About Eluard and Bayard

Two accidental encounters yesterday. First, a fascinating radio documentary about surrealism in Ireland (isn’t this exactly what Radio 4 should be for?) reminded me of Paul Eluard’s map of the world, displaying the sizes of countries in proportion to how strange they are. (I love the Canada/Mexico border.)

And then my virtual friend Steph (who used to be Chaucer’s Bitch round these parts) posted a nugget from Susie Dent about the 17th-century word “bayard”, which apparently means an unshakeable self-confidence that’s rooted in ignorance. Which is all kinds of relevant to the modern world, but specifically reminds me of one of my favourite books of recent years:

About Stalin and Magritte

Don’t ask me why I ended up at the home page of the Stalin Society of North America. And, when you haven’t asked me that, don’t ask me why they’re co-opting Surrealist iconography (and my Blogger profile pic) for their murky ends.

About Benjamin (again)

More classroom antics. We’ve been nosing around the lower reaches of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a massive, unfinished tome that’s superficially about Paris in the 19th century but manages to pull in Marxism, surrealism, postmodernism, flânerie and more; I’m tracing lines from here to Borges, Perec and more. It’s delightful and frustrating in equal parts that what we have left is a vast selection of fragments, but it does occasionally give a hint of the average writer’s working method. For example:

Play on words with “-rama” (on the model of “diorama”) in Balzac at the beginning of Pere Goriot.

which is essentially a placeholder, a comedian’s [INSERT JOKE HERE]. Another particularly appealed to me with my restaurant reviewer’s hat on, although this is one I’m almost glad he didn’t finish:

There is, to speak once more of restaurants, a nearly infallible criterion for determining their rank. This is not, as one might readily assume, their price range. We find this unexpected criterion in the color of the sound that greets us when [broken off]

Walk away René Magritte

I very rarely find myself in an “I-wish-I’d-had-a-camera” moment because I’m hopeless at taking pictures and in any case deep within my DNA I think there’s a little bit of that superstition (Amish? Inca? Nepalese? Can never remember...) that capturing someone’s image is a way of grabbing their soul. And I’m really rather shy, so I could never do that thing of stopping perfect strangers on the street and asking to photograph their groovy clothes; and I’m also very wary of confrontation, so I could never risk taking pictures surreptitiously, in case the subject objected. No, words is what I do, which is why I was massively tempted to turn the end of that last sentence into a pun about word order, by inserting the word “verb” but I didn’t, so hurrah for me.

But anyway, on Saturday night, in the gift shop of a posh hotel in Bangkok, I wished I’d had a camera. A youngish couple walked in; from what I could hear of their conversation I think they were Korean. He was wearing a blue-and-white striped polo shirt and on the right breast was Magritte’s pipe. Oh, you know the one:

That’s the chap. Except he just had the pipe – not the words. The words that seem to be a lie and then you suddenly realise they’re telling the truth, because it’s not a pipe, it’s a picture of a pipe. The words that encapsulate Magritte’s dry, self-deprecating, deliciously Belgian wit; the words that brought metafiction to visual art; the words that make you look at all art before or since through different eyes; the words without which it would still be a pipe, because nobody’s telling you otherwise. But I didn’t take a photo, for all the reasons I mentioned.

And because I don’t know the Korean for “Do you mind if I take your photo for my new website youvecompletelymissedthebloodypoint.tumblr.com?”

Ceci n'est pas une langue

Sorry, but I’m still on about words.

Small Boo has given me a rather splendid book about my favourite painter, René Magritte. Not only does it include all the images that have become stale through repetition on postcards and tea-towels, it also devotes a lot of space to some of the less familiar pieces, including paintings from the 1940s, when Magritte experimented with a looser style, some of them strongly influenced by Renoir and Matisse; as well as photographs and bronzes.

Throughout the shifts in style and medium, however, Magritte’s big idea persists: superficially ordinary, even banal subject matter, rendered bizarre and even threatening by juxtaposition and tweaking. A man with an apple for a face; boots becoming feet; a flaming euphonium; a pipe that isn’t.

The only downside is that the accompanying text seems to follow a similar trajectory. It’s comprehensible as English, but not comfortably so; the reader just about understands what’s meant, but every few lines, there’s an eye in your slice of ham. This may be the fault of author Jacques Meuris, but I’m inclined to point the finger at translator Michael Scuffil (the sort of blame game I discussed earlier). Here are a few choice morsels:

“The brush technique with its contrasts and glissandi calls forth immaterial, impalpable impressions.”

“It is moreover an example of his attempts on the moral plane to harmonize the meaning he gave to his work as a painter with that of his life.”

“Magritte was never a friend of symbols in painting, though in poetry perhaps.”

“The total rejection of the gratuitous was one of the constant features of Magritte’s attitude.”

“All that was left for this oeuvre was to topple over into its destiny in 1967.”