Descriptores cualitativos

So crucial for Dalí’s vision, work and writing is the art of the detail in its smallest and widest optical effect, that to mix it up in every case with the ongoing story would muddy it irremediably. He speaks of his ‘hypervisuality’, dependent on the powerful lenses of his eyes – amplifying an object in a limited field of vision, and its emotional effect. I have chosen a few representative cases to frame here, in the centre of the text, as exemplary, in their pure state. The cases come from ‘this sensational book’, his Secret Life, which has several versions: the original, La Vie secrète de Salvador Dalí, now freshly published and commented, the retouched Vie secrète pre-sented by Gala, and The Secret Life translated by Haakon Chevalier in 1942 and slightly altered in its Dover publication of 1993.¹

Each of these details sets the stage for an intensity of vision and feeling. Throughout, tiny things are acutely made present, from the Venetian red of the marrow of a chicken bone to the worms in a cherry. Early on, he comments on the skin of Monsieur Trayter:

le gran pousse de sa main la’aquelle havait lepiderme mate, l’odeur la temperature et les rugosites, d’une pomme de terre ride et chafe par le soleill et déjà un peu pourri

the big thumb of his hand which had a smooth epidermis, the smell, temperature, and roughness of a potato, wrinkled and weathered by the sun and already a little rotted²

As a model, I am considering how Dalí would trace the itinerary of the shadows on the rocks of the beaches near Cadaqués, when their tops would be caressed by the waves lapping up over them. He would leave traces and signals there at the exact moment chosen, as he did all through his work. In this case, his favourite signal to himself was a dried olive, set upright on an old cork on the tip of a rock, which had a point like the beak of an eagle, and would receive the last rays of the sun, standing alone in the purple light while the rest of the landscape was submerged in shadow. He would slowly drink a bit of water from a fountain, look at the olive ‘poised upon the ultimate point of day’, put it in one nostril, blow until it came out, pick it up and suck it before putting it back into his nostril.³

Which prepares the stage for a later passage in which he finds, again in his nostril, a compressed ball of the blue receipt of a telegram he had sent in order to have some money paid him . . . This kind of ‘automatic bit of play’ was, he says, characteristic of him in this period, that of the painting of the Invisible Man and the writing of The Visible Woman, in contrast to the earlier painting, Invisible Woman.

It is the same period as his concentration on the skin of a lady’s wrist, or then on certain teeth, and in particular, on one tiny little tooth which he wanted to hang from the ceiling to inspire him. Gala’s teeth were ‘so perfect, so well-shaped, regular and categorical, brilliant and glorious’. These were true teeth as opposed to the lie of his own, in his mouth of an old man. ‘Not a single tooth was where it should be. I lacked two molars that had never grown, and the two incisors of the lower jaw, which were milk teeth and which I had lost, did not grow out again (in fact they never have); still other teeth grew where they were not supposed to.’ Next to Gala’s perfect skull, his was ‘a veritable cataclysm, for aside from the chaos of my teeth, my extremely underdeveloped chin would offer a violent contrast to the decisive development of my superciliary arches, which would be monstrously

avid of sight once sight was absent’.⁴Staring at the close-up detail has the remarkable effect of making the ordinary object unrecognizable.

In the Vie secrète, he meditates on why he wants to hang up his milk tooth, as a fetish for and after masturbation, and connects it with the white of breasts, the giving of milk, and compares it to the way the melons spurted when the linden flowers were harvested – all these scenes aid in his masturbatory rituals:

My dear teeth, impoverished, uneven, and calcified! stigmata of my age! From now on, I will have only you to bite into money with!⁵

As Finkelstein points out, the visual riddle titled ‘Liberation of fingers’ of 1929 seems to emulate Breton’s autobiographical material in his novel Nadja, and to prefigure the relevations in Dalí’s Secret Life. It can be seen as ‘a collection of minutely transcribed objective facts, constituting an object that we find to be difficult or impossi-ble to identify . . . There are eighteen buttons, the one closest to me has a hair (from an eyelash or a tiger) that comes out of one of the holes. Three centimetres to the right of the button there is a biscuit crumb.’⁶The minutiae become so small that all the usual objects become unrecognizable to the ordinary gaze.

Photography works the same way, Dalí will say in 1927, because it will know how to grasp ‘the most subtle and uncontrollable poetry!

In the big, limpid eye of a cow we can see deformed, in the spherical sense, a miniature, very white post-machinist landscape, precise enough to define a sky where diminutive, luminous little clouds sail by.’ And later, he says in the same article, ‘Knowing how to look is a way of inventing.’⁷

He certainly knew how to look, and to describe the result. The entire project and product of ‘living dissection of myself ’ that makes up The Secret Life is frequently focused on parts of the body

or its dress. Often Dalí’s close stare at others or himself has to do with clothing, its affect and effect. His high consciousness of his appearance is matched by an equally high consciousness of his own calculated store of energy. He chooses to wear uncomfortable footwear, to twist his feet unnaturally, and to sit in uncomfortable positions, accentuating the pain from all this in a contraction in order to enhance his own performance.

Enigmatic Elements in the Landscape, 1934, oil on panel. The artist concentrates on the enigmatic details surrounding him.

One day when this characteristic contraction coincided with my wearing of shoes that were painfully tight my eloquence reached it height. In my own case physical pain certainly augments eloquence; thus a tooth-ache often releases in me an oratorical outburst.⁸

Or again, in 1928:

Shoes occupying the whole page, perfect products, the eurhythmic play of curves, changes of different kinds, smooth surfaces, rough surfaces, polished surfaces, flecked surfaces; clear, soft, intellectual reflections that indicate explanatory volumes, pure structural metaphors of the physiology of the foot. Marvellous photographs of shoes, as poetic as the most exciting work by Picasso.⁹

To see how this art of the detail plays itself out in his working life – and Dalí was an avid, tireless worker at his craft both visual and verbal – I will take what I think of as the cherry episode. One day he had finished a roll of canvas and decided to paint a still life on the panel of an old door. Spilling out an entire basket of cherries on the table before him, with the sunlight streaming through the window to brighten the fire of their color, he planted three strokes on each painted cherry: vermillion, carmine, and white. The dabs of paint he placed in exact accord with the sound of the mill outside: ‘tock, tock, tock . . . tock, tock, tock . . . tock, tock, tock’, leaping around to keep up the rhythm. For this he had an audience of peasants, admiring, but one pointed out that there were no stems to the ‘joyously born’ new cherries. So Dalí began to eat the real cherries and glue each stem of the swallowed ones to the wooden door, whose wormholes now seemed to belong to the painted cherries, whereas the real cherries, equally worm-infested, also had holes. An idea (a very Dalínian idea), which the painter found ‘unbelievably refined’:

Armed with a limitless patience, I began the minute operation (with the aid of a hairpin which I used as tweezers) of picking the worms out of the door – that is to say, the worms of the painted cherries – and putting them into the holes of the true cherries and vice versa.¹⁰

And then in the Vie secrète, he speaks of a rocking chair, where he is eating cherries and the chair is covered with a kind of lace that has big thick plush cherries. The sun as it strikes the closed shutters lights up the round knots in the wood to a fiery red, like the ears of the person sitting there.¹¹All these passages seem to coalesce in the mind of the reader as Dalí obsesses about this red, this shape, and these associations.

‘That shows genius’, said Ramón Pichot, who had come up to look at the work, as of course it did and does: this genius of the detail is what sets off Dalí’s way of thinking, seeing and working from the other Surrealist and surréalisant painters and writers.

The ‘living dissection’ of himself realized by his telling of his life in whatever version we read it is full of such incidents, giving to the avid reader as to the avid viewer an intensity of vision that an unread observation of the paintings cannot equal. They are what gives to his life, as I see it, its own ‘well-defined shape’.¹²So I have wanted to set off these examples of this bizarre genius from the ongoing if brief recounting of his ‘life’, the ‘secret’ and ‘public’

parts, however they seem to merge. As Dalí says of his various memories, however and whenever they are recounted: ‘The differ-ence between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.’¹³I believe, given all this and much more, that we can claim that Dalí is in the details.

11

Lorca Dead, Narcissus Alive,