These facts are not important, and are merely the vague skeleton upon which the fascinating story of Gauguin's spiritual development is bit by bit, built up. He made use of these facts in the same way as he made use of models in his pictures, as the basis for the suggestion of beautiful forms. All art to him was transposition, and in the pages of his recital he deliberately attempted to transpose his opinions on civilization, savagery, and life, into a series of imaginary adventures, which we are at liberty to believe or not as we choose.
So we follow him from Papeete into the backwoods. We find him holding aloof from the savages at first and marveling at their simple hospitality. We see him making his first tentative attempts at establishing a community of thought. He tries to persuade the natives to sit for their portraits—with little success. He tries to find solace in the companionship of the half-caste Titi, in vain. Then Jotefa comes upon the scene, the young man whose body reveals to him the hitherto unsuspected fact that civilization has only accentuated differences of sex, and thereby rendered sex more dangerous, more artificial, more unnatural. So he gets his first gleam of intelligence. The next comes, when Jotefa declares that he cannot touch the chisel, that an artist is not like other men, but some one producing a thing useful to others. This further enlightens him. He contrasts this opinion on art as something useful to man with art as the European sees it, a mere freakish amusement. Finally, he hazards everything. He takes a young native girl and makes her his wife, not without qualms of fear. All goes well until one day away from home, when he is out fishing with the natives. They laugh at his luck. He asks them why. Because his line has caught in the lower jaw of the fish and that is a sign of a man's wife being unfaithful to him. He returns home, half-believing the superstition. The native girl prays, weeps, asks to be beaten. He cannot beat her. He can only forgive and understand. So the story closes.
From such a story, we should naturally receive the impression that Gauguin's life in Tahiti was ideally happy. But his letters reveal that he was even more unhappy there than in France. So whatever elements of fact may be in his story, it is evident that they cannot be disentangled from the fictional details. It is better to take "Noa Noa" altogether as a series of fictitious adventures, designed to bring out the fact that Gauguin became, despite himself, as nearly one with the natives as it is possible for any European to be. Thus we see, bit by bit, the Tahitians claiming him as one of their own, from the day that he is forced by necessity to accept their food offered and at first scornfully refused, to the day when he finds that he shares their superstitions and even their easy tolerance of marital infidelity. If we look at the story in this light, it becomes an allegory easily readable, an allegory of civilization going down before primitive nature, expressed in a series of parables.
Unfortunately, Gauguin suspected that this story would seem too bare and devoid of literary charm if he published it as it stood, and he asked Charles Morice to collaborate. Morice thereupon wrote a series of highly florid descriptions and poems, inspired by Gauguin's pictures, in a style strongly tinged with the influence of Stéphane Mallarmé. These poems and descriptions were intercalated between the pages of Gauguin's recital.[1] The result is that "Noa Noa" contains two books; the first Gauguin's, the second, Morice's, and the reader is liable to be confused unless he remembers that the sections by Gauguin are all headed "Le Conteur Parle," and that these sections form by themselves a continuous story. Morice's contributions can therefore be disregarded.
It is perhaps better not to discuss whether or not these contributions add anything to Gauguin's recital. Some people may even prefer the glow of Morice's rhetoric to the naked blaze of Gauguin's poetry. Gauguin himself philosophically remarked that he wished Morice's work to stand beside his, in order that people might observe the difference between a civilized decadent and a naïve and brutal savage.
[1] They have been wisely omitted from the English translation.
PART V: THE FIGHT AGAINST CIVILIZATION 1895-1903
I
With Gauguin's last return to Tahiti there opened for him the final and most important phase of his life, the last stand of the savage against encroaching civilization. The letters that he sent to de Monfreid during this period are painful reading. They breathe the weary cry of a man who knows that Fate's dice are loaded against him, the complaint of a warrior who realizes that fighting is useless, but who has no choice but to fight on. For Gauguin was now exhausted by the struggle that he had carried on so long with the world out-side and within himself. The wound in his leg, given him by the sailors, had never properly healed; under the climate of Tahiti, it reopened. Owing to the rash exposure of his skin to the effects of tropical light, both legs were attacked by eczema. Night after night was spent in sleepless pain. To add to his troubles, his eyesight began to fail; nature was taking her revenge on him, was wreaking upon his body retribution for the sins of which the white race had been guilty in their dealings with the natives. It seemed to him that the gods he worshiped had become his enemies.