Brueghel/Weiss/De Lillo

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)