Erik Martiny
Marika Doux on ‘A Message of Consolation’
A Message of Consolation, Marika Doux’s third novel is the latest instalment in an emerging series of novels based on a single work of art by an acknowledged master of the visual arts. The series, called The Novel of a Masterpiece, published by Les Ateliers Henri Dougier, is garnering both critical and popular attention in France.
Your latest novel features Paul Gauguin. What drew you to this artist?
His terrible reputation! And the paradox triggered by what we think we know of him and the fact that he produced a work like The Yellow Christ.
Gauguin is a disturbing figure, but he’s true to life, disturbing because he was authentic, a flamboyant character, colourful in every sense of the word. He was a man of his time, influenced unbeknownst to himself by the ideology of his time, as everyone is, and yet within this inevitable determinism he had a thirst for truth, for authenticity and freedom in both life and art. His determination to become an artist against all odds also touched me.
He belongs to that category of person whose presence makes you work hard. The meaning of life, the artist’s vocation the question of defining the human condition, the difference between good and evil. Gauguin paid dearly for his commitment to the truth. He’s still paying for it today, and yet it’s part of what makes him a great artist. He was an artist who went right to the limit. He innovated in every area, in painting, sculpture and ceramics.
Your novel is focused on The Yellow Christ, painted in 1889. Of all his works, can you tell us why you chose to centre on that one?
I chose it because it’s a deeply perplexing work. It’s ground-breaking and beneficent! The Yellow Christ is surprising because everyone knows his hatred of the Catholic Church. It drove him to write anti-clerical pamphlets that got more and more virulent right to the end of his life. And yet, the image of Christ on the cross evidently spoke to him, to the point where he elaborated a crucifixion of his own, one that both renews the highly represented motif in a discordant way. Some critics opine that it’s the most widely represented motif in Western art.
Although you know he painted it in Britany, a bastion of Christianity, the painting is an enigma I wanted to ‘dream’ about. I wanted to invent an answer to the question I kept asking myself in front of the painting: why he thought of depicting a crucified Christ in 1889, at Pouldu?
It has to be said that it meant enough for him to call it Self-Portrait as a Yellow Christ a few months later. It means it was very significant to him. I saw the potential for a novel in that, especially when I found out that he had written absolutely nothing about the painting, even though it uses the technique he and his friends called cloisonnism (flat shapes outlined by often black contours), also known as syntheticism. The painting surprises because it announces the advent of abstraction: it eschews realism and favours the image, thus siding with the image as icon.
The Yellow Christ is a revolutionary work – the cult of redemptive suffering is absent in this crucifixion. Christ’s face, his closed eyes, make him look very much appeased. There’s no crown of thorns on his head either, unlike the Christ in the chapel of Trémalo that served as a model for Gauguin: everything is luminous, bathed in yellow sunlight.
Gauguin provides us with a living Christ who has set all the darkness aside. He’s flanked by two groups that encode the question of love and death: Jesus surrounded by women in prayer in the foreground and a Breton man climbing over a small wall to join two charming Breton women in the background.
The Yellow Christ is unique in this respect. It gave me the desire to explore what one might call Gauguin’s spiritual paradox.
At the end of your book, you quote Umberto Eco’s famous phrase: according to you The Yellow Christ belongs to what Eco calls “open works”, open to an infinite variety of interpretations. What makes this painting so open in your view?
The painting is open because it still motivates very varied, sometimes antagonistic interpretations. In an article published in 1891, Octave Mirbeau spoke of ‘an agonizing yellow’, of a ‘piteous and barbarous Christ’. I personally find the yellow that Gauguin uses very luminous. His Christ seems gentle and solar to me. But both interpretations are in my view equally valid.
Mirbeau is right if you see the colour as the expression of spiritual despair, of the depression that Gauguin was undergoing when he was creating the work. The painter felt betrayed by mankind the way Jesus was. Christ brought new life to the world and Gauguin inaugurated a different way of painting that vivified pictorial art: they were both rejected, and this suggests the yellow is ‘agonizing’.
You can adopt the reading I propose, however, if you take into consideration the letters that the painter wrote during that period and the inner struggle they bear witness to, and if you see in the counterpointing Breton women a description of the world as a place where each figure goes about his or her own business: dying and being resurrected and frolicking. The Christ figure lends a touch of modest humour to the yellow sun and the notion of eternal life. The foreground has a smiling figure and closed eyes; a little further on, a figure climbs over a boundary: there are several forms of ecstasy present in the painting and none is to be frowned upon. Christ’s luminous skin suggests he’s already been resurrected and reconciled with the temporal and spiritual realm.
Other critics, on the contrary, say that the counterpoint offered by the surrounding figures is ironic, that it denounces devotion and the alienation caused by religion.
It’s an open work because you can walk through it in so many ways. Your interpretation says more about who you are. Every interpretation is of course conditioned by culture and ideology.
What are the pitfalls you can encounter when you’re embarked on writing a novel about a painting?
The major difficulty is having to integrate the description of the painting without boring the reader! It’s hard to steer clear of that. You also have to convey the difficulty of capturing the artist’s path towards creation. It’s both delicate and enthusing.
It’s a delicate matter because when you’re not a painter yourself, you don’t know how artists go about making a painting. So I gathered quite a bit of technical information and I also asked painter friends to validate my findings and my intuitions. I asked them to specify how they imagined Gauguin went about his work: which brushes he used, if he started with bright colours first, what his pace of composition was. There is also the problem of drying and the way the colours will react, for instance.
But it gives you a thrill because it allows you to enter the world of the artist. It plunges you deeply into the contemplation of his works. You learn to notice the motifs are personal, you try to find the key to his ‘deep rhetoric’, to use Baudelaire’s expression.
In the field of French literature, where would you situate yourself?
That’s a hard question to answer. Perhaps readers are more able to determine that kind of ‘geolocalisation’ than the writer is!
Both consciously and unconsciously, I am particularly sensitive to the sounds of words. Words are my colours, I love to work over their depth and shine. In writing, I look for what I like in art: the bolt of lightning. It’s the reason I chose to insert some of Gauguin’s words within my own, the exact words he used in some of his letters. I chose to do that from the outset.
Because of that, the book is resolutely hybrid, a fiction that passes through non-fiction, exhibiting itself as non-fiction. My writing is impacted by reality because there is in us a constant interaction between fiction and reality, because our fiction is always disturbed by reality, and more rarely arranged by it.
If I had to situate my writing on a literary level, I would say I write reality-fiction in which conflict leads to letting go and inviting in poetic lightning. My writing lies at the crossroads between reality and dream, in a place where you touch the heart of things. I love that moment when it occurs. It’s a gift that is granted.
Some of Gauguin’s words resonated within me, making me want to transmit them to the reader so they would resonate within him or her too. There is in my text a voice that goes beyond mine, a voice that belongs to Gauguin. Writing is the embodiment of a dialogue with the other who is always another version of oneself and yet different. I seek to understand myself through the other person, but also to stop trying to fathom who I am!
Interview by Erik Martiny.
To discover more content exclusive to our print and digital editions, subscribe here to receive a copy of The London Magazine to your door every two months, while also enjoying full access to our extensive digital archive of essays, literary journalism, fiction and poetry.