DALI AND THE OVERWEIGHT GHOSTS
SD TUCKER explores an alarming outbreak of morbid obesity amongst 1930s ghosts, and finds Salvador Dalí’s bizarre explanations involving Adolf Hitler’s fat back, Mae West’s detachable breasts and Napoleon’s surprisingly edible trousers rather hard to stom
SD TUCKER explores an alarming outbreak of morbid obesity amongst 1930s ghosts, and finds Salvador Dalí’s bizarre explanations involving Adolf Hitler’s fat back and Napoleon’s edible trousers rather hard to stomach.
By now, I suppose we’re far enough into 2015 for most people’s New Year dietary resolutions to have ended in little more than the usual miserable, yet wholly predictable, round of cake-based failure – but wait! What if this New Year should happen to be your last? What will happen to all that unshed blubber when you die? Will you continue to carry it with you after death, in unsightly ectoplasmic form, bulging out from the seams of your winding-sheet as your spirit wobbles its way hungrily through the graveyard, looking for chips? Forget all those dusty old saws about why ghosts wear clothes: with a massive obesity epidemic currently sweeping the Western world, the question of whether or not spooks carry cellulite is clearly a far more pressing issue.
Probably the most imaginative attempted answer to this unsettling bodily conundrum came from the pen of Will Self in his 2000 novel How the Dead Live, in which the deceased yo-yo dieter Lily Bloom encounters three fellow-spooks called ‘the Fats’ – her own personal version of ‘the Fates’ a trio of blobby ghouls made up from all of the weight she had lost and then gained again ad infinitum throughout her entire feast-and-famine lifetime. Hideous creatures, “all wobble and jounce, huge dewlaps of belly hanging to their knees”, these eyeless, hairless, nipple-shorn beings are “the Pilsbury Dough Girls of total dissolution”, and follow poor Lily around everywhere in imitation of the Chorus in an old Greek play, chanting the words “Fat and old, fat and old, fat and old” at her endlessly, like tripartite manifestations of the manipulative modern female beauty-industry. 1
Self, though, was writing satire, and most fat ghosts seem to be equally fictional, fulfilling an essentially comic function through their rotundity – the sausage-chomping green splodge Slimer in Ghostbusters, for instance. For at least one person, however, the issue of fat phantoms seems to have been a matter of genuine concern, at least ostensibly. That man was none other than the prominent Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, who published a very odd article in issue five of the avant-garde magazine Minotaure in 1934. Entitled ‘The New Colours of Spectral Sex Appeal’, it was nothing less than a warning against an incredible epidemic of obesity that he saw as then being rife among a population of increasingly greedy and globulous ghosts. 2
Right from the first sentence, Dalí is blunt in his views on the topic: “For some time now,” he writes, “and increasingly so with each passing year, the idea of ghosts has been turning suave, growing heavy and rounded with its persuasive weight, with the plump stereotype... that is characteristic of sacks of potatoes.” He goes on to deplore the “extra-soft sagging of today’s ghosts”, their “compact heaviness”, and the “alarming increase in weight” he was beginning to notice every time he saw one; all of which, he said, left him feeling “horrified”. But why?
DALI DEPLORED THE “ALARMING INCREASE IN WEIGHT” HE NOTICED IN TODAY’S GHOSTS
HUNGRY GHOSTS
Included alongside Dalí’s article in Minotaure were reproductions of two of his paintings, namely The Spectre of Sex Appeal and The Enigma of William Tell. 3 The former is by far the most famous, and shows a tiny Dalí dressed in the blue sailor-suit of his early childhood, staring up at a bizarre and gigantic figure representing a headless (or is it?) naked female body, which appears to have been put together from various rotting and deformed limbs, all held together by big wooden crutches and bits of old cloth. The figure’s breasts consist of two lumpy sacks of grain, another of which serves as the figure’s abdomen. The general interpretation of the painting is that it represents Dalí’s complex feelings about female sexuality; he seems to desire the body which he also simultaneously finds disgusting, a possible legacy of his father’s misguided attempt to scare Dalí off from visiting brothels by leaving a book filled with pictures of rotting, syphilitic genitalia around the family home during the artist’s adolescence. 4 There is another thing worth noticing
about this ‘spectral’ woman in the painting, though – namely, the fact that she appears to be surprisingly... well, edible. You could rip open her sack-breasts and scoff the grain from them; her left leg alone could feed a family of four for a whole week. This is not just my own stomach talking; in 1933, Dalí had published another Minotaure essay, entitled ‘On the Terrifying and Edible Beauty of Art Nouveau Architecture’, in which he praised the swirls and curls, the bobbles and bumps, which had been placed on their buildings by architects who had worked in this style, like the Frenchman Hector Guimard, designer of the elaborate, organic-looking entrances to the Paris Métro stations. Dalí was annoyed by the way that some contemporary critics had criticised such edifices by comparing them to cakes with too much icingsugar squeezed on top as decoration. What was wrong with buildings that resembled cakes, Dalí wanted to know? Why shouldn’t a person desire to eat his own house? Declaring grandly that, in the future, “Beauty will be edible or not at all!” Dalí then reproduced some photos of Guimard’s Métro-entrances, with captions saying things like “Eat me!” and “Eat me too!” placed by them.
I don’t think that Dalí went so far as to actually suck on any cornices himself, but his theorising about the idea certainly left plenty to digest. Obsessed with Freudian notions about the so-called oral stage of infant-development, wherein babies try to stick anything they can get their hands on into their mouths hoping thereby to recreate the satisfaction given them by the maternal teat, Dalí theorised that art nouveau architecture was actually an occult emanation from the hidden dream-lives of people like Guimard. Secretly, the constructions of such architects reflected their repressed quasi-sexual childhood fantasies about eating not only bricks and masonry but inappropriate matter of any kind – indeed, he even went so far as to call art nouveau architecture “glaring ornamental coprophagia”, and implied that you could psychoanalyse its creators through their work. For instance, Dalí noticed that the lamps at the Métro entrances looked a bit like female praying mantises – which, of course, devour their male lovers after sex in captivity – meaning that Guimard should really go and seek the couch of Dr Freud immediately. 5
To Dalí, then, art nouveau architecture was profoundly haunted; cake-like buildings were like visible concrete ghosts and spectres, solid manifestations of their designers’ hidden desires. Following this logic, if you looked carefully at any city, then you would soon be able to start spotting the ghosts of people’s repressed sexuality everywhere within the built environment. Sure, sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar – but what about a large, straight edifice like, say, the Luxor Obelisk standing in the Place de la Concorde? That couldn’t really have been meant to stand in for something else, could it? Surprisingly, Dalí was actually pre-empted in such speculations by certain dirty-minded 19th-century artists like Jules Breton, who suggested that a giant gloved female hand be constructed from stone
and placed around the obelisk, gripping it in a suggestive fashion. A large stone ball representing the statesman Léon Gambetta’s fêted hot-air balloon escape from Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, meanwhile, was identified as being an unconscious representation of a giant testicle by some French artists, and the idea floated of completing the set by building the lonely gonad a twin brother and then erecting a vertical pillar of some kind between them as a giant ‘up yours!’ to prevailing bourgeois sensibilities. 6
THE FAT FÜHRER
If this all sounds rather mad to you, then there’s a reason for that: it is mad, and is so by specific design. Or, to be more precise, it is not simply mad, but actively paranoid. Around 1930-1932, Dalí – whose grandfather was a genuine paranoiac, whose delusions about being followed by imaginary thieves had driven him to suicide in 1886 7 – developed his celebrated ‘paranoiac-critical method’ of generating ideas for paintings. This, Dalí said, was a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the interpretive and critical association of delirious phenomena. 8 Basically, it involved fusing Freudianism with alchemy in order to erase the distance between your mind and the physical world around it, putting some aspect of your own psyche into inert matter, and then reinterpreting this matter according to your own unconscious wishes, thus refashioning reality itself. This process has aptly been described as “a form of divination applied to art”, and as a systematised way of “seeing multiple images in one object or scene”. 9 There are real affinities between this process and the idea of simulacra – Dalí was obsessed with seeing figures and faces in nature which were not really there, and was constantly painting optical illusions which force the viewer to become a little paranoid too, when they see them. For instance, the sack-breasted giantess in The Spectre of Sex Appeal seems at first glance to have no head – until you examine closely the seaside cliffs behind her, when a hidden face suddenly appears to emerge from amongst the rocks. Is it really there, or are you just turning paranoid, making connections between things that are not really linked?
Famously, Dalí declared (repeatedly) that: “The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad!” In appropriating paranoid thinking in his art, perhaps he was hoping to ward off any of the actual mental illness that ran in the family; or, then again, perhaps he was merely imitating the teachings of the 19th-century occultist Eliphas Lévi, a real influence on Surrealism, who had written that: “The man of genius differs from the dreamer and the fool [or
madman] in this only; that his creations are analogous to truth.” 10 Dalí certainly thought that he was a genius – so maybe his dreams were indeed analogous to some kind of truth, no matter how weird they were.
Recently, Dalí had been having repeated dreams about Adolf Hitler, Germany’s new leader. He makes reference to them in his essay about obese ghosts, when, describing an image of his childhood nurse taken from The Enigma of William Tell, he speaks of her “Hitlerian” back being “soft and tender” – look closely, and you’ll see it actually has a bite-mark in it. The full truth about these dreams involving Hitler and his nurse only came to light when André Breton, the socalled Pope of Surrealism, subjected Dalí to a kind of kangaroo-court trial in 1934, to determine whether he could remain a part of the movement. The problem was that Dalí, under the influence of his dreams, had recently been glorifying Hitler and fascism in public, seemingly trying to deliberately offend the left-wing sensibilities of Breton and his chums by making extremely reactionary statements, such as that his favourite train-crashes were those in which the poor proles in third-class suffered the worst injuries. 11 Breton demanded to know – was Dalí a Nazi? Not quite...
As Dalí quite accurately said, had he lived in Germany, his views would actually have landed him in a death camp. The thing that Dalí liked most about Hitler, he declared, was the plump edibility of his lovely fat back and the way that this was emphasised by his tight brown-shirt uniform, something that gave him “a delicious gustatory thrill”. Like certain art nouveau architecture, Dalí explained, chubby Adolf looked good enough to eat – or to have sex with. “Whenever I started to paint the leather strap that crossed from his belt to his shoulder, the softness of that Hitler flesh packed under his military tunic transported me into a sustaining and Wagnerian ecstasy that set my heart pounding, an extremely rare state of excitement that I did not even experience during the act of love,” he later wrote.
It turned out that Dalí had been having repeated erotic and prophetic dreams about the Führer, in which it was mystically revealed to him that Hitler was in fact some kind of reincarnation of his childhood nurse, gone horribly wrong. Rather than having only one ball, as the wartime song implied, Dalí’s ‘paranoiac-critical’ version of Hitler (the true version, to him) had instead been born with no fewer than four testicles and six foreskins, all of which were “evil-smelling” and abnormally compressed – bad karma indeed. Dalí had even written a long manifesto, ‘proving’ that all this was true. Breton asked Dalí if he couldn’t simply refrain from painting his dreams. Dalí told Breton to be careful what he wished for, threatening that he might well dream about having sex with him that night instead, and then paint an explicit picture of the event for the world to see. “I wouldn’t advise it, my friend,” Breton responded, coolly. 12
FIGHT THE PHANTOM FLAB
For Dalí, there was a distinct difference between ghosts and spectres, as he explained in his Minotaure essay. The paranoiac Hitler was definitely a ghost; ghosts were fleshy and substantial in a horrible way, and stood for his own fear of sexual desire – strip off Hitler’s top and all “the terrifying fat of the flesh” would come flopping out, as “the human libido makes distress anthropomorphic” and “transforms metaphysical distress into concrete fat”, apparently. Fat Hitler, then, symbolised Dalí’s fear of intercourse. In contrast to this, however, were spectres, like the rotting woman on the beach in The Spectre of Sex Appeal. Rotting women, thought Dalí, were good – as their decomposition 13 meant that their bodies could be taken apart and then fitted back together again in new and surprising ways for one’s own imaginative pleasure. He is quite clear about this – in the future, he proclaims, “sex-appeal will be spectral” and “the spectral woman will be the woman who can be dismantled.” Using his paranoiac-critical faculties, Dalí claimed to have foreseen the coming of the first-ever spectral woman, the actress Mae West, back in 1928, in particular her “round, salivary muscles, terribly gluey with biological
afterthoughts”, by which he meant her droolinducing large breasts, upon which initially firm foundations he seems to imply she built her entire career.
A late starter in Hollywood terms, pushing 40 by the time she got her first contract in 1932, West was already starting to ‘rot’ a little when she landed her first film role, and as such was one of Dalí’s ideal spectral women, as his 1934/5 collage Mae West’s Face Which May be Used as a Surrealist Apartment seemed to imply. Here, West is reduced down to the individual components of her face – her lips are a couch, her hair curtains, her eyes paintings on the wall, etc – creating a giant paranoid simulacrum for some fortunate fan of hers to live inside forever. A literal ‘objectifier of women’, Dalí would no doubt have loved the fact that, ultimately, ‘Mae Wests’ came to be a popular slang-term for ‘breasts’ and that, during WWII, Allied air-crews took to calling their inflatable life-saver jackets after her too, due to their pneumatic nature. Reducing a woman to her component assets like this was exactly the kind of thing the self-styled ‘Great Masturbator’ desired.
According to Dalí, who may not have been a regular reader of Spare Rib magazine, “the body that can be dismantled” was the natural “aspiration... of female exhibitionism,” as it would allow tomorrow’s rotting, edible, spectral woman “to show each part [of her body] separately,” something that would soon be made possible by the perverse refinement of aerodynamic costumes and corsets, as well as something Dalí called “irrational gymnastics”. Even better, with the march of technology, “new and uncomfortable [artificial] anatomical parts” will be invented for women to attach to their frames, with “false-breasts, extremely soft and well-moulded, though slightly drooping and growing out of the [woman’s] back” becoming “indispensable city-wear”, whilst special “vibratory metallic fibres on hats” will somehow act to provoke spectral smiles in their wearers. Even obese ghosts like Hitler’s unacknowledged psychic twin Napoleon Bonaparte, whose tight trousers keep in his fat legs much as Hitler’s shirt conceals his fat back, will be redeemed; with his famous bicorn hat and podgy hips constituting distinct and iconic individual components of his body, exactly equivalent to Mae West’s breasts, says Dalí, Napoleon’s ghost too will one day be able to be dismantled and rearranged, which will finally allow the artist to eat the great man’s delicious-looking fat-restraining pants.
Anyone wanting to see what such spectres would actually look like in real life, incidentally, are advised to look at some disturbing artworks made by the German Surrealist Hans Bellmer in 1936 under the collective title of The Dolls; Bellmer crafted some life-size ball-jointed female wooden mannequins and then joined them together in weird ways, so that they might have four legs but no arms or head, for instance, and then photographed himself perving at them sinisterly from behind trees in a forest. His drawing Children, the Spring Games, from around that same time is just as odd – severed female breasts and bums are joined together with elaborate mechanical devices in order to create the kind of absurd contraptions Heath Robinson might have imagined, had he been on the Sex-Offenders’ Register. Surrealists were now seeing dismembered Dalínian spectres everywhere, it seemed the Spaniard had turned them all paranoid!
What would be the ultimate effect of swapping the former plague of hideously obese ghosts for a new wave of easilydismantled edible spectres, though? Only good could come of it, Dalí assured his readers. By causing fat people and their ghosts to be “flayed alive” into their component parts and then reassembled, says Dalí, they will all instantly gain the “extra-rapid luminosity of spectral sex-appeal” and the previously “monumental prosaicness” of the entire world around us – including even such boring everyday objects as ironing-boards and large automobiles – will consequently become “ghostly [surely spectral?] and serene”. Someone should tell Rosemary Conley.