Semiotic Intersections in Baudelaire and Magritte

Semiotic Intersections in Baudelaire and Magritte* Stamos Metzidakis MAGRITTE NEVER STOPPED QUESTIONING the usual ties that bind people to the objects of everyday life. Indeed, part of his originality consists in his transformation of man in general, of man as a unique being having control over his environment, to just another object living in a pictoro-poetic universe. His famous paintings that depict a crowd of identical men wearing bowler hats, falling out of the sky, like so many drops of rain ("Golconde," 1953), or creeping along me ground to the threshold of his window, like vines during harvest ("Le mois des vendanges," 1959), make this clear. In a letter addressed to Philippe Robert-Jones, the painter is quite firm on mis point. According to Magritte, the signs he chooses to produce are "des objets ... non des symboles," despite their conventional status in me world. Consequently, one might say, like Jacques Meuris, that everydiing in the Magrittian universe is "objet, toute chose est chose, quel que soit Ie genre auquel il appartient."1 Nothing in art is to be privileged a priori over anything anymore. The Belgian painter must, therefore, have understood from die beginning of his artistic career that by questioning our perceptions and representations of things, he could not help but disturb some of our deepest prejudices, whether aesthetic or otherwise. In choosing to ally himself with things rather than "knowers" of diings, Magritte finds himself thereby naturally comparable to a poet such as Francis Ponge, the audior of "Le parti pris des choses." Nonetheless, we might assume that any parallel between our painter and a poet like Ponge can be justified as much by form as by content. I allude here to the predilection for poetic prose exhibited not only by Ponge, but also, and especially, by Baudelaire in Le Spleen de Paris, Rousseau in Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, and Lautréamont in Les Chants de Maldoror, all of whom Magritte transposed into art works at one point or other. Because he was so well-read and inspired by so many sources, one could object diat I attribute too much importance to one specific style of writing, one perhaps too marginal, and not enough to others. In fact, whenever he mentions genre it seems he does so only to denounce it. It is, therefore, important to underscore mat Magrittian iconography ignores most traditional generic constraints and often derives from non-aesthetic or anti-aesthetic sources, such as those Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 71 L'Esprit Créateur found in "cheap or low-brow literature, die literature of incredible adventures: cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, Nick Carter, Arsène Lupin and so on" (Meuris 139). Yet, these sources are not unrelated to those described in a great number of prose poems, as we shall see presently. We should, therefore, recognize that Magritte always kept his distance with the notion of high "Art," in particular, widi the notion of "great" painting , whether didactic, moral or political. This explains why he insists that "l'Art appliqué [Art with a capital A] tue l'art pur."2 He consistently rejects conceptions of Platonic beauty, moralistic allegory, servile imitation, glory or concealed symbolism so dear to past artists. To prove this assertion, we need only remember his infamous paintings mat recapture, in a new perspective, portraits made by David and Manet in the nineteenth century ("Perspective I: David's Madame Récamier," 1950, and "Perspective II: Manet's Balcony," 1950, respectively). These portraits proclaim their modernity by eclipsing the conventional use of pretty bourgeois figures, and by replacing them with coffins. The same conclusion can be drawn from Magritte's answer to a question asked during an interview for Life magazine about Primavera's face in his painting called "Le Bouquet tout fait" (1957): " J'ai choisi l'image de Primavera , mais non l'idée. Je n'ai pas lu le sens allégorique que Botticelli lui aurait prêté [...]. Je ne m'intéresse pas à la philosophie, mais à l'image" (EC 612). This leads us to suppose that in Magritte's paintings one finds a sort of semiotic continuum between the mechanisms and the objectives of his...