Sky and Castle

Ben, three paintings by René Magritte:


Castle in the Pyrenees

("Magical Realism")

























The False Mirror

(Puts a new spin on "in the eye of the beholder." More like: "In the eye of the beholder beholding this painting beholding you." Or: "In the eye, and only in the eye, beholding-as-such is manifest.

Or yet again: "In the eye of the beholder as it reads 'in the eye of the beholder' typed across the computer screen.)





The Red Model

One of the most impressive Magritte images ever, period. (followed by a period . )

We can re-name it "Shoeless" if we want. Magritte wouldn't care -- Dead men tell no lies. Living ones do.

Magritte was part of the Surrealist movement, but his style has been recently called "magical realism" in order to distinguish his quiet style from the psychedelic movement of Dali. And it's a good call too. Magical realism is a genre that crosses between painting and literature, and given Freudian ideas about the Uncanny, I'd definitely group Magritte into magical realism.

Here's an essay by Fredric Jameson that mentions Magritte, Pynchon, and even Burroughs. I heard him speak at UGA last month. He's a chubby, sweaty scholarly-type that mumbles a lot, but he's definitely brilliant. The talk was basically a narratology and a Post-colonial critique of Aristotle, the Illiad and Odyssey, Livy, Marx, and others.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/JAMESON/jameson.html