Magritte, ars combinatoria, Borges

Les affinités électives (1933)

Written 5 September 2011:

One should not be hasty in assuming that all surrealists held to the party line of the movement. Magritte was more circumspect about the arbitrary juxtapositions that Breton celebrated in Lautréamont. Here's an excerpt from a piece [On “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges] I wrote recently on Borges & his tacit attitude towards surrealism:

I mentioned the propensity of surrealism to capitalize on exotic juxtapositions. Shock effects can easily be produced by juxtaposing two incongruous objects. But how original is this? René Magritte had caveats about such casual juxtapositions, and he considered his artworks exercises in problem-solving, exemplified in his Les affinités électives (1933). In addition to how he solved the particular problem of this work, Magritte in a lecture of February 1937 contrasts arbitrary and essential juxtapositions:

There is a secret affinity between certain images; it is equally valid for the objects which those images represent . . . We are familiar with birds in cages; interest is awakened more readily if the bird is replaced by a fish or a shoe; but though these images are strange they are unhappily accidental, arbitrary. It is possible to obtain a new image which will stand up to examination through having something final, something right about it: it’s the image showing an egg in the cage.

Borges, Menard, Quixote, Ars Combinatoria

Iam mi devos verki ĉi-teme en Esperanto. Jen plu en la angla. Sed "Pierre Menard, aŭtoro de Donkiĥoto", "La Alefo", kaj "La Analiza Lingvo de John Wilkins"  troveblas en la antologio La Sekreta Miraklo. De Borges haveblas miabloge Hajkoj kaj Tankaoj, La Sudo, kaj La Biblioteko de Babelo. En Vikipedio vidu Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz kaj René Magritte.

Here is my latest piece on Jorge Luis Borges:

On “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, by Ralph Dumain

Here again we find several references and allusions to the ars combinatoria and to its limitations. See also my essay On “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges: Observations and Questions. And of course there is my web guide:

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Study Materials on the Web

The question of mechanical combinatorialism leads to more general considerations on the fruitfulness of juxtapositions, and to the evaluations of Borges and others on the theory and practice of surrealism. Note my links to René Magritte at the bottom of my web page. (See also René Magritte in Wikipedia, kaj en Vikipedio en Esperanto). See also my other links on juxtaposition, in art, fiction, and poetry.

Note this comment by Michael Theune in "Writing Degree ∞ (on Recent Haiku)", Pleiades Book Review, January 2008:

"Haiku has suffered more from Surrealism than from any other theory or aesthetic."

Theune has much more of interest to say.  He also refers to this web site:

Computerized Haiku

Magritte comes out as a positive in Theune's deliberations, which concern poetry in general, of which haiku provides just one telling form. This should enhance our appreciation of Borges' imaginative oeuvre.

Bizarro Lit / Strangega Literaturo

" . . a chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!"

— Lautréamont

Here is a literary genre I did not know existed, Bizarro Lit, as reported by Cracked.com. (I presume this web site has its origins in Cracked Magazine, a lesser-known competitor to Mad Magazine in my childhood.) Here we see perverse hybrids of other pulp genres.

This itself is hardly surprising. I cannot fix offhand when explicitly combinatorial or self-conscious genre-bending came into existence, but one can trace this tendency as least as far back as the last third of the 19th century. Consider various movements and genres over the past century and more— 'pataphysics, surrealism, Oulipo, alternate history,  steampunk . . . All are outgrowths of certain time periods and social circumstances. Individual authors such as Hermann Hesse and Jorges Luis Borges also come to mind. I think also of Richard Brautigan's genre experiments in the 1970s.

Yet, it seems to me that, for those not entirely immersed in popular culture and its attendant historical amnesia, we live in a markedly retrospective time, returning to and reexamining the past, especially of the 20th and late 19th centuries. We live in a combinatorially self-conscious period. I suppose this is usually termed postmodernism. But whatever you call it, there is a looking backward and a self-conscious comparison with the different presuppositions and norms of the present. I'm guessing this is where steampunk came from. I'm also guessing that the appearance of Esperanto and Volapük in historical and alternate history novels at this time is no accident; this also reflects our self-conscious exploration of the social/cultural past. (I know an English professor and Esperantist who agrees with me on this.)

What we cannot know, if there is to be any future at all, what to look forward to that is qualitatively new. But then, we're in a situation at least partly described by Hegel:

". . . the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall."