JOLLY DAYS

Orwell and Dali

The convergence of George Orwell and Salvador Dali is a mind mashup that gives pause. In this review of Dali's autobiography Orwell has some clever and quaint things to say. Dali is a fabulist, but Orwell notes,

… even the most flagrantly dishonest book… can without intending it give a true picture of its author .

Every gesture, intonation and surface manifestation yields information, if you pay attention, so why wouldn't the way people lie? Dali it turns out is a pretty weird cat. This is no surprise — it is old news. But Orwell makes it fresh in his remarkably current voice and in the moral framework in which he places Dali.

Dali was one of the best and earliest of media artists. He understood modern culture and the value of publicity. Orwell says, “But from his Surrealist paintings and photographs the two things that stand our are sexual perversity and necrophilia. ” What part those obsessions were of Dali and what part were assumed by him we will never know. The fascination with Dali's work circles the seductive craft and imaginative reach.

Orwell makes a sweeping condemnation, saying that Dali,

[makes..] a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even — since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard — on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.

Orwell goes back and forth, from outrage that would please the Puritan in us in its wholesale contempt — as in the above, giving Dali a power that doesn't adhere to his work on inspection — to Orwell's civilized acknowledgment that censorship won't work in this circumstance. He is upset, confused, and what Dali of course wants, Orwell is provoked. The art of provocation is not an art I am interested in myself. I think the pop culture does a lot better job of it in any case.

Dali pushes the edges of convention, but a society that recoils is a healthy society, not one in which there is something wrong. Better to have the bright sunlight wither the tainted soul.