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  • Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin by Linda Goddard
  • Timothy Mathews
Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin. By Linda Goddard. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. 208 pp., ill.

Anyone who still thinks of Paul Gauguin’s approach as an individual or an artist is that of a simple exoticist should read Linda Goddard’s outstanding book. It addresses Gauguin’s parallel career as a writer, which places him amongst other artists working with words in seeking to defend visual art against the supposed supremacy of the logos. Goddard readably and persuasively portrays Gauguin’s writing as a self-aware set of literary and narratological strategies through which to develop his public profile. These go on to shape his exploration of the naivety in which the whole idea of the savage mind is entangled. Goddard elegantly begins her own book with ‘This is not a book’, the opening words in translation of Gauguin’s memoir Avant et après (1903); and shows that Gauguin’s self-professed artlessness when it comes to writing, belied by the allusion to Diderot’s Ceci n’est pas un conte, forms an investigation of the network of sensation and motivated nostalgia that is the colonialist’s experience. In many absorbing ways Goddard places Gauguin’s writing in contexts that intersect the biographical with the political, the indigenous with the colonial. But the active critical ingredient of the book is to shift the emphasis in these writings from document to text: aesthetic artefacts that interrogate cultural experience. Chapter 1 groups Gauguin’s art criticism under the heading of his self-appellation ‘anti-critic’, uncovering the tensions in Gauguin’s understanding of interpretation. Gauguin can as little ‘escape his colonial identity as the community of critics he battled against’, Goddard writes (p. 37), exploring the full heuristic quality of the ‘anti-’ position. European colonizer joins with professional writer and critic in Goddard’s account of this embattled position, where ‘ethnographic liberalism’ is wrapped in the veils of its own imaginary, which it is then the role of criticism and art to explore. Chapter 2 is devoted to Noa Noa, the ‘apparently autobiographical’ (p. 64) narrative of Gauguin’s first two years in Tahiti (1891–93). It began as a collaboration with the poet Charles Morice, a tense relation which illuminates the nature of Gauguin’s literary ambition, and involving with varying degrees of awareness a mythical Noa Noa untouched by Morice, just as problematic as an original Tahiti untouched by literary civilization. Chapter 3 is devoted to Diverses Choses (1896–97): Goddard explores Gauguin’s citational approach to literary composition, which he aligns with the ‘primitive mentality’ along with the scatterings of dream (p. 91). Chapter 4 groups together the writings of Gauguin’s final years, 1899–1903, and brings the book to a climax in its reading of ‘Gauguin’s writing as a forum in which to explore the shifting parameters of artistic and colonial identity’ (p. 125). A mild disappointment is that quotations are given only in Goddard’s highly readable translations, with references to the original provided. Even that is offset by the book’s challenge to the very notion of an original, still more by the clarity of its organization, and finally by the creativity of its design, which marries archival research to the work with aesthetic forms it addresses.

Timothy Mathews
University College London
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