Studying Paul Gauguin’s fictionalized travelogue, Noa Noa, you’d be forgiven for pondering he’d stumbled upon an artist’s idyll when he arrived in Tahiti in 1891. “All the thrill—animal and human—of a free life,” he wrote, “are mine.” As soon as a profitable stockbroker in Paris, Gauguin informed the French newspaper L’Echo de Paris earlier than he left for Tahiti that he was rejecting the stifling “affect of civilization” to dedicate himself to artwork and pleasure. Regardless of his disappointment with how a lot French colonial rule had corrupted the island, Gauguin’s fascination with Polynesian tradition and what he known as its “primitivism” characterizes a lot of his best-known work. His devotion to his creative imaginative and prescient in any respect prices—his quest for artistic paradise—has continued to intrigue us nicely into the twenty first century. As Gauguin himself predicted, he has develop into extra of a fable than a person.
Much less interesting, nonetheless, is his documented proclivity for the younger ladies who served as his lovers and frequent topics of his work. In his 1892 portray Manaò tupapaú (Spirit of the Useless Watching), a nude lady lies on her entrance, staring up on the viewer, on show and seemingly terrified. Gauguin’s biographers generally assert that her title was Teha’amana; she was reportedly 13 when Gauguin pursued her, ultimately giving her syphilis and impregnating her. Greater than 100 years later, in 2017, Louis Vuitton used Pleasant Land, that includes a nude lady—seemingly Teha’amana—as a design for a luxury-handbag assortment. That very same yr, Gauguin’s drawings of Polynesian girls and ladies had been animated and projected onto the facade of the Grand Palais, in Paris, beaming out to passers-by.
Daisy Lafarge’s debut novel, Paul, takes a novel method to an ongoing query: How, within the age of the #MeToo motion, ought to we work together with the work of males like Paul Gauguin? Superficially, Paul seems to comply with within the vein of current novels that tackle psychological and sexual violence––most notably Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation and Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Darkish Vanessa––by centering on a weak younger girl’s relationship with an abusive man, and extrapolating the nuances of that relationship as broader indications of contemporary misogyny. However Paul does one thing extra complicated: Larfarge makes use of the totally modern story of a traumatized graduate on her European hole yr to boldly reinterpret Gauguin’s life and legacy. By reconstructing one of many giants of the creative canon as an irredeemable villain, the novel makes it unimaginable to separate the artwork from the artist. The titular character, Paul, an evocation of Gauguin, is so clearly reprehensible that we’re pressured to sentence him—and thus Gauguin himself, by extension. What, Paul asks us, is so essentially precious concerning the artist’s work that we proceed to view, promote, and have fun it greater than a century later?
Transposed to the twenty first century, Lafarge’s Paul is the boorish, middle-aged proprietor of Noa Noa, a Pyrenean natural farm (named after Gauguin’s ebook). The narrator, Frances, a shy girl with a level in medieval historical past who was fired from her job as a analysis assistant in Paris, finds the farm on a work-exchange web site. She arrives at Noa Noa, which shortly reveals itself to be extra of a commune than a place of job. Quickly Paul is asking that she come to mattress, and over time, his remedy of her worsens into psychological and sexual manipulation. The state of affairs drives an already fragile Frances to the purpose of involuntary muteness, a silence that remembers Gauguin’s unvoiced, painted topics. Like his namesake, Paul has spent vital time in Tahiti, the place he claims to have discovered true creative liberty. Paul additionally used the folks of Tahiti as muses—photographing the place Gauguin painted—and sees the nation as nothing greater than the unique backdrop for his journey of self-discovery. And the ebook implies that, like Gauguin, Paul had sexual relationships with younger ladies, which he excuses on the idea of a “cultural distinction” in Tahiti that permitted him to interact in youngster exploitation with out penalties.
The place Paul does diverge from actuality is in its purposeful refusal to clarify away his habits on the idea of brilliance. Lafarge denies Paul the protection of creative worth that so usually absolves poisonous artistic varieties. Her Paul just isn’t an excellent artist; he’s pathetic, failing. However although his habits may instantly repulse readers, Frances is so determined for steerage and safety that she takes for much longer to return to phrases with who he actually is. That gradual technique of realization guides the novel and is usually staged in scenes of commentary, drawing a parallel with the act of viewing a murals.
In a single passage close to the tip of the ebook, Frances watches Paul stare lustfully at a gaggle of preteen ladies. Later, confronted with inarguable proof of his predatory pedophilia, she shatters. “It’s so arduous to look,” she thinks to herself. “So arduous to look away.” Inside that query––to look, or to look away?—Paul asks us to think about what we’re actually seeing in work like Spirit of the Useless Watching. Frances’s discomfort turns into our personal, blurring fiction and truth till it’s unimaginable to consider Gauguin with out the ugly specter of Paul.
Inside the novel, censuring each males may be an apparent reflex, however in the true world, it’s rather more fraught. “The particular person, I can completely abhor and detest, however the work is the work,” Vicente Todolí, a former director of Tate Fashionable, has mentioned of Gauguin. Viewers may ask: What hurt can it probably do to have a look at a portray when the topic and artist are each lengthy lifeless? However the resolution to exhibit Gauguin’s artwork is a acutely aware selection—and museums, of late, have determined to put naked the artist’s habits. So is the choice to eat his work. Lafarge, by means of Frances’s battle to actually see Paul as he’s, positions the act of witnessing—so usually characterised as passive—as an act of complicity. Her inaction within the face of Paul’s habits seems virtually like acceptance, permitting Paul to proceed deluding himself that he’s “an excellent man.” Confronted with Gauguin’s work, you might be requested to make a calculation: Is the pleasure of observing it definitely worth the ache of its manufacturing?
Because the novel involves a detailed, Paul takes Frances on an impromptu highway journey to go to a collection of his associates, most of whom seem ambivalent about him. “If I had been a girl,” one man remarks to her, “I’d preserve my distance.” In one other scene, Paul pressures Frances to carry out oral intercourse on him in a baby’s mattress, which palpably unnerves her. Rising ever extra suspicious of Paul, Frances lastly confronts him about his time in Tahiti. Predictably, he begins to weep. “I’m not a nasty man,” he says, begging for understanding. However Frances refuses. As a substitute, as they’re driving again to Noa Noa, she jumps out of his automobile and buys a ticket to Paris.
It’s not completely satisfying as a decision––Paul receives no significant comeuppance. Correctly, although, Lafarge leaves the central query of the novel open. Ought to we glance, or ought to we glance away? In Frances’s escape, Lafarge appears to land on the latter possibility. However there may be one other chance, I believe.
Earlier this yr, the Alte Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, exhibited a collection of Gauguin’s work juxtaposed in opposition to the work of artists making an attempt to reckon along with his legacy. In a single room, Gauguin’s work and etchings had been positioned reverse a piece of live-action video artwork by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer, titled Why Are You Indignant?, which was created in response to Gauguin’s No te aha oe riri. Wearing the identical garments and posed in the identical positions as the themes of that portray, the ladies within the video stared at you if you handed by. You might see their our bodies shifting, their respiration, their human twitches. The road between particular person and determine blurred; you had been unable to think about the grasp brushwork of Gauguin’s work with out being conscious of the eyes of the ladies upon your again. You circled. Time handed. They had been nonetheless you, answering your gaze with their very own.
