The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (47 page)

So, my readers, you who have kept me company thus far, let us sit down. Let your glance stray over the panoramic precision of this landscape of Cadaques which you now have before your eyes, and while our bodies rest let me once more agitate your souls by telling you, and interpreting for you, a tale, both distracting and sublime, which was told me in my infancy by Llucia, my nurse. And while it diverts you you will presently recognize in the feminine protagonist, whom I shall call Gradiva, the personality of Gala, but also you will immediately recognize myself in the person of the king who is the other protagonist of this medieval Catalonian popular tale, which I have baptized with the suggestive name of

The Manikin With the Sugar Nose

And now click your tongues with satisfaction against your palates, producing that sound of the uncorking of a bottle, so agreeable to the ears, for I myself am about to uncork the full bottles that you all are, and I intend this evening to get completely drunk on the avid alcohol of your curiosity.

I am about to begin ...I begin ...We have begun!

Once upon a time there was a king whose manner of life was very strange. Each day there were brought to him three of the most beautiful girls in the kingdom who had to come and water the sweet-williams in his garden. From the top of his tower he would look down upon them, and hesitate long before choosing her who should spend the night in the royal bed, around which perfumed oils burned. She would be adorned with the most precious robes and jewels, and would have to sleep, or feign to sleep, through the whole night. The king never touched her, only looked at her. But when dawn rose, he would cut off her head with a single blow of his sabre.

To designate his choice, the king would address her whom he singled out to be the victim of his night of “unfulfilled love,” and leaning over the rampart of the tower he invariably asked her this same question,

“How many sweet-williams are there in my garden?”

And the girl, who by this question learned her death sentence, had to lower her eyes in shame, and invariably answer him with malice this other question,

“How many stars are there in the sky?”

After which the king would disappear. The chosen girl would run to her house, where her weeping parents adorned her with her richest garments in preparation for her macabre nuptial night.

One day the king’s choice fell on a girl whose beauty and intelligence were renowned throughout the kingdom. Now this girl, whose intelligence was as resplendent as her beauty, when she learned that she had been chosen, made a wax manikin to which she glued a sugar nose.

When night arrived she draped herself in a white sheet, and, hiding the manikin within it, went up into the nuptial chamber in which all the candles were lit. She placed the wax manikin with the sugar nose on the bed, covering it with her most beautiful jewels. After which she lay down under the bed, and waited.

When the king entered he stripped himself naked, and lay down beside her whom he thought he had chosen. He spent the whole night in looking at her, but as usual he did not touch her. Also, as usual, the moment he sensed the coming dawn he unsheathed his sword and with a single blow cut off the head of the wax manikin. With the blow the sugar nose broke off and flew right into the king’s mouth. Surprised by the sweetness of the sugar nose the king dolefully cried,

Dulcetta en vida
,

Dulcetta en mor
,

S t’agues coneguda

No t’auria mort!

Which means literally,

Sweet in life
,

Sweet in death
,

If I had known you

I should not have given you death!

At this moment the wily beauty, who had heard everything from beneath the bed, quickly came forth, presenting herself to the king and unveiling her stratagem to him.

The king, suddenly and miraculously cured of his criminal aberration, married her, and they lived happily for many long years.

And there the tale ends.

INTERPRETATION OF THE TALE OF THE WAX MANIKIN WITH THE SUGAR NOSE

Let us try now to interpret this story in the light that psychoanalysis by my own original methods of investigation can shed upon it.

Narcisse.

We shall begin with the generating element of the stratagem, the wax manikin with the sugar nose, and first of all, with the wax itself as a clearly characteristic and determining element.

I shall first recall to your mind its livid color, as evidenced in the expression “wan, or pale, as wax,” and the current assimilation of this pallor to that of death; also its ductile consistency (a kind of imitation flesh). Wax is furthermore not only the matter that lends itself best to the imitation of living forms and figures, but also that which succeeds in imitating them in the most anguishing fashion–that is to say, the one which, while being the most life-like, is at the same time the most inert, the most spectral, and in short the most macabre (witness the artificial cemeteries which the morbid museums of wax figures constitute, especially the Musee Grevin in Paris). The non-repugnant character of wax, which is further augmented by an attractive softness, has a variety of reasons far more direct and less intellectual than that of its con substantiality with the honey from which it originally derives. This softness of wax, moreover, is partially due to its extreme ductility, reaching the state of liquefaction upon exposure to heat–which is not a property of so many other malleable substances (clay, etc.) which on the contrary have a tendency to dry and harden. This liquefaction, with the defiguration which it entails, may easily appear as characteristic of the decomposition of corpses.

We shall furthermore observe that even when wax most obviously evokes decomposition, as would be the case of a wax manikin if it should
melt, this would nevertheless always occur without provoking repugnance, in place of which one would be conscious of a gentle anguish, owing to the fact that this would constitute the most pleasant and attenuated fashion of representing such a state. It is as if on every occasion and under all circumstances the evocation of death transmitted by the mediation and vehicle of wax were able to affect us in the gentlest fashion and constituted a pseudo-sweet used to make us “swallow” a great terror. Throughout all anecdotology of the macabre and funereal rites wax does not cease for a moment to play this constant deceptive and attenuating role to which we have just called attention, shedding light upon the dead with a false and attractive light of desirable life beneath the quivering flames of the candles that are being consumed.

Still upon this vertiginous slope of my hypothesis, it is necessary to imagine the necrophile madly troubled by the odor of burning wax which, replacing that of the sweat of the loved being lying inert, without sweat, without odor of life, would serve to render more desirable the blended, incipient and real odor of death, by attenuating it and providing it with that substitute and euphemistic illusion necessary to the nostalgic pleasure of the necrophilic “passional aberration.”

The wax, then, by its softening and idealized representation of death, would serve to prepare the short-cut to necrophilic impulses and desires. Furthermore it would act as a sentinel to the mechanism of repression, keeping out of the sphere of consciousness the coprophagic phantasms which in a more or less veiled fashion commonly coexist with the “desire for waste matter.” Thus the hypocritical warmth of the wax in a symbolic situation would replace the atrocious crudity of the real intention of these phantasms, with all the candles of copro-necrophilic consummation already lighted for the nuptial feast which would couple these two passions that together constitute the peak of aberration and perversity.
¹³

Returning to our tale, we must observe that the extremely flagrant necrophilic sentiments of the king led him to anticipate his final and decisive act by a whole appropriate ritual destined to envelop the “expectant and unfulfilled” love which was to precede the fatal
dénouement
. It was necessary–as we learned–for the king’s victim to spend the night in a state of immobility; she had to sleep or feign to sleep–in short, she had to play dead. The king’s fantasy further commanded that the sleeping girl remain prone
on
the sheets, adorned with rare and dazzling robes, like a corpse. Also it is specified that perfumed oils would be burning in the nuptial chamber and that “all the candles” must be lighted (as for the dead). All this neurotic preamble obviously had no other aim than to furnish, by a series of mortuary simulacra, idealized representations
of his pathological case, in order that the victim be imagined as having already expired, well before the culminating moment in which, as in a definitive and material “realization of desire the king reached the point of really killing the desired dead woman with his weapon, and this in the finally consummated paroxysm of his pleasure–which, in his aberration, coincided with the very moment of ejaculation.

But just at this supreme moment the tale tells us that the wily beauty who had substituted the wax manikin for herself behaved intuitively like a refined and extremely skilful expert in the most modern psychological sciences. What she did was to effect the miraculous cure of her husband-to-be by a substitutive operation which could be regarded only as magical. The wax manikin must have appeared to the king as the deadest of all his beautiful girls, and at the same time the most special, the most life-like, the most softened, desired and “metaphysical” of all. The nose falling off, a defiguration genuinely evocative of death, must also by its possible links with and recalls of the castration complex have reactualized his fears of punishment, while at the same time preparing an ambiance of remorse which by the tension of guilt feelings was propitious to an imminent repentance. The king, a probably cannibalistic copro-necrophile, was at bottom only seeking to savor the true hidden taste of death, his censor allowing him to achieve this only through the appearance of a false life composed of the pseudo-sleep of the wax with its macabre ornamentation and display. The sugared taste of the nose, falling unexpectedly into his mouth, can only have been a startling anticlimax, something incongruously inadequate and paradoxical, causing him to react in the same way as, in the inverse case, the nursing child reacts when he is being weaned.
¹⁴
The child finds his mother’s nipple suddenly offering a bitter, disagreeable and nauseating taste instead of the agreeable one of the milk he was expecting. He does not want to repeat this experience; after the cruel disappointment he no longer wants to suck his mother’s breast.

The king wanted to eat corpse, and instead of the taste of corpse he found that of sugar, after which he no longer wanted to eat corpse. But in addition to this the “sugar nose” of our tale played a much more subtle and decisive role than that of having succeeded in weaning our king from death. It did not indeed correspond to the secretly desired taste of death, but this disappointment was only partially and relatively disagreeable. For it did not only become a lucid element of cannibalistic consciousness. Most important of all, the fact that this disappointment was experienced at the very moment of pleasure (as is the case in hysterical fits) operated in such a way as to re-evaluate instantaneously and with the maximum of violence the reality of a sweetness unexpected and unknown, “effective” and “sensible” in reality, in life—a
sweetness which could suddenly appear and become desirable, precisely because the sugar nose had just served as a “bridge” to desire, enabling it to pass from death to life. Thus the king’s whole libidinous discharge formed an unfaithful fixation upon life, since this real sweetness was that which by surprise happened to occupy the expected place which the fictive sweetness of death was to occupy.