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

1

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

2

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

3

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,

4

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

5

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.

6

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

7

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

8

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.

9

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

10

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

11

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

12

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.

13

[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:

14

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.)

15

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.

16

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

17

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.

18

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

19

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

20

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,

21

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)

22

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).

23

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,

24

“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.

25

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.

26

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? 

27

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. 

28

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.

29

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.”

30

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

31

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.

32

“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”)

33

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.

34

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;

35

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

36

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,

37

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.”

41

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.

42

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.

43

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

44

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.

45

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.

46

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

47

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.

48

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

49

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

50

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

51

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.

52

 

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.

53

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.

54

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.

55

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.

56

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.

57

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

58

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

59

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

60

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

61

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

62

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,

63

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.

64

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

65

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.

66

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.

67

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

68

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

69

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

70

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.

71

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

72

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

73

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.

74

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

75

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.

76

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

77

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).

78

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

79

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

80

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

81

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.)

82

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

83

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,

84

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

85

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

86

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

87

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).

88

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.

89

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

90

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.

91

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

92

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

93

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

94

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.

95

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,

96

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

97

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.

98

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

99

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

100

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

101

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

102

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

103

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

104

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