Against sincerity: René Magritte, Paul Nougé and

the lesson of Paul Valéry

ROGER ROTHMAN

I two came in 1927, when Valéry was inducted to the Académie

For much of his life, André Breton was deeply ambivalent Française. Revolted, Breton sold his entire correspondence to
about what to make of Paul Valéry. Early in his career, he was Valéry to a book dealer on the very day of the induction.4
drawn to Valéry’s symbolist poetics and went so far as to Three years later, Valéry’s name would appear on Breton’s ‘do
dedicate a poem to him in 1913. The two became friends and not read’ list of authors both past and present (alongside Plato,
the younger poet looked to the older as a mentor and critic. Bergson, Malraux, and others).5
Even more than Valéry’s poetry, however, it was his prose The Belgian faction of the Surrealist movement — centered
piece, An Evening with Monsieur Teste (1896), that most fascinated in Brussels — is typically presented as a satellite of the French
Breton in his early years (he practically knew it by heart, he movement led by Breton. To a great extent this is true: the
once remarked). And it continued to fascinate him for the rest groups collaborated on a number of projects in the 1920s and
of his life. Decades later, Breton remarked: 930s and, for the most part, these collaborations were organized
under the auspices of Breton’s group in Paris. It is also true that
Still today, there are plenty of circumstances in which I hear
the paintings of René Magritte and Paul Delvaux and (to a
this fellow [Mr Teste] grumbling the way no one else can;
lesser degree) the poetry of Camille Goemans and Paul Nougé
he’s still the one who is always right. For me, Valéry had
reached the supreme point of expression with Mr Teste; a gained international attention only after their work was
character created by him (at least I suppose so) had truly set reproduced in the pages of Breton’s various publications.
himself in motion, had come forward to meet me.1 One would thus expect to find that, like Breton, the Belgian
Surrealists would have held Valéry’s poetic conventionalism in
But if Mr Teste was ‘one who is always right’, Breton could not contempt. In fact, however, Magritte, Nougé and the others in
say the same of Valéry himself. As Breton’s interest turned Brussels held up Valéry as a model for emulation and at the
from Symbolism to Dada and Surrealism, Valéry’s classicism same time had little interest in Breton’s concept of ‘automatic
— his ‘Racinian alexandrines’, as Breton called them2 — came writing’ and the call for a poetics of immediacy. What
to be seen as a betrayal of Mr Teste’s ‘grumbling’. By the end interested them even more than the poems and the Teste
of the 1910s, Breton had turned his attention toward stories was Valéry’s collection of meta-poetic texts — texts that
developing a poetry of immediacy, which he referred to as ranged from thoughts on Leonardo to reflections on myth and
‘automatic writing’. For Breton, automatic writing — which history. And, above all, what struck them most directly was
aimed at the direct, unmediated connection between thought Valéry’s abiding interest in the notion of artifice, of the
and word — was the antithesis of Valéry’s attention to poetic inherently deceptive nature of linguistic communication and,
conventions and the classical tradition, an attention exempli- with it, an uncompromising assault on the notion of literary
fied in the most retrograde fashion (as far as Breton was sincerity. This essay sets out to detail the ways in which the
concerned) in the poem with which Valéry, in 1917, broke his Belgian Surrealists — Magritte and Nougé in particular —
long and famed silence, The Young Fate (La jeune Parque). Still, the transformed Valéry’s critique of sincerity into pictorial and
two remained friends, with Valéry even serving as Breton’s best poetic practice. It is hoped that, in doing so, light will be shed
man at his wedding to Simone Kahn in 1921. But the on the considerable divide that separates the discourse and
relationship cooled considerably throughout the 1920s, as practice of the Belgian Surrealists from their French counter-
Breton’s allegiance to Surrealism — and with it, the insistence parts to the south.
on poetic immediacy — grew more intense and uncompromis- Before developing an account of the ways in which the
ing. As Breton wrote in his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924): ‘the first Belgian Surrealists incorporated Valéry’s ideas into their own
sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth practices, it is important to outline the particular aspects of
that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to Valéry’s poetics that most interested them. First of all, it should
our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard’.3 Poetic be noted that Valéry was at least as ambivalent toward
spontaneity, Breton knew well, was the exact opposite of Breton’s practice as Breton was toward his. In a number of
Valéry’s hyperrationalized craft. The final break between the well-known comments, Valéry dismissed Breton’s approach as

290 WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 23 , NO. 3, JULY–SEPTEMBER 2007

Word & Image ISSN 0266-6286 # 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/tf/02666286.html
DOI: 10.1080/02666280601076408
nothing more than ‘scandal mongering’6 but elsewhere his And insofar as it remains the poet’s task to address this real
criticism was more substantial. He rejected, for example, the world outside language, the poet is compelled to consider his
value that Breton placed on poetic ‘inspiration’ as a ‘naı̈ve work within the context of the lie. Hence Valéry’s claim: ‘A
conception of an extraneous force’,7 as well as Breton’s interest work of art is always a fake (which is to say a fabrication to which
in writing while under a trance — one of a number of tactics one cannot connect an author as the only actor in the process). It is
that were used to further the goal of poetic immediacy.8 As the product of a diverse collaboration’.17 From this, Valéry
Valéry once remarked, such a practice was doomed to failure, concludes that the only way to ‘insure works against the
as ‘the slightest revision violates spontaneity’.9 In addition, backlash of scrutiny and … strengthen them against the
Valéry rejected Breton’s embrace of the child and the insane, impression of arbitrariness’, is to embrace the game of rhetoric,
insisting instead that ‘it is impossible for the true poet to be to embrace the work of ‘arbitrariness itself — arbitrariness
naı̈ve’.10 For Valéry, nothing guaranteed the authenticity of a organized and decreed’.18 The honest poem is the poem that
poem — not trance states, not inspiration, not the will to the acknowledges its inherent dishonesty. In other words, for
naı̈ve. Insofar as one operates within the realm of language, Valéry, the greatest lie of all is the lie of sincerity.
one engages in a practice that is fundamentally at odds with the
structure of thought and, as such, there exists no linguistic
II
practice that can claim to represent ‘the actual nature of
Valéry’s poetics of the lie influenced almost every member of
thought’.11 At bottom, for Valéry, there is simply no way to
the Belgian surrealists, from Magritte and Nougé to Marcel
bridge the gap between the conventions of language and the
Lecomte and Camille Goemans.19 Regarding Goemans,
operations of thought. ‘Automatic writing’ was thus a project
Valéry’s discourse of the lie (and its attendant critique of
doomed to perpetual failure for the poet and deceit for the
sincerity) is evident in pronouncements such as ‘There is no
reader.
worse abuse than sincerity’, and ‘The innocent are the most
Against Surrealist automatism, Valéry insisted that the only
guilty’, as well as ‘Our lies interest us more than any truth’.20
viable poetic practice was that which based itself upon the
Moreover, it is evident in Goemans’s effort to extend Valéry’s
rigorous applications of ‘classical’ conventions. Classicism, for
notion of the poet as one who ‘stumbles over words’21 into a
Valéry, applies not to a set of themes or structures but rather to
conception of the poem itself as a thing in the world, ‘outside
a certain recognition of the conventionality of the language it
the will of the author’. 22 As Goemans put it his Notes on Poetry
employs. The classical work is that in which the writer accepts
and Experience: ‘words are not signs’ but, rather, ‘in some sense
and works within the ‘arbitrary’ rules of literary production —
organic beings, bodies’.23
the rules of rhetoric.12 In other words, the classical writer
‘dissimulates’,13 while the poem itself, built of dissimulation, Goemans’s conception of words as bodies was central, not
can only be described as ‘faithless’.14 For Valéry, the only to his evaluation of poetic practice but also to his
faithlessness of the classical poem and the dissimulation of understanding of Magritte’s painting.24 Here it was not a
the classical poet compel a reconsideration of the possibilities question of the way in which painted images can serve to
that lie with the poetic practice. Bound by the rhetorical signify things in the world but rather of the painted image as
structure of language, the classical poem engages with the itself a thing in the world.25 Against those who would see in the
world beyond words, not by the act of poetic mimesis but painter’s work ‘a rehabilitation and a glorification of the most
rather by provoking a physical response in the body of the modest and ordinary objects’, and those who (like Breton)
reader — a response that Valéry says takes places in the most would see in these objects the work of the ‘fetish’, Goemans
primitive ‘reflexes’.15 The classical poem thus functions not to insists that, for Magritte, the object is but an ‘intermediary’.26 It
describe a world but rather to cause an effect upon the reader. is not a question of ‘revealing the existence and the reality of
Valéry’s insistence on the force of rhetoric belongs to his larger objects’, but rather of making manifest a peculiar sort of
project of counteracting the romanticist claim that the classical absence. What he sees in such works as The Eternally Obvious
poet is unable to push beyond language and into the body. (1930) and Representation (1937) (figure 1) — works that identify
What Valéry contests is this: the romantic poet, to be the painted surface with the flesh of real bodies — is that, at
successful, must fully understand his craft. He can only affect some point, this identity breaks down. As we view the painting,
the emotions of his reader if he is in full command of the ways we treat the image as if it were entirely two-dimensional,
in which language works. But in so doing, the romantic has without depth — in other words, incorporeal. And this
ended up becoming his opposite: ‘A romantic who has learned incorporeality is but one of a series of absences at the heart
his art becomes a classic. That is why romanticism ended in of Magritte’s work. While looking, for instance, at Magritte’s
Parnasse’.16 most famous painting, The Treachery of Images (‘Ceci n’est pas
In sum, what distinguished Valéry’s perspective from that of une pipe’), Goemans sees what he calls ‘a double absence of the
Breton is that, for Valéry, one could in no way posit an object — absence in the representation, absence in the name’.
immediate relation to the real. To the contrary, the poet was At stake for Goemans is not the reality of the pipe but the
locked within language, held within its conventions and rules. experience of it as ‘hallucinating’27 — which is to say, the pipe

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 long time in contact with their reality. A feeling akin to terror
was the point of departure for a desire to act on the real, to
transform life.’31 Magritte understood these three terms —
poetry, mystery, terror — as intertwined. The rhetorical
structure of poetry makes the world beyond language a mystery
that is experienced as terror at the moment when the two meet.
The notion that poetry, mystery and terror were in this way
interwoven was a notion that Magritte (as well as Goemans,
Lecomte and Nougé) derived from Jean Paulhan and, in
particular, Paulhan’s reading of Valéry, a reading that he later
summarized as ‘the law of failure’.32 More precisely, Paulhan
used Valéry’s distinction between the romantic and the classic
to develop an account of modern poetry as divided into two
distinct practices. One practice (which included Romanticism)
Paulhan called ‘Terroristic’; the other (which included
Classicism) he called ‘Rhetorical’.33 These two poetic practices
were central to all of Paulhan’s writing. In his most extensive
study of Valéry’s poetics, ‘A Rhetorician in the Savage State:
Paul Valéry or Literature Considered as a Fake’,34 Paulhan
translated the poet’s analysis of the classical and the romantic
— in particular Valéry’s notion that ‘a romantic who has
learned his art becomes a classic’35 — into a theory of poetry as
Figure 1. René Magritte, Representation (La représentation), 1937. Oil on canvas divided into two camps: the terrorists on one side and the
mounted on panel, 48.5644 cm. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, rhetoricians on the other. The Terrorists (a group that would
Edinburgh. include Rimbaud and Breton) are those who aim to destroy
language and its conventions in the name of authentic,
as it exists for us within the conditions of absence or negation. unmediated expression. The rhetoricians (a group that would
And what grabs Goemans’s attention is the sense that it is include Mallarmé and Valéry) accept and embrace the
precisely at this moment — at the moment when the object, its arbitrary rules of poetic practice and aim to extend and
hallucination, and its name come together — that one feels enhance their effects. For the rhetoricians, ‘the work of art is
most acutely what he calls ‘poetry’ and ‘mystery’.28 valued for the intellectual pleasure it gives us rather than for
Both ‘mystery’ and ‘poetry’ are critical commonplaces in the the emotions it provokes in us’.36 From this distinction,
various pieces of scholarship on Magritte and both are treated Paulhan derived in broad outline a genealogy of poetic
as roughly synonymous, signifying a kind of ‘evocativeness’, the practice, linking it with the scientific practices of linguistics
experience of the irrational or illogical.29 And yet, as these two and the philosophical practices of metaphysics: ‘Linguists and
terms appear in the work of Magritte and Goemans, they are metaphysicians have at times (with the rhetoricians) held that
positioned within a more complex field of associations and thoughts were derived from words; at other times (with the
practices, one that included a third term that is often Romantics and the Terrorists) words from thoughts.’37
overlooked: ‘terror’.30 ‘Terror’ was the word Magritte used to Although at first the divide between the Terrorists and the
describe the moment in which he first recognized the poetry Rhetoricians is presented as absolute, Paulhan later insists that
and mystery of the visual world. It was the word that signified there exists an underlying connection between the two
the experience of the moment when language unexpectedly practices. For one thing, notes Paulhan, the terrorist is in fact
pierces the surface of reality, the moment when the artifice and dependent on rhetoric, as he is compelled by his craft to
conventions of speech and writing suddenly intersect with the concern himself with the rules of linguistic expression and
world outside language (the ‘real world’, as we typically refer to communication. The very attempt to go beyond the common-
it). It was this experience of terror that gripped Magritte some places and conventions of languages leads inevitably to a kind
time around 1925, when he found himself drawn to the abstract of writing that is no different in kind than the language of the
patterns on the moldings of a wooden door. The design of the rhetoricians:
moldings — a visual analog to the rhetorical ‘patterns’ of
For Terror depends first of all on language in this general
language — suddenly seized the painter with the force of sense: that the writer is condemned to express only what a
something beyond mere pattern, something that produced in certain state of language leaves him free to express: restricted
him the kind of ‘reflexive’ shudder that Valéry saw as the to the areas of feeling and thought in which language has not
consequence of language at its most refined: ‘The moldings yet been overused. That’s not all: no writer is more
seemed to me filled with a mysterious existence and I was for a preoccupied with words than the one who is determined at

292 ROGER ROTHMAN

 every turn to get rid of them, to get away from them, or even I’m thinking now of a poetic law such that, expressing a
to reinvent them.38 particular relationship of sounds to meanings and of ideas to
words, it is able, without thereby losing its validity or its
It was out of this distinction between terrorist and rhetorician verisimilitude, to stand seeing its terms inverted; to stand
(and the hidden intertwining of the two) that Paulhan being inverted. 43
developed his theory of communication in general. Beginning
with Valéry’s notion that language and thought are divided by Paulhan insists that such an analysis of poetry must be
an unbridgeable gap, Paulhan turned toward moments when distinguished from typical literary analysis: ‘My argument is
the users of language would elide or overlook this gap. Above neither critical nor — by all appearances — literary. It is
all, it was metaphor that most intrigued him. Reversing the strictly logical.’44 And it was this logical aspect that Paulhan
conventional understanding of the term, Paulhan insisted that considered the source of poetic mystery. The formula, as he
‘metaphor, far from being the result of our need to portray presented it, reads:
what we feel, expresses a failure of understanding between the From F(abc) it follows that F9(ABC)
interlocutors’.39 In other words, metaphor is an instance of the From F(ABC) it follows that F9(abc)45
more general ‘law of failure’.40 Metaphor is not language at the
service of a truth beyond discourse but, rather, is the result of It is a formula that applies to both the rhetoricians and the
an error in communication. In this way, Paulhan distinguishes terrorists:
the everyday use of language from that of literature; literature a, b, c are words for classical poets and rhetoricians, and A, B,
is the systematic manipulation of the errors of ordinary C thoughts. But for romantic poets and terrorists a, b, c are,
communication: on the contrary, ideas and A, B, C words.46
The Iliad, Madame Bovary, etc. give us, among other effects, the Paulhan is quick to point out that this mathematical formula of
feeling of being true. Nothing in them is drawn naturally from the relation between words and thoughts is not a formula
reality: neither the style nor the events recounted, not the describing an act of mimesis. There is no claim here that the
heroine, not her loves. To the contrary, one recognizes that poem represents reality: ‘in poetry, words and thoughts happen
the adventures of the novel or epic are arbitrarily cut out from
to be indifferent’.47 Instead, at issue is the mathematical
the real; they include neither the repercussions nor the
relation between poetry and thought, a relation that Paulhan
antecedents of real events; they do not exhibit the same
temporality in which these events take place; and finally, they presents in the form of the mapping of two distinct fields drawn
do not touch us directly — we do not feel our life, our together by the identity of the operations performed on them.
investment in it. Instead, the word fabrication serves to evoke Paulhan’s understanding of poetic mystery begins with the
these resistances and the difficulty of the material, foreign acceptance of an unbridgeable gap between word and world.
more so than strange, through which our ideas take shape. As As he understands it, poetry can only make manifest a kind of
Valéry has said: ‘Regardless of how forceful the fire, it only parallel between the two. Such a parallel would not thereby
becomes useful through the machines or the art that makes establish an identity between the two fields but rather an
use of it.’ But who would then argue against the notion that algorithm through which the internal relations of the one could
the machine resembles fire? Thus it is with the literary work:
be understood in relation to the internal relations of the other.
the existence of the characters, the truth of the sentiments, the
The elements coordinated around these relations remain
life, liveliness, its presence — so many superstitions and
idols which can no longer hide the linguistic nature of distinct and untranslatable, immanent only to their own
the work: in other words, forgeries. (Emphasis in the individual domains. Poetry cannot reveal the link that joins
original)41 language and the world (for Paulhan, no such link exists) but
can point to the structures they have in common. It is in this
In opposition to the lies of the novel, Paulhan places the suspension that Paulhan locates ‘poetic mystery’, and the law
deceptions of the poem. Where the novel is compelled to make by which it is made manifest:
the lies seem real, the poem, on the other hand, makes manifest
its deceptions. The novel hides its lies; the poem reveals them. It is clear that such a law, whose formula would be double,
Poetry is thus the place where language, at its most self- would go further than verisimilitude to reach the truth. For
want of rendering mystery directly — which is by definition
reflexive (Valéry would say ‘refined’), confronts the poet (and
impossible — it would in effect yield to this mystery; it would
reader) with something like the feeling of ‘watching oneself
mime it, show it.48
watch oneself’. And it is this experience that Paulhan refers to
as ‘poetic mystery’.42 This mystery is not, as one might Two things are worth noting at this point. First, the direct
imagine, the result of an active flight from the system of logic or rendering of mystery is understood to be by definition
reason. To the contrary, poetic mystery is the result of a impossible. Second, the law that determines it is understood
rational, systematic engagement with the structure of language, to be a rational system. Importantly, both are implicit in
with its rules, and its fundamental ‘law of failure’. As Paulhan Magritte’s account of the method by which he determined his
described in The Key to Poetry: imagery. Describing the process by which he developed the

293
 III
Magritte’s adoption of Paulhan’s method was in all likelihood
passed to the painter indirectly through the work of Nougé.50
Of all the Belgian surrealists, it was Nougé who concerned
himself most directly with the implications of Paulhan’s work.51
Nougé’s ‘science of poetry’ as he called it52 began where
Paulhan’s analysis left off, specifying the ways in which ‘poetic
mystery’ derives from the formulaic manipulation of words:

chat seins cils sort sol53

~ ~ ~ ~
chapeau ceinture silence sorcière soleil
Nougé’s formula establishes a relation between the upper and
lower words that has nothing to do with the referential
properties of the words. Instead, the formula bears on their
internal (in this case, phonetic) elements.
Before continuing with an account of Nougé’s method, it is
worth pointing out that Magritte’s paintings often engage in an
analogous exploitation of the internal (in this case morpholo-
gical) elements of visual representation. For example, in
Perpetual Motion (1935) (figure 3), Magritte depicts a man holding
a barbell in such a manner that one of the two spherical
weights coincides with the man’s head. ‘Head’ and ‘weight’ are
thereby united morphologically in the same way that the word
‘cils’ (‘lashes’, in English) is put into relation with ‘silence’ in
Nougé’s formula. Where Nougé’s formula forces the reader to
Figure 2. René Magritte, Elective Affinities (Les affinités electives) 1933. Oil on consider the relation between a thing and a state of being (in
canvas, 41633 cm. Private collection, Paris. this case eyelashes and silence) by virtue of their sonorous
relationship, Magritte’s formula forces the viewer to consider
the relation between two objects (in this case a weight at the
painting, Elective Affinities (1933) (figure 2), which depicts a end of a barbell and a human head) by virtue of their
birdcage in which we find not an ordinary domesticated bird morphological relationship. (Represented as Nougé preferred
but rather a gigantic egg, Magritte recalls: it, we would have something like the following: cils/
silence )
One night I awoke in a room where a cage and the bird
sleeping in it had been placed. A magnificent visual
Nougé was particularly attracted to Paulhan’s mathematical
aberration caused me to see an egg, instead of the bird, in model in part because of his early engagement in the methods
the cage. I had just fastened upon a new and astonishing
poetic secret, for the shock experienced had been provoked
by the affinity of the two objects: cage and egg, whereas
before, I had provoked this shock by bringing together two
unrelated objects…. In the course of my investigations, I
came to a conviction that I had always known beforehand
that element to be discovered, that certain thing above all
others that was attached obscurely to each object; only this
knowledge had always lain as though hidden in the more
inaccessible zones of my mind. Since this research could yield
only one exact ‘tag’ for each object, my investigations came to
be research for the solution of a problem for which I had
three data: the object, the thing attached to it in the shadow
of my consciousness, and the light under which that thing
would become apparent.49

Like Paulhan, Magritte considered his work a kind of science

— a poetic science to be sure, but one that was no less
determined by a systematic, impersonal logic in which Figure 3. René Magritte, Perpetual Motion (Le mouvement perpétuel), 1935. Oil
‘sincerity’ plays no role whatsoever. on canvas, 54673 cm. Mr and Mrs Eric Estorick.

294 ROGER ROTHMAN

and practices of the physical sciences.54 In 1910, at the age of Using Paulhan’s language, Nougé’s experimental conception
15, Nougé began his studies in clinical biology, and after the of poetry is the attempt to push rhetoric to the point at which it
war embarked on a career as a chemical engineer in a medical becomes its opposite: terror. In other words, Nougé’s poetic
laboratory. He continued to support himself in this manner method inverts Valéry’s proclamation that the Romantic ends
throughout his life. It was in part out of this preoccupation that in Parnasse. Here, the Parnassian ends up a Romantic.
Nougé developed his model of poetry as an object of scientific Consider, for example, Nougé’s transformation of
investigation and manipulation. ‘By different paths, both poetic Apollinaire’s self-consciously terroristic use of language in the
activity and scientific activity [are involved in] the invention of poème conversation and the calligramme into a rhetorically driven
new objects.’55 poetry, one determined by the language and shape of street
One can distinguish in general two ways of using language.
signs, billboards, and posters — language at its most communal
The first presumes a confidence that one can use it to and functional, language at its least subjective and expressive
translate a state, a thought, an idea, that would come before it (figure 4).61
and that would take it upon itself to express. This usage Here, the directive, ‘push the door’, is crossed with the
involves first of all the concern with sincerity and truth…. poetic cliché of an ‘interior sun’. In this crossing lies the poem’s
mystery — a mystery, it bears repeating, which is produced by
The second usage takes language as an object which one crossing two established linguistic conventions. The ‘effective-
would use to provoke, in those who submit to it, certain states, ness’ of the act is dependent on the process of skillful
thoughts or ideas, and which one would use like an object combination rather than creative invention. Another example
modifiable like any material object…. This second usage
presumes a confidence in a certain science, a certain ingenuity, a
certain happiness that experiments sometimes provide.

This second usage treats the notion of sincerity and truth as

utterly superfluous or absurd. Instead, it concerns itself with
the usage that can be made of language as an object, which is
to say the notion that one should consider the value and
responsibility that accompany the effects of this usage.56

The engineer has no use for truth, no interest in sincerity. The

engineered object is never judged by the honesty of the
engineer or the (metaphysical) truths that can be gleaned from
it; all that matters is its effectiveness (‘It is ‘‘the experiment’’
that plays, over the course of its development, the essential
role’.57) And this is to say that the poet’s task is not to express
himself but, rather, as Nougé put it, ‘to invent in the real …
two or three effective ideas’.58 It was this practice of
experimentation, of linguistic engineering, that determined
the elements of Nougé’s texts. These texts are no more sincere
expressions than they are attempts at capturing the truths of
human experience. They are experiments in language,
experiments performed with the same scientific disinterest that
characterizes the relation between the chemist and his
chemicals:
Given a sheet of paper and a young girl, a young man, an old
man, a sick man, a lover, a miser, etc.; how to use this sheet of
paper so that it becomes an object of agreement, pleasure,
desire, horror, disgust, sadness, melancholy?59

In this way, the stock characters of a short story are treated like
the elements of the periodic table: combined, heated, titrated,
distilled and recombined. Like an engineer, the sole concern is
the efficacy of the object engineered or, as Nougé put it:
‘the sole concern, independent of all concern with Figure 4. Paul Nougé, ‘Poussez la porte…’. Poem in the collection La
expression or truth — the production of an effect’ (emphasis in Publicité transfigurée (1925). Reproduced in Paul Nougé, Fragments (Brussels:
the original).60 Éditions Labor, 1983), p. 49.

295
of this practice of crossing discourses is Nougé’s deck of ‘poetry composition. Magritte, in sum, paints like a rhetorician. The
cards’: 52 playing cards, each of which contains a short charge of his paintings does not lie in their abandonment or
sentence fragment (for example: ‘if you wanted’; ‘nothing is violation of convention (as is the case in, say, Max Ernst’s
lost’; ‘in the past’62) that can be played like any ordinary game frottages or André Masson’s automatic drawing) but in the very
of cards (figure 5). One writes a poem in the same way as a application of convention — by following those rules to the
bridge player builds tricks — organizing one’s hand in the best end, by taking them too far. For example, the violation at work
way possible, taking into account not only the hand of your in The Rape, 1934 (figure 6) — the representation of a woman’s
partner but also that of your opponents. Translated into the face as breasts, torso and genitalia — is as much a violation of
discourse of poetry, the tricks are the poems, the hand is the representation as it is a violation of the woman. Her
language, the opponent the reader. objectification, her transformation from person to thing, is
Such practices are in stark contrast to those preferred by performed by the excessive application of the conventions of
Breton, for whom the activities of the avant-garde were to be Old Master painting, of the conventions that stretch back as far
fundamentally anti-rhetorical. Nougé’s practice is exceptional as Vasari — disegno, maniera, invenzione. Indeed, the model here
in that it recognized that Valéry’s commitment to the is the Venus de Milo, the paragon of female beauty and its
rhetorical properties of language could be manipulated in representation in stone.65 In proper Vasarian fashion, Magritte
such a way that it would serve the aims of the avant-garde. In a drew from the most desirable parts of the female anatomy, the
sense, Nougé’s achievement can be understood as the most beautiful examples of those parts (‘the perfect breasts, the
dialectical solution to what was among the most pressing most beautiful torso’ upon which Vasari would insist), and
oppositions faced by the poets of the interwar avant-garde: the painted them with the utmost fidelity, observing all the rules of
opposition between Mallarmé and Rimbaud, between rhetoric proportion, modeling, coloration. That the result is not
and terror. Valéry chose the former; Breton the latter; Nougé beautiful but grotesque is a sign that within the rhetorical is
both. In this sense, Nougé was among the first figures (if not the the seed of terror, for the painting would seem to suggest that
only one) of the interwar period to put Valéry’s poetics into the the rules, when followed, collapse in on themselves. Magritte’s
service of the avant-garde.63 Where Paulhan followed Valéry in adoption of a dry, academic, manifestly uninventive style of
the examination of the way in which ‘terror, pushed to the painting is not simply a rejection of avant-garde values but
limit, becomes rhetoric’, Nougé reversed this movement, rather a reengagement of them from the other side. For if the
pushing rhetoric to the point at which it becomes terror.64 avant-garde is self-consciously terroristic, explicitly aimed at
And this is surely one of the keys to Magritte’s work as well. dismantling tradition, then Magritte’s work serves to do the
For it is staked upon a pictorial practice that, no less than same from within — not by smashing it from the outside, but
Nougé’s, deserves the name ‘rhetorical’. It follows (to the by stretching it till it snaps.
letter) all the rhetorical devices of Western illusionism: the This is to say that for Magritte — as much as for Nougé and
rules of modeling, coloration, chiaroscuro, perspective and Paulhan — poetry, mystery, and terror operated within a particular

Figure 5. Paul Nougé, Examples from Le jeu des mots et du hasard, 1925. Reproduced in Paul Nougé, Fragments (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1983), pp. 202–3.

296 ROGER ROTHMAN

 5 – André Breton, What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Franklin
Rosemont (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), p. 46.
6 – Valéry, Cahiers, Vol. 2, ed. Judith Robinson (Paris: Gallimard, 1974),
p. 1208.
7 – Valéry, ‘A Poet’s Letter’, in Selected Writings of Paul Valéry, trans. Louise
Varèse (New York: New Directions, 1950), p. 153.
8 – Valéry, ‘Lettre sur Mallarmé’, in Œuvres, Vol. 1. (Paris: Gallimard,
1957), p. 640.
9 – Valéry, Littérature (Paris: Gallimard, 1930), p. 30. Paulhan cites an
analogous phrase in Jean Paulhan, ‘Un rhétoriqueur à l’état sauvage: Paul
Valéry, ou la littérature considérée comme un faux’, in Œuvres Complètes,
Vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), p. 199.
10 – Valéry, cited in Paulhan, ‘Un rhétoriqueur à l’état sauvage’, p. 208.
11 – Valéry, cited in Paulhan, ‘Un rhétoriqueur à l’état sauvage’, p. 199.
12 – Valéry, ‘Remerciement à l’Académie Française’, in Œuvres, Vol. 1,
pp. 739, 741.
13 – Valéry, Littérature, p. 95.
14 – Valéry, Littérature, pp. 95–7.
15 – Valéry, ‘Lettre sur Mallarmé’, p. 638.
16 – Valéry, Littérature, pp. 105–6.
17 – Valéry, cited in Paulhan, ‘Un rhétoriqueur à l’état sauvage’, p. 199.
18 – Valéry, ‘Remerciement à l’Académie Française’, p. 741.
19 – For an account of the centrality of Valéry’s work to the Belgian
Surrealists, see François Toussaint, Le Surréalisme Belge (Brussels: Éditions
Labor, 1986). A brief account of Valéry’s influence on Nougé and others is
present in Dominique Combe, ‘Rhétorique de Paul Nougé’, Europe: revue
littéraire mensuelle, 912 (April 2005), pp. 51–62.
20 – Camille Goemans, Écrits (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1992), pp. 233–8.
21 – Valery, Littérature, pp. 23–4.
22 – Goemans, Écrits, pp. 157–8.
23 – Goemans, Écrits, pp. 154, 155. One of the more notable features of this
text is that it presents a tripartite model of signification. It seems to me too
much of a coincidence to imagine that the source was not Charles Sander
Figure 6. René Magritte, The Rape (Le viol ), 1934. Oil on canvas, 73654 Peirce’s tripartite analysis of the icon, index and symbol. If is this so, then it
cm. Menil Collection, Houston, TX. is, as far as I can tell, the first application of Peirce’s model by any
European poet/theorist. Unfortunately, Goemans makes no explicit
reference to Peirce, and I have yet to find any account of Goemans’s work
in which Peirce is mentioned. If it turns out that Goemans had no
field of associations. Poetry signified more than simply painting’s
knowledge of Peirce, then his parallel development of a tripartite model of
other and opposite; it signified the logical, scientific and semiosis is all the more exceptional and remarkable. (See Goemans, Écrits,
functional manipulation of images. Mystery meant more than p. 156.) Goemans’s conception of words as ‘bodies, not signs’ was echoed
just the irrational, the unknowable; it pointed to the kind of later by Magritte. In a letter to a curator of a major retrospective of
relation between painting and the world that only poetry could Magritte’s work in 1966, the painter wrote: ‘I consider it desirable to avoid
any misunderstanding in this regard…. These are objects (bells, skies, trees,
manifest. Terror meant more than the sensation one feels in
etc.), not ‘‘symbols’’’. The issue is not that they signify, but that they exist
certain exceptional situations; it marked the precise moment — autonomously, unchained to the signified that ties down the signifier.
when the rhetorical manipulation of the commonplace (Magritte, letter to Phillipe-Robert Jones, 1964. Cited in Jacques Meuris,
language of painting suddenly becomes its opposite. Together René Magritte, trans. Michel Scuffil [Cologne: Taschen, 1994], p. 29).
these three terms point toward a practice in which the logic of 24 – Frederik Leen, in his account of Magritte’s use of language, suggests
the false, the force of the arbitrary and the ‘law of failure’ come Saussure’s model of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign as an
illuminating parallel to Magritte’s practice. He notes, however, that is it
together at a point. ‘highly unlikely’ that Magritte ever studied Saussure’s work, but that he
could well have picked it up from Parisian intellectual circles. (Leen, ‘A
NOTES Razor is a Razor: Word and Image in Some Paintings by Magritte’, in René
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. Magritte 1898–1967, eds. Gisèle Ollinger-Zinque and Frederik Leen
1 – André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark [Brussels: Ludion, 1998], p. 32). Given that Paulhan’s work was in fact
Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993), p. 8. directly influenced by Saussure, one could trace a genealogy of influence
2 – Breton, Conversations, p. 29. that would draw Saussure and Magritte together. In this study, I have
3 – André Breton, ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, in Manifestoes of Surrealism, chosen to concentrate on Valéry, however, not only because his influence is
trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of more direct and profound (especially with regard to Magritte’s closest
Michigan Press, 1972), p. 30. friend, Nougé), but also, and more importantly, because Valéry’s poetic
4 – My account of Breton’s relationship with Valéry has been drawn from model, insofar as it engages not only the linguistic but the aesthetic
Mark Pollizotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: dimension, provides more points of contact than that of Saussure.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). 25 – Goemans, ‘René Magritte’, in Écrits, p. 204.

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26 – Goemans, ‘René Magritte’, in Écrits, p. 204. 35 – Valéry, Littérature, p. 152.
27 – Goemans, ‘René Magritte’, in Écrits, p. 208. 36 – Paulhan, ‘Un rhétoriqueur à l’état sauvage’, p. 220.
28 – Goemans, ‘René Magritte’, in Écrits, pp. 197, 199, 202, 204. 37 – Paulhan, ‘Trois pages d’explication’, in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 3, p. 143.
29 – This is the case wherever one finds reference to the presumably self- Syrotinski summarizes the distinction: ‘According to ‘terrorist’ writers, an
evident phrase, ‘poetic mystery’. See for example, Suzy Gablik, René excessive concern with language inhibits the potential of literature to be
Magritte (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985), p. 68. what it is capable of, given its infinite creative possibilities. Terror is
30 – There are many examples of Magritte’s use of the terms ‘mystery’ and literature that rejects literary commonplaces and conventions in an attempt
‘poetry’. One of the most characteristic examples is the following: to accede to pure, authentic expression’ (Syrotinski, p. 84).
‘Regarding the issue of mystery, of the enigma of my paintings, I’d say that 38 – (‘Les Fleurs de Tarbes’, pp. 135–6). As Syrotinski puts it: ‘Terrorists
they are the best proof of my break with the collection of ridiculous mental want their language to be transparent, like a window, but its inevitably
habits which in general take the place of a true understanding of life. The refracting, distorting quality reveals it to be of necessity rhetorical’
paintings I made between 1925 and 1936 were also the result of systematic (Syrotinski, p. 85).
research in which, by a completely natural exchange, the arrangement of 39 – Paulhan, ‘Optique de langage’ (1920). Cited in Elizabeth Legge, Max
objects borrowed from reality would give, to the real world from which Ernst, The Psychoanalytic Sources (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), p. 167.
these objects were borrowed, a disturbing poetic sense’ (‘La Ligne de vie 40 – Paulhan, 1936 edition of ‘Les Fleurs de Tarbes’, reprinted in Les Fleurs
I’, in Écrits complets, ed. André Blavier [Paris: Flammarion, 1979], de Tarbes, ed. Jean-Claude Zylberstein (Gallimard, Paris, 1990), p. 248.
pp. 109–10). Cited in Syrotinski, p. 92.
31 – ‘La Ligne de vie II’, in Écrits complets, p. 143. This second version of ‘La 41 – Jean Paulhan, ‘Un rhétoriqueur à l’état sauvage’, p. 200.
Ligne de vie’ appeared in 1940, two years after the first. The earlier version, 42 – Paulhan, ‘Clef de la Poésie’, (1941), in Œuvres complètes, Vol. 2, p. 241.
although more detailed in almost every way, presents the revelation of the 43 – Paulhan, ‘Clef de la Poésie’, p. 241. Cited in Syrotinski, p. 94.
door moldings without mention of the painter’s affective response. The 44 – Paulhan, ‘Clef de la Poésie’, p. 241. Cited in Syrotinski, p. 93.
narrative breaks off after the sentence ending with ‘in contact with their 45 – Paulhan, ‘Clef de la poésie’, p. 242. Cited in Syrotinski, p. 94.
reality’. (See Magritte, Écrits complets, p. 107.) Clearly, Magritte came to 46 – Paulhan, ‘Clef de la poésie’, p. 251. Cited in Syrotinski, p. 97.
believe that this initial account had suppressed something of significance in 47 – Paulhan, ‘Clef de la poésie’, p. 249. Cited in Syrotinski, p. 96.
this event. One is drawn to wonder if it was the force of denial that 48 – Paulhan, ‘Clef de la poésie’, p. 242. Cited in Syrotinski, 94.
compelled him to pass over without mention the experience he described as 49 – ‘Lifeline II’, in Surrealists on Art, ed. and trans. Lucy Lippard
‘akin to terror’. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), pp. 159–60.
32 – For an account of the Belgian reception of Paulhan’s reading of 50 – José Vovelle is one of the few to have pursued an analysis of the
Valéry, and in particular how that reception manifests itself in the work of relation between Nougé’s poetics and Magritte’s painting. In Le Surréalisme
Nougé, see: Olivier Smolders, Paul Nougé: Écriture et Caractère a L’École de la en Belgique (Brussels: André de Rache, 1972), Vovelle provides a long
Ruse (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1995). For an analysis of Paulhan’s work as it paragraph in which he refers to both Nougé and Magritte as considering
developed out of Valéry’s, see Blanchot’s essay from 1943, ‘How is their work as ‘experiments’. In addition, he points out the similarity
Literature Possible?’, in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: between Nougé’s analysis of the ‘arbitrary’ nature of words and its
Blackwell, 1995), pp. 49–61. For a treatment of Paulhan’s work as it resonance in Magritte’s use of unrelated objects placed side to side. In
intersects with a variety of contemporaneous literary discourses see Michael addition, he notes that Magritte in fact translated a number of Nougé’s
Syrotinski, Defying Gravity: Jean Paulhan’s Interventions in Twentieth-Century poems into paintings (Vovelle, pp. 144–5). Vovelle does not, however,
French Intellectual History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998) and the special mention Nougé’s debt to Paulhan and Valéry and the way in which this
issue of Yale French Studies which Syrotinski edited: ‘The Power of debt was transferred to Magritte.
Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power: Jean Paulhan’s Fiction, Criticism, and 51 – As far as I can tell, prior to Blanchot the only significant figure to have
Editorial Activity’, Yale French Studies, 106 (2004). developed his work in relation to the ideas of Paulhan was in fact Nougé —
Lecomte was the first of the group to come into contact with Paulhan’s a fact that should be considered when assessing Nougé’s position within the
work and he quickly passed it on to the others. Lecomte first saw Paulhan’s canon of twentieth-century poetic theory and practice.
work around 1918. (See, Toussaint, Le Surréalisme Belge, p. 16; Goemans, 52 – Nougé elaborates on the parallel between science and poetry in ‘Notes
Écrits, p. 195). The most fully developed account of the influence of sur la poésie’, in Fragments (Brussels: Éditions Labor, 1995), pp. 189–96.
Paulhan’s work (and through it, Valéry’s) appears in Smolders, Paul Nougé. 53 – Nougé, ‘Introduction aux équations et formules poétiques’, in
Smolders distinguishes French and Belgian Surrealism by noting that the L’Expérience continue (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1981), p. 187.
French embraced what Valéry referred to (condescendingly) as 54 – For the details of Nougé’s life, see Smolders, Paul Nougé.
‘l’authentique et la transe’ while the Belgians adopted what Paulhan 55 – Nougé, ‘La Lumière, L’ombre et la proie’, in Fragments, p. 91.
referred to as ‘la conscience et le faux’ (Smolders, Paul Nougé, p. 11). In 56 – Nougé, ‘Notes sur la poésie’, p. 196.
general, Smolders presents Valéry’s influence on the Belgians as derived 57 – Nougé, ‘Notes sur la poésie’, p. 192.
from the poet’s articulation of language as a ruse: ‘Undoubtedly they 58 – Nougé, ‘Pour garder les distance’, in Histoire de ne pas rire (Lausanne:
inherited Valéry’s skepticism wherein literature is in its essence always L’Age d’Homme, 1980), p. 23.
suspect, leading the reader on with a thousand artifices and stylistic effects, 59 – Nougé, ‘L’Écriture simplifiée’, in Fragments, p. 153.
leading the reader to fabricate phony states of mind, attitudes and 60 – Nougé, ‘Notes sur la poésie’, in Fragments, p. 195.
philosophies that are nothing more than effects of the pen’ (Smolders, Paul 61 – The following poem is reproduced in Fragments, p. 49.
Nougé, p. 10). Lecomte was also the one who first introduced Magritte to de 62 – Nougé, Fragments, pp. 201–14.
Chirico’s The Love Song. (Goemans, ‘René Magritte’, in Écrits, p. 197). A 63 – This aspect of Nougé’s work is, as far as I can tell, unexamined in the
more extensive account of Magritte’s reception of de Chirico would have to literature on the poet, and certainly deserves more extensive investigation.
take this simultaneous reception of Paulhan into account. 64 – As Syrotinski points out, this reverse movement is implicit in Paulhan’s
33 – Paulhan regularly capitalizes the terms ‘Rhetorician’, ‘Terrorist’, as analysis: ‘[T]his is in fact the central enigma of ‘‘Les Fleurs de Tarbes’’;
well as ‘Romantic’, and ‘Classic’. For the sake of consistency, I have how can we tell whether an author intended his or her words to be read as
maintained Paulhan’s orthography. commonplaces or as original expressions? Commonplaces thus become for
34 – Jean Paulhan, ‘Un rhétoriqueur à l’état sauvage’, in Œuvres complètes, Paulhan the locus of a deep-seated tension within language and literature,
Vol. 3 (Paris: Circle du livre précieux, 1941), pp. 193–223. and far from being banal, they are, as Blanchot rightly points out,

298 ROGER ROTHMAN

‘‘monsters of ambiguity’’…. [Thus] from the point of view of rhetoric, the communally agreed-upon, rhetoric as a means of resolving the perplexing
author is freed from a constant preoccupation with language precisely by ambiguity that characterizes commonplaces’ (Syrotinski, p. 86).
submitting to the authority of commonplaces. In order to have a renewed 65 – Two years earlier, Magritte painted a small plaster cast of the Venus
contact with the ‘‘virgin newness of things’’, writers should mutually agree de Milo, and in 1936 submitted it (or a version of it) to the Exposition
to recognize clichés as clichés, and thereby institute a common, surréaliste at Charles Ratton’s gallery in Paris.

299