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  • Magritte, Cladel, and The Tomb of the Wrestlers: Roses, Daggers, and Love in Interarts Discourse
  • Ben Stoltzfus (bio)

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” said Gertrude Stein (187),1 and we might be tempted to name René Magritte’s painting A Rose Is a Rose, were it not for the fact that this image (see figure 1) is not a rose, any more than Magritte’s painting of a pipe, The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images) (1929), is a pipe. His caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” amply demonstrates that the signifier is not the signified. In his book This Is Not a Pipe (1968), Michel Foucault devotes some fifty pages to proving that the iconic representation of a pipe is not the same thing as smoking it. Indeed, in our time, no informed person believes in the transparency of the sign.

The rose is not a rose because Magritte has named his picture The Tomb of the Wrestlers (Le Tombeau des lutteurs) (1960), a title he borrowed from Léon Cladel’s nineteenth-century novel entitled Ompdrailles, le-tombeau-des-lutteurs (1879). This is an unusual and arresting title for a painting that depicts a red rose inside a room, a rose whose petals are enclosed by the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Moreover, the painting was not meant to illustrate the novel any more than Cladel’s text is an intentional ekphrastic representation of the painting. [End Page 173]


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Figure 1.

René Magritte, The Tomb of the Wrestlers, 1960, oil on canvas.

© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The novel was published in 1879, long before Magritte painted his picture, and he said that he had forgotten what the novel was about.2 Clearly, the novel is not a rhetorical representation of the painting, but roses in Magritte’s art, despite his memory lapse, are, in many ways, an ekphrastic refraction of Cladel’s work because Ompdrailles’ unrequited love and the tragedy of stabbing himself in the heart with a dagger are recurring themes (images) that appear in Magritte’s paintings, such as The Blow to the Heart (Le Coup au coeur) (1952), Flame Rekindled (Retour de flamme) (1943), and Memory (La Mémoire) (1948) (see figures 2, 3, and 4).

Magritte has always asserted that his titles, despite appearances, fit his pictures perfectly.3 And we know that he always chose his titles very carefully, sometimes with the help of friends, listing alternate ones until the most suitable title presented itself.4 Representation, that is, pictorial fidelity to the original image, was the last thing on his mind. Because the title is [End Page 174] nonmimetic, and also the “best” title, we conclude that Magritte was appealing to a subconscious dimension in the observer’s lexicon, a dimension that he has labeled “mysterious.”5 The painting does not illustrate the novel and vice-versa, but there is a symbiotic relationship between the two—an obscure equivalency that explains Magritte’s choices. I will be pursuing this equivalency throughout my essay. Meanwhile, the observer must, inevitably, ask him- or herself why Magritte chose this particular title.

Magritte says that “the title of a painting is an image made of words” (492; my translation), and his titles, more often than not, are enigmatic and defamiliarizing. They propose a different image than the one in the picture—an image composed of objects, people, or animals—an image that usually contradicts the object(s) in the painting. After the initial astonishment, the observer, if he or she is sufficiently curious, will perhaps strive to solve the puzzle by bridging the gap between the image in the title and the image in the painting. It must already be obvious that the juxtaposition of distant objects—using Lautréamont’s paradigmatic image of the umbrella and the sewing machine on a dissecting table—was part and parcel of the surrealists’ aesthetic strategy, one that Pierre Reverdy and André Breton advocated so eloquently (1969):

The image is a pure creation of the spirit. It cannot be born of a comparison but of the bringing together of two realities which...

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