Dalí's Inauthenticity

Having been the only essay primarily devoted to the visual arts, my paper was something of an outlier. Nonetheless, the conversation came around a few times to Dalí's practice and more generally to the question of how to integrate historical accounts of the literary and the visual. The paper that follows does not attempt this difficult work, but it seems to me that a place to begin is with an evaluation of the determinative properties of canonization. In the seminar, I proposed that, despite the evident reality of multiple modernisms within the visual arts, there nevertheless unquestionably existed a hegemonic mainstream of modernist production that no historical revision can decenter without, in the end, fundamentally misrepresenting the events as they occurred. That this hegemonic mainstream exerted a centripetal force on the plurality of contemporaneous practices suggests that alternative modernisms are best understood as having developed dialogically—in direct or oblique relation to the mainstream. One wonders then whether or not the same is true of literary modernisms. To put the question another way: if it can be said that visual modernisms are "arboreal" (to use Deleuze's terminology), might it be the case that literary modernisms are by contrast "rhizomatic"? I don't have an answer to this, but framing the question in this manner may go some way toward clarifying what we mean when we speak of "multiple modernisms." And this, in turn, may help to shed light on the question of modernist authenticity, for the extent to which the question of authenticity can be said to preoccupy the mainstream of modernism is, I would argue, a question that must be answered at the outset. It was clear from a number of the papers that, within the diversity of experiences we call "modernity," experiences of inauthenticity were both widespread and profound, and that diverse practices were developed to counter such experiences. Implicit, therefore, is the notion that modern life was shot through with things that seemed in one way or another inauthentic—deceptive, fake, superficial, ersatz. For me, the fact that this would be so remains a question in need of more precise answers. The essay that follows aims to be a step in that direction.

1.

When André Breton first saw Salvador Dalí's paintings, he was by his own admission awestruck: "With the coming of Dalí, it is perhaps the first time that the mental windows have been opened really wide . . . "¹ With these words, written in 1929 to accompany Dalí's first exhibition in Paris, the founder, promoter, poet and principal theoretician of the Surrealist movement was throwing all his weight behind Dalí, in the hope that his paintings (and his charismatic presence) would breathe new life into Surrealism, which at this point—five years past its first stirrings—was beginning to show some age.² There was one painting, however, about which Breton was less enthusiastic. The Lugubrious Game (1929) depicts a strange and mesmerizing collection of objects, some painted with meticulous attention to detail, others cut from newsprint and affixed to the surface with equal meticulousness (fig. 1). What disturbed the poet was the male figure in the foreground—more precisely, the stain that appeared on his pants, a brown stain that runs like melted chocolate past the man's shorts and onto his right leg. Breton was known by his friends to have had a profound and apparently unshakable distaste for anything even vaguely scatological, and this small but extravagant rendering was altogether too much for him to bear. As Dalí recalled some years later (after their friendship had soured), "I was obliged to justify myself by saying that it was merely a simulacrum. No further questions were asked."³

What are we to make of this incident? For most, it's an event hardly worth mentioning—indicative only of Dalí's considerable skill at handling those around him whose critical support he understood as useful in advancing his career.⁴ But I wonder. Isn't it possible that Dalí in fact meant what he said? Isn't it possible that he believed that what he had painted was not a man with...