Salvador Dali and The Sugar Nose

To dive deeper into my most recent essay between the works of Salvador Dali and Andre Breton, I will be branching out into a realm that more specifically intertwines the surrealist vision Breton foresaw and how those visions came to fruition in Dali’s own life. The artifact I'll be using as my vehicle to explain the mirror representation surrealism plays in reality as well as in myth are excerpts from Salvador Dali's autobiography. Dali speaks in depth about ways in which he viewed himself, how he believed he was viewed, his unrelenting desires of his imagination and his imagination towards love. I believe excerpts from this book will be direct testaments to Breton’s mission of assisting people in understanding and acknowledging their own subconscious. My overarching question will be: does myth lead us to think more deeply about surrealism and our subconscious or does our subconscious and surrealism lead our perspectives towards myth? In this essay I will attempt to answer that very question through the words of Breton and Dali. I believe that Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto is best suited for this project because I think this work will illuminate my artifact due to the emphasis on the importance of our acknowledgment on our roaming and peripheral mindscape. To put it simply, I will be arguing that Dali’s life words are evidence that the subconscious leads the way we view myths and in turn only gives greater strength and longevity to the myths we share. This is because the uncanny aspect between Dali’s life and Breton’s work can not be ignored.

In order to fully explain my points and contentions, I must first present a background for my artifact. The Secret Life Of Salvador Dali takes the reader through the first thirty some odd years of the famous Spanish artist, painter and designer. Throughout this novel, the reader encounters plenty of themes relating to arrogance, self-obsession and fanaticism. Dali also displays his talent as a writer and storyteller along with his many other talents. To begin with, Dali speaks of his childhood as a realm of worship and privilege. The artist tells stories of his foolishness, spoils and recklessness. Dali writes about true and false memories he holds from his childhood including visions of naked youthful bodies being swarmed with ants and his constant grappling he had with myth where he writes: “it has often become impossible for me to know where reality begins and the imaginary ends”. Dali also credits Freud and his discoveries as an enabler to his own realizations related to his life. All of these innate desires and visions from Dali acting out of line at home or in school to the false reality he existed in, culminate to fuel his romantic saga with his lover Gala. Which I’ll get to later on. Moving into Dali’s twenties, Dali writes of his summers in Cadeques, a northeastern Spanish beach town, where he would spend time reminiscing, studying, meditating and creating. This would be the setting for what would unfold between Gala and Salvador.

It is quite interesting to me that many of the self indulged findings Dali writes of his own life were becoming realized in a similar time and space as when Andre Breton was pushing forth his Surrealist Manifesto for all of the world to read. The ideas Breton writes of within the surrealism landscape are synonymous and backed by the events and observations Dali writes of in his autobiography. One important note to make in order to understand Breton, is how he describes the ordinary observer's role among dreams. Breton believes that the normal person essentially puts the dream state on the back burner and calls it a “parenthesis” in their daily life. Breton writes of his surprise at this phenomenon. Why I think Breton and Dali go so well together is because I believe Breton views Dali as someone who championed this movement of surrealism by simply placing more value and worth on dreams. A key component of Breton’s essay comes when he implores and questions his reader in a “why not” sort of fashion. He asks why dreams can’t have the same consistency as our reality or why these dreams can’t help us answer the fundamental questions life brings about. By doing this, Breton strips the binding of life to reality and allows his reader to look at their experiences and observations as being purely “life” whether or not it is reality or dreams. A quote from Breton which I think is extremely valuable to my argument is when Breton writes: “And since it has not been proved in the slightest that, in doing so, the ‘reality’ with which I am kept busy continues to exist in the state of dream, that it does not sink back down into the immemorial, why should I not grant dreams what I occasionally refuse reality, that is, this value of certainty in itself which, in its own time, is not open to my repudiation?” This quote directly supports my argument because Breton explains the way the state of dream can dictate how he views his world and ultimatleley dictates how he would consume myths. By giving our dreams and surrealist sections of our brain the freedom to move and flourish as they please, we can become more cognizant of how our reality emulates those specific subconscious powers.

Now, based on what I have already written and what we have studied in our class surrounding surrealism and myths, I will apply these learnings to a specific and actual series of events intertwined with myths and surrealism from Dali’s autobiography. Dali was a detailed man with an everlasting persistence which drove him to greatness, but with that, came uncomfortable and implausible truths of life. To help Dali explain his own furious and ineffable desires, he uses the myth of The Mankikin With the Sugar Nose to provide structure to his own store of desires and frustrations. Now let me first preface that Dali fell on the spectrum of necrophilia. He struggled with murderous impulses towards women he developed romantic feelings for and recalled multiple thoughts he experienced of throwing women from towers or elevated platforms. Dali shares this myth of The Mankikin With the Sugar Nose through his own words and I’ll attempt to do the same:

In a Spanish village back in the days of royalty, there of course lived a king. This king's way of life was strange. Every day, three girls from his kingdom were brought to his palace to tend to his garden. Each evening he would select one of these three girls to be decorated in accessories and royal garments as she would sleep next to him in his bed that night. The king never touched her and only stared as she slept. But as the sun rose, he would slice off the girl's head with a single swipe of his sword. One evening the king's choice fell on a young girl whose intelligence was unmatched. Upon learning she had been chosen, this girl fashioned a wax mannequin with a sugar nose to be laid in the King's bed. While the king was absent from his bedroom, the girl draped her mannequin with the most marvelous jewels and garments as she hid under the bed. When the king arrived ready for bed, he undressed himself and proceeded to look upon what he thought was the young girl he had chosen. When dawn arose, the king drew his sword and sliced the wax mannequin. Upon striking the mannequin, its sugar nose erupted from the was and landed gently into the king's mouth. Shocked by the sweetness of the girl, the king began to cry because he could not forgive himself for killing such a sweet creature. The girl then came out from under the bed revealing herself and her strategy to the king. The king was suddenly cured of his violent aberrations, he realized that he could not kill someone who was capable of being so sweet. So there, in that moment, when the king was given a second chance to carry out his vicious desire, he retracted this impulse for the rest of his life and married the girl who outsmarted his custom of violence. This is a Spanish myth which has lived on for years in the northeastern regions of Spain where Dali spent most of his life.

As I’ve said, and much like the king, Dali had his own tendencies. But Gala was this woman who was the apple of his eye. He would spend summers in Cadaques with her and her husband. And as time unfolded, Dali had learned that there was one pressing thing Gala was dying to tell Dali but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Although Gala was married, she and Dali had developed deep emotional feelings for each other. One summer when Spetember had rolled around, all of Dali’s friends including Gala’s then husband had returned to Paris by the end of August. Gala elected to stay. Dali describes this month with Gala in a tormented, monotonous but yet beautiful way. Dali writes of this time in an elegant and graceful way and I encourage my audience to spend their own time exploring Dali’s writing. This month consisted of long walks of silence and mounting pressure between Gala and Dali. Dali describes his thirst for Gala to tell him what she wanted but he declined into silence not wanting to pressure her. This tormented silence went on for weeks until Dali would not wait any longer. He describes a passionate and emotional interaction consisting of dreadul holding of each other's faces and lustful kissing. Dali had to know, and Gala finally told him. With a long pause, Gala finally released her wish. “I want you to kill me,” she begged. At this moment, a rush of fulfillment, disbelief and guilt rushed over Dali. He explains in his autobiography that he replied to Gala telling her that he would make her wish come true but internally he knew he couldn’t do it. Ultimately, Dali did not kill Gala and they ended up becoming partners in life. I highly recommend reading the whole story if you want a more in depth and first hand account of the event. What I want these anecdotes to illustrate is that Dali had in his mind the infrastructure of both the myth and his own desires which could be seen as the guiding light in how Dali understood his own unorthodox fantasies. Without Dali’s knowledge of this myth, he would not have been able to see and understand his epiphany so clearly.

To conclude, what must be taken away from my provided pieces of evidence is that myth is not false or fabricated. Myths exist because humanity created them and humanity can only create something that exists within some level of our lives no matter if it’s reality, fantasy, surrealism or dream state. The myth of the mannequin with the sugar nose is here to provide proof that our lives can and will emulate a deep feeling of desire or lust that lives within ourselves. The fact that Dali was aware of this myth while also being aware of his own appetite for twisted love is valid enough. But for these two ideas to endure separately as independent ideas in Dali’s mind until the point of collision is proof of any and all forms of myth manifestation. It is apparent to me that myths stand and endure through time because the lessons and stories they provide are ones that are perfectly feasible to occur within our world and your world of ideologies. The sugar nose only represents what we are all waiting for in life and it’s waiting somewhere along this timeline of ours.