The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (62 page)

Fig. 16.—Nubiens triant de la froude pour chasser les oiscaux.

They implored me to reveal to them the secret of the bread. I then confided to them that the principal act of the bread, the first thing to be done, was to bake a loaf fifteen metres in length. Nothing was more feasible on condition that one go about it seriously. First one would build an oven large enough to bake it in. This loaf of bread was not to be unusual in any way, and was to be exactly like any other loaf of French bread, except in its dimensions. When the bread was baked one would have to find a place to put it. I was in favor of choosing a spot not too conspicuous or too frequented, so that its apparition would be all the more inexplicable, for only the insoluble character and cretinizing purpose of the act counted under the circumstances. I suggested the inner gardens of the Palais Royal. The bread would be brought in two trucks and placed at the designated spot by a gang of members of the secret society disguised as workers, who would seem to be bringing a pipe to be laid down as a water main. The bread would be wrapped in newspapers tied with string.

Once the bread was in place some members of the society, who would previously have rented an apartment overlooking the spot, would come and take their posts in order to be able to make a first detailed report of the various reactions which the discovery of the bread would occasion. It was easy enough to foresee the highly demoralizing effect which such an act, perpetrated in the heart of a city like Paris, would have. In the course of the morning the loaf of bread would inevitably be discovered for what it was. The first question would be what to do with it—the occurrence was utterly without precedent, and the enormousness of the object would dictate acting with circumspection. Before doing anything further, the bread would be taken, intact, to a place where it could be examined. Does it contain explosives? No! Is it poisoned? No! Is it, in
other words, a loaf of bread possessing any peculiarities whatever aside from its inordinate size? No. Is it an advertisement, and if so, for what bakery and to what purpose? No, surely not, it is not an advertisement either.

Then the newspapers avid of insoluble facts would take hold of this act, and the bread would become food for the unbridled zeal of born controversialists. The hypothesis of madness would very likely be among the first to be suggested, but here the theories and differences of opinion would multiply to infinity. For a madman alone, or even a sane man alone, would not be up to kneading, baking and placing the loaf of bread where it had been found. The hypothetical madman would have been obliged to depend upon the complicity of several persons with a sufficiently coordinated practical sense to carry the idea into effect. Thus the hypothesis of a madman or of a group of madmen did not rest on solid foundations.

It must therefore be concluded that the act was in the nature of a demonstration of a probably political character, the enigma of which would perhaps presently be explained. But how to interpret even symbolically such a demonstration, which after costing an unusual effort remained without a possibility of effectiveness because of the obscurity of its intentions? To attribute it to the Communist party was out of the question. This was the very contrary of their conventional and bureaucratic spirit. Besides, what could they have wanted to demonstrate by this means? That it took a lot of bread to feed everyone? That bread was sacred? No, no, all this was stupid. It might be suspected that the whole thing was a joke perpetrated by students or the surrealist group, but this supposition, I knew, would not fully have convinced anyone. Those who knew the disorganization and the incapacity of the surrealist group to carry through anything requiring a minimum of practical effort directed to no matter what end knew them beforehand to be incapable
of seriously undertaking the building of the fifteen-metre oven indispensable for the baking of the bread. As for the students, it was even more childish to suspect them, since the means at their disposal would be even more limited. People might have thought of Dali—of Dali’s secret society! But this was still too much to ask.

All these hypotheses formed at haphazard around the cooling excitement of the event would, however, be swept aside by the brutal shock of a new act, doubly, triply more sensational than the first—the apparition in the court of Versailles of a loaf twenty metres in length. The existence of a secret society now became flagrant to everyone’s eyes, and from the more or less flabbergasting anecdote of the first apparition of the bread the public, just at the moment when it was beginning to forget it, was suddenly plunged into the palpitating moral category of this second apparition. At the breakfast table the avid eyes of readers were inevitably drawn to look for the headlines and the photographs announcing the apparition of the third loaf which, it was sensed, would appear before long, so that these Dalinian loaves of bread were already beginning to “eat” the other news, of politics, world events and sex, making these insipid and reducing them to a secondary rank of interest.

But instead of the third loaf of bread which was expected, an event exceeding all the limits of plausibility would occur. On the same day, at the same hour, thirty-metre loaves would appear in public places of the various capitals of Europe. The following day a cable from America would announce the apparition of a new loaf of French bread forty-five metres long lying on the sidewalk and reaching from the Savoy-Plaza to the end of the block where the Hotel St. Moritz stands. If such an act could be successfully carried through with the rigorous attention to all the relevant detail that I had planned, no one would be able to question the poetic efficacy of such an act which in itself would be capable of creating a state of confusion, of panic and of collective hysteria extremely instructive from an experimental point of view and capable of becoming the point of departure from which, in accordance with my principles of the imaginative hierarchical monarchy, one could subsequently try to ruin systematically the logical meaning of all the mechanisms of the rational practical world.

The account of this wild scheme was assimilated as lightly as the champagne we were drinking, and these haughty women, the most elegant in Europe at the time, made my terminology their own—“My dear, I have a phenomenal desire to cretinize you!” “For two days I haven’t been able to localize my libido!” “How was Stravinsky’s concert?” “It was beautiful—it was gluey! It was ignominious!” Things were or were not “edible.” Braque’s recent paintings, for instance, were “merely sublime”! Etc., etc. This whole exuberant and crudely Catalonian phraseology which was peculiar to me, and which people humorously borrowed from me, was in effect extremely suited, as it spread by contagion, to filling in the gaps between bits of “real society gossip.”

But, beneath the very sure snobbism of these bewildered females, the pincers of my mystification had clutched their magnificently clad breasts, within which the cancer of my brain was already silently growing. They would ask me, “But look here, Dali, what is all this about ‘bread’?” I then feigned a thoughtful air. “That is something you should ask of the critical-paranoiac method, my dear.” Some actually asked me to enlighten them on the “critical-paranoiac method,” and read my articles in which this was all beginning to be more or less hermetically explained. But I confess that I myself at this period did not know exactly whereof this famous critical-paranoiac method which I had invented consisted. It “exceeded” me, and like all the important things which I have “committed,” I was to begin to understand it only a few years after I had laid its foundations.

People were constantly asking me, “What does that mean? What does that mean?”

One day I hollowed out entirely an end of a loaf of bread, and what do you think I put inside it? I put a bronze Buddha, whose metallic surface I completely covered with dead fleas which I wedged against one another so tightly that the Buddha appeared to be made entirely of fleas. What does that mean, eh? After putting the Buddha inside the bread I closed the opening with a little piece of wood, and I cemented the whole, including the bread, sealing it hermetically in such a way as to form a homogeneous whole which looked like a little urn, on which I wrote “Horse Jam.”
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What does that mean, eh?

One day I received a present from my very good friend Jean-Michel Frank, the decorator: two chairs in the purest 1900 style. I immediately transformed one of them in the following fashion. I changed its leather seat for one made of chocolate; then I had a golden Louis XV door-knob screwed under one of the feet, thus extending it and making the chair lean far over to its right, and giving it an unstable balance so calculated that it was only necessary to walk heavily or to bang the door to make the chair topple over. One of the legs of the chair was to repose continuously in a glass of beer, which also would spill each time the chair keeled over. I called this dreadfully uncomfortable chair, which produced a profound uneasiness in all who saw it, the “atmospheric chair.” And what does that mean, eh?

I was determined to carry out and transform into reality my slogan of the “surrealist object”—the irrational object, the object with a symbolic function—which I set up against narrated dreams, automatic writing, etc. . . . And to achieve this I decided to create the fashion of surrealist objects. The surrealist object is one that is absolutely useless from the practical and rational point of view, created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way, with the maximum of tangible reality, ideas and fantasies having a delirious character. The existence
and circulation of this kind of mad object began to compete so violently with the useful and practical object that one would have thought one was witnessing a regular fight of blood-crazed cocks, from which the reality of the normal object frequently emerged with a good many of its feathers savagely torn out. The apartments in Paris that were vulnerable to surrealism soon became cluttered with this kind of object, disconcerting at first glance, but by virtue of which people were no longer limited to talking about their phobias, manias, feelings and desires, but could now touch them, manipulate and operate them with their own hands. And, remembering that the landscape is a “state of the soul,” these people were now able to stroke the naked body of another truth of Catholic essence, which had sprung from my well—that the object is a “state of grace.”

The vogue of surrealist objects
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discredited and buried the one which had preceded it, the period called “of dreams.” Nothing now appeared more boring, more out of place and anachronistic, than to relate one’s dreams or to write fantastic and incongruous tales at the automatic dictate of the unconscious. The surrealist object had created a new need of reality. People no longer wanted to hear the “potential marvelous” talked about. They wanted to touch the “marvelous” with their hands, see it with their eyes, and have proof of it in reality. Living and decapitated figures, beings formed of the most diverse zoological and botanical juxtapositions, the Martian and abysmal landscapes of the subconscious, and flying viscera persecuting decahedrons in flames already at this time
appeared intolerably monotonous, exorbitantly and anachronistically romantic. The surrealists of Central Europe, the Japanese, and the latecomers of all nations took hold of these facile formulae of the never seen in order to astonish their fellow-citizens. This kind of fantasy, combined with a certain sense of fashion, could also become a rich field for the effective decoration of up-to-date shops that know their business.