Semiotic Narratology in Magritte’s Painting

Abstract

This paper deals with who shows things in Magritte’s paintings and to whom the fact that things are as they are in those paintings is attributed.

There are several paths in the proposed task that we have chosen to avoid because of their questionable heuristic value. One of them is to use Magritte as a privileged corpus to illustrate certain semantic mechanisms of Surrealism; another is to use his work as a repertoire for the semiotic description of rhetorical figures; and another is to take Magritte’s own statements and writings about his work as valid by subjecting them to semiotic treatment. The worst path of all, however, is the attempt to taxonomize his work, at any relevant level, by means of inductive, incoherent, or essayistic “methods”.

Our aim has been to increase knowledge both of Magritte’s painting and of pictorial and visual discourse in itself.

First, through two brief visual examples, genre-like and somewhat fanciful, we will examine:
a) what is predicated—that is, the fact that things are one way or another in a painting;
b) who its appraiser is—the discursive instance to which responsibility for the content of what is predicated in the painting is attributed; and
c) who its discursivizer is—the discursive instance that shows what is predicated in the painting.

We will then outline a first typology of unusual narratological statements, rare in painting but highly present in Magritte, and discuss some of his paintings on the basis of these parameters.

Finally, we will draw the aesthetic conclusions of our analyses of Magritte’s works.