Bruegel in Words

As Above, So Below (2002), a novel by Rudy Rucker, gives us a lively if somewhat melodramatic fictional account of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The known details of Bruegel's life are few so Rucker layers his novel with fairly prosaic relationships, almost soap opera-esque, and colors the narrative with known historical detail of the Low Countries under the reign of Charles the V and Phillip the II of Spain. What the novel lacks in prose elegance and style it makes up for by conjuring the sights, sounds, smells, and day-to-day goings-on of life in places like Antwerp, Brussels, Mechelen in the 1500s.

During Bruegel's short life (1525-1569) he no doubt witnessed the atrocities and persecutions perpetrated by the Spanish monarchy against the occupied peoples of the Low Countries. His Massacre of the Innocents, a Biblical theme, has been adapted to portray a village scene in his native country and depicts the depredations unleashed on the citizens by the soldiers and mercenaries of the Spanish Crown. Rucker includes various details and scenes that aptly illustrate life under occupation and weaves these into the imagined narrative of Bruegel's life.

Massacre of the Innocents, 1567

The novel begins with Bruegel as a young man traveling to Rome and encountering real mountains (the Alps) for the first time (a salient detail as Bruegel would become known as one of the greatest landscape artists of all time), and ends with his untimely death of an unspecified stomach condition in 1569. In between, Rucker uses Bruegel's masterpieces as jumping off points for creating the fictional details of his novel. It's a useful method and lends meaning, real or not, to the works themselves while allowing the author to sketch key periods of the artist's life.

For those interested in his research and process, Rucker has posted his notes on the writing of So Above, So Below.

Two other novels in which Bruegel plays a staring role are Bruegel, or A Workshop of Dreams by Claude-Henri Rocquet (1991), and Headlong (1999) by Michael Frayn, both worth reading.

Let The Great World Spin

Just finished Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin while sitting in the fading light on the upstairs back deck of a crisp spring evening, a high white half moon overhead in a milky blue sky. My first reaction was to stand up and look around at the neighborhood, the backyards of the neighbors that I could see from my elevated vantage point, and further, across the way to Priest St and the cars passing there, and it occurred to me how amazing literature can be, how it can reach right in and touch the essential part of us, the core place where humanity lurks within everyone, the love place, love between family members, the amazing place of universal oneness, and I felt sad then, looking across the houses and the parked cars, thinking about the poverty of people’s lives in this culture imbued as they are with the superficialities of sports and television shows, and I wondered admiringly about Colum McCann’s great achievement, his deeply rendered portrait of that human place, I felt it, embraced it, and despite whatever sadness I felt for the lack of this brilliance in the cultural ebb and flow, I also felt euphoric, amazed, enthused, my heart beating with a determined thump, my eye wide open to the beauty around me.