Twentieth-Century Man by Christopher Wallace

Author:Christopher Wallace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Beyond Gauguin

Until recently,” Gore Vidal once wrote, “I assumed that most people were like myself.” It was Vidal’s experience, he said, that the Walter Mitty–ish fantasies of youth—imagining oneself to be as dashing as James Bond, say, as adventurous as Robinson Crusoe—that sort of “daydreaming ceases when the real world becomes interesting and reasonably manageable.”

After a close consideration of the enduring appeal of Edgar Rice Burroughs, though, especially the Tarzan books, Vidal had to say, “Now I am not so certain. Pondering the life and success of Burroughs leads one to believe that a good many people find their lives so unsatisfactory that they go right on year after year telling themselves stories in which they are able to dominate their environment in a way that is not possible in this overorganized society.”

When everything gets too crazy, too confusing, too overwhelming, it is our natural tendency to dream about unwinding it all, about a life we might live free from all the concerns that we deal with today in our superconnected, hyperdigital lives. In his idealized man of the jungle, swinging vine to vine, speaking to the birds and the beasts, and summoning all of the strength and wisdom of nature, Burroughs gives us a kind of un-superhero, an elemental masculine avatar we can imagine ourselves to be if only we were not so entangled by the matrix of modernity. Tarzan is who we might be if we weren’t so addicted to social media, tethered to our cubicle desks, working pointless jobs to pay off insurmountable debt. He is man unsullied by civilization, pure, prelapsarian Adam, perfectly at home in the real world—as opposed to the paved, plasticky, preprogrammed, air-conditioned world many of us now inhabit. Tarzan’s jungle is, like the Eden of Genesis, a kind of romanticized national park—sometimes a bit scary and even supernatural, but ultimately as lush and lovely and benign as Kew Gardens in the springtime.

This sort of fetishizing of a semi-mythological, prehistoric nature (and natural man)—the ultimate in “the good old days” imaginings—is what Peter called primitiva, and he both loved it and smirkingly scoffed at it. Of course, we all participate in a little low-grade primitiva-pining these days, from our scenic screensavers of pristine (i.e., untouched by man) landscapes, to the calm, Corona-commercial coastlines of our holiday moodboards. From there, if we were to punch up the aesthetic involvement and personal stakes of our personal Eden imaginings, past the lifestyle influencers draping themselves about the caverns in Petra, say, past even Henri Rousseau, who fetishized the forests of the South Seas and the indigenous peoples of the Americas though he never left his home in France, all the way to the very end of the primitiva spectrum, we would get to Gauguin.

In Gauguin’s Northern, Western Gaze aesthetics, purity and artistic truth become synonymous with primitivity. In his Tahitian pastoral pictures, we see and feel, vividly, that idea of equatorial abundance—this is a land of purity and plenty, we sense, left by a benevolent

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