Maniac Eyeball

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by Salvador Dali


  What Deeper Differences Separated Breton, The Movement, And Dalí?

  Politics – commitment, as the Surrealists called it – came between us. Marxism to me was no more important than a fart, except that a fart relieves me and inspires me. Politics seemed to me a cancer on the body poetic. I had seen too many of my friends dissolve into political action and lose their souls in it while trying to save them. Social science, economics seemed ridiculous to me, useless and especially phony – the inexact science par excellence; a lure set out with inextricable contradictions in which to trap artists and intellectuals, that is, those least fitted to resist emotional appeals so they could be mobilized in defense of causes that, come what might, would even tually be solved in natural course by the forces of history, in which intelligence played only a very minor part.

  Poetry and art were the great sacrifices to the historical event.

  Having no part of it seemed to me the only effective method of action and self-defense. The only honest way to deal with the poesy one carried within oneself like a rare and delicate flame.

  The defense of my own intimate interests seemed to me as urgent, proper, and fundamental as that of the proletariat. Besides, what would the victory of the proletariat mean if artists did not provide the elements of a style of life based on freedom and quality? A world of nameless grains of sand! Ant-heap technocracy! Dalí was fortunately irreducible to smoky ideologies. Breton talking politics seemed to me like a grade-school teacher trying to give driving lessons to a herd of elephants going through a china shop. Discipline! That was now his favorite word! To an artist, it was leprosy!

  I wanted to hear no more of it. The miserable runts littered by Communist cells who were trying to impose their morality, their tactics, their infinitesimal ideas, their illusions on Dalí, made me laugh through their pretentions. I shrugged.

  Breton, on the other hand, bowed humbly in the name of Marxism-Leninism! Before getting down on all fours, he fortunately had a salutary reflex and the Aragon Affair that followed allowed him to take more whole some positions, but at the same time he tore out his left ventricle of friendship, and I am not sure he ever got over the expulsion of his founding brother who disowned him after the appearance of Misère de la Poésie (Wretchedness Of Poetry). I was responsible for that break.

  Issue No. 4 of La Revolution Surréaliste, in 1931, under the title of Reverie, had published a piece of mine which, without any censorship whatsoever, developed an erotic description around Dullita, one of the heroines of my childhood lovelife. The Communist Party judged it to be pornographic and a committee of inquiry was named. It summoned the representatives of the Surrealist group, Aragon at their head, and the latter was commanded to publish a statement of condemnation. Breton was revolted by this, and in his Misère de la Poésie wrote that one day it would be “to the honor of the Surrealists that they had violated a ban so remarkably petit bourgeois in spirit.”

  That was the break. The moralistic Party faithful suddenly appeared totally at one with the narrow morality of the monogamous family dominated by private property, and Aragon, their vassal, was mainly looking for any opportunity to break with the Surrealists who stood in the way of his literary career. He thought, correctly, that the uncultured Communists would more easily allow him to publish his artfully commercial novels. It amused me greatly to be able thus to trap the two enemy brothers in their flagrant contradictions of friendship and thought.

  Once more, I was happy to find that politics had nothing at all to do with the deeper motivations of allegedly passionate militants. But, of course, while that was the real problem, Breton did not breathe a word of it that day.

  Had The Surrealists Fully Accepted Dalí, Artistically?

  I am the most Surrealist of Surrealists and yet between me and the group there was always a deep misunderstanding. Breton and along with him Picasso never really had any taste, any feel for true tradition. They went for shock, emotion rather than ecstasy. To me they are “impotent” intellectuals.

  They resigned for want of ability to renew the subject from inside; picturesqueness always meant more to them than creative order, the detail more than the whole, analysis than synthesis. So, they quickly came to prefer barbaric art, notably African art, to a classicism that was too difficult to master, take on, and outdo. My painting never really convinced Breton. He could not deny its interest and importance, but he regretted it. My works were stronger than his theories. They put him in the shadow, made him turn critic rather than prophet. And when I threw art nouveau at him, he was floored. He was extolling the poetry of barbarians while I was proving to him that for eroticism, delirium, biological value, disquiet, and mystery, the 1900 style was un equaled. I started a new vogue for the style of coiffures, dresses, songs, and things that had been popular in 1900. But Breton did not mention that bitterness that day either. I don’t know what point of his declamation he was at when I took off my fifth sweater, to lighten the atmosphere a bit.

  I had also raised my voice against the excesses of automatic writing and the relating of dreams that were getting sclerotic, like some old business with its rules, its bad habits, its self-censorship, and stereotyped images. What had set out to be an attempt at explaining the unconscious unknown ended in an explosion of the most adulterated narcissism.

  That was why I created Surrealist objects with symbolic connotations. The point was to invent an irrational object that as con cretely as possible would translate the raving fantasies of a poetic mind. To disconcert reason, but furnish the imagination with as many elements as possible to supply wide-awake dreams by concretely involving all the senses.

  To provoke a state of grace of the mind; that was the goal. Surrealist objects very quickly made the old-fashioned-seeming dream recitals and sessions of automatism a thing of the past. It was hard to forgive me for that. And still the group kept on with those old devices that produced nothing but dish water.

  I invented the idea of a bread twenty meters long that would be placed in the gardens of the Paris Palais-Royal, and Versailles, and several European capitals, and create a scandal capable of causing cases of hysteria that would challenge the rational bases of the most sacred notions: bread, the image of hunger satisfied, the Host and divine body, fruit of all work, ground of human communion. But where my symbolic objects pleased mightily, my bread shocked as did my thinking-machine garnished with goblets of warm milk that moved Aragon to violence. He condemned my eccentricity in the name of the children of the unemployed from whose mouths I was taking the food. The delirium, this time, was not mine! Aragon’s tin-plate socialism became grotesque. He had no more sense of humor. I think my references to Freud – whom his friends considered counter- revolutionary – bothered him a great deal and that he was trying every which way to upset me.

  What Light Did Freud Bring To Dalí’s Creative Process?

  I had often thought about Freud before meeting him. I think he would have been the only man who could talk as an equal to my paranoia. He admired my painting greatly. I would have liked to dazzle him. When I met him in London, introduced by Stefan Zweig, I made great efforts to appear to him as I imagined he imagined me: a Beau Brummel of universal caliber. But I failed.

  He listened to me talk with great attention and finally ex claimed to Zweig: “What a fanatic! What a perfect Spanish type!” To him, I was a case, not a person. His snail’s skull had not sensed my intuitions or my intimate strength. But I did make a deep impression on him, since the next day he wrote to Zweig: “I must really thank you for the introduction that brought me yesterday’s visitors. For until then, it seems, I had tended to think the Surrealists, who apparently have chosen me as their patron saint, were completely crazy (or let us say 95 percent so, as in the case of pure alcohol). The young Spaniard, with his candid fanatic’s eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, led me to reconsider my opinion. It would indeed be most interesting to study analytically the genesis of a picture of this type. From a critical viewpoint, it could
however always be said that the notion of art does not lend itself to any extension when the qualitative relationship, between unconscious material and preconscious elaboration, does not remain within determined limits. At any rate, these are serious psychological problems. ” But what interested him obviously was his own theory, not my personality. He was no longer really in the running. I sketched him on a blotter. This was in 1938, a year before his death.

  Two geniuses had met without making sparks. His ideas spoke for him. To me, they were useful crutches that reinforced my confidence in my genius and the authenticity of my freedom, and I had more to teach him than I could get from him.

  I am convinced that our meeting was a turning-point in Freud’s artistic conception. I am persuaded that I forced the great master of the subconscious to rethink his attitude. Before me – Dalí – Freud had never met any really modern artist. Before our meeting, he thought – as he wrote – that the Surrealists were “crazy”; after me, he “reconsidered” his opinion. Freud had a hunch that the Surrealists, and the Expressionists along with them, took the mechanics of art for art itself. My work – my technical mastery – and my person showed him that his concept had been foolhardy. Yes, I am convinced that if we had met earlier, or several times, some of his views on art might have been modified. My paranoiac-critical method would have opened new vistas to him. Freud thought that the unconscious was a psychic content which can no longer return to the consciousness once it has been driven out. He brought about the psychology of depths – as compared to formal psychology, which in this domain is a superficial geography of the mind – he put his finger on the reality of reason, man’s invention for realizing himself in a world perpetually in confrontation and conflict. With him, we found out that the psyche is not the conscious alone, but I could have been his living and fundamental proof that paranoia, which is one of the most extraordinary forms of the irrational unconscious, can perfectly well give impetus to rational mechanisms and fertilize the real with an efficacity as great as experimental logic. Paranoiac-critical delirium is one of the most fascinating formulas of human genius. Freud was probably too old to re-open his theses and make way for new experiments.

  February 5, 1934: Dalí’s Intentions On Trial

  The leaders of the Surrealist movement, to tell the truth, did not understand much about painting. They accepted it because it served their thesis. Period. And anything that upset their dogma had to be refuted. They did all they could to bring the more elaborate personalities back into line. So they planned to hold an exhibition in which everyone would be in alphabetical order, no doubt so as to proclaim equality before the mind. It seemed to me that a revolution that did nothing but enthrone alphabetical order fell a bit short of the mark!

  Their determination to clarify everything became crankiness; and Breton’s logic became the Mosaic Law. But my inventions were beyond their comprehension and outside their doctrine. They out-distanced their imaginations. So, one evening when I was tired and had remained home alone – Gala having gone out with friends – contemplating what was left of a runny Camembert on the table, I got an idea a few moments later before my unfinished canvas. In the foreground of the picture I had put a leafless and trimmed olive tree in front of a Port Lligat landscape. Looking at it, I suddenly projected two limp watches over the branches of the olive tree. I immediately set to work.

  Two hours later the picture was finished, the fruit of wedding my genius to the tender Camembert, the expression of my notion of space-time, prophetically representing the disintegration of matter. I painted the phosphenes of my intra-uterine pre-childhood by reproducing the frying-panless fried eggs and raw chops balanced on Gala’s shoulder. The soft, the digestible, the edible, the intestinal are naturally all part of my paranoiac-critical representation of the world and I imposed these images on everyone – Surrealists included.

  My paranoia magic never ceased bothering the Surrealists, as it was too true an expression of the Surrealism they dreamt of. I am the medium of my own imagination. I need but to stare fixedly at my canvas for a new truth of reality to appear there. I can just as well make such and such object disappear at will. I make the visible invisible by eliminating it through hallucinatory force. My creative delirium has fatal power. One day in the Café de la Paix I persuaded Robert Desnos that we could make a sublime statue by filling the whole Café de la Paix with plaster; once dried, we would merely have to cut it in quarters, make a casting of the parts, and keep them for all eternity. I explained to him the paranoiac-critical method that had led me from an obsession to an invention allowing for the preservation of the Café de la Paix fixed in time. Desnos de creed that my method would revolutionize Surrealism itself. For a moment, it seemed that that would be the case. I was ready to agree to many theoretical concessions, short, of course, of going back on myself or committing suicide as Crevel had done.

  How Dalí Remembers René Crevel

  I always felt that the first name of “René” (meaning “reborn”) was in direct opposition to “Crevel,” which is related to the French crever (to croak or die). His life was set between those two poles. Gravely ill, tubercular – he had been through a pneumo-thorax – he often disappeared from Paris for sojourns in sanatoria from which he came back renascent with a babyish happy mien, hair waved, well dressed, optimistic, and ready to plunge immediately into the most refined kind of self-destructive existence: nights out, insomnia, opium, and especially the pathetic dichotomy of poetic and political commitment. He had been fervently Marxist since 1925, and his Communism, incompatible with his Surrealist ideas, created insurmountable contradictions that tore him apart. His destiny was a perfect incarna tion of the relationship between the Communist Party and the Surrealist group, and its final outcome is symbolic.

  When René Crevel, looking like a crevé (goner), collapsed at friends’ homes and said he’d rather crever (croak), they would forthwith send him off to another sanatorium cure, after which he was reborn full of euphoria – and it all started again.

  He visited Gala and me several times at Port Lligat, where he had periods of real joy in living. He walked about stark naked in the olive grove, like an anchorite, and while there wrote Les Pieds dans le Plat (The Foot Stuck In It), Dalí et l’Anti-Obscurantisme (Dalí And Anti-Obscurantism), and Le Clavecin de Diderot (Diderot’s Harpsichord). He adored Gala, whom he called “The Olive,” and dreamed of finding and loving a woman like her. Unfortunately, all he found was Breton, the Communist Party – and death.

  Within the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists, Crevel tried to play a useful role in bringing together Surrealists and Communists. When its big international congress took place in 1934, he hoped that Breton would speak up for such unity. But the pope of the movement slapped Ilya Ehrenburg just before he was sup posed to speak.[1] That consummated the break. Crevel was deeply affected by this. He tried every desperate measure for reconciliation. A falling-out with Breton was the only tangible result of his mis carried diplomacy. The pain of this failure felled him.

  One morning I phoned him to let him know I in no way endorsed Breton’s stand. A voice answered that René Crevel had just attempted suicide and was at death’s door. I got to his house at the same time as the firemen. Crevel was trying to fill his lungs with air from the tube of a bottle of oxygen. His baby face was bloodless.

  He had put a cardboard label around his left wrist with his name printed on it in all caps like an epitaph. In my memory, he still lives today like some magnificent dream phoenix ever arising anew in the name of friendship, honor, and the appellation of free man. A most terrible evidence of the fundamental incompatibility between politics and poetry.

  But for the moment politics wrought its havoc and darkened the eyes of Breton and his group. It even blinded them to Surrealist truth. For the fiftieth anniversary of the Salon des Indepéndants at Paris’ Grand Palais, I had exhibited a canvas entitled L’Enigme de Guillaume Tell (The Enigma Of William Tell) and a drawing, Le Cannibalisme
des Objets (Cannibalism Of Objects). Lenin, down on one knee, in open shirt, wearing a cap of melting spoon and garters, had a buttock shaped like a breakfast roll with its end held up by a forked crutch. That buttock, of course, was the symbol of the Revolution of October 1917.

  I had no “Surrealist reason” for not treating Lenin as a delirious dream subject. On the contrary. Lenin and Hitler turned me on in the highest. In fact, Hitler even more than Lenin. His fat back, especially when I saw him appear in the uniform with Sam Browne belt and shoulder straps that tightly held in his flesh, aroused in me a delicious gustatory thrill originating in the mouth and affording me a Wagnerian ecstasy. I often dreamed of Hitler as a woman. His flesh, which I had imagined whiter than white, ravished me. I painted a Hitlerian wet nurse knitting sitting in a puddle of water. I was forced to take the swastika off her armband.

  There was no reason for me to stop telling one and all that to me Hitler embodied the perfect image of the great masochist who would unleash a world war solely for the pleasure of losing and burying himself beneath the rubble of an empire: the gratuitous action par excellence that should indeed have warranted the admiration of the Surrealists, now that for once we had a truly modern hero!

  I painted L’Enigme d’Hitler (The Enigma Of Hitler) which, apart from any political intent whatever, brought together all the elements of my ecstasy. Breton was outraged. He was unwilling to admit that the master of Nazism was nothing more to me than an object of unconscious delirium, a prodigious self-destructive and cataclysmic force.

  On the eve of the inquisitorial meeting, Breton, carrying a cane and accompanied by Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, Gui Rosey, Marcel Jean, and Georges Hugnet, had tried to poke holes in my Lenin at the Salon, but their short arms had not been able to reach the painting hung high. Which made them furious. That very morning, the “pope” had gotten a letter signed by Crevel, Tristan Tzara, and Eluard, saying that they would not vote for my expulsion, in spite of the specification of the order of the day that they had received:

 

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