Maniac Eyeball (17 page)

On February 5, 1934, André Breton had brought the whole upper echelon of Surrealism together in his studio at 42 Rue Fontaine, to pass on my behavior. I was running a fever and getting a sore throat. With my habitual cowardice, the very idea of illness made me even more uncomfortable and facing this ordeal upset me extremely. But in my weakness I was able to find the paranoiac logic that was to turn the situation completely in my favor. I dressed very warmly, put on my camel’s-hair coat; placed a thermometer under my tongue so as to keep vigilantly thinking about my case, and as I was about to leave discovered I was forgetting to wear shoes. I slipped them on without lacing them.

When Gala and I got there, everyone was waiting for me, seated on sofas, chairs, or the floor. It was foggy with smoke. Breton, dressed in bottle green from head to foot, looked like the Grand Inquisitor and lost no time in beginning to intone the litany of my deviations and errors. He paced back and forth continually in front of my painting,
La
Gradiva,
hung near the fancy window of the studio. I listened to him for a moment with attention, but my rising fever seemed more urgent to me and, while lending one ear to the recital of the Attorney General, I took out the oral thermometer and read it. It was 101.3, which was high.

Medical practice in such a case calls for all possible measures to bring it down. I took off my shoes, overcoat, jacket, and sweater. Then I put my jacket and coat back on, because in such cases it is also important not to cool off too quickly.

Then I put my shoes back on. Breton looked daggers at me during all this. He was nervously puffing on his pipe. “Dalí, what do you have to say for yourself?” I retorted that the accusations leveled against me were based on political or moral criteria which did not signify in relation to my paranoiac-critical concepts.

Breton was looking furious. The fact was that, having for gotten to take the thermometer out of my mouth, what I said was incomprehensible and I was spitting all over him. I fell to my knees, begging him to understand me.

He yelled louder than I did.

Then I got up, took off my coat and jacket, and a second sweater that I threw at his feet, quickly putting the jacket and coat back on so as not to catch cold. The whole bunch broke out laughing.

I turned to them, urging them to understand me, but my spittle-laden statements only made them laugh twice as loud.

Breton almost lost his composure. I should have taken the thermometer out of my mouth, but I was so obsessed with the state of my health that that would have paralyzed me. I had to choose between muteness and mumbling. Breton, meanwhile, was continuing his accusatory monologue, indicting everything I had done since I first joined the Surrealist group. What I got from it mainly was the immense distance that from the start had separated him and me.

We had met in 1928, introduced by Miró, the second time I came to Paris. He had immediately assumed the guise of a second father to me. I felt at the time as if I had been vouchsafed a second birth. The Surrealists to me were a kind of nourishing placenta and I believed in Surrealism as in the Tablets of the Law. With unbelievable and insatiable appetite, I assimilated the letter and spirit of the movement which indeed corresponded so exactly to my deeper nature that I embodied it most naturally. The farcical nature of this whole trial was the more paradoxical since I was probably the most Surrealist of the whole group – perhaps the
only
Surrealist – and what I was being accused of in essence was being too much so. Priests imprisoned in their own scholasticism were trying to refute a saint... The story was as old as religion itself!

What Breton had really never forgiven me for was having been able to amaze him from the word go: the way I gave large bills to taxi drivers and did not take my change – because I never know how much of a tip I ought to give – how I made people laugh through my incongruous assertions, brought about downright hallucinations through my opinions and deportment, and undermined his authority; my entire attitude went against his own reflexes as a meticulously well-ordered man, a book-keeper even in his moods, because, for all that he proclaimed the glories of delirium and freedom, Breton was basically rational and bourgeois.

Our first run-in came over my painting,
The
Lugubrious Game.
In it, there was a rear view of a man whose underpants had well-formed excrements coming through them. Gala had already asked me whether I was coprophagous, merely putting into words what the whole group felt. The truth, as we know, was that I had to follow my unconscious impulses in order to free myself of my fears, but to Breton this was not explanation enough. Claiming to be truly shocked by the picture, he demanded that I state that the scatological detail was meant to be only a sham. I tried to laugh it off by saying shit brought good luck and that its appearance within the Surrealist corpus was a sign of the whole movement getting another chance. Besides, historical literature was full of exerementitial allusions, from the story of the hen that laid the golden eggs to Zeus’ divine defecation of gold on Danaë; but I understood from that day forward that these were merely toilet-paper revolutionaries, loaded with petit bourgeois prejudices, in whom the archetypes of classical morals had left in delible imprints. Shit scared them.

Shit and arseholes. Yet, what was more human, and more needful of transcending! From that moment, I knew I would keep on obsessing them with what they most dreaded. And when I invented Surrealist objects, I had the deep inner fulfillment of knowing, while the group went into ecstasies over their operation, that these objects very exactly reproduced the contractions of a rectal sphincter at work, so that what they were thus admiring was their own fear.

I had hoped, at the beginning of my relationship with the group, to use it as a springboard, but I quickly sensed its dogmatic limitations. I had at one time thought of acceding to power in it, but the idea of fighting to be second in a small village when I could be first in Rome turned my stomach. I was satisfied to drop a few bomb-shells in that small-town café where the Surrealist Revolution held its assizes.

This indeed is what Breton was indicting me for with the ve hemence of Savonarola. I chose this moment to take my shoes off again, while getting out of my topcoat, jacket, and a third sweater. I was feverish and did not put jacket or topcoat back on, but only the shoes. I mumbled something through the thermometer in my mouth, just enough to give them another laugh.

When I say all the Surrealists had those petit-bourgeois taboos, I can prove it: they talked sex in a symbolic manner and the Church Fathers would not always have been moved to censor their words. Aragon’s most daring action was writing
Le Con d’Irène
(
Irene’s Cunt
), a labored erotic novel – but within the group, buggery or anal fantasies were not recognized as being part of the arsenal of love, any more than pederasty, or mysticism. I was completely amazed to find that Breton set up a whole scale of values to be observed in one’s dreams. For instance, it was strictly forbidden to make mention of any dream involving Mary, Mother of Jesus – whom I often dreamt about – nor could I confess that I was obsessed by the hairs of her arse. That was held to be ill-bred and in bad taste. And woe betide any who did not respect the code of sexual fidelity – by swiping a friend’s wife or even being unfaithful to one’s mistress! Desire and lust were no laughing matters here. There was freedom only to have great theoretical, Platonic love affairs.

I considered it a normal thing to pay close attention to my stools and talk about them. My shit is an integral part of myself, and its consistency, odor, and shape are connected to my moods, my work, my way of living. I had had explosive, foul-smelling bowel movements when I was a student painting the town; today I have admirable stools, well modulated and shaped since I have become an ascetic.

Likewise, although I have virtually given up farting for my own use, I still give it my closest attention, as did St. Augustine, the most famous
pétomane,
or fart-artist, of Church history. One of my most precious possessions is the thoroughly charming recording of a score of
pétomanes
.

The fart as well as excrement are capital subjects; both medicine and philosophy should consider them most thoughtfully. So should metaphysics, and I deplored the fact that the Surrealists held their noses at the mere idea. It seemed to me that the really Surrealist thing to do at this mock trial would have been to read a few quotations on the art of farting from the
Manuel de l’Artilleur Sournois
(
Manual Of The
Crafty Artillerist
) by Comte de La Trompette, which might have put the discussion on its proper level: poetry, freedom, man and his nature. I knew parts of it by heart, and could have reeled off some definitions that could have made for merriment, such as the proverb: “For a life that’s long and hale and hearty, ‘tis best to have one’s arse be farty.” I could have pointed out the difference between the arsehole fart and the belch, or Spanish repeat, but the wind, whether it breaks from above or below, is all one.

Antoine Furetière, in his
Essai d’un Dictionnaire
Universel
(
Attempt At A Universal Dictionary
), stresses that the Earl of Suffolk, a vassal, on each day of Christmas, was called upon to deliver before the King a jump, a belch, and a fart. I might have gone so far as to outline the different kinds of farts: the vocal or loud farts, naturally known as firecrackers, topped by the Giant Firecracker fart (or Petard, as in “hoist on his own...”). This phoenix of farts does indeed compare well with the burst of cannons or giant bladders, and it is always accompanied by a distasteful odor that defines its essence and offends the sense of smell; therein lies its sin, for it is followed by the most shameful of satellites and leaves no question about the bad company it is in. But the true, or light, fart has no smell at all.

The Latin word
crepitus,
from which the French
pet
(fart) derives, means only a noise without odor, but it is often confused with two other forms of malodorant flatulence, one silent but stinking, sometimes called lady’s gas, and the other, more likely to be substantive, known as the thick or brewer’s fart.

Any air that gets trapped in the body and after having been compressed in it breaks out, is known as flatulence or windbreaking, and the longer or shorter the time these winds remain inside and the greater or lesser ease with which they are expelled constitute the differences between them. There are composite farts, comparable to continual gusts of wind, that follow one upon another something like fifteen or twenty gunshots fired successively or as in a round; these may be termed diphthongs, and it is said that a person of stout constitution can emit up to twenty of them at one blow. The ear hears a greater or smaller cannonade, and seems to recognize the enunci ation of diphthonged syllables such as
pa pa pax, pa pa pa pax, pa pa pa pa pax
. There is nothing prettier than the combination of diphthonged farts, and we are beholden to the anus for them. The diphthong-fart in sum is pocket-thunder. Its virtue and salubrity are active – and retroactive.

It is of infinite value and was thus recognized from the days of earliest antiquity, whence the Roman proverb that a big fart is worth a talent. The Emperor Claudius, that thrice-great ruler who thought of naught but the health of his subjects, having been informed that some of the latter out of respect for him had gone so far as to perish rather than fart in his presence, and learning from one of Suetonius’ reports that before dying they had been subject to the most baleful of colics, promulgated an edict under which he allowed all his subjects freely to fart, even at his table, provided it was done lightly. The Egyptians made the fart into a god, of which figures are still extant. Some of the ancients considered the degree of loudness of their farting to be indicative of rain or fair weather.

The Comte de la Trompette, in his wisdom, concluded with some excellent practical advice:

“If a person be so slave to his prejudices that he cannot break away from them, rather than try to convince him not to fart when nature orders him to, let us give him the means at least of covering his outburst. Let him make certain, then, at the very moment that the fart is let, to accompany it with a vigorously vocal clearing of the throat. If his lungs will not accomplish this, let him make as if to sneeze most explosively; then he will be welcomed, commented happily upon by all present, and the recipient of a variety of blessings.

“If he be so awkward as not to be able to do either of these, he may spit very loudly, or move his chair with great rumbling, or in any other way create such noise as will drown out the fart. And, failing all of that, by squeezing his buttocks together as hard as pos sible, he will through compression and tightening of the great rectal muscle turn feminine what might have come out broadly male: but this unfortunate refinement may well cause an offense to the nose far worse than what it spares the ear.”

As for me, had it not been for my fever, I think that on that solemn occasion I might have given forth with a gigantic diphthong-fart that would have acted as the trumpet blast to signal the hue and cry Breton was whipping up against me. I settled for taking off my fourth sweater. Everyone was beginning to feel the heat: the smoke was becoming opaque.

High-priest Breton had long since been suspicious of my formal anti-Surrealism. Indeed, I had never sworn allegiance to him, and he was in no position to demand that I account for my actions. For it was he himself who had installed Buñuel and me in the group after seeing
Un Chien
Andalou,
the mere appearance of which had forced the Surrealists
in spite of themselves
to proclaim it as the
first
Surrealist film.
With my scenario and only two hundred and thirty-five thousand francs of the period, in six days’ shooting Buñuel, a one-time assistant to Jean Epstein, had swept away ten years of phony movie avant-garde.