‘Scattered notes’: Authorship and Originality in Paul Gauguin’s Diverses choses

Abstract

'Scattered notes, without sequence like dreams, like life all made up of fraginents; and because others have collaborated in it.' Gauguin's description of Diverses choses (1896-98) demands that we take the work seriously as a contribution to the fin-de-siMcle debate about collective authorship and nonconsecutive modes of literary composition. Scholars have, however, dismissed Gauguin's method of adapting and reiterating passages of text from other sources as mere plagiarism. This essay seeks to recuperate the distinctive process of fragmentation and repetition in Diverses choses and to show how it challenges conventional notions of authorship and originality. Gauguin's claim that his own ideas are linked with those of others is expressed thematically in the content of his borrowed material, and enacted stylistically through the juxtaposition of textual and visual fragments. I argue that the principle of this relationship was designed to replace the successive, temporal logic of the professional critic with the synthetic, intuitive vision of the painter. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.