LITR 5831 Colonial-Postcolonial Literature                                                        Research Projects 2011

Christina Crawford

Research Journal

Tracing Connections in Caribbean Art and Literature

            The connection between art and literature came up in class discussion of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel, Lucy.  We examined the work of Paul Gauguin that is referenced in the text and used as cover art.  I was surprised at how looking at Gauguin’s paintings and discussing his primitive style informed or revealed new insights about the text.  Primitivism is marked by a use of bold colors and simple lines.  More formal styles of painting require a great deal of preparation in readying the canvas as well as many painstakingly applied layers of paint to achieve realistic depth.  Primitivism is immediate, bold washes of color are applied quickly and worked with while wet, frequently in a single layer of paint.  The results are often shocking to the senses. 

Having started the semester reading Robinson Crusoe, Lucy was also a shock to the senses.  Compared to Robinson Crusoe, Lucy immerses the reader into intense psychological realism.  Lucy’s journey is emotionally charged and highly sexual.  The exotic appeal of ‘the other’ is found through-out the text.  Lucy’s inability to feel love the way she wants/needs/expects to feel it is a major problem within the text.  The primitive style paintings we looked at seem to have similar difficulties.  I think part of the appeal of the works is that they do not romanticize sex to any degree.  Both the paintings and the novel have a roughness to them which appeals straight to the reader/viewer’s id. 

After looking at the art/literature connection in class with a post-colonial text the first question that appealed to me was to investigate colonial art, specifically connections with Robinson Crusoe and the Carribean.  I wanted to compare the imagery associated with Robinson Crusoe to the paintings of Gauguin and see what is there.  Then I think it would be useful to return to primitivism and find some more about the history and art theory behind the movement.  My final area of research will be to investigate journal articles to gauge the current critical conversation happening on the subject.

The first oldest image of Crusoe that I found is this one, a black and white inked image found within the first addition of the novel.  It surprises me; there are a great many images of later origin that depict Crusoe as a triumphant warrior of sorts.  Visual artists appear to embrace the idea of Crusoe as a second Adam, representing him as a new man forging life on the island.  This echoes some of the sentiment found in Walcott’s poetry, even though he seems to ultimately reject, or want to reject, the colonial nature of the history.  This first image though, it shows a man suffering.  The ship shown tossing in the sea behind him reminds the viewer of Crusoe’s trials.  He looks tired and his face is hallowed with sunken cheeks and eyes.  Take note of the flower in the lower left hand corner of the image.  There is the appeal of otherness represented in the image.  The sky is dark, the ocean jagged, the island barren and the man worn; the flower is exotic, it is suggestive of a lush foreignness and vibrancy entirely apart from a native English bloom.  I think this image is hugely revealing about the text.  This image conveys a story in minute detail the same way Dafoe fills his novel with details about the physical atmosphere within the text. 

After looking at some primary sources concerning Crusoe I formed a hypothesis about the art produced about the Caribbean during the British Colonial period.  I expected to find landscape paintings from the period that portrayed the Caribbean as untamed, dark, and lush.  I went looking for sources.  During my undergraduate career I frequently wrote papers and did image research that led me to become quite adept at navigating museum websites looking for something specific, that was seven years ago.  At the time most museums would only have available online images of a sampling from current exhibits and highlights of the collection.  Now almost everything is available online, it is entirely an embarrassment of art history riches.  Artcyclopedia.com is a website database that organizes links to museum collections available online; and you can search by artist, nationality, period, subject manner, or medium.  After looking through fifty British landscape painters who were contemporaries of Dafoe I surrendered my hypothesis about what the paintings would be.  I would have thought that the Caribbean would be impossibly alluring to artists; that the exotic tropical landscapes would have lured painters by the dozen.  Well, if it did I could not find it.

Returning to my initial interest in Lucy and primitivism I looked for more information on primitivism as an artistic movement.  It is worth noting here that the majority of sites that came up in an online search were concerning “primitivism” as a new breed of anarchy and advocating for various anarchist groups.  The Wikipedia article (on the art movement) had some really interesting insights.  Our classroom frequently gets the pleasure of hearing music representing the different cultures we are studying; Wikipedia cited the music of Igor Stravinsky, particularly his Rite of Spring, as being indicative of primitivism in another media.  This is interesting and a little difficult to wrap my head around; when I have heard Rite of Spring I just hear it as a beautiful piece of classical music.  I would have thought modern death metal and even hip-hop would have a closer association to primitivism. 

The article is especially interesting in light of a criticism of Paul Gauguin.  We discussed the artist in class as a British transplant who chose to live and work in Tahiti; we did not touch on why he would have made those choices or any personal biographical information.  It went unsaid that an artist seeking freedom to experiment with different ‘primitive’ painting styles would be more comfortable/inspired in the Caribbean than in England.  Gauguin embraced all the artistic aspects of primitivism.  His work is marked by strong colors, stark contrasts, and an intentional roughness in the application of paint.  Many of his paintings feature nude Tahitian natives, most of them women.  Gauguin has apparently been raked across the coals by post-colonial feminist critics; while he saw himself as celebrating and supporting the Tahitians’ culture and sexual freedoms, he persisted in viewing them as a romantic ‘other.’  He objectified the people, especially women, and their sexuality to such a degree that he “took adolescent mistresses, one of them as young as thirteen.”  This predatory patriarchal sexuality casts a different light on Kincaid’s references to his work in Lucy.  The class discussion never really touched on why Gauguin’s work was singled out through the text.  Prior to reading this I thought it was simply that he was an artist from the Caribbean and his work is highly representational of the fraught sexuality within the text.  Adding some biographical information into the mix makes the decision to single him out as an artist much more suspect.  From reading selections from Kincaid’s A Small Place and discussion on her attitudes and problems with colonization it seems likely she would have viewed Gauguin as the worst kind of colonizer and disliked that his work is as well received and representative as it is.

http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/art428/gauguin.html Links to a page with a very full discussion of Gauguin’s work and how he developed as a painter.  There are a great many images of his work, especially early in his career when his style more closely resembled what we would consider traditional impressionism.  The author of the site neglects to elaborate on Gauguin’s life after his decision to move to Tahiti; so the essay, while informative, neglects to resolve the critique found on Wikipedia. 

J. Michael Dash’s essay “The Madman at the Crossroads: Delerium and Dislocation in Caribbean Literature” he leads off with by questioning “Is it possible to revisit the idea of the crossroads of the Americas in terms of a rehabilitation of the concepts of resistance, difference, exoticism, and primitivism, which have become anathema in postcolonial discourse?” (p 38).  The essay was published in 2002 and this question is particularly provoking in light of how much of our postcolonial discourse has revolved around these concepts.  They seem to have rehabilitated just fine.  He discusses Andre Breton’s travel book Martinique Charmuese de Serpents as an example of a “surrealist journey” and how such a journey removes the predatory aspect from the idea of the ‘other’ and reintroduces ‘otherness’ as a more simple objective state.  It is difficult to completely understand the essay having not read the book he is discussing, but I think the ideas presented are interesting.  He writes about how a nuanced understanding of the terms is vital to objective post-colonial studies.

My questions and research have taken me on a rather choppy journey with much stumbling and halting.  The original image from Crusoe is a vivid example of how a picture can tell a thousand words.  I am disappointed in my failure to find any British colonial paintings of the Caribbean, it is provoking beyond belief, and finding these images has become a personal mission of sorts.  The information on primitivism is interesting, but the Gauguin biographical information is especially exciting in how it casts an aspect of the text in a different light.  My ideal teaching job would be in a course like Texts and Images where I could combine my interests in art and literature in the classroom.  Outside of that class, there is room in every classroom for the use of art in instruction.  In this course Dr. White has used many images, videos, and even music to add layers to the literature we are studying.  By engaging the other senses we can engage with a text and understand it differently.  Other than my pursuit of colonial Caribbean landscapes I feel satisfied with where my research has led.  I think that an artistic analysis was a useful approach to the Crusoe image and that the relationship between Lucy and Gauguin’s work goes considerably beyond nationalism and outward shared artistic sensibilities.