MAX ERNST and The Transgressive Nature of Looking, LOOKING GOOD, novel by U.R.BOWIE

My latest novel, Looking Good, has just been published. The above is what I had envisaged as the cover of the work, but, alas, I could not get permission to use the Max Ernst painting.

U.R. Bowie

The Transgressive Nature of Looking

Max Ernst, “The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Child Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B. [André Breton], P.E. [Paul Eluard], and the Artist,” 1926.

I was introduced to this painting by the art critic Leo Steinberg, who, in an article titled “This Is a Test,” commented on the Max Ernst exhibition (1993) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Ernst, writes Steinberg, emphasizes the transgressive, even blasphemous act of looking at this painting. He first establishes that the three witnesses described in the title—although pictured in a square window at the back—are not looking at this disturbing scene at all. We see the profiles of Breton and Eluard, and, standing behind them, Max Ernst, who is staring with a very intense gaze not at Mother and Child, but at the spectator in the gallery, i.e., at you and me who look. Why are two of the “witnesses” not looking out the window at all? We can only surmise. Perhaps they have already looked, and, disgusted with what they saw, have turned away.

Leo Steinberg’s main point is that anyone viewing this painting in a gallery is conniving with forces of evil in an act of blasphemy. “The painting is engineered to embarrass; so long as I look, I am exposed to the artist’s accusing gaze as he watches the churl in me trapped in the act of ogling a sacrilege” (New York Review of Books, May 13, 1993, p. 24).

Later, also in the NYRB (May 26, 2005, p.6), John Updike comments on the painting, then on exhibition again at the Met. He makes reference to the Steinberg article, quoting the passage about blasphemous looking. He also has this to say: “The original exhibition, including Ernst’s assaultive painting . . . was closed by church pressure because of it; at the Met, alone on a large wall and protected by glass against possible Christian vandals, it exerts a sensuous spell . . . 

While this scene cannot be enrolled in Christian iconography—it has no Gospel authority, for one thing—Ernst has created something iconic, which all who take seriously the doctrine of the Incarnation, and all it entails, cannot lightly dismiss.”

But now it appears that Ernst did not himself invent this scene of Mother whipping Child. Still later, in a letter written to NYRB (September 22, 2005, p. 85) Steinberg amplifies his original assertions. In response to his earlier piece, a reader had written him, suggesting that Ernst may have been privy to an Appalachian folk ballad, originating, apparently in Scotland, as early as the fourteenth century. In this song the boy Jesus gets even with three other boys who have refused to play with him:

We are sons of lords and ladies all,

And born in bower and hall,

While you are only a Jew-maid’s child,

Born in an ox’s stall.

He builded a bridge from the beams of the sun

And over the water danced he,

There followed him those rich young men

And drownded they were all three.

Then Mary mild fetched home her child

And laid him across her knee,

She took a switch from the withy tree,

And gave him slashes three.

I have not looked into any other research on the painting, but I suspect that European specialists in art have unearthed other examples of folk legends that may have inspired Ernst. There are more descriptions of the boy Jesus in the non-canonical Gnostic Gospels. The theme of looking as blasphemous is featured in various works of world literature. For example, in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, the rather twisted girl, Liza Khokhlakova takes a voluptuous pleasure in looking at the crucified Christ: “Sometimes I imagine that it was I who crucified him. He hangs there moaning, and I sit down facing him, eating pineapple compote. I like pineapple compote very much. Do you?” 

Much influenced by Dostoevsky, the twentieth-century writer Fyodor Sologub has a similar scene in his novel, The Petty Demon. The voluptuary Ludmila says, “I dream of Him sometimes, you know. He is on the cross and there are little droplets of blood on His body.”

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What does any of this have to do with my novel, Looking Good? To answer briefly, a major theme of the novel is the transgressive nature of looking, how looking can sometimes be associated with violence. The major event of the novel is a gang rape, committed by football players in a hotel room. Throughout the novel the act of looking is treated in a variety of ways; at its most violent and aggressive, it verges on rape.

Poem by Carol Ann Duffy

The Virgin Punishing the Infant

He spoke early. Not the goo goo goo of infancy,
but I am God. Joseph kept away, carving himself
a silent Pinocchio out in the workshed. He said
he was a simple man and hadn't dreamed of this.

She grew anxious in that second year, would stare
at stars saying Gabriel, Gabriel. Your guess.
The village gossiped in the sun. The child was solitary,
his wide and solemn eyes could fill your head.

After he walked, our normal children crawled. Our wives
were first resentful, then superior. Mary's child
would bring her sorrow ... better far to have a son
who gurgled nonsense at your breast. Googoo. Googoo.

But I am God. We heard him through the window,
heard the smacks which made us peep. What we saw
was commonplace enough. But afterwards, we wondered
why the infant did not cry, why the Mother did.