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26SECTION 6 STUDENT ESSAYS
Anna Zhidaikina History Faculty, 5th Year Samara State University
The Value of Art and Human Life in Headlong by Michael Frayn
Art (with all sides and appearances) is one of the most important subjects that Headlong touches. If the novel is never-ending reasoning (sometimes on fictional connections and meanings), so it is in great extent concerned with art. The question I want to consider in my essay is how M.Frayn (on behalf of his protagonist Martin Clay) discourses on the value of art in comparison with the value of human life.
I want to quote a discussion between Martin and Kate:
Martin: “In any case, however terrible it is to destroy works of art, it isn’t as terrible as torturing people to death”.
Kate: “Isn’t it?.. Isn’t what people do more important in the end than what they feel? Isn’t what they leave behind more important than what they were?”
Martin: “You’re implying that a painting might be worth more than us? Than you and me?”
Kate: “More than me, yes”.
Martin: “More than meT
Kate: “Possibly... There seems to be at any rate one picture in the world that you think is worth more than either me or Tilda” [Frayn 2000: 258-259].
We can see, Martin’s thesis is that ‘human life is more valuable than art’; Kate’s one is different, i.e. ‘art is more valuable than human life’. I think Frayn also reflects on this question during the narration but the answer is not evident.
Bruegel made some paintings on religious theme. He did it for Catholic power in the person of Cardinal Granvelle. Martin can (with
many scholars) suspect him in collaboration with Catholic reaction. But he doesn’t. Knowing about Ortelius’s statement “Multapinxit, hie Brugelius, quae pingi non possunf [Frayn 2000: 157], he interprets this like the evidence of being an invisible sense in works by Bruegel. Beginning with The Little Walker and ending with Baler Twine he is looking for this sense in the pictures.
Another Netherlandish artist, Frans Floris... did a Fall of the Rebel Angels in which St.Michael... is striking down the heavenly dissidents... Eight years later, in 1562, with the Cardinal installed in Brussels... Bruegel weighed in with a Fall of the Rebel Angels of his own. So what am I saying now - that Bruegel was simply a hired hack of the Counter-Reformation?..” [Frayn 2000: 156]. “And no -it’s not a contribution to the Counter-Reformation. It’s totally unlike Floris’s picture. The fallen angels aren’t devilish muscular warriors, but fantastic creatures... -figures straight out of Hieronymus Bosch... thy don’t appear to be engaged in anything that might be described as rebellion... Even as he ushered the religion out of the back door , he was smuggling something else in, and under the Cardinal’s very eye. What was it? [Frayn 2000:
165].
Bruegel must cover something up the religious surface, Martin thinks. Even if it threatens his own life.
These investigations lead Martin to the ancient painter Apelles, who also was known by painting unpaintable things. He went to the conclusion that it must be thunder what Apelles could paint. So it is the thunder that we must seek for Bruegel’s canvases. But what is the thunder?
Spanish armies (in the form of Biblical plots) appear on the paintings (The Massacre of the Innocents, The Adoration of the Kings, The Procession of Calvary, The Suicide of Saul, etc. [Frayn 2000: 295-298]). Bruegel is suggested to paint it while Spanish “gendarmerie” was staying in Netherlands. And then Martin reasons on the mass executions made by the Spanish - this thing is also reflected in some works by Bruegel, for example in The Procession to
no
The crucifixes waiting for Christ and the two thieves aren’t the only engines of execution... - the landscape’s studded with gibbets, and with those cartwheels on top of poles on which victims were exposed and left to die.
Never mind what Bruegel’s intentions were - what did his Spanish and Netherlandish contemporaries think the scene represented, at a time when five thousand or so people were being executed each year...? [Frayn 2000:
229].
The Triumph of Death - another allusion to the Netherlandish reality of the 16th century:
What did they think when they turned to another landscape of gibbets and wheels in The Triumph of Death, with one victim actually being beheaded in front of them?., when they lifted their eyes to the horizon of the Triumph and saw it prophetically smudged with the smoke of one burning town after another? ... Once you start seeing it, the apparatus of persecution, and the allusions to oppression, leapt out at you from almost every picture [Frayn 2000: 300].
Martin doesn’t give a clear answer to the question on the thunder. Maybe because of transferring this idea to a new one - a baler twine. The baler twine is not an object (though the baler twine like an object appears in the novel too) - here it is a connecting idea of all Bruegel’s images which means hidden oppression.
...Phillip is writing to say that he is determined to suppress heresy at whatever cost... To avoid giving heretics the opportunity of public martyrdom they’re henceforth to be executed at midnight in their dungeons, by binding their heads between their knees, and then
in
slowly suffocating them in tubs of water [Frayn 2000:
341].
During the last part of the novel Martin had been trying to examine Merrymakers to determine whether the human are really bound between his neck and knees.
So Martin during the whole novel supposed Bruegel to depict Spanish terror in his works (in the veiled form). Anyway he did it in spite of the great risk to be accused in heresy, arrested and executed. Martin assumes this sort of things as natural - Bruegel must do this way, it’s obvious for Martin. But why? If we suppose that a human life is more valuable than any artwork? Bruegel could suppose the same, especially if his own life is concerned. My conclusion is that Martin in his heart gives more significance to the value of art than he says and thinks. If it’s normal to risk one’s life (or at least welfare) for the art there can be no conclusion that human life is more important.
Though Martin’s conscience protests against this statement. At the end of the novel Martin chooses human life - Laura’s life instead of the picture.
“She’s long since forgiven me for the brief moment of uncertainty I suffered... about which of them I was rescuing from the flames first. Whether I’ve forgiven myself I’m not sure” [Frayn 2000: 391].
There is no doubt however that the idea of the absolute value of art is a part of social progress. This idea is one of those that make people arise above their materiality, imperfectness and overcome limitation of human-nature. Besides what civilization shall we be if we do not have great masterpieces? To keep them people spent money, time (and time is invaluable) and sacrificed their lives.
And, as for me, I’d save the picture.
Reference
Frayn M. Headlong. Faber and Faber, 2000.
