Extended essay
Giles Reed
Surreaist work, specifically in Dali's dismal sport. If anyone can be
bothered to read it i would be grateful for any comments
cheers
giles
A discussion of the role of dreams in the work of Salvador Dali
Introduction
The place of dreams in Surrealism
‘Surrealism n.m. - Automatisme psychique pur par lequel on se prépose
d’exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre
manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensé. Dictée de la pensée, en
l’absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison, en dehors de toute
préoccupation esthétique ou morale.’
This description was to guide the path of Surrealism through the dream,
creative work becoming the product of the unconscious. Personal intimate
images, illogical in the waking world, yet deeply significant in the
psyche of the individual, were to form the main body of art. The link
with dreams is consequential as the unconscious reveals itself most
obviously in our dreams.
André Breton, who referred to man as ‘ce rêveur définitif’ suggests
that the reality of dreams is perhaps just as significant as that of
everyday events: ‘Pourquoi n’accorderai-je pas au rêve ce que je refuse
parfois à la réalité? He goes on in the first surrealist manifesto to
juxtapose the dream directly with reality, stating; ‘Je crois à la
résolution future de ces deux états, en apparence si contradictoires,
que sont le rêve et la réalité, une sorte de réalité absolue, de
surréalité si l’on peut ainsi dire’For André Breton these states of
waking and dreaming are the two ‘Vases communicants’: ‘un tissu
capillaire assurant l’échange constant qui doit se produire dans la
pensée entre le monde extérieur et le mode intérieur, échange qui
nécessite l’interprétation continue de l’activité de veille et
l’activité de sommeil’
The interrelation of the states of dreaming and waking is seen as the
key to a closely linked issue: the relationship between the unconscious
and the conscious, the irrational side of man and his logical self.
André Breton states that it would be sufficient for him if surrealist
activities were seen to have achieved nothing more than to have
attempted narrow the gap between reality and the dream: ‘Je souhaite
qu’il (le surréalisme) passe pour n’avoir tenté rien d’autre de mieux
que de jeter un fil conducteur entre les mondes trop dissociés du veille
et du sommeil, de la réalité extérieur et intérieur, de la raison et de
la folie, du calme de la connaissance et de l’amour, de la vie pour la
vie de la vie et la révolution.’
Dreams and painting
The value of the medium of painting for the transcription of dreams, for
the resolution of the states of ‘veille’ and ‘sommeil’ needs to be
analysed to understand the role of dreams in the work of Dali. Pierre
Reverdy noted, in his article in La Révolution Surréaliste no.1 December
1924, entitled Le Rêveur parmi les murailles, that thought expresses
itself in words whereas dreams are composed of images: ‘La pensée a
besoin pour progresser dans l’esprit de se préciser en mots, le rêve se
développe en images.’ thus the suitability of painting in more
faithfully exposing the dream. However, the problem with transposing
dreams when awake is approached by André Breton again in the first
Surrealist Manifesto, when he submits that the dream, once the dreamer
is, awake is left purely to the memory to recreate: ‘C’est que l’homme,
quand il cesse de dormir, est avant tout le jouet de sa mémoire.’
The 1924 Manifesto had only incidentally referred to painting. Pierre
Naville was one among the members of the surrealist group who doubted
that painting was suitable for surrealist expression. In the third issue
of ‘La Révolution Surréaliste’ he wrote ‘Everyone knows that there is no
surrealist painting.’ In later issues of the magazine André Breton, in
contradiction to Pierre Naville, wrote a series of articles on various
painters and their link to the surrealist movement, painters like
Picasso, Ernst, Masson, Tanguy and others. Breton however was not
interested and saw no value in the aesthetics of painting, his interest
in the medium transcending this. In Surrealism and Painting, he
expresses that: ‘It is impossible for me to consider a picture as
anything but a window, in which my interest is to know what it looks out
on.’
Dreams in the work of Dali
In the preface to Dali’s first surrealist exhibition in Pairs in
November 1929, André Breton writes: ‘The art of Dali, the most
hallucinatory known until now, constitutes a real menace. Absolutely new
and visibly malintentioned beings hereupon enter into play.’ The
statement is powerful, the link between dream and hallucination obvious.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary offers the following description of
hallucination:
hallucination n.
the apparent or alleged perception of an object not actually present
and offers day-dream as a synonym in the thesaurus.
The centrepiece for the November 1929 Goemans exhibition, and his ticket
into surrealism, was Le Jeu Lugubre. It was the revelation of a change
which was already present in The First Days of Spring. A major factor in
this change was Dali’s discovery of ways to exploit his broad reading of
psycho-analytical texts. He was finding ways of incorporating
psycho-analytical imagery with his own personal material. It is with an
analysis of Le Jeu Lugubre that we will attempt to investigate the role
of the dream in the painting of Dali.
Dali had first read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams when he was a
student in Madrid. In The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali, he
remembers the impact that his reading of Freud had on him: ‘This book
presented itself to me as one of the capital discoveries in my life, and
I was seized with a real vice of self-interpretation, not only of my
dreams but of everything that happened to me, however accidental it
might seem at first glance.’
The first visual link to the dream in Le Jeu Lugubre is the dream-like
landscape, reminiscent of the deep-space feeling in the work of Giorgio
de Chiroco. The amorphous monochrome landscape stretching off to the
horizon contrasts in a vivid dream-like fashion with the bright
multicoloured images in the foreground. These objects, according to Dali
were placed on the painting as ready-made dream images, for he says they
appeared to him like waking dreams, which he reproduced, ‘as
scrupulously as it was possible for me to…following as criterion and
norm of their arrangement only the most automatic feelings.’ He
describes that he kept Le Jeu Lugubre on an easel at the end of his bed
so that it was the last thing he saw on going to sleep in the evening
and the first on awaking.
A close analysis of the origin of the objects in Le Jeu Lugubre show a
direct relation to Freud. Many of the images are, according to Dali,
very closely related to childhood memories, images ‘which I could not
localise precisely in time or space but which I knew with certainty I
had seen when I was little. Among these are images of the fish and
grasshopper which are repeated in subsequent paintings, for instance in
the Portrait of Paul Eluard. Dali explains ‘This fish I sometimes saw
with a grasshopper clinging to its mouth.’ This image is a reference to
his childhood when he developed a fear of grasshoppers through finding a
fish who’s face resembled almost exactly that of a grasshopper. Freud
emphasised the importance of a persons childhood memories for the are
vital to the unravelling of the concealed content of a dream. The
obsessive quality of these images, being repeated in many works
reinforce there subconscious, dream-like character.
When Freud himself met Dali in London in 1938, he expressed to him that
the mystery of Dali’s subconscious is expressed outright in his
paintings. According to Dali Freud told him: ‘It is not the unconscious
that I seek in your pictures but the conscious. While in the pictures of
the masters - Leonardo or Ingres - that which interests me, that which
deems mysterious and troubling to me, is precisely the search for the
unconscious ideas, of an enigmatic order, hidden in the picture, your
mystery is manifested outright. The picture is but a mechanism to reveal
it.’ Freud is suggesting that Dali’s painting reveals a visual
representation of his unconscious ideas hence his dreams.
The groups of apparently unrelated objects in Le Jeu Lugubre, some close
in and some small in the background, might be argued as suggesting a
dream. In the dream some events are clearly visible and comprehensible,
yet on the periphery, at the back of ones mind incomprehensible images
are present. As in a dream, images are linked in a less than logical
fashion, and like for example with parrot/rabbit head, objects change
into others unexpectedly.
According to Freud the sexual symbolism of dreams is vital in their
comprehension. In dismal sport, there appears to be a powerful sexual
anxiety present. Bataille published an article on Le Jeu Lugubre in the
December 1929 issue of Documents, where he suggests the psychoanalytical
clichés available, like for instance he suggests that the tearing of the
upper part of the body in the centre, reference A. in the diagram, is
taken from the Freudian concept of the substitution of the upper for the
lower part of the body in dreams. On a more sexual basis, staircases are
in Freudian dream psycho-analysis a symbol of sexual intercourse. The
oppressive size of the staircase may express Dali’s fear of sexual
intercourse, an almost insurmountable object which the other objects of
Dali’s dreams, including his own ‘soft’ head, are restricted by. These
dream images of sexual anxiety could well have been heartfelt at this
time since he had fallen in love with Gala Eluard, who was to become his
wife, and at this time he admits never having had a full sexual
relationship with a woman.
Dali claimed that during the period that he was painting Le Jeu Lugubre
he was in a state of emotional upheaval which was close to madness, a
state which the surrealists suggested was one where the unconscious was
manifested more openly.