Inside Bruegel by Edward Snow

Author:Edward Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

Fig. 109

But all this changes when one passes to the single top spinner on the other side of the central column (Fig. 110). A mental element intrudes into the boy’s activity and one’s perception of it, and at both levels the result is something like a loss of innocence. The stiff, hieratic pose into which the boy is frozen robs his body of any sense of animation and turns it into a container of controlled psychic energy. Suddenly there is a question about what is hidden inside the self and what motivates its need for an object. The top spinners on the right are caught at the peak of their gestures by the instant of representation; but the hand of the boy on the left seems to pause of its own accord. He appears to eye his top from a greater distance than the strictly pragmatic arm’s length that separates the boys on the right from theirs. The net effect is a space of measured reflection in which the boy “administers” the lashing of his top and at the same time stands back and observes the effect of his blows. We can read his attitude as either brutality or detached curiosity—indeed, it is the strange, affectless combination of the two that makes the image so unsettling.

These aspects of the boy’s posture combine with his monklike habit and the framing arch to make the spontaneous motor-visual empathy we have with the top spinners on the right virtually impossible in his case. It is difficult not to “see through” the boy’s activity to the iconography of the Flagellation, or to the current practices of the Inquisition, or to the legal punishments Bruegel himself had depicted less than a year earlier in his Justicia (Fig. 52).4 Indeed, the boy’s gesture seems a direct allusion to that print’s executioner and flagellator. The posture of the girl hunched against the wall behind him similarly (if more distantly) recalls the two heads bowed beneath raised swords in Justicia. Her presence, also, succumbs to the emblematic mode of perception triggered by the isolated top spinner. Realistically perceived, she is an instance of uninhibited curiosity about sexuality and the body’s natural functions. Her lax “incontinence” contrasts vividly with the tight fixity of the boys’ postures: between them they suggest issues of “control” and complex ontological differences between holding in and letting go. But at the same time she tends to read as a figure of abject passivity. The arch couples her with the boy in such a reading and installs her in the mental space above him. There she can function—again, at the level of a “reading”—not only as a fantasized object but as a subjective complement: either a cast-out (or in Kristevan terms “abjected”) passivity by means of which the single top spinner’s active mastery is secured or an abused inner state where his sadistic impulse originates (and upon which it works).5

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