ABSTRACT
Michael Frayn’s Headlong (1999) achieves something similar, if even more embedded, with its deployment of Pieter Breughel’s remarkable painting of the ‘Fall of Icarus’, in which Icarus’s demise is famously offcentre, marginalized to the corner of the frame. Combining a researcher’s knowledge of Breughel with the conventions of a mystery novel or detective fiction, Frayn has his art-dealer protagonist (wrongly)
believe he has discovered a lost painting that will make his fortune. En route, Frayn has great fun paralleling the pride of his overweening narrator with the fate of Icarus. This is, of course, far from the first time that Breughel’s painting has been the subject of literary attention: W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ captures beautifully the painting’s decentring of the myth of overreaching ambition in its account of the work’s depiction of the everyday events onland carrying on heedless of Icarus’s demise out at sea.
