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Magritte's painting, La clef de verre, borrows its title from Hammett's novel The Glass Key. The rock in the picture, the key in the title, and the plot of the whodunit generate an interarts dialogue, an ekphrasis, from which Magritte paints thought-a visible poetry that mediates between the stasis of the image and the dynamism of words.
La clef de verre (The Glass Key), the title of a painting by René Magritte, is a title he adopted from Dashiell Hammett's novel, also entitled The Glass Key. The painting depicts a mountain gorge between two precipitous ridges. Magritte has placed a rock on the sunlit ridge beyond the gorge. There is no glass key in sight (see Figure 1). Magritte was an avid reader and he borrowed many titles for his paintings from books. Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), Edgar Allan Poe's The Domain of Arnheim (Le domaine d'Arnheim), and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (Alice au pays des merveilles) are three examples from approximately twenty appropriations.
Generally speaking, Magritte's paintings do not illustrate the books whose titles they borrow, and some are easier to understand than others. For example, Alice au pays des merveilles is a painting of playful wonder that Carroll himself might have enjoyed. Says Magritte: "On imagine que l'arbre est vivant dans un monde merveilleux. À cette fin, l'on a doué le paysage et l'arbre de traits humains [The tree is imagined as being alive in a world of marvels. To this end, the landscape and the tree have been given human features]" (qtd. in Sylvester II: 373).1 In the sky, next to the tree, a smiling pear with arm-like clouds has replaced the Cheshire cat. This is an imaginary wonderland that captures the whimsy of the novel, illustrating it in an oblique and personal way. La clef de verre, however, is not illustrative, and it needs explicating. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, it is paradoxical and opaque because the image in the title (a glass key) does not correspond to the image in the painting (a rock on a mountain ridge). Despite this incongruity, any comparison between a painting and a written text always raises questions about the interchangeability of images and words as signifiers. Magritte...