The Seen and the Unseen in Pieter Bruegel the Elder and William Carlos Williams

How does Williams present this? In what ways does the poem reveal and conceal what the painting itself does, and in doing so, is it simply a matter of ekphrastic mimesis? Unlike in the painting where we notice Icarus last of all, in Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” Icarus appears in both the opening and closing stanzas. Yet this apparent foregrounding of the subject of Icarus, which the title of the painting also seems to set up, is only the occasion for an immediate relegation of the supposed subject to a relative role. In her essay on this work, Charlotte Kent notices how in the opening lines “According to Brueghel / when Icarus fell / it was spring” there is a grammatical minimization of Icarus by which “The sentence expands out of an indefinite pronoun subject: “it” in “it was spring.” The season loops from object to subject. Icarus is not the grammatical subject of this sentence, nor the subject of the painting at a glance. Icarus is, in both instances, an oblique subject” (72). But in addition to this indefinite pronominal subject, the poem begins with the prepositional structure “According to Brueghel,” which at once establishes an over-arching though invisible subject, the painter, who has painted this mythological scene according to his own vision of it, thus as something both authoritative and open to subjective interpretation. The “oblique subject” of Icarus returns in the last two stanzas where Williams describes that

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning (238)

And so, despite opening and closing the poem, Icarus is both semantically and syntactically marginalized, folded grammatically in the poem and visually in the painting into a border region that emphasizes the “unsignificant” and “unnoticed” tragedy of his flight, dominated by an indefinite subject pronoun attached to a repeated past tense “was.” The poem repeats the intention of the painting through its own formal stratagems, relativizing itself to the painting, but in so doing playing out what the painting is about: the poem is itself an oblique subject that is both included and excluded by its referent, occupying a place of tortured coming after that cannot but claim a certain kind of subject position. The dialectic of the mythic and the real is reproduced in the poem as an undecidable position, located somewhere between a human world and a desired beyond. Mary Ann Caws speaks of the relations between text and image in terms of “insertion and framing, of centering and decentering, of edging and junctures, from left to right, background to foreground, and on a slant” where the reader of these verbal images is led back and forth between them and the visual images they render so as to “learn how to see, to design, to tether, and to interpret the forms and functions of such parallel readings, illuminating the double images given or chosen, as they shape reading itself, perhaps on its way to sight” (330). This aspect of “double reading” captures much of what Williams is doing in this and other pieces, though it should be stressed that the tethering of image and text has as much to do with sight as it does with what sight necessarily elides; the poems as mimetic explorations of the paintings realize themselves in their qualitative differences from the painterly image. In the formal closures and boundedness of the poem, in the black and white differentiation from all color, vision and blindness intermingle, and something new is created that virtually lurks in the bodies of Bruegel’s paintings.

It is precisely this intermingling that comes together in Bruegel’s 1568 The Parable of the Blind, painted shortly before his death. This representation/repositioning of the Biblical parable presents an oblique line running from top left to bottom right of six beggars within realistically-rendered Flemish surroundings in the act of falling headlong into a bog. The fallen leader of the group lies upended, powerless, his head turned vertically such that we cannot see his eyes. The second’s face is turned directly toward us, grimacing as he falls with sockets empty of eyes, suggesting their removal through punishment. He grips a staff lightly held by the third man who, with innocence and trust in his face and white eyes raised aloft, ineluctably moves toward the same fate. Behind him, the fourth man’s shriveled white eyes and sickly yellow face are turned upward in tormented supplication of the heavens, perhaps sensing but not yet caught in the movement downward, he holds the shoulder of the man in front of him. Behind him, the fifth man, mouth slightly agape, plods forward not yet sensing the coming fall while the sixth, connected to the former by a staff, resembles something of a baby with eyelids closed and mouth and nose curiously and playfully titled forward. In the background, the church and its long spire not fully contained by the painting loom over the scene. We are here invited by Bruegel to attempt to see blindness both as thing seen, thus from a vantage outside itself to which it is necessarily blind, and as a form of seeing which we, by virtue of our sight, cannot see. In the mutual elision and inclusion of one reference point within the other, the phenomenon of blindness brings to the fore the duality of the inner and outer gaze, where our vision of the painting as an object representing blindness leads us as if by the force of a downward fall toward a consideration of the inner world of the blind subject, which is for us unseeable. In this very late painting, Bruegel seems to be showing that this duality is insurmountable, that our human condition is conditioned by an otherness that, in marking our finitude and lack of total vision, opens also the very possibility of movement, of interpretation, of life itself. Certainly there are other more symbolic readings of the painting regarding the church and who these curiously well-dressed beggars might represent, such as that given by Lindsay and Huppé who argue that “Bruegel’s concealed point in painting the blindmen’s clothing may be to suggest further the theme of the false priest, contained in the parable of the Blind Leading the Blind…This meaning is perhaps reinforced by the particular position of the church in the background [ ] and the carefully placed tree, completely devoid of leaves, that stands before it, the bare tree being symbolic of those who are damned” (384). Yet whatever symbolic meanings Bruegel might have intended are left as open possibilities in the face of which we, not being able to see what he saw, have only the painting, the composition itself to go by, which, though finite, leaves open the interpretive possibilities made possible through the very lack of vision reinforced through the elisions in seeing and being seen.

It is this aspect of vision’s lack of vision and the corresponding fragility of authority that informs Williams’s rendering of the painting in his poem “The Parable of the Blind,” beginning with the lines “This horrible but superb painting / the parable of the blind / without a red // in the composition” (245), a statement which, when we go back to the painting, there discover the presence of the red that is supposedly absent. The introductory adjectives “horrible” and “superb” reinforce the subjective position of a viewer who shows himself susceptible to belief in seeing what is not there. And so, Williams immediately sets up the question of the veracity and completeness of vision, putting himself somewhere between the one regarding the painting and the blind men depicted. He then describes the oblique downward movement of the blind men across the canvas, stumbling finally “into a bog // where the picture / and the composition ends back / of which no seeing man / is represented” (245). Here we again have reference to Bruegel’s “composition,” a repetition that both differentiates and relates this term to “the picture” described, marking a disjunction between the formal rendering of the piece and a representational content that is only seen insofar as something remains fundamentally unseen: this invisibility is inscribed not only on the surface of the painting within its compositional structure, but also where that structure ends, “back of which no seeing man is represented.” Williams seems here to be drawing attention to the structural possibility of a painting beyond the field of representation, a material but unseen support, the canvas and frame by which the surface is able to receive the gaze of the viewer, allowing both the possibility for seeing and its opposite. The poem ends with a final repetition of what pertains to the “composition,” Williams stating that “there is no detail extraneous // to the composition one / follows the others stick in / hand triumphant to disaster” (245). The same speaker, then, who began by falsely asserting there to be no red in this composition ends with the triumphant assertion that no detail is extraneous to it. The line here drawn between the description of facts, the things of which no ideas pertain save what is found in them, and that which the viewer/narrator injects into these facts—believing to see what is in fact not there being tantamount to not seeing—is made into a spiraling line that curves the objective and subjective modes of appearance upon each other, resulting in an undecidable state wherein the legibility of the painting is suspended. The seen discloses what is unseen, and from the unseen surges the very possibility of seeing.

In Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow, also known as The Return of the Hunters, we have a winter scene in whose light we see hunters returning from an unknown and unseen wilderness whose presence is felt beyond the border of the composition. In this light between afternoon and night, a luminosity felt as only winter can disclose it, the soft white of snow reflecting the blue-green-grey glow of darkening sky, a number of oblique lines lead our eye from one end of the painting to the other: the hunters trudge though a white section of snow that forms a diagonal section of the hill’s top. Unlike the blind men, their faces are not seen; they walk past us, their staffs perched diagonally on their shoulders, their dogs trailing behind. To the left of them, half of an inn is seen, the roof slanting to the ground. The inn sign dangles at a slant, one corner of it having become disconnected from its support. Below it, human figures bundled in black tend to a fire in front of the entrance, its yellow-orange flame burning in a sharp diagonal movement, suggesting heavy wind. Moving to the background of the painting, we see the village in the valley below, to its side tiny, indeterminate black figures spread out on the oblong patches of ice, skating and at play on its surface. Beyond them, jagged mountain peaks rise up, marking the end of the terrestrial plane. Right at the oblique boundary between land and sky from the perspective we view it, a bird is painted in mid-flight, its blackness tearing a hole in the composition’s surface. In this world, all is simultaneously movement and stillness, darkness and light, the near and the far stitched together through the oblique lines by which we traverse from one edge to the other, approaching a vision of totality that never completes itself: the bird-tear where earth meets sky announces this beyond; the hunters themselves, dark bodies against the white ground, their faces unseen, likewise announce the same non-completion and fragility of appearances.

Williams, in his poem on the painting, taps into this movement of the unfinished absolute by focusing on a detail that most viewers would miss, or not attribute much significance to: after enumerating various details of the composition, he ends with the following lines:

Brueghel the painter
concerned with it all has chosen

a winter-struck bush for his
foreground to
complete the picture  .    . (239)

Bruegel, he tells us, is “concerned with it all,” that is, the totality of things, heaven and earth, life in all its modes of belonging together. And yet, Williams asserts, he has chosen this “winter-struck bush” to complete the picture, then ends the line not with a simple mark of punctuation or no punctuation, but with two period marks floating adrift in space. The bush in no way “completes the picture” as Williams suggests; the painting would still be magnificent without it. And yet, this seemingly inconsequential detail, a gnarled shrub with wilted leaves, is seen as having the power of completion. The period marks stranded at the end of the line outside of recognizable grammatical function reinforce this strange sense of completion in the incomplete, or perfection in what cannot be fully integrated into the whole. Thus, what is beyond the painting, what cannot be seen, is made visible through these marks of breakage or of seeming inconsequence: the broken inn sign, the black rupture of the bird, the winter-struck bush. The hunters return to the world of the human-integrated landscape at a slant, moving by way of these diagonals that form the crisscrossing of appearances that are always tilted away from completion, leading us forever onward in the search of what lies beyond the visible surfaces.

In another season, under the changed light of summer, Bruegel’s The Harvesters places us in view of swaths of wheat, thick yellow blocks of it that cover the landscape in the process of being carved out by the scythes of peasants at work in the pink-white haze and heat of noon. As in The Return of the Hunters, the foreground is given as a diagonal stretch of earth, yet instead of the footprints of the hunters marking the pure white of snow with darkened indentations of their progress, there are rather the clusters of wheat cut identically with the scythe, repeating in rows stretched across the floor where women are tying them into bundles. We have here regularity, purposeful labor, total enmeshment and reciprocity of human beings and nature, so much so that the harvesters seem to be a form of expression of the landscape, a mode by which it relates to itself. The human beings become the landscape, but by the same measure, the landscape becomes human, traversed and worked according to a system of production such that the unknown becomes here fully accessible and tactile. In the background, the land disappears into a mist over water, the barely-seen vessels carrying the product of these labors out into a world of commerce beyond. But as far as the painting is concerned, and those who dwell within it, the limit of the visible is the limit of the world, beyond which nothing can be represented. The world of work, which here means human reciprocity with nature in accordance with the cyclicality of seasons, is given in its pure immediacy, without intervention of anything that goes beyond it. And yet, through the absence of vision that the blanketing mist of the background presents, we are made to feel something beyond human labor without being able to say what it is. Corresponding to this blanketing mist is the central figure of the group of harvesters represented in the immediate foreground of the painting: a young man sprawled on his back, asleep, who forms the subject of Williams’s poetic treatment of the image.

“Summer!” Williams exclaims, before telling us how this painting is organized about the young reaper enjoying his noonday rest “completely // relaxed / from his morning labors / sprawled // in fact sleeping / unbuttoned / on his back” (243). In the middle of their “workaday world” is this “resting center” under a tree “whose shade / carelessly / he does not share.” The poem in its entirety flows out of this sleeping figure, lost momentarily to the world of work, sprawled out with unbuttoned pants, he sleeps while the women about him “gather gossiping.” What is the significance of this? Just as the blanketing mist of the background provides a limit to where the eye is led, concentrating all attention on the immediate world of the harvesters and the landscape to which they belong, so too does the sleeping man at the center of this world act as its internal limit, the boundary line between sleeping and waking, of the inner world of dreams and visions and that of external appearances and purposeful activity. Williams concentrates his poetic investigation in this internal limit, this disruption in the flow of the everyday and apparent world of human activity, a disruption or caesura that however finds its natural place within this world, being itself part of the cyclical movement of human bodies and nature. It is in this way that Williams reveals the mystery of the everyday internal to the work of Bruegel, a mystery for which Williams throughout his writing career was in constant pursuit.

Traces of Bruegel in Early Williams

In what remains, we shall explore the presence of a Bruegelian lineage that shapes not only the poems collected in the later Pictures from Brueghel, but whose traces can be felt also in the earlier poems. While we cannot textually prove the intentional and conscious uptake of this inheritance by Williams, we cannot help but notice certain ways in which the mode of vision that Bruegel engenders in his pictorial poetics is rediscovered, though with certain alterations, in the form of modernism characteristic of Williams’s works. In his attention to the natural world, its mode of presence as that which discloses the space wherein the play of the human and non-human, artificial and living, seen and unseen intertwine to produce the event of experience, the material data of these interactions are constantly referred back to a social reality, a community of beings with respect to which the artist holds an uneasy, complex relation. Both participant and observer, inside and outside the spectacle of these interactions, the subjective position of the author throughout the work of Williams is constantly strained, never definitively on one side or the other, always searching for an imagined community that is felt but often unseen in the flow of everyday appearances. In much the same way, we affirm, is the subjective position of Bruegel placed in relation to that which he depicts: the artist is both included and on the exterior, seeing but himself unseen, fascinated with the world of human labor and peasant customs, yet also distant from it and at times standing in moral judgment. This parallelism of dispositions of Williams the writer and Bruegel the painter is carried through in both the content and form of the scenes they bring to life, which we will consider through a few examples.

In Spring and All (1923), Williams opens up what is fundamentally a landscape, a field from which the specific crystallizations of sense that make up the individual poems are drawn and to which they return, like beings of natural origin. Each poem there expresses what we might call seasonal anguish, caught between barrenness and fullness, coming to and passing away. The poems are thus related as if at the root, expressing, as Burton Hatlen puts it, “poetry as a process without boundaries, the text as an open field of endlessly ramifying possibilities” (16), while at the same time retaining something of a lyrical “closed” structure within the individual shoots of poems flowering from this field. Within this landscape, human beings appear as coming from this same system of roots, intertwining with the objects both natural and manmade that the poems bring into the field of vision marked not simply by that factual givenness for which Williams is commonly known, but just as much by the elisions, disruptions, and blindness that mark vision’s limits and possibilities. In the opening poem of the volume, the winter-struck forms of vegetation by the road to the contagious hospital “enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter” (39). The speaker of the poem is here entirely absent, replaced, as far as this is possible, by the things themselves, matter in motion tending toward a certain consciousness: “rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken” (40). Zachariah Pickard notes how here Williams comes closest to a completely impersonal poetics, but does so “without draining the poem of energy, somehow creating a world that is paradoxically both completely still and completely alive” (91). Such a statement applies as well to many of the works of Bruegel, where landscape becomes not merely backdrop for the human symbolic order, but takes on a certain power of signification, weaving human beings into its own forms of articulation. This movement is apparent in paintings like The Harvesters or The Hunters in the Snow. In Williams’s “The Farmer,” we are presented with the looming “artist figure of / the farmer—composing / —antagonist” (41). He is the first human figure to appear in Spring and All, and sets the stage for the rest of the volume with respect to the relation of the writer to who he is writing about: “deep in thought,” the artist/farmer is he to whom “On all sides / the world rolls coldly away” as he paces through the rain “among his blank fields” (41). Rather than the image of natural fullness and fecundity, such as that presented in The Harvesters, we have here an external barrenness contrasted with the inner vision of the farmer, straining against the world rolling coldly away. Yet in both these images, the central figures are simultaneously within and outside of their environments, Williams’s farmer deep in though, Bruegel’s harvester in sleep; there is an imaginative interiority concealed from the viewer, an internal landscape of thought and vision these workers possess that position them in excess of their natural environment. This fascination with the laboring class, along with an attention to the ways in which the interiority of these figures transcend the confines of their socially inscribed functions, draw Williams and Bruegel together into a continuity of vision that expresses itself throughout their works.

The appreciation of the interiority of individual laborers, their forms of being fully within the natural world yet also in excess of it, is tempered in both writer and painter when it comes to considering working people as a collective, social and psychological entity. It is here that a certain moral apprehension enters the scene, creating a comportment both fascinated and repelled by what is witnessed. In Williams’s “At the Ball Game,” we are transported into the spectacle of collective enjoyment of sport, among a crowd that is “moved uniformly / by a spirit of uselessness / which delights them—” (57). On the one hand, Williams celebrates this mass psychology of delight in what is useless, outside the practical economy of daily living. But on the other, there is a revulsion that swells and something to be warned against: “It is alive, venomous // it smiles grimly / its words cut— […] It is the Inquisition, the / Revolution // It is beauty itself / that lives // day by day in them / idly—” (58). This dialectic between beautiful idleness and venomous terror, between suspended delight and thoughtless action of the masses animates the poem throughout. In opposition to the farmer pacing his fields deep in thought as the world rolls coldly away, we have here the heat of the world populated by a cheering crowd, “laughing / in detail // permanently, seriously // without thought” (58). We thus have a fundamentally ambivalent relation of the writer to the people about and through whom his writing finds its conditions of possibility. Carla Billitteri, in an essay on the politics of Williams’s poetics and prose, notes the ways in which Williams opposes to the perceived formlessness and terror of the proletarianized mob a desire for a certain “aristocratic revolution” that would sublate this content into a higher form of articulation, the auratic and highly formal mode of his poetry expressing both this desire and the means of overcoming anarchy in language. It is this which “exposes the critical implications of his aestheticism, and casts a revelatory light on his ambivalent relation toward the masses, modernity, and the disruptive terrain of political engagement” (60).

We can find in the work of Bruegel a similar comportment, though in a very different historical register, that likewise expresses itself through this attraction/repulsion to the crowd, which is given through the depiction of what the lack of vision engenders, where idleness provides the key to something that both goes beyond nature and is subsumed by it, the space where both thought and thoughtlessness emerge, where the intertwining of vision and blindness open up the moral instability of the human realm.

In Bruegel’s The Peasant Dance, we are presented with a scene of revelry, drinking, and dance on occasion of a celebration of a village’s patron saint. There is here a spirit of delight in uselessness, a uniformly moving beauty of the crowd. Yet upon closer inspection, one finds indications that this spectacle bears a certain venom against which the painter stands in judgment. One of the central figures leads his wife out to dance, yet his face, rough and with mouth opened in what might be aggression, is turned toward the inn where the revelers sit inebriated around a table with arms outstretched, one with a hat pulled over his eyes, seemingly in argument. The other central figure of the bagpiper seated at the table strains to blow into his instrument, cheeks distended and face contorted. Next to him sits a man with a peacock feather in his hat and a large pitcher of alcohol resting on his knee. In the right hand corner of the image, a handle from a broken vessel rests on the ground, suggesting the carelessness and potential violence of this scene of inebriation. In the background, the village people crowd around in dance, all of them turned away from the church that looms behind them. While the social dimensions and forms of relation of the masses as they are represented in Williams and Bruegel are by no means the same, we contend that Williams, consciously or not, was drawing on a set of ideas and an aesthetic approach that finds a major point of origin in the work of Pieter Bruegel.

Conclusion

The attention to minute details, the clarity and precision of objects represented, the moral ambiguity that arises from this attraction and repulsion to the everyday life of working people who are largely absent from the field of vision of many artists and writers both in Bruegel’s time and in that of Williams, this sense of being both within and outside of the scene represented, participant and observer, with vision unsteadily in focus as that which supports vision hides beneath the surface of things, all of these dimensions together produce a continuity that we have here tried to bring to light. Pictures from Brueghel is a late homage to the master who invented a new direction for both pictorial and literary arts to follow, but the extent of his influence on the work of Williams cannot be contained simply to that work. We have looked at a few examples of Williams’s early poetry where the Bruegelian influence can be felt, but certainly there is more to be explored in this respect beyond Spring and All. The interest of this inquiry is not simply in providing a scholarly basis of comparison, but in drawing out lines of filiation whose interpretive possibilities are still with us, still relevant, calling out for further creative combinations.