Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon for 10/11 — Wayno’s title: “Surrealism Syndrome” — brings together the green apple of Magritte’s Son of Man with the apple William Tell legendarily shot off the head of his son Walter:

(#1) Yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon; the therapist is Wayno’s caricature of the surrealist artist René Magritte (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page.)

Magritte’s green apple. The original:

(#2)

And then in my 1/18/22 posting “The infested apple”, 7 riffs on The Son of Man. Plus #1 above.

William Tell and his son Walter. Come with me now to the legendary 14th century. The beginning of the story, from Wikipedia:

William Tell … is a folk hero of Switzerland. According to the legend, Tell was an expert mountain climber and marksman with a crossbow who assassinated Albrecht Gessler, a tyrannical reeve of the Austrian dukes of the House of Habsburg positioned in Altdorf, in the canton of Uri. Tell’s defiance and tyrannicide encouraged the population to open rebellion and a pact against the foreign rulers with neighbouring Schwyz and Unterwalden, marking the foundation of the Swiss Confederacy. Tell was considered the father of the Swiss Confederacy.

… It is Tschudi’s version that became influential in early modern Switzerland and entered public consciousness as the “William Tell” legend. According to Tschudi’s account, William Tell was known as a strong man and an expert shot with the crossbow. In his time, the House of Habsburg emperors of Austria were seeking to dominate Uri, and Tell became one of the conspirators of Werner Stauffacher who vowed to resist Habsburg rule. Albrecht Gessler was the newly appointed Austrian Vogt of Altdorf, Switzerland. He raised a pole under the village lindentree, hung his hat on top of it, and demanded that all the townsfolk bow before it.

(#3) Grosvenor Prints site: hand-colored wood engraving, c.1840

In Tschudi’s account, on 18 November 1307, Tell visited Altdorf with his young son. He passed by the hat, but publicly refused to bow to it, and was consequently arrested. Gessler was intrigued by Tell’s famed marksmanship, but resentful of his defiance, so he devised a cruel punishment. Tell and his son were both to be executed; however, he could redeem his life by shooting an apple off the head of his son Walter in a single attempt. Tell split the apple with a bolt from his crossbow.

Gessler nevertheless arrested Tell, but Tell escaped and then assassinated Gessler. And Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden joined to become the germ of the Swiss confederation.

(Magritte, by the way, was a Belgie, neither a Frenchie nor a Swissie.)

This entry was posted on October 13, 2022 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Art, Comic conventions, Linguistics in the comics, Switzerland and Swiss things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.