Dali: Surrealism, Time, and Dreams
Salvador Dali was a member of the surrealist movement, which began in Paris in the 1920s. The movement brought together impulses from the German Dada movement, Cubism, a certain leftist anti-materialism, and Freudian psychoanalysis. One of the chief members of the group, and author of the First Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton, was both an artist and a trained Freudian analyst. These influences led Breton and others to focus particular attention on dreams. In his definition of surrealism in the First Surrealist Manifesto, Breton writes:
ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.
Brash, haughty, playful and ironic, the surrealists set out to challenge the prevailing spirit of the times, which they saw as bourgeois concern for rectitude and order combined with the primacy of rational thinking (positivism) and suppression of instinctual desires. In order to overcome the domination of the bourgeois ego, as they saw it, surrealism turned to different forms of expression: stream-of-consciousness writing (automatism), spontaneous and random drawing, works of free association in line with Freudian techniques, and symbolic expressions of the chaotic world of subconscious emotion.
Time, for Dali and others, was the bourgeois symbol that stood above all others. Time organized a person’s life like never before – and time was everywhere, on the clocks on railway stations, in the public squares, on the walls, and strapped around people’s wrists. Time regulated factory shifts, the arrival and departure of trains and subway cars, coordinated business in New York with business in Paris and London, and made sure ships did not lose a day in transit around the new International Date Line. Time was the embodiment of reason. Processes were broken down to the minute or even the second. Efficiency and synchronicity became the buzzwords of the age – an age of great faith in the perfectibility of society, economy and the human being.
The Great War, WWI, however, had exposed the problems of this way of thinking and some like the surrealists or the Dadaists considered the bourgeois worldview a self-deceptive sham. Humans, for the surrealists and Dadaists, needed to break free from bourgeois definitions, which, they thought, did little more than harness their productive energies without fulfilling their basic needs. The basic needs, unfulfilled in the orderly, time-dominated waking life, could still be expressed, though in transmuted form, in the dream state – and in fact, their suppression in waking life made dreams that much more intense and volatile. Breton expresses the surrealist perspective on the power of logical thinking in society in the manifesto:
We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer -- and, in my opinion by far the most important part -- has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud.
Opposite to the world of logic and common sense stood the dream world. In the dream state, the dreamer is not in control; the dreamer passively and totally accepts the bizarre world with which he or she is confronted.
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