W. Somerset Maugham, Henry James, and the Modernist Aesthetic of The Moon and Sixpence

The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2023: Official Conference Proceedings

“…(Maugham, 1972, p. 214) The purposeful planting of these dualities of personality, alienated identities, and artistic selfhoods into the novel in the form of two silently polemising characters is linked to Gauguin's primitivist art and post-impressionist artists, their willingness to re-invent the paintings as a non-commercial non-documenting but self-expressive form, like it used to be several thousand years before. An attempt to document post-impressionistic artefact by a realistic writer-narrator also manifests the "insufficiency of realism as an approach to works of art" (Borg, 2022). It also explains all the other creative forces behind the novel:…”

“…This also re-enhances the oppositions of cultures, mentalities, selfhoods, and identities in the novel by referring to the subconscious fear planted in all human beings through their animalistic ancestors. At the same time, this may be seen as an outcome of the attempt "to capture the significance of the object of a description" (Borg, 2022).…”

“…Altogether, this helps Maugham present his vision of art -which is mixed -due to the involvement of two artists in the story and, consequently, two visions of the world, two identities that do not match especially in the view of constant movement between different cultural loci -it fluctuates between seeing art as pictorial only, or exclusively verbal, or, closer to the end of the novel, as something synthetic in between, similar to syncretic art in the womb of mythology -it becomes the "slow coming-into-awareness" of the characters (Borg, 2022). The application of ekphrastic elements and the description of pictorial artefacts through the prism of the writer-narrator helps Maugham build the image of art as an attempt to convey something wild, primaeval, primitive, satyr-and nymph-related, in Nietzschean terms -Dionysian -as true art becomes a deep and primitive instinct.…”

“…William Somerset Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is one of his most popular and widely read works which is rather rejected by the scholars of British literature of the first half of the XX century -primarily, due to him being perceived as a second-rate writer and a non-modernist in the modernist age (Blackburn & Arsov, 2016;Borg, 2022). However, Maugham is one of those writers who raised modernist topics and thus could be equalled to his modernist contemporaries, even though his literary works were more transitional than experimentative.…”