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Genders 28 1998 Tropical Rearwindow By LEE WALLACE
Sadistic Gaze [1] Two recent and influential feminist
discussions of Paul Gauguin's Pacific oeuvre have
no time for ambivalence when it comes to analysing
Gauguin's imbrication in the aesthetic practices
and ruses of imperialism. Abigail Solomon-Godeau,
in "Going Native," argues that Gauguin's
primitivist representation of Polynesian women
reveals a "gendered discourse" which is continuous
with a colonialist "dynamic of knowledge/power
relations which admits of no reciprocity," and
which dates to the "expeditionary literature
generated by Captain Cook, Wallis, Bougainville and
the countless successive voyagers to the South
Seas, [in which] the colonial encounter is first
and foremost the encounter with the body of the
Other."1
Griselda Pollock likewise cites the work of Gauguin
as supplying "the fantasy scenarios and the exotic
mise-en-scène for not only masculinist but
also imperialist
narratives."2
A fin de siècle preoccupation with the
exotic female body and its availability for
visualisation fuels both of these analyses of
Gauguin's primitivism, but it seems to me that the
invocation of this "gendered discourse," founded as
it is on a gaze that is both male--or phallic--and
colonialist, obscures a more unsettling
recognition. The body that compels interpretation
in the Pacific, the body that incites hermeneutic
anxiety, is not that of the native woman, but of
the European male. To have it otherwise is,
perhaps, to miss the peculiar vulnerabilities and
denials staged in those paintings and writings and
to foreclose, in the name of gender, questions of
sexuality. [2] When Solomon-Godeau, in particular, invokes
the male gaze what is she referring to? In a review
article on the troubled if ubiquitous importation
of psychoanalytic theory into film and media
studies, Craig Saper reminds us that the concept of
the gaze, now indispensable to film theory and, we
might add, also making inways into art criticism,
was initially borrowed from psychoanalysis. Saper
notes that as the concept has passed between those
disciplines, it has retained some familiar
modifiers and picked up a few more; the gaze more
often than not is designated, or thought, phallic,
patriarchal, male. His point is that such
understandings of the visual and psychic dynamics
of the gaze owe little to the Lacanian analysis
from which they are said to derive. At worst, this
gendering of the gaze has reduced its analytic
power to the formulaic "men gaze at women" or, more
clunkily, "men as desiring subjects gaze at women
as objects." These phrases, and the understandings
of the gaze which they map, tend to be embedded in
analyses of film or art that ascribe sadistic
mastery to the agent that views and thereby
collapse the operation of the gaze into that of
vision.3
Such is the unacknowledged manoeuvre animating
Solomon-Godeau's article on Gauguin which bestows
on him a capacity for violence, both imaginary and
real: There is, in short, a darker side to
primitivist desire, one implicated in fantasies of
imaginary knowledge, power and rape; and these
fantasies, moreover, are sometimes underpinned by
real power, by real rape. When Gauguin writes in
the margin of the Noa Noa manuscript, "I saw
plenty of calm-eyed women. I wanted them to be
willing to be taken without a word, brutally. In a
way [it was a] longing to rape," we are on the
border between the acceptable myth of the
primitivist artist as sexual outlaw, and the
relations of violence and domination that provide
its historic and its psychic
armature.4
[3] At a certain moment feminist film theory, in
particular, assumed that the way to overturn the
power relation implicit in this demonised male gaze
was to attend to the women's gaze, then later
still, the lesbian's. Kaja Silverman suggests the
hopelessness and wrongheadedness of this wish: We have at times assumed that [the]
dominant scopic regime could be overturned by
"giving" women the gaze, rather than by exposing
the impossibility of anyone ever owning that visual
agency, or of him or herself escaping specularity.
What must be demonstrated over and over again is
that all subjects, male or female, rely for their
identity upon the repertoire of culturally
available images, and upon a gaze which, radically
exceeding the libidinally vulnerable look, is not
theirs to
deploy.5
In art criticism this tendency to collapse the
gaze into vision is exacerbated by the fact that
its traditional theoretical lexicon has never quite
escaped the anthropomorphic phallacy; even in its
more formalist moments art criticism appeals to the
"eye," so view-point implies viewer and perspective
usually belongs to, or outrages, someone. In what
follows I will reserve the term "look" for the kind
of view that naturalises itself, that asks that we
accept it as sight, as proceeding from an
individual's position. The look, then, is
associated with the function of the eyes, and we
have come to think of those eyes as lodged within
the pleasured body of a spectator, the usual
suspect being the male voyeur. This allows me to
keep "gaze" in hand for when I come to map the
articulation of a scopic field which exceeds or
disrupts vision. The gaze, as we will see, is an
altogether more discontinuous notion, and has a
disconcerting way of framing, or checking, that
look. Both terms will be used in the analysis of
Manao Tupapau, a painting in which the
subject who looks is entangled in a gaze that
exceeds the visual. Retreat [4] Here is one version of Gauguin's Pacific
career. In 1901, ten years after his first arrival
in Tahiti and in a final attempt to elude
civilisation, a jaded Paul Gauguin moved to the
rumouredly cannibal Marquesas. There he built a
studio which was a transposed and belated version
of Te Faruru, the "Studio of the South
Seas," he had created in Paris toward the end of
1893 on his return from Tahiti. The olive green and
chrome yellow walls of Gauguin's metropolitan
atelier had been hung with his unsold Tahitian
paintings, and the light-flooded space also
accommodated his sculpture, current work and the
ethnographic collection of his Uncle
Zizi.6
There, among those artefacts and other "flea-market
exotica," he held weekly soirées, where he
lectured about method, told stories from his
travels, and played music to his assembled guests.
Created eight years later, the Marquesan atelier,
already a faded repetition, advertised primitivism
and savagery in louder tones. This is Gavan Daws'
description of Gauguin's final residence: This time he identified his home in
big characters carved into a wood panel over his
lintel: "Maison du Jouir," House of
Pleasure, meaning sexual pleasure, perhaps a
reference to the traditional sexual meeting houses
of the old Polynesian culture, certainly a
statement of personal appetite. On the walls were
forty-five pornographic photographs bought at Port
Said between France and the South Seas. . . .
[Gauguin] went about the house naked, leaning on
his walking sticks, the heads of which were carved
to represent a phallus and a couple in sexual
embrace. He acquired a dog and named it Pego, a
version of the abbreviated signature he sometimes
used on his paintings, "PGo," which when said aloud
sounded like sailor's slang for "penis." Every time
Gauguin called his dog he was being outrageous, and
he knew
it.7
We could say that Gauguin's career was often
reduced to the serial indignity of the repeated
restart, but the multiple arrivals and departures
required by the primitivist agenda are such that it
becomes hard to keep relations of priority and
precedence stable. In this chronology, the relation
between original and copy seems finally replaced by
a series of simulations, like so many smutty
postcards carried between metropolitan centre and
colonial margin, in which all productions are
restagings, marked by a sense of their belatedness
and inauthenticity. [5] Christopher Bongie's Exotic Memories:
Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de
Siècle, suggests that all exotic
travellers find themselves, like Gauguin, in
strained relation to time and space, their
expectations of arrival forestalled by the spread
of imperialism, so that their savage or exotic
destinations keep receding even as they
approach.8
Peter Brooks also notes that from the moment Tahiti
appears in Western representation "the voyage out
to the South Pacific . . . is also a voyage back,
to a time before," to a "version of the erotic"
which is "both spatially and temporally removed
from contemporary Europe." Once this ambition is
thwarted by the global reach of capitalism, that
voyage out, which was to have been a voyage back,
is more frequently figured as a voyage in, to the
remote regions of the self. Brooks' analysis of
Gauguin's work, "Gauguin's Tahitian
Body"9
and Hal Foster's more recent essay, "Primitive
Scenes,"10
both take as their subject this primitivist
trajectory which directs itself toward racial and
sexual, or erotic, territory thought beyond the
reach of repression or civilised restraint. In both
essays, the ambivalence of the artist's interest in
the native and the perverse returns as a kind of
psychic come-uppance, installing an insufficiency
at the heart of the primitivist enterprise. These
analyses, doubling and departing from each other as
they do, might be said to share and rehearse the
lesson of colonial and sexual ambivalence: in the
encounter with otherness nobody goes unscathed and
Gauguin's house of pleasure stands on shaky ground.
Jungle Rites [6] In turning their discussions to Gauguin's
Tahitian paintings, both Brooks and Foster dwell on
an episode that appears as the fourth chapter of
Noa Noa, the primitivist document which
narrativises the time of Gauguin's first stay in
Tahiti and which he composed on his return to Paris
in
1893.11
As literary artefact Noa Noa remains less
than pleasing, although in facsimile with its
watercolours and woodcuts dispersed enigmatically
through the text, it has a certain luminescence.
[7] The fourth chapter commences with Gauguin
claiming that, living as he does among the
Tahitians, every day gets better . . . my
neighbours . . . regard me as almost one of
themselves; my naked feet, from daily contact with
the rock, have got used to the ground, my body,
almost always naked, no longer fears the sun;
civilisation leaves me bit by bit and I begin to
think simply, to have only a little hatred for my
neighbour, and I function in an animal way, freely
. . . I become carefree and calm and loving (25).
Gauguin then introduces a young man, his
"natural friend," who visits him daily to watch him
work and talk with him. Gauguin recalls that the
youth, "sometimes in the evening, when I was
resting from my day's work, . . . would ask me the
questions of a young savage who wants to know a lot
of things about love in Europe, questions which
often embarrassed me." As Nicholas Wadley writes,
the innocent intuitions of the youth and the grown
man's awkwardness serve an "ever-present contrast
between [a] sort of naïve clarity and the
soiled condition of civilised
thought."13
The chapter then goes on to recount an expedition
the artist and the "faultlessly handsome" boy
undertake to fell a rosewood tree from which to
make a carving. Gauguin follows his young male
guide as they climb single file through the dense
vegetation of the Tahitian interior: We went naked, both of us, except
for the loincloth. . . . And two we certainly were,
two friends, he a quite young man and I almost an
old man in body and soul, in civilised vices: in
lost illusions. His lithe animal body had graceful
contours, he walked in front of me sexless . . .
(25). Gauguin's marginal notes at this moment
underscore what he calls "the androgynous side of
the
savage."14
[8] Trailing after this unspecific sexual
figure, Gauguin becomes disoriented with desire:
I had a sort of presentiment of
crime, the desire for the unknown, the awakening of
evil--Then weariness of the male role, having
always to be strong, protective; shoulders that are
a heavy load. To be for a moment the weak being who
loves and obeys. I drew close, without fear of laws, my temples
throbbing (25). But the writer's arousal dissipates as soon as
the pursued figure presents frontally: [M] y companion turned . . . so that
his chest was towards me. The hermaphrodite had
vanished; it was a young man, after all; his
innocent eyes resembled the limpidity of the water.
Calm suddenly came back into my soul. . . (28).
Peter Brooks remarks that the recollection is
noteworthy "perhaps especially for the ambivalences
of passivity and aggressivity it displays and the
confused conception of the homoerotic temptation as
alternately domination and submission." We can
conclude from this that "Gauguin is attracted to
androgyny . . . [as] it appears to liberate him
from European categories of difference. Yet," as
Brooks goes on to note, that attraction leads [Gauguin] to
an interior experience of his own body as bisexual,
to a homoerotic temptation that places him in the
role of woman and thus must be repudiated. There is
a slide away from androgyny which resolves itself
in a feeling of guilt dispersed and innocence
achieved.15
The woodland scene ends not with seduction or
rape but with the violence of self-discipline;
Gauguin expends himself attacking the sought after
tree, "hack[ing] away with the pleasure of sating
one's brutality and of destroying something" until
his soft hands are bloodied and raw; the
renunciation is complete when, pacing behind that
naked back on the return journey, Gauguin can
"again admire, in front of me, the graceful curves
of my young friend--and calmly: curves robust like
the tree we were carrying" (28). We might reflect
here that civilised man, in turning his desire
toward a native object, locates an ambivalence
which can be restored to, and mastered by,
himself--the viewer. This peculiar relay of
identification and desire strikes me as all too
familiar, another of those decadent loops through
the exotic that replenishes the metropolitan
subject via the diminishment of a racially, or
sexually, marked other. This is what Brooks has to
say about this sexual detour: The incident might have given
Gauguin an occasion to cast doubt on his
unproblematic opposition of civilisation and the
primitive and to reflect on his need for a
tropology of Tahitian bodies in order to rework
critically a European tradition. But he doesn't in
Noa Noa achieve this kind of
self-reflexiveness, resolving the incident instead
in a moment of male bonding with his Tahitian
friend and the claim that he has recovered radical
innocence. Gauguin is interested in a polymorphous
bodiliness, but when it comes to foregrounding,
touching, and representing a body, it must be
clearly gendered as female, albeit a female body
that breaks from the traditional Western sense of
female gracefulness, that is more powerful and
compact, less distinct from the male. . . . The
passage from Noa Noa becomes virtually an
allegory of a large cultural need to centre
discourse of the body exclusively on the female
body, as if the male body and the temptation of
androgyny were too dangerous to handle. This
cultural movement may in some sense justify the
slippage in my own discussion of the Tahitian body
toward exclusively female
objects.16
Since Gauguin's interest in framing the
polymorphous body confines itself to female
subjects, which is itself a culturally determined
manoeuvre, Brooks will also decline the dubious
invitation the male body extends and restrict his
own discussion to Gauguin's representation of
women. In both the passage from Noa Noa, and
the commentary on it, the male body, as an object
available to a pleasured look, shimmers briefly on
the visual (and sexual) horizon, only to fade from
view as our writers avert their eyes. Blind [9] If we consider what is here too blinding to
look upon, we discover another way in which Brooks'
passage might be said to repeat Gauguin's
"slippage." Both text and commentary seem to be
teasingly structured around "homoerotic
temptation." Brooks' entire discussion of this
passage is caged in negatives and casual
qualifiers; it appears as the discussion he will
not provide. "One could no doubt analyse this
passage at some length, perhaps especially for the
ambivalences . . . it displays," he writes, as if
that would be a somehow tedious or predictable
interpretative byway down which to travel. But,
strangely, his testimony that the male body as
trope is culturally too hot to handle is belied by
the analysis he does engage in; indeed, Brooks is
rather eloquent, almost loquacious about the male
body and its engendering of sexual ambivalence and
disavowal. He pretends not to know, or not to be
interested in, a subject about which, all the same,
he has quite a lot to say. Why the critical ruse?
It strikes me that the "homoerotic temptation"
functions in both the Gauguin and the Brooks as a
kind of erotic or critical lever but that where in
Gauguin it triggered a well-rehearsed errancy, that
tired shuffle toward and swerve away from the
perverse, it is under a different sort of pressure
in Brooks' writing. He refuses to substitute
"homosexual" for "homoerotic," ringing in an
"interior . . . bisexuality" before arriving at the
palliative "temptation to androgyny," but he
neglects to say anything about that refusal.
Written one hundred years apart both text and
commentary seem to share the same open secret: it
goes without saying that homosexuality is the
repudiated act in Noa Noa, and the
repudiated term in Brooks' analysis. [10] Brooks is content to follow Gauguin's lead
and maintain androgyny as the trope through which
this arousal must be thought. But androgyny as
sexual trope has a way of obscuring as much as it
reveals, it tends to reconfigure patterns of sexual
difference onto a strictly gendered grid. It is
probably worth recalling that Gauguin, after all,
is in no doubt as to the gender of the native
figure he follows through the fragrant jungle, and
nor are we as readers. Furthermore, if, as he pants
up that lurid hillside, he is subject to a sexual
swoon the poles he sways between are not male and
female but domination and submission--which is what
Brooks began by saying although he never returns to
this. Initially subtle, Brooks' analysis finally
refuses to follow what we might call the
sodomitical figurings in Gauguin's writing as they
suggest the troublesome penetrability of bodies,
male as well as
female.17
Brooks assumes that refocussing his analysis on the
female body might allow him to continue to sidestep
any inquiry into the relation between (sexual)
power and visibility, whereas what we will find
when we turn to Manao Tupapau is that once
again the abandoning of the security of frontality
implicates the viewer in the posture of perversion,
and furthermore, that the primitivist invitation to
sodomy can only safely be extended across the
availability of women, thus guarding or preserving
the imagined impenetrability of the male. Behindsight [11] Perhaps then we should return to the
passage from Noa Noa and take the time to
state the obvious: the thing that sets in train
this display of, in Brooks' term, "ambivalences" is
the mere apprehension of a figure viewed--as Freud
might say--a tergo, from behind. Hal
Foster's analysis of the woodcutting episode
latches onto this tropical rearview and finds in it
a primitivist sexual genesis, or "primal scene."
Citing Freud's "association of tribal peoples with
pregenital orders of the drives, especially
oral and anal stages, an association in which
genitality is often correlated with civilisation as
achievements beyond 'the primitive,'" Foster draws
our attention to the way primitivism and
psychoanalysis, emerging in the same historical
moment, share certain narratives of cultural and
sexual arrest: they both figure the tribal, the
feminine, the homosexual, as caught in early phases
of psychic development. The primitivist aesthetic
then privileges these sites as kinds of regressive
destinations, which, once visited, can evidence the
shucking off of the repressions of civilisation.
But, as Foster's analysis unfolds, we recognise
that the primitivist psychic agenda is not without
trauma. In his article, which proposes "to use
Freud and critique him at the same time," Foster
suggests we hold to his conception of stages but
not to its association with tribal peoples. Or,
rather, I will reverse the flow of this
association: for example, to see anality not as the
property of "the primitive" but as the projection
of a particular modern subjectivity onto "the
primitive." The question then becomes not what is
"primitive anality" but why is it projected as
such--out of what desires and
fears?18
Reading through the lens of Freud's analysis of
the Wolf Man, Foster argues that the "ambivalence"
foregrounded in the encounter recalled by Gauguin
in Noa Noa is related to the doubled
phantasmatics of anality whereby the traumatic
recognition that sexual difference is founded
through castration is disavowed by a dual
identification with agents of penetration and
receptivity. The Wolf Man provides the model of a
"primitive" subject who "when faced with a
castrative threat or genital crisis" regresses "to
a pregenital order, in which the subject oscillates
between an anal eroticism, a passive
masochistic mode (associated, as usual in Freud,
with the feminine and the homosexual), and its
active complement, an anal sadism--an
oscillation expressive of a great ambivalence of
psychosexual
position."19
Thus for Foster the primitivist project, while
working a kind of imperialist renewal, at the same
time bears witness to the "crisis of white
heterosexual
masculinity"20
at the core of the primitivist encounter;
consequently, in his unravelling of the skeins of
identification and desire that tangle across scenes
such as the woodcutting episode he repeatedly
reminds us not to "mistake the desire for mastery
for the real
thing."21
The ambivalences he locates in scenes from Gauguin
and Picasso are both performative or staged and
somehow real or spontaneous: In these scenes, then, artists like
Gauguin and Picasso tease out identity in terms
that are both psychical and artistic, and they do
so at a time when bodies and psyches were
transformed by imperialist encounters and
industrialist techniques alike. Again and again
they map racial onto sexual difference and vice
versa in a conundrum of oppositions of black and
white, female and male, nature and culture, passive
and active, homosexual and heterosexual. However,
since ambivalence governs these mappings--since
"the primitive" both attracts and repels these
artists, since they both desire and identify with
it--such oppositions are pressured to the point
where they begin to falter, where the white
heterosexual masculinity founded on them begins to
crack.22
But just as these fissures in the psychic
foundations of "white heterosexual masculinity"
appear, Foster, in a move familiar to us from
Solomon-Godeau, stresses the soundness of their
historical support: "However," he writes, "to
underscore the fragility of primitivist mastery,
its basis in desire and fantasy, is not to diminish
its actuality, the reality of power relations and
domination effects in the imperialist encounter."
23
What then, we have to ask ourselves,
is the relation of primitivist ambivalence
to colonial power? [12] Foster seems aware that his analysis has
reached some dead-end at this point, though a few
pages later we find him putting the question a
little differently. The simpler version goes like
this: "How does one specify ambivalence in
the work of art? Is it somehow immanent in the
image or only activated in its
address?"24
As Foster reflects, the difficulty lies in trying
to answer that question without either
pathologising the artist or psychologising the art.
In an attempt to wrestle with that question I would
like to look at a particular painting of Gauguin's
from late 1892, Manao Tupapau, but like
Brooks and Foster before me, I want to loop that
discussion through an episode recounted in Noa
Noa. Copy [13] Given that contemporary art criticism has
paid such attention to the European and Oriental
sources from which Gauguin's Polynesian studies can
be seen to derive--those flat Japanese prints and
scrolling Greek friezes--it is probably worth
noting that, according to the artist himself, the
reproductions cluttering his Tahitian studio were,
in 1891, already the subject of an intense, though
less academic, scrutiny. Early in Noa Noa,
Gauguin relates an incident wherein he watches, and
surreptitiously sketches, an unnamed native woman
as she browses through his eclectic collection.
Putting aside "some religious paintings by the
Italian primitives," the woman's surveying
curiosity eventually snags on a more secular
subject, Manet's Olympia (figure 2): She looked with particular interest
at a photograph of Manet's Olympia. With the words
I had already learned in that language . . . I
questioned her. She told me this Olympia was truly
beautiful: I smiled at that opinion and was moved
by it. She had the sense of the beautiful. . . .
She added, all of a sudden, breaking the silence
that presides over a thought: "It's your wife."
"Yes," I lied. Me, the tane of Olympia!
(21) Immediately and urgently he presses his visitor
to model for him; outraged at the suggestion she
storms out leaving Gauguin to sulk in the cold
draught of her departure. But the depression
induced by this refusal is short-lived, "An hour
later she came back in a beautiful dress" and, the
story goes, sits for a portrait. That his
feint--he the lover of Olympia!--be answered
by hers, that his request be met with outright
denial then unspoken consent, seems to be what
pleases Gauguin in this transaction; it yields an
encounter between Polynesian and European replete
with thwarted desire, cross-identification, and
flickering jealousy, on both sides. Without making
too much of this, perhaps we might pause and ask
ourselves why this little scene of caprice and
arousal should be played out over this particular
cultural icon? [14] In the year of his departure to the South
Seas, Gauguin spent eight days before Manet's
painting in the Musée du Luxembourg in an
untypical act of reverence, producing a copy which
would eventually find its way into Degas' private
collection (figure 3).
The scandal that erupted at
the first public showing of Olympia is
well-known to anyone who has read T. J. Clark's
The Painting of Modern Life. I mention
Clark's book to recall his thesis about the
contradictory nature of capitalism's investment in
female sexuality and the slippery aesthetics such
contradiction implies, and, more particularly, his
discussion of Manet's "disarticulated" rendering of
the model's body. The features of Olympia
[15] In Clark's argument the construal of
Olympia as naked rather than nude turns on this
disarticulation of the female form: There is a lack of articulation
here. On its own it is not too disconcerting, and
in a sense it tallies well with the conventions of
the nude, where the body is offered . . . as just
this kind of infinite territory, uncorseted and
full, on which the spectator is free to impose his
imaginary definitions. But the odd thing in
Olympia's case is the way this uncertainty is
bounded, or interrupted, by the hard edges and the
cursive grey. The body is in part tied down
by drawing, held in place quite harshly--by the
hand, the black bootlace round the neck, the lines
of charcoal shadow. . . It is as if the painter welcomes disparity and
makes a system of it; as if the picture proposes
inconsistencies, of a curiously unrelieved
kind--left without excuse or mediation--as the best
sort of truth when the subject is
nakedness.26
Manet's aesthetic, Clark argues, emerges as
modernity writes itself across the sexual body.
When the social relations of mass culture mark
women with the signature of class, Olympia is, and
is seen to be, a working girl: she is prostitute
not courtesan. The self-evident femininity of the
nude has been compromised, dismantled and replaced
by a cold circuit of signs, all of which
contributes to the incoherence of the viewing
position that the work, historically, implies. When
the look of the viewer meets this recalcitrant
female object, one capable of a stare saturated
with its own desires and demands, the terms of
consensuality that the nude mystifies become open
to cynical wrangling: Olympia . . . looks out at the
viewer in a way which obliges him to imagine a
whole fabric of sociality in which this look might
make sense and include him--a fabric of offers,
places, payments, particular powers, and status
which is still open to negotiation. If all of that
is held in mind, the viewer might have access to
Olympia; but clearly it would no longer be access
to a
nude.27
Once the viewer's look is returned in this way
the scopic field of the painting is defined as that
charged zone across which gazes may lock and
challenge the immunity of vision. The imaginary
plenitude of the nude has been eclipsed by an
insufficiency which touches both object and viewer;
the sovereignty of sight is no longer unassailable.
The critical hysteria that greeted the unveiling of
Olympia is a symptom of this radical
incoherence--the ways of seeing she assigns her
audience are deeply fraught: to the Parisian public
she is cadaver, insult,
whore.28
[16] Clark's analysis traces the enunciative
address of Manet's painting as it functions in its
historical moment; we hardly need reminding--or do
we?--that the incoherence assigned Olympia's
contemporaneous viewer is no longer assigned us.
Signs of that incoherence might remain coded in the
formal innovations and radical iconographics of the
work but as viewers, here and now, we are adequate
to the canvas differently. I want to suggest that,
as an interpreter of Manet, Paul Gauguin comes near
to Clark. In Manao Tupapau, Gauguin's
Tahitian rephrasing of Olympia, the position
of the viewing subject is also a stigmatised one,
with its incoherence marked out in a specifically
primitivist register. Roll [17] Produced in 1892, a world away from the
original but with that photograph somewhere to
hand, much of the disposition of Manao
Tupapau (figure 5) is citation of the Manet. We
might think of those hands as deriving directly
from the 1865 canvas, but more than that we
recognise the way the curves of the body are
deliberately broken--legs cross, elbows bend; its
outlines against the pale sheet are also the same,
heavily scored, where those of the face are slub;
similarly the fall of the back seems vaguely
defined--the spine and left shoulder blade won't
compose readily and the play of light on the cleft
of the buttocks and the right hip and shoulder seem
to throw the small of the back out as though the
torso were awkwardly twisted; then there is the way
the body tilts or slides off the plane of the bed
into a different vertical as though there is a
slightly shonky perspective at work here that is
capable of altering the spatial depth of the
painting. [18] Where this presentation of the reclining
female most obviously departs from Manet's is that
Gauguin's native model, Teha'amana, is splayed
belly down; it is as though the Parisian original
has been brazenly rotated and turned onto its
flipside. Gauguin's account of the inception of
this painting has--as he intended--been overly
useful in unravelling its Polynesian symbolics, but
his comments might rather be read as giving clues
to a European imaginary. In a letter to his Danish
wife, Mette, in which he instructs her in the
promotion of his Tahitian work, Gauguin writes:
I am going to give you an
explanation of the most difficult [canvas] , which,
in fact, is the one I want to keep--or sell for a
very good price; the Manao Tupapau. I did a
nude of a young girl. In that position a mere hint
and it is indecent. Yet that is the way I want it,
the lines and the movement interest me. So when I
do the head I put in a little fear. For this fear I
have to give a pretext, if not an explanation, and
it has to be in keeping with the character of the
person, a Maori girl. The Maoris have a very great,
traditional fear of the spirit of the dead. A girl
from our own part of the world would be afraid of
being caught in that position (women here not at
all).29
And again, in the notebook he dedicated to his
daughter Aline, he returns to the "indecency" of
the painting: In this rather daring position,
quite naked on a bed, what might a young Kanaka
girl be doing? Preparing for love? This is indeed
in her character, but it is indecent and I do not
want that. Sleeping, after the act of love? But
that is still indecent. The only possible thing is
fear. What kind of fear? Certainly not the fear of
Susannah surprised by the Elders. That does not
happen in Oceania. The tupapau [spirit of
the dead] is just the thing. . . . According to
Tahitian beliefs, the title Manao Tupapau
has a double meaning . . . either she thinks of the
ghost or the ghost thinks of her. To recapitulate:
Musical part--undulating horizontal
lines--harmonies in orange and blue linked by
yellows and violets, from which they derive. The
light and the greenish sparks. Literary part--the
spirit of a living girl linked with the spirit of
Death. Night and
day.30
He then adds the sneering coda, "This genesis is
written for those who always have to know the whys
and wherefores. Otherwise the picture is simply a
study of a Polynesian nude." In both accounts the
carefully laid signifier of indigenous meaning, the
spectre of the dead, is a blind, a false trail or
literary device leading away from where Gauguin
locates the perversity of this painting--in the
posture of the girl. It is as though the scandal of
the pose for the European requires a cultural
alibi, hence the iconographic resort to native
fear. What happens then if we refuse the lure of
that false lead and wrench discussion of Manao
Tupapau away from speculation about the
nocturnal imaginings of the native girl toward
those of her
viewer?31
Rearvision [19] If we return to Manao Tupapau and
consider both the position of the girl on the bed,
and the positionality of the viewer then we can say
that if this painting configures a peculiar erotics
it is an erotics from the back not of the back: the
figure on the bed--like the young man moving
through the jungle in Noa Noa--is viewed by
someone standing behind her. This becomes clearer
if we consider the different vantage provided by a
later reworking of the same pose in a small pastel
Gauguin produced in Paris in 1895 of his Javanese
mistress, Annah (figure 6).
[20] The viewer of the bedded figure in Manao
Tupapau is situated otherwise. The figure in
the smaller pastel lies stable on a near
horizontal, but the angled legs of the earlier nude
accentuate a diagonal rise which the viewer's look
must follow, encroaching upwards along the prone
body towards that strangely obscured face and
irresolute stare. This positions the watcher at the
foot of the bed, precisely aligned with the watcher
in painted space--the spectre of the dead. Once
this connection has been made, once we recognise
that our viewpoint aligns with that of the totemic
head, it is as though the scene is also transected
on another axis across the foot of the bed. The
effect the drawing of this imaginary line has is to
further swivel the girl on the bed; it presents her
more from behind than from the side, exaggerating
the awkwardness of that pose. She is presented a
tergo or penetrable from behind. It is as
though none of the co-ordinates in the picture
plane are reliable and, in Peter Brooks' phrase,
the girl on the bed starts "slipping forward toward
the frontal plane of the canvas in a way that
challenges the traditional space--and posture of
dominance--of the spectator," as she has been
threatening to do all
along.33
[21] The immunity of the viewing position is
further weakened once that alignment between the
position of the watcher and that of the death's
head has been drawn. If we look closer at that
figure, we see, locked in its profiled head, a
frontal eye. That frontal eye, floating in the
confusing depths of the virtual background but also
level on the flat of the picture plane, watches
over the viewer as much as, the French title tells
us, the spectre watches over her. The viewer, we
might say, has become locked in a gaze across the
scopic field. The spectator's vision is crossed by
that weird gaze; the visual pleasure taken in the
girl on the bed and her "perverse" posture is
placed under surveillance, its intention subject to
a kind of censorship, or crossing. Hesitation [22] I find myself hesitating here; I realise I
am on the brink of taking the terms Gauguin has
offered me in going on to describe that
surveillance as "native," which would suggest that
the "Tahitian belief" and "traditional fear" so
arrogantly invoked in the letter to Mette--the
"pretext" that would be "just the thing" to up the
value of the painting--has returned to haunt the
viewer. If so, Maori superstition exceeds European
gallery economics and reaches outside the frame of
the painting to contaminate and disrupt the
impunity of the colonial viewing position. The
false hermeneutic, the one Gauguin cynically
dangles before his European buyers, might then
speak the truth, and make an unexpected return so
that the "double meaning" of the Tahitian title be
rendered: either he thinks of the ghost or the
ghost thinks of him. [23] What stays me from doing that is that I
know it is a set up: Gauguin has plotted that
crossing. In another passage from Noa Noa,
Gauguin recalls the genesis of this particular
painting: One day I had to go to Papeete. I
had promised to come back that same evening. On the
way back the carriage broke down half way: I had to
do the rest on foot. It was one in the morning when
I got home. Having at that moment very little oil
in the house . . . the lamp had gone out, and the
room was in darkness when I went in. I felt afraid
and, more still, mistrustful. Surely the bird has
flown. I struck matches and saw on the bed
motionless, naked, lying face down on the bed, her
eyes immeasurably larger from fear, [Tehamana]
looked at me and seemed not to know me. I too was
caught for several moments by a strange feeling of
uncertainty. [Tehamana] 's terror was contagious. I
had the illusion that a phosphorescent light was
streaming from her staring eyes. Never had I seen
her so beautiful, so frighteningly beautiful
(37-8). In narrativising the undoing of the male voyeur
in the cross-cultural contact zone, in entangling
him instead in primitivist perversion, Gauguin
sketches a rudimentary theory of colonial
contagion. The certainty of Western technological
know-how is undermined in the native locale, washed
over by other ghostly illuminations, and it is this
contaminatory logic that the painting formally
inscribes. We might pause to consider that
Gauguin's painting records what Foster would call
"primitivist ambivalence" with all the efficiency
of a stereoscope--it is technically able to present
two images as
one.34
Manao Tupapau conflates the native and the
sodomitically perverse, it stages an interference
between European regression and indigenous truth in
an inescapably formalist register. Gauguin's
decorative experiments with the flat of the picture
plane keep flicking us between primitivist
alternatives--perversion and tapu, say--in a
kind of optical
switchback.35
Therein, perhaps, lies the attraction and menace of
this painting. If, in its representation of a
primitivist scopic field, it revises the space of
observation and structures a gaze that invades the
seamlessness of looking, if it unsettles
vision--and hermeneutics--with hesitations and
anxieties, with ambivalent doublings, it also
suggests the impossibility of ever falling outside
that scene. In so far as Manao Tupapau
deploys the blank enunciative address of modernism,
it installs the position of the viewing subject as
permanently recruitable to a primitivist thematics.
It can replay, and replay, and replay again, the
ambivalent falterings of colonial discourse within
the privileged space of the artwork's frame. In
this way Gauguin's rearwindow draws blinds against
the intrusive gaze of the historical viewer. [24] Brooks attaches a very specific
interpretation to Gauguin's representation of the
reclining figure in Manao Tupapau. He
suggests that the precariously rear presentation of
the woman, and the "animality" Gauguin wants it to
suggest, erases the conventional dominance of the
viewer in relation to the female subject by
implicating him in an economy of gift: Like the body of Olympia,
that in Manao Tupapau is offered to the
spectator's gaze, though not frontally this time,
rather in a pose that refuses to be a pose, refuses
the sense of self-display that one finds in
Olympia and the distinct impression given by
Manet's girl that she is available, for a price.
Gauguin's nude is also available, but in a more
unselfconscious way and without connotations of
venality. As an Olympia turned over, the
nude of Manao Tupapau may suggest a
comment on the problematics of penetrability and
impenetrability posed by Gauguin--may suggest, to
use his term, a greater "animality" than that
evoked by the classic poses of the nude. The naked female form . . . is offered to our
gaze in such a way that its nakedness, conceived as
natural to the woman herself, is made a natural,
right object of vision, without overtones of sin or
commerce. . . . In contrast to the attributes of
Olympia that betoken the women's exchange
value . . . those of Manao Tupapau suggest
an economy of the gift, as it would be defined by
Marcel Mauss: the free and generous offering which
must be responded to by a corresponding gift--which
may here be the painting itself. And the gift of
the potlatch, as Georges Bataille points
out, is related to the creation of sacred objects:
objects that have no use value, that belong, not to
an economy of exchange and accumulation, but to an
economy of waste, glorious expenditure. Gauguin,
one might say, is attempting to reach back beyond
the economy of exchange to that of the gift--as it
were, denying Wallis's version of Tahiti in order
to resurrect Bougainville's
vision.36
Brooks' interpretation seems to me to raise
several questions. It endorses the primitivist
project but only as it avails itself of the
mechanism of the female body. The relation between
the exaggeration of the a tergo posture and
an economy of waste allows "animality" to stand in
this reading where "anality" does in Foster's. The
sodomitical invitation that was refused in the
scene from Noa Noa thus stages a return in
Manao Tupapau, only now the rear
penetrability of the native figure is extravagantly
indulged, leaving as it does the "sacred"
impenetrability of the male intact. Sodomitical
imaginings are thus rendered safe as they play
across the several availabilities, genital and
anal, of the female
body.37
Coda [25] Before I leave Gauguin I would like to
reference a final painting. Presented here as a
diptych, the two images that comprise figure 7 are
reverse sides of a single canvas. On the recto
appears a self-portrait of the artist in a hat, in
which Manao Tupapau, reversed, in a squared
yellow frame, takes up the high right background;
on the verso, a full-face portrait of Gauguin's
friend, William Molard, who lived in the apartment
above Te Faruru, the artist's studio at 6
rue Vercingétroix, and with whose teenage
step-daughter, Judith, Gauguin established a sexual
liaison even as he lived with his Javanese mistress
below. Brettell tells us that Gauguin "gave Molard
this two-sided canvas as a sign of his friendship
and gratitude." Perhaps, then, this is the
structure of the painting as gift: it figures as
part of an affectional exchange between men which,
even as it avails itself of tropes of perversion
and reversal, must guard against the confusion with
homosexuality and thus revives that strained though
necessary alibi, the rearwardly prone body of a
girl.38
Notes 1. Abigail Solomon-Godeau,
"Going Native," Art in America, 77.7 (July
1989): 123-4. This statement is preliminary to a
predictable--though problematic--conflation of the
imagined and the real: "On one level, what is
enacted is a violent history of colonial possession
and cultural dispossession--real power over real
bodies. On another level, this encounter will be
endlessly elaborated within a shadow world of
representations--a question of imaginary power over
imaginary bodies" (124). Peter Brooks, in
"Gauguin's Tahitian Body," Yale Journal of
Criticism 3.2 (1990): 51-89, both endorses
Solomon-Godeau's analysis and objects to it on the
grounds that "such a claim does not do justice to
the disruptive, interrogative force of Tahitian
sexuality in Western discourse" (64).
back 2. Griselda Pollock,
Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888-1893: Gender and the
Color of Art History (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1992), 8. back 3. Craig Saper, "A Nervous
Theory: The Troubling Gaze of Psychoanalysis in
Media Studies," Diacritics 21.4 (1991):
33-52. back 4. Solomon-Godeau, 125,
original brackets. back 5. Kaja Silverman, Male
Subjectivity at the Margins (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 152. In effect I wish to subvert
the scopic paradigm that Solomon-Godeau and Pollock
rely on, suggesting instead the inability of the
look to reach or subjugate its object. As Kaja
Silverman writes, "since the gaze always emerges
for us within the field of vision, and since we
ourselves are always being watched by it as we
look, all binarisations of spectator and spectacle
mystify the scopic relations in which we are held."
(151). back 6. For the description of
the interior of Gauguin's studio, see Richard
Brettell, "The Return to France" in The Art of
Paul Gauguin, ed. Richard Brettell,
Françoise Cachin, Claire
Frèches-Thory and Charles F. Stuckey
(Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1988), 301.
back 7. Gavan Daws, A Dream of
Islands: Voyages of Self-discovery in the South
Seas (Milton, Queensland: The Jacaranda Press,
1980), 261. Gavan Daws argues that "Gauguin's
filthy Port Said pictures were displayed at Maison
du Jouir specifically to ward off respectability"
and succeeded in offending his compatriots, the
priests and sisters of the French Catholic mission,
while being received with indifference by his
Marquesan neighbours (263). In a letter home,
Gauguin writes of their Marquesan reception: Men, women and children, almost
everyone laughed at them. The only people who did
not come to my house were the self-styled
respectables, and they were the only ones who
thought about them all year long. . . . Meditate on
that and nail an indecency prominently over your
door; from that time on you will be untroubled by
respectable folk, the most insupportable people
that God ever made (quoted in Daws, 263). As is well known, Gauguin's interest in
Polynesia was inspired by the artificial villages
and huts displayed at the 1889 Universal Exhibition
in Paris. The aching nostalgia at the heart of the
primitivist enterprise maps seamlessly with
capitalism's touristic trajectory.
back 8. Christopher Bongie,
Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the
Fin de Siècle (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991). Pollock makes a similar
point when she writes: The pre-modern or the non-modern
cannot be conserved in the midst of the modern.
That is the tourist fantasy of the trip to the
South Pacific. The reality is that anything the
Europeans have touched is contaminated by their
money and disciplined by their gaze, imprinted with
their power, and shaped by their desire. At this
point, where tourism rides on colonialism, and art
circulates on the latter's ships, we can see the
over-determined conjuncture of cultural and sexual
difference, and their mutual interface: sex and
race at the heart of capitalism's imperial process
(Pollock, 72). back 9. See note 1.
back 10. Hal Foster,
"'Primitive' Scenes," Critical Inquiry 20
(1993): 69-102. back 11. Gauguin's text was
modelled after Eugène Delacroix's North
African journal. Eugène Delacroix, The
Journal of Eugène Delacroix, trans.
Walter Pach (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1980).
back 12. Paul Gauguin, Noa
Noa: Gauguin's Tahiti, ed. Nicholas Wadley,
trans. Jonathan Griffin (Oxford: Phaidon, 1985).
Wadley's edition is the source of the facsimile
reproduction from the so-called Louvre manuscript
of 1893/7 which appears as figure 1. According to
Wadley, the Louvre manuscript is "an enlarged
version of the original text as redrafted by
Gauguin's collaborator, the poet Charles Morice. .
. . Gauguin's illustrations were partly made when
he first copied out the text, but some were added
some time later, back in Tahiti" (Wadley,
"Introduction" to Noa Noa, 7). When thinking
about the relevance of this image to its narrative
framing, Wadley considers the upper image of a lovemaking
couple . . . unusual because figures in Gauguin's
paintings seldom touch each other, let alone
embrace. It is an image of great charm, both in its
guilt-free simplicity and in the translucent bloom
of its colour. The lower image . . . in its
enclosure and self-concealment . . . poses a
complete contrast to the image above, in form, mood
and meaning. He concludes: The upper image is one of innocence,
the lower of a grown woman in a foetal position. .
. . The radiant combination of eroticism and
innocence in the lovemaking image and its contrast
with the opaque gloom and inertia of the other also
anticipate the confusion of feelings that Gauguin
tries to express later in the incident, involving
shades of innocence, love, lust and shame. Finally,
the placing of the couple inside the heraldic leaf,
as if they were the flower, may be related to the
story's theme of primitive man's oneness with
nature, as well as to the theme of fragrance,
Noa Noa (Wadley, "Introduction" to Noa
Noa, 145). References to Gauguin's text will be cited
parenthetically. back 13. Wadley, "Introduction"
to Noa Noa, 145. back
14. On the androgyny of the
savage, Gauguin made the following notes in his
manuscript: 1 The androgynous aspect of the
savage, the slight difference of sex among
animals-- 2 The purity of thought associated with the
sight of naked bodies and the relaxed behaviour
between the two sexes-- Vice unknown among the savages-- Desire to be for a moment weak, a woman . . .
(74, n. 42). back 15. Brooks, 67.
back 16. Ibid.
back 17. My adjectival usage of
"sodomitical" here follows Lee Edelman who analyses
"the disturbance of positionality" generated around
male-male sodomitical scenes in his
Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and
Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994),
183. The panicky confusion that Edelman argues
assails the witness to such scenes does not proceed
only from the literal positions taken up by
sodomites but more fundamentally from the fact that
these poses are figural condensations of a whole
raft of consequently disordered relations between
front and back, before and after, male and female,
homosexual and heterosexual. The scandalous
possibility of the (male) anus as a site of sexual
pleasure disrupts that psychoanalytic narrative
which secures heterosexuality through a positing of
masculinity and femininity as the temporal
consequences of the gendered resolution of the
little boy and little girl's oedipal crises,
differently rendered as each is in the promise of
phallicism and the threat of castration. As Edelman
argues, what is legible in the sodomitical scene is
"its repudiation of the binary logic implicit in
male heterosexualisation" and "its all too
visible dismissal of the threat on which the
terroristic empire of male heterosexuality has so
effectively been erected" (Edelman, 185, original
emphasis). back 18. Foster, 72.
back 19. For Foster's account of
the Wolfman's sexual ambivalence, see Foster, 76-7.
back 20. Ibid., 102
back 21. Ibid., 80
back 22. Ibid., 75-6. According
to Foster, these scenes of primitivist encounter,
and the insecurities or anxieties they map, have
historical precedents in the exoticist tradition. Often in
Orientalist art . . . racial others, male and
female, are presented as passive, available to the
masculinist viewer. A colonialist gaze seems to
double a sexual gaze in a vision of masculinist
mastery. But here too the viewer may not be so
secure; would it require such representation if it
were (81)? back 23. Ibid., 76.
back 24. Ibid., 79.
back 25. T. J. Clark, The
Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet
and his Followers (Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1984), 134.
back 26. Ibid., 134-5. Consider
as well Clark's summary statement of his thesis:
Reduced to its most simple form,
this . . . argument amounts to saying that the sign
of class in Olympia was nakedness. That may
still seem a cryptic formula, so I shall redefine
its terms . . . Class is a name, I take it, for
that complex and determinate place we are given in
the social body; it is the name for everything
which signifies that a certain history lives us,
lends us our individuality. By nakedness I mean
those signs--that broken, interminable
circuit--which say we are nowhere but in a body,
constructed by it, by the way it incorporates the
signs of other people. (Nudity, on the contrary, is
a set of signs for the belief that our body is
ours, a great generality that we make our own,
or leave in art in the abstract.) It follows that nakedness is a strong sign of
class, a dangerous instance of it. And thus the
critics' reaction in 1865 becomes more
comprehensible. They were perplexed by the fact
that Olympia's class was nowhere but in her body:
the cat, the Negress, the orchid, the bunch of
flowers, the slippers, the pearl earrings, the
choker, the screen, the shawl--they were all lures,
they meant nothing, or nothing in particular. The
naked body did without them in the end and did its
own narrating (Clark, 146).
back 27. Ibid., 133.
back 28. For Clark on the
contemporary response to Olympia, see The
Painting of Modern Life, 79-89.
back 29. Paul Gauguin, letter of
8 December 1892 (Letter 134), quoted in Claire
Frèches-Thory, catalogue note 154, "Manao
Tupapau," in The Art of Paul Gauguin,
281. back 30. Ibid., 281.
back 31. Pollock is also
interested in the model's posture which she reads
as discomforting the artist but, scarcely before
she has been able to credit that anxiety to
Gauguin, she comes to inhabit it herself. For
Pollock, the prospect of a tergo sex becomes
the very index of a masculinist European depravity
that brooks no possibility of a Tahitian feminine
subjectivity. If, in her argument, the scandal of
the painting initially resides with Gauguin, it
quickly makes an odd shift to the scandal of a
tergo sex itself. Whose scandal is that? Gauguin's choice of posture for his
model . . . evidently caused the artist anxiety.
What else is the letter to Mette Gauguin than a
worried attempt to pre-empt criticism, already
registering the shock of that display of a
vulnerable body, its invitation to a tergo
sex? The artist Gauguin so admired, Degas, at least
never exhibited his comparable fantasies. . . . Any
possible sensibility on the part of the Tahitian
woman is sacrificed to that urgency, the aesthetic
gambits of the European male avant-garde. Her body is appropriated to signify his desire
as white man and artist. Any thought about
Teha'amana' the Tahitian woman as subject--as a
historically constituted and culturally specific
feminine subjectivity--falls under his erasure.
Like Fanon's experience of being seen, and thus
seeing himself, in the mirror of white perception,
she is re-presented to herself as object, her
Tahitian and female body spattered with his
coloration, his fantasy, his historical practice of
"sexuality." The moment of production of this painting, the
condition of its possibility, are those of the
modernity of the West. It is a European man
looking. Under that gaze and the desire it writes
upon the body of the woman bought to service the
artist in bed and on it, Tahiti is but a dead
phantom evoked by Gauguin to muddle and confuse, an
alibi which does not wash (Pollock, 70-1).
back 32. In The Art of Paul
Gauguin, Richard Brettell finds gender
differently distributed across these two works.
Comparing the pastel to Manao Tupapau, he
writes: Again, the differences between the
pastel of Annah . . . and the painting of the
reclining Tehamana are striking. In the earlier
work, the model has just been awakened, and looks,
startled, at the viewer; in the pastel, her eyes
are closed and we watch her sleep. The Tahitian
woman is sturdily proportioned, with broad legs and
strong arms; Annah is thin, her visible arm almost
withered, her legs unaccustomed to exercise. Even
the hands and feet contrast, with the Tahitian's
almost dominating the body and Annah's either
hidden or summarily rendered. Gauguin's
representation of Annah in the pose of Tehamana
presupposes no spirits of the dead; rather, it is a
gentle evocation of sleep, recalling in a distant
way Gauguin's own early painting of a sleeping
child. It is perhaps worth noting the androgynous
quality of the figure [Annah] . Without the wisp of
hair, the nearly invisible earring, and the gentle
swelling of the chest, one could almost imagine
that the model was male. Even Tehamana, who could
scarcely be called archetypically feminine,
projects her sexual identity more strongly in the
painting Manao Tupapau. The very inaccessibility of
Annah is part of the mystery of this haunting
drawing. She is utterly vulnerable, yet, unlike
Tehamana, unaware of her viewer. She is alone, her
thoughts encased in dreams (Brettell, "Reclining
Nude," 309). Gauguin himself had much to say on the
androgynous aspect of Polynesian bodies: What distinguishes the Maori women
from all other women, and often makes one mistake
her for a man, is the proportion of the body. A
Diana of the chase, with large shoulders and narrow
hips. However thin one of these women's arms may
be, the bony structure is unobtrusive; it is supple
and pretty in its lines. . . . In the Oriental and
especially the Maori woman, the leg from the hip to
foot offers a pretty, straight line. The thigh is
very heavy but not wide, which makes it round and
avoids that spreading which gives to so many women
in our country the appearance of a pair of tongs
(Paul Gauguin, The Intimate Journals of
Paul Gauguin, [Melbourne: Heinemann, 1953] ,
96). back 33. Brooks, "Gauguin's
Tahitian Body," 70. Brooks' very different
interpretation of this swivelling posture will be
discussed shortly. back 34. By "stereoscope," I
refer here to the effect of what are frequently
called 3-D images which, when moved before the
viewer, alter and recompose themselves according to
the separate images whose superimposition makes up
the whole. The ones I have in mind most clearly
have religious themes; encoded in kitsch postcards,
they might depict a sacred-hearted Christ
crucified, but shift the card, or your eye, and Our
Lord's head rises beatifically. The installation
and evasion of prohibition thus enter an
interminably mirrored relation.
back 35. Tapu is the
correct name for the systems of restrictive ban
that fall across Tahitian bodies and their social
practices. For a critique of European
understandings of tapu which focus on the
clean and the unclean, see F. Allan Hanson, "Female
Pollution in Polynesia?," Journal of the
Polynesian Society 91 (1982): 335-81. However,
what Gauguin seems to be installing in his painting
more accurately recalls the notion of an evil eye
which, in the Western tradition, has always been
the figure which oversees borders and the placement
of the thresholds of sexuality and mortality.
Freud's reading of the Medusa's head and the
stiffening effect of the threat and disavowal of
castration comes to mind, of course, but even more
suggestive is Jean-Pierre Verlant's discussion of
the Gorgon. See, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals
and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I.
Zeitlin (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1991). Verlant's reading of Gorgo
allows us to consider that Gauguin's painting
arrests its viewer before the threat of frontality
as well as its remission: This is the context in which to
examine the frontality of Gorgo. The monstrousness
of which we speak is characterised by the fact that
it can only be approached frontally, in a direct
confrontation with the Power that demands that, in
order to see it, one enter into the field of its
fascination and risk losing oneself in it. To see
the Gorgon is to look her in the eyes and, in the
exchange of gazes, to cease to be oneself, a living
being, and to become, like her, a Power of death.
To stare at Gorgo is to lose one's sight in her
eyes and to be transformed into stone, an unseeing,
opaque object. In this face-to-face encounter with frontality,
man puts himself in a position of symmetry with
respect to the god, always remaining centred on his
own axis. . . . In Gorgo's face a kind of doubling process is at
work. Through the effect of fascination, the
onlooker is wrenched away from himself, robbed of
his own gaze, invested as if invaded by that of the
figure facing him, who seizes and possesses him
through the terror its eye and its features
inspire. Possession: to wear a mask means to cease
being oneself and for the duration of the
masquerade to embody the Power from the beyond who
has seized on you and whose face, gestures, and
voice you mimic. The act of doubling the face with
a mask, superimposing the latter on the former so
as to make it unrecognisable, presupposes a
self-alienation, a takeover by the god who puts
bridle and reins on you, and drags you along in his
gallop. As a result, man and god share a
contiguity, an exchange of status that can even
turn into confusion and identification. But in this
very closeness, a violent separation from the self
is also initiated, a projection into radical
alterity, a distancing of the furtherest degree, an
utter disorientation in the midst of intimacy and
contact (Vernant, 137-8).
back 36. Brooks, 70-1.
back 37. The Freudian
connotations of "gift" and its association via
waste with anality can surely not be lost on
Brooks. Foster reads the Manao Tupapau pose,
after the Wolf Man, as "bestial," as representing
an anal sadism which is one of the poles to which
primitivist ambivalence swings in order to disavow
any pull towards that other pole, an anal eroticism
assumed in oneself through pleasures thought
passive or masochistic. Foster writes: To cast these racial, sexual, and
social others in anal modes and bestial poses is
indeed to reduce women to nature in a pictorial act
of gender subjugation, as decried by feminist
critics. . . . But is an image like [Manao
Tupapau] a pure expression of masculinist
mastery, or is it not also a compensatory fantasy
that bespeaks a feared lack of mastery? Does
a masterly subject make such anxiously aggressive
moves, or is there not performed in these images a
fraught ambivalence--performed to be managed,
perhaps, but never completely so (Foster, 79)?
back 38. Françoise
Cachin, catalogue note 164, "Self-portrait with hat
(recto); Portrait of William Molard (verso)," in
The Art of Paul Gauguin, 312. There is
another Gauguin image in which we might find the
vulnerability of the European man. It is a
watercolour, not often reproduced, from one of his
Tahitian workbooks, a self-portrait from behind.
Gauguin stands, in oddly stockinged feet, on the
swollen syphilitic legs that gave him such pain,
before his easel, shorn head so bent over it that
his face is completely obscured. His strangely wide
hips are wrapped in a pareu: the artist a
tergo. See Henri Perruchot, Gauguin, ed.
Jean Ellsmore, trans. Humphrey Hare (London:
Macmillan, 1961), plate 57, "Gauguin at Work:
self-portrait." back LEE WALLACE is a lecturer in Women's
Studies at the University of Auckland. |
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