The Dream of Correspondence: Explicable Surrealism in Magritte's "Lifelines"

It’s said that a hot air balloon landed on the roof of Rene Magritte’s childhood home, and that the imprint of this unexpected, vivid event can be seen in Magritte’s paintings of familiar objects possessed of unusual characteristics or set in unusual contexts.  It’s also said that the early death of Magritte’s mother led to the painter’s sliding from the world he knew was real, where his mother was dead, to the world he wished was real, where his mother was alive, and that this slippage between worlds shapes Magritte’s work.  I like the tidy mythologies used to explain the signature qualities of interesting people.  I don’t care if they’re true.  They allow me to imagine origin-points for art, which can inform my own thinking about art and how to make it.  It can also be useful in trying to teach people to engage an art form, whether it be painting or writing or film-making—any art that involves a relationship between an artist and the world around him or her, which… is pretty much any art.

                In an essay called “Lifeline,” written for a retrospective of Dada put together by Robert Motherwell, Magritte tells his own stories of becoming an artist.  The piece is engaging because Magritte is smart and quirky, and sometimes it’s hard to read his tone—his baseline tone is earnest, but he can seem dryly tongue-in-cheek at times, as in this passage, where he recalls an early experience with art.

                “In my childhood I used to play with a little girl in the old crumbling cemetery of an out-of-the-way provincial town, where I always spent my vacations.  We would lift the iron grates and descend to the underground passageways.  Climbing back up to the light one day I happened upon a painter from the Capital, who amidst those scattered dead leaves and broken stone columns seemed to me to be up to something magical.”

                The painter was up to something magical?  Here, Magritte has descended into and returned from an underworld.  Who’s really up to the magic, here?  It doesn’t matter: out of his childhood experiences, Magritte brought forward an idea of painting—of going deep and resurfacing among relics where the image can come forward—and he carried that idea in a determined manner through his life to become a well-known international artist in his own lifetime—a rare feat—and one who’s work continues to command popular and critical interest.  I say that he carried it forward in a determined manner because Magritte struggled through decades of anonymity, during which he worked in marketing and even painted forgeries of famous works by Picasso and Renoir which his friend and later biographer sold to help them survive.  A 2011 article in The Independent reports the discovery that Magritte even forged his own work, both for commercial purposes and as an expression of his ironic attitude toward concepts like authenticity and reality. 

                In “Lifeline,” Magritte describes stages of his artistic development.  Early on, he painted the girl—the one he played with in the cemetery and the tunnels—in ways designed to produce the emotional charge of eroticism.  Eventually, Magritte sought a more removed, aesthetic position, which he describes this way: “Thinking it possible to possess the world I loved at my own good pleasure, once I should succeed in fixing its essence upon canvas, I undertook to find out what its plastic equivalents were.  The result was a series of highly evocative but abstract and inert images that were, in the last analysis, interesting only to the intelligence of the eye.” 

                Though he describes his paintings in this mode as failures—overly literal, even analytical— Magritte recognizes that they led to a crucial development: “I grew able to look at a landscape as though it were but a curtain hanging in front of me.  I had become skeptical of the dimension in depth of a countryside scene, of the remoteness of the line of the horizon.”  Magritte realizes that his own artistry can put pressure on the world, and cause it to give, or transform it.  Allying himself with surrealism and with the political thought of Marx and Engels, Magritte “became convinced that I must thenceforward live with danger, that life and the world might thereby come up in some measure to the level of thought and the affections.”  Again, here, it’s hard for me to read Magritte thoroughly—I can’t tell if the danger he’s referring to is political (he did live through the nightmare of World War II in Europe) or more aesthetic or theoretical, i.e., the unhinging of referentiality that his paintings would perform is itself a kind of hazard.  That by questioning the traditional relationships between familiar objects in the social world, one risks a certain amount of unraveling.

“In my pictures I showed objects situated where we never find them.  They represented the realization of the real if unconscious desire existing in most people. 

The lizards we usually see in our houses and on our faces, I found more eloquent in a sky habitat….  A woman’s body floating above a city was an initiation for me into some of love’s secrets.”

In this last, I feel like Magritte is trying to participate dutifully in surrealist discourse—one shouldn’t be too logical in one’s explanations of one’s artistic processes.  The discourses of logic aren’t amenable, often aren’t friendly to, and simply aren’t capable of encompassing the artist’s work.  To try to explain is to capitulate, or at best to try and perform a very suspect translation.  But Magritte has logic at his core.  You can see the way his paintings isolate singular objects, even if they defamiliarize those objects.  It’s almost scientific, experimental—selecting a subject and then subjecting it to the pressure of his art.  You can hear Magritte reasoning in his articulations about artistic practice: “The creation of new objects, the transformation of known objects, … the utilization of certain scenes from half-waking or dream states, were other means employed with a view to establishing contact between consciousness and the external world.”  These are alternative forms of contact, but Magritte is not overwhelmed by them—a part of Magritte stays in the world of conventional, logical, communicative discourse, so he can articulate his artistic thought in ways that the public can comprehend.  An artist who was fully overtaken by surrealism might stick entirely to utterances on the level of “the lizards we usually see in our houses and on our faces”—language designed to exist unfettered by meaning. 

Even when Magritte recounts, in “Lifelines,” the dream that pushed him into his mature artistic practice, it’s a dream of logic, a dream of pairs, a dream of correspondence:

“One night in 1936 I awoke in a room where a cage and the bird sleeping in it had been placed.  A magnificent visual aberration caused me to see an egg, instead of the bird, in the cage.  I had just fastened upon a new and astonishing poetic secret, for the shock experienced had been provoked by the affinity of two objects cage and egg [not bird and egg, I here wonder—but… I can see the correlation he’s talking about], whereas before, I had provoked this shock by bringing together two unrelated objects.  From the moment of that revelation I sought to find out whether other objects besides the cage might not likewise show—by bringing to light some element that ws characteristic and to which they had been rigorously predestined—the same evident poetry as the egg and cage.”

Magritte is seeing here how affinities can be even more wondrous than paradoxes.  Earlier, he had forced objects into unusual relationships in order to see them afresh, now he could allow unexpected affinities to reveal even deeper, more magical truths about the objects that came into his paintings.  For me, this idea is clearer but less eye-opening in prose than it is in viewing—seeing a Magritte painting inspires in me the transformation of perception, while reading the idea explained in prose allows me to think about the transformation of perception.  Both, I think, are valuable for artists--the transformation of perception and the ability to think about the transformation of perception.  The latter is maybe especially valuable for writers, whose medium is so closely associated to the making of meaning.  Language’s capability for explanation is something that writers can ignore, utilize, manipulate, etc…

Magritte’s last word: “That pictorial experience which puts the real world on trial inspired in me belief in an infinity of possible now unknown to life.  I know I am not alone in affirming that their conquest is the only valid end and reason for the existence of man.”

“Their conquest.”  The double-meaning of this is really challenging, and needs no explication by me.  It hangs there, like an apple in front of the face of logic.