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Description |
"This is the painting Dali took to show Freud in London. It belonged formerly to Edward James." (Caption); "At Zürs […] Dali embarked on a new experiment: the composition, in French, of a 'paranoaic' poem, The Myth of Narcissus, to be concurrently illustrated, 'word by word', in a painting. […] The subtitle of the poem explained that the latter constituted a 'way of visually observing the course of the metamorphosis of Narcissus' […]. Dali's interest in the Narcissus myth may have been stimulated by Albert Skira's edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, illustrated by Picasso. Given his own, Narcissus-style self-absorption it was hardly surprising that he considered the myth of great personal relevance. In this he was assisted by Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality and, particularly, 'Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia'. In the latter Freud uses the term 'narcissism' (defined in The Interpretation of Dreams as 'the unbounded self-love of children') to designate 'a stage in the development of the libido which it passes through on the way from auto-erotism [sic] to object-love', stressing that it is a moment when fixations can easily be established and neuroses and paranoia take firm hold. Dali must have been struck to discover that Freud interprets paranoia as a defense against homosexuality. Since the painter now claimed to be not only the Great Masturbator but the Great Paranoiac, featured in the painting of this title done the previous year, he must have been aware that, to be consistent, he should have claimed fear of homosexuality, real or imagined, as an important factor in his personality. But, as Santos Torroella has pointed out in his penetrating analysis of Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Dali was never prepared, or able, to take this step. […] Given Dali's fear of homosexuality, now fused with his fear of paranoia, it comes as no surprise to find allusions to Lorca [Federico García Lorca] in the poem Metamorphosis of Narcissus and, by extension, in the picture of the same name. […] Almost ten years earlier, when Lorca published his Gypsy Ballads, Dali had criticized what he considered the poem's old-hat Andalusian localism. This did not prevent the painter from hinting now in Metamorphosis of Narcissus at one of Lorca's most moving poems in that collection. The allusion comes when Dali evokes the dancers in the background of the painting, whom he terms 'the heterosexual group'. The males comprise a Hindi, a Catalan and a German; the females an Englishwoman, a Russian, a Swede, an American and 'the great somber Andalusian robust with glands and olive-green from anguish.' This must be Soledad Montoya, the protagonist of Lorca's 'Ballad of Black Anguish', whom we find searching desperately, like so many of Lorca's characters, for a love denied to her. Her presence here is yet another indication of how much Lorca, a year after his assassination, was haunting Dali. […] Santos Torroella is correct, surely, in seeing the full sense of Dali's poem, and henceforth of the painting, in the appearance of Gala at the end. Immersed in self-absorption; in danger, when Lorca was alive, of succumbing to homosexual tendencies, and perhaps still in danger of doing so; his sexual activity reduced to the fantasy world of masturbation, as symbolized by the monumental, fossilized hand into which Narcissus is transformed in the painting: Dali has been offered the chance of survival, if not cure, by the epiphany of the Muse who came into his life at Cadaqués in the summer of 1929. In this respect it is significant that the scene is set at Cape Creus, the low hills of whose hinterland are unmistakable in the background, for it was here that the couple had discovered their love. Gala does not appear directly in the painting, but is symbolized by the narcissus that bursts from the head of the despairing self-contemplative, now changed into an egg […]." (Excerpts, pp.427-430) |
