Dulle Greit, Pieter Brughel the Elder, 1563
Those fleeing Spanish fascism were greeted by the fascism taking hold in France. Brecht saw that what was now taking shape no longer fit the shape of a chamber play, but rather in the landscape of Dulle Griet, or of the Triumph of Death, as Brueghel had painted them. He had the open, wide-format book brought over from a table. For a while it seemed the only thing that interested him anymore was this skeletal woman, this rural Fury who, with a frozen gaze and a gaping mouth, a breastplate over her apron and a sack full of loot slung over her shoulder, swinging her sword amidst flames and fumes, hurried through exploded cities populated by lascivious, slobbering, trunk-bearing, fishlike, reptilian beings, or that red, sandy shoreline brimming with hosts of skeletons, who, to the clang of bells, fanfares, and kettledrums, descended upon the people in amphibious wagons and other armored vehicles, in rectangular shock-troop formations behind tall shields, oozing out of bunkers, laying into them with scythes, hoes, fire tongs, pitch torches, grindstones, nets, throwing them headlong into ponds, forcing them into cages, caves, and onto the barren hills, breaking them on the wheel, beheading them, and stringing them up on rows of gallows. But suddenly he wanted to know how the Popular Front had held up in the Spanish combat zones. […] I pushed a kitchen chair toward the table, turned the book toward me, and inspected the reproductions. Almost two years earlier, in the bookstore in Warnsdorf, I had had these pictures in front of me, now, after my experiences in Spain, they emitted a new force. Often I had asked myself how it could ever be possible to convey impressions of war, since even in precise descriptions they always lost something of their essence. There was something alien that clung to the experiences being conveyed, realistic depictions were only able to cover a tiny detail, under which lay the nightmarish terror, the panicked confusion, unresolved. Here, everything was erupting from beneath the earth, enticed by the figure of Magaera. There was the swirling ash, the brittle earth, there were the tree branches withered by the heat, the demolished walls, there were the helmeted heads of the scouts beneath the shutters, there was the carnage in gateways and caves, the search for shelter beneath boulders, there was the familiar — excessively clear in every detail — and there was the brooding, the plotting; there was the phantasmagoria of deceitfulness, of betrayal, of shamelessness and disgraceful deeds; everything was equally palpable in the tumult.
—Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 2, 1978 (Translation: Joel Scott)
The Triumph of Death, Pieter Brughel the Elder, 1562
He studies the tumbrel filled with skulls. He stand in the aisle and looks at the naked man pursued by dogs. He looks at the gaunt dog nibbling the baby in the dead woman’s arms. These are the long gaunt starveling hounds, they are war dogs, hell dogs, boneyard hounds beset by parasitic mites, by dog tumors and dog cancers.
[…]
He find a second dead woman in the middle ground, straddled by a skeleton. The positioning is sexual, unquestionably. But is Edgar sure it’s a woman bestraddle or could it be a man? He stands in the aisle and they’re all around him cheering and he has the pages in his face. The painting has an instancy he finds striking. Yes, the dead fall upon the living. But he begins to see that the living are sinners. The cardplayers, the lovers who dally, he sees the kind in an ermine cloak with a fortune stashed in hogshead drums. The dead have come to empty out the wine gourds, to serve a skull on a platter to gentlefolk at their meal. He sees gluttony, lust and greed.
Edgar loves this stuff. Edgar, Jedgar. Admit it — you love it. It causes a bristling of his body hair. Skeletons with wispy dicks. The dead beating kettledrums. The sackcloth dead slitting a pilgrim’s throat.
The meatblood colors and massed bodies, this is a census-taking of awful ways to die. He looks at the flaring sky in the deep distance beyond the headlands on the left-hand page — Death elsewhere, Conflagration in many places, Terror universal, the crows, the ravens in silent glide, the raven perched on the white nag’s rump, black and white forever, and he thinks of the lonely tower standing on the Kazakh Test Site, the tower armed with the bomb, and he can almost hear the wind blowing across the Central Asian steppes, out where the enemy lives in long coats and fur caps, speaking that old weighted language of theirs, liturgical and grave. What secret history are they writing?
—Don De Lillo, Underworld, 1997 (Previously cited by Umberto Eco in On Ugliness, 2007)
Does The Triumph Of Death resemble the current plague situation in the USA?
Posted by: Titch | April 12, 2020 at 12:48 AM
Somewhat!
Posted by: GK | April 24, 2020 at 07:52 PM