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by Emma Kibler

I was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea and this maiden she lived with no other thought than to love and be loved by me*
                                                                                     (Poe 1)

“Si vous aimez l’amour, vous aimerez le Surrealisme!,” She screams as he slams the door (Mundy 4). His eyes are like nails in the rain. He steps onto the street— the cobbled street. She presses her lips to the window— the waiting window. As he runs away his militant frame, once emboldened in comparison to her tiny fragility, sinks into a comforting smallness. He is gone. How small he looks now that he has not listened to her. How logical he seems. She is glad that he is no longer a man, but the memory of an umbrella.

There is no way she will capture him again. She knows that he no longer sees her face in every song, but a whiteness, like a bed sheet, that covers everything. Her body is water. Her features are obstructed. She finds pleasure in drowning. She wants to scream. As she breathes through the glass, watching him run, these words are in her mind: “You suicide me, so obediently. /I shall die you however one day. /I shall know that ideal woman /and slowly I shall snow on her mouth” (Matthews 61).

Why does she love him? Qu’est-ce que? What is it? She sees him as a man, yet she knows that the future will remember him as an artist. How will he capture them? Of which facets of his art will they philosophize rapturously? Will it be the way his clean and vivid images seal themselves into the mind in a manner that is almost mathematical? Is it the subconscious sense of eroticism that manages to pervade all of his work even through the innocent portrayal of a visual ideology?

René Magritte. René. Monsieur Magritte. The man she loves. A painter. A Surrealist. A prime member of an artistic collective. Even nonlinear images somehow resonate believably when depicted by his hand. His career began in commerce, and this is plainly visible through the observation of his clean lines and precise renderings. He is distinct in the way that he communicates an image that gives immediate pleasure in spite of, or perhaps because of, the irrationality of its content and the rationality of its form. He has been known for freeing objects of their practical functions so as to portray an image that is intensely compelling in its lack of logic.

Logic? She wonders if such a notion has anything to do with the way he is running so swiftly in spirals at her feet. He has always been a gentleman. He built her a house once, a tiny, brittle construct comprised of parallel lines and windows dripping with the warm, polite glow of cheap lamps. The house lived in a tree, and there was an apple that lived above it in a wooden box. And leaves— there were many, many dark, sweet leaves. The Voice of the Blood, he had named it. How fragile he had been in those days.

And yet how simple still is the execution of his work. The implications therein grow increasingly complex as one delves into his system of symbolism. Once she had overheard him say, “My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question ‘What does that mean’? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable” (Hammacher 1). Just as this statement seems immediately nonsensical and circular, so might Magritte’s images before one realizes that they each possess a highly specific logic of their own.

He is a lover. He is a painter, poet, essayist, and theorist, a part of a creative community operating under the name of Surrealism, including such personages as Salvador Dali, Giorgio DeChirico, filmmakers Man Ray and Brassai, and the poet Paul Eluard. The lectures given by Surrealist leader Andre Breton asking, “Qu’est-ce que le Surrealisme?,” evoke a world seething with the ideals of “desire, myth, poetry, taboo, and transgression” (Mundy 12). The Surrealists strove to enter a universe through their artistic product that operated on the truth of the subconscious pursuits of the nighttime mind viewed through a daytime lens. They aimed to portray their vision of man as driven primarily by desire, and viewed desire as the voice of the authentic internal self. Desire for the Surrealists was not merely a facet of human life; it was the passageway to self-discovery and root of the ever-central erotic instinct. Breton himself described desire as “the only master man must recognize” (Mundy 14). It is evident that the force of desire drips from any Surrealist masterpiece, yet it is also blindingly apparent that many painters of the movement employed a style that was as simple as possible in the rudimentary portrayal of its images. How did a land of ultimate desire, taboo, and subconscious perceptions come to be synchronized with the excruciatingly simplified style through which it has been given life? This is the paradox and genius of Magritte. Through this consciousness emerges the undeniable eroticism of ultimate simplicity that exists in the minds of children, all the more erotic precisely because it has no name and no application. It dwells in the realm of namelessness. It exists in a space where there is no cognitive will, and no cerebral remembrance.

Yet as he ran he remembered her too. He knew she would be standing with her lips pressed against the waiting glass window, unable to weep, only to wonder. He envisioned her, standing, talking, in the dark. He did not see her as beautiful, not even with the lights out! But how much less compelling, he thought, if she had been beautiful. How much more tantalizing, he thought, if her body were an apple—a tart green apple filling the whole room, bulging, breaking, tight in its own protective skin. The fruit would infiltrate the entire space and squeeze out the air around it, the way she squeezed out the air from his body. There would be one window. He would name itThe Listening Room.

Again he saw her face as a white blankness, unreadable, endless. He knew that she loved him, but he did not love her any longer. Had he ever? She was the first to whom he had ever told his true darknesses. When she asked him why he always painted her with a veil over her face, he had sung to her of the “black land” of Belgium, and of Charleroi, the grey little town of his childhood. He sang to her of his mother’s strange suicide. He was only twelve the night his youngest brother had awakened in the middle of the night, finding himself alone in his room:

The [family] searched in vain all over the house; then, noticing footprints on the doorstep and on the pavement, followed them as far as the bridge over Sambre, the local river. The painter’s mother had thrown herself into the water, and when the body was recovered her face was found to be covered by her nightdress. It was never known whether she had hidden her eyes with it in order not to see the death which she had chosen, or whether the swirling currents had veiled her. (Gohr 11)

Yet there was no sadness. All that was in him was arrogance, “intense pride at the thought of being the pitiable center of attention in a drama. He was proud to have become known [in his town] as ‘the suicide son’” (Gohr 11).

“seeing is forgetting the name of what one sees”
                                                                                 (Valery 1)

In the middle of the night she is awake. She calls his name. There is nothing in bed next to her but a large twangling of bells (Grelots Roses!) for he is gone. Across the darkened room she sees the door to the outside hallway. She is running. She runs into the hallway, but the orange is too much for her eyes. There is only one window. Across the hallway she creeps to her bedroom door. The re-entrance. The return. Darkness. He is there. He is waiting in her bed. Her hair is still wet. She walks toward the smell of his limpid eyes. She cannot see anything in the total blackness, but she knows he has returned. Back into bed—she must get back into the bed! A small white hand touches the mattress. Here she is in her white nightdress. A breath. A flash. A clasp. He engulfs her. “René!” A scream. He is not her lover. He is death in the form of the painter himself. Now it is too late. She does not breathe anymore. She sinks into his tranquility, the tranquility that comes only with the death of the soul and the birth of reality.

But our love it was stronger by far then the love of those who were older than we but the wind came out of the cloud that night, killing my
Annabel Lee*
                                                                                         (Poe 1)

In his creative outpourings the man was like a child, not realizing the import of his subconscious associations. Children, after all, were always the most empathetic receivers of his work. She remembered once seeing a small girl in a museum wander away from her parents to gaze benignly at several Magritte creations, when her father finally spotted her and questioned the tiny child’s unhindered appreciation of the images. He tried to ask his daughter if she thought any of the paintings were strange, and tested her to identify what was “missing” or “funny” about the aesthetic composition of each work. It was obvious that the child did not think, however, that any of the images were odd at all, but rather considered the adults’ confusion bewildering.

It is this acceptance, or refusal of acceptance, of nonlinear images with which Magritte commands the world to grapple. In his biography “René Magritte,” Abraham Marie Hammacher states that “preconsciousness—that is, the state before and during waking up—always played an important role in [the artist’s] work” (2). Perhaps children are intrinsically closer to this state of preconsciousness in everyday life than are adults, and this absolves the more “mature” need to question the illogic of certain images. In this proposed truth resides a major conflict presented by the work of Magritte. Why must he question the way in which the human mind has been conditioned to accept only linear representations of reality? Was he too once entrapped by a stiflingly logical view? Perhaps this constitutes a proposal that the mind in its natural, unconditioned, and abstract state is able to receive “surreal” images; whereas, it is only the social constructs that affect the way a child grows, that her ability to conceive of the nonlinear is stifled. The artist’s images suggest that the dynamic and visionary individual may escape and supercede these boundaries of perception.

And yet for all his defiance of boundaries, she wondered, why must he be so clinically aloof? Why did his creations constantly give her a feeling of alienation? Who else but Magritte would think to craft The Son of Man—an image of a common bourgeois gentleman with a green apple suspended in air obscuring his face—and yet paint this idea with such exactitude and straightforwardness that its reality is barely questioned? It is precisely this feeling of ultimate simplicity bordering on desolation that is the key to the appreciation of his illogic. Yet the artist “is a difficult painter, and his simplicity is misleading” (Hammacher 1). Instead of this “difficulty,” which arises solely as a result of the intellectual consideration of Magritte’s work, at first glance there is only an innocent acceptance of dream-state subjects that cause one to question nothing, but rather to peacefully receive the irrationality of the figure. “Simplicity” may only be “misleading” when the cerebral self contradicts the authentic image.

He, and he alone, is her contradiction. She must find a way to tell him, so that he no longer doubts her continuance when he is gone. Once he sang to her. There are parallel songs she could sing him now:

“warm still from the abandoned sheets
you close your eyes and you move
the way a song moves at its birth
vaguely but coming from everywhere”
       -The Kiss, Paul Eluard (Mundy 3)

This is familiar, one of their old favorites. She seeks something stranger, more plaintive:

“it must always be the first time
it must always be the last time
as soon as you appear you disappear, as soon as you
are dressed you are naked, you have never been,
your absence is to be no more”
     -L’Immaculee Conception, Andre Breton & Paul Eluard (Mundy 6)

Will he understand? She is hopeful. The future will intellectualize him, just as he has intellectualized himself while ironically opposing the rampant psychoanalysis of his acrylic offspring. He embodies a dual world, and at times there seems to be no possible way to merge his two minds. He manages to condition images of the illogical in a way that produces a cool and curious surprise upon reception, but soon lures the captor into a smooth belief in the impossible. Yet what does the seductor himself say of his work? In 1915 Magritte is known to have obtained a catalogue of “futurist pictures” and this discovery supposedly transformed his artistic ideals. He became obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe, whose poetry ensnared him with its seductive and nostalgic morbidity. His intent had not been to beguile; it was to sensationalize and astonish. He claimed that he was not working from a place of childlike, dreamworld aesthetics, but rather from a sense of sensuality and sexual mystery: “I cannot doubt that a pure and powerful sentiment, namely eroticism, saved me from slipping into the traditional chase after formal perfection. My interest lay entirely in provoking an emotional shock” (Soby 9). He had never been one to apologize for his naked obsession with shock value. Here he was again, running away from her as fast as he could, his face nevertheless infused with a serene smile of inimitable charm and linear simplicity.

She was the word, and he was the inflection with which that word entered the world. Between them had grown an irreplaceable symbiosis. In spite of the profound and complicated relationship between content and portrayal in Magritte’s work, it seems that the main focus of his creations lies in his subject, as the style in which he paints is as simple as an illustration in a children’s book. Upon viewing the work of his idol, Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico, Magritte admired him publicly by declaring that de Chirico was “the first to dream of what must be painted and not how to paint” (Soby 8).

and with that he
carefully washed grapes in a glass of water while explaining to his guests the importance of eliminating germs from food and then, distracted,
drank the soiled water in the glass.
and when you are not here i dream that i sleep i dream that i dream
                                                                                 (Mundy 158)

And all the night-tide I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride-in the sepulcher there by the sea, n her tomb by the sounding sea.*
                                                                                       (Poe 1)

She knows he will return, but this time she cannot let him back in the orange door. He has aligned himself too intimately with a world that no longer knows absolutes. She cannot live this way. And yet she cannot help but worry about what he will do, for she knows that “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd” (Mundy 3). She is content that he is no longer a man but the memory of an umbrella. She wants to lose him again and lose him again and lose him again so that her heart cannot again be content. He is an apple in a crowded room to her. She is to him Le Faux Mirror, an eye which reflects but does not see. She is the receptacle of his childhood dreams now raped by his own supreme complacency. He knows she will forever remain entranced, try as she might to look away from his swiftly diminishing shadow and go back into the warm house. Is it not clear that dans les yeux les plus sombres s’enferment les plus clairs (Mundy 241)?

Now she is over. She must stop reading. To turn this page over and read every word of the blank side will take her eighteen years. In this way she will be able to find the answers to the questions she smelled in this little collection of letters. It will cost her an apple in front of her face and a dove filled with clouds. She will not regret the year she lived in a house filled with nighttime even as the rainclouds outside shone like an orange sun.

* With apologies to Edgar Allen Poe.

French Translations:
“Si vous…”—If you love love, you’ll love Surrealism!
“Qu’est-ce..”—What is it?
“Qu-est-ce…” (p. 69) —What is Surrealism?
“Grelots Roses!”—Pink Bells (A painting by Magritte)
“dans les yeux…”—In the darkest eyes the brightest eyes enclose themselves.

Works Cited

Gohr, Siegfried. Magritte.San Francisco: The Museum of Modern Art. Abrams, 2000.

Hammacher, Abraham Marie. René Magritte. Trans. James Brockway. New York: Abrams, 1995.

Mundy, Jennifer, ed. Surrealism: Desire Unbound.Princeton, New Jersey. Princeton UP, 2001.

Poe, Edgar Allen. “Annabelle Lee.” Romantic-Lyrics.com, 2003. http://www.romantic-lyrics.com/pa12.shtml.

Soby, James Thrall. René Magritte.New York: The Museum of Modern Art. Doubleday, 1965.

Valery, Paul. Little Blue Light, 2003. http://www.littlebluelight.com/lblphp/quotes.php?name=Valery

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