Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin by Linda Goddard

Abstract

MLR, .,   his suggestive exploration of ‘ideas of otherness’ that emerge in Laforgue’s œuvre. At the heart of the argument is the nineteenth-century construction of German thought as ‘fundamentally alien’ and ‘opposed in essence to the French way of thinking, philosophical tradition, and national character’ (p. ): this otherness attracted Laforgue (and other liberal thinkers of the period) precisely as a means of resistance to the French status quo. Embracing German pessimism, pathologized as a contagious disease leading to France’s national decline, Laforgue’s poetics of suffering represented a counter-cultural critique of the nationalist, pro-natal bourgeois discourses of the day. For Laforgue, Germany’s otherness was also rooted in its cultural ‘primitiveness’, a state of ‘naturalness’ superior to French ‘“over-cultivation”’ (p. ), which in turn made it ‘the chosen land of the Unconscious’ (p. ): notably, in his verse the image of the forest symbolized both Germany and the Unconscious. Finally, Schopenhauer ’s and Hartmann’s philosophy invoked an even more fundamental otherness through their use of Eastern thought and Buddhism, intellectual influences that prompted Laforgue to question the very idea of stable selood, to embrace the concept of nothingness (via the idea of nirvana), and to signal the value of nonEuropean thought. As Bootle concludes, the vision of selood that emerges from Laforgue’s work is ‘one of a mutable and makeshi assemblage, an ever-changing multiplicity of constituent parts’—a modern conception that reflects ‘his model of interculturality: his celebration of cultural difference, of eclecticism and a dehierarchized relationship between cultures’ which ‘conforms to the same logic of multiplicity without defining order’ (p. ). Ultimately, then, ‘for Laforgue, there is no otherness at the most fundamental level’. Striving to ‘elude binary thinking’, the poet engaged with the Unconscious ‘as monist metaphysical principle’, while anticipating twentieth-century visions with his evocations of ‘states of betweenness’ and liminality (p. ). Bootle’s fine monograph brings us fresh and valuable perspectives on Laforgue’s infinitely intriguing poetry, prose, and, above all, philosophical engagement with the world. U  T  A A K. W Savage Tales: e Writings of Paul Gauguin. By L G. New Haven: Yale University Press. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. Many have succumbed to the biographical allure of Paul Gauguin’s writings, taking them erroneously as factual evidence of his life as colonist-artist working in France and Polynesia. Others have dismissed his musings as clumsy self-aggrandizement or as a form of distraction from ill health in later life. With praiseworthy precision , Savage Tales—the first book dedicated to the artist’s writings—tells a more nuanced story. Linda Goddard builds on her scholarship of the last fieen years, joining Elizabeth C. Childs and Alastair Wright, who have likewise considered the writings as a critical endeavour within Gauguin’s broader œuvre. Savage Tales positions Gauguin’s manuscripts, art criticism, journalism, and art-theoretical texts as another medium through which he fashioned himself as a ‘savage’ artist.  Reviews Gauguin’s motivations for writing are the emphasis of the first half of the book. An initial chapter considers his ambivalent attitude towards written interpretation, the province of the art critic. Gauguin notoriously cast aspersions on critics while clinging to criticism’s profile-raising potential. He even composed art criticism himself. Parsing instances in which he explained his artworks, Goddard reveals how he manœuvred a strategy of ‘counter-criticism’ as an ‘anti-critic’, by dispersing multiple, at times inconsistent, accounts, effectively calling into question the value of written descriptions of art and singular meaning. For Goddard, Gauguin’s ‘counter-criticism’ belied its subversiveness, embodying a paradox, as ‘art’s autonomy ironically required his constant verbal intervention’ (p. ). In the book’s second chapter, Goddard contends with the historiography of Noa Noa (begun in ) as autobiography, recovering Gauguin’s intentions for the collaborative enterprise with poet Charles Morice. Goddard expertly argues that the partnership with a ‘civilized’ littérateur was not only purposeful, but integral to Gauguin’s aims; he manipulated the literary device of juxtaposition to constitute his own identity as ‘primitive’ through stylistic contrast. Goddard stresses that Noa Noa is not autobiographical, but rather a contribution to contemporary travel writing. She therefore sets...