Maniac Eyeball (18 page)

Un Chien Andalou
had popped full-blown out of Jupiter’s thighs – mine, that is – and Breton had had no alternative but to recognize its existence; as was the case with my painting which has proved fascinating from the first, though without benefit of theory or dogma. The first thing I wrote,
La Femme Visible
(
The Visible Woman
), inspired by my absolute love for Gala, was an admirable illustration of total Surrealism that had no need for legitimization by the movement. My passion for Gala, my authentic lack of interest in anything that was not my own burning desire – two days before the opening of my show at Goëmans’, in November 1929, I was to leave Paris because
nothing
mattered to me any more except the woman of my dreams and I was fanatically devouring my love – were so many undeniable Surrealist
facts.

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.