The Magritte Poems, Mark Young, with
an introduction by Javant Biarujia
Sandy Press, 2024
Magritte’s work has been a creative provocation for a number of poets and other writers since, of all of the painters associated with Surrealism, he produced work that quite clearly was conjured from a conceptual core. Indeed, he described his art as the visible description of thought. At their best, his paintings involve an ontological sleight of hand that exploits the gap between our representations of reality and the reality they represent, in the process rearranging our everyday picture of the world and its furniture and unsettling our relationship to both. He inverts the ordinary relationships between things; deliberately mislabels objects; creates disturbing visual puns; and reframes our ideas of the values and functions of things by forging links between things inhabiting distant ontological domains. And with the exception of a brief “Renoir” period in the early 1940s and the caricatural “vache” paintings from later in that decade, he did all of this in a neutral, almost style-less style that deliberately resembles the most banal commercial art or dictionary illustration. That style turns out to have been both an asset and a liability. On the one hand it made the paintings approachable, the better for them to work their subversion almost surreptitiously. On the other hand it made them too approachable, which resulted in their popularization to the point of oversaturation and cliche. In the process, their edges have been dulled. Many of their images and motifs are familiar enough that it’s easy to become inured to their genuine strangeness. It is to their great credit that, by engaging Magritte’s paintings with a combination of seriousness and ironic humor, Young’s poems help us to see once again how these paintings could, as Magritte put it in his autobiography/artist statement “Lifeline,” make “everyday objects shriek aloud.”
Young’s poems are imaginative inventions grounded in ekphrasis. Some of them involve inferences spun out of the visual clues Young sees in the paintings; some are meditations on the philosophical problems the pictures appear to raise. All of them carry the titles of the paintings to which they respond.
Here is La Joconde:
The
slice-of-sky curtain is
center
stage — or should
that be
center plage? Behind
it are
two other curtains, red
this
time, ready, when the
bell
starts to ring, to move
slightly
forward & draw to-
gether
to conceal the other &
leave
only sand & sea in sight.
The painting shows a seashore at dusk, with a round bell sitting on the sand. At its center is a wedge of bright blue sky flecked with white clouds. The sky, like the bell, is familiar as one of Magritte’s frequently recurring visual motifs. The sky is framed by two red curtains pinched in at the middle, the one on the left paralleling the half-hourglass shape of the slice of sky. Young’s response takes the form of a calligram using center-justification to mimic the curvilinear outline of the curtains and wedge of sky. His description of the painting is economical and precise; with an off-rhyme between “stage” and “plage,” he imagines the section of day-lit sky as a prop or stage set about to be hidden by the red curtains once the bell signals them to close. Will that closing mean the close of day, leaving only the twilit stretch of beach and water? Or, if this is all a stage set, does that mean that the world we perceive is simply a spectacle to divert us? Young answers this second question with Le Beau Monde:
The
world which
we see
clearly
is the curtain
in front
of
the
world which
Magritte clearly sees.
Le Beau Monde shares the curtains-and-sky motif and general formal structure of La Joconde, but with differences. The wedge of sky is the same but the curtains here are solid blue, and the wedge is superimposed over an identical blue-sky-with-clouds that makes up the entire background; the bell is replaced by one of Magritte’s signature green apples. The scene as Young gives it to us is no longer a stage set; rather, the curtain appears to be an embodiment of the Veil of Isis, which occults the true reality of the world behind the apparent reality “we see/clearly.”
With this terse poem, Young encapsulates in a few words one of the fundamental motifs recurrent in Magritte’s art – concealment, in the form of objects covered by or hidden behind other objects. Magritte’s biographer Alex Danchev quotes the painter telling an interviewer, “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” Magritte seems to have meant this in a literal sense, but the paintings hint more generally that the visible is concealing something of a reality other than the mundane reality we see. Magritte was no metaphysician, but some of his paintings do suggest a dissociation or contradiction between the phenomenal world and whatever it might be hiding – the noumenal, the Ideal, thought: call it what you like, even if he might not have used those terms. The implication is that the phenomenal world is a screen hung on an invisible frame. If Magritte’s neutral style compels us to recognize the banal objects he depicts as physical things unproblematically present to perception, his subjecting them to bizarre arrangements or his opposing words to them, whether through incongruous labels or titles, tends to undermine what Stevens called “the eye’s plain version.” We’re left with the impression that what we’re supposed to see is that what we see is constituted by what we don’t see: that is, by the invisible image or idea that makes the thing present to us as the thing it is. As Young puts it in The Improvement,
Things
might seem to be
how
they seem until you
reach
the door — or, more
probably,
one of many doors —
marked
Magritte the Magi-
cian,
open any of them, &
discover
the invisible that
resides behind the visible.
Young’s first of three responses to The Son of Man, Magritte’s famous
image of a bowler-hatted man whose face is hidden behind a green apple, begins
by raising a question concerning the relationship of the apple to the laws of
physics, and hence to the nature of its reality:
Does
this apple obey
the laws of gravity
& fall at thirty-two feet
per second per second?
Does time move slower
in the reality of an unreal
landscape? Do objects
invent their own velocity?
Is the apple’s downward movement through time and space something proper to the apple – does it “invent [its] own velocity” – or is it something we impose on it? Does our experience of time vary with the perceived reality of the place in which we experience it? The questions Young raises here seem to touch on the Kantian notion that such structures as time, space, and causation aren’t inherently part of an independent reality but instead are imposed by the conceptual apparatus of the human mind. This may or may not have been what Magritte intended, but Young’s imaginative questioning of the painting insightfully reveals a meaning provoked by the image itself.
One of the techniques Magritte famously used to provoke a surreal meaning was the pairing of images of objects with the names of other, seemingly unrelated objects. It was a technique he employed in a series of paintings titled Le Cle des songes, translated either as The Interpretation of Dreams or The Key to Dreams. Young takes a 1935, English-language Key to Dreams once owned by Peggy Guggenheim that depicts a horse, misnamed “the door;” a clock, misnamed “the wind;” a pitcher, misnamed “the bird;” and a suitcase, correctly labeled “the valise,” and responds to this painting of dual signification with a double-entendre of his own:
.....& then
there are
those rare
times when
our dreams
speak to us
in a language
we can under-
stand.....
Does the “language we can understand” refer to a decoding of dream symbolism in which an image of obscure meaning is translated into the word that reveals its true meaning (or vice versa)? Or to the fact that here Magritte uses English, a language we as Anglophones can understand?
One of the conceptual motifs Magritte addressed in various ways is the inversion or deliberate confusion of the relationship between inside and outside. One of his best-known works, The Human Condition, shows a room in which there is an easel holding a canvas in front of a window; the image on the canvas is a skyscape exactly continuous with the view beyond the window. The immediate meaning of the painting would seem to be a pun on the notion that a painting is a window on the world. But Young’s response goes further and sees a conundrum in the skyscape appearing both inside and outside of the room:
Inside the
outside
is much
the same
as outside
the outside
except
there are
far fewer
people.
As the wry closing comment indicates, not everything in The Magritte Poems is a straight-faced meditation on metaphysics; Young’s signature ironic humor runs throughout the collection. It’s an attitude in keeping with the mordant wit that informs much of Magritte’s work. Young writes with a plain diction that is superficially analogous to Magritte’s flat, illustrational style, but whereas Magritte’s style conveys a sense of intellectual detachment and emotional distance, Young’s instead draws the reader in and signals his own involvement with the paintings he engages. That it is a vital involvement is apparent not only from the number of Magritte-inspired poems Young has written and collected here, but from the many registers in which Young writes as he responds to Magritte’s images and ideas. In addition to the more philosophically oriented poems that I’ve chosen to focus on, there are poems based on the facts of Magritte’s life, and poems of social criticism. The collection also contains Young’s “Florence Foucault” poems, which are sourced from Michel Foucault's Magritte book This Is Not a Pipe and from The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, an 1860 book by Florence Hartley. With The Magritte Poems Young has produced what is in effect his epic, but one that seems to want to be dipped into and read a little at a time. There is much here to please and to stimulate.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Open Doors Review, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, and elsewhere. His essays on poetics have appeared in the books Telling It Slant (University of Alabama Press), and The World in Time and Space (Talisman House). He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III will be appearing in A Year of Deep Listening, to be published by MIT Press in December 2024. Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.