Le Faux Mirror: A Profile of René Magritte
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 ...
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...dgar 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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