Do surrealismo ao fantástico moderno: processos semióticos na obra de René Magritte e J. J. Veiga

Abstract

Taking as a subsidy the Semiotic theory, the presence of the fantastic was analyzed in pictures by the Belgian painter René Magritte and in the novel by the Brazilian writer J. J. Veiga, aiming to describe the semiotic strategies of the narration and the surrealist inspiration image. Peirce's philosophical semiotics constituted the chosen trend, amplified by the concepts of semiotics of cultures, with regard to the characterization of cultural objects and narrative. Of the nine sign cells formed by Peircean trichotomies, two of them were considered: the quali-sign and the index, from which four models or semiotic strategies responsible for the fantastic effect were pointed out. They are: (a) the distortion of the properties of the quali-sign, (b) the unconfirmed indexes, (c) the counterjunction and (d) the confrontation of opposites. These categories were studied in a corpus consisting of sixteen Magritte paintings: The betrayal of the images (1928-29), The lost jockey (1948), Hegel's vacation (1958), The unexpected answer (1933), The song of the storm (1937), The Battle of Argonne (1959), The Grave of the Fighters (1961), The Vintage Month (1959), The Secret Player (1927), The Beyond (1968), The Lovers (1928), Reproduction prohibited (Portrait of Edward James) (1937), The Threatened Assassin (1926), The Empire of Lights (1954), The Voice of Silence (1928), The Waterfall (1961). The imagery texts was compared with excerpts from the novel A hora dos ruminantes de Veiga. The following was an overview of the differences between the traditional and the modern fantastic and Surrealism, which arose at the historic moment when the cultural and ideological crisis of a Europe devastated after the First World War created a nonsense art: Dadaism , representative of the crisis of the bourgeois systems. Surrealism, however, would bring a new method: to access the gray area of the human unconscious and thus reveal the full truth, that which is not suffocated by the predictability of bourgeois systems. Hence the importance of the characterization of the surrealist object, which would be the one of unknown use or, more importantly, it would be the object not linked to an oppressive culture.