* Thornton Niven Wilder's novel 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey' (1927), available in Penguin's series 'Twentieth-Century Classics'.

> Thornton who?

* Wilder (1897-1975), a US playwright and novelist. He won the 1927 Pulitzer prize for 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey'. Other works include, 'Our Town' (1938), 'The Skin of Our Teeth' (1942) and 'The Matchmaker' (1954). The last appeared as the hit musical 'Hello Dolly!' in New York and in London, 1964 and 1965 respectively.

> So what's the connection with 'The Falls'?

* Well, the novel - to quote Greenaway - is, 'a scrupulous study of biography, written to justify a coincidence when five unassociated individuals fell to their death at the collapse of a Peruvian rope-bridge. The proto-Falls needed a rope-bridge disaster and the Violent Unknown Event - the VUE - was invented..'. It's said that Wilder's novel is the only one Greenaway has read encyclopaedically ten times.

> Who were the five unfortunate individuals?

* The Marquesa de Montemayor, Pepita, Esteban, Uncle Pio and Don Jaime. They fell to their deaths at noon on Friday, 20 July, 1714.

> And...?

* Whereas most of inhabitants of Lima and Cuzco, Peru, would have said with secret joy, 'There but for the grace of God go I', Brother Juniper - a red haired Franciscan - decided to establish 'why' this disaster happened to 'those' five individuals. There are a hundred ways of wondering at circumstance. Was it a coincidence or part of a plan? "Some say that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God." The disaster clearly wasn't dependent on human error, nor on probability. It was an 'Act of God' and, being such, Brother Juniper decided he could use it to prove a theological rule.

> Just a second... 'Act of God'. Isn't that the title of a 1981 film by Greenaway?!

* That's right.

> I think we're on to something here! Carry on...

* Before the rope bridge disaster, Brother Juniper had attempted to catalogue the souls of 15 victims and 15 survivors of a pestilence which visited the village of Puerto. He rated each soul on a basis of one to ten as regards it goodness, its piety, and its usefulness.

> And...?

* Firstly, Brother Juniper decided that his third criteria was useless. Secondly, according to his criteria, the dead were five times more worth saving than the survivors and, therefore, the pestilence had been directed against the really valuable people in the village of Puerto.

> That must have shaken his faith! What conclusion did he draw?

* 'The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.'

> So what did he make of the collapse of the bridge at San Luis Rey?

* At first - as is to be expected - he believed the wicked had been visited by destruction and the good called early to heaven; pride and wealth had been confounded as an object lesson to the world, humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city.

> You imply that he revised his opinion.

* As a matter of fact he did. He went on to consider whether the wicked were actually as bad as he and others had perceived them to be. Before he could pursue this line of thought, however, his study was pronounced heretical. It was ordered to be burned along with its author. Whether we are to take this as a criticism of the Church is best left for another dialogue. Anyhow, Brother Juniper spent his last night in a cell trying to seek in his own life the pattern that had escaped him in the five San Luis Rey victims. A delegation from the village of Puerto and Nina (Goodness 2, Piety 5, Usefulness 10) and others stood while Brother Juniper was given to the flames.

> So, Greenaway's 'The Falls' and Thornton Wilder's 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey' are attempts to not only contain but also to come to terms with disaster?

* Yes. They could be seen as attempts to come to terms with disasters by encoding them - or representing them - through language. Maps, catalogues and tabulated data can be taken as representative tools for creating order from chaos. In both Wilder and Greenaway, however, they are presented as bogus, so that the whole nature of representation is called into question.

> You've lost me...

* Sorry, I'll go a bit slower. Both catalogues and maps are selective: they do not, and cannot, display all there is to know about any given phenomena or environment. They are, in a quite important sense, conventional. As we know, conventions usually follow cultural, political and even ideological interests, but if they are to function properly they must be so well accepted as to be almost invisible. In short, catalogues and maps provide practical opportunities for making connections whenever and wherever it is socially and politically strategic. In 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' Borges makes a similar point. He writes, 'The metaphysicians of Tlon do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude... They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect'.

> Wilder, Borges... these seem important to 'The Falls'.

* Reflecting on the strangeness of Wilder's, Borge's and Greenaway's orderings we surely come to also reflect on the ideas of order which 'are' possible for us to think.

> That idea is enough to give you a headache!

* As the extract from Borges may have suggested, there is in some quarters considerable nostalgia for catalogues, maps and even fictions in which the emphasis falls upon the order of 'things' rather than upon the 'order' of things. That is, there is a nostalgia for a mimetic form of representation which purports to give direct access to extra-linguistic and extra-textual reality. The sociology of knowledge argues that such direct access is impossible, since the reality experienced by human beings is always historically produced: there is no transcendent and naturally given reality.'

> That's far too general, let's get back to specifics.

* Okay... Well, I don't think it's a coincidence that both Wilder's novel and Greenaway's film begin with a disaster, with suffering. As I'm sure you know, suffering usually leads one to question the 'order' of things. Out of pain or suffering, out of a feeling of profound dissatisfaction with the present state of knowledge or our mode of being, a philosophical or religious aspiration can arise. However, there is a way in which dominant culture seeks to offer us condolence for suffering, condolence for grief. Not only is the condolence unsatisfactory but it also goes against the 'human condition'. (For an examination of this theme you might want to see Greenaway's 1986 film, 'ZOO'.) It was precisely because of a disaster that Brother Juniper was led to begin his philosophical inquiry: 'do we live by accident and die by accident, or do we live by plan and die by plan?'. Being a Franciscan, he obviously believed his study would prove the last. Who knows what Brother Juniper would have concluded if he had been allowed to live! In contrast, Greenaway, being a humanist, would view Juniper's belief as a myth, a myth designed to reassure us of both our origin and end. As I've said, condolence does not acknowledge the human condition. On a number of ocassions Greenaway has said, 'In a moral world the good rarely get rewarded, the bad rarely get punished, and the innocent are always abused.'

> It all sounds rather pessimistic.

* I can see why you'd think that. Perhaps you'll allow me to quote Greenaway?

> Please do.

* 'Darwin has given man such a short communicable history and such a long uncommunicable prologue that looking back is no comfort either, because evolution appears so directionless, and so apparently purposeless. Darwin has finally put man irredeemably out on his own... Darwin has given us a freedom that no social or religious programme has ever given us, for, if man is on his own, then all the checks we relied on to excuse or explain our own shortcomings and mediocrities have been removed. We are, at least, now free for what we want to be'.

> Hmmm. Does that include being free to make a cup of tea?

* Yes, why don't we have one together? We could discuss the influence of Borges on 'The Falls' while we dunk our Digestives.