Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small by Roger Rothman (review)

Speaking of the tiny in relation to the larger than life character of Salvador Dalí might seem, at first, counterintuitive. Besides pioneering self-aggrandizement as an art form, Dalí has created the largest surrealist object in the world: The Dalí Theatre-Museum in the Spanish town of Figueres, and has left us, thanks to his colossal energy and grandiose gestures, thousands of works. Yet, a new book, Tiny Surrealism, by Roger Rothman, allows us to see the extent to which the tiny in the art of Dalí deserve a closer examination. According to Rothman, the tiny is essential to understanding Dalí, and, honoring this premise, he studies, with microscopic critical acumen, the aesthetic implications of the “tiny” in the art of this Spanish genius.

Tiny Surrealism focuses on the earlier part of Dalí’s career and explores his underlying fascination with the small in order to reconsider his deliberate subversion of modernist orthodoxies. For Dalí, in his attempt to reveal the intrinsic irrationality and mysteriousness of the world, has resorted to the tiny as a disruptive device—both the literal and the metaphorical tiny: ants, breadcrumbs, blackheads, but also the superficial, the inconsequential, the anachronic.

The first chapter, “Little Things,” explores the development of Dali’s attraction to the little as a way to disrupt Order, since “only little things can affect the ‘flight’ from use to nonuse, meaning to nonmeaning” (35). Dalí attempts to make visible the thing-ness of objects, in order to get closer to what in this theoretical framework can be understood as “objective reality.” It is in this context that Rothman accurately reevaluates the influence that the photographic camera and Vermeer’s art had on Dalí’s depiction and vision of the tiny.

The second chapter, “Paranoia,” follows the evolution of Dalí’s identification with little things as he adapted the surrealist discourse to his vision of the small: “Just as Dalí had conceived of the photograph and Vermeer’s gaze as tools in the service of liberating the little things of the material world, he had come to see surrealism as a tool in the service of liberating the little things of the world of the mind” (55). It is in regards to this evolution that Rothman studies Dalí’s unique concept of paranoia. Like the disaggregating effect of photography, paranoia manages to provide a purely objective account of perceptions (interpretive delirium) without giving way to any form of rationality (interpretive coherence). However, Rothman insightfully connects the paranoiac’s will to systematize confusion not so much to photography as to the “disorienting re-aggregation” of the cinematic montage.

Chapter 3, “Parasitism,” explores another dimension of the “thing,” and, contrary to what one might expect, the interest on the parasite is due not only to its characteristic as a small object but, more importantly, to the fact that its exposure is disruptive. The marginal, insignificant, and inconsequential nature of the parasite, “force[s] us to consider that the world is entirely irrational and inescapably mysterious” (110).

In chapter 4, “Superficiality,” Rothman meticulously shows the ways in which Dalí’s surrealism of the surfaces defies one of the central aspirations of mainstream Surrealism: authenticity. Against the grain of modernist aesthetics that privileged depth and origin over surface and copy, Dalí developed a fascination for surfaces as another way to corrode the divide between reality and representation, or, better yet, to discredit reality altogether.

Chapter 5, “Submission,” delves on an unexpected subcategory of the tiny that also subverts modernism. This chapter studies the masochistic logic of self-restraint and suppression of desire that presides over Dalí’s work as yet another attack against the avant-garde imperatives of originality and independence.

Finally, the last chapter touches upon another form of the inconsequential: “Anachronism.” One by one, Rothman studies the outmoded and antimodernist artists reinstated by Dalí (i.e., Vermeer, Meissonier, Böcklin, Millet, among others) as forms of subversive forces against...