Where Art Never Dies

Avalon Grover 03/13/2023

Often, Surrealists in the 1920’s operated by disturbing, confusing, and attacking the unconscious mind to expose one’s desires and traumas. Comparatively, the work of Jacques Lacan and Salvador Dalí centered around the activity of the conscious mind instead. Lacan’s theory of paranoia and Dalí’s paranoic critical method invoke an active investigation of the human psyche in respect to paranoia and similarly argue the discrediting of reality, both by encouraging and examining the conscious mind. In 1932, the former published his doctoral theory, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité, in which he defines paranoia as a “mode of reaction” to one’s personal experiences rather than an organic process and establishes a dialogue with Dali’s similar method. The Surrealist developed the paranoiac critical method, a process in which he invokes a paranoid state by perceiving multiple images within a single configuration and then using those visions to create art. Much of his paranoic art pieces involve a spectator and a phantom, prompting the viewer to question the objective and subjective significance in the bourgeois irrational. In 1947, Jean Genet created his play The Maids which centers around the paranoia of two sisters who want to murder their mistress. The play blurs the lines between reality and illusion, inflicting a blatant sense of artificiality and confusion in the viewer as well as exposing the unreliability of a paranoid person. His play scrutinizes the norms of bourgeois society through the relationship of an oppressor and her oppressed and the traumas it inflicts on the latter. While Lacan and Dalí argue the importance of examining one’s paranoia and stress its astounding ability to create new realities, Genet’s play exposes the opposite, implying the conscious mind filled with paranoia results in violence and tension rather than truth by exploring the power dynamics of the characters in his play.

The dialogue between Jacques Lacan and Salvador Dalí is established through their similar mindset towards paranoia and the insane but also through the latter’s artwork, in which his method is most portrayed. However, in order to fully comprehend the significance of Dalí’s paintings, one must also understand Lacan’s perception of paranoia as a form of the imaginary and unconscious of the insane. Lacan theorizes “the delirious visions that paranoia produces accentuate, rather than diminish, the disturbing sensation one feels when an object or a face is temporarily misread” (Greeley, 473-4). In his theory, he explains that reality essentially splits for a person with a paranoid mind and their new feelings and interpretation towards reality become detached, resulting in a distorted interpretation of events and a sense of persecution. In other words, that person now feels as though they are a victim in a reality that only exists to them. The sensation Lacan previously implies in regard to “the disturbing sensation” refers to the same experiences as the sane but enhanced to create a new narrative and mindset for a person filled with paranoia. The hallucinations they experience often resemble that of our encounters with fear, shock, and suspicion. He also argues that reality is not concrete but rather “an externalization of internal psychic conflicts and desires” (Greeley, 473) thus implying one’s understanding of reality is merely a conception created by one’s unconscious mind. Dalí takes this concept one step further to actively and purposefully visualize the paranoia deep within the one’s mind using his paranoic critical method. 

As previously stated, his method utilizes the paranoid state by seeking multiple images in one configuration to portray reality according to a paranoid person. Multiple of his paintings attempt to prompt this perception such as Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critic City: Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History, 1936 or Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, 1940, both of which manipulate our understanding of what we consider reality and contort that into an evolving, personal conceptualization. With his paranoic critical method, Dalí placed himself in a paranoic state of illusion by searching for multiple images where the sane would consider there to be only one. Ironically, we use this method almost every day of our lives in looking for shapes in a cloudy sky or finding faces on a rainy window. The only difference is those images we may find are then projected onto Dalí canvas. However, his method also encourages us to use it again to interpret the images he had previously conceived. In his painting Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critic City: Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History, 1936, Dalí use of double images and an eroticization of his wife, Gala, repeats throughout the painting, creating an alternate, personalized reality, related to that of the mind of a paranoid person. The most prevalent images are the iconized figure of his wife in the center holding a vine of grapes and the horse walking away in the distance, both of which closely resemblee the configuration of the grapes. By relaxing one’s eyes and allowing oneself to be fully immersed in the mind of Salvador Dalí, the similarities become clear, and the method becomes even more apparent. The second painting displaying the paranoiac critical method is the Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire in which the bust of Jean-Antoine Houdon, a French sculptor in the form of an arched hole in a ruined wall and two Dutch women. Their faces form his eyes, the collars of the women’s clothing his under-eyes, his neck the black dress of the right woman, and the side of his face is shaped by the tradesman facing the Dutch women. Without taking a step back from the painting and attempting to enter a state of paranoia in which the reality we believe to be real may simply be an illusion itself, the bust of Houdon is very difficult to visualize. In my experience however, entering this paranoiac state is easier than exiting it – I found myself searching for more double images or new realities I hadn’t noticed before. The paranoiac critical method exposes a person’s desire for a distorted reality and projects the hallucinations he had seen himself for us to see. Both Lacan and Dalí perceive paranoia to be a form of disoriented reality so similar to that of the sane that the difference is difficult to distinguish. Lacan explains paranoia to be a disturbed interpretation of events resulting in the feeling of persecution and fear while Dalí uses his artistic abilities to expose those sensations and immerse his theoretically sane audience into the paranoiac mindset.  

Comparatively, Jean Genet’s The Maids displays paranoia in a crime setting where, although the characters operate in an oppressed environment and display a victimized mentality, they are fully aware of gravity of their actions; in other words, their sense of paranoia does not entirely cloud their judgement. Furthermore, Genet also incorporates Lacan’s theory of paranoia and trauma into the relationships and power dynamics between the oppressor, being Madame, and the oppressed, being the maids. The play consists of three physical characters: Solange, Claire, and Madame, all of which are meant to be played by boys. Genet takes a similar approach to his work as Dalí by creating a piece that is illusionary and confusing yet the difference between The Maids and Dalí paintings is Genet’s purposeful attitude towards artificiality. By essentially telling the audience the play is not real – through his choice of boys playing the maids – Genet rethinks the “poetics” of paranoid crimes. Instead of immersing his audience in a reality that may or may not be real, his form of reality is blatantly false, inferring that the reality of a paranoid person is both entirely unreal and aware. For the first few pages of the play, Solange and Claire partake an imaginary retelling of their experiences with the Madame, referred to by the two as the “ceremony” (Genet, 49). It consists of one woman playing the Madame and the other playing the opposing maid and allows for the imaginary Madame to be in a position of power of her sister; the entire act is reminiscent of the childhood game of pretend, however this version played by adults insinuates a much darker and paranoid version. Their reversion back to the familiarity of childhood activities places them in a position of inferiority to the Madame and the Madame in a position of power and influence simply by being the object of their obsession. It also places them in an imaginary reality that they create together. We see the two enter and exit voluntarily which we see Solange says “already[?]” and Claire says, “it’s over already” (Genet, 46) in reference to their ceremony which they notoriously do not finish. The end is inferred to be the murder of Madame, which we learn when Solange says, “I can’t finish you off” (Genet, 46), and which we learn at the end when they fail to kill her. Regardless, the maids’ ability to operate in and out of their pretend ceremony shows the audience that, although the play is entirely false, the characters are well aware of their actions and may consciously make decisions both in our reality and in theirs. The concept in Genet’s play insinuates that the paranoia state is not entirely illusionary as Lacan and Dalí believed it to be. He rethinks the “poetics” of paranoid crimes by essentially stating that the criminals in this play are paranoid and create new realities, just as Lacan argues, but also that exposes they maintain a sense of awareness in this paranoid state.  Their violent acts are not without thought.

The truth behind paranoia has long been debated and examined by psychoanalysts, therapists, and the Surrealists. The latter, however, typically took an interest in the psychosis because of its phenomena of illusion, distorted reality, and its relationship to the insane. Salvador Dalí in particular incorporated this sense of paranoia into much of his work and created what he coined the paranoic critical method, a process of looking at one typical configuration and finding multiple images. To do so, he would immerse himself into the mindset of a paranoid person and then project the images he conceived into his paintings, such as Suburbs of a Paranoiac-Critic City: Afternoon on the Outskirts of European History, 1936 or Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire. Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst, created his own theory of paranoia in which he argues that those who suffer from paranoia have split from reality and become detached, resulting in a sense of persecution and a distorted interpretation of events. Jean Genet, a French novelist, create his play The Maids in 1947 displaying the minds and acts of two paranoid women on the set of theatre to emphasize the feelings of illusion one might feel. Lacan and Dalí’s mindset on paranoia paralleled each other and their separation theories both argued that paranoia results in a sense of a new reality and thus actions we may not be able to control. Genet, on the other hand, displayed in his play that, although paranoia does push people into false realties, their actions, and especially their crimes, are not mindless. Looking at the behavior of those who commit seemingly motiveless crimes may be considered an act of paranoia and a “mode of reaction” in Lacan’s eyes, but in Genet’s, the motive stems from the trauma of those individuals. 

Works Cited

Dali, Salvador. “Suburbs of the ‘Paranoiac-Critical Town.’” Suburbs of the “Paranoiac-Critical Town” | Fundació Gala – Salvador Dalí, 1935, https://www.salvador-dali.org/en/artwork/catalogue-raisonne-paintings/obra/434/suburbs-of-the-paranoiac-critical-town. 

Dali, Salvador. “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire.” MWeb Problem, 1940, https://archive.thedali.org/mwebcgi/mweb.exe?request=record%3Bid. 

Greely, R.A. (2001), Dalí’s Fascism; Lacan’s Paranoia. Art History, 24: 465-492. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.00278

Genet, Jean, et al. The Maids. Faber & Faber, 2016.