ABSTRACT
Since every book has these gaps, these blanks that are filled in reading, the visionary experience in question, then, may arise not ‘henceforth’ with the opening of Flaubert’s book but always with the opening of any book. Christopher Collins, in The Poetics of the Mind’s Eye, asserts that ‘every text presents a world in which figures, or fragments of figures, hover upon empty grounds, a bizarre world of floating synechdoches, of undulant Goyaesque phantoms…every poetic text simply by virtue of its medium simulates visionary events.’3 Later I will be discussing the argument that produced this conclusion. First, though, I want to concentrate on a specific artistic practice; for artistry precedes argument, produces argument, is perhaps a form of argument. As Foucault develops his points out of Flaubert’s work, so I wish to develop mine out of a more recent example of the visionary page, one that makes the visionary visible in ways that Breughel could never have conceived: Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books.
