Scripta 9_2_link_final.pdf - Uniandrade

[…] to superimpose three images at the same time or the texts which are
being said about each one of the characters, in such a way that metaphor
and reality can be seen at the same time. The director relates this narrative
procedure, which he had already employed in Death in the Seine, to cubism,
in which several different aspects of the same object are represented at the
same time. 4
The books, introduced by means of superimposed images and by
a narrator’s voice-over, during the narrative pauses, reveal themselves as an
extensive compilation of Renaissance knowledge, which ranges from
astrology to geometry, architecture, cosmography, and other sciences.
The fact that the books that Shakespeare’s Prospero studies are
mostly of magic and that it is from them that he derives his power has
probably inspired Greenaway to conceive of the books in his Prospero’s
library not as ordinary ones but as living, magical (and at times even
phantasmagoric) books in which colors change, liquids ooze and glow, sounds
and voices are heard, three-dimensional objects can be seen to move and
spring out of the pages, plants, animals and mythological beings surround
the words, showing that books reflect all that exists “outside a library context”
(GREENAWAY, 1991, p. 107). For instance, as it is opened, the pages of
the book called A Primer of Small Stars “twinkle with travelling planets,
flashing meteors and spinning comets. The black skies pulsate with red
numbers. New constellations are repeatedly joined together by fast-moving,
dotted lines” (GREENAWAY, 1991, p. 17; 20).
They are books with which the reader can interact. As Prospero
turns the pages of Vesalius’ Anatomy of Birth, his “fingers appear to become
covered in blood … the organs of the body become three-dimensional
[…] then red ink floods the paper. There is the sound of babies crying”
(GREENAWAY, 1991, p. 70). In The Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead, “a
voice chants their names with a sonorous but rapid whispering monotone.
[…] We hear the doleful scratching of a hundred pens and the deep tolling
of bells” (GREENAWAY, 1991, p. 76). When you open the smaller books,
inside The Book of Languages, many languages are released: “… words and
sentences and paragraphs gather like black tadpoles or flocking
starlings…accompanied by a great noise of babbling voices”
(GREENAWAY, 1991, p. 96).
Three books are related to the natural sciences, among which we
can mention The Book of the Earth, which is described as follows: “its pages
Scripta Uniandrade, v. 9, n. 2, jul.-dez. 2011
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