grotesquery

Today I'm offering you a text and an image, both concerned with fish swallowed whole.

Leonidas of Tarentum was a poet active in the roughly the same period as Theocritus, the 3rd century BC. He specialised in epigrammatic poetry and among his works are a number of epitaphs - short memorials to the dead. Among these is one to Parmis, the fisherman, who died when he accidentally swallowed a fish:

Shore-fisher Parmis, whom none could surpass,
Kallignotos's son, a spearer of wrasse
And furious perch that snatches up the bait
And fish that in hollow caves and deep rocks wait,
Once took his first catch from the sea and tried
To bite down on his deadly prey, and died.
For from his hand it, slimy, darted free
And wriggled down his narrow throat, and he
Rolled over, letting out his final breath,
And by his pole, fishhooks, and lines met death,
So filling up the final threads of doom.
The fisher Fischer made for him this tomb.

The slightly odd introduction of a fisher called Fischer is an attempt to capture a bit of word-play in the original Greek text, where Gripōn, the gripeus (fisherman) sets up the tombstone.

Jerry Clack (whose translation this is) comments on the story thus: 'Parmis is a victim of Tyche, that is of the unexpected, in this case the negative and irrational element which permeates everyday life'. The term tychē is quite common in Greek and means something like 'chance' or 'fortune'. It is also the name of the goddess who personifies those phenomena and - as I understand it - became more important in the post-classical period when both Theocritus and Leonidas were writing. We are, then, back in the presence of 'luck', where the slipperiness of the fish evokes the slipperiness of experience and the difficulty of 'getting hold of life'.

But there is a a comic flavour to this too - darkly, even nightmarishly, comic. It is the kind of story that makes you laugh out loud and then guiltily clap your hands over your mouth. One could express the capricious nature of tychē with a more dignified image than that of a fisherman choking to death when a fish jumps down his throat and the story feels like an expression of a bizarre, obsessive anxiety - 'I'm afraid that one day I'll die with a sea perch stuck in my gullet'.

To accompany the epitaph for Parmis, I've chosen a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the elder, which dates from 1556 and was engraved by Pieter van der Heyden the following year. The image illustrates a proverbial saying - what H. Arthur Klein calls a 'maxim of worldly wisdom' - namely, 'big fish eat little fish' (a text that appears at the bottom of the engraving in Latin and Flemish).

A huge fish lies on the shore with smaller fish pouring out of its mouth and smaller ones again emerging from those. At the same time, a stocky little figure with an enormous knife slices open the fish's belly and still more voracious creatures spill out on the ground before him. Klein points out that a whole array of Flemish proverbs are illustrated in the picture beyond the one that is explicitly mentioned: '"Little fish lure the big"; "One fish is caught by means of another"; "Fish are hooked through fish"; "They hang by their own gills" ( ... i.e., they are caught by their own weakness or vulnerability).'

But, just as Leonidas' poem illustrates the caprices of tychē through a particularly grotesque imaginative flourish - it must be imaginative, surely? can this really have happened to anyone? - so the visual rendering of these 'maxims of worldly wisdom' shows a wild, even nightmarish imagination at work. To quote Klein again:

We see the exuberant abundance of action and incident, the seven-ringed circus effects, the simultaneous variations on a given theme (often cryptic, seldom dull). This Bruegel is an abundant, repetitive, and extensive artist, an analogue in line to such outpouring geniuses as Rabelais and Shakespeare in literature. Yes, and even to the Melville of Moby Dick, to Mark Twain, and to Thomas Wolfe (prior to editorial pruning).

There is a crazy energy about the humans in the image as there often is in Bruegel's work more generally. And in both Leonidas' poem and Bruegel's drawing, the oddness of fish - so slimy! so voracious! - overwhelms the conventional lessons that the material teaches and takes us to a place both more ribald and more appalling.

A disturbing detail of Bruegel's image is the strange human-legged fish-creature that is proceeding out of frame to the right of the image, another fish hanging from its mouth. Where is it going? Does it live on the land? Humans and fish, it seems, are not so different after all.