In A Visual Sense, Then, The Echo And Narcissus Story Might Be Seen As A

In a visual sense, then, the Echo and Narcissus story might be seen as a battle of vertical and horizontal, with the horizontal triumphing through restoring the vertical to itself. It is a warning from the represented to the viewer, it says- if you only look to yourself for love you will end up destroying everything, including yourself. Echo, of course, is another agent symbolically destroyed through the infinite semiosis (echo, after all) entailed through a lack of audience.
The still body of water in all the Echo/Narcissus representations is the same- or at least, linguistically symmetrical- to the fading body of Echo: both bodies are references to the origin, and the unconscious ambition to merge with the origin. The Freudian desire to merge with the source must disturb the way we perceive ourselves - in so far as we are reflections of our origins- but the irony for Narcissus is that he cannot see that the source is right in front of him, and it is only through disturbance that we can become aware of the source. Any perfect reflection, with no material interference would prevent us from having no way of knowing that it was a reflection. Dali's representation of this story (1937) features an egg cracking, with a flower breaking through: surely another clear signifier of the origin being broken through. It is only by the shell breaking that the flower can appear; but the transformation, interference, agency, comes at the price of Narcissus' life.
At the exact centre of the painting is a lascivious group of figures slightly removed from the rest of the painting's subject-matter. Described by Dali as a heterosexual group in attitudes of preliminary expectation they strike poses, admiring themselves in reflective water. The gathering recalls groups portrayed in Renaissance paintings, and probably signal the influence of Dali's trips to Florence and Rome immediately before he began work on The Metamorphoses of Dali.
To the left of this group we find Narcissus kneeling in and looking down into, the pool of water that seems too dark to reflect his own image. In Dali's surreal world this water does not need to reflect, does not need to be untouchable, because the rules of the fictional world must not be symmetrical with the rules of the real world, as we have seen they must in other kinds of art. So, the purpose normally served by unbreakable water, in representations of this myth, is here served by the broken egg. In the surreal world, Narcissus has always already penetrated the water, the egg is always already broken. Through its surrealism, Dali's image has sidestepped the responsibility of mimetic imagery to represent its own representation, and shortcuts directly to the subconscious and oedipal issues around origination.