Destiny Keshner

Professor Joseph Gaudiana

ENG 170

3/2/2022

 The Analysis of ants in The Persistence of Memory

Salvador Dali’s incorporation of ants on the pocket watch in The Persistence of Memory is evolved by his conscious hallucinations and paranoia. Some scholars have made note that Dali’s use of ants in his paintings was provoked from his childhood memory of a swarm of ants on an injured bat which Dali got from his cousin. Dali continued to hallucinate insects on people’s body parts and on various objects. Ants appear in many of Dali’s paintings as a symbol of decay. Dali hallucinated so often that they became a sensation for him because it felt like another universe, and he learned how to put himself into a hallucination. His hallucinations would allow him to look at objects and picture it in a different way or attach his phobias onto them like ants. Dali became so obsessed with “his reality” that he decided his paintings would portray his view of the world.

Salvador Dali’s admiration for insects began at a young age, he would collect ladybugs, and glow worms in a jar. After Dali’s interaction with ants on the almost deceased bat ants became a symbol of decay and death for him because he blamed the ants for the death of the bat. At the age seven Dali’s parents decided to enroll him into school. Dali believed that school served no purpose to him and while he would sit in classes he would daze of and think about the difference between false memories and real ones. While many people believe that real memories are authentic and magnificent Dali disagrees and supposes that false ones are more intricate with more realistic appearances. The belief of his false memories and real ones is evidence to the beginning of his hallucinations and paranoia. In The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Salvador Dali writes about one of his first experiences with hallucinating, “Already at this period I remembered a scene which, by its improbability, must be considered as my first false memory. I was looking at a naked child who was being washed; I do not remember the child’s sex, but I observed on one of its buttocks a horrible swarming of ants which seemed to be stationary in a hole the size of an orange” (Dali,38). The false memory of Dali envisioning the ants is evidence of the beginning of his hallucinations and why he adds swarms of ants into his paintings. Dali’s interpretation of false memories leads him to beginning to induce his hallucinations to create his paintings.

When Dali first began painting, he was known for painting landscapes. He then was inspired by Pablo Picasso’s cubism pieces, and he wanted to incorporate both cubism and surrealism into his artwork. Dali was also intrigued by Sigmund Freud’s book The Interpretation of Dreams because the book went into detail about self-interpretation, his personal experiences with dreams, and psychoanalysis (Romm, Slap,339). When Freud and Dali finally met, Freud did not seem to be impressed by him and he believed that he had some sort of mental illness. After they met, and Freud proclaimed that the reasoning why when Dali was so obsessed with him was because when he read The Interpretation of Dreams it gave him reasoning to induce his hallucinations and paint what he saw. In Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí: Personal Moments, Romm and Slap write about Dali’s interaction with Freud and how Freud interpreted him, “After reading the Interpretation of Dreams, Dali may well have seen a personal message in that he had permission to display his unconscious for all to see” (Romm, Slap, 346). This quote sheds light on the reason why Dali began to add distorted, uncomfortable objects into his paintings. After Dali read Freud’s book, he felt that it was acceptable to use what he saw from his induced hallucinations like the swarming of ant’s and include them in his paintings. The Persistence of Memory is not the only painting that has a swarm of ants on an object, other paintings like The Great Masturbator, Dali and the ant, The ants, and many more. Dali became so obsessed with his “reality” that all his paintings were created by his paranoic-critical method.

In The Secret Life of Dali, Dali provokes his idea that false memories are more realistic than real memories, considering this idea Dali wanted all his paintings to be false memories which is why Dali would induce himself into hallucinations to create obscure paintings. His induced hallucinations eventually led him to creating double images which he assembled to confuse the audience with his hallucinations and delusions. Additionally, he created double images to deceive the viewer’s perception of what the object is. In Salvador Dalí: Double and Multiple Images, Haim Finkelstein writes about the ideas behind the creation of Dali’s double image paintings, “In other words, the object seen in external reality undergoes a change of meaning or context without any physical modification (this would constitute an hallucination), the new context being a function of some obsessive idea which, as Dali would have it, is mostly erotic in nature” (Finkelstein,319). Finkelstein explains the process that Dali goes through to create his paintings. Since his paintings are him changing reality with what he perceives it as this gives reasoning to the fact that he adds swarms of ants into his paintings because when he goes into his paranoic state he wants the viewers to observe the objects in a different way from what it is usually seen as.

Dali created his paintings from a paranoid state because he admired the idea of his viewers because confused. Since Dali’s ideas come from his paranoic state most of his paintings seem sexual and violent. In the book The Surrealism Reader: An Anthology of Ideas, edited by Dawn Ades, Ades quotes an essay from Dali explaining how his disturbing sexual, violent ideas come from his conscious hallucinations which is his actual reality whereas Andre Breton the creator of surrealism states that surrealistic paintings are created by unconscious dreams. Enviably Breton disagrees with Dali using his ideas from a paranoid state and not from an unconscious dream. Dali states, “Nothing can prevent me from recognizing the multiple presence of simulacra in the example of the multiple images, even if one of it states adopts the appearance of a rotting donkey and even thousands of flies and ants; and, since in this case one cannot infer the meaning of these distinct states of the image…” (Ades,266). Analyzing this quote, we can infer that Dali adds insects onto objects in his painting so that it can make the viewer feel puzzled and not understand the meaning behind it. The reasons why a viewer can not understand the meaning is because they are coming from his own reality that none else see’s.

It is often thought that Dali’s incorporation of ants in his surrealistic painting The Persistence of Memory comes from his dreams because Andre Breton created surrealism for artists to create paintings from their dreams. In the book The Surrealism Reader: An Anthology of Ideas, edited by Dawn Ades, Ades writes about how Dali believes hallucinations are more ideal than the real world and that Breton the creator of surrealism says hallucinations are equivalent to dreams. Ades states “Breton was later alarmed at his use of the idea of ‘discrediting reality’, lifted from his own 1924 text ‘Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality’, because Dali called for total overriding of the real world…” (Ades,264). Breton created surrealism around the idea that dreams and hallucinations are equal because when you dream you envision a different reality with obscure details. Therefore, Breton’s idea of surrealism is using what an artist sees in their dreams and creating it into a painting with their imagination. Breton and Dali have different views on dreams and hallucinations because when Dali is creating his paintings, he is not using what he envisioned in his dreams, his hallucinations are of his reality therefore he paints what he sees. Breton believes that hallucinations and dreams are the made-up imagination in your mind.

Given these points we can conclude that the incorporation of ants in The Persistence of Memory and in many other paintings of Dali’s were created from his conscious hallucinations. Despite the fact that surrealism was created for artists to paint what they envisioned in their unconscious dreams Dali believed that his ideas from his conscious hallucinations were more ideal than dreams. We can also conclude that the reasoning Dali created disturbing realities in his paintings were due to mental issues as seen by Sigmund Freud.

 

 

Works Cited

Ades, Dawn, et al. “Salvador Dali The Rotting Donkey.” The Surrealism Reader: An Anthology of Ideas, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2015, pp. 264–267.

Dalí Salvador. “Chapter 1, Chapter 2.” Secret Life of Salvador Dali, Dover, Mineola, NY, 1942, pp. 14–305.

Finkelstein, Haim. “Salvador Dalí: Double and Multiple Images.” American Imago, vol. 40, no. 4, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983, pp. 311–35, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26303569.

Romm, Sharon, and Joseph William Slap. “Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dalí: Personal Moments.” American Imago 40.4 (1983): 337-347.