"Fictional" Texts in Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence
Abstract
The Moon and Sixpence (1919) draws on the life of Paul Gauguin in complex ways, some of them surprising. Not intended as fictionalized biography—the raw biographical facts are too plainly incompatible—the novel nevertheless follows an abstract outline of Gauguin's life and career to shape the story of Maugham's fictional artist, Charles Strickland. Maugham also mischievously plunders specific realia from Gauguin's life-world to build some of its inner detail. Recently I published an article demonstrating that the descriptions of Strickland's oeuvre in The Moon and Sixpence either evoke specific paintings by Gauguin, or else gesture toward identifiable phases in Gauguin's artistic career (see Wright, "References to Gauguin Paintings"). Maugham has borrowed unashamedly from Gauguin's actual output to supply the substance of his fictional hero's artistic achievement. The very literalness of this creative procedure prompts further inquiry into whether the art-historical texts Maugham invents to lend verisimilitude to the intellectual milieu in which Strickland's work is first noticed may not similarly be tied to the historical facts of Gauguin's early critical reception. The fictional texts are four in number. The first is an article in Mercure de France by one "Maurice Huret." There are two mentions:
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- Faculty of Humanities [2033]