Museums of the Mind: Magrittes Labyrinth and Other Essays in the Arts

Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte's mother committed suicide by drowning herself when he was 13. Spitz, a psychoanalytic critic, interprets his enigmatic paintings as signs of a lifelong struggle with this loss. In this dense but intriguing scholarly miscellany, Spitz (Art and Psyche) muses on the absurd as manifested in Chekhov's play The Bear and in Freud's dissection of jokes; interprets Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as an avant-garde postmodernist work; and explores themes of nonconformity and rebellion in the film Dead Poets Society and in Calvin and Hobbes, a comic strip whose six-year-old protagonist creates a florid fantasy life with his toy tiger. In Sophocles's Antigone, Spitz finds an ethical imperative: conflicts in life must not be avoided. Her poignant concluding essay on Brundibar, a Czech children's opera that was performed many times by child inmates at the Nazis' Terezin concentration camp, illumines the power of art to inspire hope and a will to live. Illustrated. (Jan.)