The Pillow Book (1996) by Peter Greenaway

J. Lacan

Fonction et champ de la parole et du language, In: Ecrits.

"Le symptôme est ici le signifiant d'un signifié refoulé de la conscience du sujet. Symbole écrit sur le sable de la chair et sur le voile de Maïa - Mais c'est une parole de plein exercice, car elle inclut le discours de l'autre dans le secret de son chiffre."


J. Lacan

Lituraterre, in: Autres Ecrits.

La lettre dessine « le bord du trou dans le savoir »



M. Liart

Le Phénomène Psychosomatique.

« le phénomène psychosomatique n'est pas un cri, puisque celui-ci s'adresse à l'Autre, c'est un écrit qui n'est "pas à lire", c'est un imprimé.


P. Willoquet-Maricondi

Fleshing the Text: Greenaway's Pillow Book and the Erasure of the Body (pdf)

[…] Greenaway's The Pillow Book is inspired by the classic 10th-century Japanese text, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, a diary written by a lady-in-waiting at the court of the Heian empress, Sadako. In this diary, Sei Shonagon recounts her amorous adventures, offers aesthetic observations, and indulges in one of Greenaway's own favorite activities: list-making. What also drew Greenaway to Sei Shonagon's text was the Japanese author's enthusiasm for literature and the natural world, an enthusiasm which Greenaway clearly shares.

[…]

what Greenaway redefines through his "art-about-art" is, more broadly speaking, representationality itself. Greenaway's references to art history are but particular manifestations of his comprehensive investigation of what it means to represent. Greenaway's films explore the means through which humanity has sought to represent itself and the world--through images (paintings, drawings, photography, films), objects (architecture, sculpture), words (print, calligraphy), sounds (speech, music), and bodies (dance, sex, death).

[…]

Abram applies phenomenology, most specifically the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to an investigation of the impact of written language, particularly the phonetic alphabet, on our perception of and relation to our bodies and to the "body" of the world around us. In this study, Abram examines the origins of writing and describes writing's subsequent gradual divorce from its natural referents--the human body and the land. What I would like to suggest in my analysis of The Pillow Book is that the split between language and body, which, Abram convincingly suggests, was brought about by alphabetic writing, is something analogous to the split, hypothesized by Lacanian theory, of the Subject from the totality of Being brought about by the Subject's entry into the Symbolic.

[…]

In the case of The Pillow Book, language--in the form of ink--will be substituted […] for human blood, for life itself.



[…]

This process of substitution is initiated when Nagiko's father ritually inscribes a birthday greeting on his daughter's face and neck. Greenaway calls this ritual an "incantation" (The Pillow Book 90). It is designed, I would argue, to mold the child in very specific ways, according to a familiar pre-existing script or narrative.




[…]

This shift--from the organic connection between speech and body to a connection between speech and alphabetic writing--helped inaugurate what Jacques Derrida refers to as the subordination of writing to spoken language characteristic of Western metaphysics, where the written word is taken to be a mere "supplement to the spoken word" (Of Grammatology 7). While Derrida's intention is to deconstruct the basis for this subordination of writing to speech, and to return to writing its disruptive potential, my desire here is to suggest that something more fundamental is lost in this process whereby speech and alphabetic writing become linked. What is lost is the sense that a material, organic body is at the source of the production of both speech and writing--whether alphabetic, hieroglyphic, or ideographic.

[…]

The logic of Derrida's argument is that Western metaphysics privileges logos because of its proximity to the signified. Since the essence of the signified is presence, the privileging of logos amounts to a privileging of presence. This privileging of presence is, for Derrida, a privileging of univocal meaning and truth.

[…]

If speech comes to have the value of truth, it is only because writing has already made possible the dissociation between a "concept" and any particular, local manifestation of what is represented by the concept.

[…]

By separating "knowledge" from the body of the "knower" and from place, writing makes possible the abstraction of knowledge, its transportability in time and space, and consequently its universalization and permanence.

[…]

in The Pillow Book, the living body is literally, not simply metaphorically, sacrificed in the name of the written word. The film allegorizes the process, described by Jean Baudrillard, of "substituting signs of the real for the real itself" (4). If an analogy is drawn between the human body and the body of the world, and between text-making and map-making, Greenaway's film can be taken as an allegory of the process through which the map comes to replace the territory--through which, in the film, Jerome's skin is literally fashioned into a book. Jerome's flesh is removed, separated from the skin, and discarded as garbage.






[…]

The Pillow Book can thus be taken to support Abram's contention that written language, particularly the phonetic alphabet, has permitted a timeless and disembodied kind of "knowledge" that estranges us and alienates us from the living, sensuous world, and that ultimately becomes fatal to us and to the world.

[…]

The film opens with this birthday ritual. We see Nagiko's father gently painting a birthday greeting on her forehead, cheeks, lips, and neck, while a gramophone plays a record popular at the time Nagiko's parents met. Nagiko's mother, grandmother, and aunt are present as well, but mostly as witnesses (audience, readers). The father's action is described in the filmscript as ritualized and affectionate, but also as odd and disturbing: "the child is no more, for a moment, than something to write on. And the father's signing is a little too Godlike" (The Pillow Book 31). The father's drawing of the letters on the girl's face is accompanied by his recitation of an oral incantation, a spell of sorts, which works to establish the child's identity and role within a filial narrative, one she is destined to pass on to her own child.







[…]

Subjectivity and narrative are further linked when Nagiko sees her own written-upon reflection in a mirror. Her specular experience thus takes place from within the Symbolic realm, through language. Kaja Silverman has argued that the Lacanian mirror stage, which I believe this scene is also designed to evoke, "is always mediated through language, and can only be understood in terms of organized cultural representations" (85). To dramatize the importance of this moment of self-recognition, of Nagiko's own recognition and acceptance of herself as a Self, as an Other, as an authored subjectivity, the image reflected in the mirror is colorized, while the rest of the frame remains in black and white. Greenaway has suggested that the mixing of black and white with color photography plays with the notion that the truth is in black and white while fantasy is in color. One implication of this is that the colored reflection of Nagiko in the mirror is a fantasy of egocentric subjectivity which will become the reality of modern man's and woman's emergence into the Symbolic.





[…]

By virtue of being visible, only the written word, as opposed to the spoken word, could be mistaken for a body and/or a world.

[…]

The Pillow Book, by showing the fusion of textual language and the body […] is Greenaway's clearest but also most allegorical cinematic expression of humanity's alienation from its own body and the body of the world.

[…]

"some cultures permit no images, perhaps some cultures ought to permit no visible text"

[…]

In this context, it is interesting to note that the script calls for a scene which was shot but not included in the commercially released film. In the script, the calligrapher hands Nakigo's maid an onion before he leaves. Surmising that perhaps the onion juice will reveal the invisible writing on Nagiko's body, the maid rubs the onion over the body of the young model. Although the juice from the onion fails to reveal the writing on the body, it causes Nagiko to shed tears which, as they splash on her body, magically expose the letters. Once again, the body itself--its fluids--is shown to be the agent of language. The agents of language here are tears, however. Thus, the emergence of written language is associated with the shedding of tears--with grief, pain, and loss.

[…]

Greenaway is also deploying multiple representational means to ask critical and crucial questions about representationality itself. Above all, he invites "new sympathies" with the non-human world by recasting man's position in that world. He reconnects language to the body by showing that oral and written expression emanate from the body. Finally, Greenaway reveals the dangers to the body of substituting an abstracted and arbitrary body of language for the expressive sensorial body.

[…]

as Greenaway has pointed out in a personal conversation, Yiddish was mostly an oral language. When first committed to paper, it was written in Hebrew. The speakers of Yiddish were also, apparently, forbidden to use the language to describe body parts. Jerome subverts these interdictions associated with spoken Yiddish by writing the name of a body part on a body part, and by using the phonetic alphabet.

[…]

He [Greenaway] has also traced the development of language as something emanating from, or produced by, the body to something which now produces the body, scripts it, and envelops it as a second layer of skin.



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