Seduction, Receptivity and the ‘Feminine’ in Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book

As is well known to anyone familiar with Peter Greenaway's cinema, systems abound in his work. It is packed with organizational devices whose purpose is to impose order on existence: structural patterns, taxonomies, representational regimes, meta-narratives and so on. Such systems may operate diegetically, in the preoccupations and obsessions of individual characters, or non-diegetically, punctuating the very composition of a film. Yet they are habitually shown to be unequal to the reality it is their raison d'ětre to organize; comically or tragically, they end up dwarfed or burst apart by the multiplicities they exist to contain, blindly outflanked by what is. As such, Greenaway's cinema follows a vector running militantly counter to much mainstream - and certainly Hollywood - film. Whereas the latter tends to unfold in the direction of resolution and clarification, moving narratorially from confusion to stability, from fragmentation to synthesis, Greenaway repeatedly takes the yearning for synthesis and resolution as an explicit and ironic focus. Pre-emptively dramatizing the endeavour to create organizing principles, myths and narratives, his films insistently trace their etiolation and dissolution, their inevitable failure to ‘stav[e] off chaos’.1

As several commentators have pointed out, the articulation of this entropic vision is frequently coded in gendered terms.2 Greenaway himself has observed that: “Film after film after film” expresses his fundamental “mistrust […] of [the figure of] the male hero” (Willoquet-Maricondi, 2008, p. 309), and this emerges most emphatically in the repeated affiliation between his male protagonists and the organizing codes and systems that are progressively undermined in the course of each work. It is Greenaway's men who ordinarily fabulate and/or impose these codes, hubristically seeking to master existence by interpreting, cataloguing, regulating it. They rarely survive longer than the organizing matrices they sponsor. Greenaw