« Ceci n’est pas une pipe » : réalité et représentation chez Yourcenar et Pamuk

Abstract

Aware of a schism between the world and himself, the artist is haunted by the question of reality. I will study several approaches to consider this divorce. Humorously, painter Magritte shows in several works that pictures are just what they are, and that they « betray » reality. On a literary level, Yourcenar with her Comment Wang-Fô fut sauvé, and Pamuk, in his Mon nom est Rouge, portray artists who also face this distance. As the first writer enters an imaginary world that surpasses reality in terms of beauty, but causes the « real » death of the painter and a subsequent imaginary liberation similar to eternity, the latter takes pleasure in describing Eastern illuminations and cuts out the hero’s life into paintings mentally, claiming at the same time that those marvellous pictures, ideal and multiple as contrasted with the uniqueness of reality, are only signs or memories.