The Tragic Myth of Salvador Dalí

Abstract

This paper proposes a critical reading of the self-analysis outlined by Salvador Dalí in the essay “The tragic myth of Millet’s Angelusâ€, in the light of the interpretation of a family dynamic under the primacy of the replacement infans fantasy. It is suggested that this narrative, elaborated accordingly to the paranoiac-critical method, superimposes personal myth and fiction, omnipotent allegory and delirious reinterpretation of the tragic familial saga of a mother-child dyad permeated by the historical evocation of the phantasmatic “recovery†of a brother that died nine months before his birth. The authors triangulated selections from the dalinian text on the Angelus, biographical data and Bion’s contributions regarding the importance of private myths in the construction of identity. It is concluded that Dalí rehearses an approximation to another dimension of the maternal imago that other written autobiographical elements seem to contradict. More precisely, the Mother Antigone that “buries†the body of her in statu nascendi son under the father’s impotent and accomplice gaze. Also highlighted is the importance of Gala as a figure of the Annunciation of a tragic-grandiose destiny, according to the biblical mysticism of the “Only begotten Son of the Fatherâ€, a romanced solution, of surreal and delusional nature, for the probable central issue of his existence, the condition of replacement child of a dreaded and unknown Other.