Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign

The Penguin Book of French Verse, 2, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” said Gertrude Stein (187),1 and we might be tempted to name René Magritte’s painting A Rose Is a Rose, were it not for the fact that this image (see figure 1) is not a rose, any more than Magritte’s painting of a pipe, The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des images) (1929), is a pipe. His caption, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” amply demonstrates that the signifier is not the signified. In his book This Is Not a Pipe (1968), Michel Foucault devotes some fifty pages to proving that the iconic representation of a pipe is not the same thing as smoking it. Indeed, in our time, no informed person believes in the transparency of the sign. The rose is not a rose because Magritte has named his picture The Tomb of the Wrestlers (Le Tombeau des lutteurs) (1960), a title he borrowed from Léon Cladel’s nineteenth-century novel entitled Ompdrailles, le-tombeau-des-lutteurs (1879). This is an unusual and arresting title for a painting that depicts a red rose inside a room, a rose whose petals are enclosed by the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Moreover, the painting was not meant to illustrate the novel any more than Cladel’s text is an intentional ekphrastic representation of the painting.

Ben Stoltzfus

Papers

Magritte, Cladel, and The Tomb of the Wrestlers: Roses, Daggers, and Love in Interarts Discourse