Bruegel on the Sexes: A Detail from Children's GamesAuthor(s): Edward SnowSource: The Threepenny Review, No. 14 (Summer, 1983), pp. 26-27Published by: Threepenny ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4383224 .

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ART

Bruegel on the Sexes: A Detail from Children's Games

Edward Snow

N THE left-center foreground of Bruegel's Children's Games, a nearly

upright diagonal leads from a boy on a hobby-horse and two girls playing di- rectly in front of him through a man and a woman carrying a child to a small couple playing an obscure version of "odd or even" or "guess which hand." It is one of the clearest thematic struc- tures in the painting. All three configu- rations depict the human relation as a convergence of separate, heterogeneous spheres. And in each case (though am- biguously in the third) what comes together is male and female respectively. This tiny series is a masterpiece of tact and condensation; it is difficult to imagine how more could be said in so little space about what lies between the sexes.1

1.

IN THE CENTER of the diagonal a man and a woman make a bridge of arms

for their child and carry her forward on it.2 A wonderful sense of security radiates from this plump, heavily en- cumbered little body. The equally cor- pulent body of the girl swinging inside the building above and to the left ex- presses the elation of flying through the air, defying gravity; but the child in the foreground is an image of contented weight. Parental arms lift her free of the earth, but it is the sag of her own body against them that ensures the stability of her perch.

1. I am indebted to Michael Gervasio for calling my attention to these three images and suggesting to me what is at stake in them.

2. The two figures carrying the child appear to be actual adults, not (as elsewhere in the painting) larger children who can be figura- tively perceived as adults. There is obviously no objective basis for identifying the central figure as their child, but the nuances of the image-and this is true even if the larger figures are taken to be older children-em- phatically suggest a family group.

She remains quiet and passive, utterly trusting in what supports her. Only in the pastoral realm in the upper left is there a similar sense of supportive con- text, a surrounding element to which human presence can abandon itself and feel contained and secure. There the dominant note is disencumberment: the two sun-darkened boys relaxing naked at the edge of the stream evoke a kind of animal, creaturely at-homeness, (the one standing up to his shoulders in the water is painted to look only half human), while the third who swims in it with the aid of water-wings could easily be mistaken (so it seems to me the painting encourages us to imagine) for its mythological inhabitant. But the little girl's clothes, far from burdening her with her isolated human selfhood, make her a presence every bit as dense and primordial as one of Cezanne's

apples. Elsewhere in the painting hu- man ingenuity must grapple with an indifferent setting and a poverty of means: the leap-froggers, fence-sitters, stilt-walkers, rail-hangers, and tree- climber achieve through improvisa- tional feats the elevation and poise that are given to the little girl as benign preconditions of experience. It is as if their goal were her starting place.

Although the focus of the image is the girl's assurance, the parents who lift her into it in doing so enter into a vital relationship of their own. Only the man's face is visible, and we can see from it that his attention is invested solely in his daughter. He is in a sense as alone in his joy as she is in her con- tentedness: the image is a beautiful rendering of the parent's vicarious re- living, through the role of what Dorothy Dinnerstein has called "nurturer, plea- sure-giver, empathetic wish-granter," of childhood's imagined delights. Yet even though his wife scarcely exists for him in this moment, the image also affirms his link with her. In order to lift the child they join hands, and though they don't consciously regard each other, their arms are full of a life they share between them.Their carrying gestures are rendered in such a way, in fact, that they appear to be simulta- neously offering and receiving from each other the love they separately invest in the child. Though they pull against each other in order to hold the child aloft, the child's weight responds by drawing them together. In this they are like the barrel-riders on the right and the two groups in front of them playing tug-of-war, only they experience the tension between them as love, not strife, and pivot around an enduring bond rather than a momentary and precarious connection. The child's position simi- larly links her to both the boy on the right being stretched across the wooden beam and the gauntlet-runner on the left making his way between two rows of seated children (the gauntlet of kick- ing legs over which he leaps is a visual echo of the V-shaped bridge of arms that holds her up). So many of the games require a victim or object of persecution to transform the instinct

26THE THREEPENNY REVIEW

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for opposition into communal experi- ence; Bruegel explores this irony more fully in his Procession to Calvary and Allegory of Justice. But the little girl is suspended in an aura of benign con- cern, and mediates as an object of al- truistic affection.

Near the right corer of the central building, just beneath a boy perched high on stilts, an "opposite" of the girl in red stands with outspread arms. Bereft of companions and unassimilated by any game, this girl has only her empty arms (which conjure up no lift- ing presence) to declare her place in the surrounding whole. Bruegel tempts us to read her gesture as an address to the boy above her, but then projects it forward toward something unspecified and limitless, and stretches her arms open until they become a wide embrace. The gesture resembles all the reaching and groping that weave into the scene both a need for connection and a con- dition of unfulfillment (cf. the blind- folded woman, the boy on the cellar door, the children playing on the sand- pile, and the figures circling in the shadow of the building); but in taking that motif as far as it will go, and stretching it past its natural limit, her arms transform it into a gesture of ac- ceptance-an extravagant "Here I am" that simultaneously prodaims and opens itself to the surrounding "There is." She and the girl in red face each other from opposite sides of the central arena, bracketing the problematical spectacle that unfolds there between antithetical yet complementary affirmations of the human condition: one an autogenous self, branching in a place of barrenness

like a Bruegelian tree; the other a ripe, red fruit suspended in the boughs of a rooted sexual relation.

2.

IN THE EXTREME foreground, just be- low the parents and their child, a

small boy straddles a hobby-horse. He too stands at the threshold of the cen- tral arena, on the verge of entering it. We can see in his activity the tentative emergence of a male principle that blossoms exuberantly (and riotously) in the space ahead of him. He is a pro- totype, for instance, not only of all the riders in the painting, but also of the boys who are so fanatically engrossed in whipping tops. He seems to have just stepped off the portable jakes be- hind him (is this the reason for the absence of pants?) and into the more active, phallic stage of the imagination -Bruegel has gone out of his way to portray the hobby-horse's head as if it were an extension of the boy's own bare leg. Whip poised, knees bent, tensed on the balls of his feet, he awaits the forward thrust of his horse. His clothes all but swallow him, and the broomstick is pitifully inadequate to the massiveness it is supposed to repre- sent. All his being is concentrated on the task of filling these as yet unrealized spaces, as he exacerbates and at the same time harnesses the inner violence needed to bring his mount to life and make it leap forward at his bidding.

His activity seems to destine him for the world of the leap-froggers, the barrel-riders, and the tug-of-warriors;

yet it places him on a direct collision course with the two small girls playing just in front of him. Both sexes, equally absorbed in their respective activities, are about to experience the opposition that bears fruit in the configuration of parents and child above them. But its results here promise to be anything but creative. The girls stand in the boy's way as obstacles to the uninhibited filling-out of his male self; he in turn descends unwanted on them like some overbearing, Centaur-like beast.

3.

AT THE TOP of the diagonal, two small children come together over

an issue posed by a closed fist. In the two lower groups it is the sexes that converge, but here we cannot be quite sure. The child on the left is definitely a girl (there is even something old and crone-like about her); the one on the right appears to be a boy, but his(?) sex is deliberately left hidden and in doubt. In a sense this sexual ambiguity is the mystery being held out to (and with- held from) the girl. Their game em- bodies-latently for them, symbolically for us-a threshold where the funda- mental difference between two human existents is on the verge of becoming a sexual difference.

In contrast to the threat of incipient conflict evoked by the configuration at the base of the diagonal, these two children come together in almost con- spiratorial intimacy. They are totally engrossed in the obscure transaction that passes between them. We see a

first unconscious venture into the space that flourishes between the couple of the marriage group. Yet what draws this couple together is more wryly con- ceived. The girl on the left reaches out with the same enthusiasm as the hus- band below (her wide-eyed, intensely focused look is the barest transforma- tion of his), but in order to pry open her partner's closed fist, the companion to which he keeps withheld behind his back.What is given to her in this rela- tionship she must guess at, and what (if anything) she gains from the ex- change will no doubt wind up in her own tightly drawn purse.

The child on the right observes in- tently the girl's absorption in what he(?) conceals from her. He seems as fas- cinated with what is going on inside her as she is with what is hidden inside his fist. His gesture (unlike that of the wife below, which reads as total, self- less giving) appears to offer something to her as a way of cunningly drawing her out of herself, into the space be- tween them and the mystery it conceals. They are attracted to each other in terms of a secret each holds out to (and withholds from) the other. What they share is a reserve, an unknown quantity founded in their separateness from each other. That the unit of exchange can be closed in a fist and bargained over in this way seems an obvious irony (one of Bruegel's most sardonic draw- ings depicts a war of money-bags and strongboxes); yet there is still the sug- gestion that in that closed fist (and the transaction that concerns it) is the seed of the child below all bundled up in red. OI

SUMMER 1983 27

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