The Draughtsman’s Contract and the Crisis of Structuralism

Peter Greenaway’s cinema questions the numerical, verbal and pictorial determinations of sets and systems. Two or one, even or odd? (Twelve drawings or ‒ thirteen?) Is two, as a stabilization of symmetry, undermined by decompositions in time and space that defy any possible reduction to sub-binaries? This latter question is reserved mainly for A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), though it is anticipated in Vertical Features Remake (1978) and especially The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), which I will treat as a response to both questions at once. The plot of this film, with its riderless horses and lack of an heir, raises the question Lévi-Strauss raised in the most influential exposition of structuralism we have, The Structural Study of Myth. Two or one? Are we born of parents or are we autochthonous? Lévi-Strauss’s reading of the Oedipus myth is an allegory of structuralism itself: are intelligible signs born from the differentiation of two other signs (binaries) or do they arise parthenogenetically, as “natural signs,” from the autonomous self-identity of what they represent? On the other hand, in the dissolution of identity we see in the body of Mr. Herbert raised from the moat, are there appearances that dissolve identity altogether? The paper will show how the overdetermined frame and its symmetries (the stationary camera, the draughtsman’s viewfinder and grid, the “framing” of Mr. Neville, etc.) are confirmed and disconfirmed by invasions of the frame, and the ways in which drawing, painting, and landscaping both “fix on paper” and disrupt the offspring or sterility of twinning.