The story of Echo and Narcissus is one that everyone above the age of twelve knows. It’s about a nymph who becomes cursed for crossing Juno and can only repeat the last words spoken to her, never making words of her own. The story is also about a man who shuns every woman and nymph that comes to him and becomes cursed by one of the shunned women to fall in love and not have it returned. Well, he fell in love with his reflection the next time he sat near a pool of water, pined after it until he died, and became a flower. Lots of artists have used the story as content for one of their paintings. My personal favorite, Salvador Dali, is among them. The style in which Metamorphosis of Narcissus was done makes it instantly recognizable as one of Dali’s works. With his style being that of the surrealist genre, one notes all manner of seemingly inconsequential things which turn out to have a deeper meaning and lend this rendition of the story its uniqueness. An article by Milly Heyd entitled “Dali’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus Reconsidered” attempts to point out and explain the interesting and baffling points of this piece. While most of Heyd’s points are well thought-out and seem to have research put into the interpretations and conclusions drawn, I find some to be missing the point or reaching the wrong conclusion.
First off, Heyd misinterprets Dali’s use of color. The sitting Narcissus is primarily done with warm and lively colors accompanied by a fiery glow behind his head. Heyd notes that red is the color of blood, which she associates with decay and putrification. I see the warm colors and the red as an association with fire, warmth, and blood as well, but I link these to life and energy rather than decay. After all, the warm-colored Narcissus represents the still-living man, before he undergoes his transformation. The cracked, bony, and emaciated hand juxtaposed to the right of Narcissus acts as a nice contrast to the image of life. It is a pale bone color and is holding a white egg, out of which sprouts a narcissus flower. Heyd takes this flower/hand combination to symbolize rebirth through the sprouting of the flower. I feel that she misplaced the symbolism of the hand because she associated the living body with decay. The hand is meant to symbolize death with its pale cracked surface. That’s what one thinks of when one sees those colors: sterility, death, and ashes. In Catholicism on Ash Wednesday we receive ashes on our foreheads along with the blessing “You are born from ashes and to ashes you shall return.” And lo! Out of the pale ashes springs new life in the form of a flower. It all comes together to form a cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
The flower has more significance to Heyd, though. She interpreted the flower sprouting from the egg as a representation of Gala, Dali’s wife. Along with the white of the flower and the egg Heyd believed that it represented his wife because she was an image of purity in his eyes; an image of unblemished love and beauty. This is understandable because Gala has made numerous appearances in Dali’s paintings, but this interpretation isn’t accurate because of two reasons. Dali loved painting his wife; all of her appearances in his paintings are obviously her and not merely a symbolic representation. Reason number two is that the story of Narcissus is one of self-obsession. Narcissus loved only himself, and therefore a representation of the love that he (Dali) has for another would be both inaccurate and out-of-place. Like I said, the flower is merely a representation of the next step in the never-ending cycle of life, death, and rebirth.
Heyd’s idea of what the hand symbolizes isn’t death, as I interpreted it, but rather Echo herself. In the story she, too, was rejected by Narcissus. When she knows that she cannot have the love she longs for she pines for him and her bones turn to stone. The hand is very stone-like in appearance and texture and is an almost perfect “echo” of the image of Narcissus seen just to the left of it. Again, there are two reasons as to why this theory doesn’t check out. Firstly, Echo has nothing to do with the rebirth of Narcissus as a flower and yet the hand pictured quite clearly connects the rebirth and the death that are symbolized by the hand and the flower. Secondly, Echo is represented by the figures in the background making provocative gestures towards Narcissus. The figures in the back represent Echo because they show her expressions of love and attempts to get the attention of Narcissus and as they fade even further to the background they lose detail, as an echo loses its clarity with each returning ring. Of course this is also a method for showing perspective and distance, but this fact makes the symbolism that much more subtle and abstract. The figures also serve to accentuate the fact that Narcissus has eyes and attention only for himself.
Art is awesome because it has the amazing quality of being generally open to interpretation. Anyone that can look at a piece of art is capable of coming up with his or her own interpretation of it. Surrealist art in particular has this quality because it tends to be so ridiculously odd and out-of-the-ordinary that people will almost inevitably come up with their own unique idea of what each part means. It makes for pretty good discussion and conversation. Heyd interpreted many aspects of the painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus that I couldn’t make head or tail of as far as meaning and significance went, but there were also some parts of her analysis that didn’t sit well with me. I think my interpretation makes much more sense, but then again, doesn’t everyone think that their own interpretation of anything is the only real right answer?
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