Introduction: When Narrative Gives Way to Organisation
If Finnegans Wake abandons episodes because episodicity itself becomes a limiting fiction, Peter Greenaway abandons narrative for a closely related reason.
Greenaway’s films are often described as baroque, mannered, overly intellectual, or perversely anti-story. These descriptions miss the point. Greenaway is not rejecting narrative because he cannot tell stories; he is rejecting it because narrative closure misdescribes how meaning actually operates.
Like Joyce in the Wake, Greenaway shifts from storytelling to continuous organisation.
1. From Sequence to System
Classical cinema presupposes:
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temporal progression
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causal continuity
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character-centred motivation
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narrative payoff
Greenaway replaces these with:
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lists
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catalogues
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numerical constraints
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taxonomies
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formal symmetries
This is not aesthetic excess. It is a structural decision.
In this, Greenaway is doing visually what the Wake does linguistically: dissolving the primacy of sequence.
2. The Draughtsman’s Contract: Rules Without Resolution
The Draughtsman’s Contract is often read as a puzzle to be solved. This is a mistake.
The film establishes:
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rigid rules of representation,
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precise perspectival constraints,
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obsessive visual repetition.
Yet the accumulation of detail does not yield clarity. It yields overdetermination.
Like Wakean language, the system is too productive to stabilise. The rules generate meaning, but they do not guarantee truth.
3. Images That Refuse to Settle
Greenaway’s frames behave like Joyce’s sentences in the Wake:
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densely layered
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internally structured
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resistant to prioritisation
There is no privileged element:
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foreground competes with background,
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text overlays image,
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image becomes diagram,
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diagram becomes ornament.
The eye cannot decide where to rest — because resting would be a false closure.
Meaning remains in motion.
4. Characters as Functions, Not Agents
Greenaway’s characters resemble Joyce’s Wakean figures more than classical protagonists.
They are:
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placeholders for formal roles,
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nodes in systems of inheritance, desire, violence, or decay,
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vehicles for constraint rather than psychological depth.
Identity becomes procedural, not personal.
5. Non-Commutativity Without Episodes
Unlike Ulysses, Greenaway does not divide his films into stylistically discrete episodes. Instead, he creates continuous visual non-commutativity.
Each new frame:
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reconditions the previous ones,
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alters the salience of earlier details,
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retroactively shifts meaning.
There is no stable “order of viewing” that would make the system converge. Even repeated viewings do not settle interpretation — they intensify instability.
This is Wakean continuity rendered visible.
6. The Viewer as Ethical Participant
Perhaps the deepest affinity between Greenaway and Joyce lies here:
neither allows passive consumption.
The viewer, like the reader of the Wake, must:
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choose what to attend to,
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tolerate excess without synthesis,
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abandon the hope of final understanding.
This is not aesthetic cruelty. It is an ethics of participation.
7. Why Greenaway Is Often Resisted
Greenaway is frequently accused of being cold, cerebral, or inhuman. These reactions are revealing.
What is resisted is not complexity, but the loss of:
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narrative reassurance,
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emotional hierarchy,
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interpretive closure.
Greenaway removes the comfort of being told what matters.
In doing so, he exposes the viewer’s own habits of sense-making — exactly as Joyce does.
Conclusion: Seeing the Wake
If Finnegans Wake is language that never pauses long enough to become an episode, Greenaway’s cinema is vision that never pauses long enough to become narrative.
Both enact the same ontological insight:
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meaning is generative, not stored
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coherence is local, not global
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closure is optional — and often dishonest
What remains is not confusion, but play — serious, structured, inexhaustible play.
And like the kaleidoscope:
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the fragments are fixed,
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the relations keep turning,
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and no final picture was ever the point.
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