Unbinding the Text: Intermedial Iconicity in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books Christina Ljungberg (Zurich) 1. Introduction Prospero’s Books, Peter Greenaway’s 1991 adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, is a remarkable production in many respects. Challenging its audience with a dazzling neoBaroque multimedia experience, the tension generated by the constant border crossing among media such as writing, film, painting, and their digital varieties explores both the history and potential of each medium, in particular their media-specific materiality. In so doing, Greenaway not only gives us a commentary on how we should ‘read’ the film but he also openly interrogates the process of its adaptation while displaying what is involved in such a project for a postmodern filmmaker adapting an almost four-hundred-year-old canonical play to contemporary sensibilities. What makes Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books so intriguing for an analysis of the intersemiotic processes involved in adaptation is that the relation between Prospero, the magician, and his books shows a conspicuous similarity to the relation between Greenaway, the director, and Shakespeare’s text. The film is, as Peggy Phelan (1992: 43) points out, about “a playwright leaving the theatre, performed by an actor [John Gielgud] who may be thinking about retiring, and is directed by a man who wants to redefine the properties of the filmic frame”. What does Greenaway do with Shakespeare? What strategies does he employ to adapt Shakespeare’s play, which already self-reflexively interrogates the media of books, language, visual design – and, in particular, the role of the director – to evoke imagination and the “fancies of the brain” (Greenblatt 1997: 3048), which are the core elements of both magic and theater – and film? The key issue here, I would argue, lies in the performative process of adaptation, in which both the play as well as its screen transmogrification are performances, but in which the constituent elements of the pre-text are taken apart, analyzed, and re-ordered. Thus, new configurations are generated from already existent parts, creating something entirely new and thereby often disclosing hidden or unsuspected relationships, which in turn leads to fresh insights. Such processes are characteristic of what Charles Sanders Peirce defines as diagrams, which together with images and metaphors form the three types of iconic signs. Peirce (EP 2: 212-13) describes the creation of a diagram as a process which involves construction of “hypothetical state[s] of things”, the forming “a plan of investigation”, the selection of “the features which it will be pertinent to pay attention to”, and finally the repeated return to some of these features. Peirce’s description of these cognitive processes is easily applicable to those of intermedial adaptation. Furthermore, the intersemiotic transformations involved are both self-reflexive and entail the (re-)mapping of structures; therefore, they have a conspicuously iconic character. What kind of mapping takes place in such a highly complex adaptation as Prospero’s Books? This work would seem to pose a particular problem since its intricate structures interact on several planes, including the level of the media, which involves both film and digital media as well as those engaged in productions of theater (and literature). What new meaning does such deconstructing and subsequent reassembling of the pre-text’s constituent elements generate, and how do they affect our understanding and interpretation of the film? How is the figure of dislocation – shipwrecks, loss of home and culture, as well as the disorientation generated by Prospero’s conjured masques – translated into Greenaway’s postmodern adaptation? And more specifically, to what degree does adaptation in itself involve dislocation, or the “disruption of an established order” as Merriam Webster defines the word? I will argue that the figure of dislocation governs Shakespeare’s play as well as it resonates throughout Greenaway’s performative multimedia reworking of this canonical text into contemporary sensibility. Not only does the text self-reflexively perform the very process of adaptation, but it also becomes ‘destructured’ into images, images with which Greenaway plays as with words, showing the extent to which verbal language is visual and calling for a new visual literacy in order to ‘read’ our visually governed multimedia culture. 2. Adapting the pre-text Although film adaptations of famous literary works have accompanied films since the medium’s invention, one would tend to agree with what Robert Stam (2005: 4) states in his seminal introduction to Literature and Film (Stam and Raengo 2005): “Too often, Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 2 adaptation discourse subtly reinscribes the axiomatic superiority of literature to film”. Such discourse also plays on fears that the text will be appropriated by visuality and other sensory modalities, enacting what W.J.T. Mitchell (1980: 43) once called “the struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs”. This manifests itself in notions that, for instance, the source or pre-text will be overwhelmed by the audio-visual-verbal spectacle on the screen, drowning it in lavish costumes and time décor; that the adaptation might either be too literal a transformation of the pre-text or too radical an interrogation of the text, unsettling and alienating the audience; or that the translation of the pretext’s cultural memory and context into another medium is not possible. Often considered as mere ‘borrowings’, adaptations therefore have been judged as to their literary quality. Moreover, Lawrence Venuti (2007: 24) argues that a film adaptation of a novel is often considered an “unfaithful or distorted communication of the author’s expressive intention”. But, as he points out, such a view more often than not entails the unconscious use of a third term, “a dominant or authoritative interpretation of the text, which the critic applies as a standard on the assumption that the film should somehow inscribe that and only that interpretation”. Such critical practice is of course especially common when it comes to the adaptation of a canonical literary text like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which has already accumulated a body of commentary and ‘authorized’ interpretations. The very mixed reception of Greenaway’s film illustrates this clearly. The criticism of the film ranged from seeing it as “a kind of illustrated essay on Shakespeare and his hero” which “references the masterpieces of the past in a manner that antagonizes our pleasure in the arts rather than enhancing it” (Washington Post’s Hal Hanson 1991), “a cluttered spectacle [which] yields no overriding design but simply disconnected MTV-like conceits or mini-ideas every three seconds” (Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum 2008) but also a “ravishing but incomprehensible adaptation of The Tempest” (Brown, also Washington Post 1991) and “a collection of tumultuous visions, suggesting a great library of the gods as imagined by Renaissance painters” (New York Times’s Vincent Canby 1991). This criticism testifies to the large variety of preconceived ideas, understanding and expectations of adaptations. Film adaptations must necessarily perform substantially Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 3 diverse operations on the source text’s formal and thematic features in order to translate these into film language. This means that they, on the one hand, could be regarded as “parasites” or “hybrids” as Stam (2005: 3) suggests with reference to the take on orchids in the film Adaptation (2002) by Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman. This film about writers and writing performs the procedure and problematics of adapting a book for the cinema both thoughtfully and hilariously. The orchid metaphor – the book in question is Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1994) – not only suggests the pervasive hybridity of adaptations but also that they, on the other hand, can be seen as “mutations”. Such a mutation could ensure its survival by adapting to “changing environments, changing tastes, as well as to a new medium, with its distinct industrial demands, commercial pressures, censorship taboos, and aesthetic norms” (Stam 2005: 3). Hence, what must be explored are the “unstated doxa which subtly construct the subaltern status of adaptation (and the filmic image)” (2005: 4).1 Stam’s use of the postcolonial term ‘subaltern’ in this context makes a telling analogy between film adaptation and postcolonialism as well as their relationships with dominant discourses. The postcolonial ‘subaltern’ (Guha and Spivak 1988) always deals with a disadvantage towards hegemonic discourses and must therefore develop their own. Similarly, Stam’s (2005: 5) suggestive formulation of the “subaltern status of adaptation (and the filmic image)” above establishes the (imagined) authority, control and appropriation discursively exercised over adaptation by the source or pre-text. But more recently, adaptation has been looked at as a kind of performative criticism, as a critical interrogation and evaluation of the pre-text which produces a new work of art. The concept of the performative as developed by J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida and others is that dimension of discourse which generates new ‘realities’. Performative statements are neither true nor false since the reality to which they refer is only created by their being uttered. For example, a judge who condemns a murderer to a penalty of prison utters neither a true nor a false statement; he or she creates the reality of the consequences of this condemnation by uttering the judgment under certain necessary and appropriate circumstances. Likewise, authors of works of literature, a film or a film adaptation of a literary work may be said to create performatively. Whatever they present (i.e., perform) as real is a reality created by their very presentation. As Stam points out, Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 4 Just as the literary utterance creates the state of affairs to which it refers – rather than merely imitating some pre-existing state of affairs – so the filmic adaptation might be said to create a new audiovisual-verbal state of affairs, rather than merely imitating the old state of affairs as represented by the source novel. (Stam 2007: 11) Rather than considering adaptations as ‘borrowings’ attempting to affirm the continuity of traditions and genres, they could be analyzed as instances of discontinuity, of cultural conflict and mutation (to some extent even mutilation): in short, as polyvocal dislocations that celebrate the hybrid and performative quality of adaptation. Such forms of hybridity and dislocation reveal adaptations to be highly dialogic speech acts in which the artistic utterance always mingles its own expressions with someone else’s (cf. Bakhtin 1984). Adaptation thus becomes an orchestration of discourses, talents, and tracks, but also a space in which all these various elements are located – and dislocated. This dialogic quality could also be the reason why – despite criticism to the contrary – an adaptation is allowed relative independence from its pre-text because the two are both similar and different but never identical. A film adaptation is always an interpretation produced at a certain historical and cultural moment. Moreover, it must be produced according to certain medium-specific rules (screen play, film format); it will depend on the intertextual or intersemiotic relations between film and other cultural practices; and it will necessarily be influenced by the contemporary context and conditions of film production. The adaptation of a work therefore increases its intermedial complexity. It also highlights its performative dimension, as it can be said to create a new state of affairs rather than imitate its ‘pre-text’. Adaptation would therefore seem to necessarily involve what Fauconnier and Turner (2002) call “double-scope blends”, blends that require polyvalent iconic representations or otherwise ambiguous multiple interpretations that must first be deconstructed and then reconstructed into new syntheses. That is why adaptations entail intermedial iconicity, since they either concern the transgression of boundaries between conventionally distinct media of communication (while retaining formal features of the pre-text) or the iconic enactment of one medium within another. Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 5 3. Adaptation and translation An intriguing feature of Greenaway’s adaptation is that it is an almost verbatim translation of Shakespeare’s text about Prospero, formerly the Duke of Milan, who was usurped by his brother and exiled, put in a boat that eventually, together with his daughter Miranda, lands him on an island. A sympathetic friend, Gonzalo, provides him with books from his library, which enables Prospero to become a magus, a powerful wizard who is able to find his way across the oceans, to combat the witch Sycorax, to colonize the island, and take her son Caliban as his slave, to educate Miranda and then, using his magic powers, to revenge himself on his brother with the help of Ariel, a spirit of the air. But Greenaway’s film, as James Tweedie (2000: 111) points out, “is not the standard ‘literate’ adaptation, which attempts to emulate the canonical status of a literary object, but a ‘literal’ film, one that deconstructs its subject into infinitesimal elements and translates them, word by word, image by image”. Instead, he contends, the film, “at times literally word for word, both demonstrates how those words were themselves ‘put together’ and performs their disintegration into constituent elements”. By deconstructing the boundaries between verbal and visual culture as well as those of dance and music, Greenaway’s adaptation actually translates the text into such a cascade of images that it blurs the distinction between the narrative and the visual (as well as between dance and music). This opens up the question about the relationship between translation and adaptation, as well as their relation to their source or pre-texts. Generally, translation is defined as the recreation or transposition of those features – semantic, rhetorical, stylistic and structural – that the translator deems important from a pre-text into a target text of media-specific equivalence, which produces a text in a new medium / language. In contrast, adaptations have to adjust the pre-text to a new medium but instead of being a transposition of the original it maintains core elements of the original in such a way that they are fully recognizable. However, as Lawrence Venuti (2007: 25) points out, “[t]he relation between such second-order creations and their source materials is not communicative but hermeneutic, depending on the translator’s or filmmaker’s application of an interpretant”. He suggests translation theory as a way of thinking about film adaptation as it offers “a more rigorous critical methodology”, and more specifically, a Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 6 more hermeneutic concept of language. In his view, we should think of translation and adaptation as an interpretation that fixes a form and meaning in the source text in accordance with values, beliefs and representations in the target language and culture (Venuti 2007: 28). For this operation, the interpretant of the sign, that is, the effects of the signs on the spectators (Peirce EP 2: 429), needs to be taken into account since [i]nterpretants enable the film to inscribe an interpretation by mediating between its prior materials, on the one hand, and the medium and its condition of production, on the other – by providing, in other words, a method of selecting those materials and transforming them into the adaptation through the multimedial choices made by the filmmakers. (Venuti 2007: 33) The interpretant enables a translation, which is a further development of the sign. The interpretant is not the interpreter who is the personal agent but much more that “in which a sign as such results” (Colapietro 1993: 122). An interpretant can be either formal or thematic: as Venuti (2007: 33) explains, a formal interpretant involves a “relation of equivalence, such as a structural correspondence maintained between the adapted materials and the film”; it may also include “a particular style, such as a distinctive set of formal features that characterize the work of a director or studio”, or comprise a “concept of genre that necessitates a manipulation or revision of the adapted materials”. A thematic interpretant involves “codes, values, ideologies” such as a previous interpretation of the adapted material, the moral or cultural stance adopted by the filmmakers or a political position: “a number of interpretants will be applied in any adaptation, even if in the long run they might be grouped into more general categories as the analysis proceeds and the field is articulated in an overall interpretation” (Venuti 2007: 34). The hermeneutic relation is therefore not only an interpretation of the pre-text but engages with it much more forcefully in that it interrogates it, and in so doing, exposes under what cultural and social conditions it has been produced, as well as what translation or adaptation that has processed them. The metaphor of projection seems to me to be fruitful in this context, not only because the interpretant involves projection in itself. Like maps, adaptations often entail modes of projection for their interpretation since they are mapped from the medium context of one medium to the one of another. Moreover, similar to a map projection, Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 7 which must translate a three-dimensional reality into two-dimensional space2, the projection at work in adaptation will necessarily always involve some kind of distortion. Although this is just as true of translations, the change in medium necessary in adaptation poses additional hurdles. Features of the projected domain are dramatically altered through additions, deletions, or substitutions, which force us to negotiate – or renegotiate – continuously the relationships between the various media at hand, constructing a mental diagram by drawing a new map of interconnections. Projections are pervasive throughout Prospero’s Books because Greenaway provides Prospero with a Book of Mirrors as well as using mirrors and reflections to conjure up and control his plots. Moreover, as Peggy Phelan points out, Combining the Renaissance convention that theater’s job is to hold a mirror up to nature and the intricate contemporary critical theory of the cinema as both a mirror and a screen for the spectator’s ‘identifications’, Greenaway’s film simultaneously projects a deeply accurate Renaissance worldview and an exhilarating illustration of the most technically innovative possibilities of contemporary cinema. (Phelan 1992: 44) Consider, for instance, how the projection of dislocation is translated from the play to the film. Shakespeare’s text is a story of loss and gain; it is also a story of geographical and cultural dislocation (and partial relocation), which gives it its character of disorientation and Unheimlichkeit in the sense of the “un-housedness” or “not-at-home-ness” that is often used in postcolonialism (cf. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 2000: 73). Prospero’s predicament is the consequence of his being too absorbed in his books, losing touch with reality and therefore becoming ‘dislocated’ from his duties as the ruler of Milan. To Miranda, the dislocation from Milan makes her subject to her father’s complete control and magic powers, including the fact that he involves her in his revenge on his shipwrecked enemies. Caliban, who as the son of Sycorax is the island’s legitimate ruler, is turned into a colonially dislocated subject who is forced not only into subservience by his new master’s refusal of acknowledgement but also to adapt his master’s language and culture – and being ridiculed for his inability to do so (cf. Hulme 2003). In the play, the figure of dislocation thus rules the diegesis from its very first scene when the shipwreck brought about by Prospero’s violent tempest brings his enemies to his island. Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 8 In Greenaway’s adaptation, dislocation pervades not only on the diegetic level but also on the structural and thematic levels. Deconstructing cinematic conventions, he undoes in particular those codes pertaining to the classical Hollywood cinema such as spatial perspective and temporal logic. Temporal continuity is suspended in relation to the dislocations of the historical references to art and art history, e.g., by including objects that were produced after Shakespeare’s time (like the Piranesian bath house, Prospero’s ‘prophetic borrowing’). In Greenaway’s cinema, time can be dislocated, reversed and differently conjoined – or undone, as in a palindrome (cf. Ljungberg 2007: 249). To Greenaway, Phelan (1992: 44) argues, “time is a way of counting, an alphabet that can be recited backwards or forwards”. Instead of starting events on board the ship and have the plot develop sequentially, Greenaway hence opens his film with a dazzling montage in which time and space are taken apart and again juxtaposed to disjunctively voice the film’s concerns. What we see is a recurring frame of a back-lit drop of water splashing in slow-motion into a black pool, followed by a quote from Shakespeare’s play which we simultaneously watch being written into a book and hear being read out by Gielgud / Prospero in voice-over: Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me From mine own library with volumes that I prized beyond my dukedom. (Act I, Sc 2, 167-169) Then frames of dripping water intercut with those of a quill writing on paper until we arrive at A Book of Water, flipping its pages. The book, set within a rectangular frame superimposed on the background, exhibits da Vinci-like drawings of whirlpools, hydraulics, and diagrams of the Archimedes Screw; waterfalls and cataracts are intercut with animated frames displaying clouds and storms which then alternate with the dripping water and close-ups on the blue ink-well. The flood of images then stops on a hand in the frame on which the water drops. Superimposed on a handwritten manuscript permeated by clouds, it is followed by a traveling wide shot to the Piranesian bathhouse and pans over to the pool in which Prospero is immersed, his hand stretched out to catch the drops of water, still within the rectangular frame (Figure 1). Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 9 Fig. 1. Sir John Gielgud as Prospero stretching out his hand We see a hand writing ‘Boatswain’ on paper, superimposed on Prospero, who is still in the frame, then an intercut between Ariel and Prospero’s hand, followed by a full shot of the book and, in it, an animated film strip with a ship fighting the waves in a tempest; a subsequent cut to Prospero shows him pronouncing the lines as he is writing them, creating the impression of a command echoed on board a ship. A close-up of the inkwell follows, then a cut out of the rectangular frame to Prospero in his magic robe, sitting at his pulpit surrounded by model tall ships in his study and, finally, a ship in storm, its captain issuing the order “Bestir! Bestir!”, repeated aurally and visually; the book in the frame starts to undo itself, its pages loosening and swirling through the air. Venuti’s emphasis on the importance of the interpretant as the translating instance would indeed seem apt for an analysis of this sequence. This rapid montage has no direct counterpart in Shakespeare’s play. What is even more interesting here is Greenaway’s take on dislocation as the disruption necessary for the creative act and for the film’s UrSzene: the very first image, the drop of water, the first book, The Book of Water – which is countered by the drowning of the twenty-two books (except for the two saved by Caliban) at the end, making water the beginning and (almost) the end of everything and thus functioning as a frame in itself. With this rapid sequence of images – water, inkwell, quill, paper, text and book – Greenaway confronts us from the very start with the process of writing, i.e., the production of texts, and books as the main objects of desire – which Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 10 are also the site where conflicts are acted out and relationships contested. But the pen’s scratching noise on the page reminds us, too, that writing is not only a precondition for the writer’s imaginary, fictive world in which he can move. It is also the space in which he can place himself as the protagonist whose “fancies of the brain” (Greenblatt 2007: 48) can change the world. As Greenaway writes in his screenplay, The storm winds have been let into the library by the person of Prospero himself – who now strides into the space of swirling papers … we now have two Prosperos … the Prospero – dressed in blue – sitting at the desk who has dreamt up the scenario … and the Prospero as actor in his own drama – ... dressed in red – walking past. (1991: 20) 2. Sir John Gielgud as Prospero as the books are unbinding themselves By having Prospero appear in both roles amidst the papers eddying from the unbinding books, Greenaway enhances the dual function of Prospero as both the magician / writer and the protagonist / character. Prospero’s role as the creating instance is also reinforced by his taking on all the lines up to the play’s crucial turning point in Act 5, when Ariel convinces him to show mercy, which then gives his characters voice – and humanity. Moreover, Greenaway’s film problematizes Prospero’s complex relationship to his books. Functioning as the condition for both his survival on and his control of the island Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 11 they are also the reason for his present predicament. If his books once led to his ousting from Milan, his new writing in his cell-like study both sets him apart and allows him to take part. The books therefore play a dual role, they alienate him from the external world at the same time as they permit him to interact with it. There is thus an ongoing resistance here between the book as object and the texts it attempts to control but which elide representation. As James Tweedie (2000: 107) points out, “Greenaway’s film presents an extended meditation on the relationship between the mystical authority of the book and the hybridizing act of reading and writing”, which is manifested in the film’s Baroque explosion of sumptuous visual details, a “visual and conceptual ‘cacography’” that matches the “cacophony of Prospero’s ‘isle full of noises’” (Romney quoted in Tweedie 2000: 108). This “cacography” contains disorder and dislocation – not only do the books’ contents refuse to stay contained but the books also themselves escape or disintegrate into pages swirling in the air, unbinding themselves into words come alive. Rather than the scientifically ordered inquiry into knowledge that the books purport to be, they present themselves as the source of unbounded knowledge, which is unfolded in front of us in an endless unordered disarray defying location. Similar to the dislocation of spatial perspective and temporal continuity, the ‘logic’ seemingly guiding the twenty-four books (their number being suggestively equal to that of film frames per second)3 is more reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges’ “Chinese encyclopaedia” with its highly heterogeneous categorization of animals into groups of those “(a) belonging to the Emperor (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification,…” that fascinated Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (1970: xv). The idiosyncratic selection of books thus has Prospero’s library come across as “a museum of image-making and intermediality founded by alternatively organized principles; the book is a space where architecture coexists with related manifestations of ‘music’, and where text and image manifest the same lineage” (Tweedle 2000: 111). Such different logic also prevails in the seemingly clear division of the film into past, present and future. As Greenaway (1991: 13) argues, this overall distribution means that “the Past corresponds to Prospero’s long explanation of his history, the Present deals with Prospero’s various real-time plottings and the Future concerns those plans Prospero Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 12 makes to guarantee the success of his dynastic ambitions for his daughter”. However, this organization – into three unequal parts – also performs the “deliberate confusion between fact, memory, and fantasy”, as an old man’s recollection of events played out in a space that is “basically dark and richly coloured, influenced by late seventeenth Italian and Dutch painting of interiors” (Greenaway 1991: 37). The references to, e.g., Piranesi (who was not born until 1720) is explained by Prospero’s magic arts which make him perfectly capable of ‘prophetic borrowing’ (Greenaway 1991: 42). Greenaway’s dislocations on the film’s structural and thematic level hence both reflect and productively interpret those on the pre-text’s diegetic level. Apart from the obvious dislocations of Prospero, Miranda and the shipwrecks, the most prominent sign of dislocation on the story level is of course the cultural dislocation of Caliban, whose language and gestures mark him as a slave under Prospero’s power. Long a debate between Early Modern and Postcolonial scholars, the problem of how to interpret Caliban has generated sharp interchanges (Sharpe 1993; Loomba 1998; Hulme 2003). Greenaway’s move to have the dancer Michael Clark interpret Caliban’s Otherness and oscillation between hatred, lust and despair transforms the play’s inherent colonial violence exerted by a dominant power towards its Others. It also beautifully reveals the constructedness of social and cultural hierarchies and systems. That Caliban is the dislocated – and constructed – Other of Prospero’s own subjectivity is already suggested in Shakespeare’s pre-text when Prospero recognizes that “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (5.3.278) as both irreparably human and authorial4. 4. Self-reflexivity and performativity In Prospero’s Books, it is, however, most insistently Ariel’s disrupted flight that dislocated him from his aerial characteristic. Prospero’s power over Ariel, his medium, stems precisely from his ability to project the spirit’s incarceration but also his liberation. First imprisoned by Sycorax to suffer twelve years in a “cloven pine”, then liberated by Prospero but constantly reminded of what he owes his ‘saviour’ (and threatened to be locked up again, should he not behave), Greenaway has Ariel appear in four different Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 13 ages played by four different actors, as a child, a boy, a teenager and a young man. In so doing, Greenaway interlinks not only the history of avant-garde film in which often various actors play the same part but also Renaissance theater in which one actor would play several parts. But, as Peggy Phelan (1992: 48) points out, Ariel also functions as “Prospero’s surveying camera, his time keeper, his means of projection, his ‘representational apparatus’”. The relationship between Prospero and Ariel is one fraught with conflicts and challenges but one which is also dynamic and transformative: it is Ariel in Act 5 who has Prospero realize that the revenge he wants to exact is too harsh and has him show mercy by appealing to his emotions, which turns around the tragic play he is writing; finally, it is Ariel, not the books, who ends the film with his flight into the spheres. By shifting the focus from the relationship between Prospero and Caliban to that between Ariel and Prospero, Greenaway employs Ariel as his “means of projection” and his “representational apparatus” (Phelan 1992: 48). This shift is significant as it puts the film’s emphasis on the relationship between the artist and her or his medium. It therefore indicates the specific interpretants created by Greenaway for his adaptation which emerges as a film in which the pre-text’s expressions are first dislocated and then translated into the images in the books let loose. These unbinding archaic books are strongly suggestive of postmodernism’s ‘free-floating images’ at the same time as they also symptomatically portend Benjamin’s age of mechanical reproduction as well as our own multimedia technologies. A crucial agent in this is Greenaway’s Graphic Paintbox, whose rectangular cutout in the middle of the viewing screen presents yet another defamiliarizing and thus dislocating device (Figure 2). Functioning as a structuring tool – a hands-on mise-en-abyme –, it differentiates the various narrative levels, e.g., by presenting the various books and their content. It has us follow how, inside its frame, certain crucial events are acted out, analeptically and proleptically seen through Prospero’s eyes. These are the events that stem from Prospero’s writing, that is, they mirror his imagination and his virtual (re)collection and thus have no connection with reality. As Greenaway (1991: 12) points out, the island is “full of superimposed images, of shifting mirrors and mirror-images – true mir-ages – where pictures conjured by the text can be as tantalizingly substantial as objects and facts and events, constantly framed Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 14 and reframed”. The Graphic Paintbox therefore diagrammatically structures the film adaptation, informing us on what level an event takes place. At the same time it reflects Prospero’s fantasies and his knowledge stored in the books which it inserts into the main narrative, granting us an insight into how Prospero’s play develops from the books he has read. Figure 3. The Graphic Paintbox with The Book of Water. As a digital instrument, the Paintbox itself functions iconically since it represents numerically translated information of pre-recorded images and animated films that can be manipulated in every possible way, be it by altering, combining, merging or superimposing them5. As Herbert Klein (1996) states, “there is hardly an image or a shot in the film that is not generated from some previous image”. Therefore, with the Graphic Paintbox, “film is no longer restricted to the mere reproduction of once-recorded images; with this technique, new images are created and the filmmaker becomes a painter” (which Greenaway already is, see Greenaway, Gras and Gras 2000: 132). The Paintbox allows free manipulation of previously recorded images that can thus be changed, combined and fused together. This gives the filmmaker unprecedented access to libraries of images and texts that can be called up and merged with images that have been freshly shot or other categories of text or numbers (Figure 4).6 Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 15 But the Graphic Paintbox also functions metaphorically, as an allegorical reading of the Renaissance convention that theater is a mirror as much as the contemporary critical stance that cinema is a mirror and a screen for the spectator identification, which was argued by Phelan (1992: 44) earlier. Furthermore, as she (1992: 49) points out, “as an allegory of the relationship between the artist and his medium, Greenaway’s film is also then an autobiography of his own role as Magus. In this sense, Prospero’s relation to Ariel mirrors Greenaway’s with his paintbox”. But Prospero’s mind and “archive” also mirror Greenaway’s. Thus, to look for authenticity or “originality” here would, as Klein (1996) argues, be out of place. Instead, “the film shows the process of artistic creation and is at the same time an example of this process. Just as Prospero scribens brings forth the drama through the manipulation of his ideas, the film arises through the manipulation of images”. Figure 4. The Graphic Paintbox with the Book of Water in the center against the bathhouse background, framed by an exaggeratedly artificial rain That such diagrammatic manipulation implies dislocation on several levels has already been demonstrated. However, it also means that choices must be made from the dislocated material which, taken out of context, is nothing but manifestations of the same basic stuff. The minute components dislocated in Greenaway’s ‘archive’ can therefore be Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 16 seen as a visual vocabulary articulating a new order of reading. Arising from what is already at hand, it attempts to open up space for acquiring visual literacy by deconstructing verbal literacy. This ‘destructuring’ not only plays with the concept of images as words; it also shows the extent to which verbal language is visual. What does visual literacy mean to us who belong to highly textually literate cultures? How visual is text and how textual are images? There is even increasing evidence of the iconic character of letters: as Mark Changizi et al. (2006) have shown, natural writing systems are partly visual7. At the same time, the visual language of cinema is text based, which Greenaway (2010) has repeatedly deplored, calling for an undoing of “the primacy of the text and the unprimacy of the notion of the image”. Hence, what Greenaway seems to be doing is to thwart our routine cinematic ‘reading’ to show that there are alternatives ways of seeing. By translating the verbal pre-text into wildly associative images, Greenaway’s adaptation is suddenly less an adaptation than a creative translation of Shakespeare’s poetic and evocative text which he then forces us, his viewers / readers, to perform by syntactically combining the disparate elements to literally create new insights8. The experience of being at a loss is critical here since what Greenaway is doing is to expose his “adaptation” to make us aware of what we are unknowingly doing when we are watching movies, not only this one but in particular more conventionally structured ones. This function is connected to a distinctive kind of aesthetic engagement or even experience, which is prior to questions of cognition: we are thrust into a situation in which narrativity is replaced by visuality with the sudden lack of linear narration pushing us to our limits of perception. There is, however, also another aspect of this interaction between adaptation and translation which could explain the curious fact that Prospero’s Books is almost unintelligible to readers who are not very familiar with Shakespeare’s play and forces those well acquainted with it to return to the pre-text over and over again. This shows not only the indexical character of the relationship between pre-text and adaptation, which is what enables orientation and therefore also accounts for the diagrammatic aspect of adaptation. Such mapping processes necessarily involve diagrammatic reasoning, as Peirce (CP 2.272) points out: all thought processes require the formation of an imaginary “sort of skeleton diagram, or outline sketch” of our choices from which we can then make Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 17 our decisions and achieve new insights. However, this can only be done by projecting the various outcomes of our choices which then in themselves produce new and different signs by new combinations and juxtapositions. 5. Conclusion Such new assemblages create both dislocation and disorientation, which underlines the extent to which cinematic orientation in Prospero’s Books is only a provisional and temporary achievement in the ongoing rush of intermedial art forms. These projections are also what make Prospero’s Books different from more conventional narrative cinema and why it confronts us with a cognitive challenge. The projections are of course decisive for the reception of a film adaptation, as they may be either reinforcing the pre-text, or “disjunctive”, resulting in contradictory or even opposing interpretations that will be received differently: “The viewer’s interpretant thus becomes a central factor in accessing the significance of an adaptation, raising the question of whether an academic critical discourse can or should take precedence over other, more popular forms of reception” (Venuti 2007: 34). Hence, Greenaway’s film involves the projection and performance of dislocation on at least three levels: 1) at the diegetic level, as it involves shipwrecks and people being lost in both time and space, including cultural (Caliban) and spiritual (Ariel) dislocation 2) at the level of medium, since, in an adaptation such as Prospero’s Books, the multimedia necessarily must adapt to postmodern sensibilities by generating the sense of dislocation so prominent in Shakespeare’s play. Furthermore, Greenaway clearly wants to create a new way of seeing, a new visual literacy that reorganizes our visual attitudes and extends beyond traditional Hollywood narrative cinema. In so doing, he avails himself of what Winfried Nöth (2009: 114) calls “performative metareference” and defines as “the reference of the act of sign production itself”. Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 18 3) at the level of reception, since the Baroque flood of images seems to have resulted in both utterly disoriented spectators and admirers, though as Klein (1996) suggests, Greenaway perhaps “makes excessive use of the possibilities offered by the Paint Box, demanding visual skills that can only be acquired through extensive training in the appropriate codes”, ane “even if the film … possibly asks too much of the viewer, it nevertheless does not manipulate him”. We may not be manipulated but we are certainly dislocated, since Greenaway’s unbinding of Prospero’s books undoes temporal continuity and therefore the fluency with which we usually ‘read’ the events on the screen. The film may then be considered a series of dislocations reflecting not only the extent to which the source text insists on being enacted and re-enacted but also how the film performatively casts us in the roles of Caliban and Ariel, making us Prospero’s – and Greenaway’s – prisoners. These dislocations may be said to lie at the heart of the adaptation – and in turn, carry forward Shakespeare’s own adaptations and translations of stock narratives and other sources, making this a highly self-referential work. Greenaway does not so much attempt to manipulate viewers as engage them in new ways of experiencing film beyond traditional linear narrative by forcing them to performatively interact with it. His selfreflexive manipulation of time and space creates a liminal space in between and thus the end of the film could be read as unwriting or rewriting Prospero’s dialogue: Shakespeare’s Prospero can stop being a magus, a status he has obtained through his knowledge and the magic he obtained from books. He can give up his magus status and quietly return to being the Duke of Milan, whereas we are let free but in an exilic position, barred from a return home. More generally, thinking of Greenaway’s adaptation in terms of projection and space would suggest the extent to which multimedia are liminal configurations. One medium merges into another and is inevitably consumed in the process: by fire, water or mildew or rot – and reconstructed? If adaptations, as Robert Stam (2005: 45) suggests, “engage the discursive energies of their time, they become a barometer of the ideological trends circulating during the moment of production”, then Greenaway’s adaptation points to the necessity Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 19 to adopt a new visual vocabulary in order to be able to ‘read’ an ever increasingly visually dominated multimedia culture. That is the “mutation” potential that adaptations offer and which implies that a hybrid art form, although it may ‘rob’ a canonical text of some of its meaning, can, in so doing, produce something new and thus contribute to its survival, regardless of medium. That is after all what is self-reflexively suggested by the film’s last frames capturing Ariel’s flight, as he is set free. Running across a full shot of the clapping court which freezes and first becomes a background still, then a world map, he gains speed to leap out of the frame to other spheres. The creative process will always find new ways of articulating itself; the artist’s spirit in whatever form will always survive. In Peter Greenaway’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s text, intermedial iconicity therefore performatively, diagrammatically and metaphorically reflects the narrative structure, pretexts and contexts of this self-interrogating work. By having Gielgud’s Prospero so ostentatiously colonize and control everyone else with his voice and his magic, Greenaway creates a parallel to his own casting of himself as an old-fashioned ‘auteur-style director’. Hence, he makes a caricature of himself in the all-powerful character of Prospero, and thus self-reflexively and ironically distances himself not only from Hollywood conventions but also from the more typically European text-based cinema he obviously wants to escape. But Greenaway’s adaptation achieves something more as he taps most radically into our ways of unthinkingly watching film adaptations. By jamming our systems of interpretation to the effect that even the most readily intelligible signs require slow and painstaking analysis, he makes us aware of the degree to which the visual language of cinema is imbricated in language. His deconstruction of cinematic language thus demonstrates the complexity as well as the interdependence of both reading and seeing processes and how much this is grounded in iconicity. In so doing, he not only lays bare the extent to which our textual literacy is acculturated at the expense of other kinds of reading but also points to new fields of investigation of how such iconic processes work. Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 20 Notes 1. Stam (2005: 4-7) mentions eight sources of hostility to adaptations, namely literature’s “putative superiority”, “dichotomous thinking”, “iconophobia”, “logophilia”, “anticorporeality”, “the myth of facility”, and “class prejudice” and “parasitism”, i.e., that films feed on their literary source text. 2. A map projection will distort the relationships between five geographical features, namely area, angle, gross shape, distance and direction (see Ljungberg 2005; Monmonnier 1996) 3. The film’s more detailed structure consists of ninety-one sections, each designating a different visual location and broken down into numbered shots. 4. For a discussion on reading and misreading Shakespeare, see Hulme 2003; Loomba 2003). 5 Although digital imaging has become much more sophisticated in the twenty years since Prospero’s Books was produced, Greenaway’s artful manipulation of time and space in the Graphic Paintbox images for the film was revolutionary at the time of the film’s production and is still impressive. For a discussion of his relationship with the Paintbox, see Greenaway, Gras and Gras (2000). 6. Digital representations are always iconic since there is no longer a physical connection between the subject and the image- The image is created by numerical translation. This is why the reliability of photography’s connection to the real has been so debated with the onset of digital photography. The same goes for digital manipulations – as soon as the indexical anchoring is lost, so is the relationship with reality, which makes the image iconic. 7. Oliver Sacks (2010: 24) points out that alexia, word blindness or visual aphasia, is cased by damage to a specific visual word form area in the brain “dedicated to the visual image of words” which is activated in reading. This sudden inability to read by often highly skilled readers demonstrates the extent to which reading, although we might think of it as a “seamless and indivisible act, and as we read we attend to meaning …[…] is in fact, dependent on a whole hierarchy or cascade of processes which can break down at any point” (Sacks 2010: 27). We are born with some sort of system which allows us to make sense of the world; nevertheless, defining and recognizing objects, which takes place in the perceptual act, demands ”a whole hierarchy of functions”. As Sacks points out, ”[w]e do not see objects as such, we see shapes, surfaces, contours and boundaries presenting themselves in different illuminations or contexts, changing perspective with their movement or ours” and then create invariants from this ”complex, shifting visual chaos”. A similar visual recognition is most likely deployed in reading, Sacks says, and ties this to the discovery made by Mark Changizi (2006) and his colleagues who have shown that all natural writing systems share certain features that our neurovisual system can translate. Investigating more than a hundred ancient and new natural language writing systems, they found that all (including alphabetic and Chinese systems) share certain basic topological features with the environment. As they suggest, these ”have been selected to resemble the conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms” (2006: E117). Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 21 8. As Greenaway pointed out in his talk in Zurich in January 2010, after eight-thousand years of textual literacy he is firmly committed to ”have the textmaker stand in the shadow and the imagemaker proudly come forward”. References Borges, J. L. 1973. Other Inquisitions. London: Souvenir Press. Brown, J. 1991. Prospero’s Books. Review. Washington Post 29 November. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/ prosperosbooksrbrown_a0add6.htm (6 May, 2010). Canby, V. 1991. Movies with their own language. Review of Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. New York Time 15 November. http://movies.nytimes.com /movie/review?res=9E05EED7123AF935A15756C0A967958260 (6 May, 2010). Changizi, M., Zhang, Q., Ye, H., and S. Shimojo. 2006. The structure of letters and symbols throughout human history are selected to match those found in objects in natural scenes. The American Naturalist 167.5: E117-139. Colapietro, V. 1993. Glossary of Semiotics. New York: Paragon. Fauconnier, G. and M. Turner. 2002. The Way We Think. New York: Basic Books. Foucault, M. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Greenaway, P. 1991. Prospero’s Books. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. Greenaway, P. 2010. New Possibilities. Guest lecture at the Zurich School of Art and Design (HGKZ) 7 January. Greenaway, P., Gras, V. and M. Gras. 2000. Peter Greenaway: Interviews. Jackson MS: University Press of Mississippi. Greenblatt, S. Introduction. In The Norton Shakespeare, S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J.E. Howard, and K. Eisaman Maus (eds), 3047-3054. New York: W. W. Norton. Guha, R., and G. Chakraworthy Spivak. 1988. Selected Subaltern Studies. With a foreword by Edward W. Said. Oxford: Oxford UP. Hinson, H. 1991. Prospero’s Books. Review of Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. Washington Post November 27. http://www.washingtonpost.comwp-srv/style/ longterm/movies/videos/prosperosbooksrhinson_a0a720.htm (6 May, 2010). Hulme, P. 2003. Stormy weather: Misreading the postcolonial Tempest. Early Modern Culture 3:1-22. http://emc.eserver.org/1-3/hulme.html. 10 June 2010. Jonze, S. and C. Kauffman. 2002. Adaptation. Klein, H. 1996. “The far side of the mirror”: Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. Ehrfurt Electronic Studies in English (EESE) 12. http://webdoc.gwdg.de/ edoc/ia/eese/artic96/klein/12_96.html. (10 May, 2009). Ljungberg, C. 2005. Cartographic Strategies in Contemporary Fiction. Orientations: Space / Time / Image / Word. C. Clüver, L. Hoek, V. Plesch, and P. de Voogd (eds), 155-172. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Ljungberg, C. 2007. ‘Damn Mad’. Palindromic figurations in literary narratives. In Insistent Images, E. Tabakowska, C. Ljungberg and O. Fischer (eds), 247-265.. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 22 Ljungberg, C. 2010. Diagrammatic Figurations as Textual Performance. In Signergy, J. Conradie, R. Johl, M. Beukes, O. Fischer and C. Ljungberg (eds), 47-71. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Loomba, A. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge. Loomba, A. 2003. The postcolonial Tempest: Response to Peter Hulme’s ‘Stormy Weather’. Early Modern Culture 3:1-22. http://emc.eserver.org/1-3/loomba.html. 10 June 2010. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1980. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago. Monmonnier, M. 1996. How to Lie with Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago. Nöth, W. 2009. Metareference from a semiotic perspective. In Metareference across Media, W. Wolf (ed.), 89-120. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Peirce, C. S. 1931-1958. The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1-6, C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss (eds), Vols 7-8, Arthur W. Burks (ed.). Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cited as CP. Peirce, C.S. 1998. The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2, the Peirce Edition Project (ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Cited as EP 2. Phelan, P. Numbering Prospero’s Books. Performing Arts Journal, vol. 14, no. 2 (May, 1992): 43-50. Romney, J. 1991. Prospero’s Books. Sight and Sound 1.5 (September): 45. Rosenbaum, J. 2004. Prospero’s Books. Chicago Reader Movie 2 July. www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/.../Section?oid... - United States (6 May, 2010). Sacks, O. 2010. A neurologist’s notebook: A man of letters. New Yorker, June 28: 22-28. Shakespeare, W. 1623/1997. The Tempest. In The Norton Shakespeare, S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J.E. Howard, and K. Eisaman Maus (eds), 3055-3107. New York: W.W. Norton. Sharpe, J. 1993. Allegories of Empire. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota. Stam, R. 2005. Introduction: The theory and practice of adaptation. In Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, R. Stam and A. Raengo (eds), 1-52. London: Blackwell. Tweedie, J. 2000. Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. Cinema Journal 40. 1 (Fall): 104-126. Venuti, L. 2007. Adaptation, translation, critique. Journal of Visual Culture 6: 25-43. Ljungberg, Unbinding the Text 23