Window/Picture: L'assassin menace and Artist Descending a Staircase - Critical Essay

It is only when the imagination is dragged away from what the eye sees that a picture becomes interesting.

Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending a Staircase 39

It is a commonplace of Stoppard criticism that Tom Stoppard writes by engaging in what Susan Rusinko has neatly dubbed "creative plagiarism" (96). With the 1972 publication of After Magritte, Stoppard extended his plagiarism from the verbal to the visual. Critics have pointed out not only the conceptual similarities between that play and Rene Magritte's painting but also a visual similarity between the opening of the play and a specific Magritte painting, L'assassin menace. [1] The title of Stoppard's Artist Descending a Staircase has rewardingly led critics to examine the relationship between that play and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase. [2] But it has also led them away from seeing a much stronger relationship between that play and, once again, L'assassin menace.

Artist Descending a Staircase, a play about artists, turns on a particular painting that one of the central characters made in 1920 and on the love of a blind girl, Sophie, for its creator. Beauchamp, a sound artist in the play, might be describing Stoppard's project in writing it when he speaks of the liberation of "the visual image from the limitations of visual art... to create images--pictures--which are purely mental" (36). [3] When the play was commissioned by a consortium of European broadcasting companies, Stoppard set himself the challenge of writing a play that "had to be" for radio rather than the stage (qtd. in Mayne 34). [4] He self-reflexively set blind Sophie in the audience's position. "The first duty of the artist," Beauchamp says, as if commenting on the play, "is to capture the radio station" (20). In 1990,

Elissa S. Guralnick argued that Artist Descending a Staircase not only captured the radio station but was perhaps Stoppard's finest play: prejudice against drama for radio had led scholars to see the work as minor (286-87).

The wittiness of Stoppard's response to L'assassin menace is manifest in his use of the aural medium and in both the structure and content of the play. As Magritte critic Suzi Gablik has observed, L'assassin "has all the character of one of those psychological games in which one is supposed to make up one's own story from the image" (49). And it would seem that Stoppard has done so twice, first in After Magritte and then, in much more detail and more elaborately, in Artist Descending a Staircase. While no scene in Artist Descending a Staircase is directly comparable to that in the painting, the play can be understood to tell the story of L'assassin.

The painting at the center of Stoppard's play may itself be a witty inversion of the window at the center of Magritte's painting. Magritte, most notably in La condition humaine, calls into question the Renaissance concept of painting as a window on reality by setting a painting in front of a window. We assume from the continuity of the painting with the view through the window that the painting is a representation of that view. But because the painting largely occludes the view, we cannot be sure. Indeed, we become aware that all of La condition humaine is a painting; there is no view through a window. Thus Magritte points out that perception is inevitably a function of representation, of human creation. Stoppard's play is similarly about the entrapment of humans in their representations. The characters believe they are seeing reality as if through a window, but what they see is their pictures of reality. In the play, Stoppard also considers the responsibility of the artist to attempt to conscientiously repr esent reality.

L'assassin is highly suggestive of a play in a proscenium theater, one that has a playing area at either side in front of the proscenium, a main playing area within the proscenium, and at rear center, an inner stage--the center rear window. Foreground and midground share the same wide floorboards, painted, like the walls of the room, in perspective and lit from front left. The three men seen through the window all face directly front. The man standing in the central area and the men standing as if in front of the proscenium, one on either side of the stage, all face diagonally front.

The subject matter itself seems highly theatrical. Gablik describes works like L'assassin from Magritte's first period, 1925-30, as "melodramatic, bizarre, often macabre, tinged with eroticism and generally dark in both mood and colour" (42). L'assassin is also comic. Unlike many Magritte paintings, it contains human figures, a number of them, quite realistically set in a room. The figures in the painting, atypically, do not float or engage with oversized objects or with animals that would not realistically appear in that setting. Also atypically, the painting seems to have some narrative coherence, albeit withheld. In the central area a young nude woman lies dead on a chaise lounge, blood streaming from her mouth or having streamed and congealed. In front of her to the right stands a suited man wholly undisturbed by the scene behind him, listening to a gramophone. Although the title suggests that he is the killer of the woman, no weapon is present. On the floor behind him is a suitcase, and on a chair besid e him, a coat and hat. He seems about to leave. He gives no indication of being aware of the men standing in top coats and bowler hats in the foreground at either side, hidden, ready to attack him. Their means of attack are bizarrely comic: one wields a primitive-looking, bone-like club; the other holds a large net. The three men facing in through the window heighten the sense of drama and mystery. It is no wonder that this Magritte painting in particular invited Stoppard's playwrighting.