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Anonymous
Belgian Literature
2016-02-17 00:07:23 Post No. 7705695
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Belgian Literature
Anonymous
2016-02-17 00:07:23
Post No. 7705695
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What do you folks think of Belgian literature, in particular this short story by Jean Mogin (1921-198)?
'The Giants were Grinning'
At the Rijksmuseum Joseph took a detour to show me a picture of two giants vomiting.
The leftmost and homosexual giant was vomiting blood and semen, the rightmost giant was vomiting distorted forms, revealed from the correctly anamorphic angle to be a tangle of bodies arranged so as to ensure mutual death. Of those bodies, only painted were the imperfections and sagging contours; the forms of the faces were plucked from their warts. Both giants were infected with a disease that caused necrophilia.
The forms were painted to suggest they were a fungal infection on the canvass, save for those in the background, layered in thick mottled dollops that seemed to reach for language to embody them in the adjective ‘tumorous’. These forms seemed to be thickening to language, swelling to the riotous form of lolling tongues, seeking out description at some horizonal chaos where all engages all.
Vomiting as they were, it was discernible that the giants were grinning.
While not obviously skillful, the artist had compacted astonishing detail in the picture. Tattooed on the left giant’s naked stomach was cross-section of its digestion with diagrams chronicling the process not in stages, but in ages, the excretory ‘age’ as some era of apotheosis. Tattooed on the right giant’s chest was a landscape of images designed to provoke description; they already seemed to exist half in painting and half in language, and so it is redundant to describe them. Both of the giants were balding – their hairlines were receding to reveal tattoos of scalp rotting on skull. Some of the paint was peeling and showed the artist’s preparatory pencil sketches – renderings of the giants’ skeletons, structures that looked architectural rather than anatomical. I spent a good deal of time staring at the tumorously-clotted background, a landscape in which intestinal, vascular, seminal and necrotic themes were congealed in visual analogy.
The painting drew me in, but also seemed to push out; to want to infect and permeate, to be translated and transcribed, to mix with language in mutual saturation, to reproduce itself in a conquering variety of forms.
This picture was awful, in the old sense of awe-full, but in the new sense as well. It disturbed me. I asked Joseph why he showed it to me and he laughed. We were tense in the museum café. I still visit him when I’m in the country but our friendship has suffered.
