Gauguin's Paradise Lost by Andersen Wayne

Author:Andersen, Wayne
Format: epub
Publisher: Bookmasters Group

Octave Mirbeau

95. Late nineteenth century Tahiti, two views.

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Pariah’s Progress

If Gauguin’s golden dreams had trumpeted Tahiti as a classic Paradise, then surely his first view of Papeete must have sounded in him the full resonance of Eden’s fall from grace. Perhaps any center of commerce set upon the surface of a natural and self-sufficient landscape becomes tainted by comparison, takes on the nature of a stain or an abrasion upon flesh, and is rued for its presence. Papeete made no pretensions to grace; it resembled a ghost town of the Old West transplanted to a tropical setting, with row upon row of general stores and saloons, low-lying, some constructed of unplastered brick and others of unpainted wood, topped by roofs of corrugated iron. The physical properties of the natives themselves, which might have redeemed the uninspiring landscape, were shrouded beneath tentlike dresses and ankle-length loincloths, in accordance with the standards of decency imposed by the missionaries. At the time of Gauguin’s visit, Calvinist, Catholic, and Mormon missions had been established in Tahiti for decades; the Bible was the only reading matter available in Tahitian at the time, and the natives attended church faithfully every Sunday, understanding little of the doctrine but responding enthusiastically to the stories and parables which informed them that they were children of sin. The pagan gods who had enlivened Tahitian religion and mythology for thousands of years had departed from the scene, perhaps in disgust; nowadays no one knew their names, and sadder still, the primitive forces that activated them had also abdicated. Only in the deepest countryside did the dark forces wield any power in Tahiti; in Papeete, the colonial officials, pompous and overstuffed, held sway over the town’s business in the same way as the missionaries dictated the content of “savage” souls. The imposition of unnatural materials polluted Papeete: iron roofs and cement walls captured the tropical heat and made it unbearable; venereal disease had come like a plague from the European God, as if to remind the natives that their centuries of unhampered sin had not gone unnoticed; imported mores, which acknowledged the existence of sin but insisted that it be labeled and quartered and treated as low life, succeeded in transmuting free love into purchased pleasure. Henry Adams, who had visited Tahiti not long before Gauguin’s arrival, had this to say of Papeete: “The town is different from anything I ever saw in the long catalogue of towns I have met, and has an expression of lost beatitude quite symbolic of Paradise, apart from its inhabitants.”

In the days before the missionaries came Tahiti had lived in the European imagination as an ancient Greece of the South Seas, embodying, in the words of the botanist Joseph Banks, “the Golden Age come again.” Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook on this expedition, wrote that the Tahitian women were the most elegant in the world, their clothing as natural and beautiful as the drapery of a statue, “their bodies … so beautiful that they might even defy the imitation of the chisel of a Phidias or the pencil of an Apelles.

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