In 1976 Albert Wendt published a watershed essay for contemporary Pacific artists, and for Pacific Islanders in general, entitled ‘Towards a New Oceania’ at the height of decolonisation and national independence movements in the Pacific. The essay was a bold affirmation of the central role of the imagination – more specifically, of new art forms appearing in the region – in the realisation of this utopian ideal. The implicit relationship between the ‘new Oceania’ and an ‘old Oceania’ in the essay drives further investigation. The two are inextricably related since there can be no new without an old, without some sense of the Oceania that is past or passing. Yet, he was not referring to the Oceania of history books, museums and excavation sites, but rather to an Oceania in us, a subjective proposition addressed to the consciousness of modern Pacific Islanders.
A theoretical account given by F. R. Ankersmit of what he calls ‘sublime historical experience’ reveals some related existential insight. According to Ankersmit, this is the apprehension by an individual consciousness or collectivity (a ‘me’ or an ‘us’) of a new historical identity whose main characteristic is that it is ‘constituted by the trauma of the loss of a former identity – precisely this is its main content, and that this is the ineluctable truth announces itself in the realisation (agonising, resigned, or otherwise) that this loss is permanent and can never be undone.’ Ankersmit adumbrates four paradigms in which ‘identity’ struggles with the tensions between forgetting and remembering. The first paradigm is the rationale underlying most histories, which are written or recorded on the assumption that we are our past, and the past must not be forgotten lest we lose ourselves. The second paradigm complicates the first by suggesting that sometimes it is necessary to forget the past in order to act effectively in the world or to summon the creativity, will or imagination necessary to live in the present or build a future. The third and fourth paradigms complicate the relationship in a different way. In both, radical historical change or profound historical events shatter identity to its core so that there is a traumatic sense of loss and/or forgetting in which the relationship between present consciousness and the past becomes problematic. In elaborating the third and fourth paradigms, Ankersmit defines the former by its desire to ‘reconcile’ experience and identity. In the third paradigm, ‘closure of the trauma is possible’. This may be so ‘only at the price of the greatest effort and of a most painful descent into the past of an individual or of a collectivity – but it can be done.’ In the fourth paradigm however – and this is what he means by ‘sublime historical experience’ – it can’t, and the trauma of the loss feels permanent. ‘And what loss could possibly be greater – for is this not as close to death as one may come?’
The significance of John Pule’s work derives from the way it explores the gamut of possibilities for historical consciousness outlined by Ankersmit: from the imperative to remember the past to the painful confrontation with the irrevocable nature of history. Four examples his work will be examined: first, a sampling of paintings from the 1990s and 2000s; then an epic poem entitled The Bond of Time, written in 1983 when Pule was twenty-one years old; then an autobiographical novel called The Shark That Ate the Sun, published in 1992; and finally, what we might call a ‘readymade’, a suit given to the artist by his father on the occasion of his baptism as a young boy.
Take these with you when you leave, 1998, is one of the more explicitly autobiographical paintings in Pule’s work and features numerous iconographic motifs that refer to the autobiographical narrative told in his novel. The painting is structured by a rough grid, filled with a medley of improvised patterns, symbols, signs and pictorial narrative vignettes, some of them smudged and smeared into the surface of the canvas. The compartment to the upper left sees various silhouettes and outline drawings which can be decoded biographically. But the readability of the painting in terms of a coherent autobiographical narrative – or indeed any kind of narrative – begins to break down in other sections. The seemingly familiar scene of the ‘lamentation for the dead Christ’ scene is composed as if to emphasize its strangeness. And the rest of the painting becomes entirely cryptic, as if memory had shifted into another register, unmoored from personal experience, family stories, and familiar cultural narratives.