" is the
vortex that draws al of the other mentions of drowning in it. There is a clearly
recursive structure, or recurrent" (ha ha ha--not really) in the play related to
drowning. "drown" is used 20 times in the play.
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Drowning in relation to friends and enemies—face book / Folio—the reader as
friend?
I now turn to Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films in order to examine specific
ways in which the endings and end title sequences adapt the book in ways that
both unify the film and yet also complicate our sense of the ending of film, of how
the complete a narrative film is, of when the narrative stops and the closing
paratext begins, of when one can exit the cinema or turn off the DVD or blu-ray.
Can one still afford to write off the end of film when the end credits begin? Or is
one compelled for fearing of missing something to stay seated and keep
watching even after “The End,” potentially reentering the film from the moments
in the textual / paratextual endings after “The End” that loop back the closing
paratext to the earlier text of the film? I address these questions and others in a
necessarily tentative manner by discussing the extent to which the endings and
end title sequences of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films paradoxically save
the film author as a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or distintegrating the
book (“auteur,” you will recall, means “author” in French and has a much higher
cultural status than does the everyday “ecrivain,” or writer).
Prospero’s books do not exist in The Tempest. There are references to his
staff and to his cloak as prop, but not to what is sometimes his “book” or to his
“books.” We never see Prospero drown his books.27 The seven minute long end
title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by Kyle Cooper, transposes the
moment when Prospero “drowns” his books: as the credits roll and the camera is
submerged under water, we watch Propsero’s books fall slowly through the
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ocean heading toward the bottom. Taymor originally cut Prospero’s epilogue
from the film script but ended up restoring it. In her book The Tempest, Taymor
writes: “The film’s last image of Prospera on the ocean cliff, her back to the
camera, tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks below, and the staff’s
subsequent shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut and timed and scored
and mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete. I asked
Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the epilogue] and set them to
music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence. And to that haunting female
vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and we drowned the books of
Prospera in the deep dark sea” (21).28 Taymor enlarges authorial agency in the
preface to her book, entitled “Rough Magic,” writing that “we drowned the books of
Prospera.” Yet this enlargement of cinematic authorship depends on the expansive,
leisurely condensation of Prospera’s transposed and visualized declaration to
“drown” her “books” and Prospera’s ventriloquized epilogue. I read Taymor’s film as
an allegory of the immersion of the book into a residual paratexual storage space,
sending off her film and accommodating areaderly and spectatorial desire for an
authorial force by encrypting and spectralizing the absent writer of the book
accompanied by a speech turned requiem sung by a female extra-diegetic voice
identified only in the end title sequence rather than spoken by Helen Mirren
(Prospera). The film’s specters are re/called at the end of tie-in screenplay book.
The last two pages of the book show a still taken from the film’s end title sequence
of a book opening up after it has been plunged into the water with the production
and cast credits superimposed over the left-hand page. See Figures 0 and 0.0, the
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verso and recto pages).
Figure 0 (verso page) Figure 0.0 (recto page)
Filming an adaptation of The Tempest allows Taymor to perform a paradoxical
salvage operation of the book which is not salvific: precisely because the
drowning books are absent all paratext (no titles or authors are visible on the
covers), the book as a medium serves as a metaphorical storage unit for film, a
book cover like the metal canisters used to house rolls of film that contain, as it
were the author. This paradox may be vividly grasped in the book of the film The
tempest, with the author listed as “Julie Taymor Adapted from the Play by William
Shakespeare”: in a paratextual space usually left blank, namely, the inside back
cover and page opposite, the film credits for the director and actors are printed
just to left of an “uncredited” book falling though water, little bubbles surrounding
it. The book of the film shows a nameless book while also recording Taymor as
the film’s author: the weirdly double move in which Taymor claims a kind of
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hybrid authorship-- crediting Shakespeare as her sourceappears and disappears
in the fold of the of the book as one turns the page and then, presumably, closes
the book. By focusing on the books opening as they fall underwater, Taymor
invites us to ask a question no one has thought to ask, namely, what does it
means to “drown a book?” Phrased another way, we might ask: Why does
Prospero not follow Caliban’s instructions to Stephano and Trinculo--“burn but his
books”--in order to destroy them? Taymor quietly insists on the drowning
Prospera’s unidentifiable books makes them unreadable even though the pages
are open.
Greenaway performs a very different kind of salvage operation in Prospero’s
Books. Cataloguing and displaying all thirty-five books of Prospero’s library in
separate sequences, the film has an epilogue but not an end title sequence. In
the final shot, “The End” appears at the bottom of the screen and remains there
with additional logo information as the shot fades to black. The opening title
sequence consists of one of Greenaway’s characteristic tracking shots, the
camera moving at the same pace as in it moves right in lone long take. The
sequence unfolds much like a scroll; a huge book being turned by a naked man
in the opening title sequence is just one of many bizarre and heterogeneous
scenes. By contrast, the interpolated serial book sequences that interrupt the
dialogue from The Tempest are all set up and set off with the use of a digital
paint box. Greenaway visualizes the (never theatrically staged) book drowning in
the film's final tour de force montage which ends with the two final and book
sequences. Prospero’s last books prove to be exceptions: Shakespeare’s yet to
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be completed First Folio and The Tempest. All of the plays have been printed in
the Folio, the narrator tell us, except for The Tempest, which is written in a bound
book of the same size as the Folio. The first page we saw Prospero writing on in
the film’s prologue returns first as a blank space in what is a facsimile of the Folio
and then as a film prop, a bound, completed manuscript of The Tempest we saw
Prospero begin to write in the prologue.
The permanently blank pages of Folio becomes an empty yet potentially redemptive
allegorical space. “There are thirty five plays in the book and room for one more,” the
narrator says; “nineteen pages have been left for its inclusion right at the front of the
book, just after the preface” as the camera shows the First Folio page with the poem
entitled “To the Reader.” (See figures 1-4)
Figure 1 Figure 2
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Figure 3 Figure 4
As Caliban surfaces from the water and recovers the floating books, the narrator
offers the ostensibly reassuring comment that “We still have these two books,
safely fished from the sea.”
Of course copies of these two books are extant, but the two books in the film
exist only as props, as referent effects. Shakespeare’s safely fished books both
expand and diminish Shakespeare’s authorial presence: On the one hand, the
collected works are completed; on the author, their completion means splitting
the manuscript of The Tempest from the printed thirty four works (and implicitly
superimposing Prospero on Shakespeare as authors of The Tempest). In any
case, the drowning of Prospero’s books but not Shakespeare’s is only part of
Greenaway’s rewriting of the play. Prospero ends by liberating Ariel and
delivering the epilogue, his close up talking head shot increasingly shrinking into
a smaller frame until it occupies only its center and is surrounded by black. In an
extratexutal epilogue, Prospero’s image then becomes a photograph of Gielgud
on a stage set, and as the camera dollies back at a smooth pace in what
Greenaway calls “a single, bravura take” (163), we see Ariel (played by three
different actors) running towards the camera as a text begins to be superimposed
over the applauding audience of courtiers. This last shot of the film ends as Ariel
is shot in slow motion and then jumps off the screen and over the camera.
In a moment of “iconoclash,” or uncertainty about whether this liberation from
the page is creative or destructive, the manuscript of The Tempest and of the
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First Folio are is saved only insofar as the collected works are split into different
print media (handwriting and print). 29 It differs markedly form the more
symmetrical ending in the screenplay.30 In Greenaway’s extratexutal epilogue,
the book returns as an unreadable work of art: a single page an unbound page
looks like an abstract multi-media painting (See figure 7). The sequences with
“Prospero / Shakespeare’s” (164) books had already begun to make them
partially unreadable. The Folio is submerged even before it is drowned so that
the date cannot be read on the bottom of the page. Similarly, the shot of the page
with Ben Jonson’s dedicatory poem in the first Folio omits “To the memory of my
beloved” at the top of the page, showing just “The Author MR. W I L L I A M S H
A K E S P E A R E : A N D what he hath left us.” The Tempest is similarly
defaced: the manuscript is shot in such extreme close up that the film frame cuts
off he top and bottom parts of the page. (See figure 7). Writing becomes
automatic. A close up of the word “boatswain” we saw Prospero write in the
prologue returns in the First Folio sequence, along with Gielgud’s voice
pronouncing it (and “master”) off screen. But this time an exclamation mark is
added after “boatswain” by animation. (See figures 5-6).
105
Figure 5 Figure 6
Figure 7 Figure 8
Similarly, in the final shot, unreadable letters are written backwards in the upper
right of the screen through animation and run right to left, some letters disappear
as others appear in a recursive cycle. (See figure 7.) “The End,” the date of
Prospero’s Books, and the film’s production companies appear first on bottom of
the final page but then only on the otherwise black screen. (See figure 8.)
Genette’s account of the publisher’s introduction (consisting chiefly of the
author’s name on the book cover and title page) is transformed by Greenaway int
The Reading to Come: Yes, We Can’(t)
Internal reading a matter of awaiting—messianic reading. Mowat too—we have to
wait for the more knowledge to come, but writing, Godot like,is what it’s all about.
''Tis for good and useful writings to nail and rivet it to them, and
its reputation will go _according to the fortune of our state. For
which reason, I am not afraid to insert herein several private
articles, which will spend their use amongst the men now living_, AND
106
THAT CONCERN THE PARTICULAR KNOWLEDGE OF SOME WHO WILL SEE
FURTHER
INTO THEM THAN THE COMMON READER.' But that the inner reading of these
private articles--that reading which lay farther in--to which he
invites the attention of those whom it concerns--was not expected to
spend its use among the men then living, that which follows might seem
to imply. It was that wrapping of them, it was that gross
superscription which 'the fortune of our state was likely to make
obsolete ere long,' this author thought, as we shall see if we look
into his prophecies a little. 'I will not, after all, as I often hear
dead men spoken of, that men should say of _me_: "He _judged_, and
LIVED SO and SO. Could he have spoken when he was dying, he would have
said _so_ or _so_. I knew him better than any."
Mackaye, Harold Steele. The Panchronicon. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1904.
Image of “ci-phi” (not cyber fiction but cipher fiction) as image of the not yet read,
the temporality of reading that leaves it open, the archive open, never closed,
finished. Strong historicism , focused on the past, necessarily crosses over into
future, fictional speculation, however. Or gesture of deferral to the future (more
knowledge of a positivist sort) is a way of not having to read, of suspending reading
(we can't know anything yet, but someday soon, we will! But that day never arrives,
of course). So a very perverse structure of empiricist research—you want not to
know enough, just a little will do, preferably with images.
107
The Reader Conceal-Revealed: The Not Yet Read lost manuscripts of Shakespeare
Look at examples of The Not Yet Read lost manuscript fantasy, including Black
Dossier but focus on the Bacon as Shakespeare controversy. Sir Francis Bacon’s
Cipher Story and Panchronicon as example of uncanny relation of truth and fiction.
Loop in which the revelation of the hidden leads to a pointing to other places of
hiddenness, just waiting to be revealed. Science oriented to fiction, and fiction
oriented to science.
Images of cipher machines and portraits of authors. Cipher story cover with page
from the Folio and the Droeshout portrait superimposed on it without the face (the
folio text constitutes the lines of his face. Shakespeare Code cover. Like Lost
Leonardo—Da Vinci Code is the original for The Shakespeare Code. On a vole la
Jaconda, with Romeo as thief. Cobbe Portrait—use of scientific machines to
establish the truth.
Doctor Who Season3?
Episode going back to Shakespeare’s London
To discover why Love’s Labours Regained Or Love Regained. She shouts “author
author” birthof the author is a retrofit. Do they say that? Now they do. not written—
it’s about race reations in the pre
Materiality of the book—not a stage prop.
Spectrality of sovereignty. But question of biopower and also destruction of the
book.
108
And question of burial at sea versus cremation and inhumation.
Ranciere, Names of History Philip II writing desk—death of the king
Prospero never writes in the lay, nor does he ever read.
Derrida Post Card—Love of Lcan why only what he would have said? Why not
would he wold have written? Why does Derrida reverse Lacan, who Derrida says
went from speech to writng without acknowledging Derrida, by going from writing
to speech? What s=is the differencebetweenthe future anterior of what will or
would have been said after Lacan’s death in “For the Love of Lacan” and the Pascal
note?
Scene in The Amateur with Christopher Plummer, a secret agent, giving a lecture about Bacon being the author of Shakespeare using Prospero’s epilogue, projected on a screen, as his evidence, before a small crowed and the hero, also interested n the Shakespeare authorship debate, escapes from the lecture hall from a would-be assassin. Prospero’s Books as a film adaptation outside the play—leaving the play text blank, a future state of being a book to come, a book that never arrives.The text is written and erased.Water both a medium of writing and of erasure of writing.
Going on Record: PanoptichronPanchronicon—Phoebe demonstrates that one can record one’s voice by citing passage about Bacon being the true author of Shakespeare’s works and is told the cylinder to the phonograph will “talk back.”
The facsimile and prop are like hidden text, the invisible that is incarnated, in the
physical material of the book, but still yet to be read, terra incognita that can
never be recognized except as dirt or ureadable ink. Yet textual critics are no
less empirical than are editors. If there is no lost manuscript to recover, as many
textual critics maintain, just a desire for it, the lost manuscript, if recovered would
be an always already edited manuscript. As McLeod puts it, it would have layers.
109
The origin is a palimpsest and the untextual book as material thing becomes a
palimpsest. Editors think they linearize the process like CSI. Textual critics think
there is only an infinite regress. One could go back to the mystic writing pad and
celluloid. The unconscious would take one back to arche-writing. Question
concerning technology in textual criticism, editing, and the history of the book.31
31 The edited world is not going to disappear just because it is revealed to be
wrong. Indeed, which of our abiding wrlds is no innocent as not to be edited
already? Textual criticism is important to imp on editorial practice . . not as
deliverance form its mistakes, but because it an vivid shapes to the problematic,
mythy errors that we shall contiue to fly by.
13 Georg Stanitzek, ‘Texts and Paratexts in Media’, Critical Inquiry (Autumn 2005):
37, 38. On the book and film, see Gerard Blanchard, ‘Le Scriptovisuel ou Cinémato-
Graphe’, in L’Espace et la lettre: Écritures, typographies (Paris, 1977), pp. 411, 422.
For more on the cinematic paratext and the book, see Richard Burt, Medieval and
Early Modern Film and Media (New York: Palgrave, 2008; rev. 2010). On opening
title sequences as text to be read in relation to the film, see Tom Conley, Film
Hieroglyphs (Second edition; U of Minnesota P, 2006), pp. xxv-xxvii.
14 The introduction of The Girl Can’t Help It (dir. Frank Taschlin, 1956) is an
exception to the rule. Lead actor Tom Ewell talks to the audience out of character
before the film begins and seems to enlarge the aspect ratio of the film from
Academy ratio (33.1) to Cinemascope (widescreen aspect ratio) by pushing on the
left and right sides of the film image. Similarly Cecil B. DeMille comes out from
behind a theater curtain and faces the camera directly as he speaks into a standing
110
To Derrida, biblion and subjectile and facsimile in the text itself—a kind of back
up visible of the back up, but as a ghost matter, at one remove or more, a kind of
immediacy. A kind of anrchivology n the archival effect not recognized as such.
Facsimile poses a problem of narration—materiality and referent—and
historicism.32
microphone to introduce The Ten Commandments (1956).
15 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation Jane E. Lewin (Translator) (Cambridge UP, 1997) 16 William H. Sherman, ‘The Beginning of “The End”: terminal paratext and the birth
of print culture’, in Renaissance Paratexts Ed. Helen Smith (Cambridge UP, 2011).
pp. 65-90. See also Sherman’s essay, ‘On the Threshold: Architecture, Paratext, and
Early Print Culture’, in Sabrina A. Baron, Eric Lindquist, and Eleanor Shevlin (eds),
Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies and the Legacy of Eisenstein (Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 2007). p. 67-81.
17 In his brilliant essay, ‘Upon Leaving the Movie Theater’, in The Rustle of Language
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 345-46, Roland Barthes ignores end credit
sequences and endings.
18 As a central, perhaps inaugural example, see the closing sequence of Se7en
(1995). It is now often possible to see DVDs/ blu-rays of films from the 1930s to the
1980s on DVD/blu-ray, released with overture, entr-acte and / or intermission, and
exit music.
19 Even logos have sometimes become brief narratives. For example, the
Dreamworks logo sequence shows, in various ways, a boy fishing while sitting on a
111
And the appeal rather than command or decision at the end takes us to WB’s Trauerspiel (see Sam Weber on Hamlet) with Prospero now a slave, a prisoner, but also returns us to the letter, difference between singular and plural. Christopher Plummer and Jon Savage action film The Amateur (dir. Charles Jarrot, 1982) in which Plummer is a CIA agent who also reads the epilogue as a cryptogram of Bacon’s signature that he wrote the play and, by extension, all of Shakespeare’s plays. John Savage plays Charles Heller ,a cryptographer in the employ of the CIA
crescent moon. The animated logo sequences of Pixar animated feature films are
also notable. For example, in the memorably inventive, extended animated logo
sequence at the end of Wall-E (dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008). Animated studio logos
were used back as far as 1930s Universal films with a scale model of the earth being
circled by an airplane (not built to the same scale). Clint Eastwood uses this now old
logo at the beginning of Changeling (2008) in order to make it consistent with the
historical period of the film’s narrative. Similarly, The Wolfman (dir. Joe Johnston,
2010) remake begins with the 1Universal Studios logo that opened the original
1942 film directed by Curt Siodmak.
20 On this point, see Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow: Longman-
Pearson, 2005), especially pp. 229-230.
21 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science,
Religion and Art (2002). Latour and Wiebel write: ‘Iconoclasm is when we know
what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations are for what
appears as a clear project of destruction of art; iconoclash, on the other hand, is
when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there
is no way to know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’
(14).
112
The missing author (Shakespeare, prospero as Shakespeare in his farewell to the stage play—the drowning of the book and breaking of the staff his farewell, or Bacon as Shakespeare) keeps getting reinscribed at the vanishing point of force reading (Malvolio) between law and justice, each making the same totalizing, integrationist move on the complete works.Book or books? Magic book?
The future anterior of Prospero’s epilogue, as you would me set me free.Request and a command.
22 In the screenplay, the film’s ending loops back to the beginning: ‘A series of ever
decreasing splashes drip and plop into the black water . . . thus the beginning of the
film is reprised. A final splash plops . . . all water-movement ceases and the screen is
a black velvet void.’ (Prospero's Books: A Film of the Shakespeare's The Tempest,
164).
24 “emboss the paper with the unlinked type . . . renaissance books routinely
contain hidden text where the innocent eye draws a blank. In other words, there
exists a literature not yet registered on the maps of early printing. The Corteginao
is just one of many books with such terra incognita—terrain unknown until now,
that is. (190) uninked type” (189) But even in merely ambient light you would be
able to see several lines of dirty traces below it.” “The angelic (the missionary)
direction of narrative. (152)
As we are learning to differentiate the stages of the printing schedule from those
of the literary narrative” (159). Overleaf is another copy of the same page—a
remarkable one, for the paper remembers its ordeal at the press. (159)Consider
the photograph, opposite (168). With this image, I want to remind you of what lies
behind the term ‘forme’, meaning on one side of a printed sheet of paper.
(169)Bleed through of the diagrams in McLeod’s essay. Book splits right where
113
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,And what strength I have's mine own,Which is most faint. Now, ’tis trueI must be here confined by youOr sent to Naples. Let me not, (5)Since I have my dukedom got,And pardoned the deceiver, dwellIn this bare island by your spell;But release me from my bands
the two hands hold the text partly open to see a shape of Easter Wings that is not
its shape and to read The Church across the title as well as Easter Wings.
Textual critics and editors are irreducibly conflicted in some sense, but only to an
always already redited to default. Or some dialectic—Hegelian—improved
editions. Fewer errors. Both produce genetic narratives—transmission and
production, both invested in the same “thing” and both adopt the same model of
textual forensics. McLeod’s investment isn’t in gazing but reading is see
something (metaphorically) I didn’t see that I see your point.
(Understand comprehends letters and images).
It is always possible that the change from a comma to a period could have
occurred through damage to the comma during the print-run, rather than by
deliberate substitution of one type for the other. But that such discriminate
damage would have not only enhanced the system of punctuation, but also left
no destructive traces is highly improbable. N.20, 156
Photo-facsimiles of the entire manuscripts are . . “ n. 23,156
“textual tree” 124 (botanist, naturalist)
p. 124—return to the same place the reader was at the beginning of the essay.
(124)
114
With the help of your good hands:(10)Gentle breath of yours my sailsMust fill, or else my project fails,Which was to please. Now I wantSpirits to enforce, art to enchant,And my ending is despair,(15)Unless I be relieved by prayer,Which pierces so, that it assaultsMercy itself, and frees all faults.
Textual critics and editors both act like prosecutors, call up experts. Vocabulary
of theology “restored” text.
Serial order of the editions numbered. Like Prospero’s Books.
“death bed manuscript” (84)
“The Easter Wings gallery”
A museum tour.
Greek technopaegnia (142)
Photography does not lie, of course. You can trust it, because it just gazes, like
a silly goose (the two words are cognate).27 It does not lie. It does not lie
because it does not analyze. It surfaces while, instantaneously. But the
underlying type-facsimile is not facsimile is not a gestalt [sic]; its coming into
being was atomistic, sequential and linear. It is all these because it is a reading,
because reading rationalizes (these two words also cognate), because reading is
abstract and analytical. In short, reading is to deep – it is not sufficiently
superficial to report the evidence, which lies, after all, on the surface.
“Shape” as a form (printing)
A stroll through the Easter Wings Gallery shows appropriation drifting
inappropriately according to fashion; this drift forestalls literary criticism’s
115
As you from crimes would pardoned be,Let your indulgence set me free.The epilogue installs a future anterior of who will have written “Shakespeare’s” plays. The referent of “me” is no longer Shakespeare. See Looney on The Tempest as NOT autobiographical. And all of the Stratfordians who read it as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. The pay-off of imagining a reading yet to come is double: you get to sign for the writer while reading his signature and you get to be mute while doing it. You are merely a kind of medium without a medium. Desire for muteness, See Barbara Johnson. All you have to do is breathe: “Gentle breath”
approach to a science (148)
One wonders if there is not something non-linear—even anti-linear—Herbert’s
poetic Enter Reader, 41
Czech cop and CIA agents in Jon Savage movie The Amateur.
Well, if mutation of messages is the way of this world, how are to react to
Herbert’s editors? Does their inexhaustible fertility issue in sublime adaptation or
merely befuddled degeneration? (14)
Is it really an exaggeration to say that these poems are invisible in the edited
texts of the last century and a half before form (reading)
McLeod wants to separate narratives even though in a sense he does not
produce a narrative, or only a narrative loop. End in the begin.
At the same time a delinearization-one or two poems? 3D perspective or not?
Constant derailings made possible through the photograph and the diagram.
And yet a narrative of production—from fetus or fetal production / gestation to
birth (but no after birth.
Not so much into breaking things and walking away but into shape (no
reshaping). You want to stay with the shape. Not geneticist, not a textual
eugenics. A secular Creationism (hidden text gets revealed as literature—but it
116
Also compare applause being asked for by Prospero to Agamben’s Power and the Glory and lauding / applauding the sovereign. His last chapter on media.
Also seems like the doubling of authorship allows for the possibility of forgery, that someone else wrote it and forged a signature. There is no paper work in the play, no contract, nothing to sign. Just recognition. So the play becomes a cover, a cover story, an alibi, just sleep –think but this and all is mended, that you have slept
Homeland episode 2, Claire Danes as comparative philogist using split screen and them boxes around hands in each to show pattern. Crtptologist does not see it,
is not readable-“uninked type.” Found lost text that is not word of God (or the
author). It’s a surplus, not a supplement, but it lacks meaning. It’s an image, not
text. The reistance you provide editors lies in the way you refuse to read images.
What about the stake in the posthumous? Keats and Herbert.
So your kind of like Saint Peter but as a mortician.25 Similarly Freud draws an analogy between psychic organization and filing
systems Freud first adopts the bureaucratic metaphors of file and dossier in Studies
in Hysteria the running through a series of similes for the case study’s
(dis)organization.
It was as though we were examining a dossier that had been kept in good order.
That analysis of my patient Emmy von N. contained similar files of memories though
they were not so fully enumerated and described. These files form a quite general
feature of every analysis and their contents always emerge in a chronological order
which is as infallibly trustworthy as the succession of days of the week or names of
the month in a mentally normal person. They make the work of analysis more
difficult by the peculiarity that, in reproducing these memories, they reverse the
order in which these originated. The freshest and newest experience appears first
in the file first, as an outer cover, and last of all comes the experience with which the
117
however.But her boss does. Her idea ocmes form watching a jaz group play and watching he ifingering on nstruments.
Not a book or not a book. Crux is about the fauxsimile. Mowat has attended to it in a curious way—she does and does not establish the Grimgoire as the referent. And she says the book exists, even if only off-stage.
series in fact began.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Vol 2, 288Freud’s succession of similes testifies both to a problem of
describing the topography of the psyche as “concentric strata” (289) and to a
problem of narrating (from the beginning). Acknowledging in a parenthetical
paragraph that he is making use of a number of similes that are “incompatible with
one another” (291), Freud adds that he will continue to do so in order to throw light
on “highly complicated topic which has never yet been represented” (291). Freud
inadvertently politicizes resistance to his treatment in the process of describing it
through various conspiratorial and medical similes (resistance is a kind of viral
politics that deconstructs distinction normal and pathogenic groups, nucleus and
foreign body), but politics in Freud’s hands turn out to be a problem of
representation and narration, of organized agencies that don’t have bodies and that
cannot be visualized. In The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Pres, 2008), 35-50, Sven Spieker includes a chapter entitled “Freud’s Files” but he
not does not cite or mention this passage in which Freud uses the file simile.
26 What Mowat misses in divides the magic book form spirits is that the book is itself
spectral, it is off stage, never seen, an invisible proper. She insists on regarding as a
prop on stage like the cloak and staff. But here is no stage direction for it. Her
118
But there is a an additional, more enigmatic crux to which she does not attend and
which is not generally recognized as one, namely, the distinction between burning
his books and drown my books.
Lanier, Douglas.Title "Drowning the Book: Prospero's Books and the Textual Shakespeare."Venue/Publisher Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance [F]: 187-209.
reading is not in the least bit philological. She argues by authority---people have
thought this way. Well, people thought Coredlia shouldn't die either. Or Hamlet.. Or
Romeo and Juliet. It’s anti-philoloigcal historicism. “The film’s final moments
involve a curious recuperation of Caliban, when the
character who once defecated and vomited on Prospero’s books suddenly saves
one—Shakespeare’s First Folio—after his master makes good on a pledge to “drown
[his] books.” The strangeness of Caliban’s final gesture has elicited quizzical
comments
from many critics, who ask whether the film’s “meaningless Caliban” deserves
such a prominent role in the salvation of the First Folio: “Why Caliban?” asks
Coursen.62 These final moments, after Prospero abjures the power of his books,
Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter
Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books
by James Tweedie Cinema Journal 40, No. 1, Fall 2000, 104-26
Kind of
Lacanian, but the transfer for me is a missing inside and between
that proliferates actings out rather than an objet petit a which
119
Head Entry ao230Date 1996Notes/Performers [Warns against reading videos (such as PeterGreenaway's Prospero's Books [q.v.]) as text, arguing that suchreadings "risk an elision of the very historical and materialcontingencies which the return to performance has sought to recover."Reprinted in Shaughnessy, editor, Shakespeare on Film (q.v.).]Stalpaert, Christel,Role editor.Title Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books: Critical Essays.
functions as a blind spot and quilting point. The failure of medial transfer and
linguistic translation and psychological transference all part of a dialectic of the
closed and open book to books, the contact zone being a space of proliferation, on
the one hand, but also of retrospective collection, labor (logs) and mourning). The
unreadability of the book is linked to the impossibility of mourning.
My reading is hyperphilological in that the adaptations are a form of criticism
generated by The Tempest, by its first place and its missing—wise and wife. It’s a
philogy the science of which knows that the missing cannot be restored, only
replayed, acted out in a blocked mourning that can never be stopped.
The book to books calls forth their mourning even as they are collected and
remembered in a posthumous memorial volume.
Missing mother.
Book(fri)Ends
120
Series Statement (Studies in Performing Arts and Film 3.)Venue/Publisher Ghent: Academia Press, 2000. 223 pp.Date 2000Notes/Performers [Includes seven essays of Shakespeare interest.]Tribble, Evelyn.Title "Listening to Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 161-69.Date 2008Notes/Performers [Argues that the "acoustic dimension of Prospero'sBooks [q.v.] is one of the most complex areas of intersection between"Tempest and Peter Greenaway's film.]
from edition to reader’s annotations means re-stored Shakespeare, a relation of
concealment in revealment, a truth that is revealed in the work of art, beauty,
indirectly, and slowly.
Grenaway’s film is regarded as a typicalpostco film, except for Caibran getting the
books. Missing the twofold moment of Caliban—first rescue of Folio, then
destruction—this alternating logic of the book runs throughout the film., bound,
and collected. Claiban’s destruction is out of sequence since The Tempest has just
been written and written down, but not bound with Folilio copy.
Pericles is missing form it.
recent scholarship about medieval and early modern ritual
magic is rapidly changing the state of knowledge about manuscript magic
books.
121
McMullan, Gordon.Title Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in theProximity of Death.Venue/Publisher Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,2007. xii + 402 pp.Date 2007Notes/Performers [In addressing the "relationship of creativity to oldage and death," explores "the development of the idea of 'lateShakespeare' from the later eighteenth century to the present, showingthe mismatch between . . . the 'discourse of lateness' and the actual
At the same time, however,Prospero’s book is not a grimoire—or at least so it seems
today. While further research by historians of magic may alter this conclusion, the
contents
of Prospero’s book, as reflected in his language and actions, must be imagined as
departing in significant ways from extant grimoires.
Prospero’s book, then, seems to be simultaneously a grimoire and a stage-prop
(or romance-prop) grimoire, just as Prospero himself is simultaneously (or perhaps
alternately) a serious master of spirits and a stage-or-romance wizard who also
reminds us (as I’ve argued elsewhere) of a Renaissance magus and a Jacobean street
magician.80 But just as The Tempest is more than a play about a magician, so
Prospero’s book, within the play’s larger context of epic sea journeys and
contemporary
Mediterranean/Atlantic voyages, has an additional resonance that at first
seems quite other than that carried by the grimoires. That resonance attaches to it
in terms of the larger power of the book per se.
The book of magic that I suggest Shakespeare provides for Prospero carries with
it, as book per se, a long and difficult colonial and postcolonial history, especially
122
conditions of production and of authorship in the early moderntheatre." In the course of the discussion, examines King Lear as alate play and the performance of late selfhood in Prospero by JohnGielgud (in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books [q.v.], Mark Rylance(in Tim Carroll's production [q.v.]), and John Bell as Prospero (inPeter Evans' production [q.v.]).] Voigts-Virchow, Eckart.Title "'Something richer, stranger, more self-indulgent': PeterGreenaway's Fantastic See-Changes in Prospero's Books et al."Venue/Publisher Anglistik und Englischunterricht 59 (1996): 83-99.
since it is represented as the source of Prospero’s control over the spirits who
torment
Caliban and who make possible Prospero’s rule over his island kingdom. As a
grimoire—and even more so as a stage-prop grimoire—its historical moment
seems much further in the past and its baggage strangely lighter.But it opens up a
host of questions about Prospero and his magic, many of which must remain
unanswered
until we know more about manuscript conjuring books. As Nicholas
Watson points out, we cannot, for example, fully grasp who Prospero is as a
magician or why his book appears to differ from extant grimoires until our
knowledge of
the field is greater.96We know enough, however, to see that awareness of the
existence
of grimoires forces us to look again at all the early modern wizard and sorcerer
plays and their magic books, beginning with the commedia dell’arte and ending with,
or soon after, The Tempest itself. And even a glimpse into the world of grimoire
masters, of Oberion and Storax, of the Lemegeton and the Clavicle of Solomon brings
us the salutary reminder that there is much yet to learn and understand not only
123
Date 1996Notes/Performers [Studies the postmodern fantastic in PeterGreenaway's Prospero's Books (q.v.) in relation to "the phenomena ofabstraction, self-reflection, and excess."]
Trimm, Ryan.Title "Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Staging National Tableaux andText in Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Cinema Journal 46, no. 3 (2007): 26-53.Date 2007
about The Tempest but also about the world that is supposedly our own scholarly
bailiwick.
While in other kinds of magic manuscripts—books of
image magic, for example—scribes were rather meticulous in their transcriptions
and were proud to cite their sources, with the conjuring books scribes freely altered,
combined, added, and deleted material. As Klaassen writes, these books “have a
fluid, largely anonymous content, the lineage of which would be very difficult to
trace.”28
Despite this fluidity, however, the grimgroires share many recognizable
characteristics.
All of those that I have examined are, first of all, uniformly religious in tone, with
the “master,” as he is called, summoning spirits only after supplicating God, enlisting
God’s aid, and using God’s holy names as the major source of his power to conjure.
This new interest in conjuring books raises the next question about Prospero’s
book—namely, if we grant the likelihood that Prospero has some version of a
manuscript magic book, what are we to imagine that the book contains? We can
move toward a tentative answer by looking first at the contents of actual magic
books, though we will see later that Prospero’s putative book departs significantly
124
Notes/Performers [Argues that Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books"works against the heritage film's generic obsession with setting byforegrounding its soundstage as a textual and performative space" andthus is not situated in a specific time or even reality. Englishsummary, 26.]
Nethersole, Reingard.Title "'Burn but his books': The Power of the Library in 16th CenturyEngland and France with Reference to South Africa Today."
from them.
This image of Prospero as a Renaissance magus (or, as he is
sometimes problematically called, a “white magician”14), coupled with the tendency
to think in terms of printed books, have combined to encourage even those curious
about Prospero’s magic to ignore (or fail to look for) the only books of any use to a
conjuror—namely, manuscript books of magic.
I begin with an assumption about The Tempest that opens onto a set of
related questions. The assumption is that among the highly valued books that
Prospero brought with him into exile is one book essential to his magic, the one
that he goes offstage to consult before the series of spirit spectacles begins in Act 3,
the same one that near the end of the play he promises to drown as he abjures his
magic [actually, he promises to drown his books, not his book]. Though Peter
Greenaway, in his film Prospero’s Books, did not include
such a book among the twenty-four he decided were necessary for Prospero’s
survival,
1 the text indicates that Prospero not only has a magic robe and a magic staff
(both of which are explicitly called for2), but, like Friar Bacon and Doctor
Faustus and other stage magicians before him, he also has a magic book. Further,
125
Venue/Publisher Shakespeare in Southern Africa 8 (1995): 53-63.Date 1995Notes/Performers [Argues that in Tempest, Prospero's library is ametaphor for the power of knowledge. Books become centers of powerbecause they create "products of book learning," that is, people suchas Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand who will rule cities or nations.Also published under the same title in Shakespeare across Cultures[F]: 185-203.]
the play presents Prospero’s always-offstage book as crucial to his rule over the
island, the magical instrument that enables him to control the spirits who come
from their confines when Prospero calls, who torment Caliban and keep him
obedient, and who assume as needed the shapes of Greek mythological figures or
vicious hunting dogs.
Rateher crude dsitncitonbeteen manuscripts and printed booksas media.
l Media, Mourning, and the Incomplete Works of Material Culture
27 See Barbara Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001), 1-
33. The Tempest refers, Mowat notes, both to a singular book (“I'll to my book”;
“I'll drown my book”) and to plural books (“books I priz'd above my dukedom”;
“burn but his books”). Mowat insists that Prospero’s book is present even though
there is no stage direction for it in the text: “Prospero's always-offstage book” is
the “one book essential to his magic, the one that he goes offstage to consult
before the series of spirit spectacles begins in Act 3, the same one that near the
end of the play he promises to drown as he abjures his magic.” Prospero’s
strangely singular and clearly spectral singular plural book/s “appear” only as
126
McKee, Alexander.Title "Jonson vs. Jones in Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Literature/Film Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2007): 121-28.Date 2007Notes/Performers [Argues that by "creating a synthesis between theverbal and the visual" in Prospero's Books (q.v.), Peter Greenawayattempts to resolve the quarrel between Inigo Jones and Ben Jonsonabout the supremacy of the image or the text. Suggests that Greenawaychose Tempest to adapt because of the "way in which it responds to theJonson and Jones debate by exploring the unstable relationship betweenword and spectacle."]
phantom referents in the printed script of the play. It makes no sense at all to
make a prop for the actor playing Prospero to consult off-stage (Prospero and the
actor playing him are somewhat psychotically conflated through a psychologistic
reading of the play as literature and performance equated). What are we to
make of a phantom prop that is referenced both in the singular and the plural
without ever be shown on stage? What is the relation between the book/s and
the spirits Prospero commands? Greenaway and Taymor address these
questions in very different ways by materializing what is missing.
28 Julie Taymor, The Tempest, Adapted From the Play by William Shakespeare
(New York: Abrams, 2010). Peter Greenaway’s tie-in book, Prospero's Books: A
Film of the Shakespeare's The Tempest (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991)
serves as a paratextual commentary on the film, providing information about the
sources of each the twenty-seven books shown in the films and giving their titles
once again as they are drowned (see p. 161-62). The Secret of Kells blu-ray
edition includes a comic booklet version of the film.
29 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in
Science, Religion and Art (2002). Latour and Wiebel write: “Iconoclasm is when
we know what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations are
127
Kearney, James.Title "The Book and the Fetish: The Materiality of Prospero's Text."Venue/Publisher Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32 (2002): 433-68.Date 2002Notes/Performers [Inquiring into the significance of the absenceonstage of Prospero's books in Tempest, disputes William Pietz'sgenealogy of the fetish (which traces the fetish back to Africa) tooffer a prehistory of the fetish that originates with the Reformation,in the impact of Protestantism on "'traditional' Christianiconoclasm." Explores the "central role that conceptions of literacy
for what appears as a clear project of destruction of art; iconoclash, on the other
hand, is when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for
which there is no way to now, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or
constructive” (14).
30 In the screenplay, the film’s ending loops back to the beginning: “A series of
ever decreasing splashes drip and plop into the black water . . . thus the
beginning of the film is reprised. A final splash plops . . . all water-movement
ceases and the screen is a black velvet void” (Prospero's Books: A Film of the
Shakespeare's The Tempest, 164).
32 “emboss the paper with the unlinked type . . . renaissance books routinely
contain hidden text where the innocent eye draws a blank. In other words, there
exists a literature not yet registered on the maps of early printing. The Corteginao
is just one of many books with such terra incognita—terrain unknown until now,
that is. (190) uninked type” (189) But even in merely ambient light you would be
able to see several lines of dirty traces below it.” “The angelic (the missionary)
direction of narrative. (152)
As we are learning to differentiate the stages of the printing schedule from those
of the literary narrative” (159). Overleaf is another copy of the same page—a
128
and materiality play in the European understanding of the 'barbarous'other" in the Tempest, especially as associated with Prospero's books,to argue that the play "necessarily works within the problematic oficonoclastic discourse concerning materiality, even if thisproblematic is radically displaced."]
Anderegg, Michael.Title "Greenaway's Baroque Mise en scene at the Imaginative Centre ofShakespeare's The Tempest: A Hypertextual Recapitulation of theRivalry between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones?"
remarkable one, for the paper remembers its ordeal at the press. (159)Consider
the photograph, opposite (168). With this image, I want to remind you of what lies
behind the term ‘forme’, meaning on one side of a printed sheet of paper.
(169)Bleed through of the diagrams in McLeod’s essay. Book splits right where
the two hands hold the text partly open to see a shape of Easter Wings that is not
its shape and to read The Church across the title as well as Easter Wings.
Textual critics and editors are irreducibly conflicted in some sense, but only to an
always already redited to default. Or some dialectic—Hegelian—improved
editions. Fewer errors. Both produce genetic narratives—transmission and
production, both invested in the same “thing” and both adopt the same model of
textual forensics. McLeod’s investment isn’t in gazing but reading is see
something (metaphorically) I didn’t see that I see your point.
(Understand comprehends letters and images).
It is always possible that the change from a comma to a period could have
occurred through damage to the comma during the print-run, rather than by
deliberate substitution of one type for the other. But that such discriminate
damage would have not only enhanced the system of punctuation, but also left
no destructive traces is highly improbable. N.20, 156
129
Venue/Publisher Stalpaert, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books [F]: 101-19.Head Entry aab1481Date 2000Notes/Performers [Describes Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (q.v.)as existing in "an interactive hypermedia environment where the entireimage surface would consist of links capable of taking us not only toother frames/fields of the film itself, but to a whole range ofallusive material therein contained as well." Incorporated withrevisions in Anderegg, Cinematic Shakespeare (q.v.).]Persons Stalpaert, Christel; Greenaway, PeterDescriptive Terms hypermedia
Photo-facsimiles of the entire manuscripts are . . “ n. 23,156
“textual tree” 124 (botanist, naturalist)
p. 124—return to the same place the reader was at the beginning of the essay.
(124)
Textual critics and editors both act like prosecutors, call up experts. Vocabulary
of theology “restored” text.
Serial order of the editions numbered. Like Prospero’s Books.
“death bed manuscript” (84)
“The Easter Wings gallery”
A museum tour.
Greek technopaegnia (142)
Photography does not lie, of course. You can trust it, because it just gazes, like
a silly goose (the two words are cognate).27 It does not lie. It does not lie
because it does not analyze. It surfaces while, instantaneously. But the
underlying type-facsimile is not facsimile is not a gestalt [sic]; its coming into
being was atomistic, sequential and linear. It is all these because it is a reading,
because reading rationalizes (these two words also cognate), because reading is
abstract and analytical. In short, reading is to deep – it is not sufficiently
130
Document Type ArticleSee Also Anderegg, Cinematic Shakespeare Greenaway, Prospero's BooksGreenaway, Peter.Title "Notes de travail pour Les livres de Prospero."Venue/Publisher Positif 363 (1991): 28-33.Date 1991Notes/Performers [Prints selections from Peter Greenaway's workingnotes for Prospero's Books (q.v.), including an outline of thefundamental ideas informing the film, a synopsis, and comments onShakespeare's Tempest and the decor.]Donaldson, Peter S.Title "Digital Archives and Sibylline Fragments: The Tempest and theEnd of Books."
superficial to report the evidence, which lies, after all, on the surface.
“Shape” as a form (printing)
A stroll through the Easter Wings Gallery shows appropriation drifting
inappropriately according to fashion; this drift forestalls literary criticism’s
approach to a science (148)
One wonders if there is not something non-linear—even anti-linear—Herbert’s
poetic Enter Reader, 41
Czech cop and CIA agents in Jon Savage movie The Amateur.
Well, if mutation of messages is the way of this world, how are to react to
Herbert’s editors? Does their inexhaustible fertility issue in sublime adaptation or
merely befuddled degeneration? (14)
Is it really an exaggeration to say that these poems are invisible in the edited
texts of the last century and a half before form (reading)
McLeod wants to separate narratives even though in a sense he does not
produce a narrative, or only a narrative loop. End in the begin.
At the same time a delinearization-one or two poems? 3D perspective or not?
Constant derailings made possible through the photograph and the diagram.
131
Venue/Publisher Postmodern Culture 8, no. 2 (1998):http://muse.jhu.edu.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/journals/pmc/v008/8.2donaldson.html.Date 1998Notes/Performers [Examines how Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books(q.v.) "reads The Tempest anachronistically, as a play about the endof books and the advent of electronic forms."] Buchanan, Judith.Title "Cantankerous Scholars and the Production of a Canonical Text:The Appropriation of Hieronymite Space in Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Stalpaert, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books [F]: 43-100.Head Entry aab1481Date 2000Notes/Performers [Analyzes the parallels between Prospero's story andthe life of St. Jerome as examples of the intertextual andinterdiscursive relation of Prospero's Books (q.v.) with otherShakespeare films and works of art.]Persons Stalpaert, Christel; Greenaway, Peter; St. Jerome
And yet a narrative of production—from fetus or fetal production / gestation to
birth (but no after birth.
Not so much into breaking things and walking away but into shape (no
reshaping). You want to stay with the shape. Not geneticist, not a textual
eugenics. A secular Creationism (hidden text gets revealed as literature—but it
is not readable-“uninked type.” Found lost text that is not word of God (or the
author). It’s a surplus, not a supplement, but it lacks meaning. It’s an image, not
text. The reistance you provide editors lies in the way you refuse to read images.
What about the stake in the posthumous? Keats and Herbert.
So your kind of like Saint Peter but as a mortician.
132