Fictional Worlds as Systems: 4 Prospero’s Books — Performative, Codified Worlds

Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books presents a fictional world where the primary mode of constraint is performative and codified. Unlike Wonderland’s flexible paradox or Gormenghast’s architectural rigidity, this world enacts its intelligibility through layered symbolic, narrative, and performative structures.

Performative constraints

In Prospero’s Books, the text, images, and performance instructions function as rules that shape the appearance and unfolding of phenomena. Characters, narrative sequences, and symbolic acts are governed by codified practices that define what can emerge and how it can be interpreted. The world holds together because participants — performers, viewers, readers — attune to these constraints.

Codification and layering

Constraint is multilayered: the narrative text, the performative staging, and the symbolic visual motifs all interact. These layers are not merely decorative; they reinforce one another, producing coherence across time and medium. The world is intelligible because codified patterns guide perception and action.

Lessons for relational ontology

1. Constraint through enactment: the world’s phenomena arise not from passive rules but from actions that instantiate rules.

2. Layered intelligibility: multiple overlapping constraints produce richness and stability without requiring a fixed underlying reality.

3. Coordination across participants: intelligibility depends on alignment between performers and observers, highlighting relational aspects of world-making.

Prospero’s Books exemplifies how worlds can be made through symbolic, performative, and codified constraints, showing that intelligibility does not require either flexible play or rigid hierarchy. It reveals a third axis of world-making: one where performance, codification, and symbolic layering sustain phenomena and meaning.

Looking ahead

Having explored Wonderland, Gormenghast, and Prospero’s Books, we have seen three distinct modes of fictional world-making: mutable, architectural, and performative. The next post will synthesise these insights, reflecting on what fictional worlds teach us about systems, constraints, and the emergence of intelligibility.