Tale of Gaugin’s final years in his Tahitian idyll

THE WAY TO PARADISE

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Translated by Natasha Wimmer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 373 pages

REVIEWED BY SUDIP BOSE

By the time Paul Gaugin left Europe for good, journeying to Tahiti in the 1890s, he had had it with Western civilization. To him, Europe had become a miserable, decadent place, obsessed with materialism, corrupted by industrialism, empty of spirituality. He dreamed of a virgin landscape, a primitive place where art could be purified and renewed, a place inhabited — to use the language of the Enlightenment philosophers — by innocent and noble savages. He would be the anti-missionary; rather than imposing the West upon the Maoris of the South Pacific, he would learn their secrets and share their earthly paradise.

In 1890, Gaugin wrote a letter to the Danish painter J.F. Willumsen, expressing his hopes for a Tahitian Eden. “I want to forget,” he wrote, “all the misfortunes of the past, I want to be free to paint without any glory whatsoever in the eyes of the others and I want to die there and to be forgotten there.”

He never did find the idyllic world he was looking for. It didn’t exist, of course. And though Gaugin painted several masterpieces while in Tahiti, including the allegorical “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?,” he increasingly became an isolated figure. To make matters worse, many of his Maori neighbors thought of him as just another European. He may have declared, before leaving for Polynesia, that “the European Gaugin has ceased to exist,” but when the Maoris gazed upon him, they failed to see the savage he so desperately wanted to be.

Gaugin’s final years in Tahiti and in the Marquesas, where he died in 1903, are dramatized in Mario Vargas Llosa’s uneven new novel. The fictional Paul, like the real Gaugin, arrives in Tahiti “full of expectations,” in search of “the thing he would never find in Europe, where it had been extinguished by civilization.” (Anyone who has read D.H. Lawrence’s “Etruscan Places,” among other books, will recognize this yearning, on the part of a European artist, for an unspoiled, pre-civilized culture.)

His sexual appetite is massive, and despite his syphilis, he soon takes up with several young Tahitian girls. Here is one of the contradictions in Paul’s character: He has come to Polynesia seeking innocence, incorruptibility, and purity, whereas he himself is perverted, corrupt, and decidedly impure, his syphilis resulting in the slow, painful disfigurement of his body, beginning with the malodorous rashes that attack his legs and culminating with blindness. (Disease abounds in “The Way to Paradise,” and not just Paul’s; the writer uses illness to dispel the myth of the noble savage who lives a carefree existence in an untainted, idyllic land.) Paul wants nothing more than “to live in nature, off the land, like primitive man — the healthiest of peoples.” He is anything but.

But if sex has disfigured Paul, it also leads to great bursts of artistic creativity. He emerges from a sexual experience invigorated and ready to paint, his senses heightened, his imagination stimulated, his eye sharpened. In Tahiti, however, his carnal longings veer toward the ambiguous. He becomes interested in “androgynes, hermaphrodites, that third, in-between sex, which the Maori, unlike prejudiced Europeans, still accepted among themselves with the naturalness of the great pagan civilizations, behind the backs of the missionaries and ministers.” Though acutely masculine, Paul begins to feel an inner feminine impulse.

Mr. Vargas Llosa suggests that sexual ambiguity is an archetypal quality that Paul possesses. And so, a Tahitian woodcutter named Jotefa, to whom Paul becomes attracted, resembles someone “remembered from a long time ago.” After a journey through the lush Tahitian interior, in search of wood that Paul might carve, Paul and Jotefa have a sexual encounter, which the writer prefaces with a highly symbolic passage:

“This was the first time he had set out through the forest like a Tahitian, burying himself in the dense growth of trees, shrubs, and brush that tangled overhead and blocked out the sun; the paths were invisible to him, though Jotefa could follow them easily. In the glimmering green shade, livened by the song of birds he hadn’t yet heard, breathing in a damp, oleaginous, vegetal scent that penetrated all the pores of his body, Paul had a feeling of intoxication, fullness, exultation, like something produced by a magic potion.”

Story Continues →