Author Archives: d.patterson1

Rene Magritte’s 1927 painting “The Menaced Assassin” exudes the modernist period of painting through a depiction of mystery. We saw another of Magritte’s works, the famous “The Treachery of Images,” painted in 1928, in which Magritte raised the question of modern painting, “if it is not a pipe, then what is it?” Magritte’s intellectual history informs us of the origins of his work. His mother committed suicide at a young age. As a boy, he fell into painting, and pursued an art education in his home country of Belgium. Yet he struggled after graduating, and took to painting wallpaper to support himself and his wife. His early career was under the influence of Picasso, but after moving to Paris in the early 1920s, he became befriended Andre Breton, founder of the surrealist movement. Thus currents of Freudianism and Marxism, interest in the subconscious and the working class, bend through his paintings. Magritte would become tremendously popular in France by the 1950s, before dying in 1967 at the age of 69.

“The Menaced Assassin” hangs at the Museum of Modern Art. The piece features seven figures in four groups. At the focal point, a woman on a divan, a kind of fainting couch reminiscent of the rooms of the psychoanalysts office. She is completely nude with blood trailing from her mouth which is agape. That slight detail makes her the most expressive body in the painting. To the right a man without his coat on stands over a record player. Closest to the viewer, and hidden behind a wall from the coatless man, are two figures in bowler hats with a club and net respectively. The last group are three men looking into the room from an otherwise unsettled background often seen in Renaissance painting.

The work is an exemplar of modernism because, unlike dramatic depictions of tragic scenes as one would see in Baroque paintings such as “Judith beheading Holofernes,” or life like depictions such as the paintings of Thomas Cole, Magritte compels the reader to question the narrative of the painting. Where Baroque and Classical work compels the viewer emotionally, showing them a mimesis of some grand thematic act, and realist painting had served to depict life in a world prior to photography, modernism as exemplified in Magritte can entice the reader through uncertainty and doubt. It seems immediately obvious that there is a dead woman laying a room, but upon further inspection of the characters that surround her, the very scene comes into question. The painting becomes like a mystery novel, where one must apply a thesis and see if the pieces work, in a way that painting had resisted prior to this. Where other modernist works such as Dali or even future works of Magritte demonstrated a dream like sequence, this work demonstrates the mental image of of the detective’s imagination. A raw and uncertain perspective, where faces are washed, but murder weapons and the scene of death, which the detective would no doubt have the clearest idea of, can be placed into the imagination with certainty.

I would ask narrative questions – Who is the murderer here? Most readings assign the man over the record player as the killer, and conjecture that the men surrounding him are the “menacers.” This doesn’t seem so obvious to me however, considering that he’s not the one in the room with the weapons. Another question, is it a mark on Magritte to paint a scene of violence towards a woman in such a way? It seems to me to be a repetition of tired tropes in western art, one that could use less dramatic depiction.

The Menaced Assassin, 1927

An ideology is a idea that represents our subconscious or collective beliefs without purely expressing them. For instance, the shark that is the antagonist beast of the 1975 Steven Spielberg psychological thriller Jaws, is an ideology because it provokes a deep and unsettling fear because its ability to represent the range of collective fears of both the town and the audience of the film. Its brief physical appearances reveal the animal as a biological fact – a literal animal, which is prone to defeat. But the tension structured prior to those appearances, and the lasting fear of the ocean commonly spoken about by those that watch the film, demonstrate that the shark provokes a sustained irrational response. This is not because the shark itself may strike at any time, but that the shark may expose a subconscious or repressed idea that the viewer fears to encounter. Consider that every time the shark attacks, it draws its victims under. The scenes of attack, such as its assault on the boat that goes out to hunt it, are less dramatic than the moments of rising tension prior, and the fear of the attack rests in that the shark may bring the person down below to the subconscious zone where those ideas that the shark represents may have to be encountered.

Like the shark in Jaws, Samsa’s absurd transformation represents the reflection of the subconscious and uncertain fears of both his family and the readers. Yet, differently than Jaws, we experience this fear from the perspective of Samsa. There are very few recognitions of Samsa’s body, and never a complete depiction. However the reaction to Samsa is always an external or reflected reaction. Samsa intends to proceed to work, and finds the event of his metamorphosis a trifle that will pass, like a brief cold. The reaction by his family and the workmen that comes to gather him are incomprehensible to him. In the way that the shark as the embodiment of fear is never fully identified with the body of the shark that attacks, Samsa is never fully identified with the body he has transformed into. Further, neither Samsa nor the shark have an identifiable point of origin. Yet the shark remains an external enemy we wish to defeat and send back where it came from, Samsa’s lack of origin forces us to identify with this lack of beginning. For this reason, Samsa forces us not to confront our ideology but to embody it, identify with it (especially the fear of seeing how others would react if we were completely honest or completely exposed), and live without our repressions. We also confront the fear that to live without our ideology, or to expose ourselves, would be horrifying to others and prevent us from life. 

Kafka orchestrates an experience of trauma in the reader by forcing them to unwittingly become the origin of their fear. This is an inventive element of Kafka’s writing. I would broadly describe the style Kafkaesque as an unmitigated feeling of anxiety, stemming from a situation of absurdity, that is not only unresolved but frustratingly, the protagonist avoids resolving it all together.

Hello,

My name is Dean Patterson. I’m a student of Philosophy in my Junior year. I transferred from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas in the Fall of this year. At my prior liberal-arts school I was able to directly take upper level English courses, so I didn’t have an equivalent to this course – obviously putting me on the upper end of the age spectrum here. Nonetheless, I look forward to studying some interesting works with my classmates. As a student of Philosophy, I am interested in theory surrounding literature and the power of the text as a tool for revolution. It is the most potent way to disseminate information, and how we most directly communicate with our ancestors.

An “interesting event” over my break was to travel to Memphis with friends for New Years celebrations. Memphis is structured like an old city and has resisted the worst effects of gentrification that do such damage to New York.

I hope this semester goes well for you all, I’m sure very few of you have read this far – but if so, I’m always happy to discuss the works we read in class. Part of the pleasure of the text is discussing it with other people.