Gauguin, Gilgamesh, and the Modernist Aesthetic Allegory
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© 2011 Jennifer Mary McBryan ALL RIGHTS RESERVED GAUGUIN, GILGAMESH, AND THE MODERNIST AESTHETIC ALLEGORY: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF DESIRE IN NOA NOA by JENNIFER MARY McBRYAN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School - New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Comparative Literature Written under the direction of Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui and approved by _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ _________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey MAY, 2011 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Gauguin, Gilgamesh, and the Modernist Aesthetic Allegory: The Archaeology of Desire in Noa Noa By JENNIFER MARY McBRYAN Dissertation Director: Professor Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui This dissertation explores Paul Gauguin's Noa Noa (“fragrant” in Tahitian), a fictionalized “memoir” of his first journey to French Polynesia, which includes a transformative episode recounting a trip into the forest to collect wood for carving into sculptures. In Gauguin scholarship, this episode has provoked speculation because of the eroticized way in which the artist describes his relationship with his young Tahitian male guide on the expedition; several scholars have argued that this episode of Noa Noa is designed to trouble conventional bourgeois boundaries, while others have offered sharp postcolonial critiques. I offer a different reading of this episode, arguing that the forest journey in Noa Noa replays the journey to the cedar forest in the myth of Gilgamesh, and that the artist’s transplantation of this ancient Assyrian epic to a Polynesian setting adds a ii new layer to our understanding of the transnational and transhistorical nature of Gauguin's primitivism. I argue that as a painter in search of total artistic freedom, Gauguin used Gilgamesh to write into Noa Noa an allegory of aesthetic pursuit and to refashion himself as what Roland Barthes would call an "anachronic subject." This dissertation begins with a discussion of Gauguin's complicated mimetic behavior, positing him as an artist who is suspended between Romantic and Modernist aesthetic modes. It traces the lineage and development of Noa Noa as a multigeneric text drawing on many traditions simultaneously. It then proceeds to explore the discovery and translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh by French and English archaeologists and scholars in the nineteenth century, working as part of a larger imperialistic project fueled by nationalistic sentiment. It is within this context that my dissertation turns to the text of Noa Noa itself, comparing key passages with the Gilgamesh epic and demonstrating how these passages dramatize symbolically what Gauguin struggled to achieve aesthetically on canvas. I conclude that what has come to be known as the Woodcutter Episode in Noa Noa is not just about Gauguin's homoerotic desire for his Tahitian guide; it is about Gauguin's symbolic desire for fusion between thought and form in the work of art. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have come into being without the insightful guidance and steadfast encouragement of my dissertation director, Professor Ben. Sifuentes- Jáuregui, who saw this project through so many phases and who took it seriously from the very start. I am deeply grateful to Professor Sifuentes-Jáuregui for his kindness, his intense creativity, and his ability to see through to the very core of every issue, where the potential for fruitful complication always lies. He has enriched my understanding of language, theory, and the world immeasurably, and it was an honor to work with him. I would also like to thank my committee members, Professors Janet Walker, Elin Diamond, and Susan Sidlauskas, whose rich and elegant research has inspired me in so many ways. Their detailed comments and endless patience have made me a better thinker and a better writer, and my long conversations with them are memories that I will treasure. It is furthermore a fact that this dissertation would not have existed without the extraordinary intellectual generosity of Professor Janet Walker, who first introduced me to Noa Noa, and of Professor Steven Walker, who first introduced me to the Epic of Gilgamesh at exactly the same time. I would like to thank my colleagues Monica Filimon and Joshua Beall, whose excellent comments on early drafts of the dissertation resulted in important breakthroughs, and who pointed me to several crucial sources along the way. I am deeply indebted to several wonderful friends for their unending support and faith, especially Céline Little and Joanna Swyers, who have seen me through thick and iv thin for all of my adult life. Céline Little in particular gave me invaluable help with the French translations in this document. I am constantly amazed at my luck in having had such friends as these. Neither this dissertation nor its author would exist were it not for my parents, Ann and Oliver McBryan, who have given me the enormous and incalculable gifts of a rich life and a deep education, and who have taught me to value everything that I hold dear: family and friends, adventure and work. I am proud to be their daughter, and I dedicate this project to them with love and gratitude. I would like to thank my siblings, Shirley-Ann Rüschemeyer, Andrew McBryan, and Oliver C. McBryan, who inspire me every single day with their courage, their love, and their hilarity, and whose wonderful spouses and children have expanded my world in delightful ways. I would also like to thank my loving in-laws, Michele and Bill Berger, for their generosity and good humor throughout, and for treating me as one of their own. Finally, I must try (and will inevitably fail) to find an adequate way to express my deepest gratitude to my beloved husband, Todd Berger, who never gave up on me, never grew tired of me, and never stopped making me laugh. To be without you would be to stare, Gilgamesh-like, into the abyss. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv List of Illustrations. vii Introduction. Gauguin, Gilgamesh and Mimetic Desire 1 Chapter 1. A Tale of Three Cities; Nineveh in London and Paris 65 Chapter 2. The Two Kings: Gauguin and Gilgamesh in the Garden 133 Chapter 3. The Text of Bliss: Gauguin's Allegory of Aesthetic Desire 188 Chapter 4. Revising Gilgamesh: Anti-Agonism and the Crime Against Nature 252 Bibliography. 319 Curriculum Vitae. 327 vi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1. Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827-8. 101 Fig. 2. Gustave Courbet, The Meeting, or Bonjour, M. Courbet, 1854. 108 Fig. 3. Paul Gauguin, Bonjour, M. Gauguin, 1889. 111 Fig. 4. Alexandre Séon, Portrait of Joséphin Péladan, 1891. 117 Fig. 5. Paul Gauguin, Oviri, 1894. 126 Fig. 6. Assyrian, Hero Subduing a Lion, 8th C., B.C.E.. 126 Fig. 7. Paul Gauguin, Te Nave Nave Fenua, 1892. 182 Fig. 8. Paul Gauguin, Matamoe, 1892. 184 Fig. 9. Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait: Les Misérables, 1888. 203 Fig. 10. Paul Gauguin, Vision After the Sermon, 1888. 216 Fig. 11. Paul Gauguin, Jug in the Form of a Head, 1889. 286 Fig. 12. Paul Gauguin, Agony in the Garden, 1889. 288 Fig. 13. Paul Gauguin, Eve - Don't Listen to the Liar, 1889. 309 vii 1 INTRODUCTION: GAUGUIN, GILGAMESH, AND MIMETIC DESIRE In antiquity there was no hiatus between mythology and history: historical personages endeavored to imitate their archetypes, the gods and mythical heroes. - Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (32) The wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power. - Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (xiii) Introduction It might seem strange to begin a dissertation on Paul Gauguin with a discussion of mimesis. An anti-rationalist, Symbolist, Synthetist egoist, Gauguin made his name by rejecting even advanced Impressionism as being but a weak imitation of nature, a project that would always remain "bound by the shackles of verisimilitude" (WOS 140).1 Yet for all his obsession with originality,2 Gauguin was also a master copy-maker; indeed, 1 Gauguin, Paul. The Writings of a Savage. Ed. Daniel Guérin. Trans. Eleanor Levieux. New York: Viking, 1978. All footnotes referencing "WOS" in this dissertation refer to this volume. 2 Debates about what "originality" meant to Gauguin, especially in light of his many borrowings, disputes, and plagiarisms, have lain at the heart of the battle over Gauguin's legacy since his own time. Critics like Solomon-Godeau and, in Gauguin's own day, Camille Pissarro, reject his sampling of styles, ideas, phrasings, and ready-made images as inauthentic and thieving; as Pissarro once sniped, "Gauguin is always poaching on someone's land; nowadays, he's pillaging the savages of Oceania" (Solomon-Godeau 2 many critics have faulted him for precisely this tendency. Less a copier of nature than of ready-made images and styles, Gauguin has long been a lightning-rod figure for debates about authenticity and appropriation in modern art. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau has written, for example, "From 1881 through the 1890s, one can readily identify a Pissarroesque Gauguin, a van Goghian Gauguin, a Bernardine Gauguin, a Cézannian Gauguin, a Redonian Gauguin, a Degasian Gauguin, and, most enduringly and prevalently, a Puvisian Gauguin" (328). For many modern critics - and even for many of Gauguin's contemporaries - there seems to be no way of knowing who the "real" Gauguin, was, as an artist or as an individual. The purpose of this dissertation is not quite to answer that question, although I hope to shed some light upon it along the way. Rather, my purpose here is to investigate the many permutations of mimicry and mimesis - perhaps, more precisely, the mimetic impulse - in Gauguin's oeuvre. I plan to do this vis à vis one particular moment of intertextuality that opens, kaleidescope-like, an interpretive space in which many of the artist's central aesthetic and philosophical concerns are prismatically refracted.