Introduction: Convergence Without Collapse
Yet they do not — and cannot — converge all the way.
Finnegans Wake dissolves episodicity, segmentation, and stable construal altogether. Greenaway approaches this edge but stops short. This is not conservatism, nor aesthetic compromise.
It is a consequence of what film is.
Understanding why Greenaway must stop where Joyce does not clarifies both artists — and reveals something crucial about the limits of total play.
1. The Wake Eliminates the Pause Point
The Wake succeeds in abandoning episodes because language permits:
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continuous re-lexicalisation
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syntactic slippage without full breakdown
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semantic overlap without visual anchoring
Written language allows micro-instability everywhere at once. There is no frame boundary that must hold. No sensory channel that demands resolution.
The Wake never has to stop meaning from sliding — because nothing in language forces a pause.
2. Film Is Built from Forced Cuts
Film, by contrast, is constituted by unavoidable constraints:
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frames replace one another
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shots end
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edits occur
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scenes terminate
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durations are imposed
Even the most fluid cinematic sequence is composed of discrete actualisations.
Greenaway stretches continuity to its limit — but the limit is real.
3. The Image Cannot Slide Like Language
A Wakean word can:
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belong simultaneously to multiple languages
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activate several meanings at once
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mutate internally without losing legibility
An image cannot do this to the same degree.
Visual elements must:
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occupy space,
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present determinate forms,
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resolve into perceptual figures.
Even ambiguity in film requires stability long enough to be seen as ambiguous.
Total semantic liquefaction would collapse perception itself.
4. Why Greenaway Uses Excess, Not Dissolution
Knowing this, Greenaway does not attempt Wakean continuity directly. Instead, he uses:
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visual excess
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informational overload
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competing symbolic systems
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numerical and taxonomic constraints
He creates images that are too full to settle, rather than images that dissolve.
Where Joyce melts structure, Greenaway saturates it.
The result is not continuous flow, but continuous pressure.
5. The Ethical Limit of Filmic Participation
There is also an ethical boundary.
The Wake demands extreme reader participation, but reading remains:
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self-paced,
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interruptible,
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reversible.
Film is imposed in time.
A fully Wakean film — one that never stabilised, never paused, never allowed perceptual rest — would not be participatory. It would be coercive.
Greenaway respects this limit. He invites effort, not endurance unto collapse.
6. Why Film Must Preserve Local Coherence
For meaning to remain inhabitable in film, it must preserve:
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moments of visual coherence
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recognisable patterns
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recurring motifs that can be grasped
Greenaway ensures that while global synthesis fails, local intelligibility survives.
This is the price of visuality — and its strength.
7. Wakean Ambition, Filmic Wisdom
Seen this way, Greenaway’s stopping short is not a limitation but a form of discipline.
He pushes film to the edge of:
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non-narrativity,
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non-commutativity,
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system over story,
while refusing to cross into perceptual uninhabitability.
Conclusion: Total Play Has Medium-Specific Limits
The lesson here is not about superiority, but ontological fit.
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The Wake demonstrates what happens when meaning never settles.
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Greenaway demonstrates how far a visual system can approach that condition without breaking its audience.
Both are explorations of total play — but each respects the material constraints of its medium.
Greenaway stops where film must stop — not because he fears the Wake, but because he understands exactly how close he can go.
And that understanding is what makes his work so exacting, so demanding, and so quietly honest.
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