Between icon and symbol: motivation and arbitrariness in the meeting between text with image

Abstract

In this article I demonstrate, by the analysis of the Lygia Fagundes Telles’ short story “Eu era mudo e só” (1958), the way the literary language approximates itself to the concept of iconicity when valorizes the quality of the relations between signs and theirs referents. By using different recourses, the short story language establishes a kind of motivated signs that approximates the words and the reality they refer to. This approximation resembles the iconic language described by Charles Sanders Peirce. On the other hand, I show in the analysis of the painting L’homme au journal (1927/1928) by the Belgian painter René Magritte, the way it reveals the arbitrariness or the convention that visual signs possesses. In the painting, René Magritte approximates the concept of visuals signs to the concept of verbal signs and creates another kind of relation between the painting and the reality it represents.