Salvador Dalí: Un Experimento in ars Capacity

There are few who have “lived” and existed beyond that cursory existence of: awake, dream, consume, shit, die a little, then a lot, delay, sleep, sex, masturbate both mind and body (as if there is a difference, no) and enter through the gates of obscurity until a hope for a phoenix resurrection is available. The phenomena of beyond genius, or beyond gradated multi-brilliance in the capacity of the human exists in the limits of Salvador Dalí—painter, essayist, poet, artist and novelist. The scope of this paper is not to entertain the well known and documented history of Dalí’s vast contributions to the surrealist school of art or the criticism of the Art Nouveau models, but to simply apply an experiment in criticism and theory, and experiment in non-fiction, or what Wole Soyinka has claimed as faction.
It is the intention of this a/Author to examine and perhaps alleviate the tension and aura that surrounds Salvador Dalí through his writings, specifically his novel—Rostros Ocultos [Hidden Faces] and other, limp works which ejaculate his perversions into the public bowl of our minds. After all, it was Dalí who suggested, and I quote in full and without apology:

Sooner or later everyone is bound to come to me! Some, untouched by my
painting, concede that I draw like Leonardo. Others, who quarrel with my
aesthetics, agree in considering my autobiography one of the “human documents”
of the period […] Also, those that detest my painting, my drawings, my literature,
my jewels, my surrealist objects, etc., etc., proclaim that I do have a unique gift
for the theater and that my last setting was one of the most exciting that had ever
been seen on the Metropolitan stage…Thus it is difficult to avoid coming under
my sway in one way or another.

There are two ways to read such a claim: to reaffirm or rather to reflect in the speculum the suggestion of truth and falsity. The former offers a reading of sheer bravado and uncouth boast; the latter, a progression, via rhetorical means, of inevitable madness and perhaps the scant scent of Erasmian folly. Arguably, it is both, and this is why, in like vein, Dalí could be construed to be in some manner to exist in the venerable spirit of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who once declared:

I know my destiny. Someday my name will be associated with the memory of
something tremendous, a crisis like no other on earth, the profoundest collision of
conscience, a decision conjured up against everything that had been believed,
required, and held sacred up to that time. I am not human; I am dynamite.

And so what is it exactly about such men, who according to Freud desire to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. Further, how is it that such men, specifically Dalí can still continue to shock while remaining lodged in the capacity or the subjective frame of lasting signification? Such an inquiry need not be addressed at this time, but it is of some import to the overall present project, and will be addressed throughout.

The structure of this essay began as an ambitious event. What do I mean exactly? To begin, it was to be a triptych in design, wherein the first third was to be about Salvador Dalí: a vita nuova. This section detailed Dalí’s controversial beginnings and his relationship with long-time friend—Federico Garcia Lorca, a gifted poet in his own right. Second, the middle third was to be an examination of several works in multiple genre frames, wherein Dalí’s expressive genius could be lysed and a deconstructive approach utilized. This was to accompany my own sketches on the a/Artist known as Salvador Dalí, wherein I privilege two images following the surrealist model of the 1930s. Lastly, I wanted to experiment and construct a theoretical model, which incorporated the works of Saussere, Lacan, Freud, Foucault alongside the criticism and work of Jonathan Culler’s Framing The Sign, Blasé Pascal’s Pensées, Timothy Chappell’s The Inescapable Self, Sade’s The Misfortunes of Virtue, Iragaray’s The Sex Which Is Not One, and of course Reinhold Niehbuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. The work was to be of considerable length—130 pages, but alas as the readings increased, the work shortened, and time was the enemy. Still, I have constructed here a formidable, yet shorter version of the afore stated. What follows then is diminutive, but only in page length—the ideas and the examination are still focused on discovering the limits of human capacity and (ir)reverent appreciation, which I shall here note as the phenomenology of Dalí’s ars.

According to Jonathan Culler’s Framing of the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, “In the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies seemed in the business of importing theoretical models, questions and perspectives from fields such as linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, the history of ideas and psychoanalysis” (xii). This way of thinking has considerably altered and more recent commentary by Fred Rush (Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory; Introduction) has asserted:

Critical Theory was born in the trauma of the Weimar Republic, grew to maturity
in expatriation, and achieved cultural currency on its return from exile. Passed on
from its founding first generation—among others Max Horkheimer, Friedrich
Pollock, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno—to the leader of its second,
Jürgen Habermas, Critical Theory remained central to European philosophical,
social, and political thought throughout the Cold War period […]Along with
phenomenology in its various forms and the philosophy and social theory
gathered loosely under the headings of structuralism and poststructuralism,
Critical Theory is a preeminent voice in twentieth-century continental thought. (1)

In short then, contemporary Critical Theory is necessary and offers the potential for “new” readings taken from the old wine skins of text and illuminates the intent of the respective a/Author function[s] in the semblance of what I call genre confessions. Such admissions can take the form of the written, oral and other expressionist codes that reveal on some level the [semiotic] intent of the responsible wielder in question. In Salvador Dalí’s case, such a “genre confession” spans, to this day, the spectrum of ars, or art; i.e. his work is at once [sur]real and not [su]real. I echo therefore the beginning lines of Rush in which, pertaining to a Dalí understanding, “The complexity that results from the requirement that this plurality not be swept aside is especially daunting to one seeking to orient oneself for the first time,” (1-2) but we shall try nonetheless.

Michel Foucault in his “What Is An Author” de-centers the assignation of such a title and looks to examine, somewhat like Nietzsche in his Genealogy of Morals, the emergence and perhaps classification of such a term as a/Author. At one point Foucault recounts:

The proper name and the name of an author oscillate between the poles of
description and designation, and granting that they are linked to what they name, they are not totally determined either by their descriptive or designative functions […] These differences indicate that an author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is functional in that it serves as a means of classification. (1626-627)

Foucault’s ideation is commendable, but this paper will not examine the subject of intentionalism; however, of interest is a quote I came across by James Downey in his article, “A Fallacy in the Intentional Fallacy” (Philosophy and Literature, 2007). I quote it here at length:

According to a famous argument by W.K. Wimstatt and Monroe Beardsley, the
intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard by which to
judge the success of a work of literary art […] The author’s intention is not
available as a standard by which to judge a work’s success, it is argued, because
“If the poet succeeded in doing it [the intention], then the poem itself shows what
he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, ten the poem is not adequate
evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem.” (149)

Of interest is Downey’s concern with author intent, or function with regards to the genre of poetry, and it is indeed here where we shall also launch into Dalí’s minor work. An oeuvre by which his poetry limps in comparison to his stiff and stubbly nouvelle. The works of this nature fall under the keyword headings: sexual perversion, confession, love, masturbation and memory.

Salvador Dalí’s Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution, or “Daydream,” L’Amour et la mémoire (Paris: Éditions surrealistes à Paris, 1931), “Le Grand masturbator,” taken from his La femme visible (Paris: Éditions surrealists, 1930) collectively showcase a brilliant, yet disturbed mind. These selections are taken from Haim Finkelstein’s The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí (herein, Collected Dalí; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and are edited and translated by Finkelstein aussi. That noted, what follows are vignettes of Dalí’s poetic mind in full with commentary and theoretical applications (or do I really mean allusions here—Freud would both know and not know; I consider Dalí, a remote father figure to my exilic childish mannerisms, and so if he dies in this paper, you know why).

We begin, with commentary from Haim Finkelstein’s Collected Dalí as it pertains to an understanding or coming to terms with Dalian poetics. Dalí’s poetry, specifically his “Daydream” and “Love and Memory,” asserts Finkelstein, “are more directly personal in their attempt to reveal, in the most intimate detail, the workings of Dalí’s fantasy life,” and what is more “They also express the feelings and attitudes reflecting his frame of mind in the beginning of his relationship with Gala at the time he had already been banished from his father’s house” (146). One could find less reason for a critique on Dalí’s life armed with Freudian, Lacanian and Jungian machinery. That Dalí is hedonistic—is beyond mere row; by which he is beyond the limits of capacity and explanation, to some degree—intriguingly pleasurable. Dalí engages in what I termed earlier as a “genre confession” in his “masturbatory” writing titled, “Daydream.” According to Finkelstein, “[it] epitomizes the pursuit of libidinal pleasure, unchecked by the limitations and interdictions imposed by reality, that increasingly gains in prominence in his writings of the early 1930s” (147). Moreover, the tone of the work pays particular attention to the subject of memory and the need to concretize one’s pleasure. Why? Perhaps, Dalí is interested in a mimetic retrieval, in which masturbation, a repetitive ideal form of pleasure, is consistent with uprooting the reality of end result. This masturbatory principle is not so far estranged from Sigmund Freud’s views on both the pleasure principle and the reality principle, but first a necessary and relevant quote from Freud’s essay—“The Uncanny,” wherein the “good” doctor dictates:

It is only rarely that a psych-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of
aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of
beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other strata of mental life and has little to do with the subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. (929-30)

Dalí’s interest in what Finkelstein asserts as “scrupulous attention to detail” is at once a telling and re-inventing of the poet; i.e. as the mind is unstable and is dynamic in its [re]creations—all fingers, like Dalí’s “The Myth of Narcissus,” are [non]real, or a simulacra of the surrealist in nature. Dali explores his boundaries and like that famous text by Churchill, explores the inside of the cup, where the cup represents the capacity, the rim to invoke what the mind is wayward and adamant to suppress. We turn to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton, 1961) in which the psychoanalyst suggests:

We have decided to relate pleasure and unpleasure to the quantity of excitation
that is present in the mind but is not in any way ‘bound’; and to relate them in
such a manner that unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of
excitation and pleasure to a diminution. (4)

Perhaps then, Freud provides the reader with an initial awareness of the mind’s plaisir and a further anticipatory footnote into lasting excitation. For Dalí, what better medium to generate such machinery if not in the symbolism of his “Daydream,” a Freudian attempt to reaffirm the doctor’s ideation on “the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure” (7). This is further fleshed out in the [re]birthing attempt by Dalí’s fiction. Finkelstein states it best:

Thus, Dalí assumes in his fantasy a state of willed regression in early childhood,
with its sexual researches and theories; in particular, those concerning parental
intercourse and the begetting of children. Indeed, he [Dalí] recreates the scene of
his own begetting. (Collected Dalí, 149)

The subject of fantasy, or that which pertains to the fantastic is not examined in detail here, but it does provide the reader with an armed awareness regarding Dalí’s “genre confession” to re-li(e)ve his begotten state. Some lines from Dalí’s “Daydream are in order here, and with this accomplished through the repetition of repressed material as a “contemporary experience,” one can begin to assess the masturbatory principle at work—guised and couched, or rather implanted in the soft, rotting parts of two-lipped hedonism. My selections for the “Daydream” are lengthy, but pertinent quotes that reaffirm my earlier observations on Dalí’s capacity and the limits of his perverse oeuvre.
To begin, the “Daydream” opens with the detail of place, date and time: “Port-Lligat, 17 October 1931, 3 o’clock in the afternoon” (Collected Dalí, 150). This is then followed by a seemingly mundane prescription, which states:

I have just finished eating and I am going to stretch out on the couch, as I must do
every day for an hour and a half, following which, for the rest of the afternoon, I
intend to write a section of a very long study of Böcklin, a study which has
preoccupied me greatly for some time now. (150)

Even at a cursory reading one can already begin to construct Dalí’s usage of a Freudian and Foucauldian semantic; the first with regards to the “couch,” and the latter with regards to “intent.” What is more, Dalí’s early suggestion of feasting and resting, followed by the dual activity of desiring to write, then writing all culminate with his [pre]occupation—a study on Böcklin, the Swiss symbolist painter. A deconstructive study on the “order” of things, to echo Foucualt, but more precisely Derrida might be in order here, but I will leave that task to a more deserving scholar. Suffice it to state that the prescription precedes the perversion, and we are, as readers, being set up; i.e. if we open with a genesis, or a begetting of Dalí at the onset of the “Daydream,” then by the time we are brought to his “preoccupied” moment on Böcklin, who is responsible for his painting, Die Toteninsel, it is no far stretch to note that we have indeed traveled from birth to death in just the opening paragraph. Again, we—as readers—have been set up. As Dalí continues to lie on the couch, a Sausserian symbol of Freudian implication[s] and non-Freudian implication[s], we are to note the following strange, but uncanny reflection:

I forbid bringing the mail over to me. I am going to urinate, and yet I feel
impatient to sprawl out on the couch. I get then a very specific notion of the pleasure awaiting me in my bedroom, a sense that appears to me to be in contrast to the rather painful awareness of the contradictions I shall have to overcome. Thus I hasten to my bedroom, and while I’m on my way there I experience a very hard erection accompanied by great pleasure and hilarity. (151)

Recall, that in Foucault’s Madness & Civilization the subject of “laughter” is anything but benign, and moreover in an essay by Henri Bergson (An Essay on Laughter), it is ever-present in the form of an echo. The implications of Dalí’s laughter moment are what I have called elsewhere “the mirth supremacy.” I have often wondered if “hilarity” serves a dual purpose in the singular motive of hedonism; i.e. it is at once pleasurable to know ones intended action[s] as well as to be surprised on the journey to that intended action. Dalí moves the reader from the cursory to the shocking back to the ritual involved in an effective masturbatory release. He confesses: “Then, having hardly lain down on the couch, I immediately get up again to close the curtain in order to leave the room in semi-darkness” (151). One might suggest this to be nervous tension, or nervous disorder, but it could very well be the manifestation of the tension that exists between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Because of the time factor and scope of this present project I have decided to fast-forward toward the end where Dalí’s perversions are in full bloom and his genitalia erect and willing to penetrate the soft parts of the reader’s mind. The activity takes effect on a seemingly sacred day—Sunday to be exact. Dalí records:

The following day is Sunday. I should quickly make the most of the fact that,
close to four o’clock, everybody goes to the village. I await for a sign from Matilde in the meadow and I hurry, wrapped up in my only burnous, first into the room where the ear of corn is found, and then to the first floor. I find Dulita, Gallo and Matilde there, all three completely naked. In no time, Dulita masturbates me, but very clumsily, and this greatly arouses me. The three women go across the courtyard and into the cowshed. During that time I rush to the fountain of the cypresses and sit down no the wet stone of the bench. I hold up my penis with all my strength with my two hands, and then head for the cowshed where Dulita and the two women are lying down naked among the droppings and the rotten straw. I take off my burnous and throw myself on Dulita, but Matilde and Gallo have disappeared all of a sudden and Dulita is transformed into the woman I love, and my daydream ends with the same images as those I remember from my dream. (“Daydream,” 161)

The “Daydream” captures the perversion of a mind “awakened” to the dream-like sequence of postponed pleasure. Further, it is Dalí’s writing that the reader has to trust in order to make a decision to continue a “reading” on the masturbatory principle. The language here, more than the mere sexual description is what is important; i.e. the semantic of masculine awareness in a thrice-explored sexual fantasy is what Luce Irigaray may suggest as “obliging prop” (This Sex Which Is Not One, 25). Specifically, she claims:

Woman, in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the
enactment of man’s fantasies. That she may find pleasure in that role, by proxy, is
possible, even certain. But such pleasure is above all a masochistic prostitution of
her body to a desire that is not her own, and it leaves her in a familiar state of
dependency on man. (25)

Of interest is Irigaray’s ideation that “Woman […] is only a more or less obliging prop” (25). This thinking fits rather well to the above sample of the “Daydream” and Dalí serves as its chief masculine dominant, fantasy architect. Granted, there is something to be said about having one’s own dream regardless of gender, but that is for another project by another scholar for another audience. Dalí’s singularity and multiplicity trump the female voice. Moreover, though the “Daydream may suggest these misogynistic semantics—the dual poems—“The Great Masturbator” and “Love and Memory,” certainly reinforce it.

The concept of mimesis as it pertains to the genre of poetry intrigued Salvador Dalí immensely. The idea of repetition in his written ars is at points congruous to that of the prose of the Marquis de Sade. Specifically, Sade’s collection of writings in his The Misfortunes of Virtue parallels the perverse and the absence of benevolence—divine or human in Dalí’s “The Great Masturbator.” One might add to this Bataille’s Story of the Eye or the multi-volume work—The Accursed Share, but I leave that aside for now and tackle a more prescient and disturbing work—Dalí’s “The Great Masturbator” (herein, “The Great M”).

The commentary afforded by Finkelstein suggests that Dalí was concerned with multiplicity in the form of “mimetic confounding” (Finkelstein 175). He asserts:

Another concern of Dalí’s, to which he alludes frequently in the poem [“The
Great M”], refers to the concept of “mimetic confounding” and the playing with
notions concerning the false or counterfeit and the real…(175)

Recall, I had suggested in an earlier entry to this essay, Dalí’s participation with truth and falsity; the real and non-real; and of course the dynamism of the [sur]real and the non-[sur]real. Dalí is interested in self-discovery, and the stakes are high because of how far back he plans to retrieve such information. In a manner of noting—one could argue that Dalí’s interest in the begetting of himself is equal parts rhizome and stop game (or, might the reader allow me an intolerable pause instead). In short then the reader finds Dalí teetering on the lip of the cup, or what he notes to be the “phenomenology of repugnance” (175). And now, selections of the work itself are in order.

Dalí opens the “The Great M” with a similar time and season stamp we noted in the “Daydream.” He states:

The summer was in its last death throes behind the palisade
westward rose the principal edifice of the town
constructed of false red bricks
one could hear dimly the sounds of the town
some wayfarers among which swarmed peasants
thronged the road connecting the humble village of Hunt with the haughty
Kistern.
To the left meandered another road
humbler and narrower
a small road
melan-cholic
along whose edge were strewn
stacks of hay and shit
to serve as manure for the neighboring fields.

This first section is to be read in light of the next, and so we continue with the reading of the more shocking parts that pay homage to Dalí’s desire toward the scatological. In a medallion description he invokes a trinity of sorts to reaffirm his critical analysis of the Art Nouveau model. Dalí asserts:

There was also a medallion
bearing the three following
words
abuse
agriculture
imperialism.
And still
another
that preserved in perpetuity
three other inscriptions
crown
false gold
great shit.

These extremely interesting lines taken together place Dalí’s desire between the amorous imagination and the scatological simulacra, wherein perversion and vice, like Sade and Bataille, suggest one’s lot in life. The vision may be pessimistic in nature, but it at least affords a viable reading into the pleasure principle and mankind’s capacity for aura expression. Dalí of course did more than just list perverse words in frames of “genre confession,” and by so doing constantly shocked his viewers, his critics and his admirers. To complement “The Great M” Dalí’s “Love and Memory” re-connect the Irigarian notions of womanhood alongside Freudian desire regarding the death of the father and a misplaced wish for his sister (at once an archetype of the mother and the sustaining of the Oedipal construct). The following lines blur these distinctions and then re-focus them with alarming clarity. Dalí states:

My sister’s image
the anus red
with bloody shit
the cock
half erect
elegantly propped up
against
a huge
personal
and colonial
lyre
the left testicle
partially dipped
in a glass
of tepid milk
the glass with milk
placed
inside
a woman’s shoe

my sister’s image
the two external lips
of her sex
each one
respectively
suspended
ready to touch
the two compartments
of a case made of straw
one containing flour
and the other
grains of corn

Dalí continues in this seemingly disarming manner asking the reader for apology and non-apology—he is at once repeating his desires and at the same time stopping them; i.e. no two frames are alike, but both are the same in the concept or construct of distinction. This example and others like it has stayed “true” to its intended attempt—to quantify the limits of Dalí’s capacious genius in ars. As Dalí himself was an ambitious man with desire to complete, to finish the daunting undertaking of composing an opera, I too have constructed a small opera in the original Italian sense of work; like Dalí then, I too was unable to finish the task I intended, but I am pleased with its recorded journey.