Paul Bowles - the New Generation: Do You Bowles? : Essays and Criticism [1 ed.] 9789401211901, 9789042039087

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Paul Bowles - The New Generation: Do You Bowles?

DIALOGUE 18

Edited by

Michael J. Meyer† & Henry Veggian

Paul Bowles - The New Generation: Do You Bowles? Essays and Criticism

Edited by

Anabela Duarte

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Cover art and design: Cathrin Loerke. Cover images: January 1969. Photographer unknown. Paul Bowles papers, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware, US. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3908-7 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1190-1 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS  Abbreviations

IX

Acknowledgements

X

Paul Bowles Now and Then: Introduction ANABELA DUARTE

1

I THE FASCINATION OF PAUL BOWLES – FACE TO FACE SECRECIES Paul Bowles as I Knew Him CHRISTOPHER SAWYER-LAUÇANNO

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“I Would Invite You to Supper but I Have Only One Egg”: Teaching with Paul Bowles 45 REGINA WEINREICH The Fascination of Paul Bowles ALLEN HIBBARD

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II ECOLOGIES OF FEAR AND VIOLENCE: RESISTANCE OR DESISTANCE? The Perceptual is Political: Modes of Consciousness in The Spider’s House GREG BEVAN

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Laughing with Thieves: Images of Paul Bowles in Tahar Ben Jelloun and Mohamed Choukri CLARE BRANDABUR

85

The Spider’s House: Paul Bowles and the Question of Moroccan Independence YOUNES RIYANI EL ASSAAD

101

Tangier, Capital of Treason ANDREW HUSSEY

117

False Concepts: The Absence of Security and Intimacy in the Work of Paul Bowles ANDREW MARTINO

135

III MUSIC, NOISE AND POLITICS The Music and Politics of Pastorela (1941)  JENNIFER L. CAMPBELL

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Paul Bowles and Latin American Music LUIS HÉRNANDEZ MERGAL

169

“The Question of Music and Prose, It’s a Tricky One to Answer,” Paul Bowles: Composer – Writer VERENA MOGL 181 The Musical Styles of Early Songs of Paul Bowles CAROLE BLANKENSHIP

203

On Degenerescence and Realms of Suppression: Paul Bowles vis-à-vis Einojuhani Rautavaa ZBIGNIEW BIALAS

225

Noise and Violence in Up Above the World – Music as Torture in Modern Fiction ANABELA DUARTE

235

IV NO MAPS FOR THESE TERRITORIES: BOWLES, BURROUGHS AND BEYOND Aesthetic Tourists: The Sheltering Sky’s Critique of Modernism CHRISTOPHER LESLIE

253

American Existentialism and Surrealism in Paul Bowles’s “The Scorpion” and “By the Water,” Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs’s And The Hippos Were

Boiled in Their Tanks

BENJAMIN J. HEAL

“What You Do Is Nearer to What You Are than What You Think Is”: The Importance of Place and Space in Paul Bowles’s Short Fiction ISABEL OLIVEIRA MARTINS

265

275

Experiences of Death and Dissolution in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky and Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums NUNO MARQUES 285

V YOU ARE NOT I – FILM AND TEXT Good Film Hunting: Sara Driver, Paul Bowles, and Tangier FRANCIS POOLE

287

A Resistant Text: “You Are Not I”  YOSHIAKI KOSHIKAWA

301

VI ON INTERCULTURAL MEDIATIONS Towards an Absent Origin: The Edge of Anger in Paul Bowles’s “A Distant Episode”  315 BOUCHRA BENLEMLIH The Impossible Relationship with the “Other” in “The Time of Friendship” 325 FERNANDO GOMES

VII MOMENTUM NO SPEED: FILM, BOHEMIA AND THE UNCANNY The Film Narrator Paul Bowles KOSTOULA KALOUDI

339

Gothic Short Circuits in Paul Bowles’s Fiction MARIA ANTÓNIA LIMA

347

Literary Friendship: The Bowleses and Tennessee Williams KRISZTINA DANKÓ

357

Contributors

369

Index

377

ABBREVIATIONS CS: Collected Stories ADE: A Distant Episode TFFH: Too Far From Home TSH: The Spider’s House TSS: The Sheltering Sky WS: Without Stopping

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to ULICES and the American Studies Research Group of the University of Lisbon, namely professor Teresa Alves and professor Teresa Cid, who both gave me support and encouragement. This volume could not also have been completed without the finantial assistance of FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) to the Do You Bowles? International Conference on Paul Bowles in 2010. My appreciation of their generous support is high. I wish to thank Henry Veggian, the editor of the Dialogue Series, for his interest in the work at large, and also to Masja Horn at Rodopi, for her helpful assistance. I would like to acknowledge all contributors who endured such a hard work without losing their breath in what turned out to be a long journey. My sincere appreciation to all. And, of course, to the Delaware University, Tim Murray and Francis Pool, who were enthusiastic all the way. Also to L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin who provided Paul Bowles’s images for the cover. A note of appreciation is due to the Harry Ransom Center, for the authorizations regarding Paul Bowles’s materials, to Irene Herrman who generously provided musical scores to contributors and to the literary executors of the author’s ouevre. Last but not least, I would like to thank my closest friends and family who gave me support and cherished the making of the present book.

PAUL BOWLES NOW AND THEN: INTRODUCTION ANABELA DUARTE

Fuzzy slow aaaaah! Aaaaaah! I remember being born1 The present book is the result of a successful international conference held in Lisbon in 2010 to celebrate Paul Bowles’s 100th birthday (www.doyoubowles.com). The American Studies Research Group at the University of Lisbon Center for English Studies (ULICES), organized the meeting and gathered writers and speakers from all corners of the world to honour Bowles’s centennial. From the beginning, the organization aimed at bringing forth the diverse aspects of the author’s work, both in literature and music, and at the same time draw in an international team of experts, scholars, authors and artists who shared creative research. We proudly present in the current volume twenty-five essays from the conference. From Europe to North Africa, North America and Japan, to a no man’s land or new maps of global cooperation and sovereignty, the writings propose new approaches to Bowles based on his multiple interests in the fields of literary and musical production. It is not so much an interdisciplinary line of thought and critical analysis we aim for as a non-disciplinary critical method, a world-body of connections always on the move to the next direction, an actual nomadic stance on artistic and creative potential analyzed from a variety of perspectives. We are accustomed to think about Bowles as a gentleman, a classic writer who lived an exotic life in far-off countries, a hip American artist connected with the Beat Generation (but of a more elegant line) and we can even grant him a place in the late modernism canon (trusting it will exist), alongside Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein and other modernist provocateurs. However, it is hard to believe such a writer and composer is included in more radical branches of literature and thought, due to his insistence on fine writing and proper English, economy of means and

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design, complex and self-referential composition. Likewise, refinement and a declared self-imposed split between his public and private persona, seem to be the motus or general tone of his autobiography Without Stopping, ironically entitled Without Telling by William Burroughs (or “Untold Tales,” by Virgil Thomson) or less ironically so, Knowing when to Stop, by Ned Rorem. Between Burroughs’s plea for truth and Rorem’s self-containment lies a space in which Bowles is lodged in a fluid substratum of his own. His retreat from public scrutiny by means of a publica(c)tion seems rather contradictory and amusing at first sight, but appearances, according to Zizek, should be treated carefully: Appearance, the public face, is never a simple hypocrisy whose truth resides in the scandalous hidden details … appearances are all we have, so we should treat them with great care – it happens quite often that, as a consequence of destroying an appearance, one ruins the thing itself behind the appearance. It is often claimed today that privacy is disappearing, that even the most intimate secrets are open to public probing, from media investigations and state surveillance to public confessions. But our reality is the opposite one: what is effectively disappearing is the public space proper, with its own dignity. (Zizek 409)

Hence, Bowles’s awareness of this public space and his meticulous relationship with it is not so much a refusal to say it all as a means to preserve his interiority from a global hunger for exposure of personal details at the expenses of one’s work and the historical significance of it. What’s the use of telling about his sexual partners, illnesses, dangerous liaisons, why this, why that – who would care? Bowles maintains: “The day I find out what I’m all about I’ll stop writing – I’ll stop doing everything. Once you know what makes you tick, you don’t tick any more” (Caponi 149). So appearances are important especially for those artists who work secretly in thought and in writing, inconspicuously, in order not to ruin their inner being and creative power. Finding the world hostile, the artist reacts with concealment and deception through fiction and makes fiction the very core of his being. In fact, Bowles uses it as a weapon:

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I was aware that I had a grudge, and that the only way I could satisfy my grudge was by writing words, attacking in words. The way to attack, of course, is to seem not to be attacking. Get people’s confidence and then, surprise! Yank the rug out from under their feet. If they come back for more, then I’ve succeeded. (Caponi 95)

It would be difficult to find his notorious cool detachment here, or his charming pose of an exotic gentleman. Instead what we have is Bowles as a corrosive agent provoking the disruption of appearances in an ultimate state of emergency: I don’t write “about horror” but there is a sort of metaphysical malaise in the world today, as if people sense that things are going to be bad. They could be expected to respond to any fictional situation which evoked the same amalgam of repulsion and terror that they already vaguely feel. (96)

According to the author, his writing adopts horror and other literary devices to create a fundamental doubt in readers and to shake their basic assumptions, an effective means for questioning the hegemonic discourse, provoking social awareness and latent emotional outbursts, including one’s own: … I am writing about today …. If I stress the various facets of unhappiness, it is because I believe unhappiness should be studied very carefully; this is certainly no time for anyone to pretend to be unhappy, or to put his unhappiness away in the dark. (And anyone who is not unhappy now must be a monster, a saint or an idiot.) You must watch your universe as it cracks above your head. (Caponi 5)

For Bowles, rational search for knowledge within the Western system and conceptualization leads to human disintegration and predatory techniques (what in Deleuzian terms is perhaps meant by “State apparatus of capture”). Surreptitiously, it reminds us of that famous motto of the “Les Incorruptibles,” known as “Refinement, Paradox and Aporia.” In his last interview to Le Monde, on August 19, 2004, Derrida provided an interpretation of “the incorruptibles”:

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By means of metonymy, I call this approach [of “the incorruptibles”] an intransigent, even incorruptible, ethos of writing and thinking ... without concession even to philosophy, and not letting public opinion, the media, or the phantasm of an intimidating readership frighten or force us into simplifying or repressing. Hence the strict taste for refinement, paradox, and aporia. (Lawlor n.pag.)

Though the intellectual and philosophical purposes of the French thinkers (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault) and Bowles’s are distinct,2 isn’t it nevertheless a similar line of thought and writing that Bowles is producing within this new perspective, that is, precision of language and thought, freedom from gregarious institutions and a natural abhorrence of easy solutions and popular concessions? Granted this point, one can note that he was not alone in such an idiosyncratic artistic path. Charles Henri Ford, John Latouche, Ahmed Yacoubi, Brion Gyson, William Burroughs, Aaron Copland, just to mention a few, were his friends and collaborators and they all were polyvalent and rather peculiar artists. In Without Stopping, Bowles’s controversial autobiography, one can have a taste of what it was like to live in the twenties and early thirties in New York and Paris, as Orwell would put it: “when dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low” (“Inside the Whale” ch. 1). Moreover, according to Eric Mottram, in Staticity and Terror, the memoir “provides a context of events for his career which shows clearly his centrality, bringing together American culture figures of the Lost Generation, Thirties radicals, Forties New Yorkers, the Beat Generation and the Movement writers of the Sixties” (32). Not to mention the musical counterpart of the literary scene and his connections with the bulk of avant-garde American music and theatre (long before he became the “author-who-also-writes-music”),3 film, fashion, radio, dance, art criticism and radical magazines. All of these connections clearly reveal the core of his work in continuous dialogue with different arts and métiers. How a Writer Sings Bowles has been criticized for decadence, nihilism and anarchism. Of decadence he claims that in art and literature “nothing is decadent but incompetence and commercialism” (Caponi 4-5), which is to say that he represents the real thing, both the “genuine artists” and the

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“genuine scoundrels” (Orwell ch. 1), so to speak, who inhabit an age he himself entitled an “Age of Monsters” (Let it Come Down 175), following Gramsci’s proclamation that “now [from the first world war on] is the time of monsters” (276). And nihilism and anarchism go hand in hand, according to Eric Mottram, with Bowles’s detachment from the laws of magic and the laws of society “which generate the uneasy anarchism of his fictions, and that, too, is a firm American tradition” (32). By contrast, when critics discuss Bowles’s music, they generate completely different kinds of comments. As Ned Rorem claims: Paul Bowles’s music is nostalgic and witty, evoking the times and places of its conception …. Bowles communicates the incommunicable. But even at their most humane his tales steer clear of the “human,” the romantic, while his music can be downright sentimental. (Hibbard 227)

The classification of Bowles’s music as witty and nostalgic or charming can be understood in its cultural context as Nadine Hubbs argues, in the Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity: … much of what we know of homosexual (including camp) culture from this era is in the form of humour, wit, or charm that serves to conceal and distance a speaker from (at least some) interlocutors or onlookers …. (116)

And apparently, Bowles himself considered his music as “entertainment” and with “charm.” However, by entertainment he meant music that engages the listener with the purity of sound and tone and not with the show biz. In our opinion he is half way between Pound’s theories on sound and performance and Rorem’s appreciation of his music. But that is not saying that his music and his literature are two different species, as Rorem claims (see Swan, 1995 and Pound, 1968). However, the view of Bowles’s music and literature as two antinomic art forms is the standard critical approach that prevails in Bowlesian studies up to today, and Rorem’s position is paradigmatic in what concerns that exquisite relationship. Following the same line of inquiry, and significantly later, in 1995, for instances, Eli Gottlieb,

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in an article curiously entitled “On Hearing Bowles,” claims the same unequal quality and balance: … The question – finally unanswerable – leads us quite naturally to his music, which has the advantage, over writing, of being far more “about” itself. In listening to his work, one is immediately struck by the freedom of the music. Where the prose is always necessarily harnessed to the low gear of narrative, the lightsome inventions of his compositions surprise. (Swan 33)

And finally he declares at the end of the article that “… it is increasingly clear [that fiction and music] have very little directly to do with each other.” However, Bowles himself claims that his fiction, and especially the novels were written with great freedom. Describing that process, he wrote, “I often have no idea what I’m going to write when I sit down. I never plan ahead of time …. Writing isn’t about an idea. It comes more from a kind of feeling” (Caponi 199). The exception was of course The Spider’s House, a work that “from the outset demanded a rigorous schedule” (x). The latter work was more like his composition of music, which required extreme concentration, technical knowledge and thus a less intuitive approach. Regarding this controversial point Bowles remarks: “It doesn’t require any technical knowledge to write in your own language. At any age. But it does require a certain amount of technical knowledge to do the same thing with music” (Night Waltz). So it seems that some acquired assumptions on the author’s work reflecting dualistic and/or antinomic conceptualization, needs to be challenged with broader perceptive and contextual analysis. Moreover, when asked if he did find any parallels between his work as a composer and his writings he replied: Well, if you’re a composer, that’s going to determine something about the form in which you construct your prose. Especially novelistic construction. There’s definitely a connection in that it can affect your style. If you have an “inner ear,” then you hear everything you write; you hear it out loud, every sentence, every phrase. When I write I hear it as I’m working. I hear it as it should sound before I ever type it. (Caponi 110)

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Thus, in our opinion the critic in “On Hearing Bowles” didn’t hear him justly. As noted in earlier discussion, Mottram sees Bowles’s fiction also as dualistic, oscillating between stasis and terror. Stasis is the choice on which Bowles characters rely for security and non-violence, for a place of enclosure, a sheltering sky where a man does not risk dislocation from society. And terror is connected with underground forces and nature, an exposure to Nothing, to a humanity without pattern “and therefore lost” (11). Rorem’s comments on Bowles’s music are also dualistic in a different but connected way. Clearly, all critics are striving to understand Bowles’s oeuvre from a symmetrical perspective, black and white, a striated space of thought that moves from one point to another, giving his literary and musical work intrinsic properties (themes, tradition, context, interiority from which his work derives), in detriment of more situational ones. Mottram, however, suggests a line of thought, which he doesn’t explore but that propels us to a further enquiry into a new Bowles effect. It is the sculpting of this effect that we search and follow in our book, that is, the conception of Bowles’s work as pure strategy, a non-coded body of invention. Mottram suggests this approach when he quotes Port Moresby, who in a flash of wisdom summarizes this pursuit of a more smooth way of life, a non-linear space of commitment and becoming: He felt very close to himself, perhaps because in order to feel alive a man must first cease to think of himself as being on his way. There must be a full stop, all objectives forgotten .… The whole of life does not equal the sum of its parts. It equals any one of the parts; there is no sum. (10)

To feel alive, listening to one’s heartbeat and stop thinking in following a pre-determined direction is to let oneself free to pursue every direction and give time a new rhythm and speed. It is a creative space of oblivion where development happens at every point of a line and it happens by mutation and not evolution for every part of life is the playing of a differential and the differential never produces wholes (sums) but multiplicities (singularities). This differential and its multiple movement calls for a playfulness and enjoyment that is a fundamental part of Bowles’s musical and literary work and which critics never seem to acknowledge, preferring instead dualistic,

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decadent and nihilistic readings of Bowles or sharp contrasts with his so called “nostalgic and witty music.”4 We want to play with Bowles and be played by him. The crucial aim of this volume of essays is to present as many different readings of Bowles as possible, and especially those that challenge previous readings of the author (including those regarding the relationship between his music and literature), thereby following the stream of a minor literature/music which thinks each work anew without reverting to old categories and movements to justify its value and significance to a modern readership/listenership. In fact, we want Bowles’s work to inspire new modes of thought and consciousness each time it is re-produced, read, performed or criticized. But not studied, for study is a “dirty word” (Swan 10). Why cannot Buddha go into the mountains without his barometer? The present collection is divided in seven chapters, not because it obeys to a circumscribed number of thematic or disciplinary materials that would seem fit to put together under a general designation (although that happens too) but to open up the field of Bowles research to the problems of contemporary society. What’s the use of exploring Bowles’s work if not for the intensive struggle lying at the core of today’s wisdom, laziness and self-despair? It is a sort of “spiritual wickedness in the heavens” (Ephesians 6:12, qtd. in Zizek xv) that he foresaw in The Sheltering Sky, a poetic report of the sign of the times after World War II and of one’s own too restless soul, which finds its perfect echo in current global sensibility. That is part of his fascination, his actuality and creative non-alignment, which keeps bringing new work from newcomers and from renowned scholars and artists all around the world. A renewal of Bowles’s readership is at stake and every chapter tries to address it by including not long but insightful essays, sharpness of tone and controversial ideas, like cult movies or twisted ballads. Accordingly, the book begins by introducing the man and the artist with first-hand testimonies of distinguished scholars who met him and were personally and critically sensible to both his allure and imagination. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, Bowles’s first biographer, speaks in “Paul Bowles as I Knew Him” of the man and of the artist with passion and at the same time with a critical eye which smacks of

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indiscretion: “I spent years trying to penetrate beyond that set piece Paul so liked to offer the world. I spent years attempting to decipher who Bowles really was.” Understandingly, we find it a most difficult task, especially when the subject of one’s curiosity openly claims that he doesn’t know (and doesn’t care) of what makes him tick for otherwise he probably wouldn’t tick anymore (Hibbard 148-49). One can easily apply the same thought to Lauçanno as well – if he did know what he was looking for, maybe the biographer himself would stop ticking and his fascination fade out. The article moves in this dialogic aporia and presents the wonderful adventures (and misfortunes) of a scholar who immersed himself in Bowles’s “world and life”: a private jungle of thought, fiction, music, cannabis, friends and manners. In short, Sawyer-Lauçanno offers an exciting portrait of “an extraordinary man.” Regina Weinreich, teacher and film director, who co-taught a writer’s workshop with Paul Bowles in the 80s, in Tangier, gives us an oblique and witty report of the man behind the screen (not the curtain): “I Would Invite You to Supper but I Have Only One Egg.” She finds him “courteous, friendly, and charming,” although at the same time she acknowledges that his fiction “is imbued with something sinister,” which pulls us back to the mystery of the writer, a sort of an elegant Hitchcock with a crushing appetite for a good laugh and a macabre and criminal interest: “I don’t find murder, or the possibility of murder sad, do you? … All human beings are capable of it, given the right circumstances.” And he did create the right circumstances in Let it Come Down, when the protagonist killed his Moroccan acquaintance, Thami, out of the blue, or in Up Above the World, or in his countless intriguing short stories. Weinreich also highlights Jane Bowles and their peculiar marriage as well as Burroughs and the making of Naked Lunch. This reminds us of the astonishing fact that “there are numerous points of entry into the life and work” of the artist Bowles, due mainly to the wide variety of his production “that continues to circulate in contemporary culture.” Allen Hibbard, a teacher and writer who has written extensively on Bowles’s (short) fiction, is the author of these lines. Hibbard proposes to reflect upon what Bowles means for today’s world, what is it that makes his work and his figure still so attractive to contemporary audiences. First of all, Bowles’s short stories and his literary work are the prime source of his fascination, and he explores some of Bowles’s favourite themes and the dramatic quality of his

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writings by underlining their disruptive force “beneath the smooth surface” of the text (something that Lauçanno and Weinreich felt from another angle). Bowles’s short stories are depicted and analysed in terms of centrality of place and setting, concept of journey, and a sort of nomadic flow that questions the “very nature of movement” of some of his characters and actions.5 Another source of fascination is the life of the author itself, full of seduction and exotic places and without boring jobs – “what a tantalizing prospect for those of us haunted by a fantasy of ultimate freedom.” Addiction to travelling, however, provided materials for both his fiction and music. Last but not least, Hibbard underlines the importance of Bowles’s work to foster understanding of today’s conflicts between Islam and the Western world. Gloompots and Agonizers In the second section, “Ecologies of Fear and Violence: Resistance or Desistance?” the idea is to connect Bowles’s production with the recent conceptual framework of “social ecology” based on violence and conflict and to figure out what kind of answers to this phenomena are still available or possible in order to face up to a general cynicism in practical action and thought – something that Bowles was aware of when claiming that “the cynicism and wisecracks ultimately function as endorsements of the present civilization”(Caponi 100). At the same time, we intend to explore artistic works in broader historical, cultural and political contexts. Following this line of inquiry, The Spider’s House immediately comes to mind, a novel which the author himself considered a “political” work, for lack of a better term: “Thus, whether I liked it or not, when I had finished, I found that I had written a ‘political’ book which deplored the attitudes of both the French and the Moroccans” (x). And so for the first time Bowles is engaged with a political vision of his own – that whether he likes it or not was also the result of the “major political and social transformations” in Morocco, “which moved from colonialism to independence through various intense struggles in the postcolonial period” (Edwards 82). Propelled by this premise, Greg Bevan, in “The Perceptual is Political: Modes of Consciousness in The Spider’s House,” develops a stimulating argument around Bowles’s awareness and “dissent against colonialism and Western material culture in general,” already implicit in his

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fiction and “explicit in some of his essays,” despite rumours that sustain his imperialistic way of life. In fact, he seems to suggest that this “political book” of the author is a sort of a “Truth–Event”6 with resistant contours and one which differs from an aestheticizing of a war that fosters a philosophy of desistance such as, for instance, the one performed by Burroughs in Tangier at the same time, under the same revolutionary circumstances. In a letter to Ginsberg and Kerouac, Burroughs claims: “There’s a war here I want to dig” (Letters 292). Moreover, in “Aestheticizing the Revolution: William Burroughs in Tangier,” Kurt Hemmer declares: [that] the very means Burroughs uses to resist the European narrative impels him to desist from making a critical stand against certain imperialistic attitudes. As Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, the resistance to imperialism in Tangier burst into his novel, but was met with the desistance of his narrative hipster persona. (103)

On the contrary, Bowles seems to consistently contextualizing the novel’s characters in a complex geopolitical order and American policies through two exploratory modes of consciousness, namely wisdom and knowledge. In Bevan’s words: “Cultural assertiveness and end-of-empire resignation, instrumental knowledge and fatalistic wisdom: as Koch might say, it is all here.”7 No one (and nothing) rules forever. A not altogether different position is presented by Clare Brandabur in her exciting article “Laughing with Thieves: Images of Paul Bowles in Tahar Ben Jelloun and Mohamed Choukri,” which points to the cultural dissonances lying at the bottom of the encounters between American writers of the “Interzone” and their Moroccan interlocutors, focusing on both colonialism and orientalism. Quoting Andrew Hussey in “Screening Tangier,” she claims that “the reality of the socalled ‘gay Tangier’ was, and no doubt still is, a predatory form of sex tourism rather than the real utopian liberating playground … wished for by Burroughs et al” (Owen and Hussey 2007). Therefore, instead of analysing Bowles’s viewpoint on Moroccans, a more popular issue, she consistently brings to the surface particular Moroccan writers’s responses to how they perceived Paul Bowles et al. From the exodus of starving families of the Rif, the economic, social and sexual assault on the natives is deeply resented and depicted in vivid literary pictures

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of not so magic realism. Already in 1939, in an essay entitled “Marrakech,” George Orwell watched a column of overworked Negro infantry soldiers (under French rule) marching and sweating, and he asks the most outrageous question with his usual nerve and perspicacity: “How much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?” The answer to this question came almost two decades later, in 1956, when Morocco finally gained its independence, and French colonialism came to an end. Then, under the auspices of the nationalist drive, some young Moroccan scholars have become critically engaged “with an examination of what had been written in and about their country by expatriate writers” and armed with postcolonial theory started to produce a critical speech on Bowles. We include in this chapter (and collection) an essay by one of those scholars, Younes Riyani, who focuses on The Spider’s House from a more radical perspective thus illuminating the general tone of much criticism on the work of expatriate writers – and especially Bowles – that is being produced from a Moroccan point of view.8 It is interesting to compare this essay, “The Spider’s House: Paul Bowles and the Question of Moroccan Independence,” with Bevan’s, since both extensively use the same critical sources, namely Hans Bertens and Brian Edwards, to come to different conclusions. Riyani’s main thesis is, in his words, to “demystify Paul Bowles’s attitude towards the Istiqlal party and the question of Moroccan Independence ….” Thus, he attacks Bowles’s contradictory appetite for “backward” Morocco, and his beloved medieval Fez, in opposition to a more balanced struggle for evolution and progress. A compelling text by Andrew Hussey gives us a contemporary vision of a sign of the present time, in that Hussey explores the complex relationships between East and West. Suggestively entitled “Tangier, Capital of Treason,” after Jean Genet: “Genet loved Tangier. He called it ‘the capital of treason,’ on the grounds that it was full of criminals, spies and homosexuals,” and only mentioning Bowles in passing, Hussey’s essay does however give an elaborate and complex report of a post-Bowles Moroccan era which reveals much of the centrality of Bowles’s work to the present inter-cultural scene. The essay, written in a compelling journalistic literary style, denounces the excesses of foreign presence in Tangier in the name of sexual liberation and reflects on the bombings in Madrid (in 2004) and their relationship to the city (“terrorism is violence as a game”), and to

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a broader socio-economic situation which is related to the so-called “Fourth World War,” which “is not a conflict between Islam and the West or the rich North and the globalized South, but a conflict between two different experiences of the world – those who can join in the modern world, and those who are left behind.” Baudrillard would say in America: Long live the Fourth World, the world to which you can say, “Right, utopia has arrived. If you aren’t part of it, get lost!” the world that no longer has the right to surface, the disenfranchised, who have no voice and are condemned to oblivion, thrown out to go off and die their second-class deaths. (122)

However, even those who can join the modern world are not secure and often what they experience is the dread that lies behind the fragile curtain of material and “democratic” societies, as the need for security is the result of governmental political and military strategies and the merchandising system manipulation of that need, by creating common feelings of insecurity leading to consumption both of goods and protection. This modern need for security is also inevitably linked to war. In 1897, M.I.S. Bloch prophetically claimed: “This is the future: no combat, only famine; no killing, only the bankruptcy of nations and the collapse of any social system” (qtd. in Virilio 142).That is something that Bowles foresaw when writing stories to provoke the outburst of the unfamiliar and emotional terror on his readers, hastening to declare: “Security is a false concept” (Caponi 91). Taking up that premise, in “False Concepts: The Absence of Security and Intimacy in the Work of Paul Bowles,” Andrew Martino elaborates a close reading of the concept of security in the author’s fiction. He claims “without security, one runs the risk of tumbling into a state of anxiety that ultimately leads to madness and annihilation. In his fiction Bowles opens the path toward oblivion via an exposure to anxiety.” On one hand, he proceeds to analyse the elements (informants) that provide a false sense of security and intimacy in Bowles’s fiction, starting with the concept of family (the bond between father and son) and travelling in unknown lands (loss of passport/identity). On the other hand, he finds in form and sequential writing, the ideal “mechanism that seeks to provide a sense of security, not only for the author, but the reader as well.” Contrary to

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the Beats who promoted non-linear narratives and reading – Burroughs famously asserted, for instance, that one could begin reading Naked Lunch on any page – Bowles’s narrative strategy is to provide a solid ground from where content works like a line of flight. Oh where’s your ear I want to whisper to you Section Three, entitled “Music, Noise and Politics,” follows Paul Bowles’s multiple interests in the field of literary and musical production, thus considering him both as a writer and a composer by offering theoretical interpretative tools and meta-linguistic constructs to enable a more refined understanding of the author’s overall work, beyond the traditional fictional/textual focus. Gore Vidal in the introduction to Bowles’s Collected Stories 1939-1976, impressively suggests the importance of this line of enquiry where both music and literature work together in the possibility of producing unexpected results: For the American Academic, Bowles is still odd man out; …. In fact, he supported himself for many years by writing incidental music for such Broadway plays as The Glass Menagerie. It is curious that at a time when a number of serious critics have expressed the hope that literature might one day take on the attributes of the “highest” of all the arts, music, Bowles has been composing music as well as prose. I am certain that the first critic able to deal both with his music and his writing will find that Bowles’s life work has been marvellous in a way not accessible to those of us who know only one or the other of the two art forms. (35)

Accordingly, we expect to offer our readership some insightful tools that foster a deeper accessibility to Bowles’s work. The chapter includes six essays, which deal only with music in connection with literature, politics, and cultural issues. It starts with a wonderful essay by Jennifer L. Campbell that focuses on the politics and cultural intricacies of inter-Americanism surrounding the making and the performance of Pastorela, a ballet, in 1941. Bowles wrote the music for the American Ballet Caravan, directed by Lincoln Kirstein, and the work is based on a traditional Mexican-Indian liturgical play. In Campbell’s words:

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Although the work was meant to send a pro-Latin American message on behalf of the United States, Pastorela received mixed reactions, suggesting an unfortunate misalignment between the positive intentions of its creators and its reception by South American audiences.

Interestingly, we believe, the same sort of misalignment and negative reception was produced by a Charles Henri Ford opera, Denmark Vesey, in 1939, for which Bowles also wrote the music, based in African folk materials, which suggests a broader contextual design and significance of Campbell’s critical analysis. The need for authenticity in searching for traditional music and patterns was typical of composers and Western musicology of this time and it reflects also Bowles’s concerns with the traditional Morocco he loved and for which he is so much blamed for appropriating. Melissa de Graaf, claims that in the Depression era, at the heart of American modernism, the “primitive and exotic seized the imaginations of artists, writers, and musicians on both sides of the Atlantic” (156). Likewise, this interest led composers to appropriate vernacular music and later to a Popular Front’s “musical style” less experimental than accessible to a wider public (see Graaf). One consequence of this passionate affair was the great collection of Moroccan music he recorded in 1959, and that today is still available at the Library of Congress. However, this interest that extends itself greatly to Latin American music, as we are about to see, was not completely altruistic. According to Luis Mergal, “[it] paid off handsomely in his own oeuvre.” In “Paul Bowles and Latin American Music,” Luis Mergal, a Puerto-Rican scholar and pianist, draws a formidable picture of the Latin American musical scene, the very roots of Bowles’s interest in Latin rhythms and melodies, and even hints at the origins of the author’s turn from composing to literature. He consistently suggests that the “yearning for primordial myth” is what leads the artist to “traditional (“folk”) music in the first place” and finds Bowles’s music an extraordinary example of the “adaptation of folk idioms to art music.” Carole Blankenship takes a different approach in “The Musical Styles of the Early Songs of Paul Bowles.” For someone who claimed not to like vocal music, Bowles did manage to produce a lot of it, namely operas, two cantatas, choral works, and songs. The early songs of Bowles are exquisite and Blankenship thoroughly examines them

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from an historical and analytical perspective which shows three distinct compositional styles: one experimental and atonal appearing only in a set of six songs (Six Chansons, 1932), that reflect the “PostModern harmonies” of the time, a second described as “analogous to the French mélodie,” which shows his taste for French music (Satie, Debussy, Ravel) and language (Cocteau, Linze) and a third one being the folk (American) style (Minstrel songs). It is deeply rewarding to realize the incredible range of Bowles’s creativity and musical production, a truly singular work on its own but it is equally fascinating to examine how this production necessarily connects with his writings as previously mentioned. The two fields of artistic production are linked, even if they have separate “lives,” as argued on the following essay by Verena Mogl: “‘The Question of Music and Prose, It’s a Tricky One to Answer’ – Paul Bowles: Composer – Writer.” Mogl alleges “Bowles’s artistic work was always in one discipline, with the exception of the years 1946 to 1950,” because “the number of pieces of music he composed after 1950 is just as low as the number of literary texts he wrote before 1946.” Hence, she suggests that a “time of transition” before the shift from one art form to the other took place and claims that the author was not particularly interested in a specific art form per se and the particular skills each one required, but in the search “for the suitable means of expression.” She finds the reasons for this shift in the irrational and intuitive drive of art, which began with his conception of the poems as dream states and the practice of surrealist techniques such as the so-called écriture automatique that would give his lyrical texts “a hint of dreaminess and floating surreality.” She further claims that as Bowles looked for a comparable approach to music he felt gradually unsatisfied by too many rational/technical constraints that would inhibit his free situative musical style. Thus, “writing literature solved a lot of the problems he had not been able to solve while he was composing,” and enabled him to work without boundaries. The article proceeds with a fascinating comparative analysis of both modes of production, literature and music, in Bowles’s work. Regarding the relationship between literature and music, and the work produced by authors from its double bind, it is worth stressing that Bowles’s work is unique from that perspective. Ned Rorem, his friend and also a writer and composer himself, submits a most eloquent picture of that uniqueness:

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Composer-authors generally compartmentalize their two vocations, allotting parts of each year, if not each day, to each profession. But as authors their subject is inevitably music (as witness Berlioz, Schumman, Debussy, or today, Boulez, Thomson, Sessions), whereas Paul Bowles is a fiction-writing composer, the only significant one since Richard Wagner, and even Wagner’s fiction was at the service of his operas. (Hibbard 226)

It is also relevant to underline the importance of Ned Rorem as one of the first critics to pay attention to the comparative analysis between American literature and music. In fact, he is one of the few at his time (and even now) who knows both Bowles’s prose and music, and writes and publishes about it, whether we agree or not. He sees this as a symptom of American’s “exclusive engagement with specialists,” when writing about Frank O’Hara, for instance: His apercus on what an American opera should be are so much more lucid and concerned than mine .… He was the first of the so-called New York Poets (with Schuyler, Koch, Ashbery) to vanish. I set to music all of them extensively, but their close relation to the sonic art is never, but never, mentioned by critics and biographers. In America the arts do not interconnect. (x)

Likewise, amplifying the resonances of that relationship, “On Degenerescence and Realms of Suppression: Paul Bowles vis-à-vis Einojuhani Rautavaara,” by Zbigniew Bialas, proposes a provocative connection between Bowles’s distrust of the “Western apparatus of representation” and similar concerns in Einojuhani Rautavaara’s opera Thomas, 1985. Taking as a starting point Bowles’s numerous references in fiction and music criticism on “Western degenerescence” and the notion of voice/vocality as the ground element in representational theory, he develops a critical analysis of the “fabrication of ready-to-use exotic soundscapes,” focusing on the vocal and linguistic organization of musical works. In Rautavaara’s opera, thus, he discovers a more effective means for criticizing the hegemonic language (English) through auditory aesthetics and, in his own words, “less – obviously – literary forms” – something that according to Bialas is not achieved by Bowles in spite of his attempts to use sound in his fiction to subvert the “integrity of the cogito.”

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Moreover, he bypasses Bowles’s considerations of hearing as a secondary sense and brings sound aesthetics to the fore. My own contribution to the volume, “Noise and Violence in Up Above the World: Music as Torture in Modern Fiction,” is an inquiry into the aesthetics of noise and violence that ultimately lead to music used as torture (the recent War on Terror is an emergent example), in modern fiction, namely in the work of Bowles and his last novel, which he described as an “entertainment” in the manner of Graham Greene. In fact, my claim is that Bowles’s novel triggers dramatic implications the author never dreamed of and that what was supposed to be an exercise in the thriller genre turns out to be a novel, perhaps the first one that connects fiction with music as a weapon and as torture. The power of music in war was already well described by Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) when he remarked that it is “an art which is so near akin to the soldier’s that, in our modern Western World, it is regarded as the best preparation for a military training” (qtd. in Virilio 172). My argument develops around the theoretical corpus of the seminal work of Jacques Attali, Noise, and the more recent research in the field of Music as Torture studies. It also underlines the use of noise as a potential field of inventiveness for future research in literary works and a way to foster understanding, or better, new layers of knowledge and research on the experience of sound and fear in different narratives. The Future is Now The title of the fourth section, “No Maps for These Territories: Bowles, Burroughs and Beyond,” springs from my sheer admiration for the work of William Gibson and the kind of high tech – cyberpunk philosophy that his books inscribe. Not that Bowles has anything to do with it, strictly speaking, for he was no high tech lover. However, cyberpunk is not just about high tech, but contemporary science fiction drawing on uncharted waters of entropic urban systems. From this point of view, we can find resonances within the works of “Bowles, Burroughs and Beyond,” with modernism and the “muckrackers,” for instance, who waged cultural campaigns against oppressive corporate monopolies or corrupt politicians. This is something akin to pursuits of cyberpunk characters who express their philosophy in the maxim “High tech, Low life.”

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Thus, engaged with modernism but in a provocative way, Christopher Leslie proposes a reading of Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky as a critical statement on the modernist project itself, via (and against) Gertrude Stein. In “Aesthetic Tourists: The Sheltering Sky’s Critique of Modernism,” Leslie argues: [that] while modernism did provide a mechanism for artists to take an outsider’s look at language and society, it was unable to assist real people in contexts radically different from the ones they were used to.

And he systematically provides a close reading of the main characters in the novel, Port and Kit, and biographical and autobiographical materials that support a planned and derisory attitude of Bowles towards the modernist sensibilities of the protagonists of the story. Modernist techniques, he notes, are not the best way of seeing the world, especially when the world “is an environment that does not lend itself to this methodology.” To “make it new,” then, is not enough, and the result is the annihilation of Port and the mad wandering of Kit, whose ultimate experience in the desert and survival does not enrich her but degrades her. Relying on a dialogue between American literature and transatlantic and transnational ideas connected with modernism and modernity, Benjamin Heal’s essay, “American Existentialism and Surrealism in Paul Bowles’s ‘The Scorpion’ and ‘By the Water,’ Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs’s And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” provides an examination of the alienated self, folklore and the idea of “primitivism” in Bowles’s short stories, revealing its European artistic imaginary based on Existentialism and Surrealist techniques, and underlines the fact that “Burroughs and Kerouac were looking beyond America for their influences, at ideas that hadn’t hit America yet.” He traces Luis Buñuel, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton and Sartre as possible sources of inspiration for Bowles in the particular making of Hippos. Although not following a comparative analysis between these literary works, he nevertheless underlines their importance in the post-war period “in presenting an American literature that has “lost innocence.” The next essay, “The Importance of Place and Space in Paul Bowles’s Short Fiction,” begins with a suggestive quote from the author – “What You Do Is Nearer to What You Are than What You

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Think Is” – and focuses on two particular short stories, one being Too Far from Home (1993), a late novella by the author and another story “At Paso Rojo” (1948). Isabel Martins analyses how places and the perception of confined spaces “can be read as an effective means of conveying the characters’s inner nature,” their sense of guilt, displacement and basic violent compulsions. In these stories, Martins notes that the protagonists are not the usual victims of Westernized perceptions of the Other, like in many of Bowles’s writings, but, in fact, are the predators. Moreover, she suggests that place and space are structural elements that support the narrative structure and its exotic outlines, pointing also, like Ben Heal’s essay, to a loss of innocence. Nuno Marques’s paper “Experiences of Death and Dissolution in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky and Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels and The Dharma Bums” reviews the sense of a psychological as well as a physical displacement and existential anguish as a mirror of the general malaise of the “civilized American of the post-war period.” Supporting his conviction of the centrality of Nature in both works, and the impossibility felt by Bowles and Kerouac characters for developing an unselfish relationship with it, Marques underlines their ultimate failure and their return to Western civilization. Face to face with their own selves, the confrontation with the natural forces of the desert and the mountain does not withstand the protagonists’s quest for an ultimate revelation, nor do their mystical ruminations, which lack a true communion with the “wilderness,” resulting in the characters’s alienation and growing distance from their surroundings. Section Five contains just two essays, but in fact it has a deep resonance in our project, for the film You Are Not I, by Sara Driver, who participated in the conference, was based on Paul Bowles’s homonymous story, and was restored and digitalized with our conference in mind.9 Thus it played an important part in the overall tone and aesthetic concept of the conference, being included in its main exhibition entitled “Pirates at Heart: Excavating Paul Bowles,” which featured the screening of the film at Cinemateca de Lisboa, followed by a discussion, and a whole section dedicated to it named “You Are Not I – A Film by Sara Driver,” which included the original press kit and film script, letters of Paul Bowles to the director, posters, promotional photographs and press kit for screens in other European venues.10 I still remember with amusement the large number of emails exchanged with Francis Poole, poet and film librarian/archivist at the University of Delaware, and also Tim Murray, and the pressure

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I was putting on both (and myself) to have the film (and the other materials) ready for our presentation. In the end, with relief, one could finally claim, “we did it!” for we really had to overcome unspeakable obstacles. The film has a truly unique story and has been a great success ever since, being presented at many international film festivals, reviewed by The New York Times in 2010 and also presented at the New York Film Festival in 2011 and at other scholarly events on Bowles. Hence, it is doubly fascinating to open the chapter with Poole’s extended essay11 on the extraordinary discovery of the film and its connection with the No Wave scene of New York – a fact that becomes even more extraordinary since no one knew what was inside the mysterious film case which was covered with bug powder, reminding us of David Cronenberg’s film of William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch, as the canister ultimately contained a notable example of reality surpassing fiction as well as a remarkable first film. However, none of this would have happened if Bowles hadn’t written the story “You Are Not I,” and if the film director, Driver, hadn’t found it inspiring and connected with her own interests and sensibility, and perhaps more importantly with her own times. The story, which results from the exchange of identities between two twin sisters (one mentally ill and another one allegedly mentally sane), points towards a reflection on the very concepts of madness and normalcy and to the making of a resistant text that resists, precisely, many common assumptions about cultural and linguistic behaviour. Likewise, Yoshiaki Koshikawa attaches considerable relevance to the story, claiming: Among Bowles’s works, “You Are Not I” (1948) makes a critique of society that is relevant even today, despite the fact that the story was published more than sixty years ago. The story radically questions the basis for Western discourses about boundaries which differentiate between “sanity” and “insanity.”

In his essay, “A Resistant Text: ‘You Are Not I,’” Koshikawa claims that travel narrative is one of the major elements in Bowles’s short stories and proceeds to highlight “boundaries” as the operative model of his enquiry. Acknowledging that Bowles is a master of landscape, he suggests the replacement of the idea of “scenery” with the idea of

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“law” and “taboo” since assigning meaning to the landscape “is a product of the imagination of the travellers who cross “boundaries” and “borders” and not of the landscape itself. By examining boundaries that define “insanity,” the use of a specific “Power Apparatus” and of a distorted syntax he demonstrates the resistant mechanisms that “reveal the vulnerability of those seemingly distinct “boundaries” and expose the arbitrariness and relativity of law and taboo that are accepted as natural by people who live inside of the boundaries.” Section Six addresses the mediation of cultures and the complexities of key concepts and patterns of behaviour, which dominate the East/West debate with two essays also. The sense of a modernity that fails to come to grips with a more realist image of the “Oriental” land and that, on another hand, threats to ruin ancient beliefs and origins in the name of progress is a dominant theme in Bowles’s work and connects it also to Lévi-Strauss’s ethnographical journey and anthropological concerns on Tristes Tropiques. Focusing on a controversial Bowles short story, “A Distant Episode,” the section starts with Bouchra Benlemlih’s “Towards an Absent Origin: The Edge of Anger in Paul Bowles’s ‘A Distant Episode,’” which proceeds to depict the elements in tune with Lévi-Strauss’s ethnographic mourning, regret and nostalgia that are “emblematized in the title of Tristes Tropiques.” Trapped in nostalgia for the past, Bowles’s protagonist, the Professor, remains a prisoner of the “atemporality of memory structures, and of symbolic systems,” failing to recognize the essential changes in time and history that pertains to every living social system. Like a typical Western traveler, the professor “assumes that the village will not have changed, that it is timeless, out of (Western) time,” failing to understand that “traditions are constantly changing” and becoming blind to the suggestive announcements of his tragic destiny. Hence, the Professor’s doomed ambivalence is both rooted in an intellectual refusal of modernity/absent origin and in an empirical estrangement from the native/real world, a “structure of feeling,” that according to Benlemlih finds resonance in both Bowles’s and Lévi-Strauss’s own “feelings of grief, as nature, land, raw materials and also people are transformed.” From a more post-colonial perspective, Fernando Gomes, in the second and last essay of the section, explores the complexity of human and cultural relations between the Islamic and the Christian worlds in “The Time of Friendship,” a Bowles short story written in 1962.

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Based on a Bowles journey into the desert, the story draws on the impossibility of a middle-aged woman to return to her beloved second home in Taghit, because of the Algerian war. Thus, Fräulein Windling, the main protagonist of the fictional work, represents the typical Bowles travelerin search for a more authentic way of life in idyllic landscapes. Her exquisite relationship with Slimane, a young Arab, “imbued with eroticism,” is authentic; however it also shows that her particular demand for cultural purity and true experience is not based on a dynamic and impartial vision of the cultural forces at play. In fact, Gomes argues that she both lacks vision and will to understand the “other’s” traditions and progress, aiming at imposing her own “factors of cultural transformation” and not allowing learning them from others, namely their religion and concept of modernity. I saw Dracula as though he’d rescued Jesus from the cross The seventh and final section, “Momentum No Speed,” focuses on disparate elements of Bowles’s writing, social life and film which point to an alternative pace of time where people would write letters instead of e-mails, travel by ship and ground transportation instead of planes and high jets. Many Bowles works were written while travelling by ship, a form of travel he regarded as far more inspiring than the current modes of displacement. In that sense, his nomadic expatriate life in a sub-urban, geo-economic region, Morocco, a timespace of interdiction, can be seen as a plea for staticity against the modern belief that “stasis is death.” The first essay, by Kostoula Kaloudi, discusses the role of the narrator Paul Bowles in the film The Sheltering Sky, and the dimensions that role takes in the ability to evoke “a real or imaginary past, on its relationship with magic, on the indirect reference to the personality of Jane Bowles in the film.” It doesn’t propose a critical analysis but a reflection on thoughts that the novel and the film inspire. Thus, finding herself also an alternative (s)pace for her own “analysis,” Kaloudi suggests the existence of a variety of mirrors in the film as a dreamlike sign of a dual reality and illusion that supports an autobiographical reading of the film and the very essence of the art of cinema “where the ghosts force us to go to them.” Believing the narrator Paul Bowles “is led to a “disclosure” by his featuring in the film,” she projects the author in a magical space-time where he can freely recall “his personal and literary memory.”

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Calling equally on the exploratory potential of the mysterious and magical dynamics of Bowles’s belief in a secret passage between the natural and conscious world that “caused a short circuit in the brain,” is Maria Lima’s contribution “Gothic Short Circuits in Paul Bowles’s Fiction.” In this interstitial space of a “dark exotic mood” where beauty and terror reflect the state of complete isolation of Bowles’s characters, Lima draws a parallel between the author’s compulsive use of “effects of reduplications, mirroring and magical exchanges,” and American Gothic Fiction, notably Edgar Allan Poe’s mechanisms of psychic disintegration and perversity. Moreover, she actually “discovers” Bowles’s magical recipe for the processional metamorphosing of unfamiliar patterns of fear and terror and how he puts them at work to “reveal some of the disturbing secrets of the intercultural clashes” in his writings: a fictional universe where creation depends on destruction to exist. Completing the final chapter of the Do You Bowles? volume, Krisztina Dankó examines the literary (and musical) friendship of Jane and Paul Bowles with Tennessee Williams, the influential American playwright. In addition, she shows a sort of Western version of a more personal “time of friendship” within Bowles’s literary and artistic circle of Bohemian friends that point to a magical space-time when people were easy to meet in spite of geographical distance and lack of financial resources. Thus, proceeding to highlight Williams’s several stays in Tangier, the making of the successful The Glass Menagerie, his close relationship with Jane Bowles and her work (“an acute admixture of humour and pathos”), their travelling companionship, lovers and dedications to Paul Bowles, Dankó attributes such a long friendship to Williams’s neurotic personality and need to be surrounded by sensitive people who were “all as frightened as I am … only about other matters.” The distinguished contributors to this collection illustrate a multiplicity of approaches to Bowles’s work. They encourage us to draw stimulating and challenging configurations of knowledge and artistic interrogations of reality through his work, and beyond it to foster new avenues of research that situate Bowles’s in relation to the great questions of contemporary society.

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NOTES 1

All subsequent titles are inspired by quotes from Paul Bowles’s oeuvre. Bowles didn’t know their work and probably wasn’t interested too. In a letter to Wayne Pound referring to a Jameson [Fredric] essay he clearly remarks: “As a layman, I find many of its references meaningless: texts by Althusser, Derrida, Adorno, Lefebvre, Debord, Lacan and Foucault mean nothing to me because I’m wholly ignorant of them …” (Miller 525). However, connections between provocative tone and will, as evidence of one’s singularity, seem obvious. 3 According to Ned Rorem: “In 1949, with the publication of his very successful Sheltering Sky at the age of forty, Paul Bowles became the author-who-also-writesmusic, after having long been the composer-who-also-writes-words” (Hibbard 226). 4 As we shall see, in a whole chapter dedicated to Bowles’s music production, “Music, Noise and Politics,” his musical spectrum is much more diverse than critics ever allowed it to be. 5 Virilio suggests that the very nature of movement is speed and would be interesting to analyse Bowles’s stories from that perspective too. 6 Speaking of Alain Badiou, Devin Zane Shaw claims “an event breaks with the state of the situation, and reconfigures the co-ordinates of the symbolic order” (184). At the same time “truths” are opposed to “opinions” so that the Truth-Event is the result of knew artistic and thought configurations of works of art. See “Inaesthetics and Truth: The Debate between Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière,” 2007. 7 “It is all here,” wrote Stephen Koch in a 1979 review of Paul Bowles’s fiction, “ – the Casbah, the kif dens, the maze of slums, the hurt, lurking, imperialized Arab boys. Bowles has lived this murky Western dream, brought his formidable artistic intelligence to it” (qtd. in Hibbard, 242). 8 For further reading on this topic see Brian Edwards’s Morocco Bound, 2005 and Greg Mullins’s Colonial Affairs, 2002. 9 The special screening Francis Poole talks about in his essay came at a later stage when Sara Driver was informed about the film, and probably another copy was made. 10 I was at Delaware University in November 2009, where I met Francis Poole and learned about the existence of Sara Driver’s film at the audio-film archives. I was researching Bowles’s filmography and videography for my PhD and conference program. We started immediately to discuss the possibility of its presentation in Lisbon, but first official authorizations were needed from the University and from the director, Sara Driver, who didn’t know a copy of her 1982 Bowles film still existed. In fact, by the end of May 2010 we were desperately looking for her: “Anabela ... I’ve been trying to contact either Sara Driver or Jim Jarmusch for two weeks. I called the Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, Writers Guild, even his agent but no luck. I even tried a friend in the film business in New York. There are two other places I might try next Tuesday. We are off for the Memorial Day weekend. Preferably I would like to contact Sara first. We’ll see. Have a great weekend. Francis” (personnal communication, 29 May 2010). As for our part, we did contact Cinemateca de Lisboa by e-mail explaining our interest in the screening of Driver’s film (on 19.02.2010) and asking for her contacts (on 29.05.2010) but received no answer (until finally, much 2

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later, when we had everything figured out), although I came to know they did contact her on May 3. 11 The original “essay” was the result of our specific request for a text for the conference’s twenty-page exhibition catalogue, Pirates at Heart, in October 2010. The exhibition, entitled “Pirates at Heart: Excavating Paul Bowles,” in residence about two weeks, was co-produced by the University of Lisbon and the University of Delaware, represented by Tim Murray and Francis Poole.

WORKS CITED Baudrillard, Jean. America. London: Verso, 2010. Bowles, Paul. The Spider’s House. New York: Ecco Press, 2003. Caponi, Gena Dagel. ed. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Duarte, Anabela. Do You Bowles? Paul Bowles Centennial. University of Lisbon, ULICES, Oct. 2010. Web. 15 May 2012. Edwards, Brian T. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Graaf, Melissa Jenny de. “Documenting Music in the New Deal: The New York Composers’s Forum Concerts, 1935-1940.” PhD Thesis. Massachusetts, Brandeis U, 2006. Hemmer, Kurt. “Aestheticizing the Revolution: William Burroughs I Tangier,” in Bowles, Beats, Tangier. eds. Allen Hibbard and Barry Tharaud, Tangier/Denver: ICPS and CMI, 2010. (99-106) Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study in Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Hubbs, Nadine. The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity. Berkeley: University of Califórnia Press, 2004. Lawlor, Leonard. “The Incorruptibles.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Nov. 22, 2006. Web. Jan. 4, 2012. Miller, Jeffrey, ed. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Mottram, Eric. Paul Bowles: Staticity & Terror. London: Aloe Books, 1976. Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles. Dir. Owsley Brown, 2002. DVD.

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Orwell, George. “Inside the Whale (1940),” in Collected Essays, eBooks@Adelaide. ed. The University of Adelaide Library, 2007. Upd. Aug. 29, 2010. Web. 5 Fev. 2012. ––––.“Marrakech (1939),” in Collected Essays, eBooks@Adelaide. ed. The University of Adelaide Library, 2007. Upd. Aug. 29, 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2012. Pound, Ezra. Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. New York: Da Capo Press, 1968. Rorem, Ned. Wings of Friendship: Selected Letters, 1944-2003. United States: Shoemaker Hoard, 2005. Shaw, Devin Zane. “Inaesthetics and Truth: The Debate between Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière.” Filosofski Vestnick XXVII. 2 (2007): 183-199. Swan, Claudia, ed. Paul Bowles Music. New York: EOS Music Inc., 1995 Vidal, Gore. Introduction. Collected Stories 1939-1976. By Paul Bowles. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow P, 1980. 1-5. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Trans. Mark Polizzotti, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. Zizek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2011.

I THE FASCINATION OF PAUL BOWLES – FACE TO FACE SECRECIES

PAUL BOWLES AS I KNEW HIM CHRISTOPHER SAWYER-LAUÇANNO

I present a series of memories about Paul Bowles from my initial meeting with him in June of 1985 through the early 1990s. I reflect on who Bowles was as a person and who he was as an artist, and address my own curious role as his biographer. I discuss his relationships with Jane Bowles, Ahmed Yacoubi and Mohammed Mrabet and his friendships with many of the leading creative figures of his time. I also analyze his attitudes toward Morocco and Moroccans. Finally I attempt to summarize how and why his contributions to literature and music endure.

I first met Paul Bowles in the summer of 1985. We had corresponded some the year before and he had invited me to come visit him in Tangier. At the time I knew that I wanted to write something about him, though I wasn’t quite sure what. I had read everything he had published and was convinced that he was one of America’s great writers. What I couldn’t understand is why so few now knew about him, why so few seemed to have read him, why he had been so forgotten in his own country. My indignation had been further fueled that spring, when in response to a request to write a small study on an American writer for a university press, I had proposed Bowles and had been rejected. The editor essentially wrote back stating that Bowles was not important enough to warrant a publication. I arrived in Tangier that summer with eyes and ears wide open. I realize now that I really had little idea of what to expect. Even though he had written me that he lived in an apartment across the street from the American consulate on the outskirts of Tangier proper, I had imagined the apartment to be some sort of Moroccan-style place, with tile and fountains, and that Bowles would maybe be dressed in a djellabah, lounging on cushions, smoking kif. Well I got the last parts right: he did still smoke kif and he did sit, though quite upright, on low cushions. His apartment in the Immeuble Itesa, in a poured concrete edifice, however, was fairly non-descript. The whole

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apartment was three and a half room, with the sala, with its three sets of cushions arranged triangularly surrounding a low table, the official visiting room. Since I was sure that I was one of the few who knew who Bowles was, I expected that I’d have a private audience with the great man. To my surprise when I arrived the small apartment was full of guests. And Bowles, nattily clad in linen trousers and a well-pressed lightblue shirt, was serving tea and conversing quite easily with the cortege who surrounded him. Off to the side was a rather fierce-looking middle-aged Moroccan who silently sat smoking kif. I introduced myself to Bowles, and he, in turn, introduced me to the others present. Then, motioning to the Moroccan, said simply, “and that’s Mrabet.” Mrabet scowled, returned to his kif. First impressions, of course, are not always accurate nor even true. In this case what I observed that first afternoon was a Bowles set piece, both true and untrue. At this time in his life – he was 74 – he was far from the image I had in my mind of a reclusive, unknown writer holed up on the edge of Tangier. He was, in fact, sought out by just about anyone with somewhat advanced literary interests who happened to pass through Tangier. And he welcomed those who flocked to the Immeuble Itesa. He enjoyed holding court, and while the conversations were not terribly deep, he didn’t seem to mind giving pretty much the same answers to the same questions, or telling stories about Tangier’s past glory days and how now it was so dreadful. What I quickly came to realize was that the dapper gentleman who held court in his sala on any given afternoon was a carefully constructed public persona. This “you” was not quite his “I.” I spent years trying to penetrate beyond that set piece Paul so liked to offer the world. I spent years attempting to decipher who Bowles really was. And long after my biography was published I continued to think about Bowles, puzzle out something he’d said, mull over an event. I’m not sure I ever really found out who he exactly was, but I did discover quite a lot about the man, and we, of course, had our own relationship. What I want to do is give some sense of the Bowles that I knew, of the man and the artist, of the writer and the composer. Fortunately for me, I hung around Tangier long enough that first summer to penetrate somewhat beyond the Bowlesean surface. On probably a dozen occasions I did have the opportunity to talk with Paul alone. With his permission I recorded some of these

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conversations. And I found when I expressed my interest and knowledge of his work he opened up quite a bit. And talk about the work led to accounts of how the work came to be, and these often led to enchanting tales of a past life spent in exotic geographies. The other major entrée into Bowles’s world came through Mrabet. On maybe my second or third visit to see Paul the only other one there was Mrabet. Since I spoke Spanish, the language that Paul and Mrabet spoke between them, I was able to enter into their ongoing conversation. When others arrived, Mrabet invited me over to sit by him. I accepted, and we continued our conversation. From that moment on, Mrabet and I got on quite well. By the time I returned to the States that fall, I had decided to write a biography of Bowles. When I wrote Paul what I wished to do, he was less than encouraging: “I hope no biography will be written during my lifetime.” But he didn’t shut the door either: “I hope you will come to Tangier ... and discuss the project with me.” The following summer I returned and within a week or so Paul decided to allow me to proceed, but with the caveat that he “be excused from all participation in the project.”1 Despite his official avowal not to participate, he never refused – at least outright – to answer a question, provide me with a contact, and unearth a letter for me to read. Indeed, over the next couple of years, I spent a fair amount of time with him, talking and listening, reading and rereading everything he had written, published or unpublished, talking with those who knew and had known him, playing and listening to his music: in other words, immersing myself in his world and life. Our relationship, of course, was odd. How could it not have been? I was prying into his life, unearthing memories and experiences, some of which he wished would not come to light. He was nervous that I would expose him. And yet, he was clearly curious about what I was doing. And while I would like to say that we were friends, I cannot. But we were not enemies either. After the biography was published he wrote me that he supposed he “should be thankful [he] was not presented in a more unfavorable light; it certainly could have been done, and it was only your unwillingness to be harmful that prevented it.” I was glad that Paul realized that in doing my best to tell his story, my aim had never been to harm him. In fact, it was the opposite, and

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my admiration for him remains as strong now as it was more than a quarter century ago. I was probably closest to Paul during the winter of 1987. He was recuperating from surgery in which a doctor had severed his great sympathetic nerve as a way of treating a clogged artery. For several weeks in January, with the exception of Mrabet, I was the only visitor. He was not strong, so I would only stay a couple of hours each day, but he seemed to look forward to my visits. For some reason, now not clear to me, I missed going to see him for a couple of days. When I showed up again he was quite peeved. “I thought you’d suddenly decided to leave without even saying good-bye. I was about to send Mrabet looking for you.” It was during this period that we spoke the most about people that were closest to his heart: his mother, Jane, Yacoubi. When I finally had to leave he said he hoped he’d see me again but he supposed not. When I replied that I’d definitely be back in June, he said that what he meant was that he wasn’t sure he’d still be on the planet. “I hope you have all the information from me that you need,” he added. Our parting was difficult. When I returned, as promised, in the summer of 1987 I was relieved to find Paul’s health had improved. By that time I’d become quite involved with his music and was as interested in reviving interest in his compositions as in his books. My desire for a concert finally materialized the following spring when Michel Redolfi, the director of the Festival Manca in Nice decided to dedicate a program to Bowles’s music. I offered to come to Tangier to pick Paul up and take him to Nice but he declined. I went, but as a rank amateur had little to do with the actual production. The art songs were sung beautifully by baritone Dale Duesing; the piano music, however, was performed quite poorly mainly due to a lack of rehearsal time. And while I would have rather had better piano performances, the concert did, I believe, thanks in part to Radio France Culture’s broadcast, help to remind the public, and musicians, that Paul was a composer whose works were definitely worth performing. Through all this period Paul and I exchanged letters, and I kept extensive journals of my conversations (when not taped) with him. I also wrote a fair number of reflections on him, his work, and on others I got to know at the time. In putting together this text I reread our letters, reread my journals. In reviewing this material from more than 20 years ago, I was somewhat surprised at how vivid those memories were. And how many memories there were! Which ones were worth

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sharing? How to form a portrait of this extraordinary man? In the end I decided to focus on three aspects of Bowles that I think say the most about who he was: his relationship to Morocco and Moroccans, his friendships and views on friendship; and finally his own sense of himself as a creative artist. Perhaps because Mrabet helped open the door for me to Bowles – indeed he often managed to draw Paul out on subjects no one else could – I think it useful to begin there. Paul’s relationship with Mrabet, I came to see over the years, was to some extent emblematic of his relationship with Morocco itself. One on one Bowles was the interested party, drawing him out, encouraging his kif-inspired ramblings, delighting in the darker and sinister tales, becoming inspired himself by his vivid accounts and commentaries. Mrabet functioned in many ways as Bowles’s eyes and ears on Morocco; he brought him stories (and kif), kept him informed of the gossip on the street, and of the latest happenings. He also watched out for Paul. In later years he made him both breakfast and dinner. Mrabet was attentive and caring and very useful to Paul. But, of course, Paul was exceedingly helpful to Mrabet. Without his recognition of Mrabet’s genius, and his willingness to record and translate his stories and novels, he would likely have remained just another kif-smoking, Moroccan fisherman. What Mrabet represented for Bowles was a Morocco of the past, where people still told stories to one another, where life was lived more simply, where art was inspired by the world around the artist, not by a European gallery, where music was played on instruments, not boom boxes. Bowles has been accused by some critics as being a neo-colonialist, or even a colonialist. These charges have some merit. Bowles certainly did have a somewhat paternalistic attitude toward Moroccans, and by the mid-80s was certain that Morocco was – to use his term – “ruined.” Even as early as the mid-50s, however, he was feeling that an era was quickly coming to an end. In The Spider’s House, Stenham, whom Bowles acknowledged shared similar viewpoints to his own, says: “When I first came here it was a pure country. There was music and dancing and magic every day in the streets. Now it’s finished, everything. Even the religion. In a few more years the whole country will be like all the other Moslem countries, just a huge European slum, full of poverty and hatred” (188). When I asked him about this quote he looked at me with a wry smile on his

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face. “Well? Stenham was right, wasn’t he. Oh maybe not. It’s even worse than he thought it would be thirty years ago.” Remarks of this sort were common coming from Paul. Mrabet largely shared Bowles’s feelings that so-called progress had erased so much of traditional Morocco. Bowles, in fact, told me that both he and Mrabet had been vilified in the press. “I’ve been attacked at various times in the paper for being a neo-colonialist. First of all they claim that I wrote all the translations that I do and that the Moroccans don’t exist. Mrabet doesn’t exist. And of course he got pretty angry with that. And then they said that yes, Mrabet exists, but he’s just a pantin, a marionette being manipulated by the Americans and implying practically that the CIA was behind it. Idiotic. They didn’t really like what he does because for them it’s a Morocco of the past. They don’t want to admit that there’s any magic today. There is, and he knows it, but officially there’s no such thing. And there’s no kif so you can’t write about that. Mrabet just writes about what he imagines and sees without any political overtones whatever. But for them it’s very reactionary, practically wicked.” Mohamed Choukri, whose novel For Bread Alone Bowles translated, as well as other books, did not share Mrabet’s view or sensibility. Choukri told me that Paul was only interested in a Morocco that no longer existed, a Morocco in which Europeans had privileges, where the natives were backward and in awe of the Westerner. “He [Bowles] hates everything about Tangier, today. He hates it that we’re an independent country, that we liberated ourselves from the French. And he hates everybody in Tangier except for his old friends up on the Old Mountain and a few Moroccans who get favors from him by telling him what he wants to hear.” Choukri, who by the time I met him was no longer friendly with Paul, certainly had some axes to grind but he wasn’t entirely off base either. Nonetheless, it was not nearly as simple as Choukri stated it. The problem Bowles had with Morocco after independence was not that the French no longer ruled. What bothered him was that Morocco and its people seemed to have lost their own identities. Or as he told me: “Most Moroccans you’ll meet these days want to deny their own past, or don’t even know of their past. They don’t want to be reminded that they once had a flourishing culture and long traditions. And what do they have now? Everything they can import: music, televisions, blue jeans, cars, appliances, even food. They’re less independent now

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than they were before independence. But they think they’re living the good 20th century life.” Bowles’s story “The Hyena,” in which a hyena lures a stork into his cave with promises of peace and friendship and then kills him, served for him as the fable that summed up what had happened to Morocco with the coming of independence. Or as he told me: “The stork represents tradition, the hyena represents progress. Progress normally wins out. Tradition isn’t strong enough.” So what to make of all of this? My journals are full of contradictory assessments. In one entry, for instance, occasioned by listening with Paul to some of his recordings of Moroccan music, I chronicle how clearly dedicated Bowles was to preserving this exceptional music, to what lengths he went to make these recordings, how much he cared about them, how important it is that he did this. In another entry, just a few days later, I react to his pronouncements that Tangier has nothing to offer him any longer, so why should he bother to engage it. And I noted on so many occasions how dismissive Bowles was of anything contemporary in Moroccan culture, how he isolated himself from the outside world, how with the exception of Mrabet, almost all of his visitors seemed to be Westerners, mostly from abroad. Clearly Bowles had decided that there was no reason any longer to venture beyond his own apartment. Indeed, by the time I knew him his excursions outside the house were exceedingly limited. At about 4:30 each day his faithful driver Abdelhouaid would come to drive Bowles in his gold Mustang to the post office. Occasionally, Paul would go to dinner at a friend’s house on the Old Mountain. And the American School and the consulate would occasionally invite him to some event. But he rarely sat in a café any longer, or picked out his fruit at Tangier’s Fez Market, or even walked along Merkala Beach. He claimed that nothing in Tangier interested him any longer. “So why stay?” I asked him one day. He looked at me directly, hesitated a moment, then said, “I’m as comfortable here as I would be any place else. Besides, where would I go?” In the end I’ve come to feel that Bowles was not really a neocolonialist but rather a victim of nostalgia for an earlier period. In what he thought was a more Moroccan Morocco of the 30s and 40s and early 50s he had found inspiration for his best work. He actively sought experience and experience seemed to have sought him, as well. Little escaped his notice because he was so alert to all that was happening around him. But because he convinced himself that

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tradition was vanishing with progress, and that Morocco was rapidly changing for the worse, he began to lose interest in what was happening. And as he grew older he became more and more content to isolate himself from the outside. If the world came to him, that was fine. But he would not go to the world. And the world that came was largely the Western world, the place where he was best known. “I have no reputation in Morocco at all,” he told me. “Moroccan writers don’t know that I exist, or if they do, they don’t care. The best ones don’t live here anyway; they’re all in France or somewhere abroad.” And so what appears to be a neo-colonialist attitude is really more that of a willful separation of the Morocco that is from the Morocco that was. The Morocco that is was devoid of interest; the Morocco that was was the land that gave life to his writing. The hyena and the stork. From the time Bowles first went to Morocco, he of course, lived and navigated two worlds: that of expatriate Tangier, and that of Moroccan Tangier. From what he and others told me, there was far less of a divide between the Moroccans and the Westerners during the 40s, 50s and even 60s than there was by the 70s and 80s. And yet even in this earlier period there was still a division. Bowles’s closest friends were mainly members of the expatriate set, but even there a schism existed between the Old Mountain crowd – folks such as Lord David Herbert, Margaret McBay, Rex Henry, and Jay Hazlewood – and less pedigreed (or at least poorer expats such as Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and Alfred Chester. As Burroughs remembered it, “[Paul] was in solidly with The Old Mountain crowd, that rather wealthy expatriate circle. Paul was a celebrity in that group, regarded as a celebrity.” Along with these two groups were those who came to visit for an extended time, such as Tennessee Williams, Cecil Beaton, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Maurice Grosser, Buffie Johnson, and then the Beats: Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso. The painter Buffie Johnson, who had known Paul and Jane since the 30s in New York, and who lived off and on in Jane’s apartment after her death, noted that Paul was at ease, as she put it, “in high or low society.” According to Buffie, “[h]e could lunch with David Herbert at noon, have dinner with Yacoubi, meet up with Tennessee later that night, and the next morning visit with Burroughs in the hole he lived in at the Muniriya. And what was remarkable, is that he was always the same person: unfailingly courteous, interested in what his friends had to say, always offering something of himself.”

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My own observations of Bowles’s interaction with all and sundry match that of Buffie. And Bowles was a loyal friend. He counted Virgil Thomson, for instance, whom he hadn’t seen face to face in more than a quarter century as a dear and close friend. Correspondence kept them in touch. Virgil and Paul were still writing each other in the 80s. It was no coincidence that among the last pieces of fiction Paul wrote were two epistolary stories, “Unwelcome Words” and “In Absentia.” The way he kept in touch with many was through the post. He eagerly looked forward to each day’s batch of letters, and routinely devoted himself each day to responding to his many correspondents. Paul kept his associations with so many alive for him and for others through reminiscences. Paul loved to tell stories about his many friends over many years. One of my greatest pleasures was to listen to Paul mimic the accents and speaking styles of folks like Tennessee Williams, Capote, John Latouche, and Burroughs. When Bowles talked of them, they almost became present. Dialogue was a natural feature of these tales, the speakers’s voices alternating in pitch, tone and accent. If song was required, then it was sung. Friendships, he once told me, kept him going during the long years of Jane’s decline. By the 80s, many of those he’d been closest with, such as Williams, Capote, and Libby Holman were dead. And others, such as Burroughs, Gysin, Edouard Roditi, Thomson or Rorem no longer came to Tangier. Reminiscing about old friends was a chief topic of conversation when Bowles did get together with those whom he’d known for years. I was present on several occasions when he and Buffie would begin conversing about someone from their past. Paul, whose memory was nearly photographic, could recall the tiniest details about past events, including conversations. And while Paul could certainly be rather catty at times, and enjoyed gossip and gossiping, I rarely heard him say anything terribly nasty about anyone. He was even fairly generous toward Alfred Chester, with whom he’d had enormous difficulties. While he did describe Chester as “that horror” he also allowed how the poor man couldn’t really help himself. “He was totally mad.” Once, I was the third party when Margaret McBey came to visit. At some point the conversation turned to them remembering various deceased members of the Old Mountain crowd. And again, Bowles would mimic the accents – this time mostly British – of certain individuals, and suddenly one recollection would turn to another and

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Tangier, as it was in the 1950s was suddenly spread out before my eyes. Memories, in fact, were very much in the forefront of Bowles’s mind by the time I got to know him. It wasn’t that he lived in the past but as he told me: “Those were better times.” And then, of course, there were his Moroccan friends. From what I observed, Moroccans were rarely present in the same room at the same time as Westerners. Bowles told me that was because there were still fairly rigid class divisions in Tangier. Neither side, he told me, felt comfortable mingling in large social situations. Even when Moroccans invited you to their homes, they would generally not invite many other Moroccans. Edouard Roditi told me that this was something of an issue for him when he was in Morocco because neither Europeans nor Moroccans were accustomed to joining together in a group. “You rarely attended a dinner party, for instance, in which you’d have Moroccans seated with Europeans or Americans. It just didn’t happen. When you left you might return to your place where your Arab boy would be waiting but few would ever think of bringing the Arab boy with them to dinner. And the Arab boy wouldn’t expect to be invited.” I observed this often. Even when both Mrabet and Bowles’s driver and handyman, Abdelhouaid were present, they rarely joined or were asked to join a group of Westerners. If it were just the four of us, then a conversation was possible but the moment others arrived, the Moroccans retreated to the other room, or left the house all together. When I asked Mrabet about it he told me that he had no interest in meeting most of those who came to see Bowles. “Even if they speak Spanish or French they don’t usually have anything to tell me that I want to hear, and they could care less what I have to say.” When asked about the divide, in general, Mrabet told me that the foreigners almost all saw the Moroccans as either servants or sex partners, and that many Moroccans could only see the foreigners as rich people who would give them jobs and money and gifts, or at least money for sex. Or as he explained: “Some of the foreigners were very nice to us, gave us presents and money and asked for little in exchange; others were not that way. They’d cheat us out of money they owed us, accuse us of stealing, find ways to get rid of us. Paul and Jane were always good. Jane was too good and let Cherifa take over her life. Even after Cherifa tried to kill her, she wouldn’t stop her from coming to see her. And when she came it was only to work her bad magic and get Jane or

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Paul to give her more money. Paul was generous to everyone, even Cherifa. Yacoubi was first for sex but soon became like a son to Paul. Larbi and Choukri he also helped but they turned on him. I’m not Paul’s son. I’m his friend. He never asked me for sex. And Paul’s my friend.” I would be remiss in talking about Paul’s friends if I didn’t mention that among his closest and dearest friends were the characters in his books. To hear Paul talk about his fictional characters, they were as alive as anyone he’d ever known. Here, for instance, is Bowles talking about two of his characters in Up Above the World: “His real name was Grove; he was called Grovero as a joke. And from Grovero it became Vero … I liked Luchita with her terrible drawings. She was a real hippie, I think. She prefigured Haight-Ashbury. They also drew pictures on the sidewalk with colored crayon and colored chalk. What did she say? She said she earned 8000 old francs a day doing it in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I think they could do it here, too. The only thing is, you better not try.” And in talking about Dyar, in Let it Come Down, Bowles told me: “He wasn’t terribly bright. He expects to be a victim and then he is a victim: he’s his own victim.” It’s not unusual, of course, for writers to speak about their characters as living, breathing beings but Bowles told me that for him it wasn’t worth writing about someone unless he knew exactly who he or she was. “I had to know what their story was, where they’d come from, who they’d been before I met them. Once I knew this, then I could go on with them.” Kif often helped Bowles go on with his characters. Paul told me that he struggled and struggled with Port’s death scene until one day he scored some majoun and climbed up a hillside overlooking the port where he consumed it. The effect was tremendous, with Bowles hallucinating, the harbor and trees taking on grotesque forms, the very ground he was walking on in an attempt to get back to his cottage, shifting under him. In his state of intoxication, he was unable to write but after the effects began to wear off he made some notes and by the next day was able to write almost the entire scene. Bowles, in fact was a great believer, in allowing the subconscious to inform the conscious self. He told me that a number of stories would never have been written without what he termed “oracular consultation delivered through a kif pilgrimage to the other world.” While to be sure kif was extremely helpful to Bowles in that it allowed him to relinquish conscious control over his subject, and

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therefore permit other possibilities to enter, it would be inaccurate to say that Paul didn’t also plan many of his stories, and to some degree all of the novels. Even The Sheltering Sky, the novel he least structured in advance, was framed in general long before he even actively began to write it. Let it Come Down, he told me, because of what he called “the impossible ending” was planned down to the smallest detail. And yet to enter the minds of his characters, he allowed kif to be his guide. Writing music was, according to Paul, a very different process from writing fiction. Incidental music that he wrote for theater productions was always keyed to a programmed set of actions on stage. And while he was free to interpret how the action might sound, he also felt, as put it, “quite circumscribed.” He did feel freer when he wrote non-theatre work, but even then he claimed he could never simply allow one note to lead to another note until a work was completed. “I had to see the whole structure,” he told me. He also noted that while music had to be written quite precisely, he often found he could not express precisely what he wanted to through notes alone. Only through words could he sometimes say what he thought he had to say. Finally, he claimed that writing was more cathartic than composing. In writing, he could follow the contours of the subconscious as they manifested themselves in his consciousness. Bowles did say that he thoroughly enjoyed listening to or performing music in a kif-induced state, but he said he wrote little while under the influence. “It doesn’t work the same way,” he simply said. “I don’t really know why.” “I don’t really know why.” Paul said that to me about so many things on so many occasions. Occasionally, it was a way of deflecting me from probing further. But more often I feel it was an honest response. He really didn’t know why he had done this or that, why a story emerged, why he made so many of the decisions he made. It was part of his openness, even part of his charm. It’s been more than 25 years since I first set foot in Paul’s sala; more than 20 since I last saw him. But he is as vivid to me today as he was all those years ago. He is as important to me today as he was then. His legacy is his work, both writing and music. I’m delighted to celebrate that considerable legacy.

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NOTES 1

All quotes from conversations with Bowles and others who knew him are recorded on tape and/or in my personal journals from 1985-1988.

WORKS CITED Bowles, Paul. The Spider’s House. New York: Random House, 1955. ––––.“Letters from Bowles to Sawyer-Lauçanno,” Paul Bowles Collection, University of Delaware.

“I WOULD INVITE YOU TO SUPPER BUT I HAVE ONLY ONE EGG”: TEACHING WITH PAUL BOWLES REGINA WEINREICH

This testimony is a memoir of teaching with Paul Bowles based upon the author’s experiences in the classroom and beyond in the summer of 1983. As part of the School of Visual Art’s summer program in Tangier, I team-taught a writer’s workshop with the famous expatriate author. During this teaching stint I met Mohammed Mrabet and Mohammed Choukri, encounters that added considerably to my knowledge of the literary life in Tangier and also helped shape my work on such writers as Brion Gysin and William Burroughs.

He was reserved and elegant, a gentleman from a bygone era in fine European jackets and pressed slacks. His blond-white hair and bonethin physique gave the impression of delicately carved ivory. He carried a cigarette holder through which the smoke of black Sobranies, a mix of tobacco and kif, thickened the air of his apartment at the Immeuble Itessa, a stone’s throw from the American embassy in Tangier. The American writer and composer Paul Bowles first came to Morocco in 1931, at the insistence of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; fitting then was his continuation of Stein’s tradition in Tangier. A principal attraction for Western travelers, his “salon” was a dark living room of rugs and floor cushions against wood panels and bookcases, with a fireplace used for warmth in the North African winter. If it were not for the muezzin’s cry from the nearby mosque, you could mistake it for a modest place in Greenwich Village. His lifestyle was so spare he did without a phone; callers would arrive unannounced. He greeted each one as if expected, graciously moving guests through a small foyer stacked high with suitcases and trunks to the living room, and then retreated to the kitchen to prepare tea. On a given afternoon, the room filled with admirers sipping and

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chatting as this agile 73 year old – as he was the summer I met him – sprung up from his floor cushion to show a rare album, an out-of-print book, a painting by Ahmed Yacoubi or Brion Gysin. The conversation shifted facilely from the best belly dancing to Taprobane, the island he once owned off Sri Lanka. “I don’t find murder or the possibility of murder sad, do you?” he might remark casually and without irony. “All human beings are capable of it, given the right circumstances.” Such statements together with his distinctly cold-blooded yet pure writing style had made Paul Bowles an international cult figure. The Bowles mystique is also linked to his adventurous and celebrity-filled past, Paris in the 20s and 30s, to a time when it was still possible to enjoy the luxury of sea travel and picturesque hotels in exotic settings unscarred by technology and tourism. By the time I met him, Bowles had a fame so special that when New York’s School of Visual Arts offered a writers’s workshop in Tangier, featuring this noted expatriate, his name alone drew a dozen or more students per session, even though few American bookstores carried his titles. I was only too aware of his allure when I was asked to teach the class with him during the summer of ‘83, and surprised to find him courteous, friendly, and charming. Wanting to be the perfect visitor and learning that my future co-teacher was quite sophisticated and loved chocolate, I went to Teuscher’s in Rockefeller Center and bought the finest champagne truffles. When I presented them everyone in his ménage scowled while Bowles seemed extremely amused. This was just the kind of misunderstanding he adored and I just unwittingly walked into it. How could I know that while Moroccans are not permitted to drink alcohol, candy counted? Champagne truffles! As I found out, Paul could not have cared less about fancy, costly candy from Switzerland. What he craved were M&M’s. The apartment was convenient, just a zigzag from our classroom at The American School on rue Christophe Colombe. In class, Bowles was more presence than performance. He did not consider himself a teacher but gave both encouragement and conference time most generously. Students were eager for definitive statements on the value of their work: they wanted desperately for him to say, “You are the next Hemingway”; instead he insisted obsessively on proper language. He would point out grammatical errors, intent on finding each one. He even read a 324-page novel, making corrections in the margins for

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typos, and said to its author, “I can’t tell you a thing. You know what you are doing.” Once Bowles claimed to have understood a story well enough, but one thing puzzled him, “What does ‘grossed out’ mean?” Our students were amused that he’d never heard this expression, perfectly acceptable to them, and offered, “disgusted me,” “nauseated me,” “moved me to vomit.” “Ah.” He seemed to see. He then recounted a scene in a Paris restaurant where he had ordered a steak tartare. After a bite or so he realized there were maggots racing around his dish. The students gasped in horror. Delighted, and with the timing of a stand-up comic, he added: “Then I felt them racing over my mouth and face. Does that illustrate it?” The class was writhing. “I guess steak tartare was the wrong thing to order,” he finished. While Bowles would not tell the students much about how to write, he explained his own technique: “They just come out that way.” But he offered this advice to writers: “You have to be in the fictional world until it is more real than the table you can touch. You have to tell the truth that transcends fact.” Bowles’s fiction is imbued with something sinister, as if some evil has won out, a New Age naturalism. His native characters surrender to the will of Allah. In his fable “The Hyena,” for example, a stork being simply a stork falls prey to a hyena being simply a hyena, praising Allah for being who he is as he lustily throws up the half digested stork and rolls around in his vomit. In “The Garden,” a man who has created a beauteous garden in the desert, is beaten to death by his neighbours for deigning to rival the art of Allah. From our perspective today, it is easy to see how the seeming affect-less writing reflects a Western sensibility. Bowles’s Western characters like Port and Kit Moresby of The Sheltering Sky are detached, aimless, and spiritually bereft, moving into exotic locations, almost trespassing, where they cannot help but be doomed. Perhaps some aspect of his life is reflected. Paul and Jane Bowles were a dazzling young couple, as the story goes, he the talented composer, and she, a bright, original, funny personality whose writing was regarded the finest in America by Tennessee Williams. The Bowleses lived in W.H. Auden’s rooming house for artists and then a two-room apartment in Brooklyn Heights vacated by Gypsy Rose Lee. By 1948 they were situated in Morocco, where they were entertained in the finest European homes, consorting

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with Cecil Beaton, Sir David Herbert, Peggy Guggenheim, Barbara Hutton. Then something happened. As Paul’s writing flourished, Jane’s was stymied. Jane would tell friends that she had to write but could not; Paul had become the writer in the family, not she. Her health began to deteriorate – “from excessive drinking,” claimed Paul. But another story persisted about a powerful Moroccan woman named Cherifa who styled herself a witch, and who, in the employ of Jane Bowles, poisoned her by placing cyanide packets under her pillows, and burying them in the soil of a plant. “Oh come on,” visitors would say. “You don’t really believe that, do you? “Do you believe in cyanide? It’s factual,” he would say.

That fleshy plant still sat on the terrace of Paul’s apartment, a dusty relic of a bygone horror, and he would shudder to point it out. In 1956 Jane suffered a stroke and after years of treatment in sanitariums she died in Malaga in 1973, blind and unable to move or speak. Ten years later Paul still found Jane’s tragedy incomprehensible and dated her decline from the time their sexual life together ended. As his co-teacher I was also called into action as ambassador or intermediary between Bowles and a parade of artists who came to teach or lecture. No matter how prim or important the person, each would pull me aside and ask about Bowles’s love life, his alliances with young Moroccans, with the Moroccans he promoted or translated and with whom at one time or another he lived: Ahmed Yacoubi, with Mohammed Mrabet, with Mohammed Choukri. It would become the cliché of the summer. Sexuality for each of them was a questionable matter. It was, first of all, difficult to imagine Bowles in bed with anyone. Handsome as a matinee idol, he was also stiff in his body like a perfect statue. Could you get close? Could body fluids flow? When asked why Americans found Tangier so attractive a spot to settle in, Alan Ansen smiled mysteriously and repeated as if a mantra, “Boys Boys Boys.” Of course, Paul had Ahmed (which each of them denied vigorously despite the fact that those who knew them well–like Edward Roditi– were assured of this certainty). Bill Burroughs had Kiki. But it was Allen Ginsberg who replied most honestly: “It was a sociological event. You could sleep with a boy one day and the next be would

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bring around his younger brother claiming he needed dental work.” The American gentlemen were first and foremost a source of income for a culture so desperate parents would forcibly cripple their children, the better for them to beg. Jane had many lovers and was famously involved with Libby Holman. Having met Cherifa in the marketplace, Jane was attracted to her weirdness. She would wear a djellaba to cover up her blue jeans. Coming into the household Cherifa dominated in such a way, Jane was only too eager, too desperate of losing her she paid her amply for her services. Jane was crippled at a young age with polio and walked with a limp. Despite the unusual nature of their marriage, she was a wife typical of the 1940’s and 1950’s and followed her husband’s proclivities including moving to Tangier where she unfortunately did not flourish, drinking and partying with abandon. She acted out her rebellion, exhibiting the tendencies of Surrealist artists of her time, a femme enfante; she found her muse/wife role incompatible with her art, her enactment of this childishness was most evident in her writing. Those who knew her talked about this quality, seen in the needy siblings Harriet and Rhoda in her two-character puppet play, A Quarrelling Pair. Despite her conflicts, she was extraordinarily charming and intelligent and with a sense of play, Jane had affectionately dubbed her husband “Gloompot.” During most of their marriage, Paul travelled compulsively (both with and without Jane) through Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Bowles explained his wanderlust: “Why must one live in one place? Especially the place one already knows?” Nevertheless, he has lived in one place, preferring never to leave Tangier, never to travel by plane, not even to visit other Moroccan cities. Bowles has written, “I did not choose to live in Tangier permanently; it happened.” Its main attraction: “Tangier has been touched by fewer of the negative aspects of contemporary civilization than most cities of its size.” But by 1983 Tangier was in flux, expanding with construction sites everywhere. Even in the most ancient sections of the medina, television antennae adorned rooftops. During Ramadan night, as Moslems broke their day long fast, King Hassan II in the midst of prayer was broadcast live. The American show “Dallas” could be tuned in on three separate channels simultaneously. Yet women in the street walked entirely covered by chadors, bed sheets were laundered by hand, and Europeans of every class could afford a servant or two.

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For a person who had traveled so extensive and fearlessly, Bowles was surprisingly maternal with me. If I would say, “I’m going to Fez for the weekend,” he would say, “Why?” “Why not?” I would laugh. “You might get hurt. Your things would be stolen.” He had all sorts of cautionary advice.

Bowles’s menage consisted of a housekeeper, driver for his tan Mustang Abdulahaid, and Mohammed Mrabet – this was before they had their huge fallout – with whom he had an unusual literary collaboration. Mrabet barely read or wrote even in his own Moghrebi. Instead he told his tales into a tape recorder and Bowles translated them without editing. Mrabet would hang out in Bowles’s study, which looked onto thousands of houses in the distance and a strip of the sea. There he would pray to Allah accompanied by the chirping of canaries caged on the windowsill. Excessive kif smoking kept Mrabet’s eyes at halfmast. By afternoon his speech slowed to a slur. He would boast: “I am Riffian and I am proud.” One day he rushed into the living room where Paul and I were sipping tea announcing that he had just composed five stories. “Wow,” I exclaimed. “Can you tell me your secret?” “I go fishing early in the morning,” he said. “When I come chez Paul, I tape the tales told to me by a giant fish.” Mrabet had damaged his stomach so badly with hashish and majoun he was now permitted only kif which he smoked in the tiny bowls of his sebsi. Refusing to smoke anyone else’s, Mrabet bought kif for himself and Bowles cleaning it with the swift motions of a cook chopping parsley. Bowles kept his share on a low table beside his favorite cushion where he emptied and refilled his cigarettes. Bowles analyzed his habit, “I cannot decide whether I’m running from or to,” he told me. Friends have commented that he had grown increasingly detached, famously Tennessee Williams in his memoir. Yet his eyes were clear and his wit acute. Perhaps like Stenham, his protagonist in The Spider’s House, Bowles believed that “a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life.” He said he never wrote about his life – “I rub it out as I live it” – except in autobiography, a copy of which he gave to me. The dust jacket of Without Stoppping listed people whose lives he had touched: Francis Bacon, Truman Capote, Salvador Dali, John Huston, Anais Nin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ezra Pound, Katherine Hepburn, and so on. After I’d read it, I remained puzzled: now I knew what happened to

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him, but not how he felt. That seemed to be the prevailing critique as Burroughs dubbed the book, “Without Telling.” Despite the fact that many seemed unsatisfied with Bowles’s autobiography, he looked shocked, “Well, that is what I intended. Why should I write about my feelings?” I wondered, in this age of psychoanalysis, was he shutting out feelings because of his father. I had read how he, a failed concert pianist who had turned to dentistry, had punished his son for his childishness by taking away his notebooks. Had he been bitter and envious of Paul’s talent? “I don’t think he wanted any children,” said Paul, “but in those days they really didn’t have abortions. If there had been, they would have had me over a barrel.” “Did that experience influence your not having any children?” I asked. “No,” said Bowles, “It never occurred to me. I always thought that to have children you had to have money – which I did not have. And besides, Jane was absolutely adamant. She did not want children. She was terrified.” “Terrified of children?” “No. Of having a child. The pain. The idea horrified her.” “Was there something about your individual sexualities that prevented it,” I pressed on. “Wasn’t there a time when you stopped having relations with one another and went on to others?” “Millicent Dillon, Jane’s biographer, took all of that so seriously,” replied Bowles with his usual evasiveness. “Do you deny Jane was a lesbian, then? What about Cherifa, the native woman who allegedly poisoned her?” “That was part of Jane’s interest in ‘characters,’” said Bowles. “If she saw a monster on the street, Jane would say, ‘She’s such a character. I love her.’ It had to be an outlandish, repulsive character!” “Do you mean to say there was no relationship between Jane and Cherifa?” “There was,” said Paul unhappily, “for many, many years. Seventeen years. Jane would say, ‘She’s my daughter. She means everything to me. I won’t let you send her away.’ Cherifa was insufferable, a horror.”

We often talked alone in Bowles’s salon, waiting for guests. After a few puffs on his cigarette, he would remove it from its holder and pass

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it to me. One afternoon, I gave him tapes of American jazz. On another, he taught me about the different kinds of North African music, distinguishing Djellalah from Djebaala in neatly rounded syllables. We listened to King Crimson’s version of “The Sheltering Sky” on two sets of earphones plugged into the same walkman. He reminisced about Jane, how he learned Yiddish expressions like yenta – the word for a gossip – from her, only he made into an adjective, “yenti,” he would mimic her, as in “that’s so yenti;” he spoke of Tennessee, how excessive he had been with everything, his fear of death, and what a shock his death had been, nevertheless; he talked about the literary life of Tangier, how Burroughs’s Naked Lunch had started out as pages randomly piled on a hotel floor with footprints, food stains, and rat turds stomped into it. And then there were the evenings when Mrabet who was in charge of the marketing and preparing of meals, would serve chicken with couscous or lamb tagine to Pete Hamill or Francine du Plessix Gray. One night Mrabet, so high on kif, stared into my eyes longingly and asked me to marry him. I would become his second wife. (Moroccans are permitted to have four simultaneously, provided they could support them.) Not wanting to flatly refuse him, I asked Paul what should I do. “I think you should say no.” One late afternoon Paul and I hung out together, smoking and talking about his unusual life. Mrabet had not cooked that day. Before saying goodbye Paul said, “I would invite you to supper but I have only one egg.” I could only imagine how he would prepare it.

THE FASCINATION OF PAUL BOWLES ALLEN HIBBARD

This essay addresses the question “What is it about Paul Bowles that continues to fascinate us?” The first topic discussed is the tantalizing quality of Bowles’s artistic production, particularly his stories, marked by profound psychological insight, vivid descriptions of foreign landscapes, bracing journeys, and a precise, tight style. Bowles’s adventurous life with at times relentless traveling (Paris, Morocco, Latin America, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and elsewhere) and an unwavering pursuit of personal freedom is another source of our fascination. Finally, Bowles’s sustained interaction with and portrayal of Morocco make his life and work especially relevant and significant in a period of history during which tensions between the Arab/Islamic world and the West continue to escalate.

There are numerous points of entry into the life and work of Paul Bowles, reflecting the wide variety of Bowles’s production that continues to circulate in contemporary culture. Bertolucci’s film adaptation of Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky is one possible entrance. Or, one might enter through his musical compositions such as “Music for a Farce,” or “The Wind Remains,” a zarzuela inspired by Federico Garcia Lorca, or songs setting Tennessee Williams lyrics to music; or through his renditions of Moroccan stories – Larbi Layachi’s A Life Full of Holes, or one of the dozen or so books by Mommad Mrabet such as The Lemon; or through his early grisly, gothic stories such as “The Delicate Prey” or “A Distant Episode”; or through his life story – an American writer who went off to Morocco and lived there for more than five decades, more than half of his life – conveyed through one of the handful of biographies of Bowles (by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, or Gina Dagel Caponi, or Millicent Dillon, or Virginia Spencer Carr) or through his own unrevealing autobiography, Without Stopping, which William S. Burroughs dubbed Without Telling, or through one of the fine documentaries

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focusing on his life and work, such as Catherine Warnow and Regina Weinreich’s The Complete Outsider or Owsley Brown’s Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles; or through seeing his name mentioned along side those of other famous figures of the 20th Century Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, and so many others; or through his recordings of indigenous Moroccan music, made for the Library of Congress; or from reading the remarkable novel Two Serious Ladies by his wife Jane Bowles. Regardless of what portal one goes through to gain access to Paul Bowles, it is quite likely that this initial encounter will produce a desire to know more about this fascinating figure. In this essay I would like to reflect upon what Bowles means for us today, on the 100th anniversary of his birth. By now, I think we can say with confidence that Bowles has secured an enduring place in American letters. What it is about Bowles that attracted us to him and continues to fascinate us, hold our attention? What does Bowles have to say in 21st Century, as he continues to speak through his work and his interpreters? My own fascination began with my acquaintance with his short stories. I have always felt that Bowles was best at short forms, both in music and literature. Among my favorite musical compositions are the Latin American piano pieces, which I prefer to his sprawling Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra. He will be remembered above all, I believe, for his stories. While his novels may continue to have some appeal, they often seem–upon rereading–as lodged very much in their historical moment. I thus begin with this first source of fascination: the work itself, particularly the stories. As I wrote in Paul Bowles: The Short Fiction: “Generally, the Bowles story is told in a fairly straightforward, linear manner, yielding a hard, smooth surface that supports no moral comment on the actions that take place” (xiii). “The good storyteller,” Bowles himself wrote in the introduction to Larbi Layachi’s A Life Full of Holes, which he translated, “keeps the thread of his narrative almost equally taut at all points” (9). Bowles’s aesthetic principles are similar to those proposed by Edgar Allan Poe in his criticism of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, and “The Philosophy of Composition.” The way this distance is achieved is demonstrated in Bowles’s semi-autobiographical story, “The Frozen Fields.” We are told of Donald, the young protagonist, after his father had roughly rubbed his

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son’s face in snow: “An unfamiliar feeling had come to him: he was not sorry for himself for being wet and cold, or even resentful at having been mistreated. He felt detached; it was an agreeable, almost voluptuous sensation which he accepted without understanding or questioning it” (ADE 155). This scene might call to mind stories Bowles had heard from his aunt and relates in Without Stopping, in which she said his father had purposefully tried to kill him when he was an infant, by leaving the window open during the winter. “The Frozen Fields” ends with Donald expressing a wish that wolves will come and devour his father. Beneath the smooth surface quality of Bowles’s stories there is often a potent force that threatens to erupt and alter the order of things: Revenge, lust, deceit, jealousy, gratuitous or sadistic violence. Examples can be found in “Pages from Cold Point,” where a son appears to come on to his father while the two are living in a remote location on a Caribbean island; in “Paso Rojo” where a Mexican woman frames a ranch hand as a thief because he spurns her advances; in “The Echo” where the daughter of an American woman comes to visit her mother in Latin America and finds she must compete with her mother’s female companion for her mother’s attention; in “A Distant Episode” where an American linguist in remote parts of Morocco has his tongue cut out by a member of a hostile tribe; and in Up Above the World where Grove has his mother killed then drugs two American tourists who, he suspects, might have knowledge of the crime. I am reminded here of remarks on the short story made by Richard Ford, in his introduction to The Granta Book of the American Short Story, a collection that opens with a story by Jane Bowles, “Out in the Open,” followed by Paul Bowles’s “A Distant Episode.” “As we read,” Ford writes, “we can sense the precarious nature of any literary construction, its barely containable excitation of words which mimics our own suffusion in experience, and whose eventual style, like a ballerina’s line, is an expression of the manner by which chaos is conditionally and beautifully held at bay” (xvii). “I do like best of all,” Ford later continues, “stories whose necessity is in the implied recognition that someplace out there there exists an urgency – a chaos, an insanity, a misrule of some dire sort which can end life as we know it but for the fact that this very story is written, this order found, this style determined, the worst averted, and we are beneficiaries of that order by being readers” (xxi).

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Place or setting is another salient element of the Bowles story, something he shares with Ernest Hemingway and Eudora Welty, among others. Bowles himself has spoken of the importance of place in the making of his stories. In the preface to A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories of Paul Bowles, he writes, “[i]t seems a practical procedure to let the place determine the characters who will inhabit it.” I draw upon just one example to display Bowles’s skill at depicting place: a scene from his story, “The Echo,” set in Latin America: Mornings were hard to believe. The primeval freshness, spilled down out of the jungle above the house, was held close to the earth by the mist. Outside and in, it was damp and smelled like a florist’s shop, but the dampness was dispelled each day when the stinging sun burned through the thin cape of moisture that clung to the mountain’s back. Living there was like living sideways, with the land stretching up on one side and down on the other at the same angle. Only the gorge gave a feeling of perpendicularity; the vertical walls of rock on the opposite side of the great amphitheatre were a reminder that the center of gravity lay below and not obliquely to one side. Constant vapor rose from the invisible pool at the bottom, and the distant, indeterminate calling of water was like the sound of sleep itself. (ADE 17-18)

The dramatic clash between daughter and her mother’s female love interest unfold against this backdrop Yet one more characteristic of Bowles’s fiction is the centrality of journeys, as both theme and organizing narrative principle. Paul would say that every story was a journey. There was the journey in the story. There was also the journey of the writer in the act of conceiving and developing the story’s contours and texture. In this regard we might call to mind characters’ journeys in any number of stories and novels: Kit and Port Moresby as they journey farther and farther in to the desert in The Sheltering Sky, the Professor in “A Distant Episode,” Pastor Dowe in “Pastor Dowe at Tacaté,” the American brother and sister in Too Far From Home, the photographer in “Tapiama,” Nelson Dyar in Let it Come Down, Dr. and Mrs. Slade in Up Above the World, and Malika the Moroccan woman in the wonderful story “Here to Learn.” Most of these journeys, as we know, are ill fated, marked by surprise and terror.

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I turn to “Tapiama” to demonstrate these dynamics. At the beginning of the story we meet the protagonist, an unnamed American photographer, in a remote region of Latin America. We are given no information about why he is there or how he got there. He is roused at night by indigestion, removes his insect netting, and leaves his room, drawn by some inexplicable force, leaving his camera behind. He is pulled toward a fire with a group of men huddled around it, a boat nearby. “Vas a Tapiama?” “Sí,” he replies, without even knowing where the place is. Once in Tapiama he finds a cantina and witnesses a grotesque, ominous scene while drinking some kind of local hallucinogenic beverage. He seems to be unable to act, even though he has a premonition that things will turn out badly: The question of freedom was governed by the law of diminishing returns, he said to himself, walking faster. If you went beyond a certain point of intensity in your consciousness of desiring it, you furnished yourself with a guarantee of not achieving it. In any case, he thought, what is freedom in the last analysis, other than the state of being totally, instead of only partially, subject to the tyranny of chance? (ADE 221)

Finally the photographer leaves the cantina after a brawl develops, finds his way back to the boat, pushes off and drifts along, carried by winds and tide. Five native boys discover him, by chance, at the end of the story. We don’t know what will happen next. We see here the release of human will and agency as the protagonist simply goes with flow, á la deriva, letting forces around move him, where ever the current takes him, even if it be toward the abyss. What is it that leads from one moment to the next – Will? Chance? Some kind of cosmic force? The very nature of movement is at issue, philosophically, compositionally. What takes things from one place to another? The story unfolds sentence by sentence, governed by an inexorable logic. See where we are at the end of one sentence. Go to the next: “It was an invisible spectacle whose painful logic he followed with the entire fiber of his being, without, however, once being given a clear vision of what agonizing destinies were at stake” (232). The beauty of his writing is one more source of my admiration and fascination. I cite, for the purposes of illustration, a portion of the wonderful long paragraph from Let It Come Down in which the protagonist, Nelson Dyar, lies naked in a boat on a beach near

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Tangier, beneath the sun, “in a state of self-induced voluptuousness,” thinking about what holds him together, what constitutes his being and identity: And so he, lying in the sun and feeling close to himself, knew that he was there and rejoiced in the knowledge. He could pretend, if he needed, to be an American named Nelson Dyar, with four thousand pesetas in the pocket of the jacket that lay across the seat in the stern of the boat, but he would know that it was a remote and unimportant part of the entire truth. First of all, he was a man lying on the sand that covered the floor of a ruined boat, a man whose left hand reached to within an inch of its sun-heated hull, whose body displaced a given quantity of the warm morning air. Everything he had ever thought or done had been thought or done not by him, but by a member of a great mass of beings who acted as they did only because they were on their way from birth to death. He was a no longer a member: having committed himself, he could expect no help from anyone. If a man was not on his way anywhere, if life was something else, entirely different, if life was a question of being, for a long continuous instant that was all one, then the best thing for him to do was sit back and be, and whatever happened, he still was. Whatever a man thought, said or did, the fact of his being there remained unchanged. And death? He felt that some day, if he thought far enough, he would discover that death changed nothing, either. (183)

Incorporated in the verbal texture of the passage is Bowles’s existentialist philosophy, influenced as he was by Camus and Sartre. Another key source of our fascination with Paul Bowles is his life itself. Indeed, so attractive – so seductive – is his life that some of his admirers and fans no doubt have wanted to slip into his skin – to become Paul Bowles – rather like Allal in the story by that name, slides into the form of a snake, escaping the physical confines of his own body, experiencing the almost sexual thrill of wholly inhabiting a vastly different living form. Here was a man, Paul Bowles, who never held a real job in his life, and moved seemingly wherever he wanted whenever he wanted, doing whatever he pleased (though he frequently threw up his hands in the face of whatever was happening, saying “What could I have done!”). What a tantalizing prospect for those of us haunted by a fantasy of ultimate freedom. Virgil Thomson once said of Paul “he is as ‘free’ a man as I have ever known, even when

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accepting an obligation, which he does strictly on his own, never under pressure” (qtd. in Caponi xiii). Bowles left the United States for Paris the first time when he was nineteen, traveled extensively throughout his youth, in Europe, North Africa and Latin America; lived most of his life in Morocco; and even, for a short time in the 1950s owned an island, Taprobane, off the coast of Sri Lanka. “Part of Paul’s appeal,” Daniel Halpern writes in his Preface to Too Far From Home: Selected Writings of Paul Bowles, “is that despite his seeming urbanity, he has chosen to lead a romantic, even exotic life” (viii). Halpern goes on to describe that on his first meeting with Bowles at Northridge California in the late 1960s, when Halpern was just twenty-two, Paul told him “about the trance dancing performed by the various Berber religious brotherhoods; the Berber music, which Paul had taped for the Library of Congress ... ; the street life of Tangier and the Café Central, where foreigners sat day and night drinking mint tea and discussing the nature of the world; the month of Ramadan in the Islamic world, when all the believers observe the long days of abstinence with a North African stoicism and await the first bowl of Ramadan soup called harira ... ;” he heard, too “about Aicha Kandisha, a malevolent djinniya [with the body of a woman and the feet of a goat] who makes those who gaze upon her go crazy” and “about the little restaurant down the Atlantic coast in Asila, where you can sit in the sun and for a few dollars eat your fill of wonderfully prepared fish pulled from the water an hour earlier” (vii). Three months later Halpern found himself in that mythical world, seduced by the exotic scene, like many others: the dream at the end of the world. We might pause very briefly to consider the exotic, a topic the young Moroccan scholar Rachid Agliz in Agadir is working on. Like Romance, the exotic depends on distance. For Bowles, it meant finding a culture radically different from that he knew, the antithesis of the modern world, the primitive. In this regard, Bowles can productively be considered alongside Claude Lévi-Strauss, the great anthropologist who, like Bowles and many other modernists, was drawn to primitive cultures. Marianna Torgovnick examines the modernist allure of the primitive in her splendid study Gone Primitive. Bowles lived and traveled “When the going was good,” to use the title of a book of Evelyn Waugh’s travel pieces published in the 1940s. The pace of life was not nearly as fast as it is now. People traveled by ship and had time to write letters. (Bowles wrote many

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letters, as evidenced in Jeffrey Miller’s collection of his letters, In Touch, and he famously spurned the telephone, though he did have a fax during the last period in his life.) Bowles traveled at a time when Americans could travel without so much concern for safety; free from a growing hostility that accompanies the maintenance of Empire. He did not have to put up with the hassles of contemporary travel, marked by mass tourism and security mania. Now the remotest places are so accessible; as Pico Iyer notes in Video Night in Kathmandu, even the most exotic places have been pulled into the orbit of modernity, even post-modernity. Waugh wrote in his dairy in 1963: “It was so fun thirty-five years ago to travel far and in great discomfort to meet people whose entire conception of life and manner of expression was alien. Now one has only to leave one’s gates” (qtd. in Fussell 171). Waugh’s remarks prompt us to note various changes in the last half of the twentieth century: 1) Modes of transportation, particularly the increase of air travel; 2) The waning of the British Empire, and 3) The flow of immigrants from former colonies (Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, India, Egypt, etc.) to colonial capitals such as London, Paris, Amsterdam, and even Lisbon. Travel provided material for Bowles, as seen in his story “Call at Corazón,” and his novel Up Above the World, both of which depict travel by ship, without which there would be no story. These slower modes of travel no doubt also affected the way he wrote. Without Stopping is peppered with references to travel by ship; he used this time to read, write or compose music. His first trip to Europe was on the Rijndam, a Holland-American liner; he took along Gide’s notes to Les Faux-Monnayeurs, The Counterfeiters. A few years later, he “took passage on an old American freighter called the McKeesport” (WS 105). His first trip to Morocco was aboard the Iméméthe II, which landed at Ceuta. He refers to buying “a third-class passage on the Juan Sebastian Elcano,” bound for San Juan de Puerto Rico, from Cadiz, one of many trips in 30s, including one, first-class, toward North Africa on the Conte di Savoia – which he took back to Barranquilla, Colombia, later boarding a Grace liner to San Pedro, CA (167). Together, after their marriage in 1937, Jane and Paul took the Kano Maru from New York to Panama, then the Cordillera from Puerto Barrios to Hamburg, and a German ship Europa back to New York, just as WWII was breaking out. He composed “Pages from Cold Point” on the SS Ferncape, traveling from NY to Casablanca in 1947. In a Forward to Let it Come Down, written thirty years after the novel

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was first published in 1952, Bowles recalls that in December of 1949 he boarded a Polish freighter, the General Walter, in Antwerp, bound for Colombo. As the ship passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, he looked out at Tangier with a pang of longing. This he identified as the detonating moment for the novel. His next trip to South Asia, with Ahmed Yacoubi, was on board the Batory of the Polish Ocean Lines. They returned on a Norwegian freighter Tai Yang that ran from Rangoon to Oslo. He then went from Tangier to Istanbul on the Deniz yollari line, then back to Ceylon on the Orsova with Jane and Ahmed. He boarded the P&O liner Chusan, with Ahmed, for a round-trip from Colombo to Japan. Another trip to Ceylon was on the British-India Steam Navigation Co. ship called the Chakdara, with a return on a ship with “the unlikely name of Issipingo” (335). During the fifties and sixties he composed music for Tennessee Williams plays (Summer and Smoke and Sweet Bird of Youth) while crossing the Atlantic on board ship. In the mid-sixties Jane and Paul sailed on the Wilhelmsen Liner, the Tarantel. While in Thailand in 1968, Paul caught a Danish ship, the Simba, headed from Bangkok to Genoa, hurrying back to Tangier because of Jane’s declining health. Continually, as he traveled, he noted and bemoaned the decaying state of the world around him. In the introduction to his collection of travel pieces, Their Heads are Green and Their Hands and Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World (1963) he proclaims that if possible he never returns to the same places, for they would inevitably be worse upon the return. Later in his life he found modernity catching up to him in Tangier. By that time, it was too late in his life to move. What’s more, he would have found it difficult if not impossible to find another place to his liking, for there were fewer and fewer places that had escaped the influence (scourge he might say) of modernity. The centrality of the encounter between Westerners and the Muslim Other in Bowles’s life and fiction certainly resonates in our times, giving his work significance it might not otherwise have. In the conclusion of my book on Paul’s short stories, published in 1993, I noted that “no other American writer of any note has lived so long in an Arab country and given us, through the lens of fiction, such an alluring aperture onto that intriguing culture .... In our own cultural moment, as we begin to recognize the importance of exploring and granting respect to the “other” – both within ourselves and as manifest

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in cultural differences – it would seem that Bowles’s work takes on even greater significance” (132). This I wrote before 9/11. A good deal has been written, and can still be written about the encounters between Western travelers and local inhabitants of the Maghreb, encounters that in Bowles’s fiction usually don’t go so well; they often come to an impasse, or a point where the Western visitor returns home. We might think of the end of Bowles’s novel The Spider’s House in which the American journalist Stenham has formed what begins to look like a friendship with a young Moroccan named Amar, in Fez, during the time of the Independence movement. The memorable last scene of the novel shows the Americans – Stenham and Polly Burroughs – driving away, viewed from the boy’s perspective: Amar was running after the car. It was still there, ahead of him, going further away and faster. He could never catch it, but he ran because there was nothing else to do. And as he ran, his sandals made a terrible flapping noise on the hard surface of the highway, and he kicked them off, and ran silently and with freedom. Now for a moment he had the exultant feeling of flying along the road behind the car. It would surely stop. He could see the two heads in the window’s rectangle, and it seemed to him that they were looking back. The car had reached a curve in the road; it passed out of sight. He ran on. When he got to the curve the road was empty. (TSH 405-06)

The fate of Thami, the Moroccan in Bowles’s earlier novel Let It Come Down, is worse. The American, Nelson Dyar, drives a nail through his head. The rather ironically titled story “The Time of Friendship” tells of a Swiss woman, Fräulein Windling, who comes every winter to stay in a small, remote village in the Sahara and befriends a young man named Slimane. When she tries to talk with him about religion, he says, “No, no, no, no! Nazarenes know nothing about Islam. Don’t talk, madame, I beg you, because you don’t know what you’re saying. No, no, no!” (ADE 178). She is disappointed when the boy shows no appreciation for all of her efforts to make a crèche from local materials in celebration of Christmas. In the end, the war (against the French) makes it impossible for her to visit the region.

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That these relationships between Western travelers and Moroccans are embedded in the fabric of a contentious history of conflict is seen in Bowles’s wonderful, short book Points in Time. One of the vignettes relates the story of a Franciscan monk, Fra Andrea, from Spoleto, who upon an invitation from a Moroccan he meets, goes to visit Fez. The friend is no longer there, and the place seems hostile towards foreigners. The monk gravitates towards a group of Rabbis who, upset by his views and attitudes, complain to the Muslim authorities who seize the occasion to get rid of him. The monk is “given no opportunity of defending himself against the charges [of ‘conspiracy’ and the practice of magic’], and is “thrown straightway into a cell where they tortured him for a few hours. Finally someone impaled his body on a lance” (23). The monk becomes a pawn in a larger game of history. We are told early in the story that the Moroccan King Mohammad VIII had recently been incarcerated by the Portuguese. The monk’s fate might be considered as part of antiWestern, or an Anti-Christian backlash. Another vignette tells of Moors sent back to Morocco after the Reconquest, not even knowing Arabic. Feeling betrayed, they resort to piracy: “The seas are full of Nazarene ships, they said. There are enough for all. It is pleasing to the most High that the riches of the infidels should be returned to Islam” (29). These stories and themes resonate for us today, as various European countries (Switzerland, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, England, and the U.S., among others) struggle to find ways of dealing with Muslim minorities. During his lifetime, even though he lived through the first Gulf War, Bowles likely never imagined that the encounter with Islam would become such a critical conflict (though a fairly reliable source once told me that Bowles had said World War III would be between the West and the Islamic World). I am not saying that Paul had it all figured out. I don’t think he did. All I am saying is that during the course of his life he interacted on a daily basis with Muslims in Morocco and, through that process, at least became better acquainted with their beliefs and practices. In some ways, the narratives he has constructed seem to support the position advanced by Samuel Huntington in his popular, controversial work The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington asserts that “the West’s universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China; at the local level fault line wars, largely between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate

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‘kin-country rallying,’ the threat of broader escalation” and so forth. (20). “The survival of the West” – which Huntington sees as worth fighting for at all costs – “depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from nonWestern societies” (20-21). While I recognize the tensions and their sources, I reject the implications of Huntington’s position that seems to leave little possibility or space for dialogue or accommodation. I don’t have time for a fully developed rebuttal here. Suffice it to say, there are limits to the extent to which Bowles’s experience and knowledge of that particular place and time can be generalized. So, what does it mean to reflect on Paul Bowles in the second decade of this millenium? It might be easy for us to succumb to a kind of nostalgia for times gone by, or a sense of belatedness articulated in Bowles’s poem, “Elegy,” composed in 1927: Can you not see how you are all too late Can you not see how you must all give yourselves up to me Linen and lizards We are all unsuited to dwell here in this plain There I no way out but strangling Merely recline on this rock in the sunlight Hold your head thus And submit to my soft hands It is the only way out We are all too late

The world Bowles knew is gone. Certain ways of being in the world are no longer accessible to us. The Twentieth Century, with all its violence and promis, is over. We have lived through the end of an era, exemplified in the deaths of Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Bowles. But it is too easy to slip into some version of what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperial nostalgia.” Rather, we must be attentive to the changing scene around us, and adjust our vision. One of the most exciting things for me over the past five or six years has been my involvement in a series of conferences in Tangier, the first of which was “Writing Tangier,” brainchild of Barry Tharaud and Khalid Amine. When I got an invitation to speak at the first conference, I was of course pleased, but I had ambivalent feelings. Did I want to go back? What was Tangier without Paul? I went and

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I’m glad I did, for I came in contact with a group of young Moroccan scholars – such as Mimoun Dauoudi, Younes Riyani and others – who were critically engaged with an examination of what had been written in and about their country by expatriate writers, often situating their work alongside Moroccan writers, notably Mohammad Choukri, Taher Ben Jelloun, Anwar Majid, and Mohammed Akbib. They were armed with critical tools provided by postcolonial critics, chief among them Edward Said and theories laid out in his still influential book Orientalism. At times, the critiques of Bowles, as many of us realize, have been sharp, accompanied by charges that Bowles took advantage of Moroccans, exploiting his position of privilege and power. The perspectives and work of Moroccan colleagues show fresh, exciting ways of looking at Bowles, as does the marvelous study Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, by Brian Edwards. Edwards’s book places the writing of American expatriates (as well as other types of production) within broader historical and cultural contexts that display patterns of circulation, particularly Moroccan responses. In other words, things don’t just go in one direction. Mrabet’s Chocolate Creams and Dollars, in which Alfred Chester plays a role as “Alphren,” is a response to Western presence in Morocco, as is AnNar al-Hamra [The Red Fire], a play by Tanjaoui playwright Zobeir Ben Bouchta, in local, Moroccan dialect, based on the relationship between Ahmed Yacoubi and Paul Bowles. All of this simply suggests that Bowles’s work and life will continue to fascinate new generations who become acquainted with him, for he has left us with powerful and memorable creative works that resonate. He continues to speak. His words are still with us. We read and reread them. And in the process, Bowles’s presence is somehow felt. At the end of “Unwelcome Words,” one of Bowles’s late short stories, written in epistolary form, the letter writer communicates across great distance with a correspondent he had not seen for years, now immobilized in a wheelchair: There’s obviously nothing I can do from here to help you, so I may as well let it rest. But as you sink into your self-imposed non-being, I hope you’ll remember (you won’t) that I made this small and futile attempt to help you remain human. Hasta el otro mundo, as Rosa Lopez used to say. (ADE 352)

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WORKS CITED Bowles, Paul. Collected Stories. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1980. ––––. A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories. New York: Ecco Press, 1988. ––––. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. ed. Jeffrey Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. ––––. Introduction. A Life Full of Holes. By Larbi Layachi. Trans. Paul Bowles. 1966. New York: Grove, 1982. ––––. Let It Come Down. 1952. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980. ––––. Next to Nothing: Collected Poems, 1926-1977. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981. ––––. Points in Time. London: Peter Owen, 1982. ––––. The Spider’s House. 1955. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1982. ––––. Without Stopping. 1952. New York: Ecco Press, 1985. Caponi, Gena Dagel. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Edwards, Brian. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, From Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Ford, Richard. Introduction. The Granta Book of the American Short Story. London: Granta, 1992. Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Halpern, Daniel. Preface. Too Far From Home: Selected Writings of Paul Bowles. New York: Ecco Press, 1993. Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles, Magic & Morocco. San Francisco: Cadmus Editions, 2004. ––––. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Macmillan, 1993. Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Iyer, Pico. Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-so-Far East. New York: Knopf, 1988. Mrabet, Mohammed. Chocolate Creams and Dollars. Trans. Paul Bowles. New York: Inanout Press, 1992.

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Oates, Joyce Carol. Introduction. Too Far From Home: Selected Writings of Paul Bowles. ed. Daniel Halpern. New York: Ecco Press, 1993. Rosaldo, Renato. “Politics, Patriarchs, and Laughter,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. ed. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. (12445). Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978. Stein, Gertrude. “Picasso.” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. ed. Carl van Vetchen. New York: Vintage, 1990. Torgovnick. Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

II ECOLOGIES OF FEAR AND VIOLENCE: RESISTANCE OR DESISTANCE

THE PERCEPTUAL IS POLITICAL: MODES OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE SPIDER’S HOUSE GREG BEVAN

“What is my writing,” Paul Bowles asked, “but a conscious exploration of possible modes of consciousness?” Critics have taken the question rhetorically, in step with the prevailing view of Bowles as an apolitical writer – a view that has rendered problematic his third novel, The Spider’s House (1955). Set during the Moroccan independence uprising against the French, The Spider’s House is as richly political as a Graham Greene novel, a startling work from the author best-known for the psychological nightmare The Sheltering Sky. But a closer look reveals, in fact, a uniquely Bowlesian political novel. It uses a perceptual dichotomy – wisdom and knowledge – to triangulate its central characters: an anti-modern American expatriate, a Francophile tourist, and an illiterate Moroccan youth ripe for radicalization. A study of these themes helps us understand how The Spider’s House became – evidently to its author’s regret – a singularly perceptive study of political issues that affect the region to this day.

“It is all here,” wrote Stephen Koch in a 1979 review of Paul Bowles’s fiction,” – the Casbah, the kif dens, the maze of slums, the hurt, lurking, imperialized Arab boys. Bowles has lived this murky Western dream, brought his formidable artistic intelligence to it” (qtd. in Hibbard 242). The same claustrophobic tales of personal destruction were described in the obituaries attending Bowles’s death twenty years later, most of the reviewers adding a note of bemusement at the author’s decision to live the last fifty years of his life in Tangier, Morocco – at his refusal, one might say, to awaken from his murky dream. But in reference to those eulogies, Brian Edwards makes a thoughtprovoking point: ... not one of the U.S. obituaries and tributes considered [Bowles’s] half-century in Tangier in the context of the major

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political and social transformations in that city, in Morocco, or in the greater Maghreb, which moved from colonialism to independence through various intense struggles in the postcolonial period. (82)

Edwards finds this omission striking because he views Bowles as a writer of no small political import, who “played a significant part in imagining the relationship of Americans to the foreign” (78). He attributes the preoccupations of the Bowles obituaries to “the perceived chasm separating cultural production from international politics” (78), a chasm that he and others have done important work to bridge. Edward Said devoted his Culture and Imperialism (1993) to mending the same “split in our critical consciousness,” arguing that it is crucial to “comprehend how the great European realistic novel accomplished one of its principal purposes – almost unnoticeably sustaining the society’s consent in overseas expansion” (12). But in spite of his long literary career as a Western interpreter of North Africa, Bowles gets only one indirect reference in Said’s book. Could early critical pigeonholing (one thinks of Leslie Fiedler’s 1951 epithet “pornographer of terror” [171]) have led us to dismiss political elements in Bowles – note the “imperialized Arab boys” in the Koch quote above – as mere texture? An answer to this question must include two observations. First, unlike the Western artists and critics with whom Said is predominantly concerned, Bowles makes implicit in his fiction (and explicit in some of his essays)1 a dissent against colonialism and Western material culture in general. As Gena Dagel Caponi writes, for Bowles “a world in which the majority of the inhabitants (nonWesterners) have been colonized and made to feel like aliens in their own land is a world gone seriously wrong” (Paul Bowles 104). Second, Bowles’s homeland was not a colonial power in the sense that, say, Kipling’s was. During the time that it dominated American perceptions of the Arab world (that is, until the 1970s oil embargo) the Maghreb was a French colonial possession. Edwards notes: In literary and popular representations of the Maghreb, American authors pay nearly as much attention to the French Empire as they do to these Berber and Arab cultures and North African landscapes. The complicating presence of the French in such texts encourages us to see these examples of American

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Orientalism ... as texts that engage the complex geopolitical order of the post-1941 period. (2)

Edwards goes on to analyze Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (1949) in this light. It is a sensible choice, given the goal of establishing Bowles as a politically significant writer, since his first novel is also widely considered his most important. Yet from its famous opening section, in which Port Moresby gradually stirs from sleep, the novel promises less an exploration of geopolitics than a journey into the mind. Certainly The Sheltering Sky is one of the first works we think of when Bowles asks an interviewer, “What is my writing but a constant exploration of possible modes of consciousness? You could almost qualify the entire body of work as a series of variations on the theme of human perception” (qtd. in Caponi, Conversations 138). Without gainsaying the insights of Edwards’s study, I will take a different approach, focusing on Bowles’s third and most underappreciated novel. The Spider’s House (1955) renders the absence of Moroccan sociopolitics from his obituaries more problematic than anything else he wrote, and for two reasons. The first is its explicitly political premise, which Francine Prose, in the “Introduction,” sees leading us to anticipate the arc of a Graham Greene novel (xv). It is 1954, and revolution threatens Morocco. The French have exiled Sidi Mohammed, who is both Sultan and Imam, replacing him with a puppet. In response the Istiqlal (Independence) party demands that Moroccans abstain from the Feast of the Sacrifice, over which the Imam must preside. If Muslims comply, they are guilty of sacrilege; take part, and they risk the vengeance of the insurgents. The novel’s central characters – Amar, an illiterate fifteen-year-old boy of Fez, an American novelist and long-time Fez resident named John Stenham, and Lee Burroughs, a female American tourist – find their paths intersecting as violence begins to erupt. Yet in the critical literature one generally finds a downplaying of the political elements in The Spider’s House. Lawrence Stewart maintains, “Though [Bowles] was writing in the midst of political strife ... at no time would he be a political novelist. The events in Fez in 1954 were the appropriate backdrop against which the drama of human personality again takes place” (Paul Bowles 101). More nuanced is Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno’s contention that “The Spider’s House, for all its political overtones, is not a political novel in

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the usual sense” (326) – which, indeed, it is not. For the second reason it demands our attention is its exploration of politics not through the cinematic lens pioneered in Greene’s novels – and widely imitated ever since – but through modes of consciousness, Bowles’s selfproclaimed abiding theme. When the anti-modernist Stenham declares that “wisdom consist[s] in the conscious and joyous obedience to natural laws,” his friend Alain Moss is dismissive. “‘My dear man, wisdom is a primitive concept,’ he had told him. ‘What we want now is knowledge’” (156). In these two modes we have the novel’s central dichotomy. Considering the wide-ranging use that has been made of the words “knowledge” and “wisdom,” we had better pause here to give them operational definitions. What we want now is knowledge: the word, as Moss frames it, equates to practical experience and expertise. Knowledge is an instrumental and explicitly political thing: throughout the novel, as Hans Bertens notes, it is associated with “the desire to control one’s destiny” (127). To that one might add the destiny of others, and here knowledge is tied not only to colonialism but to the patronizing “bourgeois humanism” critiqued by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (109-10), and embodied in the novel, as we will see, by Lee Burroughs. For wisdom, we can employ the definition provided by Stenham above, adding that in contrast to knowledge, wisdom is divorced from politics. For Moroccans in the novel the “conscious and joyous obedience” is to Islam; the atheist Stenham replaces religion with “natural laws,” a substitution that Bertens finds to be “the weak spot in Bowles’s presentation of these issues” (133). It is true that “natural laws” is “a term that confuses rather than clarifies” (The Fiction of Paul Bowles 133), but the weak spot is not Bowles’s but Stenham’s: as we will see, his renunciation of knowledge in favor of wisdom will prove tragically unsustainable. From his first appearance in the novel, John Stenham – a New England novelist of long tenure in Morocco, a nonbeliever and lapsed Communist – is a man of intriguing contradictions. His appreciation of the medieval beauty of Fez, and of Islamic tradition, appear genuine; he seems more aware than anyone else in the novel of all Morocco stands to lose in its rush to modernize. Yet his preservationism can be callous and hypocritical, as when he gripes to himself that Moroccans “were ashamed of [the old city’s] alleys and

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tunnels and mud and straw, they complained of the damp, the dirt, and the disease” (168) while he himself, as Steven Olson notes, “dwells appropriately in the tower of the Mérenides Palace hotel” (345) outside the old city’s walls. His poor chemistry with Lee Burroughs, a fan of his novels who has sought him out in Fez, springs from his awareness that she would like to see Morocco modernized: Hers was the attitude of the missionary, but whereas the missionary offered a complete if unusable code of thought and behavior, the modernizer offered nothing at all, save a place in the ranks. And the Moslems, who with their blind intuitive wisdom had triumphantly withstood the missionaries’ cajoleries, now were going to be duped into joining the senseless march of universal brotherhood. (252)

Their “blind intuitive wisdom” is what Stenham envies; he later declares to Lee that “The intellect is the soul’s pimp,” explaining that “the intellect was constantly seducing the soul with knowledge, when all the soul needed was its own wisdom” (311). Yet he is embarrassed whenever his Moroccan acquaintances ask if he has ever considered converting to Islam: “it demanded a humility and submission that he could not conceive himself as feeling” (217). Stenham is a respectable sort of expatriate: he speaks good Arabic, can mix with the locals and knows a good deal about the culture. Yet he also believes that “a man must at all costs keep some part of him outside and beyond life” (203) and it is clear that his lifestyle is based on the idea of being an invisible observer, his love of Fez on the belief that Fez knows him not. Recalling his walks in the “strange and lonely spots” outside the city walls, Stenham thinks: Their beauty existed for him only to the extent that he was conscious of their outsideness ... It was the knowledge that the swarming city lay below, shut in by its high ramparts, which made wandering over the hills and along the edges of the cliffs so delectable. They are there, of it, he would think, and I am here, of nothing, free. (166)

Richard Patteson calls Stenham’s philosophy “the fiction that he or anyone can be truly detached” (111). But the flavor of self-delusion revealed here, it bears noting, is quite specific to the expatriate in an exotic land. Difference from the native people instills the feeling of

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being apart, and hence invisible – while at the same time rendering the expatriate utterly conspicuous. This is a point with political ramifications. And while Bertens is correct to point out that “a good many things remain virtually undramatized” (166) in this set-speech-heavy novel, Stenham’s politically charged epiphany arrives in a beautifully rendered scene, in a place that recalls Fanon’s depiction of the archetypal colonists’ quarter: It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers ... The colonist’s sector is a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things. (4)

The place is the dining room of the Mérenides Palace hotel, where Stenham has ordered his lunch: For the first time he heard orders being given in the kitchen. And then from the open window came the long, slowly rising note of a muezzin calling the prayer of the loulli. Immediately it was joined by another, until it became a great ascending chorus of clear tenor voices. Just as there was always the first lone voice, there was also the last, after the others had finished. He listened to the way it drew out the final syllable of its Allah akbar! Having called to the east and south and west, the man was now facing the north, and the voice came floating over the city as clear as the sound of an oboe. Then a rooster’s crowing on some roof covered it, and the waiter arrived with a large vol au vent and set it before him. All at once he was conscious of the absurdity of the moment. This entire mechanism, the kitchen with its chef, the busboys in the pantry, the hierarchy of waiters, the assortments of china, glassware and cutlery, the wagon with its rotating display of hors d’oeuvres, the trays on wheels with their aluminum ovens and flickering blue alcohol flames, all of it was for him, was functioning for him alone. It was not as though there were a possibility that someone else might come in and lift the weight of responsibility from his shoulders. (212)

It is a richly interpretable scene. Absorbed as always by the exotic devotions to a God that he is sure does not exist, Stenham is confronted for the first time by a very different kind of “humility and

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submission”: that of the hotel staff to him, whose ghostlike nonpresence obtains only in his own mind. For the first time he perceives that his presence in Morocco – and that of others like him – is all too keenly felt by the natives. Atheism can wish away gods but not colonizers; his desire to remain “outside and beyond life” will soon – when the young Amar falls into his care – become an unsustainable luxury. Of the three principal characters in the novel, Lee Burroughs’s presence is the most clearly linked to political concerns. Informing Stenham that she used to work for UNESCO in Paris, she adds, “I wouldn’t say I’m fascinated by politics, but at least I know they exist” (178). To Stenham she is a missionary-modernizer, slavishly devoted to the promise of progress, but a look at the geopolitics of the period affords her a more complex significance. Edwards recounts how the U.S. government had promised Sultan Sidi Mohammed with American support for Moroccan independence as early as 1943, but a combination of racial condescension and alliance with France led to the scaled-back announcement that “European colonies would be independent only when their leaders could govern themselves properly, a formula familiar within late colonial rhetoric and one that lurked at the heart of postwar U.S. thinking” (97). Lee Burroughs is also known as Madame Veyron: she was (and perhaps still is) married to a Frenchman. With this in mind – along with the narrator’s remark that she “belonged wholly to her time” (297) – we can regard Lee, much more than the aloof and apolitical Stenham, as an illustration of the fact that “U.S. thinking about North Africa was framed by French thinking about the Maghreb” (Edwards 97). To her, the French presence in Morocco is a salutary one; here is how she challenges Stenham’s hypocritical romanticizing of the old city where he declines to live: “I think that’s the point of view of an outsider, a tourist who puts picturesqueness above everything else. I’m sure if you had to live down there in one of those houses you wouldn’t feel the same way at all. You’d welcome the hospitals and electric lights and buses the French have brought.” This was certainly the remark of a tourist, and an ignorant tourist, too, he thought, sorry that it should have come from her. (188)

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Beneath Stenham’s defensiveness is a truth: in contrast with his years of residence, Lee arrives in the novel with no firsthand experience of Morocco. Yet Bowles establishes her sense of self-worth by mentioning the letters she writes home, “much admired (and carefully collected) by almost everyone who received them; the steady production of them had come to be one of her principal raisons d’être” (296-97). For all her progressive bonafides, Lee recalls the Western knowledge of the East portrayed in Said’s Orientalism – a self-referential thing cut off from its subject: So far as it existed in the West’s awareness, the Orient was a word which later accrued to it a wide field of meanings, associations, and connotations, and ... these did not necessarily refer to the real Orient but to the field surrounding the word. (203)

Readers familiar with Bowles’s fiction will know that Morocco promises trouble for a character like Lee, thinly armored by the misconceptions of her own civilization. It duly arrives near the end of the novel, when Stenham, Lee, and Amar leave riot-torn Fez to view the religious festivities in the mountains attending the Feast of the Sacrifice. Perhaps relieved to be in a place decidedly not operating for his benefit, Stenham is enchanted by the exotic tableau of campfires, kif, tribal music and devotional dancing: more clearly than anywhere else in the novel we see his love for a religious surrender he cannot achieve. But Lee’s response to a drum-and-dance performance is starkly different: The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous, with its own necessities and patterns. The message they were beating out, over and over, was for her; it was saying, not precisely that she did not exist but rather that it did not matter whether she existed or not, that her presence was of no consequence to the rest of the cosmos. It was a sensation that suddenly paralyzed her with dread. (319)

Like Stenham in the hotel dining room, Lee has been delivered a sudden epiphany. But in the novel’s terms this is a moment not of knowledge but of wisdom. Whereas Stenham has been made aware of his significance – and culpability – as a colonizer, the letter-writing

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Lee has been confronted with her own metaphysical insignificance, and invited to submit: to nihilism instead of Islam.2 She responds to this apolitical realization with an impulsive act that could hardly be more politically charged. Realizing that Amar is part of that autonomous world – “there was no room in his personality for anything that mankind had not already fully developed long ago”(345) – she attempts to strike back at it by giving him all the money she is carrying and encouraging him to buy a gun, and by implication join the Istiqlal resistance. But Lee has a poor understanding of Amar, the most dynamic of the three principal characters, whose transformed awareness provides the novel the bulk of its gravitas. An illiterate country boy, and yet the son of a faith healer and descendant of the Prophet, the Amar we first meet seems bereft of knowledge and yet preternaturally wise. His beliefs about the French – “the great ambition of every Frenchman in Morocco was to kill as many Moslems as possible” (90) – are ignorant caricatures, yet he possesses what Stenham later comes to regard as a “natural wisdom” (329). Amar himself sees this as a unique connectedness to the world, whose sensations have “a particular message for him that they could not have for anyone else” (29) – least of all his better-schooled childhood friends, who now seem to have “grown to be like old men” (19). This gift is from Allah, Amar knows, embracing the notion of surrender that gives his religion its name. “What is the first duty of everyone in the world? To surrender. Al Islam! Al Islam!” (329). In the course of the novel Amar experiences a series of political revelations, culminating in a shocking glimpse of the true aim of the Istiqlal. For Bertens, these insights are “too instantaneous to be credible ... Bowles has obvious difficulties in dramatizing a gradual development and asks the reader to accept unbelievably rapid transitions” (136). But I think scenes in the novel reveal the subtle signs of knowledge – specifically, awareness of his status as colonial subject – that Amar elicits from the outset. Fanon writes, “The first thing the colonial subject learns is to remain in his place and not overstep its limits. Hence the dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality” (15). Perhaps this is why Amar, being violently beaten by his disciplinarian father, fantasizes about running through the colonist’s quarter of Fez and beheading Frenchmen with a sword (25). Later, he witnesses a mob stab to death two mokhaznia – soldiers of the

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Ministry of Home Affairs – and his reaction adds a believable political awareness to the earlier fantasy: He had just seen two Moslems killed, but he had not felt even a stirring of pity for them: they were in the pay of the French, for one thing, and then they had surely committed some unspeakable crime against their own people to have been singled out that way for annihilation. (128)

Amar is on his way to radicalization; one expects to soon find him in the arms of the Istiqlal. Instead, as the French lock down the old city amid spreading violence, he finds himself outside its walls, cut off from his family, and under the wing of Stenham and Lee. But near the end of the novel, after Lee has given him money to buy a gun, he revisits the countryside retreat of Moulay Ali, the leader of a band of rebel fighters. It is here that Amar has his own revelation. Said writes that the nationalist leaders of colonized people “were partly formed and to some degree produced by the colonial power. The national bourgeoisies and their specialized elites ... in effect tended to replace the colonial force with a new class-based and ultimately exploitative one, which replicated the old colonial structures in new terms” (Culture and Imperialism 223). Moulay Ali and his henchmen are a creation of the colonists in just this way: they drink alcohol; they sing a heroic song about a woman who shoots her own son for the good of the Party; they say things like “The value of propaganda has no relationship to the degree of its truth” (385). That Moulay Ali occupies the knowledge side of the novel’s dichotomy, personifying “the desire to control one’s destiny” (Bertens 127), is clear when he coolly tells a scandalized Amar, “I think I can manage with the brains I have, without Allah’s further help” (368). Having betrayed their own religion, they next betray Amar, leaving him as bait for the French police ambushing the house. Amar hides on the roof, absorbing the knowledge he has just gained. In a sense his revelation combines the political weight of Stenham’s with the metaphysical import of Lee’s: [It hardly matters, he thinks] how many other Moulay Alis there were and whether they failed or succeeded. By having lived with Christians they had been corrupted. They were no longer Moslems; how could it matter what they did, since they

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did it not for Allah but for themselves? The government and the laws they might make would be nothing but a spiderweb, built to last one night. (397-98)

As he hears the police climb into their cars and drive away, his political rumination shifts to a philosophical insight that is the mirror image of Lee’s: ... he felt supremely deserted, exquisitely conscious of his own weakness and insignificance. His gift meant nothing; he was not even sure that he had any gift, or ever had had one. The world was something different from what he had thought it ... dimly he was aware that when everything had been understood, there would be only the solved puzzle before him, a black wall of certainty. He would know, but nothing would have meaning, because the knowing itself was the meaning; beyond that there was nothing to know. (399)

From America Lee has confronted the terrifying outer limits of Western knowledge; Amar, from a Moroccan standpoint, has seen its barren triumph. But the far greater dramatic impact of Amar’s epiphany, when we compare it to Lee’s, is not merely the result of its political-philosophical synthesis, or indeed of the suspenseful plot turn that provides its backdrop. Lee can simply shake off her momentary angst by giving Amar money for a gun; Stenham can undo his (if not his nation’s) uncomfortable complicity in colonialism by fleeing the country with her, as he does at the novel’s end. But it is appropriate that the boy, returning to Fez in search of his new American friends, finds himself abandoned: for Amar, whose world has become an “alien world of Moslems who were not Moslems” (387), there is no such escape. As Bertens writes, “Amar is ready to join the ranks of Bowles’s nihilists. He is on his way to knowledge, the way his friends have gone before him, and is already aware that knowledge destroys meaning” (143). A book concerned with the limits of perception and consciousness raises certain questions, among them whether it can escape its own epistemological trap. Robert Young and more recently Ibn Warraq have asked of Orientalism, in Young’s words, “how Said separates himself from the coercive structures of knowledge that he is describing. What method can he use to analyze his object that escapes the terms of his own critique?” (167). For its part, and for all its

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psychological penetration of politics, The Spider’s House provides no clear answers to the ongoing difficulties besetting the Muslim world. Prose finds this ambiguity praiseworthy, a “coolly reasoned perspective that effectively prevents the reader from forming a simplistic view of the region’s problems, or of their solutions” (xviii). But for Bowles, who wrote in a 1981 preface that “fiction should always stay clear of political considerations” (x), the mere questions posed by his novel were evidently a mark of failure. Trapped by the implications of his themes, Bowles wrote ruefully that “whether I liked it or not, when I had finished, I found that I had written a ‘political’ book” (x). The Istiqlal may have agreed. In a nervous 1958 letter to his friend Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Bowles anticipated charges of espionage from the Moroccan police who had suddenly called him in for questioning, and of whom he wrote: It’s safe to assume ... that they are still furious about the last book, which of course is an indictment of their one political party, the one, unfortunately, which won out in the government, and which now has the country completely paralyzed with fear. (In Touch 279)

The espionage charges never materialized, but in light of the explicitly political themes of The Spider’s House we cannot dismiss Bowles’s fear as paranoia. But nor can we agree that the novel is an indictment of the Istiqlal, without pointing out how much more it is: a testament to the sacrifices attending modernization; a study of the moral responsibilities of the expatriate; a rumination on knowledge and wisdom. Bertens’s overall analysis of the novel is insightful, but he inadvertently pinpoints its achievement when he criticizes it for being “almost entirely concerned with the orthodox Moslem tradition embodied by Amar and with presenting the effects of the Isitqlal’s presence in Fez on the boy, rather than with an objective description of the contemporary political situation” (121-22). We read newspapers for such objective description; in literature, surely, we seek the human face. That Bowles believed the latter to be far the more revealing is evident even in his essays. Consider this account of an exchange he once had with a French colonial official:

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“Our great mistake,” he said sadly, “was ever to allow these savages to read and write.” I said I supposed that was a logical thing to say if one expected to rule forever, which I knew, given the intelligence of the French, that they did not intend to try, since it was impossible. The official ceased looking sad and became much less friendly. (Their Heads 35)

Cultural assertiveness and end-of-empire resignation, instrumental knowledge and fatalistic wisdom: as Koch might say, it is all here.

NOTES 1

For several of the finest of these – “Africa Minor,” “A Man Must Not Be Very Moslem,” “The Rif, to Music” – see Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963). 2 Scenes such as this have prompted most critics to apply the existentialist label to Bowles, one to which he has both assented (Caponi, Paul Bowles 18) and objected (Stewart 152). Bertens (6-16), Eisinger, and Hassan are among those who argue – I think persuasively – that these philosophical signposts are not so much existentialist as nihilistic.

WORKS CITED Bertens, Hans. The Fiction of Paul Bowles: The Soul is the Weariest Part of the Body. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1979. Bowles, Paul. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. ed. Jeffrey Miller. London: Flamingo, 1994. ––––. The Sheltering Sky. 1949. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. ––––. The Spider’s House. 1955. New York: Ecco P, 2002. ––––. Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World. 1963. New York: Ecco Press, 1984. Caponi, Gena Dagel, ed. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

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––––. Paul Bowles. New York: Twayne, 1998. Edwards, Brian T. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Eisinger, Chester E., Fiction of the Forties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox, New York: Grove P, 2004. Fiedler, Leslie. “Style and Anti-Style in the Short Story.” Kenyon Review 13 (1951): 155-172. Hassan, Ihab. “The Pilgrim as Prey: A Note on Paul Bowles.” The Western Review 19 (1954): 23-36. Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Olson, Steven E. “Alien Terrain: Paul Bowles’s Filial Landscapes.” Twentieth Century Literature, 32 (1986): 334-349. Patteson, Richard F. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. 1993. New York: Vintage, 1994. ––––. Orientalism. 1978. New York: Vintage, 1979. Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Grove P, 1989. Stewart, Lawrence D. Paul Bowles: The Illumination of North Africa. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. Warraq, Ibn. Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007. Young, Robert J.C. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. 1990. New York: Routledge, 2004.

LAUGHING WITH THIEVES: IMAGES OF PAUL BOWLES IN TAHAR BEN JELLOUN AND MOHAMED CHOUKRI CLARE BRANDABUR

Most discussion of Paul Bowles centres on Bowles’s view of Moroccans, his nostalgia for a Tangier that had preserved an idealized past for foreigners, the good old colonial days, a time when you could get “good servants” and in any conflict with natives, the police took the foreigner’s side. Bowles’s stories shock when Western encounters with Moroccans or Algerians end in violence, madness, and/or death, in some cases because naive Westerners completely misread Arabic cultural signals. But how did Moroccans perceive Paul Bowles? This paper interrogates the writing of Tahar Ben Jelloun and Mohamed Choukry to find out.

To appreciate fully the cultural dissonances attendant on the encounter between American writers who flocked to the “Interzone” of midtwentieth-century Tangier and their native Moroccan interlocutors, two qualifying factors must be taken into account. The first is colonialism, the second orientalism. Both socio-historical discourses must be reckoned with if we are to contextualize the literature stemming from this encounter. As Owen and Hussey remark in “Screening Tangier,” “the reality of the so-called ‘gay Tangier’ was, and no doubt still is, a predatory form of sex tourism rather than the real utopian liberating playground ... wished for by Burroughs et al” (Owen and Hussey 2007). In his concise history of US/Moroccan relationships, Greg Mullins raises the question: “in seeking sovereignty over their own bodies and sexual desires, did American expatriates compromise the sovereignty of the Moroccans among whom they lived?” (13). Having established that, since “the United States government emerged as a significant participant in the informal and formal colonization of Morocco” (13), and that “transactions between Americans and Tanjawis ... were conducted under United States law” (13). Mullins concludes:

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... I argue that American expatriate writers inhabit the legacy of American and Moroccan political history. As residents of Tangier, they participate in the social structures of colonialism and discover that their interaction with Tanjawis are of necessity shaped by the psychology of colonialism. (14)

That Mullins is right to stress the psychology of colonialism is confirmed by the critique of other Moroccan writers. Much of the discussion of the work of Paul Bowles centers on Bowles’s view of Moroccans, his nostalgia for a Tangier that had preserved an idealized past for foreigners, a time when you could get “good servants” and when, in any conflict with natives, the police took the foreigner’s side. Much of the shock effect of Bowles’s stories concerns the rude awakening of Western characters when Moroccans or Algerians act in unexpected ways: when fatal errors in communication culminate in violence, madness, and/or death. But there is another side to this relationship: how did Moroccans perceive Paul Bowles? This paper will explore Moroccan perceptions of Bowles, taking Tahar Ben Jelloun and Mohamed Choukri as examples. I will conclude with a brief look at Joseph A. Massad’s recent book, Desiring Arabs, which analyses orientalism and the views of another Moroccan writer, Khalid Duran. While Western writers exult in their exploits amidst free drugs and free sex in the international zone, consideration must be given to the human commodities who are treated in these encounters as mere objects of consumption. If a tourist finds bliss in the availability of “boys” at any time of day or night, what extremity of poverty leaves these children at the mercy of such exploitation? They may be too young to define and assert their own sexual limits, and perhaps are obliged to prostitute their bodies to support a destitute family. The other side of wealthy American tourists fulfilling unlimited desire may mean the abuse of children whose families are too poor to protect them in an impoverished postcolonial Arab city. Ideally individual freedom to act out sexual fantasies meets a limit when it violates the rights of the sexual “other.” The consequence of this lack of constraint for predators and their victims is the subject of Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel, Leaving Tangier. Since Moroccan “boys” are persons and not just cabbages or carpets, it is important to explore the ways in which Bowles and his fellows appeared through the Moroccan gaze – a re-focus analogous to

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Edward Said’s looking at Zionism from the point of view of its victims in The Question of Palestine and elsewhere. A crucial text in Leaving Tangier is quoted from an “old concierge in an apartment building [in Tangier] where an American writer and his wife lived” who gives a sardonic criticism of Americans who exploit poor Moroccans to enhance their own literary production. There is, of course, a profound irony in the occurrence of this critique in the stream of consciousness of the predatory Spaniard Miguel who is on his way to seduce a young Moroccan. As we have seen, Mullins has established that encounters between American expatriates and Moroccans are marked by unequal power, dominance being on the side of the foreigner. Ben Jelloun is very aware of this inequity: when Miguel lists among the qualities in Moroccan men that attract him, he includes “their availability, which marked the inequality in which the relationship was formed (41, emphasis mine). This inequality is underlined when the “old concierge” attributes the problem to “our friend poverty” which “can lead us to some very sad places” (41). Miguel reflects on the unfortunate fact that the “best” Moroccans want to leave: “When a country gets to the point that the ‘best’ of its children want to leave, it’s a terrible thing” (45), a comment suggesting that it may be Moroccans educated under the French colonial system who have been “colonized” to feel more French than Moroccan and so want to escape to Europe. The narrator continues: Why, then, did Miguel want to tear Azel from his own world to take him home to Spain? At first, he wanted to help Azel. Only after seeing him a few more times did he realize that a fling or even a serious affair was possible. Whenever Miguel forced a man to become involved with him, he regretted it, but he found a kind of perverse pleasure in feeling lonely and sorry for himself. He loved the ‘awkwardness’ of Moroccan men, by which he meant their sexual ambiguity. He loved the olive sheen of their skin .... The old concierge in an apartment building where an American writer and his wife lived had said it best. This type, they want everything, men and women from the common people, young ones, healthy, preferably from the countryside, who can’t read or write, serving them all day, then servicing them at night. A package deal, and between two pokes, tokes on a nicely packed pipe of kif to help the American write! Tell me your story, he says. I’ll make a novel out of it, you’ll even have your name on the cover: you won’t

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be able to read it but no matter, you’re a writer like me, except that you’re an illiterate writer, that’s exotic – what I mean is, unusual, my friend! That’s what he tells them, without ever mentioning money, because you don’t talk about that when you’re working for a writer, after all! They aren’t obliged to accept, but I know that poverty – our friend poverty – leads us to some very sad places. People have to make do with life, that’s how it is, and me, I see everything but I don’t say everything. We’re all hung up by our feet, it’s like at the butcher shop: you ever seen a sheep hanging from its neighbor’s hoof? No? Well, Moroccans who go with Christians, it’s the same thing! (40-41)

This passage (which can only be interpreted as a direct though “hearsay” criticism of Paul and Jane Bowles) is a key moment in the narrative: on the brink of a seduction which will result in the ruin and death of a talented young man, this shrewd Spaniard, Miguel, deplores the exploitation – sexual and financial – of illiterate peasants by predatory Americans. To evaluate Ben Jelloun’s critique of Bowles, it should be said that the meeting of East and West in the Tangier “interzone” of the 1940s and pre-independence 1950s was conditioned by two important forces: orientalism and colonialism. Without taking both into account, the tendency is to look at the encounter of these two “Others” as wholly strangers to each other, whereas in fact each approached the other with highly charged assumptions and preconceptions. Given the triumphalist, imperialist assumptions of “the American century” so well articulated by Brian Edwards in Morocco Bound (2009), the Americans approached Arabs as inferiors and potential clients rather than as equals. Ironically their colonial history gave Moroccans an advantage: Americans could be assumed to know only recent Moroccan history as it impinged on US national interests like the recent struggle between Rommel, the “Desert Fox” and the Allied Commanders Eisenhower and Mark Clark in the 1942 invasion of North Africa. And they probably knew Humphrey Bogart’s Casablanca. But they probably did not know that Moroccans resented with good reason the US failure to aid their struggle for independence from France. Mullins observes: While Morocco played an important role in American post-war strategic military planning, it did not figure prominently in the

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American cultural imagination .... In the post-war years, Washington was acutely aware of Morocco’s economic and political importance to United States interests, but for most Americans Morocco was then and remains today a blank space – a nation considered only marginally relevant to American culture and politics. (17)

Orientalism and colonialism qualified the mutual gaze of Americans and Moroccans. As Edward W. Said defines orientalism: The argument, when reduced to its simplest form, was clear, it was precise, it was easy to grasp. There are Westerners, and there are Orientals. The former dominate: the latter must be dominated, which usually means having their land occupied, their internal affairs rigidly controlled, their blood and treasure put at the disposal of one or another Western power. (36)

The beauty of this definition is that it articulates the intrinsic connection between orientalism and colonialism. Sanderson Beck’s Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco 1700-1950 (2010), gives examples. Both Spain and France had gained the right to “defend” Morocco under various mandates through which European settlers were encouraged to take ownership of land without regard for previous legal rights. Beck records that after 1926, the year in which the legendary rebel leader from the Rif, Abd el-Karim, was finally forced to surrender to the French, the number of French land owners tripled, while Moroccans lost their land and were forced to move to the cities. Beck claims that 65% of the budget went to French officials, and that in the 1937 drought, French colonial farmers were given water from the Bou Fekrane River to irrigate their crops, angering Moroccan farmers who received no such concessions. In a 1998 doctoral study of Moroccan Colonial soldiers as a neglected subaltern group, Driss Maghraoui records the dire circumstances under which Moroccan men were recruited into the occupation army. It helps us understand the destitution and rage of Mohamed Choukri’s father in For Bread Alone to learn that destitution forced dispossessed farmers to choose between military service and prison. According to Beck, by 1923 the French controlled the natural resources of Morocco: they exported phosphates, iron, coal, and manganese as well as cotton. Moroccan manufacture of cotton goods was not allowed: it was exported raw and the Moroccans

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were forced to buy expensive clothing and household items from France. Meanwhile the indigenous population was taxed on everything including land use (Beck). It was in response to the desperate poverty in the Rif region that the young Abd al-Karim determined to get an education and begun to agitate for an independent Morocco. In 1916-1917, he was jailed for anti-colonial activity. But he continued to organize and in 1921 led a rebellion. He attacked Spanish Morocco when Spanish troops crossed a river he had declared a red line. In three weeks with a force of 3,000 Rif rebels, he killed 8,000 Spanish soldiers. In response France sent a huge force of 250,000 well-armed soldiers (including mustard gas) led by the future Marshal Petain, forcing Abd al-Karim’s surrender in 1926. Of all the natural resources robbed from Morocco by its various colonial masters, its people head the list: the French siphoned off coal, cotton, manganese, etc., but it was the people, especially the men, who were the resource most exploited by both French and Spanish occupiers. Franco took some 50,000 Moroccans, virtual prisoners of war, to Spain to fight for the fascists. Moroccan troops were used in huge numbers in both World War I and World War II. Maghraoui says: There is yet persistent neglect of the fact of the participation of non-French colonial troops in the ‘French Army’ especially in its major European wars. Colonial soldiers were very extensively used in the defence of France itself during the First and Second World Wars, but they remain absent from its historical memory .... They liberated Marseilles, but not a single street carries their name. (3)

The colonial troops took heavy casualties: of the 5,000 Moroccan soldiers who fought in the battle of the Marne, only 700 survived (Maghraoui 6). Colonial Moroccan soldiers were also used in Indochina, and regiments of the Tirailleurs (selected troops who remained loyal to the French after the Fez mutiny) notwithstanding official denials, were used to fight within Morocco itself, most extensively between 1924 and 1926 against Abd-el-Karim during the Rif rebellion (7). Both the terrible exodus of starving families from the Rif in 1952 and the pro-independence riots in Tangier in 1956 feature with grim realism in Mohamed Choukri’s novel, For Bread Alone, a

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fictionalized autobiography. The brutality of Choukri’s father has parallels with the character of the father of the great Kenyan author and educator, Ngügi wa Thiongo. Though Choukri does not provide a glimpse of what his father was like before the famine or explain why he joined and then defected from the Spanish army, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, Paul Bowles’s first biographer, told me that he had heard from Moroccan informants that Choukri’s grandfather had lost what herds and property he owned as a result of French colonial depredations. And Sawyer-Lauçanno has graciously shared with me unpublished notes in which this family history is hinted at. During the severe drought of 1952, the seventeen-year-old Mohamed Choukri and his family were forced by starvation, together with thousands of others, to leave the Rif and migrate to the city – first Tangier, then, finding neither food nor work, on to Tetouan. This ghastly journey over a landscape strewn with corpses and dying animals, during which Choukri’s father in rage and despair kills Mohamed’s small brother, is one of the turning points in For Bread Alone. Given this violent history, it is not surprising that Tangier in the 1940s was full of migrants and squatters who, like the Choukri family, had been dispossessed by crushing conditions that were largely the effect of colonial oppression. They therefore looked with bitterness and envy, perhaps hatred, at the wealthy tourists whom they saw enjoying elaborate meals and expensive wines on the terraces of Tangier hotels. Unaware of this history, naive foreigners tended to despise this rabble of bootblacks and pimps as thieves not to be trusted. The Americans were well known to the Moroccans for their failure to assist Moroccan independence and their collusion with the French oppressors. The Americans thought, like Mungo Park two hundred years earlier, that they had “discovered” an earthly paradise, that they were “strangers in a strange land,” but in fact, the Moroccans knew exactly who they were – they were Frangia, Christians, and infidels, who did not belong in Tangier. They were distrusted and resented, only tolerated as a source of food, drink, sex, and money. That Moroccans’s strong sense of injustice should be directed toward these carpetbaggers is not surprising. Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier implies that everyone in Morocco, certainly everyone in Tangier, “even the best of its children,” is desperate to leave. The reasons given in the fiction are extreme poverty and lack of opportunity for development. But if we ask for the cause of these conditions, we are thrown back on the colonial history

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of the country and the subsequent post-colonial privations. Ben Jelloun’s earlier novel, This Blinding Absence of Light (2005), suggests some of the internal problems facing the country which one hopes are now being ameliorated. Hamid Irbouh’s insightful study of the French colonial educational system, French Colonial Art Education in Morocco (2001), suggests the possibility that young Moroccans were deliberately indoctrinated with the idea of French superiority and Arab inferiority, and were given values and attitudes toward their own culture that made their defection from the home land inevitable. “They based their textural production on the presumed superiority of Western art versus Moroccan crafts, relying on concepts of differentiations of gender, ethnicity, and class. It was, therefore, these differentials that allowed them to emerge as producers of colonial culture. French colonial women understood themselves as part of a colonial machinery of scholarship (12). Ben Jelloun seems to suggest that colonial education had subverted Moroccan cultural identification and thereby made the best of her children want to leave. If they unconsciously assimilated French ideas of gender, personal freedom, and even identity, it is no wonder they experienced alienation. Like Achebe’s title, they were “no longer at ease” in their own country. In Chapter 8, we experience Ben Jelloun’s touching interior monologue in the form of Azel’s letter to Morocco that begins, “Dear Country,” and lists the reasons for his desperate decision to leave: My land has not been kind to me, or too many of the young people of my generation. We believed that our studies would open doors for us, that Morocco would finally abandon its society of privilege and arbitrary misfortune, but the whole world let us down. (The Blinding Absence 67)

But he assures Morocco that he is not leaving for good, and is only on loan to the Spaniards: I am not leaving you forever. You are simply lending me to the Spanish people, our neighbours, our friends. We know them well. For a long time they were as poor as we were, and then one day, Franco died, democracy arrived, followed by freedom and prosperity. (68)

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Azel’s love for Morocco intensifies the pathos of his leaving. Of course there are several levels of irony here: it is one of the Spanish “neighbours” who will seduce and abuse Azel as it was against the cruel occupation of the Spanish that Abd-el-Karim rebelled. Mohamed Choukri met the Bowles rather late in their Tangier residence, at a time when Jane Bowles was already extremely ill and had been hospitalized. In his reminiscence on Paul Bowles, Choukri demonstrates an uncanny sense of which elements in Bowles’s life and fiction would most interest his readers, and indeed which elements might have been most decisive for this American writer whom Choukri both admires and resents. Choukri hones in on Bowles’s early emotional and psychological development that seem to have had much to do with his later preoccupations as a writer. Choukri chooses passages in the autobiography Without Stopping and the unique short story The Frozen Fields which are in many cases exactly those chosen by Colm Toibin for analysis in his “Avoid the Orient,” a review of Virginia Spencer Carr’s Paul Bowles: A Life. Both writers are fascinated by evidence of severe psychic and spiritual abuse, as in passages that depict the child, a victim of a father’s psychological cruelty, taking revenge by imagining violent attacks on his father. Choukri also points out the psychological defence mechanisms whereby as a child Bowles developed Stoic endurance, refusing to cry and retreating into absence in order never to show that he has been hurt by his father’s cruelty: a way of creating worlds in which he himself is not present. A fervent admirer of Bowles’s style, Gore Vidal, has noted this quality of cold objectivity, of not being present in his fiction as a living feeling person. Delighted to have been asked to write an introduction to a collection of Bowles’s short stories to be published by Black Swallow Press, Vidal records in Point to Point Navigation: Bowles proved to be something of an inhuman observer like one of those vividly colored parakeets that he doted on. Or, perhaps, the spirit of one. I enjoyed all of the stories except a few at the end .... I thought them not as compelling as ‘Pages from Cold Point’ and ‘The Delicate Prey.’ .... He was also touchy about any hint that he had been influenced by the Marquis de Sade ... in fact, he said, he’d never really read him. I reminded him of that afternoon in Paris when he paid a lot of money to buy the Pléiade edition of Sade. (114)

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Perhaps it was this quality of an “inhuman observer” when narrating scenes of rape or carnage that prompted Leslie Fiedler to describe Bowles’s fiction as “horror pornography,” an observation the author makes with special reference to “A Delicate Prey” (502-3). In the brilliant short story, “The Frozen Fields,” the child protagonist Donald is helpless with rage, and then fantasizes a wolf crashing through the window during Christmas dinner, sinking its fangs into his father’s throat, and dragging him bleeding across the frozen fields. In this sequence of events, although the outraged child is unable to physically challenge the father or to protect himself, his psyche creates dream-images in which vengeance is carried out through the vicious attack of a wild animal on his abuser. The story is particularly interesting for the dream sequence in which, after the wolf has apparently killed the abusive father, Donald and the wolf sit cuddling together by the stream, before running off playfully through the trees. In the autobiography, Without Stopping, Paul Bowles describes how, as a precocious child, he would create whole towns and roads and games in which he was invisible – or “not there.” He learned to hide these drawings and maps from his sadistic father, who would otherwise have ridiculed or attempted to control his creations, and even his access to paper and pens. “The Frozen Fields” is a fictional account of a Christmas spent with grandparents and aunts and uncles, in which the father figure, an exact replica of Paul’s father, forces the little boy to put every toy, back in its original box and then make a list for thank-you notes. One of the boy’s relatives tells Donald “Your father is a devil.” This short story perfectly mirrors Bowles’s relationship with his father as depicted in the autobiography Without Stopping. It would not be surprising if a person subjected to such psychological, physical, and spiritual abuse would come to trust animals more than he trusted humans. In Paul Bowles in Tangier, first published in 1997 and incorporated with some additional reflections in In Tangier (2010), Choukri provides an astute if ambivalent evaluation of a man he both admires and resents. His sources are both from personal acquaintance – having met and talked with Bowles many times and worked with him on the translation of his novel For Bread Alone – and from his reading of many of Bowles’s publications including the Letters published as In Touch. Choukri was fascinated by Bowles’s character and felt the writer had been influenced by Puritanism: “In Paul’s life sex remains a sin” (In Tangier 203). “Homosexuality fascinated Paul,

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but he elevated it to the level of an abstraction, sublimating it into an idea, in order to escape the physicality of it” (203). In a letter to Bruce Morissette, Bowles confirms: … homosexuality is a thrilling subject to me, just as are sanguinary killings and rapes, and tales of drug addicts ... and who would not give several years of his life could he but strangle with impunity.” (In Touch 42, emphasis mine)

Choukri quotes this letter at length, saying: “This is Paul Bowles’s understanding of sex. Insofar as he couldn’t actually engage in this kind of deviant behaviour, he remained protected by his Puritanism” (203). Choukri further quotes Bowles’s confession to Bruce Morissette of his fear of perversity (20 February, 1930). Bowles wrote: I am too perverse. If I find I am doing a pleasing thing and that people like it, I switch; it must be bad what I am doing. I’ve got to displease them. Adolescence? Anger. Perhaps you will say it is part of “panemotionalism.” Hooray! If it is, I can still be normal (by that I mean either hetero or homo) but if not, then I must wander down life seeking something to fall definitely in love with, and it is quite like it will be with animals. That will be too bad, because there we have a vice more vicious than ordinary indulgence with humans. But I was long ago aware that whatever I put my hand to is made into some sort of vice. There can never be any love, affection, even any satisfaction “in my life” ... “at least I am abnormal in a “different” way. But it makes of life a series of steps down into regions unspeakably foul and deep. (203-04)1

Choukri obviously enjoys revealing these shocking confidences to his readers, and his attribution to Paul Bowles of the influence of Puritanism would appear to dissociate Choukri from the elder man’s “perversity,” saying Bowles “wallowed in the torment of his characters” (206). Presumably he expected his readers to disapprove of Bowles’s fantasies of “strangling with impunity” (203), but a few pages later Choukri casually admits his own desire to strangle a troublesome prostitute. He also accuses Peter Owen and several other publishers, including Daniel Halpern of Echo Press, and Jeffrey Miller of Cadmus, saying they are all vampires. But he reserves for Bowles his special complaint: “When my literary agent asked Halpern for the

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publishing rights to my book Jean Genet in Tangier, which Bowles translated, his answer was, ‘the rights are reserved for Paul Bowles, Choukri is nothing but an illiterate.’ Halpern had forgotten, or was pretending to have forgotten, that there is a text and that it was originally written in Arabic” (207-8). To Choukri’s fairly well-known complaints about having been defrauded of the money which he should have gotten for the royalties to his work, defenders of Bowles retort that, had it not been for Bowles, these Moroccan writers would never have published anything and would have remained completely unknown. I would suggest that the sense of overwhelming injustice at the dispossession, impoverishment, humiliation and loss of dignity inflicted by the Western colonizing world can never be assuaged: even if the shoeshine boys and pimps stole all the silverware and expensive booze from the pantries of the Minzah, it would not begin to compensate for the outrage that is the legacy of colonialism. In Joseph Massad’s book, Desiring Arabs, the author documents Western preoccupation with the sexual desires of Arabs that appear with startling clarity in records of sadism and brutality practiced against Arab prisoners. In a report written by Subhi al-Khadra (the father of Salma al-Khadra Jayyussi, eminent Palestinian translator and poet) after al-Kahdra’s imprisonment in Acre prison under the British Mandate in 1938, al-Kahdra describes torture including sexual sadism inflicted by British and Zionist Jewish soldiers on revolutionary Palestinians during the 1930’s anti-colonial revolt. It reads exactly like the report of Seymour Hersch of the torture and sexual sadism illustrated by the leaked photographs from Abu Ghraib. Massad quotes Hersch’s Washington Post reports (26 January 1991) describing how “American fighter and bomber pilots would spend hours watching pornographic films to get themselves in the right mood for the massive bombing they carried out in Iraq” (46). Thus Orientalist fascination with the sexual desires of Arabs as explicated in such tomes of wisdom as Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind has real consequences in the real world, especially when such Orientalist works are adopted by U.S. military and war planners (43). The cultural and literary history of Paul Bowles, his American colleagues, and their Moroccan associates requires contextualization to be understood. Paradoxically it is possible that US imperialism inspired writers like Paul and Jane Bowles and William Burroughs to leave the US at the time of total military mobilization with its

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censorship and lack of personal freedoms and to find more permissive surroundings abroad. But it is also likely that the gross economic inequality between them and their Moroccan “clients” caused conflict and resentments for which their failure to understand their cultural “others” had ill prepared them.

NOTES 1

Quoted from In Touch 39. On checking the accuracy of Choukri’s quotations from the letters published in In Touch, I found that the wording is accurate though Choukri telescoped two letters from Bowles to Morissette.

WORKS CITED Al-Khadra, Subhi. “Report,” in Akram Zu’aytur, ed. Watha’iqalHarakah al-Wataniyyah al-Filastiniyyah 1918-1939. [The Documents of the Palestinian National Movement, 1918-1939] Beirut: Mu’assassat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyyah (1979): 493-94. Beck, Sanderson. “Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco 1700-1950.” Ethics of Civilization: Mideast and Africa. Vol. 16. Santa Barbara, CA: World Peace Communication, 2010. Bowles, Paul. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. New York: The Echo Press, 1972. ––––. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. 1972. New York, London: Harper, 2006. ––––. The Sheltering Sky. 1949. London: Penguin Group with Peter Owen Ltd, 2006. ––––. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. ed. Jeffrey Miller, New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 1994. Brett, Michael, and Elizabeth Fentress. The Berbers. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1997. Carr, Virginia Spencer. Paul Bowles: A Life. New York: Scribners, 2004.

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Choukri, Mohamed. For Bread Alone. Introd. and Trans. Paul Bowles. London: Telegraim (Saqi) Books, 1973. ––––. In Tangier. London: Telegram, 2010. Edwards, Brian T. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Revised Edition. New York: Stein and Day, 1966. Irbouh, Hamid. “French Colonial Art Education in Morocco,” Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World 2. 1 (Mar. 2011): n.pag. Web. 13 Jun. 2014. Jelloun, Tahar Ben. Leaving Tangier. Trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Penguin, 2009. ––––. This Blinding Absence of Light. Trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Penguin, 2005. Maghraoui, Driss. “Morroccan Colonial Soldiers: Between Selective Memory and Collective Memory.” Arab Studies Quarterly. 20. 2 (Spring 1998): 21-41. Massad, Joseph A. Desiring Arabs. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Mullins, Greg. Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Owen, Laura and Andrew Hussey. “Screening Tangier: The Arab City in the European Cinema,” in Performing/Picturing Tangier. eds. Khalid Amine, Andrew Hussey, Barry Tharaud, and José Manuel Goni Perez. Tangier: International Center for the Performing Arts, 2007. (9-16). Patai, Raphael. The Arab Mind. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1978. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Sanchez, Maria Porras. “Dreams of a Penal Colony: William S. Burroughs translates Tangier,” in Performing/Picturing Tangier. Eds. Khalid Amine, Andrew Hussey, Barry Tharaud, and José Manuel Goni Perez. Tangier: International Center for the Performing Arts, 2007. (89-96). Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. Unpublished notes on Mohamed Choukri’s Grandfather, Istanbul, 2010.

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Toibin, Colm. “Avoid the Orient.” Rev. of Paul Bowles: A Life, by Virginia Spencer Carr. London Review of Books 4 Jan. 2007: 30-32. Vidal, Gore. Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir 1964-2006. London: Little Brown, 2007.

THE SPIDER’S HOUSE: PAUL BOWLES AND THE QUESTION OF MOROCCAN INDEPENDENCE YOUNES RIYANI EL ASSAAD

In this paper, I will draw attention to an important and often overlooked theme in Paul Bowles’s The Spider’s House, and to contribute to a new critical understanding of Bowles’s reaction and response to the question of Moroccan Independence. The paper aims to examine and to explore Paul Bowles’s hostile and subjective account of the political situation of Morocco it proposes to represent. In short, the paper seeks to demystify Paul Bowles’s attitude toward the Istiqlal (Independence) party and the question of Moroccan Independence as it is articulated throughout the novel, and to draw a link between the novel and Bowles’s statements about Moroccan Independence in various interviews.

In the preface to the 1982 edition of The Spider’s House, Paul Bowles writes: “whether I like it or not, when I had finished, I found that I have written a “political” book which deplores the attitudes of both the French and the Moroccans” (Preface, n.pag.). With this statement, it seems that Paul Bowles intends to condemn both parts of the conflicting situation in Morocco during the first half of the 1950s between the French protectorate and the Istiqlal party. A close reading, however, reveals that the target of Paul Bowles’s disapproval and critique is the Istiqlal party rather than the French colonial enterprise. It is indeed not surprising that Bowles in the same preface writes: Ingenuously I had imagined that after Independence the old manner of life would be resumed and the country would return to being more or less what it had been before the French presence. The destruction on the part of the populace of all that was European seemed to guarantee such a result. What I failed to understand was that if Morocco was still a largely medieval land, it was because the French themselves, and not the Moroccans, wanted it that way. (n.pag.)

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In this essay, I will draw attention to an important and often overlooked theme in Bowles’s The Spider’s House, and to contribute to a new critical understanding of Paul Bowles’s attitude towards the question of Moroccan Independence. The aim of this paper is to explore and to deepen Johannes Willem Bertens’s remarks about Bowles’s hostile and subjective account of the Istiqlal party that makes The Spider’s House beyond any objective account of the political situation of Morocco it proposes to represent. In short, this paper seeks to demystify Paul Bowles’s attitude towards the Istiqlal party and the question of Moroccan Independence as it is articulated throughout the novel, and to draw a link between the novel and Bowles’s numerous statements about Moroccan independence in interviews. For all the emphasis on Amar and Stenham and what they represent, The Spider’s House develops a religious worldview that allows Bowles not only to express his romantic attitude towards the changes and their pervasive effects on the traditional life of Morocco, but also to condemn the Istiqlal party that strives for the Independence of the country. Throughout the novel, Bowles delineates Amar as “a naïve young protagonist” (emphasis mine) who is totally absorbed by his orthodox religious conviction that “everything is designed by Allah” (emphasis mine). For Paul Bowles, Amar serves as an efficient vehicle for the construction of a worldview as Bertens notes: “Man’s first duty” is to surrender to the “inexorable laws of Allah”, to eliminate all ambition, to accept simply what will come inevitably. Thus, in Amar’s view, “tomorrow belongs to Allah.” (125)

Throughout the novel, Bowles indeed elaborates a firm framework within which Amar is overwhelmed with his strong sense of identity based on his belief that everything has been written by Allah – a belief that champions, what Bertens calls, “the superiority of surrender over the desire to gain control” (127). In a conversation about the present colonial situation of Morocco, Bowles identifies Amar with his father Si Driss who qualifies the sufferings of Moroccans under the French regime in the following terms: “Everything is new. Everything is bad. We’re suffering more than we’ve ever suffered. And it is written that we must suffer still more. And that is nothing. Like the wind” (TSH 27). It is clear that

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Bowles intends the notion of Maktoub – everything is written by Allah – to be an adequate excuse for the presence of the French in Morocco: since the French presence is a natural part of Maktoub, and any resistance or attempt to change the situation is a disregard or disobedience to the divine laws of Allah. However, such a worldview is achieved in the novel not solely through the notion of Maktoub, but also through the condemnation of the nationalist movement that struggles for Moroccan independence and the return of the exiled Sultan as the symbol of dignity and sovereignty of the country. Evidently, while reinforcing the notion of Maktoub as a fatalistic discourse of surrender, Bowles vaccinates Amar and his father Si Driss against politics and the Istiqlal party in particular, since the world of politics is accordingly a world of sins and lies: … What they say may be the truth, but their reason for saying it is a lie, because it is politique. You know what politique is? It is the French word for a lie. Kdoub! Politique! When you hear the French say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the friends of Independence, say: our politique, you know they mean: our lies. All lies are sins, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by Moslem, who does? (27-28)

By qualifying politics as kdoub – lies, Bowles subscribes to the fatalistic discourse that gives priority to politics over religion as the “end of Islam.” Clearly, behind this attitude of Si Driss lies the authoritative voice of Bowles that advocates the surrender to the divine laws in the political struggle of the nationalist movement for Moroccan independence. To get a clear picture of this, one need only to draw on Amar, who finds himself torn between the religious world view of Si Driss and the patriotic world view of Said the potter. Amar’s question, “which is greater, the Sultan or Islam” (114) is a clear manifestation of his awareness for the first time in his life that there is a world of difference between his fatalistic view premised on the principle of Maktoub and the view of the nationalist movement which, as Bertens remarks, “is not content to wait until Allah decrees that the French should be driven out, but which has taken it upon itself to drive them out” (134). It must be noted that Amar gradually realizes that the deposition and the exile of the Sultan of Morocco, Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef, and the appointment of Ben Arafa as the substitute of the legitimate

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Sultan, is not a simple or a passing event to Moroccan people, but it is, as Bertens indicates, “more than a concept, a string of words about a distant happening; he saw the symbolic indignity turn into a personal affront, disapproval transformed into rage” (136). For a while it seems that Amar begins to gain a new awareness of the political situation of Morocco in 1954, and the deep impact of the exile of the Sultan on Moroccan people. Yet, Amar’s religious background prevents him from identifying himself with the nationalist movement when he realizes that the religious sacrifices of the Aid El-kbir will be prevented by the Istiqlal party as an act of resistance against the French colonial authority, which has exiled the Sultan in the same day of Aid El-kbir the previous year. Despite his sympathetic attitude toward the Istiqlal party’s struggle against the French, Amar cannot digest its call to boycott the religious sacrifices of Aid El-kbir, for he considers, in his father’s words, the act of preventing the Moroccans to celebrate Aid El-kbir is a great sin that will bring about “the end of Islam” (120). In this respect, Bowles makes use of Amar and Si Driss to maintain and solidify the prevailing religious worldview of The Spider’s House, a view within which everything is evaluated and judged in religious terms. Thus, Amar’s identification with his father’s world view in which “Sins are everywhere” and his condemnation of the nationalist movement in which “Sins are finished” is a clear manifestation of Amar’s position in the conflict that takes place in his mind between his world view of surrender and submission to what is written by Allah and the nationalist world view which takes resistance as the only way to Moroccan independence instead of waiting for the intervention of divine justice. In addition to his evident disapproval of the Istiqlal’s decision not to celebrate the Aid El-kbir, Bowles reinforces the same negative attitude towards the Istiqlal party when Amar realizes in Moulay Ali’s house that the Istiqlal’s members explicitly show their disrespect and disregard for Allah’s laws when they drink alcohol and neglect their prayers before meals. In much the same way, Amar is shocked and disillusioned when he discovers that he has been used as bait for Moulay Ali and his friends’s escape from the French police by the end of the novel. With this betrayal, Amar seems to be scandalized not only about the patriotic aims of the nationalist movement, but also, as Bertens indicates, about his own existence:

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… his life means far less to Moulay Ali than the safety of Moulay Ali himself and his friends – and perhaps the interests of the movement – that he is, for the first time, squarely confronted with the total insignificance of his existence. (42)

By pointing to these negative acts of the Istiqlal party, Bowles intends to highlight the orthodox Moslem tradition embodied in Amar and his father Si Driss, and to explore the negative effects of the nationalist movement on Amar’s conception of the world. It is in this context that Bowles’s strategy in The Spider’s House operates in exactly the same worldview of Amar in which the members of the Istiqlal party are depicted, in Bertens’s terms, as “pompous, humorless, ugly, myopic, arrogant and deceitful characters” (121). Consequently, Amar condemns Moulay Ali – as the representative of the Istiqlal party – to be an infidel who has betrayed the laws and precepts of Islam: I came here happy in my head to see you, even though I know you’re not a Moslem …. I did have respect for you, much respect, because I thought you had a head and were working for the Moslems. But whatever you make for us will be a spider-web, an ankabutz, and may God who forgives all hear my words because it’s the truth. (368)

In the above passage, Amar does not only deny the Islamic identity of the nationalist movement, but he also foresees that the struggle of the Istiqlal party against the French colonial regime will lead not to an independent nation but rather to a new Morocco that will be similar to the “House of the Spider.” It is safe to say that the title of Bowles’s novel must be seen in the light of Amar’s judgment, which is also Bowles’s judgment of the Istiqlal party, for he believes that the movement is working against the will of Allah. Categorical as he is, Amar’s judgment on the Istiqlal party can then be seen as a translation of the verse in the Qur’an which says: The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she taketh unto herself a house, and lo! The frailest of all houses is the spider’s house, if they but knew. (Epigraph, n.pag.)

According to Bowles’s understanding of the above verse, the members of the Istiqlal party are then depicted as “those who choose other

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patrons than Allah,” since they are encapsulated within Amar’s radical attitude by the end of the novel: These men had no understanding of, no love for, either Allah or the people they pretend to be helping. Whatever they might manage to build would be blown away very quickly. Allah would see to that, because it would have been built without his guidance. For if men dared take it upon themselves to decide what was sin and what was not, a thing which only Allah had the wisdom to do, then they committed the most terrible sin of all, the ultimate one, that of attempting to replace Him. He saw it very clearly, and he knew why he felt that they were all damned beyond hope of redemption. (387)

Surprisingly, instead of identifying himself with the nationalist movement’s struggle for Moroccan independence, Amar decides to condemn the Istiqlal party to failure, since he believes that the nationalists are non-Moslems and corrupted by Christians, and, therefore, “the government and laws they might make would be nothing but a spider web, built to last one night” (397). Clearly, behind this attitude lies the attitude of Stenham and Bowles himself, which seeks to demonize the nationalist movement that strives for an independent Morocco. Yet, it must be observed that Stenham, unlike Amar and Si Driss who consider the French presence in Morocco as Maktoub, deplores both the French and the countermovement of the nationalists, for Stenham recognizes, in Bertens words, that both parties “are working towards the same inevitable end: the destruction of the happy indigenous culture at the expanse of a further expansion of the “course of western thought” (154). In deploring both parties, Bowles, through Stenham, suggests that the French party is “rational and deadly,” whereas the nationalist’s ideas are “fundamentally identical with those of Marxist-Leninism,” or “another product of the West’s desire to command destiny” (TSH 155). Thus the political upheavals caused by the French and the Istiqlal party motivated and provided the basis for Bowles and Stenham to condemn both parties as the source of destruction of both the medieval life of Morocco and the fatalistic world view of Moroccans that takes surrender and submission as its basic principle. However, at a more fundamental level, Bowles’s concern in The Spider’s House is not to track the pervasive effects of the French presence on Morocco, but

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rather to put emphasis on what the Istiqlal party is destroying as a resistance movement, and not on what they are striving to build. Thus Bowles in The Spider’s House champions the culture of submission as a source of happiness and innocence of Moroccan people, and not as a source of ignorance and backwardness. It is therefore not surprising that Bowles gives much space to his Western characters in the narrative continuum of the novel to legitimize and defend the civilizing mission of France in Morocco. Bowles’s strategy in this respect favors the French protectorate and denigrates the Istiqlal party that is a symbol for the Moroccans’s ambition for a better tomorrow. In The Spider’s House, Bowles presents the French protectorate as the rescuer of Moroccans and their culture, which is depicted in Moss’s words as “something accidentally left over from bygone centuries, now in a necessary state of transition that the people needed temporary guidance in order to progress to some better condition” (155). It is precisely this attitude toward Moroccan culture that provides the foundation for Bowles’s legitimizing the French protectorate as a policy that has brought “hospitals and electric lights and buses” (188) to Morocco, and that will put the Moroccans on the path of progress. Obviously, this attitude is of valuable support to the French protectorate that Lee Bourroughs idealizes as a civilizing mission of when she claims, “For her the Moroccans were backward onlookers standing on the sidelines of the parade of progress; if they must be exhorted to join, if necessary pulled by force in the march” (252). Certainly, beneath this sympathetic attitude towards the French protectorate lies a bitter critique of Moroccan culture, which Stenham re-evaluates as “a culture of ‘and then’ rather than one of ‘because,’ like ours” (187). By pointing to the fatalistic aspect of the Moroccan culture, Bowles, through Stenham, gives implicitly a reason for the French presence in Morocco whose task is to transform Moroccans from primitive to rational beings, because in the Moroccan mind: One thing doesn’t come from another thing. Nothing is a result of anything. Everything merely is, and no questions asked. Even the language they speak is constructed around that. Each fact is separate, and one never depends on the other. Everything’s explained by the constant intervention of Allah. And whatever happens, and was decreed at the beginning of time, and there’s no way even of imagining how anything could have been different from what it is. (187)

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This passage helps us understand Bowles’s clear distinction between the West’s rational mind and the Moroccans’s fatalistic or irrational mind. In doing so, Bowles successfully sets Moroccans as people who are “far away from us”, because of the “unbridgeable gulf” that exists between us and them. Thus, Stenham’s attitude serves Bowles’s strategy in The Spider’s House as a backdrop against which he has been able to articulate Moss and Lee Bourroughs’s sympathetic attitude towards the French colonial regime in Morocco. Against this supportive attitude towards the French protectorate, Bowles emphasizes Stenham’s vehement denouncement of the Istiqlal party and the young Moroccans who are represented as a real threat to the religion and culture of Morocco: … [they] showed an inclination to ally themselves with the course of Western thought. Those renegades who prated of education and progress, who had forsaken the concept of a static world to embrace that of a dynamic one – he could gladly have seen them all quietly executed, so that the power of Islam might continue without danger of interpretation. (216)

This hostile attitude towards the young members of the Istiqlal party must be seen in the light of Bowles’s and Stenham’s fear for the disappearance of the medieval life of Moroccans, and the destruction of the fatalistic world view embodied in Amar and his father Si Driss. It is in this context that Bowles, through Stenham, despises those young Moroccans who are associated with the nationalist movement: Moreover, no one would care. Perhaps one could say it was already dead in one sense, for most of those who lived in it, (and certainly the younger ones without exception) hated it, and desired nothing more than to tear it down and build something more in accordance with what they considered present-day needs. It looked too impossibly different from any city they had ever seen in the cinema, it was more exaggeratedly ancient and decrepit than the other towns of Morocco. They were ashamed of its alleys and tunnels and meads and straw, they complained of the damp, the dirt and the disuse. They wanted to blast the walls that closed it in, and run wide avenues out through the olive groves that surrounded it, and along the avenues they wanted to run bus lines and build huge apartment houses. Fortunately the French, having declared the entire city a monument historique, had made their

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aims temporarily unattainable. The plans for every new construction had to be submitted to the Beaux Arts; if there was any departure from the traditional style it could not be built. (168)

What we learn here is that the French protectorate must receive all the praise for its preservation of the medieval Morocco as an exotic land that provides Bowles and Stenham with a warm shelter to enjoy the “ignorance” and “innocence” of the Moroccan people. In praising the achievement of the French protectorate in preserving the medieval Morocco, Bowles, through Stenham, then condemns those young Moroccans as a real threat to the purity and originality of Morocco as a medieval land. Those young Moroccans, who are affiliated with the nationalist movement, are depicted as one of the dangerous forces that work toward the destruction of Bowles’s pure and unaffected Morocco. Thus, for Bowles those young Moroccans, with their Western education, are working with the Istiqlal party to destroy “all social, moral, economic patterns of Moroccan’s medieval life” (Bertens 8). Yet, the failure of Paul Bowles to recognize the modern project of the Istiqlal party as a nationalist movement is simply the result of his hostile attitude toward the Istiqlal as a source of the destruction of his medieval Morocco, and of his romanticization of the fatalistic world of Amar and his father Si Driss who champion surrender to the will of Allah – Maktoub – and who are categorically against politics and change In romanticizing Amar’s fatalistic worldview together with his clear condemnation of the Istiqlal party, Bowles expresses his obvious fear of the effects of the Istiqlal on Amar, and therefore on the traditional life of Morocco he had known in 1930s. However, Bowles’s hostile attitude toward the Istiqlal party must be seen, as Bertens remarks, as a handicapped attitude since: … The movement is presented almost entirely in an indirect way. We are only told what effects its actions have on the population of Fez, and can never be sure to what extent these effects are the result of rumor rather than deliberate Istiqlal party policy. Most of information comes from Stenham, who is clearly hostile, or from Amar, who has only the vaguest understanding of the movement’s aims and methods and feels bound to condemn it on religious grounds; very little is transmitted directly. Even the role of Moulay Ali, the one

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character who clearly belongs to the Istiqlal, is not made clear and his position in the movement never established. (121) .

Besides Stenham’s hostile attitude towards the Istiqlal party, Bowles puts much emphasis on Amar to perform the role of a denouncer or a surveying eye that condemns the aims and methods of the Istiqlal party. However, Bowles fails to make Amar’s role compatible with his awareness and understanding of the political situation in Morocco in 1954. Being a fifteen-year-old naïve boy who has never been to school, Amar is unable to dramatize the emergence and the struggle of the Istiqlal party as a nationalist movement that seeks the independence of Morocco. Yet, Amar proves to be an “unreliable witness” whose rendering of the political situation in Morocco is colored by his negative and bitter attack on the Istiqlal party on the one hand, and by his tolerant attitude toward the French colonial enterprise as part of “Maktoub” on the other hand. Bertens remarks that: The novel is arguably harsher on the nationalists than the French: we have Si Driss’s vehement denouncement of the movement; we have Stenham’s scantling commentary: we are presented to believe the murderers are members of the party although they may well be hungers-on; finally, we are naturally indignant at Moulay Ali’s use of Amar toward the end of the novel .... What is presented, however, is how the people of Fez are intimidated. We hear that the Istiqlal party wants more personal freedom for women …. What seems an attempt to give women the status of human beings is presented as one of the elements destroying the orthodox way of life. Apparently the Istiqlal, contrary to appearances, is intent on definitively deposing the sultan and putting an end to his feudalistic reign, but this too is merely seen as a threat. (120-21)

Far from being an objective account of the Istiqlal party, Bowles clearly takes the side of Amar, Stenham, and Si Driss to romanticize the medieval Morocco that suits his personal taste and desire of primitive Morocco. However, The Spider’s House’s negative attitude toward the Istiqlal party must be seen in the light of Bowles’s colonial nostalgia to Fez and Morocco in general, whereby Fez is seen as “an enchanted labyrinth sheltered from time, where as he wondered mindlessly, what his eyes saw told him that he had at last found the way back” (167).

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To this nostalgic view of Morocco, Bowles’s The Spider’s House manifests an anti-nationalist attitude, for the nationalists are working toward the destruction of Bowles’s old and pure shelter where the charm of the country is “a direct result of the people’s lack of mental development” (210). Moreover, Bowles’s attempt in The Spider’s House to preserve Morocco intact from the effects of both the French and the nationalist movement is ample evidence of his obvious fear of the “loss of happiness” that he has been enjoying in Morocco. It is precisely this fear that motivates Bowles to deplore both parties, because the independence of Morocco means the end of the idealized Morocco. Bowles’s colonial nostalgia is indeed an obvious colonial desire that strives to stop time and keep Morocco pure and unaffected by the nationalist movement that seeks to free and modernize Morocco. In this respect, Greg Mullins notes: John Stenham – the protagonist of the Spider’s House – has a severe case of colonial nostalgia … he is dryly unsentimental in his nostalgia … Stenham adores Fez because it looks medieval, and he cherishes the trance dances of the filala and other religious sects because to him they are primitive, ever barbaric. He dreads what he views as the increasing modernization and “Westernization” of Moroccans … Stenham desperately tries to keep his own modern, rational, and western subjectivity detached from the Morocco he adores only so far as it is “oriental.” (33-34)

It is safe here to say that Bowles’s The Spider’s House, through Stenham, is mourning the loss of his romanticized traditional Morocco. Yet, Bowles’s novel is another colonial text that yields for an “impossible mission” to preserve the primitive culture of Morocco that is undergoing rapid change under the political climate of the 1950s. If Bowles, as Greg Mullins remarks, is associated with nostalgia for colonialism, his protagonist Stenham: … is not nostalgic for colonialism .… Rather, he yearns for a time before colonialism and wishes to witness medieval Fez that – he imagines – has no contact with Europe. Moreover … he wants to see and know this pre-modern Fez to know himself in opposition to it ….” (Mullins 34)

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For Stenham, Fez is not only an object or a site of desire, but also a place where he seeks his pleasures and privileges: “In the end, it was his preferences which concerned him. He would have liked to prolong the status quo because the décor that went with it suited his personal taste” (TSH 286). It is this fetishization of Fez that makes Bowles and Stenham idealize and romanticize the static culture of Moroccans, but it also embodies their exclusion of the lives and desires of Moroccans who are striving for the liberation of their country from colonialism, and the building of a free and a modern nation. Thus, Stenham’s fear of change can be seen as a manifestation of his “imagined” and “lost” Morocco as his old medieval “House” whose pillars are founded on superstition, fatalism, fanaticism, violence, ignorance, and degradation of women. Yet, it is important to note that Bowles’s romanticization of Amar seeks to set a religious ground from which he departs in his condemnation of the Istiqlal party. Bowles’s attitude toward the nationalist movement is mediated through the voice of Amar, who is presented as a naïve young boy who is out of touch with the political situation of Morocco in which the French colonial regime and the Istiqlal party were in a state of tension concerning the question of Moroccan independence. Thus his ignorance of the political climate in Morocco during the first half of the 1950’s is ample evidence that Amar is not a reliable witness who can be trusted to deliver an objective description of the contemporary political situation in Morocco. In this sense, Amar’s handicapped vision toward the Istiqlal party can be seen as a manifestation of Bowles’s failure in dramatizing both Amar’s religious world view and the negative attitude toward the Istiqlal party, since, as Al Ghandor notices in an interview with Paul Bowles, Amar is given a role incompatible with his social, educational and cultural milieu and dimension. He is also given, according to Al Ghandor, a philosophy and a way of life incompatible with the person he is, being the illiterate youth that he is. Al Ghandor also notes that Bowles has put in Amar’s mouth sophisticated utterances and highbrow ideas about the religion, life, and death that do not match his intellectual equality. Against his romanticization of Amar as a representative of the primitive, static, pure culture of his imagined Morocco, Bowles has been able to show to his Western reader the destruction of culture that has served as an effective shelter from the wilderness of Western culture. To this point, Bowles claims in “An interview with Oliver Evans”:

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The Spider’s House is definitely a time thing, isn’t? About the moment when the old is destroyed and the new breaks the shell and sticks its ugly head out. It is, yes, it is true that it is a sort of apologia. Not for anything that one can ever do again. It is simply an evocation of that which has been lost. We will never have it again. It is finished, it’s smashed, it is broken. We’ve killed God and that’s the end of it. There won’t ever be that again. (Caponi 54-55)

Despite his denial that he does not try to preserve the traditional Moroccan culture, Bowles argues that he “was just remarking on its disappearance, that is, on the modernization of the Moroccan mind. No, how could you preserve magic? Trying to do that would be Hitlerian, bring back the dark ages because they were nicer than today” (Caponi 160). However, it may seem that Bowles’s denial of his attempt to preserve the primitive Morocco that he comes to know in 1930s is not a solid argument, since his mourning for the “lost Morocco” is at the same a condemnation of the Istiqlal Party which he describes as responsible for these changes: The Nationalists were not interested in ridding Morocco of all traces of European civilization and restoring it to its precolonial state; on the contrary their aim was to make it even more “European” than the French had made it. When France was no longer able to keep the governmental vehicle on the road, she abandoned it, leaving the motor running. The Moroccans climbed in and drove off in the same direction, but with even greater speed. (Preface, n.pag.)

In the above excerpt, Bowles’s direct condemnation is addressed to the nationalist movement rather than the French, because as he realizes that “what I failed to understand was that if Morocco was still a largely medieval land, it was because the French themselves, and not the Moroccans, wanted it that way” (Preface, n. pag). In idealizing Amar’s world view and attacking the Istiqlal party, Bowles not only tries to preserve what Brian Edwards refers to as the “sexually, socially and culturally liberating environment of Morocco,” (82) but he also stands against the Independence of Morocco, because it simply means the loss of his “paradise” and the privileges he was enjoying in Morocco. To his personal desire, Bowles strives to preserve his lost Morocco against the will of the Moroccan people who wish nothing than to live in free and independent Morocco.

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Bowles indeed shows through his colonial nostalgia a total neglect of the sufferings of Moroccan people who are tortured, dehumanized, and killed by the colonial machinery of the French regime. He ignores all the crimes that have been committed under the umbrella of the “civilizing mission” or the “protectorate treaty” whose aim was to protect the Moroccans from themselves, and from their barbarity and primitiveness. It is safe to say that Bowles assumes the position of the real protector when he depicts the stereotyped view of Moroccans as childlike. Thus, Bowles’s fear of independent Morocco is in itself an embodiment of his strong belief as an American who behaves as a father toward his (Moroccan) children. Bowles seems to fall into the same trap of the “protector” father who knows what is good and what is bad for his children. In doing so, Bowles is indeed walking on the same path traced by the protectorate treaty signed between the Sultan and the French administration to rescue the Moroccans from their backwardness and primitiveness, and to teach them how to behave, think, live, and even die. More important, Bowles’s colonial nostalgia together with his attack on the Istiqlal party can be seen as a reflection of the official American attitude toward the Independence of Morocco in the first half of the 1950s. Against the United States’s promise of an independent Morocco after the famous meeting of Casablanca, the United States worked hard to prolong the colonization of Morocco, despite the French conviction that it was time for the independence of Morocco, because the new geopolitical situation give Morocco a crucial role in the international relations after World war II, during the beginning of a new era in which the United States declared itself as the new political power in the world. Finally, we can say that Bowles’s The Spider’s House is built upon the famous saying of resident-General Lyautey who was the master mind of the protectorate policy in Morocco when he says: “Govern the mandarins, not against them. Do not offend a single tradition; do not change a single habit. Identify the governing class with our own interests” (qtd. in Maier 91). Moreover, it must be said that Bowles dual tone, anti-colonial attitude toward the French and anti-nationalist attitude toward the Istiqlal party, crystallizes the contradictions embedded in Bowles’s attitude toward the question of Moroccan Independence. His anti-colonial attitude toward the French protectorate must be seen in the context of Bowles’s view of the

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French regime, which has poisoned the medieval style of Moroccans who were about to abandon their traditional life because of the effects of colonialism. On the other hand, Bowles’s anti-nationalist attitude toward the Istiqlal party is derived from his conviction that the nationalists are striving to put Morocco and Moroccans on the path of evolution and progress. These two attitudes therefore must not be separated from Bowles’s colonial nostalgia through which he seeks to preserve the old traditional Morocco that belongs to a bygone era, and to freeze it at the margin of history.

WORKS CITED AlGhandor, Abdelhak. “Atavism and Civilization: An Interview with Paul Bowles.” Ariel 25 (April 1994): 7-30. Bertens, Johannes Willem. The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, 1979. Bowles, Paul. The Spider’s House. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990. Caponi, Gena Dagel. Conversation with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Edwards, Brian T. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, From Casablanca To The Marrakech Express. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2005. Maier, John. Desert Songs: Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan images of the West. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Mullins, Greg. Colonial Affairs. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

TANGIER, CAPITAL OF TREASON ANDREW HUSSEY

This essay is a mixed-genre piece – interviews, reportage, impressions – of what it feels like to be in Tangier in the 21st Century. If there is any guiding theoretical position it is what Walter Benjamin might have called the “politics of atmosphere” – in other words, political actions or positions which are driven not by grand historical positions but rather by the details and nuances of everyday life. The Tangier Bowles knew is here in this text – but it has also mutated into something else: a prison, a killing jar. It is a widely held myth that Bowles’s Tangier and the reality of radical Islam in contemporary Tangier are very separate spheres in history and culture. This essay shows that this is not the case.

I was just about to order a drink when a Moroccan man lurched over towards my side of the counter and tried to punch me in the face. This was in Dean’s Bar, which is a tiny hole-in-the-wall place in the Ville Nouvelle of Tangier. It was late afternoon and for this guy – mid thirties and heavily built – a long day of booze was now starting to kick in. His friends pulled the drunk back and then pushed him into a seat in corner of the room, glassy-eyed and still swearing at me. It is against the law in Morocco for Muslims to drink, although there is a strong, heavy drinking culture amongst Moroccans in all of the cities. The main streets of Tangier and Casablanca in particular are littered with bars, which are usually former cafés from the period of the French and Spanish Protectorates, and which are hidden from public view by drapes or blacked out windows. These allow everybody to pretend that they don’t exist. Another way of sustaining this lie is for the police to arrest any Moroccan who looks even mildly drunk in the street. This pleases the Islamists, who can say that Islamic law is being upheld in Morocco, whilst allowing the government to get on with the job of policing the bars, which serve up cheap alcohol

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and low-grade prostitution to a mixed clientele of office clerks, manual workers, and the unemployed. My attacker’s friends were trying to make him look respectable enough to avoid a beating or jail on his way home. I was the only nonMoroccan in the place. Nobody apologized or offered me a drink. On the face of it, this incident was unremarkable. The bars of Morocco are generally rough places where hard drinking often ends in violence. Foreigners rarely enter this world, preferring the hotel bars and nightclubs that cater for Western customers with credit cards. So it was not unusual for a European like me to be cold-shouldered or even insulted in a place like this. Sixty years ago Dean’s Bar was known in Europe and America as the most glamorous bar in Tangier, which was then the most famous city in Morocco. In those days Tangier was the haunt of film stars, millionaires, writers, a gay and druggy Western élite of playboys and playgirls. At some point in the 1970s, the Tangier scene faded and the city reverted to its status as an obscure and poor backwater. These days, on the Boulevard Pasteur – which was once the chic center of the Europeanized city – the apartment blocks are decrepit and the broken streets smell of sewage. This is all a very long way from the Sin City of legend. In 2004, however, Tangier became notorious for a new form of evil. This was in the wake of the massacre in Madrid on the 11th March when 198 people were killed and two thousand wounded by incendiary devices on morning commuter trains into the city. On March 13th, the police arrested three alleged key players who were Moroccan, and from the city of Tangier, only an hour away by ferry from the Spanish coast. All Moroccans were deeply shocked by the bombings. The emotions ran particularly high in Tangier. In the days and weeks after the attacks in Madrid, there were demonstrations for peace and against terrorism in the city, some of them sponsored by the government. But they were disorganized and unconvincing. The real mood was closer to an angry despair. This quickly turned into an aggression towards Europeans. This was the anger that I walked into head-on in Dean’s Bar where I had ventured only days after the attacks in Madrid. Since the late 1980s I have spent significant periods living and working in Madrid and Tangier. During that time Madrid has accelerated away from its near Third-World status to become a modern European capital, whilst Tangier has gone backwards into

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poverty and corruption. The links between the two cities have always been close, but these days most of the traffic has been one way as Moroccans have migrated to Spain for jobs and money. I went back to both Tangier and Madrid shortly after the bombings – partly out of curiosity and partly driven by an instinct that it was no accident that most of the bombers came from Tangier. Since then I have gone back more and more frequently to the city. Most of all, I have wanted to see for myself how far back the city has fallen. Tangier is in Africa and an Islamic country, but it is also part of the Spanish-speaking world. It was under Spanish control for periods in its history and at one stage was part of the world of Al-Andalus, the lost Islamic land in southern Spain, which was finally conquered by the Catholic Kings of Spain in 1492. Along with French and Darija (a dialect of Arabic), a faintly antique version of Spanish is still one of the first languages of the street in Tangier. The neighboring cities of Ceuta and Melilla, roughly an hour’s drive from Tangier, actually are Spanish territory – Moroccans need visas to get past the border controls, which are heavily policed. Moroccans have also been killed trying to cross these borders illegally. The city of Tétouan, a half an hour away and a halfway house between Tangier and the Spanish enclaves, is in Morocco but looks like a Spanish city – it has the same plazas, the same architecture and street furniture. But Tétouan is a desperately poor place and everything modern also looks half-wrecked. It is notorious as a base for hard-line Islamists and lawlessness and many of the heaviest gangsters in Tangier – experts in drug running and people trafficking – have their origins here. I once stayed for a week in a hotel in Tétouan where the owners effortlessly combined pious observation of prayers and an openly casual drugs racket. Nearly everyone in Tangier supports Spanish football teams. There has always been a large Spanish presence here – they are called ‘Tangerinos’ to distinguish them from the ‘Tanjawi,’ the Muslim inhabitants of the city. Even now, in the streets around rue Jebha al Watania, you can find remnants of a community of exiles who came to flee from Franco’s Spain. This is a visibly aging population but they still have barbershops and the kind of old-school tapas bars that you can’t really find in Spain anymore. On clear days you can see the Spanish coast from almost any point in Tangier. Sometimes it seems so near that you can make out cars and houses. One of the best places to see this is a square called the Plaza

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de Faro in the dead center of the city on the Boulevard Pasteur. During the later afternoon and early evening this place swarms with shoeshine merchants and low-level hustlers selling drugs or sex. Mostly, however, it is populated by young men hanging out, smoking dope, chatting with each other and staring out at Spain. The square is nicknamed the Plaza de los Perezosos – “the Place of the Lazy” – because it attracts the unemployed and the idle. Nearly all-young people have worked, or want to work in Spain. This can be a fatal ambition. The corpses of those who try to get across the Strait illegally are regularly swept on Spanish beaches. In the bars and cafés of Tangier there is a lot of black humor about this. The sea between Spain and Tangier is casually called the “graveyard.” There are lots of jokes about the gullibility of the sub-Saharan Africans whose drowned, bloated corpses are washed up in Spain or lost at sea. These would-be immigrants have come here to pay all that they have to sail to their dream of Europe, usually at night and with no guide, in tiny boats called “pateras” – an old Andalusian word for a flat-bottomed fishing boat. They have little or no chance of survival. “It’s called ‘African tourism,’” I was told by one late-night Moroccan drinker in the Bar Negresco: “this is how it works: Don’t See Europe and Die!” Tangier has in fact always been a tragic place, a place where people come to die. In the 1960s, this meant the poor peasants from the nearby Rif Mountains, trudging into the city, half-starved from the regular famines that swept the area. Most recently, the city has become a magnet for the so-called “harragas.” In Darija, “harraga” means “one who has burned his papers.” The “harragas” do this so that they cannot be sent back home. These young men, mainly Moroccan or Algerian, are a level down even from the Africans. They hang around the docks with no money, no passport or identity documents and little hope. They are in every sense trapped between two worlds. The 11th of March is now known simply in Spain as “11-M” or “El Once M” – a cipher for Spain’s 9/11 moment. The slaughter was in fact one of the worst mass-murders on European soil in modern times, matched only by the Lockerbie bombing of 1988 (when a Libyan bomb brought down a plane bound for the United States onto a small Scottish village, killing 270). The facts of what happened in Madrid that day are still shocking. The morning was clear and bright. As the city awoke, a band of young

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men planted thirteen sports bags in four trains leaving from the outlying town of Alcalá de Henares. Each bag held a mobile phone. The bombers wore football scarves – in the colors of Real Madrid – as a light disguise and weaved between the trains, distributing the bombs in a fairly even pattern. This was all performed in a light-hearted and playful mood. At this time in the morning – between 7 and 7.15 a.m. - the trains were busy with early morning workers: cleaners, laborers, shift-workers. The packed carriages were alive with banter. One of the bombers stopped to chat up two pretty Romanian girls on their way to work, before skipping off the train leaving behind a bomb in a rucksack. One of the girls, fancying her chances with the cheeky but good-looking Arab, called after him. Minutes later she was blown into pieces. All the trains were heading towards Atocha, the main train station in Madrid. At 7.39 a.m., as the first train headed past the Calle Téllez, which lies no more than 500 yards from the station platform, the first bombs were detonated by a mobile phone. A few seconds later, four more bombs went off in another train heading into Atocha. Within minutes, two more trains were wrecked. By 8 a.m., the trains lay across the lines between Atocha and the district of El Pozo del Tío Raímundo – a poor, immigrant quarter of Madrid. Between the station and the trains, the lines were scattered with bloodied, limbless trunks, arms, legs, and severed heads. “I saw the bodies, and children wandering alone,” said Margarita Sanchez, a 40-year-old dental assistant from El Pozo, “it seemed like the end of the world.” The experience of each survivor is of course an individual experience but their accounts taken together are horribly similar. First the explosion – noise, blinding light and the air sucked out of the body – then the silence and horror, when everything happens in dream-like slow-motion. One of the first medics on the scene, Dr. Ervigio Corral, reported on the stillness of what he saw. This terrified him. What he found most disturbing – the stuff of his future nightmares – was that the only people left alive in the trains could not move. They also could not hear or speak. Their eardrums had all been burst by the blast. They were nearly all in unspeakable pain but when asked what was wrong they could not reply. They pleaded for help with their eyes. The first Moroccans arrested were Jamal Zougam, Mohamed Bekkali and Mohammed Chaoui. The police had found one of the mobile phones used in the attacks. They discovered that the SIM card

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had been sold to these Moroccans, from Tangier and Tétouan, who worked in or hung around a “locutorio” called “Nuevo Siglo” (“New Century”) in the Calle de los Tribuletes, near the center of Madrid. “Locutorio” is the Spanish word for the kind of cheap communications shop that exists now all over Europe, where immigrants from poor countries can come to telephone home at cheap rates, or simply to hang out with friends and compatriots. The Calle de los Tribuletes is in the district of Lavapiés – a former bastion of the white working-class of Madrid, which was now home to Africans, Arabs, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and Indians. Not long after the bombing, I went to see for myself the “locutorio” where the massacre had apparently been plotted. When I got there, the shop was boarded-up after the arrests but the sign was still on the door. “Those guys were not terrorists,” I was told by a Tunisian waiter (who would not give me his name) at a nearby café who regularly served them coffee, “No way. They were maybe rogues and did some bad stuff, but they were not killers.” This was a fair point; the simple fact they had supplied the mobile phones used in the attacks did not make them guilty of anything more than dealing in stolen goods. Jamal Zougam, was however already well known to the Spanish security services. He had been picked up by the police in 2001, who found in his apartment videos of his Moroccan friends fighting in Dagestan, Russia. He also had videotapes of Bin Laden’s speeches and books by radical Imams – in short all the paraphernalia of the apprentice Jihadist. Under Zougam’s influence, the “Nuevo Siglo” was indeed an excellent place to meet with religious extremists and get radicalized. In recent years there have been countless academic studies of how this works. The process is always simple. The first step is to feel a sense of belonging with other outsiders who felt displaced in their host society. Smoking kif (the Moroccan form of Cannabis, smoked traditionally in a thin pipe called a sebsi) refusing alcohol, singing old songs, watching videos, remembering the past all contributed to a sense of family. The group also bond over shared grudges and perceived slights; this could be a girl rejecting sexual advances because she was a “racist,” a drug deal gone wrong. In this context, Islamic radicals present themselves as superheroes, at war with the world of “Jehiliya” – an Arabic word meaning Pagan Barbarity and a cipher for the Western world as a whole. Like all

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young men the Islamic radicals are competitive and try to outdo each other with the ferocity of their faith, their denunciations of the West and their plans for destruction. The Spanish sociologist Rogelio Alonso, an expert on psychosocial stress in immigrant groups, has described this bonding very effectively: “terrorism is a group phenomenon,” he says, “it is an action which is entirely determined by group dynamics.” In simple terms, this means that the radicals needed each other: like football hooliganism, terrorism is violence as a game, a contest between competing egos to see who can wreak the most havoc. There are two more steps towards murder. Firstly you have to identify the enemy. For the young men at Zougam’s “locutorio” this was the Spaniards they met everyday, who not only denied them opportunity and wealth, but who were occupying the historic lands of Al-Andalus which had once been Islamic territory. Police informers who had been monitoring the group in “locutorio” and in the nearby Restaurante Alhambra, reported that the Moroccans constantly referred to “occupation” and “Jews”: they saw no difference between the Spanish “occupation” of Ceuta and Melilla, which are on North African soil, and the lost world of Al-Andalus. In order to kill the enemy you must dehumanize him. This second shift towards terror takes the form of a linguistic sleight of hand. This begins by thinking that the Spanish act like the Jews in Israel. The experience of living in occupied Andalus – the radicals in the “locutorio” argued amongst themselves – is directly equivalent to living like the Palestinians, displaced and lost in Israel and Gaza. The next step in this murderous logic is to imagine that the Spanish, the agents of dispossession, actually are “Jews.” Police informers say that this was how the young men in Zougam’s circle habitually referred to all of the sub-Humans outside the door of his shop. Everything outside the “locutorio” was “haram” – that is to say forbidden by Islam and sinful. In this world, all Jews are the enemy, and all Jews are targets: this was the logic of the Islamist warriors. These young men in Madrid had no official affiliation to AlQuaeda. They didn’t need it. This was Al-Quaeda ideology as youth revolt. On the wall at the end of Calle de los Tribuletes somebody had painted the graffito in English: “Kill All White Men!” “It’s a joke. It’s supposed to make you laugh,” explained Malik, a Senegalese guy drinking beer in a neighboring bar. Back in Tangier, nobody I talked to found this funny.

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In the wake of the arrest of the Moroccans in Madrid, the Frenchtrained Moroccan security forces in Tangier, Les Renseignements Généraux, were now cracking down hard on anyone suspecting of association with terrorists and the jails were filling up. The Mosques were empty. Young men shaved their beards – the mark of the Islamist radical – overnight. People were frightened. Most crucially, they were also ashamed. The notion of shame cuts deep into the collective psyche of the Tanjawi. The word in Darija is “Hchouma.” This can be variously translated into English “shame” or “disgrace.” As is often the case in dialectal Arabic the cultural concept is more important than the word itself. To be accused of “Hchouma” is to have committed an act of cultural taboo. This is often conveyed without words but by the accuser touching the right eye and pointing at the accused. The closest equivalent in the West is the notion of “disrespect” found in Italian or Black American cultures. Often when Darija speakers use French they put the French word “honte” alongside the Darija to make clear what they are trying to say. Interestingly, they do not have to do this when they speak Spanish. This is because the Spanish word “Verguenza” conveys much the same cultural meaning and needs no translation. Most importantly, although “Hchouma” does not have a specifically religious meaning – it is not the same as “haram” – it is still a powerful and sometimes deadly insult. No one knew this better than the Tanjawi writer Mohamed Choukri. When he died in 2003, Choukri was saluted by the King of Morocco, Mohammed VI, as the most famous and distinguished literary son of Tangier. In his lifetime, however, Choukri had been mainly regarded as a pariah figure in Moroccan culture. Choukri became notorious across the Arab world in the 1980’s with his autobiography For Bread Alone, that told the story of how he had come to Tangier as an illiterate youth fleeing famine in the Rif mountains. He arrived in the city in the 1950’s at the height of its reputation as a glamorous playground for Westerners. Like everyone else he knew, Choukri sold his body to Western men for sex. The only other choice was starvation. I spent a lot of time with Choukri in the winter of 2002 in the Café du Ritz, a shabby but friendly restaurant in the backstreets of downtown Tangier. Choukri told me that by writing about the reality of Tangier life, he was accused of bringing “Hchouma” to the city.

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When we finished I often accompanied Choukri to his apartment nearby. He was always worried about potential attackers, complaining that now he was older he couldn’t defend himself and that he should buy a knife. We talked about Tangier, and how the city had changed during Choukri’s lifetime. Choukri had known nearly all of the gilded literary expatriates who came here, as friends, clients or lovers. These included Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet. The only name he remembered with affection was that of Jean Genet. He said that, alone amongst his American or European contacts, clients and lovers, Genet had, never made him “feel inferior.” Genet loved Tangier. He called it “the capital of treason,” on the grounds that it was full of criminals, spies and homosexuals. Choukri described Genet in his later years, wandering the corridors of Hotel Minzah in a Nembutal trance. He liked Genet but thought he had a falsely Romantic view of the city and knew nothing about the realities of life there. As proof of this, Choukri told me about the first time that he had performed fellatio on a rich foreigner in an expensive car near the sea front. He was in his late teens and starving. Afterwards, he went to sleep in a cemetery because he hated himself for what he had done. He was overcome with shame, and needed to sleep near his ancestors and prayed to them for forgiveness. This was, said Choukri, a life the foreigners could never understand. In 2002 Choukri was a bitter old man, drinking heavily and heading quickly for self-destruction. His book had made him famous but it was also banned in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. He had told the truth about the Arab world and the West but this was seen by his enemies as a betrayal; he had disclosed an intimate secret to the outside world and thereby brought shame to the Arab family. For this, he would never be forgiven. On a personal level, for all his fame as a writer, he had never forgotten the original traumas of his youth as a whore. He still described his experiences as “rape.” This indeed is the real nature of the cultural distance between the Tanjawi and the foreigners who came to Tangier to fuck them. It is most clearly defined in the diaries of the English playwright Joe Orton who spent his summers here in the 1960s. When these diaries were published posthumously as a book in 1986 (Orton died in 1967), it was praised on both sides of the Atlantic for its witty and unashamed accounts of drug-taking and gay sex. Orton, and others like him,

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conceived of Tangier as a kind of anti-Britain where they could do whatever they wanted out of reach of the law and in the name of sexual liberation. Orton also loved flaunting his homosexuality and provoking any heterosexual tourist who dared to enter his space. In his diary, he recorded his pleasure at shocking a pair of staid American tourists who were eavesdropping on his conversation with friends at a table in the Café de Paris (the conversation involved sodomy, sperm and an expensive rug). When his friends nudged him to let him know that he was causing offence, he retorted loudly, cackling with high camp glee: “Fuck them! This is our country, our town, our civilization.” Orton could not have been more wrong. King Hassan II, the first ruler of Independent Morocco, hated Tangier. This was mainly because it was full of foreigners who were there for the drugs and sex. The city was declared as a bastion of unIslamic values and a place that brought “Hchouma” on the Moroccan nation. There were periodic police raids on “immoral persons” but the foreigners were always too rich and too powerful to be driven properly out of the city. Frustrated, Hassan turned his back on the place, never visited it and deprived it of economic investment. When the foreigners finally left in the 1980s, the city was all but a ruin. For many Moroccans, Tangier is still an apostate city. This is of course a religious and not a legal status but it still carries weight with Muslims (and all Moroccans are legally Muslims). The apostate city is a place that is so spiritually corrupt that it opposes God himself. This supreme evil is now most visible in Tangier in the form of the Casino at the beach of Malabata. This is an imposing white skyscraper, allegedly owned by Saudis, which dominates the bay of Tangier. It is surrounded by armed guards and alleged to be the meeting-place of Middle-Eastern playboys, arms dealers, drug warlords and politicians who indulge in the most expensive prostitutes and other Western pleasures. The Casino stands diametrically opposed to the Medina – the poorest and holiest part of the city – and can be seen from most points in Tangier. Even the most moderate Muslims see this as an insult. The Tanjawis also complain that it is always the Casino that goes into lock-down and is guarded by armed police during periods of tension and the mostly unreported riots that occasionally rip through the city. The most dangerous part of Tangier, however, is not in the center but in the outlying suburbs – an impenetrable forest of badly built

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low-level apartment buildings. This is where most of the riots and other forms of violence – murders, muggings – take place. These areas are not unlike the French banlieues, the badlands of decaying public housing which surround all major French cities and which have become notorious in recent years for battles between the French police and immigrant, mainly North African youths. If anything the suburbs of Tangier are far worse than anything you can see in Paris, Lyons, or Marseille. This is because they are the product of financial and political corruption. I was told by a friend who is an insider to the political administration in Tangier that they are often built by gangsters who are laundering money made from trafficking people or drugs. The buildings are badly built, prone to floods and even collapse. People have died as a result of this shoddy construction work. Because they were built without regulation many of these housing estates don’t officially exist – many of them were built at night by illegal labor. Even though these estates are officially invisible, every time I drive down from the airport I am astonished how quickly another forlorn, half-built rash of apartment blocks has sprouted out of nowhere. The Tanjawis call this “Hizam al-fakr” (“the belt of poverty”). Unsurprisingly, this is where the most radical Islamists have taken control of the mosques and the streets. It was here, in the early 2000s, in the suburb of Casabarata, the preacher Mohamed Fizazi, promised to send “Islamic Brigades who would set fire to Europe.” Fizazi is now in jail for involvement with the bombings in Casablanca in 2003, but he knew or had contact with all the Moroccans who bombed Madrid. Back in the center of the city, although the Old Tangier that Choukri knew is long since gone, the sex trade is not quite yet finished. In the summer of 2009, at the Café de Paris at the Place de France, I watched leather-clad American and European queens sit openly with their teenage Moroccan consorts. Single Anglo-European men in the city are regularly propositioned by boys who can’t be more than children. Young Arab intellectuals these days angrily describe such relations as “humiliation”; another crime on the charge sheet against the West. Not just in Morocco but across the Muslim world, the myth of Arab bi-sexuality is nowadays seen not just as an Orientalist fiction, but as yet another insult. Beyond the educated élites, such visible sex tourism can have deadly consequences. In the early 2000s Tangier was targeted by an

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Islamist group, based in the suburbs of Tangier, who planned to machine-gun Western tourists on the beach. The Islamists had heard that in the center of Tangier, Westerners were having sex with boys and even animals in public view. The police who foiled the plot described the gang, all originally from the countryside, as illiterate and ignorant of Western ways. No doubt this was true. But their anger was real too; the would-be killers knew what they had seen in the “civilized” streets of Tangier. In the 2007 trial of the bombers in Madrid, 12 of the 18 convicted were from Morocco and all of them had connections with Tangier. The ringleader was indeed Jamal Zougam, who had worshipped in Casabarata with Mohamed Fizazi. Zougam helped make the bombs and was identified by three eyewitnesses of planting the rucksacks on the train in a smiling, relaxed mood. Zougam had been born in Tangier in 1973, in the rue Ben Aliyem, a rundown street in the upper part of the Medina. This is the poorest part of the Medina but only a few steps away from the American legation, the former headquarters of the US Diplomatic Mission, which has been here since 1821 and is now an elegant museum. In the cafés further down towards the port, where sebsi and tea are the main staples, Zougam is now remembered as a tough and witty friend. In the years since the bombing, at least for some Tanjawis, he has also become a hero, a local boy made good. “Zougam showed that we can fight back,” I was told by heavily lidded smoker. Nobody here had heard of Paul Bowles, William Burroughs or any other Bohemian expatriates. But they knew all the names of the Madrid bombers and said that they were proud that they came from Tangier. “We should be making famous footballers who can play for Chelsea,” I was told by a guy called Rachid, who spoke English with a Cockney accent due to his time spent in U.K. prisons, “but we don’t: we make Jihadis instead!” This was in the summer of 2009. This perverse feeling of pride was not at all universal across the city; there were many who said that they were still ashamed of the bombers. One of the hit songs that year was a track by a Tanjawi rapper called DJ Muslim called ‘Ana Muslim Mashi Irhabi’ (“I am a Muslim but not a Terrorist”). The Medina smokers laughed when I mentioned this and said that DJ Muslim was probably a stooge and funded by the Moroccan government; “DJ Muslim is not a rebel,” I was told in the Medina cafés, “The real rebels are somewhere else. They don’t take money from the government.”

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They meant rebels like Jamal Ahmidan, who killed himself in April 2004, as the Spanish police began to lay siege to the house in Leganés (a southern suburb of Madrid) where the plotters had made the bombs. He was one of the key figures in the plot, probably the most daring and hard-line figures without whom the plot would never have happened. To many young men in Tangier now he is a role model. His story is like a video game, taking him from bad-boy gangster to Islamist Street-fighter and finally world-famous martyr. Ahmidan was born in Tétouan in 1970 and arrived in Madrid in 1990, by then already deeply steeped in the low-life of his native city and Tangier. He had the nickname “El Chino” (“the Chinaman”) on account of his unusual facial features which were more Asian than Arab. Shortly after settling in Madrid he married a Spanish woman, a junkie. He did this most probably to get papers, although he also fathered a son. He made a living by selling dope and forging documents, and he soon had first experiences of a Spanish jail when he was sent down in 1992 for dealing drugs. He was arrested again in 1999 for the same offences and this time sent to a detention center outside Madrid. With an Algerian cellmate he started a fire in attempt to break out. In 2000 he was back in prison in Morocco, having run someone down whilst drunk-driving. According to Ahmidan’s brother Mustafa this was the turning point when Jamal found Islam as the solution to his messy life. Mustafa testified to police that in prison Jamal gave up heroin, cocaine and alcohol and became a religious fanatic. On his release, however, this did not prevent him taking up again his former career as a dope dealer. Only this time he was on a mission. By now Jamal was an expert at negotiating the Madrid underworld and also a regular worshipper at the mosque in the Villaverde district of Madrid. This combination of criminal expertise and religious faith was toxic. He bought the explosives for the 11-M bombing with money made from his drug deals. For Ahmidan, this was a perfect and blessed exchange: to use the profits made from Western corruption in holy war against the West. Mustafa Ahmidan ran a bar in the Calle Fuengirola, in the southern extremities of the Madrid. This was where Ahmidan hung out towards the end of March 2004 in the weeks after the bombings. He was in the company of his Spanish girlfriend Rosa Maria and other members of the gang. They laughed at the incompetence of the police and even organized a barbecue where they played football, cooked and prayed.

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Again according to Mustafa, Jamal Ahmidan had no intention of killing himself. This was only the beginning of the long war of revenge against Spain. One of the documents found by police after the bombings described the bombers as “most valuable young men who have changed history.” Certainly this is how they thought of themselves. They exulted in how the bombings in Madrid immediately split Spain into two factions: the small minority of those in government who blamed the killing on the Basque separatist group ETA, who were no strangers to organized violence in Madrid, and an overwhelming majority of Spaniards from all political views who sensed a cover-up and a lie. In the days after the bombing this anger grew into a ferocious contempt for the government – obvious liars who were now mocking the dead by refusing to tell the truth. Spaniards with long memories claimed that they had never seen such wild emotions on the streets since the Civil War of the 1930’s. For a brief moment, as Spain seemed once again about to divide against itself, it must have seemed to the bombers that the catastrophe of Moorish Al-Andalus was finally being avenged. Back in the radical mosques of Tangier, the worshippers exulted that it was Jamal Zougam from Tangier and his friend Jamal Ahmidan from Tétouan, the spiritual sons of Fizazi, who had broken Spain in two. That is not what happened. The Madrid bombers grew up in a city that had been abandoned by the mother country, Morocco, and was yet still not part of Europe. They were angry and humiliated, and these emotions were made even deeper and more intense by living in Spain, which in every sense imprisoned and alienated them. But the massacre in Madrid did not – as they hoped – finally divide Spaniards, heralding the collapse of the Spanish State; it only united Spaniards in shock, grief and disgust. To the bombers’s delight, a Spanish government fell in the weeks after the bombing, but it was replaced by a national consensus for peace, stability and forward motion. Most of all, it made the Spanish feel that they had finally achieved the mature, “European” democracy, which they had desired for so long. When I lived in Spain in the 1980s, many of my Spanish friends used to quote the self-deprecating, self-hating proverb “Africa empieza a los pirineos” (“Africa begins in the Pyrenees”). Now this was no longer the case. As the measured aftermath of 11-M showed, Spain was now – at long last – in Europe.

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The Moroccan government craves a presence in Europe. It has applied repeatedly for membership of the European Union and finally been rewarded with “advanced status” in 2007. Mohammed VI, the young King, is known as a modernizer who wants to make Morocco less “African” and join the rich club of the West and its client countries. But nothing in Morocco is quite as it seems. This is not an Orientalist cliché but a clear-eyed description of the gap between the image that Morocco sells to the world as a tourist paradise – a blissedout Arabia-lite – and the political reality of an authoritarian government battling to contain Islamist anger. Part of the Moroccan government’s strategy to present a safe image to the world has been to clean up Tangier. The easy part was to polish the surfaces – the legendary hustlers have been moved on from the port by the “tourist police,” the stinky and not very picturesque Medina has been tidied up, the “harragas” and whores are these days all but invisible, working the lorries bound for European in the Port Terminal. The aim is for a “tourist-friendly” city, an exotic but accessible place which functions as – in the clichés of the Government Tourist Guide puts it into cliché – a “bridge between Islam and the West.” It is much harder to eradicate the rage here that erupted in the bombing of Madrid. The Islamists have now gone underground in Tangier but their presence can be felt everywhere. “This city is still ready to explode,” said Khalid Amine, a friend, a University Lecturer, an academic expert on Moroccan culture and long-time resident of the city: There is hatred here. I see this every day with my students. They no longer want to study. They don’t see the point. They want to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the Imams tell them: ‘you don’t have to do Jihad over there; you can make Jihad in Spain or Morocco.’ The Imams want to make Morocco a war zone, and Tangier is the front line.” (February 2010)

“Years ago, Spain and Tangier were like brothers. We went to Spain all the time. We lived alongside the Spanish, played football with them and spoke their language.” I was told this by Hishaam Aidi, who was brought up in Tangier but is now an academic at Columbia University, where he studied under Edward W. Said. At a conference organised by the local University, I watched Hishaam deliver a lecture

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in Tangier on the importance of the historical memory of Al-Andalus on both sides of the Mediterranean. Hishaam argued that this memory has been buried under what he called “Spanish Orientalism” – sometimes the Spanish celebrated their Moorish heritage in food, music and architecture, but mostly they were ashamed of it and tried to forget it. This is why, he said, for Moroccans and Spaniard alike, the bombings in Madrid were “the most savage and bitter confrontation” with this memory. The problem is that I think that Tangier and Madrid are still part of the same family,” Hishaam said to me later in the café Chellah, “except that now they hate each other. No one knows why this argument started.” The Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, who is in his seventies, lives for six months every year in Tangier. Goytisolo is these days praised in Madrid and across the Spanish-speaking world as a great writer. One of the reasons for this status is that Goytisolo has done more than any other living writer to deconstruct the notion of “la Hispanidad” – the official version of “Spanishness” which stretches from Madrid across to South America. “La Hispanidad,” as Goytisolo describes it, is almost always Catholic and European, and therefore false. I met with him in a café in one of the oldest Spanish quarters in Tangier to ask him about this. He explained to me that Spanish-ness was also made up of elements from Arab culture but that idea was still taboo in Spain. He explained that this was because any association with Islam or the Arab threatens to undermine the notion of Spain as a European nation. Goytisolo has coined the term “Memo-ricidio” to describe in particular the wiping away of the memory of Al-Andalus as a kind of cultural genocide. This process, he says, explains much of the present anger in Tangier. “But the problem is not just for the Tanjawis,” he said, “It is Spain’s problem too. After all, it is the Spanish who once again have turned their face away from their brothers, and who must face the consequences of this action.” This is why Tangier is now one the most complex and fragile frontlines of what many historians now call the “Fourth World War” This war is not a conflict between Islam and the West or the rich North and the globalized South, but a conflict between two very different experiences of the world – those who can join in the modern world, and those who are left behind. In the past thirty years, Spain has moved forward into “modernity,” embracing consumer culture and democracy, denying its past fratricidal violence and civil wars. This

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simply has not happened in Tangier. It cannot happen so long as the city is despised by Moroccans and shunned by the Spanish who, “like brothers,” once lived here in such intimacy. The Tanjawis who have made it in Europe can find the atmosphere strange and unfriendly when they come back. For a whole generation in Tangier, the failed drive to economic success – the empty tourist hotels and the hard police presence – has made the city feel like a prison. They don’t need to be taunted by those who have escaped. In the streets of the city, the tension hangs in the air, waiting to be transformed into an electric storm. A place like Tangier is a frontier zone with its own illusory torments. It tortures the mind because escape is so near and so far. In the early 21st century, to be back in Tangier is quite definitely to be back in Africa.

FALSE CONCEPTS: THE ABSENCE OF SECURITY AND INTIMACY IN THE WORK OF PAUL BOWLES ANDREW MARTINO

Paul Bowles is a writer who has created literary worlds where security is cruelly absent. A world without security, then, logically leads to a world devoid of intimacy on any kind of meaningful level. Therefore, one is lead to conclude that without security intimacy is impossible. Bowles famously stated that “Security is a false concept,” in an interview. Taking this statement as my point of departure, this essay argues that security and intimacy are empty concepts in which the entire Bowlesian ouevre is predicated. Drawing on numerous short stories and novels, I argue further that Bowles is a writer from whom we can trace the murmurings of the post 9/11 milieu in which we now find ourselves; a world where our obsessions with security has made us definitively insecure, and thus, less “at home.”

The fiction of Paul Bowles is undeniably disturbing in its content and in the clinical, almost scientific fashion in which those stories and novels are recounted. Bowles brings his reader as close to the abyss as any writer since Poe. Yet, while Poe shows us an interior world predicated upon madness, Bowles shows us a world predicated upon the madness of a world where we have come to fool ourselves into feeling a false sense of security. In an interview Paul Bowles did with Daniel Halpern in 1975, Halpern asked Bowles about the motivation behind so many of his characters in leaving the safety of the western world and its “predictable environments” for unknown territory, to which Bowles replied, “Security is a false concept” (91). I would like to take this statement as my point of departure. The fundamental concepts which Bowles makes use of, and calls into question in his fiction, can lead back to the human need for a sense of security in one’s life. Without security, one runs the risk of tumbling into a state of anxiety that will ultimately lead to madness and annihilation. In his fiction Bowles opens the path toward oblivion via an exposure to anxiety. With the exception of sticking to an entirely Western mode of storytelling (a

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linear model with a clear beginning, middle, and end), security, or its absence, is a dominant informant in the Bowlesian oeuvre. In fact, I suggest that any informed reading of Bowles’s work would do well to start with the premise mentioned above. Content The first, and perhaps most personal of these informants that correspond with a false sense of security is the concept of family. Bowles’s problematic relationship with his own family is one that informs his biographical mythology and runs throughout his fiction as well. In Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno’s biography of Bowles, The Invisible Spectator, he writes: Throughout Paul’s childhood, Claude would always be viewed as a monster, a personification of evil itself. But Claude did little to present a different picture; indeed, he seemed to revel in the role. (5)

Virginia Spencer Carr begins her book Paul Bowles: A Life, with the following statement: “Paul Bowles hated his father. There was never a time that he could not remember hating him” (1). In his own autobiography Bowles writes candidly about his troubled relationship with his father. In the very first pages Bowles describes an early encounter: Now Mother was in the hospital just outside of town; when Daddy arrived from New York, he took me aside and with more than his usual asperity said: “Your mother is a very sick woman, and it’s all because of you, young man. Remember that.” (WS 9-10)

It does not take a trained psychologist to determine the potential for psychological trauma that a father’s statement to his son like the one quoted above constitutes. It was important enough for Bowles to recount it as one of his earliest memories. Moreover, the fact that Bowles places this exchange at the very beginning of his autobiography sets the tone for his relationship with his father from the first stages. Later, Bowles recounts a time when his father attempted to kill him as a baby by leaving the crib containing the infant Paul next to an open window in the dead of winter. Death by

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exposure, then, winds its way into Bowles the younger’s consciousness that will later manifest itself in his desire to leave his homeland behind and submerge himself in his fiction. Exposure will become a fundamental theme in Bowles’s fictional universe. The hostility between fathers and sons is an important theme in Bowles’s work. It is also an important theme to explore when attempting to come to terms with the motivations behind Paul Bowles the writer. Bowles’s relationship with his father was one based on, if not outright hatred, then a profound sense of distrust and resentment. This resentment comes out strongly in several of Bowles’s stories. “The Frozen Fields,” written in 1957, is a story that is obviously biographical. In the story a six year old is accompanying his parents to the farm of his maternal grandparents for the Christmas holiday. From the very beginning the reader encounters a tyrannical father figure who clearly resents the fact that he has to make this trip at all. As a result, his short temper is directed toward his son Donald. In several scenes Bowles presents us with a father figure who is uncaring, cruel, and combative. One senses that the presence of the father causes a considerable amount of tension among those gathered at what is supposed to be a festive occasion. In what is arguably the most uncomfortable moment in the story, the father takes Donald out for a walk and asks him to throw a snow- ball. In Donald’s first clear act of defiance toward his father, he refuses. The father becomes enraged and pushes snow in Donald’s face and down his back, knocking him down in the process. Yet, Donald does not give in, but stands up to his father in his own way. The traumatic event marks a clear line in the sand, not just severing Donald’s relationship with his father, but severing Donald’s relationship with the world: An unfamiliar feeling had come to him: he was not sorry for himself for being wet and cold, or even resentful at having been mistreated. He felt detached (emphasis mine); it was an agreeable, almost voluptuous sensation which he accepted without understanding or questioning it. (278)

Donald’s relationship with the world will be forever changed from this point on, and his ability to form positive relationships will, one gets the sense, become extremely challenging for the youth. Donald’s relationship with his father is not the only casualty in the story. Interestingly, the story juxtaposes the cold, emotionally

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impotent life Donald leads at home with his parents to the warm, welcoming home he finds at the farm of his grandparents. In many ways, the farm constitutes a real home for Donald. However, the last confrontation Donald has with his father breaks all ties with Donald’s sense of home at the farm. In fact, the security Donald once felt at the farm, combined with the security one can only cling to in childhood (that sense of wonder at the world, a world where possibility still exists) is severed for good. In the final scene Donald is in his bed fantasizing that he has joined a wolf in the wild. Donald has, for all intents and purposes, become a wild beast, forced to roam across the frozen fields. The promise of security the farm once held for him is no longer available. The security of childhood, of his childhood, however problematic it was, is proven by his father to be irrevocably false. The father-son relationship is explored further in Bowles’s third novel, The Spider’s House. Amar is a troubled youth living in a tumultuous time; the eve of Morocco’s independence. In Bowles’s only overtly political work we once again have a cruel father figure. In the very first scene where the reader is introduced to Amar’s father we witness a particularly brutal beating Amar receives. While beating Amar his father states, “I hope I kill you!’ his father screamed. ‘You’d better be dead!’”(25). The implications of psychological damage are obvious. Amar’s relationship with his father is one based upon mutual antagonism and resentment. At the end of the book Amar’s three father figures – his biological father, Moulay Ali, and Stenham – all abandon him. Like Morocco, Amar is abandoned to his fate and he is left standing in an empty road as his future and sense of security drive away: Amar was running after the car. It was still there, ahead of him, going further away and faster. He could never catch it, but he ran because there was nothing else to do. And as he ran, his sandals made a terrible flapping noise on the hard surface of the highway, and he kicked them off, and ran silently and with freedom. Now for a moment he had the exultant feeling of flying along the road behind the car. It would surely stop. He could see the two heads in the window’s rectangle, and it seemed to him that they were looking back. The car had reached a curve in the road; it passed out of sight. He ran on. When he got to the curve the road was empty. (405-406)

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The scene above is highly symbolic of the trauma of abandonment and insecurity. The last word of the scene, indeed the novel, is “empty.” Similar to “The Frozen Fields,” it is the father (or in this case the father-figure) who leaves the boy behind. Although Donald realizes that he has nothing to receive from his father, Amar is still holding on to that sense of belonging and security, as if they might come back after him. The reader is left with the sound of Amar’s running feet on the pavement. These sounds represent echoes of an idealized sense of security, a phantom, a specter of home that never really existed in the first place. Interestingly, Bowles dedicated The Spider’s House to his father. It would be too easy to read this dedication as constituting a reconciliation between Bowles and his father. When one looks at the way fathers are portrayed in this novel one immediately gets the sense that they do not fare very well. It makes perfect sense, given Bowles’s documented hatred of his father, that he would dedicate this particular novel to his father. The Spider’s House is Bowles’s most political book, and it is largely about Morocco’s impending independence from France. However, this novel is also another of Bowles’s meditations on the relationship between fathers and sons. Ultimately, those relationships are horrifically unhealthy. Bowles’s dedication of The Spider’s House can be read as a dig at his father in the only way that the author knows how – through the vehicle of his imagination. Although these stories constitute some of Bowles’s finest work, their content makes them extremely uncomfortable to read. The bond between parent and child is our first experience with a sense of security. Children depend upon their parents for everything and a child (at least until a certain age) loves his parents unconditionally. When that bond begins to break down the child will naturally begin to build up defenses to compensate for the lack of love and security. As a result, the child’s sense of home becomes perverted and its memory can even trigger traumatic responses. The logical conclusion, even though it may not always be the case, is a profound sense of disconnectedness resulting from a false sense of security and an absence of any real intimacy between parent and child. In turn, this leads to the child’s future difficulties with feeling a part of a community. Perhaps the most arresting aspect to the Bowlesian indictment of security is the Western traveler in unknown lands. Time and again Bowles returns to this theme in his fiction. In his 1947 short story, “A

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Distant Episode,” a Western professor of linguistics travels to the Maghreb to study certain dialects, only to end up beaten, mutilated, sold into slavery, and eventually without his mind. The Professor in “A Distant Episode” is the Bowlesian archetype: the arrogant, educated, and perhaps self-entitled wanderer searching for the authentic experience in an alien geography. What happens to the Professor in “A Distant Episode” constitutes a point of origin that will inform the rest of Bowles’s fiction. The story is replete with powerful images of hell and suffering. In one particularly resonant scene, the café worker is leading the Professor to a place where the Professor can obtain camel udder boxes: Turning off the road, they walked across the earth strewn with sharp stones, past the little ruin, through the trees, until they came to a place where the ground dropped abruptly away in from of them. (27)

It is easy for the superficial reader to move quickly past this short paragraph. Yet, the paragraph may be metaphorically the most important in the Bowlesian universe. The motivation for most of Bowles’s protagonists is to “turn off the road” and onto errant paths. These errant paths constitute dangerous roads away from the safety, light, and security of the known world. Ironically, Bowles is also careful to point out that most of his protagonists venture into the unknown with a false sense of security. The Professor’s contact, the café owner, is no longer there. What he encounters is a worker who from the very beginning resents, if not shows outright contempt, for the obviously Western Professor. The Professor also spends four years learning the language. However, the cultural barrier proves to be too strong and the security that the Professor thinks he has by learning the language turns out to be false. The final scene of the story shows the one-time Professor (for he has lost all semblance of his humanity, to say nothing of his Western identity) running hysterically off into the desert. The scene is worth quoting in its entirety: Again it was sunset time [a symmetrical reflection of the story’s beginning]. The Professor ran beneath the arched gate, turned his face toward the red sky, and began to trot along the Piste d’In Salah straight into the setting sun. Behind him, from the garage, the soldier took a potshot at him for good luck. The bullet whistled dangerously near the Professor’s head, and his

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yelling rose into an indignant lament as he waved his arms more wildly, and hopped high into the air at every few steps, in an access of terror. (35)

The simplicity with which Bowles composes his sentences only serves to heighten the sense of bewilderment and terror the reader experiences throughout the story. The Professor is last seen wandering off beyond our line of vision. In Bowles’s first novel, The Sheltering Sky, many of the themes first explored in “A Distant Episode” are revisited and probed even deeper. Although the novel itself could be said to be Bowles’s most powerful indictment of the concepts of security and intimacy, I will limit my discussion here to just one aspect: the loss of the protagonist Port Moresby’s passport. The correspondence between Port’s losing his passport and identity is further complicated as Port begins to get sick while he and Kit travel deeper into the Sahara. Early in the second part of the novel, Port has gone to lodge a complaint with the commander of a military post in Bou Noura, stating that his passport had been stolen by the proprietor of the hotel Port and Kit had been staying at. The proprietor, Abdelkader, is a native. Although the accusation troubles the commander because a white Westerner has accused a native of theft, which in turn strengthens the negative stereotypes of the natives, he is not so much concerned with the accusation per se as he is with the complaint falling into his lap. Although Port’s accusational logic is sound, it never occurs to him that the real culprit is a fellow Westerner, Eric Lyle. The issue of security, therefore, becomes dependent upon cultural differences rather than personal character. In other words, Port trusts Eric Lyle more than he trusts the natives. He relies upon the familiar face of Eric Lyle as a sort of safety net that will keep him tied to the west. Port’s hatred of the west is manifest in his disgust for the Lyles, a disgust that allows him to keep a distance and defer intimacy. At the same time, that deferral still affords him the opportunity to observe from a detached perspective. However, the fact that it turns out to be Eric Lyle who stole Port’s passport leads the reader to conclude that one can never be totally detached from the events surrounding one’s life. The correspondence between the loss of identity via the loss of the passport, and Port’s sickness, is of upmost importance. Port feels that as long as his passport is missing, he will slowly lose his identity; this

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constitutes a direct connection to Western conceptions of identity. Our passports, especially while we are traveling, function as lifelines to our sense of belonging and home. As Port remarks: “It’s strange,” he said with a deprecatory smile, “how, ever since I discovered that my passport was gone, I’ve felt only half alive. But it’s a very depressing thing in a place like this to have no proof of who you are, you know.” (164)

So long as Port’s passport is missing, his sense of identity, and his sense of himself as a flesh and blood human being, will continue to deteriorate. As the novel progresses and Port begins to get sicker, his life becomes more spectral, more ghostlike, and he wanders into a new frontier where the lines between existence and non-existence become increasingly ambiguous. This ambiguity is a symptom of the loss of a feeling of security. Little by little his life begins to lose meaning and the sickness he has contracted somewhere along the way begins to dominate his sense of self. Without his passport his security in the world is compromised. Soon, however, Port begins to feel a kind of rush in the fact that he can furnish no legal proof of who he is or where he comes from. Like the Professor in “A Distant Episode,” Port is descending into a metaphorical and psychological abyss from which there is no escape. That abyss is a world without security, a world where the prime ontological condition moves from the familiar (knowing who we are and where we come from, to say nothing of where we belong) to the unfamiliar. Port’s desire to plunge into the unfamiliar is part and parcel with his desire to shake off modern conceptions of identity. “When he considered it, he realized how that it rather suited his fancy to be going off with no proof of his identity to a hidden desert town about which no one could tell him anything” (174). Port’s journey ends in death. The security of his identity collapses with the loss of his passport, and the much sought after reunion with his wife is never reached. Moreover, what little security Kit felt in her marriage is now absent. She is left behind in a world where she vanishes into a crowd after moving through the harsh landscapes of the Sahara. In one of the last scenes of the novel, Kit tells Miss Ferry, a woman who has been assigned to pick her up, exactly what has happened:

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“I have no luggage,” said Mrs. Moresby, looking at her. “You haven’t?” She did not know what else to say. “Everything’s lost,” said Mrs. Moresby in a low voice. (332)

This wonderful bit of dialogue tells us a great deal. To be totally lost is to be without any feeling of security whatsoever. Kit’s experience in the third part of The Sheltering Sky is one that completely pulls the rug out from under any concept of Western security: knowing where one is in space and time. Kit loses everything in the Sahara, including her sanity. Form Western modes of narrative constitute an attempt to contain time and its logic as forms of colonization and enclosure. Western narrative colonizes in the way that it structures modes of thinking to adhere to a specific, linear, and encapsulated model. Through the act of narrative, being (existence as such) is enclosed so that it may be controlled and manipulated by the person (s) or ideology that directs the flow of information. In this decidedly Heideggerian formulation, the metaphysical momentum toward closure is profoundly end-driven. This has served as the dominant narrative model since Aristotle. The fiction of Paul Bowles, from a narratological perspective, is decidedly Western. For Bowles, we can assume that Western narrative structures do provide a sense of security that the content of his fiction calls into question. The Western modes of narrative that Bowles employs in his fiction offer a type of security for the writer. It allows him or her to control events that are otherwise uncontrollable and random. We must remember that the fictional worlds created by Bowles are highly mimetic of his empirical life; a life very much informed by the lure of the unknown. That is to say, those fictional narratives are grounded in a realistic mode. The relationship between the fictional world and the “real” world is one in which each closely resembles the other, and whereby the reader often confuses reality with fiction. Bowles’s mimetic fictional impulses are prime movers informing his fiction. Bowles doesn’t quite present us with a world that faithfully mirrors the empirical world, but instead, slightly alters the point of view to write about a world that could be empirical, but is simultaneously different. For example, in his 1980 preface to Let it Come Down,

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Bowles explains the characterization of the Tangier that is represented in that novel: The hero [Dyar] is a nonentity, a “victim,” as he describes himself, whose personality, defined solely in terms of situation, elicits sympathy only to the extent to which he is victimized. He is the only totally invented character; for all the others I used as models actual residents of Tangier. Some of these people have moved away and the rest have died. The sole character whose model remains here is Richard Holland, and this is because I am still here and he is a caricature of myself. (8-9)

Just as Holland is a caricature of Bowles, the Tangier re-presented in Let it Come Down is a caricature of the Tangier where the author lived. When considered in this way, the narratives of Bowles become caricatures of empirical models based upon the experiences of the author and later, those storytellers he translates from the Maghrebi, Mohammed Mrabet and Mohamed Choukri specifically. The empirical world cannot be controlled, and there is no guarantee of security for its citizens. Bowles provides his readers with a series of model universes that explores the relationship (a relationship grounded in tension) between citizens and place. Therefore, I argue that Bowles’s use of a Western linear form of narrative is itself another mechanism that seeks to provide a sense of security, not only for the author, but the reader as well. That is to say, the reader becomes so caught up in the content of Bowles’s narratives (which are intended, content-wise, to make us feel a sense of discomfort) that he or she can fail to notice the security of the form that he or she is following. Bowles’s narratives are exquisitely comprehensible, and our ability to comprehend offers a sense of security in nearly every situation. In a fundamental way, Western narrative constitutes a disciplinary discourse; it seeks to simultaneously contain and control. Western narrative, as we recall, is both linear and mimetic, and as such functions as a disciplinary mechanism to control the events and the characters contained within the story, as well as control the anxiety of the reader. When reading a (traditional) Western narrative the reader is guided to read the work sequentially. Sequential reading is in turn mimetic of the narrative the reader is following. That is, while the reader gets caught up in the sequential events taking place in the story,

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he or she is also forced to read sequentially; from left to right and from start to finish. This is one of the great contributions of the novel. And we would do well to remember here that the novel is a Western concept with imperialistic implications, as Edward W. Said argues in Culture and Imperialism. I am not suggesting that this is a narrative strategy Bowles consciously employs. In fact, I argue that Bowles’s use of Western mimetic narrative form is part and parcel with his inability to totally abandon a Western consciousness, despite his living in the Maghreb for over fifty years. Thematically, the employment of a Western narrative allows Bowles to completely control the events of his stories while realistically the use of this type of narrative structure controls Bowles the author. The author becomes trapped in an entirely Western ontological predicament where the end is there from the very beginning, guiding the events of the story to their logical conclusion. In most cases with the fiction of Paul Bowles, that logical conclusion is death, insanity, estrangement, or some combination of all three. The Western narrative form is Bowles’s attempt to hold on to some semblance of security. It is not accidental that this form of narrative security is disciplinary in nature. Ironically, it was this type of disciplinary society that Bowles attempted to flee from in the first place. Yet, discipline does provide a false sense of security and intimacy. There is a sense of a protection and rules that govern the events of our lives that in turn allow us to feel “safe” and “secure.” In other words, this feeling of security helps us to go about living an otherwise normal life. The use of a Western narrative form also functions as a normalizing principle. The content of Bowles’s fiction is often so horrific and disturbing that we as readers become caught up in the events. Because of the content we sometimes forget that we still exist in a realm of recognizable codes; we comprehend what is being told to us and we can, moreover, conceive of ourselves in the position in which Bowles’s protagonists find themselves. While reading Bowles’s work we do not place ourselves at risk in the same way that his protagonists do. This is one of the functions of fiction; we are able to vicariously live through the characters and experience their world (s), all from the safety of our living room chairs. Bowles’s narrative form provides the author with opportunities to normalize events and render them comprehensible for the reader. Readers of Bowles always know where they are in space and time. Bowles does not experiment with the narrative calisthenics that an Alain Robbe-Grillet or Thomas

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Pynchon does. In regards to narrative structure, Bowles sticks with the familiar. The normalization principle of Western narrative is at the heart of its (Western narrative) attempt to provide a sense of security in an otherwise insecure world. As Richard F. Patteson remarks in his book, A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles: In Bowles, however, the “propensity to order reality” has quite a different implication. Humanly fashioned structures are not correspondent with cosmic order but are defenses against an intuited cosmic disorder. The need for reassurance is the same, but the reassurance is tentative, provisional, and ultimately unreliable. (106-107)

Although Patteson’s argument is for something else here, the implications are the same. We rely upon narrative to provide us with a sense of security and intimacy. However, those concepts are fundamentally created, or false, when we begin to consider them with a critical eye. Therefore, it is not a lack of security that Bowles’s characters come to face, but the realization that the concept of security the characters depended upon turns out to be false. The raison d’être informing Bowles’s fiction is this very understanding that security and intimacy are false concepts. Without security we become free-floating figures in a chaotic and dangerous world. Paul Bowles shows us, that despite that false concept of security, the world can still hold many marvels. WORKS CITED Bowles, Paul. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. New York: The Ecco Press, 1985. ––––. “The Frozen Fields.” The Stories of Paul Bowles. New York: The Ecco Press, 2001. ––––. “A Distant Episode.” The Stories of Paul Bowles. New York: The Ecco Press, 2001. ––––. The Sheltering Sky. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ––––. Let it Come Down. Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1997. ––––. The Spider’s House. New York: The Ecco Press, 2003. Carr, Virginia Spencer. Paul Bowles: A Life, New York: Scribners, 2004.

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Halpern, Daniel. “Interview with Paul Bowles,” in Conversations with Paul Bowles. ed. Gena Dagel Caponi. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. (86-101). Patteson, Richard F. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987. Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

III MUSIC, NOISE AND POLITICS

THE MUSIC AND POLITICS OF PASTORELA (1941) JENNIFER L. CAMPBELL

This essay unpacks the complex nature of inter-Americanism during the late 1930s and 1940s by closely examining the subject matter, music, and reception of Paul Bowles’s ballet Pastorela. In 1941 Lincoln Kirstein selected a traditional Mexican-Indian nativity play as the basis for a new ballet, and he commissioned Bowles to compose the score. At Kirstein’s insistence, Bowles incorporated some of the lyrics and folk tunes associated with the pastorela play into his music, but much of the Mexican-inspired, folk-sounding material was invented by Bowles himself. Drawing upon a variety of archival source materials, I explore the politics behind Kirstein’s decision to depict Mexican culture to South American audiences and examine the political implications of Bowles’s musical portrayal of Mexico. Ultimately, their combined efforts resulted in a North American rendering of Mexican religious material that was crafted specifically for South American audiences and financially supported by the United States government.

In the 1930s the United States government directed its attention to South America out of economic interest, as well as a concern for national defense. Opportunities for trade with European countries diminished as Nazi power increased, causing a shift in international relations, and the U.S. looked to South America in an effort to forge a united front capable of withstanding European hegemony. As part of this endeavor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for the first time in U.S. history, established government offices formally dedicated to using cultural diplomacy as a mechanism of foreign policy. By 1940 South American countries were on the receiving end of U.S. cultural exportations, largely because U.S. officials were looking to strengthen economic alliances and to counter what they believed to be increasing pro-Nazi and anti-American propaganda. In 1941 arts impresario Lincoln Kirstein was awarded a substantial governmental subsidy to send his dance troupe, the American Ballet Caravan, to South America, and the repertoire performed by the group mirrored the U.S. government’s overarching philosophy of inter-

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American relations even though it was chosen independently of any direct government influence. Based on a traditional Mexican-Indian nativity play and created in the full knowledge that it would performed on this tour, the ballet Pastorela reflects the complex nature of inter-Americanism that took hold in the United States during this period. This paper explores the politics behind Kirstein’s decision to depict Mexican culture to foreign audiences, and it also examines the political implications of Paul Bowles’s portrayal of Mexico through music. Although the work was meant to send a pro-Latin American message on behalf of the United States, Pastorela received mixed reactions, suggesting an unfortunate misalignment between the positive intentions of its creators and its reception by South American audiences. The scenario of the ballet is based on a manuscript that Kirstein procured through one of the dancers, José Martinez.1 In general the term las pastorelas, also known as los pastores, applies to a type of dramatic play regularly performed in Mexico in the days preceding Christmas, which tells the story of the journey of the shepherds to see the newly born Christ child through a combination of song and dialogue. In his book The Sources and Diffusion of the Mexican Shepherds’ Plays, Juan B. Rael describes how this type of liturgical drama arrived on Mexican soil via the Spanish Franciscan missionaries in 1524: One of the first things the missionaries did was to familiarize themselves with the language, the customs, and the psychology of the natives … The missionaries soon learned that the natives had a great dramatic taste, for many of the rituals and religious ceremonies of the Aztecs had dramatic elements in them … Taking advantage of this propensity of the natives toward the dramatic, the Spanish missionaries wrote religious plays in the native languages or translated them from Spanish into the native tongues. (39)

These plays are similar to the liturgical dramas that flourished in Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although, as Rael shows, the texts are dramatically different from the Spanish versions because they were written specifically to reach the original peoples of Mexico.2 A single performance of the play could take up to six hours, so Kirstein substantially cut the story, carefully selecting the segments

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that he wanted to highlight in his condensed, thirty-minute ballet scenario.3 After an opening dance, the action begins with five shepherds (Pastores) embarking upon a trip to Bethlehem. An old hermit (El Ermitaño) stops them to ask of news of the birth. Bartolo, the lazy shepherd, complains that he does not want to travel any further, but Gila, the cook and the only woman character in this version of the play, flatly refuses to feed him if he stays behind. The shepherds continue their journey, but the distance is too far, so they decide to rest and sleep for the night. Lucifer (Luzbel) appears in their dreams, trying to sway them from reaching their destination but they remain unfaltering. In a final effort to stop the procession, Lucifer’s devils try to marry Gila to the hermit, but Saint Michael the Archangel interrupts the sinister event and a fight ensues. Good triumphs over evil and the shepherds ultimately reach the Christ child and offer their presents to him. An Indian (El Indio) then arrives on the scene, bringing his own gifts to the child. Kirstein, by all accounts, had no personal religious leanings, and none of his other ballet scenarios had even the slightest religious implications. So what might explain his decision to base a ballet on this play? One plausible answer is that Kirstein had become enraptured by the “vogue of all things Mexican” (Delpar n.pag.), and that the pastorela subject was, to him, an authentic way of celebrating the folk and folklore of the country. The musicologist Elizabeth Crist argues that prominent intellectuals in the 1930s, such as authors Carleton Beals and Stuart Chase, constructed a romanticized view of Mexican folk life: Many artists and intellectuals in Copland’s circle responded to the economic and cultural crisis [of the Depression] by mounting a critique of industrial capitalism and envisioning a holistic modern community grounded in folk culture. Latin America, and especially Mexico, was widely seen as unspoiled terrain spiritually bound through its pre-Columbian history to an aboriginal American character. (49)

Mexico, then, offered a “study in social harmony and individual fulfillment, a stark contrast to the alienation perceived as endemic to modern American life” (48). Setting aside for the moment the religious associations in Pastorela, it becomes evident that Kirstein’s selection of his ballet subject echoed this broader interest among

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progressive intellectuals of this period. The annual staging of the nativity play could be understood as indicative of social harmony and as being more about the yearly tradition of villagers, participants, and audience members coming together for one purpose than about the religious aspects of the story. And the fact that dancer José Martinez’s father had himself been involved with several performances of the play possibly enhanced the degree to which Kirstein considered this subject authentically Mexican and representative of the “folk.” The inclusion of an Indian adds an additional “primitive” quality to the ballet, another element that was attractive to left-leaning artists like Kirstein.4 The Indian was not a stock character that appeared in every pastorela but was added when relevant to the particular location in which the performance took place. By Kirstein’s time, progressive intellectuals no longer viewed native peoples as “dangerously uncivilized;” instead, as Crist states: Rural peoples were valorized as “machineless men,” free from the tyranny of clocks, the market economy, and the mechanized civilization. The presence of a vital, rural Indian culture was an essential part of Mexico’s appeal. (49-50)

In light of this pervasive attitude, the inclusion of the Indian character in the pastorela would have likely made the play even more charming and authentic in Kirstein’s eyes. Looking for someone who could create an appropriate musical setting for his scenario, Kirstein commissioned Paul Bowles (19101999). Bowles had worked with Kirstein before, writing the music for Yankee Clipper in 1937, and the collaboration was successful enough for Kirstein to turn to Bowles again. According to Bowles, the music for Pastorela is a mix of authentic folk melodies and Bowles’s own folk-inspired creations, and this combination came about as a result of the collaborative process with Kirstein. Inspired by his visit to Mexico in 1937, Bowles wanted to create a score that was imbued with the essence of the country, but he was reluctant to incorporate actual folk melodies into the piece; Kirstein’s persistent meddling, however, altered Bowles’s plans (Letter to Virgil Thomson). Kirstein envisioned the work as a “ballet-opera in one act” and wanted the music to include vocal sections, thereby paralleling the dramaturgicalmusical form of the pastorela play itself. In total, there were seven sections of text that Kirstein wanted to include, and the lyrics of the

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songs, which contained clear references to the Virgin Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus, poetically narrate the action of the ballet. Kirstein, however, did not have musical transcriptions for the songs from the play; he had the words but not the melodies, rhythms, or harmonies to accompany them – except in the corporeal form of his dancer Martinez. Bowles recounted the collaboration that Kirstein imposed upon him: He insisted I listen to the squeakings of his friend Martinez and use what I could. I used as little of the material I could get away with and made up most of it myself because I liked my own inventions better. (Letter to V. Thomson)

In the end, Bowles crafted a score for piano and two male voices in which he wove the vocal numbers between instrumental selections, and he then forwarded his piano version to the young Mexican composer Blas Galindo, who orchestrated the piece.5 Throughout the ballet, the proportion of authentic folk material to Bowles’s newly created material is unclear. If one takes Bowles at his word, then he used at least some of what Martinez sang, but the full extent of Martinez’s musical contribution is unknown. With an untrained voice, Martinez sang the songs based on what he remembered from his childhood, making it plausible that his version of the music differed from what was actually performed. Given the vagaries of memory and because the texts and tunes of pastorelas varied from village to village and were passed down through oral tradition, it is almost impossible to confirm that the melodies Bowles used were authentic. Only a small number of songs from a few versions of the pastorela plays have been transcribed and none of them has the same combinations of texts and melodies found in Bowles’s music.6 The existing transcriptions, however, do confirm that Bowles’s settings of the songs share similar general characteristics to pastorela tunes. This is certainly the case with “Caminata” (“long walk”). In this movement, Bowles sets each of the four couplets of text with exactly the same melody, which is straightforward, syllabic, and free of text painting. He sets the mood with a shimmering, atmospheric introduction, followed by the entrance of the vocal parts with the melody harmonized in thirds. Although the melody stays the same throughout, Bowles creates interest by gradually increasing the vigor

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of the instrumental accompaniment. He inserts jaunty, rhythmic interludes between verses, and the music from these interludes eventually displaces the softer, more delicate music from the introduction (See Figures 1, 2 and 3). Corre borreguita por esa ladera, A coger los flores de la Primavera. Pastorcillos somos, del cerro bajamos, A coger venimos, frutitos de estos ramos; Camina, Gilita, que vendras cansada, Por aquellos montes haremos majada. A que frio tan fuerte! A que cruel helada! Cae por estos montes, y en estas montanes.

Run, little lamb, to that hillside, To gather the flowers of Spring. We are little shepherds, from the hills, To gather with fruits of these branches; Come along, Gila, you may be tired, We’ll pitch camp in those hills, How cold it is! What cruel frost! Falls from those hills and mountains. 7

Figure 1. “Caminata” text and Kirstein’s translation.

The Music and Politics of Pastorela (1941)

Figure 2. “Caminata,” mm. 1-11.

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8

Figure 3.

Bowles’s “Caminata” exhibits characteristics similar to those pastorela melodies transcribed by Juan Rael (566). One example is “Pastores,” a melody associated with the pastorela Coloquio y Pastores de los Siete Vicios (Figures 4 and 5, below). Although in different keys, the first four measures of Rael’s transcription and Bowles’s melody share leaps from dominant to tonic, a descending melodic contour, and conjunct motion. And although Bowles’s “Caminata” is in 4/4, it could also be felt in a duple meter like the “Pastores” melody. In other words, Bowles’s melody has an authentic folk quality to it because of its intervallic simplicity, diatonicism,

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repetition, and metric characteristics – perhaps this material is indeed related to Martinez’s “squeakings.” The arrangement of the melody and the accompaniment, though, is definitively Bowles. By adding rhythmic interest to the melodic line and by creating lively orchestral interludes, he turns what is supposed to be a slow, trudging procession across difficult terrain into a dance-filled journey.

Figure 4. “Pastores” melody from Coloquio y Pastores de los Siete Vicios, mm. 1-4.

Figure 5. “Caminata” melody from Pastorela, mm. 1-2.

Bowles’s music in the non-vocal sections is most likely his own creation; he retains a folk-like character in these parts, too, although it is mixed with European influence. In “El Indio,” Bowles chooses a quick-paced triple meter and intersperses duplets, creating a lively, jagged rhythmic quality (See Appendix 1 for the score). The memorable melodies are diatonic and have a warmth and easiness about them even though they have a considerably larger range than the melodies for the vocal numbers. For all the superficial simplicity, however, a subtle, sophisticated underpinning suggests a closer link to European-North American art-music tradition than to the indigenous music of Mexico. As shown in Figure 6, the movement is in a compound ternary form, reminiscent of a Minuet and Trio; the A section (mm. 1-48) is itself in a small ternary form, while the B section can be considered a rounded binary (mm. 49-88). (It could be argued that the B section is also a small ternary form, but two musical characteristics more strongly suggest an interpretation of the form as rounded binary: all the sections in B are in the same key and the melodic material throughout B is closely related.)

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mm. Key:

B b

a’

link

c

A (reprise)   d

c’

1-17 18-31 32-48 49-50 51-61 63-73 74-84 G maj. D maj. G maj. C maj. C maj. C maj. C maj

link 85-88 V/G maj.

Figure 6. Formal design of “El Indio.”

Bowles blends the form of a Minuet and Trio with a folk-like veneer to portray his “Indian,” which he accomplishes by scoring the music for the piano in a way that, for Bowles, recalls the instrumentation of Mexican folk music. Although definitions and categorizations of Mexican folk music, or mariachi, are slippery at best, Bowles offered his interpretation of the Mexican folk sound an essay for Modern Music, writing that the “classical” mariachi group consists of violins, harp, jaranas, guitars, and guitarrónes (very large guitars). He also cited a list from Vicente Mendoza, a musicologist of the period, who suggested that the “classical” ensemble consists of “two violins playing in thirds, two vihuelas (guitar-like instruments), whose players sing as well in the form of responses to the principal singer or go along with him in thirds, and a drummer” and noted that a trumpet may often be added to this instrumentation (“On Mexico’s Popular Music” 228). In “El Indio,” the insistent rhythmic gesture throughout the a and a’ sections suggests two trumpets playing above a chordal guitar part, while the voicing in the b section implies two violins playing in thirds above a guitarrón. The contrasting B part, or Trio, is lyrical and songlike, with the c and c’ sections evoking a principal singer accompanied by guitar followed by the d section in which short responses are sung, perhaps, by vihuela players. This combination of European and Mexican folk characteristics implies that Bowles’s “El Indio” is not a musical depiction of the romantic savage of the preColombian Aztecs; instead, Bowles paints a portrait of a mestizo, a racially blended person whose genealogical lineage is a mix of Mexico’s indigenous people and European settlers.9 Although full of folk and folk-inspired music, Pastorela was intended as high art, along the same lines as Aaron Copland’s El Salón México or Billy the Kid, and it had the same political agenda. Crist has argued that the elevation of folk music in the United States during this time was partly because of the Popular Front movement

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that had been gaining ground with politicians, intellectuals, and cultural elites: By 1935, various forces had aligned to promote American folklore as an emblem of progressive politics: the official Comintern policy and Communist Party aesthetics, certainly, but also a rising pan-Americanism, the programs of the New Deal, and the Popular Front as an encompassing left-wing social movement. All encouraged artists and intellectuals to draw on the resources of traditional American culture, such that by the second half of the 1930s, folk music was widely considered by leftist composers to be the authentic expression of the American people and a means of relating their concert works to national culture. (42)

In the arts, this manifested itself through a redefinition of “modern” as being associated with “the people,” and the category of modern music became redefined by those in Bowles’s circle to include folk tunes and popular characteristics (simple melody, diatonic harmony, and so on) (23-4).10 The characteristics of this modern music made it “of the people”: Bowles’s score, a fusion of Mexican folk music and Western European musical tradition, was a modern artistic tribute to the Mexican people and culture.11 That a composer desired to embrace a culture by absorbing its characteristics into his or her musical vernacular was not a new phenomenon. In this instance, however, the music of Pastorela reflects a larger, more controversial trend during a period when the United States government believed it could show its appreciation for Latin America by using Latin American themes, places, music, and people and reworking this subject matter into an Americanized package, which was sent out to Latin American countries as an expression of friendship. Although these efforts were largely intended in goodwill, they were underscored by American hubris. A government report submitted in September 1940 on the topic of shortwave broadcasting in South America included a telling commentary about what some in the U.S. thought of the artistic capabilities of those to their south: The success of American entertainment in the form of motion pictures, music, singing, and other of the visible and audible arts is based on the fact that it is inherently American. That

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Latin Americans themselves are not usually very competent in entertainment fields can be judged from the example of Argentina which … has failed to produce motion pictures with anything like a universal appeal. Similarly Mexico, while it has produced considerable talent along these lines, appears unable to present that talent in an effective and universally appreciated manner. (Aaron Copland Collection n.pag.)

A combination of this attitude, coupled with ignorance of and indifference to the many cultural components that varied from country to country commonly yielded reactions that were not characterized by gratitude but rather by resentment.12 Further compounding the problem, U.S. attempts to demonstrate an appreciation for Latin American culture were considerably flawed. These difficulties were especially prominent and perhaps most noticeable in the film industry. A famous example was Down Argentine Way, a movie riddled with so many problems that it “became the symbol for what was wrong with Hollywood movies about Latin America” (Bender 125). Although the film was mostly set in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a significant portion of the music was an “Americanized version” of the Cuban rumba, and the characteristic Argentine tango was not included at all. Language and nationality were also issues, as the vocalist featured in the movie was the Brazilian Carmen Miranda, who sang in Portuguese rather than in Spanish. These types of obvious but common blunders plagued many projects and frustrated progress in fostering inter-American goodwill. Pastorela was haunted by a similar, although less egregious, misstep, but it strikes at the center of the problem: cultural disconnect. Kirstein’s secularized interpretation of the pastorela play as indicative purely of Mexican folklore is plausible, and even to a certain extent accurate, because by this time the pastorela, although still traditionally performed during the Advent season, had taken on a more popular, secular connotation than a sacred one. Even so, Kirstein overlooked the origin of the genre and in doing so inadvertently showed some insensitivity. Furthermore, every work that his troupe performed abroad had to be viewed by and receive the approval of U.S. officials, suggesting a parallel between the relationship of the U.S. to South America and that of the Franciscan Spanish missionaries to Mexico and linking the U.S. with the imperialist associations of Spanish colonization. Because many Latin Americans were suspicious of the United States’s neighborly efforts, Pastorela’s unfortunate

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association with Spanish colonization (if it was recognized by the audiences) may have hindered the effective communication of the more progressive or leftist tendencies that were prominent within the intellectual and cultural leadership of the United States. And what is known about how South American audiences responded? South American critics penning newspaper reviews generally took one of two routes: they either ignored the work entirely or only briefly mentioned it in passing, a lack of acknowledgement that I interpret as an indication of dislike. Most reviewers commented extensively on ballets they enjoyed and panned those they did not. One or two writers gave Pastorela brief but adverse attention, criticizing in particular the choreography – and they wrote nothing at all about the music. In his report to the U.S. government, Kirstein further confirmed the negative reception of this ballet, lamenting “One thing was made obvious – that Latin Americans did not react favorably to anything Latin” (Rockefeller Family Archives n.pag.). Pastorela was performed in the U.S. for the first time in 1947, long enough after it had been composed that Bowles said he could actually enjoy the music (WS 234). By this point, with the Nazi danger in South America removed, the focus shifted to concerns about communism at home. It was in these new conditions that Kirstein staged the U.S. premiere of Pastorela, and its larger meaning escaped contemporary audiences. Kirstein lost on both fronts, as his Mexican ballet was misinterpreted and undervalued in South America and in the U.S.: the time when it would have been most relevant and most appreciated had passed. Looking at it today, perhaps the ballet seems dated and unusual, but its scenario and music give us a tangible example of the complicated interplay of culture and politics within the Western Hemisphere during 1941.

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Appendix 1 Paul Bowles, Pastorela: “El Indio” (1941)

The Music and Politics of Pastorela (1941)

Reprinted by permission of Irene Herrmann, executor.

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NOTES 1

In the Kirstein papers, the manuscript appears in handwritten form with the inscription: “A mi hijo y su amigo” from Ynes B de Martinez, José’s father. This version was written down in 1928 and regularly performed in a village in Nuevo Leon, Mexico. See “Cuaderno de Pastores….” in Lincoln Kirstein Papers. 2 The Spanish and Mexican versions share similar names for some of the stock characters, a few relationships in the action between characters, and a small number of borrowed lines, but Rael argues that the preponderance of distinct textual differences can only be explained by the plays being “written in whole or in part in Mexico” (315). 3 The cast of characters and Kirstein’s scenario for the ballet, which is summarized here, are found in the Ballet Society Collection. 4 The term “primitive” is not a pejorative description in this context but a positive one. Crist states that the “romantic view of Mexican or Indian culture [during the 1930s and 1940s] owes to a basic stereotype of the primitive, of native peoples connected to nature by a numinous bond and free from the corrupting knowledge of modernity” (49). 5 The Pastorela piano manuscript is part of the Paul Bowles Collection housed in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin. The Spanish titles of the movements are listed exactly as they appear on Bowles’s score. 6 One of the best sources for transcriptions is Rael, 495-580. 7 The Spanish text and Kirstein’s translation of it has been reproduced exactly as it appears in Kirstein’s files. See the Ballet Society Collection. 8 “Caminata” from Pastorela piano manuscript (1941) by Paul Bowles. Reprinted by permission of Irene Herrmann, executor, and the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. 9 It should be noted that mariachi music, commonly considered “Mexico’s folk music par excellence” is, in and of itself, mestizo music. For a brief history of mariachi, see Helena Simonett, Banda: Mexican Musical Life Across Borders. Middletown, C.T.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. For an expanded discussion on mariachi, see Mulholland. 10 Also see Robbie Lieberman, 34-9. 11 That Bowles swung politically left is a well-known fact; he was sympathetic enough to the cause to officially join the Communist party in 1938, although he tried to exit it in 1940. He said of his decision to leave: “I was not totally disillusioned [with the Party]; I was merely less passionate, and at the same time much busier in my own life” (Caponi 114). He was not officially allowed to leave, however, and his name remained on the register. Bowles continued to lean left, but expressed it in similar fashion to that of his mentor, Aaron Copland, who embraced the less extreme Popular Front philosophy. 12 For instance, in his report about the Yale Glee Club Tour, Bartholomew writes of his experience: “Finally, it is high time to warn all workers in the Pan American field to drop the term ‘goodwill.’ Our friends to the south have had an overdose of ‘goodwill’ both in speech, in written word and in receiving visitors who come labeled with it” (Rockefeller Family Archives n.pag.).

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WORKS CITED Aaron Copland Collection. “Shortwave Broadcasting to Latin America” [Report], 9, 4 September 1940, Library of Congress, Correspondence, Committee for Inter-American Affairs, Box 355, Folder 9. Ballet Society Collection. RG6, file 3132, Ballet Society Archives, New York, N.Y. Bender, Pennee Lenore. (2002). Film as an Instrument of the Good Neighbor Policy, 1930s-1960s (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). New York University, New York. Bowles, Paul. “On Mexico’s Popular Music.” Modern Music 28 April 1941: 225-30. ––––. Letter to Virgil Thomson. 27 July 1941. Virgil Thomson Papers. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. ––––. Without Stopping. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972. Caponi, Gena Dagel. ed. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Chujoy, Anatole. The New York City Ballet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Cole, M.S. Trans. Los Pastores: A Mexican Play of the Nativity. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907. Crist, Elizabeth B. Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland During the Depression and War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Delpar, Helen. The Enormous Vogue of All Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1920-1935. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996. Duberman, Martin. The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Fejes, Fred. Imperialism, Media, and the Good Neighbor. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1986. Flores, Richard and William L. Merrill. Los Pastores: History and Performance in the Mexican Shepherds’ Play of South Texas. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1995.

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Garafola, Lynn. “Lincoln Kirstein, Modern Dance, and the Left: The Genesis of an American Ballet.” Journal of Dance Research 23. 1 (Summer 2005): 18-35. Gellman, Irwin F. Good Neighbor Diplomacy: United States Policies in Latin America 1933-1945. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Lieberman, Robbie. My Song is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-50. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Lincoln Kirstein Papers (ca. 1913–1994), Box 25, Folder 244, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. New York, N.Y. Mulholland, Mary-Lee. (2007). Mariachi in Excess: Performing Race, Gender, Sexuality and Regionalism in Jalisco, Mexico (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). York University, Toronto. Ninkovitch, Frank. The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950. Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1995. Paul Bowles Collection. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Austin, T.X. Pike, Fredrick B. FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Rael, Juan B. The Sources and Diffusion of the Mexican Shepherds’ Plays. Guadalajara, Mex.: Librería La Joyita, 1965. Rockefeller Family Archives/Rockefeller Archive Center (RFA/RAC). “Report of the Yale Glee Club South American Concert Tour,” 10, Box 12, Folder 102, RG 4 (NAR/O/Washington DC/CIAA). ––––.“The American Ballet Caravan” [Report], 10, n.d., Box 101, Folder 966, RG 4 (NAR/Personal Projects). Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. Smith, Peter H. Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S–Latin American Relations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Woll, Allen. The Latin Image in American Film. Revised edition. Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1980. Woods, Randall B. The Roosevelt Foreign-Policy Establishment and the “Good Neighbor.” Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1979.

PAUL BOWLES AND LATIN AMERICAN MUSIC LUIS HÉRNANDEZ MERGAL

This article traces Bowles’s interest in Latin American music, from his early childhood exposure to popular recordings to his folk-influenced music written in Mexico and the Caribbean. After a look at Bowles’s early musical training, the major composers who influenced his own musical style, and his period of study with Aaron Copland in Paris and elsewhere, the article discusses the artist first sojourn in Latin America. His trips to the Spanish Caribbean, including Puerto Rico are discussed at length, as well as some notable pieces written in Puerto Rico and in Mexico. Bowles’s writings on Mexican folk music are discussed in relation to today’s ethnomusicological understanding of the dialectic of preservation and innovation, the “authentic” versus the “inauthentic,” in traditional music.

Paul Bowles’s interest in Latin American music can be traced back to his childhood. In his autobiography Bowles relates the story of his first encounter with music (as far as he could remember) when his father brought home a phonograph and some classical music recordings (WS 28). This was in 1918. The first piece he recalls hearing was Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Soon enough, Bowles began buying his own records, the first being “At the Jazz Band Ball,” by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Indeed, the album was released in New York on September 3, 1917, according to “The Original Dixieland Jazz Band Discography” (Mainspring Press). Bowles, born on December 30, 1910, was six years old at the time. In his autobiography, Bowles recounted the story to illustrate his difficult relationship with his father, who considered jazz to be “trash” and at once prohibited Paul from playing such records. Paul’s reaction was to turn to a different type of music: “After that I bought military bands playing Latin-American pieces” (28). Bowles does not specify which military bands he heard, but as an illustration, it might be mentioned that the Victor label at that time had

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a military band (The Victor Military Band) that issued recordings from at least 1903 until 1923. Their repertoire was a mixed bag ranging from German marches (“Hoch Deutschland,” JCE-377, released March 1, 1903) to Irish songs (“St. Patrick’s Day,” B-11083, released November 11, 1911), to early jazz (“Ragtime Violin,” B11506, released January 24, 1912), and Latin American music (“Maurice Tango,” “Argentine Tango”, “Tango Medley,” “Tango Land,” “Echale Manteca al Gringo,” “La Rumba,” “Lukoumi Tango,” all released in 1913-14).1 It is a well-known fact that the Argentinian tango (or what passed as tango outside of Latin America) was the rage at the time, both in Europe and in North America. Actually, the term became a catch-all for “Latin” music in general, but it did open the way for the diffusion of other Latin American styles such as the Cuban Rumba. More than a mere anecdote, this story encapsulates what will become a major theme in Bowles’s art, both music and writing: his interest in the “exotic” as a means of escape from the strictures of mainstream, middle-class American culture. A short time after buying the phonograph, Bowles’s family also acquired a piano, and Paul took lessons on piano technique as well as music theory and sight singing. So began Bowles’s musical life. A few other major music-related events in Bowles’s formative years might well be worth mentioning. First, his encounter with the music of Stravinsky. In 1926, Bowles attended a concert by the New York Philharmonic, which included Stravinsky’s Firebird. He immediately bought a recording and listened to it for hours on end. It was his introduction to twentieth-century music (Sawyer-Lauçanno 41-2). However, it is not Stravinsky’s Russian ballets, but his particular brand of neo-classicism, in works such as Apollon Musagète and L’Histoire du Soldat, that may well be considered one of the major influences on Bowles’ style. Later on Bowles attended the University of Virginia, where he discovered Gregorian chant, Prokofiev, Duke Ellington and bought his first blues record (WS 76). In New York on Christmas vacation 1928, Bowles attended one of the CoplandSessions Concerts, where the program included Henry Cowell’s Seven Paragraphs for String Trio and George Antheil’s Second String Quartet, among other pieces by contemporary American composers. Thus he became acquainted with the latest in American music. Of course, Copland himself would later become Bowles’s mentor and composition teacher.

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Before that, during his first stay in Paris, in 1929, Bowles had obtained an interview with Prokofiev, who was sojourning in the French capital. At the last minute, though, he seems to have gotten cold feet, took a train out of the city and left Prokofiev waiting. Perhaps at this time Bowles was not ready to commit himself to becoming a “real” composer, since, after having some poems published in the French avant-garde journal transition, he was also intent on pursuing a writing career. But the Prokofiev incident may also be seen as forming part of a pattern of behavior that more than anything else reveals Bowles’s concept of the nature of music. During his first visit to Morocco in 1931, where he went with Copland at Gertrude Stein’s suggestion, Bowles was fascinated by the North African country, taking in the landscape, the exotic sights and sounds that stimulated his imagination. Copland complained that his student did not care for “hard work”: Bowles found the thorough-bass exercises and the analyses of Mozart’s sonatas demanded by Copland tiresome. His aversion to Beethoven - and, as a matter of fact, to all things German - is well known. Bowles found French music much more congenial to his character. That is why he had no use for the larger forms like the symphony or the sonata. Music, for Bowles, far from being a “spiritual” and moral art in the beethovenian Germanic tradition, was rather a play of the senses, an expression of the sensuous quality of sound, and no more than that (Interview P. Ramey). Rhythm, as is evident in his music, represented the most perfect manifestation of pure vitality. Hence the attraction to nonWestern music: North African, Spanish Caribbean, Mexican and Central American. Like all good composers who have found inspiration in folk music – reaching back to Dvořák, Bizet and other nineteenth-century composers, Bartók and Kodály in the twentieth century, Manuel de Falla, whom he actually met in Spain, and most especially the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, who became an important influence – he did not actually quote folk melodies, but rather internalized the folk language to such an extent that he could produce folk-like melodies and use them for his own purposes. On this topic, his response to Elliott Carter´s unfriendly commentary about him, that he took folk tunes and deprived them of their meaning, is revealing: “But I never used Latin folk tunes; rather, I invented melodies in the manner of Latin folk music. Of course they are deprived of meaning, because they never had that meaning in the first place” (ibid.). What

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he did use was Latin rhythms. It is much more difficult to invent folklike rhythms than it is to invent folk-like melodies. As we shall see, in some of his early pieces Bowles actually uses some well-known Latin rhythms. But he did manage later on, in some of his Mexican-inspired pieces, to invent rhythms that approximate and evoke folk patterns without quite quoting the original ones. Bowles’s first sojourn in Latin America appears to have been in the Spanish Caribbean. After spending two years in Europe and North Africa, Bowles headed back to the United States in the spring of 1933, embarking at the port of Cádiz on the Juan Sebastián Elcano towards San Juan, Puerto Rico. Under US colonial rule since the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the island of Puerto Rico during the 1930s was hard hit by the Great Depression. Exacerbated by a thirtyyear-long economic policy that consisted in wiping out an already weak local bourgeoisie in favor of American-owned sugar plantations and other industries, Puerto Rico at the time was a very impoverished colony. In spite of these difficult conditions, there was quite an active musical life, with many a Spanish zarzuela and Italian opera company making frequent stops on the island. Local ad hoc orchestras were hired for these productions. There were also distinguished local musicians like the Figueroa family, whose members had all been trained at the École normale de musique in Paris and who had international careers. But of course Bowles was not interested in local Western-art-oriented musical life. As is made clear by the emblematic exoticism, which permeates his short description of the trip in his autobiography, he was only interested in “local color.” After an unpleasant voyage, where “everything, including the water, reeked of fish,” and during which Bowles was impressed by the spectacle of men grooming roosters “destined to perform cockfights in Latin America,” by “paring their spurs, rubbing them with unguents, and staging false confrontations between them, by merely holding them while they faced one another and grew excited,” he was glad to land at San Juan (WS 167). After wiring his parents and storing his belongings in a hotel, Bowles went up to Barranquitas, a small town high up in the central mountain range of the Island. He stayed there a week. What he did there, apart from “eating fried bananas, habichuelas (beans), eggs, and rice” (WS 168), we do not know. He does mention in an article published in 1946 in Modern Music that here in Puerto Rico he had heard “improvised orchestras of marimbula, cuatros, and guiro” (“In the Tropics” 248).

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The marímbula is a bass lamellophone (“finger piano”) of African derivation that is found throughout the Caribbean. The cuatro, often dubbed “the Puerto Rican national instrument,” is a plucked guitartype instrument of Spanish derivation, with five double courses of strings (originally four, hence its name). The Puerto Rican güiro is a scraper idiophone made of a hollow open-ended dried gourd with close parallel notches cut on one side. It is played with a metal scraper to produce a ratched-like sound. It is interesting to note that Bowles mentions the cuatro in the plural. The standard ensemble for Puerto Rican traditional mountain music, usually called música jíbara – “jíbaro” being the local term for the mountain dweller – consisted of the cuatro, plus a regular acoustic guitar, and the güiro, but no marímbula, an instrument that belonged to a different genre of traditional Puerto Rican music: the Afro-Puerto Rican plena, which originated among the population of African descendants that dwelled mostly in the coastal areas of the Island. Perhaps that is why he describes the orchestra as “improvised,” meaning that there were two or more cuatros but no guitar, and a marímbula. However, it is difficult to be sure what Bowles may have meant exactly. One may speculate that the type of music he heard played by the “orchestra” was most probably the standard música jíbara, consisting of Africanderived rhythmic patterns played on the marímbula, which functioned as a bass instrument, and the güiro; patterns very similar to those used in the Cuban son and more distantly related to the Argentinian tango, which provide the rhythmic foundation for the cuatro melodies, themselves based on a vast repertory of melodic patterns known as seis, and with a harmonic support typically using the so-called Andalusian cadence, actually an ostinato pattern (usually i-VII-VIV7), identical to the descending tetrachord ciacona bass of the early baroque (Bukofzer ch. 2). In his autobiography Bowles also mentions that upon his return to New York he handed to pianist John Kirkpatrick his Piano Sonatina and some piano pieces “written in Barranquitas” (WS 167). Kirkpatrick would go on to perform the Sonatina on June 18 live on the air at WEVD radio in New York, and later in December of the same year (1933) at a League of Composers’s Concert, organized by Copland (Sawyer-Lauçanno 148). Of the pieces written in Puerto Rico, a short one titled “Guayanilla” is signed “San Juan, May 1933.” It is to be presumed that Bowles visited Guayanilla, a small village located on the southern coast of the Island, just a few hours drive from

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Barranquitas at the time. This charming piece is typical “early Bowles”, with a very French sounding harmony – echoes of Satie and Les Six – and absolutely no Latin folk elements in it, rhythmic or otherwise: the only Puerto Rican thing about it is its title. Perhaps Bowles did not even visit Guayanilla, but one does hear the soft rolling surf caressing the beach in the gently rising arpeggios of the left hand accompaniment. The nocturne-like piece, marked “larghetto” and “rubato,” has no time signature; a clear sign, probably inherited from Satie, that no accents should be heard and that the music must flow freely. The implicit meter, though, is mostly 6/8, while the tonal center of the piece is C# minor, with a minor dominant on G# also prominent. The simple song-like structure of the piece begins with an introductory section – rising arpeggios in the left hand answered by descending figures in the right – that accelerates towards a nicely ornamented melody. A climax on a C#m4/2 chord brings the music to a sudden halt, only to resume softly. An extension of the principal melody appears in octaves at a high register, leading to a restatement of the original melody and a return to the introductory material. The piece ends with a short coda where some new material, with a hint of neo-classical irony, is brought in as a sort of afterthought, closing with a 13-note descending scale flourish, à la Chopin, in the right hand and the notes of the C# minor triad distributed at the extremes of the keyboard, disappearing into a very soft ppp. “Guayanilla” was featured, along with the Sonata No. 1 for Flute and Piano and the piano pieces “La Femme de Dakar,” “Café sin Nombre,” “Portrait of KMC” (Kay Owen), and “Portrait of BAM” (Bruce Morrissette), in an all-Bowles concert held at Midtown Center in New York on January 26, 1936 (ibid. 165). There is no mention of who played this concert, which also featured the premiere of Bowles’s close friend Harry Dunham’s film Venus and Adonis, for which Bowles wrote the music. But a recording was issued in 1938 by the New Music Quarterly, featuring Bowles himself playing “Café sin Nombre” and “Huapango No. 2 (El Sol),” and pianist Jesús Durón playing “Huapango No. 1.”2 While in Puerto Rico Bowles also worked on another piece he had begun in North Africa: the Suite for Small Orchestra.3 It is a threemovement work that begins with a Pastorale, made up, according to Bowles, of simple and repetitious North African melodies that he remembered from a trip to Algeria in 1933 (Interview P. Ramey). However, rather than literal quotations of folk melodies, the material, if it is indeed North African, seems quite transformed by the very

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Stravinsky-influenced neoclassical style adopted by Bowles. Short phrases in starts and stops, an orchestration that underscores the woodwinds, and bass pizzicati punctuating a long independent line in the bassoon are all typical traits of the Russian composer. Not that Bowles’s piece is a vulgar imitation. Far from it, the piece is very imaginative and shows a budding composer with an original and strong voice. The second movement, Havanaise, is not an habanera but rather more like a tango, composed in southern Morocco in 1932 (ibid.). Over a lilting accompaniment on strings and muted trumpets, the clarinet sings a non-chalant melody. Bowles’s use of percussion – soft cymbals, snare and, later on, castañuelas – and piano is quite witty. A colourful orchestration indeed. The final Divertissement begins in fast staccato notes that soon form a march-like accompaniment to a humorous passage in woodwinds, later interrupted by the piano, which introduces a waltz rhythm over which the violins play a dancing melody. Next, various combinations of instruments take up the waltz by turns. A brief return to the opening material leads to a big final surprise: enter the conga drum with a tropical son montuno rhythm accompanying the muted trumpet in the high register in a very Latin Caribbean-sounding melody. The section is well crafted, but does not seem particularly suited to the rest of the piece. It feels like it was added without a thought to the unity of the piece as a whole. But perhaps that is what Bowles was looking for, a certain unsettling effect? In 1934, after spending another season in North Africa, Bowles embarked once again at Cádiz, on the same ship he had taken the year before, the Juan Sebastián Elcano. This time his destination was Colombia, but the ship made stopovers at San Juan, Santo Domingo, Curaçao and La Guaira (Venezuela). The stopover in San Juan gave Bowles enough time to go for a walk in the city, as reported to his friend Bruce Morrissette in a letter of November 7, written on the ship a day before arriving at La Guaira (Miller 140). Bowles tells an amusing anecdote relating to this trip in his autobiography. At San Juan a woman and her teen-aged son boarded the ship. Bowles made friends with the boy, who had brought marijuana in the form of grifas (cigarettes) and soon offered him some. As Bowles had never heard of the drug, he did not inhale properly, did not feel anything, and was not impressed. Later on, though, in Curaçao, Bowles did inhale but found the sensation unpleasant: “... I did experience a strange sensation of being irretrievably there in that place, drowned in the noise of the

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ubiquitous frogs and insects” (WS 178-79). A surprising incident, considering the important role kif was to have in Bowles writing some years later! In 1937 Bowles, joined by Jane Auer (his future wife), Kristians Tonny and his wife Marie-Claire Ivanoff, went by bus to Mexico. This would be the first of several long stays in Mexico and Central America during the next few years. A very important event during this first trip was his meeting with Silvestre Revueltas, thanks to a letter of introduction given to him by Copland, who had recently returned to New York from his second trip to Mexico. In a memorial article written for Modern Music in 1940 after Revueltas’s premature death (29-30), as well as in his autobiography, Bowles recalled this meeting. Bowles was very much taken by the generous Revueltas, who lived in dire poverty and suffered from alcoholism. Musically, Bowles found in Revueltas a kindred spirit. Taken to a performance of his Homenaje a García Lorca, Bowles was “immediately struck by the luminous texture of the orchestral sound” and admired the music’s “impeccable style” (WS 199). Indeed, the piece in three movements – Baile, Duelo, and Son – is a tour de force of the kind of “transformation of folk music into art music” much admired and already practiced by Bowles. One wonders, though, what Bowles may have meant by his further comment about the minimum loss of “purity” in this transformation process (Mangan 29). Aside from the fact that he belonged to a time when composers and musicologists were very much worried about the loss of the world’s traditional musical heritages and the imminent disappearance of “pure” folk traditions (see Nettl ch. 20 and 24) – and his great recording and collecting activities in North Africa and elsewhere should be seen in this light4 – one might also see at work here the Rousseauian notion of the “noble savage,” whose music reflects the sheer vitality of a culture not yet “polluted” by civilization. Be that as it may, Revueltas became a major influence on Bowles. He also introduced him to the Grupo de los cuatro, a group of young Mexican nationalist composers – José Pablo Moncayo, Blas Galindo, Daniel Ayala and Salvador Contreras – who had all been students of Revueltas and Carlos Chávez at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Ciudad México. Revueltas also introduced Bowles to the Mariachi groups in Plaza Garibaldi (where one can still hear them today). Eventually, Bowles became quite knowledgeable about Mexican traditional music, as a further article for Modern Music attests (“On Mexico’s Popular Music”). There, after deploring the

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state of confusion regarding current knowledge about the differences between the various forms of traditional Mexican music, Bowles rants about the damage done to local musical cultures by Mexico City radio stations, which teach regional musicians “the monstrous bastard kitsch which now passes for music all over Central America” (41), thereby promoting the loss of authentic regional traditions. Here Bowles again gives voice to the preservationist trend so typical of his time. Although things have changed considerably since then, the dialectic of preservation and innovation in traditional musics is still a major theme in ethnomusicology and folklore studies today. In the rest of the article Bowles sets out to classify and describe some of the major traditional Mexican genres: the huapango in its two regional types, huasteco and veracruzano, noticing about the latter its strong African-derived polyrhythms; the different types of sones played by Mariachi orchestras; the song-types canción ranchera and corrido, as well as the jarabe dance form. The article ends with a renewed call for preservation: “Here is a whole national music dying before it has been made known to the cultured world” (46).5 As of today, in the year 2012, Mexican traditional music is very much alive and kicking, and the “cultured world” (by which he presumably meant Europe and North America, a regrettable ethnocentric bias) knows all about it thanks to the interchange of all the world’s musics made possible by the Internet and other mass communications media. As a matter of fact, the discourse of “purity” in traditional music and the supposed threat of “contamination” by commercial music, shared by Bowles and many others at the time, has become obsolete today. From at least the 1980s, if not earlier, most ethnomusicologists have come to view musical idioms within a given culture area as the ever-changing product of a network of diverse influences. The phenomenon of musical hybridization is seen as an ongoing process that may have been accelerated by the newer mass communications media, but that in any case has always been part of the development of the world’s music. Thus, even the old distinctions between indigenous, traditional, folk and urban musics have been called into question. Ethnomusicologist Carolina Robertson, for example, in an article on Latin American music, explains: The fluidity of form and concept in indigenous cultures defies belaboured definitions and categories which attempt to differentiate ‘pure’ from ‘acculturated’ forms; “Indian” from

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“mestizo;” and rural folk from urban popular idioms. The contemporary musical panorama reflects change as a dynamic reality of peoples who have lived with conquest for 500 years. (Grove Music Online)

Robertson further identifies a connection between the classification of musics and the traditional racially based classification of peoples (an idea that has also become suspect in contemporary anthropology): A great deal of confusion has been engendered by scholarly attempts to classify peoples of the Americas into what are rather artificial groupings: indio, mestizo, criollo, acculturated, unacculturated. Usually, these categories are based on assumptions about racial purity, intermarriage, cultural contact as a purely post-colonial phenomenon and other fictions imposed by outsiders. (ibid.)

An example of the changing attitude towards musical hybridization which characterizes Latin American ethnomusicological work today can be seen in a recently published anthology of articles by leading scholars in the field. As explained in the Introduction by Albert Recasens: Ibero-American musical history offers an example of the constant transformation of those aspects which constitute it, be they literary (texts, poetry, improvizations), audible (form, melody, rhythm, instrumentation, or musical texture), or performative (styles and the different contexts in which music is performed). Moreover, all of these aspects have been stamped by the neverending influence of migrations, wars, linguistic transformations, material progress or regress, political interventions, economic fluctuations and, especially, racial mixture.6

Indeed, the cross-fertilization between folk and art music – precisely what Bowles, Revueltas, and the other composers mentioned were doing in Mexico – should also be seen as part of the process of formation of any musical culture. In this sense, Bowles’s Mexicaninfluenced music is part of the Latin American music heritage. Thus, Bowles’s acquaintance with Mexican traditional music paid off handsomely in his own oeuvre. His fascination with the intricate rhythms and enchanting melodies of the son and the huapango

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inspired some of his most felicitous music, the best example of which is a series of piano pieces written between 1937 and 1948. The Huapango No. 1 is a bright piece that in terms of rhythm displays the syncopations which characterize this style. Bowles further quite ingeniously suggests the offbeat accents of the huapango dance by alternating between 6/8, 2/8 and 5/8 meters. Harmonically, the piece moves from tonic (C major) to supertonic, also a feature of the huapango. The coloring with parallel third or fifth and octave chords in the right hand over simple triads in the left resembles the sonorities of the marimba. Much more daring is the Huapango No. 2: El Sol, which has a more dissonant harmony and toccata-like driving rhythms, as well as huge octave leaps in the right hand, making for a very exciting piece. Both Huapangos date from 1937. Two pieces from 1943 are La Cuelga and El Bejuco. Cuelga means “hanging” and may refer to various Spanish-derived dancing traditions that are common not only in Mexico but throughout Latin America. One is religious: the “hanging of Judas” that was enacted as part of Holy Week celebrations. But the Cuelga was also associated with the hanging of necklaces in birthday celebrations. At these festivities, many dances and songs were performed. Considering the festive character of Bowles’s piece, it probably represents one of the many varieties of celebratory Cuelgas danced throughout Mexico. Bowles’s piano piece is a highly syncopated dance in 5/8 time with a punctuated bass line, featuring sudden contrasts between piano and forte, and ending very softly. El Bejuco is actually the title of a traditional huapango from the Huasteca region of Mexico. In this piece Bowles manages to invent a catchy melody that sounds totally folksy, while the left hand beautifully imitates the rhythmic accompaniment of the guitars. Sayula (1946) is a city in Jalisco, a state most usually identified with the Mariachis. As Bowles indicates in the abovementioned article, the classical Mariachi ensembles would consist of violins, harp, jaranas (a guitar-type), regular guitars, and guitarrones, which are oversized guitars played pizzicato on a single string (“On Mexico’s Popular Music” 43). Indeed, such are the sounds hinted at in this son: the strumming of the guitars in the right hand arpeggios, the pizzicato guitarrón in the off-beat bass line, and the typical parallel thirds of the violins in the cheerful right hand melodies. Iquitos (Tierra Mojada), finished in March 1947, perhaps refers to the city in the Peruvian Amazon, whose heyday was between 1880 and the First World War, during the famous Fiebre del Caucho (“Rubber boom”)

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that spread throughout the region. There are various Tierra Mojada (Wetland) throughout Mexico and Central America, so this piece’s title is something of an enigma. The music, however, certainly sounds Mexican, although the setting is pure Bowles. Although Orosí (with the stress on the last syllable) is a volcano in Costa Rica, near the frontier with Nicaragua, this piece’s title probably refers to Orosi (stress on second syllable), a picturesque colonial town not far south of San José de Costa Rica, where the newlyweds Paul and Jane spent their honeymoon in 1938. The piece, completed in 1948, begins in a placid mood, long held chords in the left hand supporting an introspective melody that eventually develops into a more dance-like tune in parallel thirds with a 3/8 meter accompaniment, and ends as it began, calmly resolving into a soft A-minor chord.7 Mention should be made of Pastorela, a ballet written in 1941 for American Ballet Caravan, the company founded by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine, and for whom Bowles had written in 1937 the now lost score for Yankee Clipper. Based on the traditional Mexican posadas celebrated on the nine days before Christmas, which in fact were a Christianized version of a pre-Hispanic celebration of the coming of Huitzilopochtli, warrior god of the Mexica people, the ballet included some vocal sequences with actual words and melodies heard by Bowles in Mexico (WS 234). There is also an orchestral suite consisting of five selections from the ballet music: La Lucha is a vibrant dance tune which features high-register clarinets and a sardonic-sounding trombone; a serene flute accompanied by strings begins the comfortably-paced Caminata, which soon turns into a brisk walk with violins punctuated by brass; El Indio is a predominantly iambic rhythmic dance followed by a slower section featuring a sweetsounding oboe; the violins sing an expansive melody in the moving Pieza Tranquila; and it all comes to a brilliant end in the exhilarating Danza General. In a beautiful little book about his visit to Bowles a short time before his death in 1999, Mexican writer Juan Carvajal refers what Bowles told him regarding his turn from composing to literature, which as a matter of fact occurred in Mexico: While reading various ethnographic books with literal translations from the Arapey and the Tarahumara ... the desire came over me to invent my own myths, adopting the point of view of the primitive mind. (45)

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Thus was born his first short story “The Scorpion.” In it, he writes: The theme of myth soon turned from primitive to contemporary .... It was through this small door that I was drawn towards the land of literary fiction. (25-26)

It was this yearning for primordial myth which had led Bowles, I believe, to traditional (“folk”) music in the first place. Like his European and American counterparts, Bowles saw in traditional music a refreshing fountain in which to renew the tired Old World art music. Perhaps because of his refusal to let himself be dominated by the strictures of academic, learned composition, Bowles’s music is one of the most effective and original examples of the adaptation of folk idioms to art music. And at least in this respect, his Latin American pieces surely constitute the most important part of his whole musical output.

NOTES 1

“Victor Military Band Musical Group.” The website includes sound clips of most of the recordings from the Library of Congress. 2 There is a copy of this recording in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library. See David Hall. 3 Sawyer-Lauçanno claims the piece was begun in Puerto Rico, but Bowles himself, in an interview with Ramey, indicates the piece was begun in 1932 in North Africa. See An Invisible Spectator 150. 4 For discography, see Irene Herrmann and Benjamin Folkman. “Catalogue of Paul Bowles’s Musical Works.” The Authorized Paul Bowles Website. 5 See also Bowles’s article “Music”, 254-257, for yet another analysis of traditional Latin American musics in terms of authenticity and purity threatened by the commercial music associated with radio and cinema. 6 Albert Recasens, “Introducción”, in A tres bandas: Mestizaje, sincretismo e hibridación en el espacio sonoro iberoamericano, 16. My translation. Recasens was the curator for a musical instrument exhibition at the Antioquia Museum, which was part of the Third Ibero-American Congress of Culture, held in Medellín, Colombia in July 2010. The theme of the Congress was “Ibero-American musics in the 21st century.” 7 These piano pieces are now published, set out in a different order, as a suite titled “Seven Latin American Pieces.”

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WORKS CITED Bowles, Paul. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1985. ––––. “In the Tropics: Pages From a Journal.” Modern Music. Winter (1946), reprinted in Paul Bowles on Music. eds. Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann. Berkeley: U California P, 2003. (248-252). ––––. “Music.” Mademoiselle. March (1946), reprinted in Paul Bowles on Music. eds. Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann. Berkeley: U California P, 2003. (254-257). ––––. “On Mexico’s Popular Music.” Modern Music, May-June (1941), reprinted in Paul Bowles on Music. eds. Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann. Berkeley: U California P, 2003. (41-47). ––––. “Silvestre Revueltas.” Modern Music. November-December (1940), reprinted in Paul Bowles on Music. eds. Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann. Berkeley: U California P, 2003. (29-30). ––––. Interview by Philip Ramey. “I Never Liked to Raise my Voice.” The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site, 1995. Web. 12 February 2012. Brylawski, Samuel, ed. Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings. Web. 12 February 2012. Bukofzer, Manfred F. Music in the Baroque Era: From Monteverdi to Bach. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1947. Carvajal, Juan. Una tarde en casa de Paul Bowles. México: Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2001. Hall, David. “New Music Quarterly Recordings – A Discography.” ARSC Journal (Journal of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections), Vol. 16: 1/2, (1984), 10-27. Web. 12 February 2012. Herrmann, Irene and Benjamin Folkman. “Catalogue of Paul Bowles’s Musical Works.” The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site. Web. 12 February 2012. Mainspring Press, ed. “The Original Dixieland Jazz Band Discography.” adapt. from Brian Rust’s Jazz and Ragtime Records 1897-1942 (6th Edition). Web. 12 February 2012.

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Mangan, Timothy and Irene Herrmann, eds. Paul Bowles on Music. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003. Miller, Jeffrey, ed. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Nettl, Bruno. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Recasens, Albert, ed. A tres bandas: Mestizaje, sincretismo e hibridación en el espacio sonoro iberoamericano. Medellín, Colombia: Tercer Congreso Iberoamericano de Cultura, 2010. Robertson, Carolina and Gerard Béhague. “Latin America.” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online. Web. 17 February 2012. Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

“THE QUESTION OF MUSIC AND PROSE, IT’S A TRICKY ONE TO ANSWER”1 PAUL BOWLES: COMPOSER – WRITER VERENA MOGL

It can be assumed that Paul Bowles’s shift from composing music to writing literature was influenced by several independent factors all rooted in different aspects of the artist’s personality and life. An important point is the fact, that a major driving force behind the artist’s creative output was the irrational and intuitive, which he wanted to integrate in his artistic work. In the course of analysing Bowles’s various working techniques it becomes clear, that the shift from one art form to the other seems, more than anything else, to be the result of Bowles’s search for the specific art form, that gave him the best means of expression in line with his specific interests and also technical skills. Hence the transition from music to literature outlines an “outer” process of an overall personal and artistic development.

History has seen a great many people with two gifts or vocations, but Paul Bowles stands out among them.2 For in reviewing Bowles’s career, it becomes clear that he was not only professionally active in two fields of art, but also that he rarely worked as a composer and a writer at the same time. The periods in which he mainly composed or mainly wrote come one after the other and they only overlap for a few years. The years in which Bowles worked both as a composer and a writer can be narrowed down to roughly between 1946 and 1950, yet we can also recognize in these years an increasing shift away from composition towards literature. Thus, in 1946 Bowles composed five pieces of incidental music, seven songs and two instrumental pieces and wrote five stories. In 1947 he composed one piece of incidental music and three instrumental pieces, but began writing his novel The Sheltering Sky and wrote four stories. In 1948 he wrote only one piece of incidental music and wrote three stories. In 1949 he composed one song and four instrumental pieces, but wrote three stories, finished his

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novel The Sheltering Sky and began writing his second novel Let It Come Down. Gena Dagel Caponi considers this change from composition to literature a “myth” (A Nomad 281). In her opinion Bowles devoted himself to both disciplines all his life, but this point of view is easily contestable. It is correct that Paul Bowles still composed after switching to literature, but only sporadically. Especially in the field of so-called non-dramatic art music, his compositional work after 1950 is limited to less than ten pieces of music. Additionally, we must consider that these few pieces of music Bowles composed after 1950 were hardly accessible to a wider public (even the stage music he composed after this period was performed at the American School in Tangier, not on Broadway). Thus all things considering, it is difficult to claim that Paul Bowles’s productivity did not clearly shift from the field of music to literature after 1950. We must also add that the number of pieces of music he composed after 1950 is just as low as the number of literary texts he wrote before 1946.3 Hence the focus of Paul Bowles’s artistic work was always on one discipline, with the exception of the years 1946 to 1950. This shift from one art form to the other is evident in Bowles’s work and it is of special interest in view of his two gifts. First and foremost, the question arises why the shift took place at all. Because if a person is blessed with more than one gift, one would assume that s/he could and would be active in all of the disciplines s/he is talented in, focusing on one in particular and allocating the others a less prominent role.4 In Bowles’s case however, not only does the main focus shift from one occupation to the other, but at the same time the other occupation – music – all but runs dry. We can assume that Bowles’s shift from composing music to writing literature was influenced by several independent factors all rooted in different aspects of his personality and life. Nevertheless, the art forms in question – music and literature – constitute the center of the question concerning the reasons for the shift. In this respect, it is justified to start the search for answers with the artistic processes underlying Paul Bowles’s work. It is obvious that (not only in Bowles’s case), the acts of composing and of writing required particular skills, supported specific working methods and only permitted certain means of expression. I propose that in regard to his creative work, Bowles was not so much concerned with the particular art form per se. Rather, we can assume that in Bowles’s artistic work and the changes it was subject to over the years, we can detect the

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search for a specific form of expression. The creative process Paul Bowles followed in his life maps this search for the suitable “means” (of expression). It is my theory that in the end one art form provided Bowles with more artistic “means” than the other, hence the shift. The Source of All Art – Intuition Research literature and statements from Bowles himself evidence the importance of intuition in regard to his creative energy. From the very beginning of his creative activities, intuition was the driving force (see WS and “Autobiography”). As he had grown up completely isolated as a child, he had learned from an early age to originate inspiration and creative impulses from within him. The subconscious, intuitive element became for Bowles – not least owing to his mother’s influence who had taught him how to “empty his mind” (Carr 20) – a mental sanctuary and the most important source of his creativity. In the course of his creative development he improved in learning to use this mental resource for himself and to easily access it. Yet during his artistic career it became obvious that this approach was not equally suitable for composing music and writing literature. In the field of lyric poetry, Bowles had practiced the technique of so-called écriture automatique to transform subconscious, intuitive creative impulses into a creative working process: All through my late teens, from sixteen on, I was writing surrealist poetry. I read André [Breton] who explained how to do it, and so I learned how to write without being conscious of what I was doing .... One part of my mind was doing the writing, and God knows what the other part was doing. I suppose it was bulldozing the subconscious, dredging up ooze. (Caponi, Conversations 120)

His dispute with Gertrude Stein had shown him that a poem that had been written intuitively had to be subsequently revised, but he was fundamentally capable of working from his subconscious and at the same time lending lyrical texts a hint of dreaminess and floating surreality: As far as I’m concerned, all poems are dreams, in the sense that the relationship between words and the relationship between thoughts operate as in dreams. One goes into reading a poem as

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one goes into living a dream, with no preconceived ideas, totally absorptive, and making no judgment until it is over. (Caponi, Romantic Savage 212)

From the time he started working as a composer, Bowles looked for a comparable approach to music, too. He wanted the music itself, like his poems, to also convey a certain intuitive and dreamlike atmosphere. As early as spring 1930, Bowles told his friend Bruce Morrissette in a long letter about his musical ideas and ambitions and reported on the problems he saw himself confronted with while trying to realize his visions (Miller, In Touch 35-36). He knew that there was a form of music that showed exactly the kind of intuitive character he was looking for, as he had occupied himself with foreign and exotic music when he was younger (28). Bowles was fascinated by foreign musical cultures and he searched for means to lend his music a comparable emotional quality (Swan 108), which he couldn’t find in Western, so-called art music. Around 1944 the artist himself mentioned: What interested me the most in the writing of music was the possibility of making music which would be expressive, and yet not in the oratorical way European art-music is expressive. (Swan 6-7)

His personal approach to creative work in general and his passion for foreign musical cultures further cemented his attitude towards Western music theory. Thus he never followed his compositional education with much (artistic) passion. Nevertheless, his aesthetic demands on music were complex and his attempt to compose from the subconscious – without well-grounded knowledge of composition techniques and musical theory – was no easy undertaking. It transpired that music in general did not prove to be very suitable for a working method guided by the subconscious. Even the purely technical activity Bowles had to perform as a composer contradicted his intuitive approach. For in order to be able to compose, he had to think and work not only horizontally, but also vertically, that is, if he wanted to write polyphonic music. Yet vertical writing essentially makes an intuitive working method impossible, as it requires a differentiated perspective across at least five lines and maybe different accolades to create a consistent piece of music.

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It made things even more difficult that Bowles generally had problems imagining more complex musical combinations. Without a piano, he could not imagine musical formations in his inner ear. And even if this had been possible for him, he would not have been able to write down the music he imagined, as he lacked the practical and above all theoretical tools, so that to him chords looked correct even when they were not (Bowles and Rorem 112). Thus a linear, consistent working method, similar to écriture automatique, was practically impossible. Reworking passages noted down was also problematic owing to the “inflexibility” of the music with its tonal range limited to Western art music. Once noted down (with great effort), the artistic product was terribly hard to rework, as it was not a case of simply changing notes or moving whole sections of a composition and connecting them with the new context. Naturally, these problems had an immediate impact on the act of composing and thus on the works themselves. They can be seen both in the manuscripts and the pieces of music. We can detect in the handwritten notes how hard it was for Bowles to write down his musical ideas (see Figures 15 and 26 below).

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

The notation does not seem to have been written by an experienced and confident hand and several irregularities are clearly visible. We cannot talk of a consistent compositional “signature” in the literal sense. Many manuscripts reveal how Bowles tried to subsequently rearrange or string together sections (see Figures 37 and 48 below).

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Figure 3.

Figure 4.

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Also several factors within the works evidence the difficulties Bowles was confronted with while composing. One is Bowles’s preference for the short form: if we review his musical oeuvre, we see a prevalence of pieces with one movement, for instance most solo pieces for piano(s), like e.g. the “Prélude pour Bernard Suarèz” (30’’) or “Iquitos” (90’’). Even more extensive musical works such as the scenic vocal works The Wind Remains, Yerma or various ensemble pieces show that Bowles tended to strongly subdivide them and in so doing break up their large structure.9 This can be explained by the fact that Bowles was best able to develop a compositional concept of situative sonority in a small space. Here, situative sonority refers to an approach that characterizes Bowles’s personal style and can be verified with the help of the various musical parameters. Thus the element of harmony in many of Bowles’s works does not aid the development of larger associative structures, but remains bound to the sonority of individual sections that differ harmoniously from what comes before and after them. Also, the large-scale processing and development of a musical idea does not take center stage, but rather the immediate acoustic impression of numerous musical ideas and experiences that follow one after the other in contrasting alternation dominates. Although Bowles alludes to a connection of individual motivic ideas, he rarely realizes one and musical motifs do not constitute a formal structure. Characteristic of his work is the predominance of rhythmic patterns that are in fact rather conventional, but in many cases go beyond metric boundaries, overlap or are modified. This creates the overall impression that the pieces are not of one homogenous “sonorous cast,” but rather disintegrate into various contrasting sections and layers. These are the roots of the “kaleidoscopic” impression that forms the basis of Paul Bowles’s music (Herrman 152). In it are manifested the special quality and the characteristic acoustic appeal that constitutes his music. A piece of music, which includes most of the characteristics typical for Bowles’s compositional style, is “Night Waltz” for two pianos. It was composed in 1949, thus the change from music to literature had almost taken place. This means, at the time of composition Bowles must have been at a point, where he had fully exploited all compositional means he had been able to acquire during his career. Indeed, in all its musical parameters “Night Waltz” shows Bowles’s compositional habit of working with single fragments and layers, that

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are only loosely interwoven and stand more or less across from each other, as described above. Neither harmony, nor rhythm or form shows any traceable logic in their overall constitution. There are slight traces of motivic work in “Night Waltz,” but this does not alter the overall impression of fragmentation. Nevertheless – or maybe just because of that – it is a haunting piece of music. Nevertheless, Bowles became increasingly disillusioned with technical problems as he tried to realize his musical ideas. In the end, even after exhausting all the compositional means accessible to him, Bowles was unable to find satisfactory creative expression in the field of music. The aesthetic-technical dilemma Bowles found himself in led to music becoming more and more an abstract, closed cosmos to him. It became a distinct area he could not enter by way of his subconscious and could neither (and did not want to) enter by way of his intellect. Music became something intangible for him (Caponi, Conversations 8). Working without Boundaries The positively liberating effect that writing literary texts had on Bowles after the difficult process of composing is mirrored in the literature. It is above all manifest in the high productivity rate of the years until 1952. The large number of texts Bowles wrote up to this time shows his great need to communicate artistically. For the shift from writing music to writing literature solved a lot of the problems he had not been able to solve while he was composing. On the one hand, there was the problem with the technical realization of an idea. Writing was something Bowles naturally mastered and he didn’t need special “translation devices” – like the piano for composing – but only pen and paper. Bowles succinctly remarked thus: It doesn’t require any technical knowledge to write in your own language. At any age. But it does require a certain amount of technical knowledge to do the same thing with music. (qtd. in Night Waltz)

Additionally, writing differs from composing in that writing (with the Latin alphabet) exclusively takes place in a single movement from left to right. This trivial fact marked a crucial difference for Bowles. For it allowed him to write down the words in the flow of one linear

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movement. This made it easier for him to establish a connection between the intuitive creative impulse and the realizing handicraft. Moreover it was not a problem – and Bowles set great store by this fact – to subsequently revise and improve the original notes, to change, insert and/or add things. We can see how intensively Bowles reworked his original notes in a handwritten original (see Figure 5 below).10

Figure 5.

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For Bowles, the process of writing consisted of several steps. First, inspiration had to come. This was made easier by the fact that Bowles selected topics, drawing from his own experiences. In another step he was able to use his intuition when transforming them into literature. He wrote his texts, the product of his intuition in one of the notebooks he always carried with him. He remarked: I often have no idea what I’m going to write when I sit down. I never plan ahead of time .... Writing isn’t about an idea. It comes more from a kind of feeling. (Caponi, Conversations 199)

Finally he slowly revised the written passages and in so doing Bowles paid meticulous attention to the use of the individual words. Just like the musical manuscripts, the literary drafts show how Bowles subsequently rearranged the different passages. Obviously, written text proved to be more suitable for this kind of revision (see Figure 6).11 Traces of Bowles’s working methods are easy to detect in his literary texts and it also becomes clear to what extent literature proved more suitable than did music for Bowles’s creative approach.

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Figure 6.

Essentially we see in Bowles’s literature – as well as in his music – a tendency towards the small scale. Stories constitute the core of his literary oeuvre; even his four novels are not very voluminous, and moreover are subdivided on the outside into several small units in the form of chapters and books. Thus disregarding the chapter division in all novels, The Sheltering Sky is subdivided into three books, Let It Come Down into four books, as is The Spider’s House (four books and prologue). Up Above the World consists of six books in total. This is

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remarkable given their somewhat small scale. By condensing the action into a comparatively small space, Bowles is able to follow his chosen subject matter using his typical situative plot structure, without the perceptible loss of a greater framework. On the contrary, within the comparatively small scale of his works, his highly contrasting literary style becomes apparent most impressively. For example, as regards dramatic structure: in all of Bowles’s literary works, the course of the action is fundamentally not predictable, just as in his music acoustic expectation offers no orientation. The dramatic structure completely follows the subject matter of the text and not the rules of an abstract dramatic structure (outside the subject matter). There is no plot development in the classic sense (Hibbard 18). The development of tension and the advancement of the plot primarily result from the presentation of the psychological constitution and emotional worlds of individual characters, the often-contrasting juxtaposition of psychologicalemotional mental states of different characters and the conflicts that grow out of them. The events are as unpredictable as the characters are irrational – often following one momentary impulse. There is no logic giving meaning to and linking the story besides the logic of the situative and the arbitrary. The rules that govern the subject matter are self-generating. Neither is there a moral authority communicated by the author, floating above the subject matter, so to speak, and holding out a protective hand (29). Bowles commented: A moral message is the last thing I look for. I reject moral messages …. I don’t like other people’s moral messages, no! I suppose what I look for is accurate expressions, for accurate accounts of states of mind, the way in which the consciousness of each individual is reported in the book. How the author makes us believe in the reality of his characters, in the reality of his settings. (Caponi, Conversations 49)

Everything is allowed; everything is possible and can happen any time. No deed is judged or condemned.12 Mainly in his stories, Bowles succeeds in realizing this technique in a very impressive way by arranging the moments of action mostly on a narrative axis that points ahead (Hibbard xiii). Within the action that unfolds in a comparatively small space, abruptly alternating moments of tension and the easing of that tension follow one another. There is essentially no redundant action, as even minor matters have their own dramatic weight within

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the whole and have their own atmospheric impact. The situative logic that informs the action does not disturb its development, as the cosmos that is created around a character is naturally limited by the size of the text. Within this cosmos the arbitrary and unpredictable do not lose themselves in disorientation (not least owing to linguistic clarity), but are the main ingredient of the dramatic structure. Just as Bowles’s music is concentrated wholly on the situative sonority of the musical motifs, his texts are focused on the action of each particular moment. The only difference is that in music it was much harder for Bowles to create a sonority superior to the moment – for instance in the sense of a musical program that creates coherence – from the music itself. In literature the subject matter superior to the plot can create such coherence and span the situative logic that constitutes the overall structure. The narrative speed is also shaped by breaks and contrasts. The way in which Bowles “speeds it up” or “slows it down” is impressive. For example, he takes his time when portraying psychologicalemotional mental states and pursuing the protagonist’s (and from time to time also minor characters) trains of thought. This stretching of time in favour of the internal action results in extensive reviews of consciousness in many of Bowles’s literary texts (55-58), thereby making such reviews a fundamental and partly autonomous part of the plot. With that being said, there are passages in which crucial elements of the plot are summed up or narrated elliptically. The variation of the narrative speed and the specific emphasis, which both the action and story line experience, are crucial elements of Bowles’s narrative technique (Pateson 92). It is interesting that Bowles himself stated that his experience with music had significantly helped him find the proper narrative speed – which can be compared to musical rhythm (Scher 4) – when writing literature and thereby give it form: One’s attitude toward form and what constitutes form is bound to be influenced by the fact of one’s having been involved in musical form for years. That is form, as far as I’m concerned. Yes, form as I see it has to do with the sense of speed, that is, the relationship between what’s going on in the book and the duration of time it takes to tell it. (Caponi, Conversations 44)

His choice of words too (especially of adjectives) is remarkable in this context and shows that Bowles also worked with contrasts in literature (Bertens 254; Hibbard 235, 241). Concise linguistic dichotomy –

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short, bold statements on one side, longer sentences with a subjective leaning on the other – can be deemed a specific characteristic of Bowles’s literary work. He used it pointedly as a means of dramatic composition: “If you want a slow movement, then you find the right words to convey a sense of slowing down” (ibid.). This is especially evident in the affective and mental states of characters, as well as description of landscapes and moods (i.e. more or less static parts of the plot) that he described elaborately in longer sentences in which he made extensive use of adjectives and drew on the linguistic instruments of metaphors and symbols. In contrast to this he mainly presented dynamic motifs, laden with plot-related tension, in a very sober way. In moments of the greatest tension, he often reduced his language to as few words as possible. The effect of this is first and foremost shock, as the change from one linguistic and expressive world to the other is generally very abrupt. An American journalist laconically summarized Bowles’s ability to rise moments of the highest tension to an even greater level with very reduced language as follows: One of Mr. Bowles’s chief talents lies in the slow, artful building of tension, a gradual crescendo of seemingly harmless details that works up to a scream. He achieves this effect through the use of a pitiless, flat, matter-of-fact style, almost toneless, that withholds emotion even at the crucial junctures. (Knickerbocker n.pag.)

Yet not only Bowles’s work with contrasts in literature forms an analogy with his contrast-rich music. The manner in which Bowles approaches his characters (and elements of action) also shows a similarity to his music. The use of themed ideas in music – which only follow the purpose of a situative sonority – is akin to the approach of introducing characters and ideas in his literary texts, which then disappear without a trace after they have fulfilled their purpose. Even main characters simply vanish as soon as their conflict has passed its climax. The most prominent example of this is the character of Port in The Sheltering Sky. He might be the only protagonist in the history of novels who simply dies after barely two thirds of the action, never to appear again.

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Imaginary Music Against this background it is an interesting final observation that Bowles used music in his literary texts very often on a thematic level. In his texts he often lent music exactly that intuitive, hypnoticintensive effect he wanted to lend his own compositions. And he not only integrated music into his plots, but also noise and silence, which also play their part in the dramatic course of the story line, too. This shows that he was not predominantly concerned with artificially determined forms of sound, but first and foremost with the experience of sound. Just as he processed nature’s sounds in his music and wanted to create a “natural” sound, in his literary texts noise and silence are just as significant as music itself. Moreover he gave the music in his texts a symbolic meaning and an influential power over the characters. This “written” music (in the literal sense of the word) therefore contained the expressive power he was looking for, and did not find, in his compositions. The use of music in the texts as a symbol of the sensual-physical and the internal element further illustrates the effect Bowles sought to give his music as a composer too. Language as a symbol of the rational in his texts stands in contrast to this. In this way, Bowles managed in his literature to access his creative resources via the subconscious, to write down the ideas they gave rise to and to revise them in a rationally driven working process, that over time becomes increasingly apparent in his texts. The observations described here confirm the theory that Bowles was not primarily concerned with the specific art form when he moved from music to literature. Above all the shift proves to be the result of his search for a suitable art form that allowed him the best means of expression in line with his specific interests and technical skills. The transition from one art form to the other therefore outlines the process of an overall personal and artistic development, whose roots can be found in the irrational and intuitive.

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NOTES 1

Gena Dagel Caponi 3. This article is a segment of my Master’s thesis, completed in 2006 at the University of Hamburg, Germany. 2 On persons with more than one gift see Reinhard Göltl. 3 In 1939 Bowles wrote his story “Tea on the Mountain”, published much later. Other early works are “The Scorpion” and “A Distant Episode” (1945), that both connect to the “time of transition” (emphasis mine and expression). In Without Stopping Bowles mentions another early text that was only partly published in the magazine Argo in December 1930, under the title “A White Goats Shadow;” see also Jeffrey Miller, A Descriptive Bibliography, C69, 122. As such, his literary productivity before 1946 cannot be compared to that after 1946. 4 As did, for example, Ernst Krenek. Besides his music he wrote lyrical texts, essays and texts on music theory. Moreover, a great many literary sketches are preserved. He also wrote his own libretti and wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung and Wiener Zeitung. Yet in the course of his adolescence, Krenek’s creative output was definitely focused on music. Indeed, his productivity steadily “fluctuated” – as Anne Zauner and Erwin Köstler put it – “between different modes of expression”, but always “fluctuated around a fixed axis” (188), that is music. 5 See UDEL, Irene Herrmann, Paul Bowles Music Collection, 1935-1996. This picture and all following examples of musical manuscripts are reprinted by permission of the Paul Bowles Music Estate, Irene Herrmann curator. I would like to thank Irene Herrmann and also the Special Collections Department of the University of Delaware for making the documents available. 6 See UDEL, Paul Bowles Papers. 7 UDEL, Irene Herrmann, Paul Bowles Music Collection, 1935-1996. 8 UDEL, Paul Bowles Papers. Copyright © The Estate of Paul Bowles, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (U.K.) Limited. I would also like to thank the Special Coll. Dept. of the University of Delaware for making the documents available. 9 Irene Herrmann commented on the scenic vocal music thus: “His operas are constructed as series of separate songs” (Herrmann 152). Already in 1984, Ned Rorem described Bowles’s music as a series of separate songs tied together: “Like most nostalgic and witty music that works, Bowles’s is all in short forms, vocal settings or instrumental suites. Even his two operas on Lorca texts are really garlands of songs tied together by spoken words … (355). I would like to thank Anabela Duarte, the editor of the present volume, for this hint on Ned Rorem. 10 UDEL, Paul Bowles Papers. Copyright © The Estate of Paul Bowles, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (U.K.) Limited. I would also like to thank the Special Coll. Dept. of the University of Delaware for making the documents available. 11 ibid. 12 Above all this shocked many of Bowles’s readers. To quote just one reaction, Leslie A. Fiedler called Bowles a “pornographer of terror” (Hibbard 203) and in the Kenyon Review, of the same volume, Fiedler wrote the following of Bowles’s texts: “The whole impact of his work is the insistence on the horrible, and his stories seem only literary by accident” (217).

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WORKS CITED Bertens, Johannes W. The Fiction of Paul Bowles: The Soul Is the Weariest Part of the Body. Utrecht: Rodopi, 1979. Bowles, Paul. Without Stopping. New York: The Echo Press, 1972. ––––. “Autobiography.” Antaeus 55 (Autumn 1985): 7-27. Bowles, Paul and Ned Rorem. Dear Paul Dear Ned: The Correspondence of Paul Bowles and Ned Rorem. North Pomfret: Elysium Press, 1997. Caponi, Gena Dagel. “A Nomad in New York: Paul Bowles 1933-48.” American Music. 7. 3 (Autumn 1989): 278-314. ––––. ed. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Literary Conversations Series, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. ––––. Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage. Carbondale/ Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Carr, Virginia Spencer, Paul Bowles: A Life. New York: Scribner, 2004. Göltl, Reinhard. Künstlerische Doppelbegabungen: Dichtung, Musik, Malerei, Philosophie. Goethe, Mendelssohn, Nietzsche, Schönberg, Grass. Books on Demand: Hamburg, 2002. Herrmann, Irene. “Bowles, Paul.” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. ed. Stanley Sadie. 2nd ed. Vol. 4. New York, (2001): 152. Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Knickerbocker, Conrad. Rev. of Bowles’s Up Above the World. The New York Times, March 12, n.pag., 1966. Miller, Jeffrey, Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1986. ––––. ed., In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. New York, 1994. Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles. Dir. Owsley Brown, EOS Orchestra, 2002. DVD. Paul Bowles Music Collection, 1935-1996. Bulk dates: 1935-1945. Irene Herrmann. MS Collection No 487. I: Music by Paul Bowles, MS Music. Box II, Folder 31, n.d. U Delaware. Paul Bowles Papers. Special Coll. Dept. Supplement 1999, MS 163, XV: Music, A. 3. Fragments. Box I, Folder 62, 63. n.d. U. Delaware.

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Patteson, Richard. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Rorem, Ned. Setting the Tone: Essays and Diary. New York: Limelight Editions, 1984. Scher, Steven Paul. Verbal Music in German Literature. New Haven, London: Yale U P, 1968. Swan, Claudia, ed., Paul Bowles Music. New York: EOS Music Inc., 1995. Zauner, Anne and Erwin Köstler, eds. Die Andere Seite. Bild, Klang, Text, Grenzgänge in der österreichischen Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Innsbruck: Haymon Verlag, 1996.

THE MUSICAL STYLES OF EARLY SONGS OF PAUL BOWLES CAROLE BLANKENSHIP

In 1992, Ned Rorem wrote, “No American in our century has composed songs lovelier than Paul Bowles’s.” As early as 1930, Bowles was setting his own poems to music and soon writing songs using the poems of Jean Cocteau, Federico García Lorca, Georges Linze, and Gertrude Stein, among others. The song form corresponded with Paul Bowles’s love for words and his affinity for short musical forms. Bowles’s Six Chansons (1930-1933), an earliest group of songs, was performed at Yaddo in 1933 by Ada MacLeish and Aaron Copland. In 1939, the artist was hired to set folk songs for the Federal Music Project of the Works Progress Administration. He composed more than eighty songs; approximately half of them remain unpublished. The songs presented here reveal Bowles’s treatment and synthesis of experimental harmonies, French mélodie, and the folk song style.

In an interview with Philip Ramey, Paul Bowles said: For me, short, simple pieces were the most satisfying, perhaps because I didn’t know how to appreciate long, complex ones. My ideal was to write small pieces with only as many notes as absolutely necessary; pieces which could be listened to many times and would be fun to hear. I admit that’s rather limiting. Formally, those pieces scarcely exist. As a composer, I think of myself as someone as marginal as Louis Moreau Gottschalk or Reynaldo Hahn. (Swan 11-12)

Altogether, Paul Bowles composed approximately eighty songs that do not belong to his theatre works. Over half of Bowles’s musical output was vocal music, including operas, two cantatas, choral works, and songs. Most of the songs were non-commissioned and therefore reflect Bowles’s own selection of texts, subjects, and musical characteristics. The poets he favored most were Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, himself, his wife Jane Bowles, and later, Tennessee Williams. Several of his songs were

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published early in the 1930s. Then in 1984 Soundings Press published Paul Bowles: Selected Songs containing eleven previously published songs and twenty-seven formerly unpublished songs. Most of the songs in the collection are facsimiles of manuscripts. The oldest piece is from 1933 with the most recent having been composed by Bowles in 1960. In the autobiography of Ned Rorem, entitled Knowing When to Stop (Bowles’s autobiography is titled Without Stopping), Rorem writes: His music is warm, wistful, witty, redolent of nostalgia for his Yankee youth, wearing its heart on its sleeve; and it is all cast in small forms. (222)

Paul Bowles studied composition with Aaron Copland. About Copland, Bowles said: “my whole musical and intellectual background was formed by him” (Caponi 7). Copland’s musical influence on Bowles is debatable but Copland’s encouragement and promotion of Paul Bowles is unequivocal. The Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet (1931), written under Copland’s eye, is thought to be Bowles’s earliest existing composition but that is without including the earliest songs written in 1930. When Copland organized the First Festival of Contemporary Music at the Yaddo Artist Colony (Saratoga Springs, NY) in 1932, he wrote to Bowles in Paris, requesting that he send something to be performed on the concert. Bowles sent six songs set to his own texts; five were performed (see Figure 1).

The Musical Styles of Early Songs

Figure 1.

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Alfred H. Meyer reviewed the entire festival, which consisted of three concerts over two days, in Modern Music. Regarding Bowles’s songs Meyer wrote: Paul Frederic Bowles provided five songs to words of his own. For these exceedingly sensitive songs the accompaniments were no more than backgrounds in the truest possible sense of the term, a harmonic touch here, a sonority there. No attempts at stylization for piano, no figuration, no counterpoint; just a plain background of shrewdly mixed sounds. One remembers particularly a few miraculous chords on the words ‘clouds’ in the second song, in which the effect was so wondrously wrought that one actually seemed to be seeing color rather than hearing sound. (174)

The songs themselves, in manuscript only, and owned by Irene Herrmann, are titled Six Chansons, 1930 – 1931, even though two are dated 1932. Bowles composed the Six Chansons in three different locations: New York, Italy, and Paris, which may explain the halfFrench title, a title that is neither mentioned in the Yaddo Concerts, nor in the reviews of those concerts, nor in Jeffrey Miller’s bibliography of Bowles’s works. The Chansons are without individual titles, but are instead numbered with roman numerals. The poems on which the six songs are written were most likely included in the poems that Bowles showed Gertrude Stein in 1931. Bowles had by that time written four of these Chansons and would continue by setting two more of his own poems to music in 1932. The first chanson in the cycle, “It was a long trip back” is titled “Delicate Song” in Paul Bowles: Next to Nothing, Collected Poems 1926 – 1977. Bowles’s song setting does not include the last three lines of the poem printed in his collection (24). “It was a long trip back” was set to music by Bowles while he was on a ski trip in Clavières, Italy, in January of 1932, with a married woman, Anne Miracle Manheim. On this excursion, Bowles became very ill, was admitted to a hospital and received a letter from Stein suggesting that he return to Paris. This is the short letter that Bowles would set to music. It was subsequently published twice as “Letter to Freddy.” “It was a long trip back” was perhaps chosen by Bowles as the text to set at the time on account of his illness, and the length of time it took for him to return to Paris. The poem is reminiscent of a seaside,

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with the harbor, the sailboats, the smell of the waves, and swamp grass. Bowles was a long way from all of those things when he wrote the music. “It was a long trip back” is marked allegro and is the only song of the six with a suggested tempo. The piano introduction is seven measures of 2/4 meter, in which two voices play constant eighths in mostly parallel motion, perhaps indicating walking or traveling. Beginning in measure 14, the meter then changes in each bar. The meter markings include 3/4, 7/8, and 5/4, and vary many times. Using the changing meter, Bowles stresses the important words and syllables, giving strong beats and/or long duration to words such as “long,” “lilies,” “shone,” “thoughts,” and “road.” The texture Bowles wrote for the piano is very thin. The A section is two voices only, moving in eighths. “It was a long trip back” is typical of Bowles’s song style. The characteristics that are typical are the simplicity of the accompaniment, the speech-like setting of melody and rhythm of text, the metrical shifts, and the short text and therefore brevity of the song. Harmonically, however, “It was a long trip back” is unlike Bowles’s published songs. Bowles systematically gives the melody half-step dissonances that clash with the chords in the piano. These dissonances together with non-functional, chordal movement have the effect of tonal instability and atonality. The third Chanson, “Will you allow me to lie in the grass?” is the setting of a short poem that is also somewhat surreal. The poem begins with lovely thoughts of lying in the grass and being covered by clouds and leaves, but suddenly in the next to last phrase, the French word couleuvre occurs and is repeated. Couleuvre is French for grass snake. The final phrase of the song, in English, is “A green snake came over the air to me.” The sweet musings are disturbed without resolution or explanation. In Next to Nothing: Collected Poems, 1926–1977 the same poem is titled “International Poem” and is printed as follows: Will you allow me to lie in the grass? The clouds will form a spread for me and I shall be all Covereverythingwith leaves Shallwebe all Couleuvrecouleuvrecome tomyaid Agreensnakecameovertheairtome – 1927 (17)

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This one page song has no bar lines, just as three lines of the poem have no spaces. The voice begins the song moving in quarter notes semi-chromatically. The second phrase is quickened with eighth notes on repeated F#. The third phrase repeats the first six pitches of the opening phrase on quarters followed by successive B naturals which speed up and become a row of sixteenth notes, quickening with excitement, for the phrase “a green snake came over the air to me.” These sixteenth-note B’s slow to one eighth followed by one quarter, and finally one half-note C# on the word “me” (as seen in Figure 2).

Figure 2.

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In this song Bowles used five- and six-voice chords with many added dissonances. By and large the chords contain their own major and minor thirds, are bitonal, contain frequent added seconds, and are not functional. The voice then frequently adds minor seconds to the chords, increasing the dissonance. The final chord of both sections is a D Major chord together with a G# Minor chord. This chord, which underscores the word “clouds,” is the chord mentioned by Meyer in the Modern Music article. The word “clouds” is sung on F#. The C# at the final cadence of the song on the word “me” above the identical D Major/G# Minor chord gives this song as a highly dissonant conclusion. The Six Chansons are experimental pieces for Bowles to some extent simply because they are, to the best of our knowledge, the first songs he composed. Also, in the Six Chansons, Bowles explores speech-like rhythm, asymmetrical meter or no meter, bitonality, and added chord tones that produce an intensely dissonant outcome. The harmonic structure is experimental and truly reflects the post-modern harmonies of other composers of that era. Bowles retains several of the characteristics here in his future songs, but never returns to the jarring, “split chord” harmonies that saturate the Six Chansons. After the songs were sung at Yaddo on April 30, 1932 by soprano Ada MacLeish with Copland at the piano, Copland wrote to Bowles saying, “You’re on the map now, and don’t you forget it” (WS 153). Soon Bowles was spurred on by the notices of the reception of his songs at the Yaddo festival and began working on a song cycle based on five sections of the long poem Anabase by St.-John Perse. It is at this stage in Bowles’s composing that the French mélodie becomes significant. Bowles’s love of the French language, his desire to be in France, and enthusiasm for Satie, Debussy, and Ravel are evident. It is then logical that Bowles would set French texts in the style of the beloved French art song or mélodie. In February of 1933 Paul Bowles wrote from Algeria to Gertrude Stein, “[i]n a little while I suppose I shall be going to America. It is time to show Copland my output. I am sure he will be pleased” (Miller, In Touch 112). In the summer of 1933, while in the U.S., Bowles was very productive, once again choosing to set poems in French. Bowles set a group of songs he titled Danger de Mort with poetry by Georges Linze, a Belgian avant-garde poet of the early twentieth century. The poems of Danger de Mort resemble Bowles’s

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own poems of Six Chansons in their brevity and simple style, as well as their brief, incomplete, and seemingly unrelated thoughts. The first song, “Un tour de la terre,” translates: One trip around the world An inch of space A hum of a seashell The signs of the street Hanging over the abyss And all is so grand That one does not even know if It is the plane, the earth, the hand Ascending or descending

Bowles is free yet again to stress words as he pleases, alternating the number of beats from even to odd at will. Therefore, each phrase is shaped differently from the others, set especially for its text. At first glance the piano’s character looks much like the two-part accompaniments seen in two of the Chansons. At second look, it is apparent that this accompaniment contains an ever changing number of voices, not strictly two or three voices throughout, and so it is not as contrapuntal as those piano parts of the Chansons. It is clear to this point that Bowles preferred to write songs in groups of poems by a single poet. Below is a list of more songs from the period 1934-1935: Scenes from the Door The Ford Red Faces There my lost hands Letter to Freddy Rain Rots the Wood Green Songs Grass Farewell Silence Moon

Gertrude Stein

Éditions de la Vipère

Edouard Roditi Gertrude Stein Charles Henri Ford Richard Thoma

Not published New Music/G. Schirmer G. Schirmer Editions de la Vipère

This was a productive time for Bowles, especially when one includes Memnon, five songs on the poetry of Jean Cocteau, an unpublished song cycle that Bowles also composed during 1935. Bowles began writing Memnon while he was the guest of Henry Cowell in San Francisco (155). Cowell was a member of the music faculty at

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Stanford, was an influence on Bowles musically, and was a promoter and publisher of many composers’s works through his quarterly magazine, New Music. There in San Francisco, in January 1935, Bowles set the first of the Cocteau poems. Bowles’s personal connection to Cocteau preceded the composition by four years. During Bowles’s second trip to Paris (1931), he wrote the following to Daniel Burns: One of the first things I did here was meet Jean Cocteau, and to go the following day to his house for tea. He rushed about the room with great speed for two hours and never sat down once. Now he pretended he was an orangoutang, next an usher at the Paramount Theatre, and finally he held a dialogue between an aged grandfather and his young grandson which was sidesplitting. I think never have I seen anyone like him in my life. He still smokes opium every day and claims it does him a great deal of good. I daresay it does. By definition, the fact that it is considered harmful for most mortals would convince me of its efficaciousness for him .... (60-61)

When asked about memorable letters he had received from notables, Bowles replied: I had written to ask his (Cocteau) permission to use a collection of his poems called Memnon for a song-cycle I had written. He wrote back: “Imaginez moi refusant un tel honneur!” (Caponi 156)

In 1995, Irene Herrmann received a review of her compact disc, Paul Bowles, in the New York Times, and David Weintraub soon contacted her. Mr. Weintraub wished to give her a box of music manuscripts, all by Bowles, that he had found in a closet in his recently deceased father’s home. Eugene Weintraub (now the name of a division of G. Schirmer) was a publisher and his connection to Paul Bowles is not known. The box contained the manuscripts of Six Chansons as well as the Cocteau cycle, Memnon, in addition to many other works (personnal communicatiom, 18 May 2003). In Memnon, Bowles gives each song an Arabic number followed by a short title: 1. Les Statues 2. Memnon

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3. Recette 4. La Grèce 5. Le Sourire

Of this set, the fourth song, “La Grèce,” is the only song from Memnon in the collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, where it is titled “Athéna.” In Bowles’s bibliography, Jeffrey Miller also uses the title “Athéna” for this song. However, the title of the manuscript of the same song owned by Irene Herrmann, is “La Grèce.” The poem translates: Greece Greece, small and sacred Her profile so similar Completely made of chalk On a black board in the sun. Athena with her billy goat’s eyes And a grasshopper’s weapons Touches her hand on the curls standing near her. Pelops Statues made from the sickening gift of Perseus Apallas never pierced Grasshopper of the Greek sand.

“La Grèce” begins with two conventional musical concepts not seen in the songs of Bowles thus far: first the song begins in the key of the signature, B major, and second Bowles uses a true ostinato pattern in that key which continues in the piano through measure 11. The middle section of the song modulates, including a new key signature, which Bowles has not used in the songs to this point. Bowles modulates back to B major with the ostinato, but then he cannot end a song on the tonic without added tones. In the case of La Grèce, Bowles begins the final measure with a D natural followed by the entire B major chord with its third, D#. The ostinato patterns of “La Grèce” consist of triads with added notes at the intervals of the ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth. In this way, “La Grèce” is more similar to a song by Debussy than any of Bowles’s songs we have seen thus far (see Figures 3-5).

The Musical Styles of Early Songs

Figure 3.

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Figure 4.

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Figure 5.

Somewhat surprisingly, there are no extant songs by Bowles that are dated between Memnon (1935) and the next large group of songs dated 1939. Bowles set two groups of folk songs in 1939. It is not clear which set was written first or why they are grouped in two sets. As evidenced by the stamps printed on the copies found in the New York Public Library, Bowles was paid to compose adaptations of folk songs by the Works Progress Administration. It may be assumed that some of the folk songs Bowles chose to arrange were heard by him while he was preparing to write the music for the film America’s Disinherited, produced by the Sharecropper Film Committee for the Southern Tenant Farmers’s Union (Miller, A Descriptive 239). Several of the songs are truly Minstrel songs,

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including “The Boatmen’s Dance,” which is also one of the songs arranged by Aaron Copland for his Old American Songs collection, 1950. Bowles stays true to the melody and rhythm of the original, which are nearly exactly the same as Copland’s melody and rhythm. However, Bowles chose harmony that is bold in comparison to the harmony of Copland, but cannot be considered experimental as Bowles’s songs already discussed. The accompaniment of “The Boatmen’s Dance” is lively and rhythmic and certain to enliven a song about dance. After a fourmeasure introduction that introduces the tune, the piano supports the singer in a generic dance pattern. The left hand of the accompaniment plays the strong beat while the right hand is assigned the weaker beats of a vamp that could accompany any tune chosen in the saloon on a given night. Bowles includes a note at the bottom of the first page, “Left hand legato and to the fore.” The harmony is fairly traditional, with tertian harmonies that include ninths and elevenths, perhaps reminiscent of harmonies often plucked on a banjo. Bowles interpretation is quite colorful especially when compared to Copland’s arrangement, which is harmonically functional with mostly tonic and dominant spellings, many in root position (see Figures 6-8).

The Musical Styles of Early Songs

Figure 6.

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Figure 7.

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Figure 8.

On the other hand, Copland’s rendition contains more rhythmic interest, with varying accompanying patterns and rhythms. Another of the folk song arrangements, “The Mary Golden Tree,” is titled “The Mary Golden Lee” in John Harrington Cox’s collection Traditional Ballads and Folk-Songs Mainly from West Virginia. The first verse of text is very similar to that used by Bowles for his setting. However, Bowles includes 5 verses, while Cox printed 12 verses in his collection (66). Burl Ives writes that this ballad was first printed as “Sir Walter Raleigh Sailing in the Lowlands” (44). Bowles beautifully arranges “The Mary Golden Tree,” with lush chords. However, when the notes of the melody are added to these chords, they somehow seem stark and lonely. For instance, after the initial measure of two rolled G major chords, Bowles writes in the second measure an 8-voice chord, built on thirds but containing multiple major seconds and major sevenths creating several dissonances. The melody seems simple and lonely above this chord and the chords to follow, suiting the text, “as she sailed on the lonesome sea” (see Figures 9 and 10).

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Figure 9.

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Figure 10.

After a short humming section, Bowles repeats the refrain and ends the song with notable harmony and one startling melodic mutation. The last four measures have quicker harmonic rhythm with new chords on beat three of each measure, instead of one chord per measure as before. As the voice cadences in measure 16 it creates a half step clash with the chord, as does the next chord. Bowles changes the last note of the tune so that nothing resolves. Instead of the last three notes of the melody continuing F-E-D, Bowles ends with F-E-E. Likewise the final chord remains the E minor chord in the right hand underpinned with octave A’s in the bass. These concluding measures

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have a chilling affect and they do mirror the experimental harmonies found in the Six Chansons. To summarize the style in Bowles’s arrangements of the 16 Folk Songs, they contain triadic harmony that is functional and non-chord tones are only added for color and drama, with minimal, but highly effective moments of dissonance used by Bowles for deliberate affect. Three distinct compositional styles are evident in Bowles’s early songs. The first style is experimental and atonal, appearing only in the Six Chansons. The second style is analogous to the French mélodie. This is the style of the cycles Memnon and Danger de Mort, as well as several of Bowles’s songs in English. The folk song style is third and is manifest not only in Bowles’s WPA folk song arrangements but also later in his song settings of some original melodies. Bowles’s use of three musical styles in these early compositions truly serves to define his fairly large output of short songs. Evidence of the experimental harmony, the French mélodie, and the folk song style may be found in combination in practically every song Bowles composed in his succeeding forty years of composition.

WORKS CITED Bowles, Paul. Four American Folk Songs. New York City W.P.A. Music Project, 1939. ––––. Next to Nothing: Collected Poems 1926-1977. Santa Barbara, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1981. ––––. Twelve American Folk Songs. New York City W.P.A. Music Project, 1939. ––––. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. New York: Putnam, 1972. ––––. G. Lambert and N. Rorem, Dear Paul, Dear Ned: The Correspondence of Paul Bowles and Ned Rorem. North Pomfret, New York: Elysium Press, 1997. Caponi, Gena Dagel. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

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Cox, John Harrington. Traditional Ballads and Folk-Songs Mainly from West Virginia. Publications of the American Folklore Society. ed. Tristram P. Coffin. National Service Bureau, Vol. XV, 1965. Ives, Burl, The Burl Ives Song Book; American Song in Historical Perspective, New York: Ballantine Books, 1953. Lomax, Alan, The Folk Songs of North America: in the English Language, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960. Meyer, Alfred H. “Yaddo – A May Festival.” Modern Music (May – June 1932): 172-176. Miller, Jeffrey. Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1986. ––––. ed. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Rorem, Ned. Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir. New York: Simon Schuster, 1994. Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. Swan, Claudia, ed. Paul Bowles: Music. New York: Studley Press, 1995. Yaddo Festival Program. April 30 – May 1, 1932. The New York Public Library Archives, New York.

ON DEGENERESCENCE AND REALMS OF SUPPRESSION: PAUL BOWLES VIS-À-VIS EINOJUHANI RAUTAVAARA ZBIGNIEW BIALAS

Both Paul Bowles and Einojuhani Rautavaara were Aaron Copland’s students: Bowles more impressionistically, Rautavaara more methodically, and both have had their views shaped by their teacher. Much has been said about how the overlapping elements of various cultures are reflected in the systems of music used by Bowles and Rautavaara, resulting in the organization of the works that are meant to be both architecturally and organically coherent. Is there a direct line from Copland, via Bowles to Rautavaara? The author, focusing on vocal and linguistic organization of works (with discourse-oriented and cultural implications), analyses to what extent the escape from the Western patterns – the need of which has been pronounced in Bowles’s insights on music – can be discerned in the operatic practice of Einojuhani Rautavaara.

The risks involved in undertaking such an endeavor are obvious. First: the distinctiveness of “writing” and “composing,” an issue that has been elaborated on by most twentieth century theoreticians and practitioners of both forms: writers, composers and critics (and most forcibly by those who dealt with “writing” and “composing” – Strauss’s Capriccio can serve as one example, although in the 19th century this distinction was not that sharp due to the legacy of Romanticism, the case of Wagner being the most obvious). Second: Paul Bowles himself believed in the “complete separateness of writing and composing music” (Mangan viii), even though he did a lot of writing about composing. Interestingly, as an aside, more writing is done on composing, than composing is done on writing – putting nonverbal impressions into verbal expression is more popular than putting verbal impressions into non-verbal expression. There are exceptions, but that is usually in the form of, say, an opera about a writer, e.g. Alexis Kivi. Bowles, notably, told one biographer that music and

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literature dwelt in “different rooms” (ibid.) a view he reiterated in the last interview with Irene Herrmann, significantly the last words of the interview: IH: “Separate worlds?” PB: “Well, yes, of course” (272). In addition, Bowles’s attitude to the sense of hearing (music), as opposed to the sense of seeing (text), was, additionally, that auditory aesthetics are unevolved: There is no doubt that hearing is considered a secondary sense, one which is less directly connected with the intellect than sight is – more visceral and infinitely less differentiated. (107)

It will perhaps be interesting to note that in a short review in a recent issue of The New Yorker, Aaron Copland – objective, affirmative and wide-ranging – is portrayed as the Updike of American music, as compared to melancholy and subjective Samuel Barber, who is American music’s Cheever (91). One thing, however, is certain: Paul Bowles is American music’s Paul Bowles and that makes a few things easier. I do not wish to talk on Bowles vs. Aaron Copland, i.e. autodidact vs. teacher, nor am I fascinated by the speculations on the relationship between Bowles and Copland. What interests me here is the fact that both Paul Bowles and Einojuhani Rautavaara were Copland’s students: Bowles more impressionistically, Rautavaara more methodically, and both have had their views shaped by their teacher. Is there a direct line from Copland, via Bowles to Einojuhani Rautavaara? Much has been said about how the overlapping elements of various cultures are reflected in the systems of music used in Bowles’s and Rautavaara’s works: diatonic, dodecaphonic, free-atonal and synthetic modal – resulting in the organization of the works which is meant to be both architecturally and organically coherent. To what extent can the escape from the Western patterns – the need of which has been voiced in Bowles’s insights on music – be discerned in the operatic practice of Rautavaara? What I wish to focus on is not musicological, but vocal and linguistic organization of musical works that has discourse-oriented and cultural implications. We get a hint of what might be at stake when we see in an early, frequently quoted fragment of The Sheltering Sky, that Western music becomes associated with auditory irritations (Mangan vii).

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Across the street a radio was sending forth the hysterical screams of a coloratura soprano. Kit shivered. “Let’s hurry up and get there,” she said. “Maybe we can escape that.” They listened fascinated as the aria, drawing to a close, made the orthodox preparations for the inevitable high final note. Presently Kit said: “Now that that’s over, I’ve got to have another bottle of Oulmès.” (TSS 8)

From here, however, the link I wish to make is not direct. Finnish culture is one that probably interested Paul Bowles least. In all his criticism written for Modern Music and New York Herald Tribune between 1935 and 1946 there are hundreds of references to Mexican music, folk music in general and African music in particular, and only one reference to Finnish music, not surprisingly that of Sibelius, and the in passim comment is not too sympathetic: Bowles reviews the Nazi-produced propaganda film, Feldzug in Polen, and derisively refers to the score by Herbert Windt saying that the composer uses such “epic snorts and groans” that come out of listening to “lots of Sibelius” with admiration (Mangan 30). Thus, the post-Coplandian affinity between Bowles and Rautaavara can be attempted not because Bowles had anything to say about Finnish music but because he had lots to say about the distrust towards the Western apparatus of representation. This can be found in his creative writing, but it also features in his music criticism, including such memorable summaries as those where he speaks of the “degenerescence of romantic music before the maggots of modernism brought a new kind of life to the general mass of decomposition” (163). Bowlesian logic, his specific attitude towards “Western degenerescence” gestures towards opera because, if there is a common ground between the representational and non-representational, it is – like it or not – to be found in the voice and everything that the voice is made to be responsible for. The relation between voice and identity is something of an obsession among contemporary theorists but I’m not attempting here to interrogate the concept of the voice. Fascinating realms of voice’s monstrosity, ventriloquist potential and/or alien powers taking possession of the body have all been amply elaborated on in theory: from Freud, via Lacan to Zizek. Followers of Jacques Derrida, on the other hand, readily recognize that the presence of voice is in the center of all Western epistemology. What is at stake – if we extend this – is the link between vocality/exoticism, even though James Joyce, who customarily uses auditory hallucinations to signal a

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schizophrenic breakdown in the narration (Battista 134) would perhaps claim that we might need to deal with a question of vocality/schizophrenia. This, however, would be going too far, unless we state that reverting to the construct of exoticism is equivalent to exhibiting symptoms of social schizophrenia. One way or another – and Paul Bowles was sensitive to this – interpretation of the presence and quality of voice/vocality remains in the background of the Western construction of the concept of exoticism. In one of the more irritating fragments of Elias Canetti’s Voices of Marrakesh the reader finds the following eulogy to ignorance in the contact zone setting: During the weeks I spent in Morocco I made no attempt to acquire either Arabic or any of the Berber languages. I wanted to lose none of the force of those foreign-sounding cries. I wanted sounds to affect me as much as lay in their power, unmitigated by deficient and artificial knowledge on my part. I had not read a thing about the country. Its customs were as unknown to me as its people. (23)

The focus on “the foreign-sounding cries unmitigated by deficient and artificial knowledge” signifies volitional amplification of exoticism in the sonic/somatic/semantic environment, or in other words – volitional amplification of the significance of soundscape.1 This is important because just like analyses of visual metaphors demonstrate how a trompe-l’oeil resulted in the fabrication of ready-to-use exotic landscapes, similarly, an appropriate trompe-l’oreille may result in the fabrication of ready-to-use exotic soundscapes enhancing the Western construction of the exotic. No wonder the use of sound has always been one of the staples of Orientalist categorization because hearing, like seeing, is a process of thinking: the evidence of the ear, dependent on the choices, has to be always fragmentarily modified in the brain. Narrowing the focus: in postcolonial literary theory we read of various strategies of revenge against the center, and a substantial corpus of postcolonial writing is an attempt to place oneself in a position in which, presumably, language can break free from the constraints of “English.” The revenge however will not be successful if it is an attempt at either imitating a standard version of the metropolitan language (Conrad) or abrogating, subverting and transforming it globally into distinctive varieties (the majority of postcolonial literature).

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Likewise, Paul Bowles cannot achieve it from the perspective in which he writes. Not that Bowles does not try. It is enough to pay close attention to The Sheltering Sky to realize that 1) “primal” screams come at climactic moments in the narration, 2) the voice is used to mask the void (a very Conradian device because Heart of Darkness is really, contrary to what the title suggests, the story of the monstrosity of the voice, not of darkness), and 3) sounds do not simply embellish Bowles’s fiction, they are tools of annihilating the integrity of the cogito. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness though presented in myriads of commentaries and analyses as studies of light and darkness, is from the very start an oral journey.2 Marlow undertakes an expedition in search of Kurtz’s voice and he suggests almost directly that Kurtz is, eventually, physically limited to what leaves his mouth: “A voice. He was very little more than a voice. And I heard – him – it – this voice – other voices – all of them were so little more than voices” (333). In the story, full of echoes and recollections along the way, in the end it is Kurtz’s voice that vibrates, just as Kurtz’s body dissolves. In Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky much of what happens to Kit and Port in Africa, corporeal in the extreme, is built through a soundscape as much as landscape. Port (like Kurtz), in his death sums up all that is vocal/orificial about the body – the focus is on the open mouth which negotiates what vibrates between the outside and the inside of the body, an open mouth that utters unintelligible, defeated semi-English sounds. However, the true revenge against English as the perpetrator of the crime of exoticizing other languages/voices would need to consist in degrading the metropolitan language to the status of “impurity”, and an assault on the ear, the very auditory irritation. This cannot be attempted in literature for the simple reason that in order to show English as an impurity English would need to cease being a viable vehicle of communication. More than that – in such a role – spoken/written language has to cease as the sole, or the major vehicle of the message. Thus: one should revert to less-obviously-literary forms. This is perhaps where Einojuhani Rautavaara’s opera Thomas (1985) comes in as an appropriate example.3 Thomas was written for the Joensuu Song Festival marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Kalevala.4 The main character – Thomas “Anglicus” – is presented as the 13th century traveler to Finland who brings about a conflict of shamanist and Christian cultures. Rautavaara, the composer

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and author of the libretto, presents “Anglicus” as a traveler from a distant island and [he] interprets his activities as instrumental in the eventual fusion of conflicting ideologies in Finland. Though most of the text is written/sung in Finnish, there are substantial passages in medieval religious Latin, sopranic vocalizes representing the threshold space between birds’ language, shamanism, and Christian mysticism and – most interestingly from our perspective – intrusions in English, or rather “semi-English”: stilted, archaized, misspelled and mispronounced, meant as a version of 12th century Middle English, yet in fact a rather fictitious variety (this is perhaps what Tolkien could do to English if he was inventing English and not Elvish), in sum: English which is very clearly skewed. With the insistence on such sounds where English, when sung, is barely identifiable, Rautavaara is taking some of Bowles’s assumptions and acts to the limit, even though instead of going to Africa (south of “Romanticism”) Rautaavara proceeds to Karelia (north of Romanticism [Sibelius excluded]). English in Rautavaara’s Thomas is a deviant and defiant linguistic behavior. It bears traces of glossolalia, especially when opposed to the harmony of “natural” birds’s sounds in the shamanic vocalizations. “Faulty” English chants allow an interpretation of Anglo-Saxon vocality as a pathological condition: including echolalia or hallucinatory babbling. The more so because the entire corpus of this “hinted 12th century English” is limited to nightmarish scenes in the beginning of Act One. Thomas experiences delirium on his death-bed. English chants – a mélange of sounds: an exotic “impurity” in a sea of other voices – represent “the motherly” and “the childrenly” in the libretto. The voices of children are repeated at the end of the opera, after the plot returns to the beginning (the cyclicity of time is reminiscent of T.S. Eliot as well as Bowles here): Lasten ääniä [children’s voices]: Com Thomas! Com Thomme! Com pley mid us! The pley is bigunnen. Com Thomas! Com pley mid us! (11, 54)

Abstracting from the meaning of repetition and echo that would require a separate analysis I would like to stress that the children’s voices and the mother’s voice form no chorus. Rautavaara uses here pre-recorded samplers as if deliberately pinpointing to a non-chorus

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quality to the voices of children calling Thomas to play with them and the mother admonishing him to return home: Äidin ääni [mother’s voice]: Thomas! Thomas! Dere Thomas com hom! Thi moder clepeth the! Hit is sone derk. Com hom! Com hom! (11)

English in this opera is not simply “hallucinatory babbling” – a deviant and delirium-inspired linguistic behaviour. In the confrontation of languages and civilizations, presented by means of voices, Finnish is the language of Ego with a hint of transcendence into a sphere beyond the rational-subconscious, i.e. into a shamanistic world; Latin functions instead as Superego with a by-path into an Ego, while English over- and under-passes the sphere of Ego and functions either as the m/Otherly (superego – the mother’s command to return home because it is getting dark is a thinly veiled return to the womb/death motif (Ewige Weibliche), or an injunction to enjoy [come play – where id is the Ewige Kinderliche, so to speak, an unruly, everplaying, misbehaving child]). There is one more language functioning in the opera: that of the Maiden – the only figure that can easily transcend the boundaries between the pagan and the Christian world, finding her place in each of them, yet not fully belonging to any of the two. Her sopranic vocalizations accompanied by a taped sound of twittering birds are not semantically empty as she imitates the voice of birds and Christian/shamanic spirituality at the same time. She can be seen as “the personification of conscience, compatible with the Christian doctrine” (Bruth 13) or “the virgin Marjatta who gives birth to a child seen as the Christ child, the King of Karelia” (Wuorinen 146) but at the same time she represents the ecstatic shamanistic world and the world of nature. There is a contradiction in the vocalizations, too: on the one hand they evoke the animalistic, natural world (Shamanistic tradition), on the other hand the music is based on a twelve-tone series, which is a paragon of order and predictability, as in dodecaphonic music the sequence of the tones is arithmetically predetermined. This paradox is inaccessible to Thomas to whom she speaks/sings not “in a language” but “in tongues” – as befits ecstatic

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epiphanies. He addresses the “maiden” commenting on her vocal/lingustic incomprehensibility on the individual and social level: Kuka sinä olet tyttö … “Who are you maiden Are you that people? Is it they who sent you That people? Can you not speak, maid? You speak that people’s tongue: It is no language, it is but sound It says nothing … Nor is it any people.” (26-27)

The Maiden’s supposed glossolalia is, however, though contradictory and paradoxical, far from being meaningless, since the chorus translates the meanings of vocalizations. Formally speaking, when choral operas feature a choir, it frequently acts as a frame from which the soloists emerge, but, philosophically speaking, chorus always is a translator of an individual vocal act into a social language and landscape. In that respect the vocalizations are a proto-philosophical language if the source of all wisdom is prophetic madness represented by Pytias’ glossolalia and their subsequent translations (Colli, Nietzsche and Plato 244 AB). In effect it is only English – the vehicle externalizing the workings and the energy of the id and the superego – which remains empty at the level of the ego; it is exotic because it appeals neither to the ego, nor to any level where the ego can get any mirroring or translatability. English in the Far North, just like English in Morocco, is the realm of suppression: an idea that might be very much after Bowles’s own heart.

NOTES 1

For definitions of soundscape as sonic environment see R. Murray Schafer, Robin Maconie and John Andrew Fisher. 2 While it is not my intention to engage here in an ongoing debate on Heart of Darkness, it is worth noting that this debate still offers fresh directions and insights. One example is Conrad in Africa: New Essays on “Heart of Darkness”, by Attie de Lange and Gail Fincham with Wiesław Krajka, eds., Boulder, Lublin, New York:

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Social Science Monographs, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Columbia University Press, 2002. 3 Einojuhani Rautavaara is one of the most famous Finnish composers (born in 1928). He studied at Helsinki Music Academy and then in New York. In the USA he took lessons from Aaron Copland. Rautavaara is the author of nine full-scale operas, eight symphonies, as well as numerous choral, orchestral and vocal works. He has been active as composer since mid 1950s. His latest composition so far is Missa a cappella for chorus a cappella (2011). 4 The voice has always had a mystical dimension for Rautavaara, as can be seen in his early song cycles: Three Sonnets by Shakespeare (1952), Pyhidpiiivid (1953) and short choral works Laulaja (1956), Ave Maria (1957) and Ludus verbalis (1957). Also two short operas, consistently built on the contrast between the present and the past: Marjatta matala neiti (1975) based on the last canto of Kalevala and Runa 42, Sammon ryosto (1974-81) concerned with the Sampo motif (also based on Kalevala) are predominantly choral in character. cf. “The Bird Sang in the Darkness: Rautavaara and the Voice” 19-23.

WORKS CITED Battista, Maria di. “Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. eds. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2000. (127145). Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005. Bruth, Siglind. Saints in the Limelight: Representations of the Religious Quest on the Post-1945 Operatic Stage. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2003. Canetti, Elias. The Voices of Marrakesh. Trans. J.A. Underwood. London: Marion Boyars, 1993. Colli, Giorgio. Narodziny filozofii [La nascita della filosofia]. Trans. Stanisław Kasprzysiak. Warszawa: Res Publica, 1991. Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darknesss,” in Typhoon and Other Tales of the Sea by Joseph Conrad. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963. Fisher, John Andrew. “What the Hills Are Alive With: In Defense of the Sounds of Nature.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 56. 2 (Spring 1998): 167 - 179.

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Lange, Attie de, Gail Fincham and Wiesław Krajka. eds. Conrad in Africa: New Essays on “Heart of Darkness.” Boulder, Lublin, New York: Social Science Monographs, Maria CurieSkłodowska University, Columbia U Press, 2002. Maconie, Robin. The Concept of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Mangan, Timothy and Irene Herrmann. Paul Bowles on Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Moody, Ivan. “The Bird Sang in the Darkness: Rautavaara and the Voice.” Tempo. New Series. No 181. Scandinavian Issue. Cambridge University Press (June 1992): 19-23. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Die Geburt der Tragödie oder Griechenthum und Pessimismus.” Gesammelte Werke: Dritter Band. München: Musarion Verlag (1920): 3-165. Platon. Fajdros. Trans. Władysław Witwicki. Kęty: Antyk, 2002. Rautaavara, Einojuhani. Thomas. Opera in Three Acts. Libretto translated into English by Roy Goldblatt. Helsinki: Ondine Oy, The Friends of the Joensuu Song Festival, 1988. Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1977. The New Yorker. “Briefly Noted.” 4 Oct. 2010, 97. Wuorinen, John H. The History of Finland. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965.

NOISE AND VIOLENCE IN UP ABOVE THE WORLD – MUSIC AS TORTURE IN MODERN FICTION ANABELA DUARTE

My work is an inquiry into the aesthetics of noise and violence that ultimately lead to music used as torture (the recent War on Terror is an emergent example), in modern fiction, namely in the work of Bowles and his last novel, Up Above the World (1966) which he described as an “entertainment” in the manner of Graham Greene. Through this exploratory work on noise and violence we’ll see an increase in complexity and the possibility of an alternative system of meaning. In fact, my claim is that Bowles’s novel triggers dramatic implications the author never dreamed of and that what was supposed to be an exercise in the thriller genre turns out to be a novel, perhaps the first one that connects fiction with music as a weapon and as torture. Music, like drugs, is intuition, a path to knowledge. A path? No – a battlefield. Jacques Attali, Noise

Music as torture has recently been receiving media attention due to reports of abuses committed by U.S. forces in which sound and music are used as instruments of torture on Muslim prisoners in various theaters of war in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba. Hence it is appropriate to begin this essay by quoting Attali, one of the main theorists of the political economy of music who foresaw the use of noise as a weapon of war in situations of conflict, as an effective tool for power and social change. The epigraph, which highlights music as a battlefield of knowledge, also stresses the transformative capacity of music as a new mode of cultural production with the capacity to subvert the traditional economic relationship of base and superstructure, and at the same time the primacy of the visual over the auditory. In fact, the author foresees the possibility of the most ineffable of superstructures, music, to anticipate and produce historical developments and new

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social and cultural formations, a notion that today finds resonance in the work of Bruno Latour, who talks about Gabriel Tarde’s idea that the economy is like the Amazonian forest: [W]hen people arrive in the Amazonian forest, they think the forest is very rich and deeply rooted in the European way, while in reality, as pedologists have shown, the Amazonian forest is hung on the sky in a certain sense …. If you cut the forest, the ground immediately disappears and you find that the forest is attached by its branches to the sky and not rooted into the ground. The economy for Tarde is the same .… We plunge it into what we think of as material infrastructures when it is in fact attached or connected to what he calls “passionate interests”, that is, evaluations of belief and desire. (1)

Thus, Tarde turns the economy upside down and suggests a totally different understanding of music; something that Attali in the 80’s took note of and brought forth in his very first critical work on music. Applied to the use of torture, the musical phenomenon then raises several different questions. If music announces and enables the articulation of new social formations and predicts new historical developments, what is the revelation that results when it is used as a weapon and instrument of torture? What are the aesthetic and psychological effects on victims, military agents and both musical culture and the wider milieu? As consumers and scholars of music and culture, does this affect our lives and our perception of the musical phenomenon usually taken as entertainment and source of joy? (Cusick, “You Are in a Place” 4). On the other hand, when considered alongside fiction, how does music as torture behave as a musicalliterary phenomenon? Will it enable a radical change in the perception of our being and as object of study, or will it extend the range of our understanding of the phenomenon through the literary work? On one hand, music reassures by a channeling of noise, by the transformation of dissonance into harmony, by a ritual sacrifice, a simulacrum of the terror of violence that is noise. On the other hand, noise disturbs, produces and blurs differences at the same time, and with the advent of technology becomes a powerful weapon: In its biological reality, noise is a source of pain. Beyond a certain limit, it becomes an immaterial weapon of death. The ear, which transforms sound signals into electric impulses

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addressed to the brain, can be damaged, and even destroyed, when the frequency of a sound exceeds 20,000 hertz, or when its intensity exceeds 80 decibels. Diminished intellectual capacity, accelerated respiration and heartbeat, hypertension, slowed digestion, neurosis, altered diction: these are the consequences of excessive sound in the environment. (Attali 27)

This is the conceptual characterization of noise as violence and as a source of pain that will be used throughout the present work. However, our analysis also suggests a positive potential of noise as experienced by Bowles as a child and, consequently, as a means for inventiveness and break with classic patterns of sound. In Up Above the World this ambiguity of noise is sustained and explored through Day’s character. Likewise, we follow Michel Serres’s belief in the existence of a “‘parasite:’ … who intervenes to interrupt normal communications. By perturbing the routine exchange of messages, the parasite can provoke the production of novelty …. Like a ‘simple fluctuation, a chance event, a circumstance,’ noise too can produce a new system of meaning.” (The Parasite 18, qtd in “Negentropy” 268).

Noise and Violence Paul Bowles, as a composer, participated in the twentieth-century avant-garde classical scene both in Europe and the United States and was aware of the new techniques and the increasing use of nonmusical sounds, randomness, aestheticizing mistakes, recordings and ethnomusicological data that were extensively used by composers such as Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, and Bowles himself, among others. In addition to composing modern music and writing about it in his many articles on music, he also wrote soundtracks and theatre music, which dealt with sound effects and other sound objects. Therefore, he was acquainted with the use of noise and dissonance as a field of potential inventiveness and as a cultural weapon. Not only was he acquainted with it, but he also felt a strong attraction to it when he recalled: My first interest in music came from a purely hypnotic reaction that musical sounds always had on me – not music itself, for it

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always had formal patterns (even Jazz), and showed direction, had some sort of climax and worst of all had a predictable end. I refer to the musical sounds I could produce myself by spinning a large musical top or by sliding a metal object up and down the strings of a German zither my grandfather had given me, or the creaking of a rusty door hinge. (Swan 5)

Musical sounds are noises which Bowles experimented with as a child, feeling their texture, their trajectory of becoming, leaving behind the usual dichotomies of music, a space in between where he could freely immerse in a “non-thinking state” of nothingness, of pure affective tone. It is not surprising that Paul Bowles later conceived of the possibility of using music and noise as violence and torture in his own fiction, namely in Up Above the World, a novel published in 1966. It was a literary “entertainment” a la Graham Greene; in Bowles words: “I didn’t consider it a serious book like the others. It was like Graham Greene calls an “entertainment” (Caponi 52). But we know how serious Greene’s “entertainments” can be. Knowing the power of music and noise to produce a “non-thinking state which lasted as long as I repeated the sounds” (Swan 6), and the intensity whose force he still feels (“they still operate on me with as much force as ever”), it seems quite logical for him to put this force at work in the literary subject. The only difference now is that noise, the vibrational field of a force, no longer serves beauty and an aesthetic libertarian bias but modulates moods and affect to produce a bad vibe, an ambience of fear and dread, and finally torture. How an artist, both a composer and writer, produces a novel whose main character is not a literary protagonist but noise and violence itself is something we feel compelled to research.1 However, to note “the special attention he pays to tone, balance, structural integrity, and harmony [in the novel], in much the same way that he has composed short musical pieces” (Hibbard xiii), is not so much our trajectory as it is to investigate how he deviates from it, how he negotiates those musical techniques and aesthetics in order to propose a more disruptive, interstitial approach to fiction through noise and violence which as we know is an important “entity” in his fiction, one that bears witness to a continuous sense of mystery, unpredictable development and closure, a furor against easy solutions and a delicate prey for metamorphosis. Asked about the use of violence in his fiction, the author answered:

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… It’s unsettling to think that any moment life can flare up into senseless violence. But it can and does, and people need to be ready for it. What you make for others is first of all what you make for yourself. If I’m persuaded that our life is predicated upon violence, that the entire structure of what we call civilization, the scaffolding that we’ve built up over the millenia, can collapse at any moment, then whatever I write is going to be affected by that assumption. The process of life presupposes violence, in the plant world the same as the animal world. But among the animals only man can conceptualize violence. Only man can enjoy the idea of destruction. (Caponi 122)

Along with noise and violence, we find in Up Above the World a unique literary work amazingly tuned to today’s concerns with the use of music as a weapon and as torture in the context of the new realities of the War on Terror. In fact, the so-called “No Touch Torture” is the use of music to inflict pain and the use of programmed sound to break someone’s personality, or better: … a “modern system of torture” [that] aims to combine “sensory disorientation” – isolation, standing, extremes of heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence – with self-inflicted pain, both physical and psychological, so as to cause a prisoner’s very “identity to disintegrate.” (Cusick n.pag.)

This is very different from the “entertainment” Bowles thought to produce. In “Up Above the World” we can trace how music as torture produces certain structural effects, and how noise and violence work together to construct a symbolic field of fear and dread throughout the narrative. Treated as a death force, violence is “the excess which disturbs the normal run of things by desiring always more and more” (Zizek 54). However, our aim is not to get rid of this excess, but to give it a ride and also a form and a sound. Right at the beginning of the novel the symbolic mechanism of fear and dread starts working: The ship was in; they [the Slades] had heard its mournful whistle when it had arrived out in the harbour at some dark hour during the night. (865)

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The Slades, a couple of American tourists in a Latin-American country, are waiting for the ship that will carry them to their exotic dark destination. And these very first lines of the novel immediately situate the reader in a strange and disturbing environment with the sound of a “mournful whistle” in a spectral “dark night.” “The ship was in” reveals a fantasmatic dimension of irreversibility, a wondering desire that can be neither fulfilled nor contained, so that noise and violence as a death force can spread its influence throughout the text like some poisonous gas. Words such as “rain,” “insects,” and “night creatures” enact a certain textural quality throughout the text, be it by repetition or musical substance – they produce noises connected with fear, with what Mrs. Rainmantle calls the “violent ward:” A cockatoo in a back patio screamed twice; it was the voice of a demon. “Good God! We’re back in the violent ward,” said Mrs. Rainmantle. (875)

The first part of the novel is full of musical references and natural sounds that keep reminding us of disquieting backgrounds through apparently naïf or ironic surfaces: “Are there sharks in the water, Daddy?”….”Of course there are, dear [Dr. Slade]” (870) …. “There is a place called Paraíso only 32 km from here .… Big stones in the jungle, with faces in them. They’ll give you nightmares! .... Sabe lo que son, las pesadillas?” (872)

The vibrational field of language is everywhere connecting the narrative to a full spectrum of sonic dominance, like a virus, an audio virus that captures and induces terror. This language and its symbolization is what makes noise even more effective as a predatory virosonic technique: “the wide sound of the rain that fell,” “a constant tapestry of insect sounds – the roar of the rain,” “the mechanical sound of the insects,” a cockatoo in a back patio screamed twice,” “it was the voice of a demon,” “the steady chorus of insects and tree frogs,” “[i]t’s a kind of a soundproofing,” “the clamour of the frogs,” “the insects sang,” “the steady song of the night creatures.” Through repetition, timbre, and textural quality, the narrative is built upon layers of musical significance that become meaningful through language and its symbolic field of expression – awe and fear.

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Bowles always gave importance to the space between the words, its sound and rhythm. And if in his music there is a preference for a rhythmic and melodic perception (rhythmelody) (Goodman 60), resulting in the author’s abundant production of songs and short form work, in “Up Above the World” he clearly strives for a more textural and rhythmic approach (texturhythm) (ibid.). Texture and rhythm both work to produce a narrative that is always not fully formed so that violence and noise can keep disturbing any pre-composed representation and push desire beyond its proper limits. This excess, which produces “bad” violence also keeps it inventive and singular. Music as Torture From the second part on, we start feeling in real time the effects of violence and noise in the protagonists of the story. Grove (Grover, Grovero, Vero) or Mr. Soto, the MC of the story, its death-force, is the one who never is satisfied, the one who is pushing desire always to its limitless horizon. He is the noise man, the avatar of the “violent ward” and the ultimate brain of evil and conspiracy. In fact, picking up what was left of the detective stories, Bowles himself declared: During the winter [in 1962] I began to work on a novel whose writing I intended to make a purely pleasurable pastime. I tried to recapture the state of mind which had produced the thrillers I had read …. (WS 355)

But one thing interesting about thrillers and detective fiction according to G.K. Chesterton in “Defense of Detective Stories,” is that they are “based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies,” meaning that “ it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves” (qtd. in Zizek 55), i.e. the figures of morality itself. Thus the figure of the detective, the agent of social justice is somewhat outside of morality so that according to Zizek, based on Kant, “the absolute excess is that of the law itself.” The great divide is then not on an external opposition “between law (the romantic detective) and its criminal transgression (the moral burglars)” but on an opposition “internal to the transgression itself,” i.e. between particular transgressions and the absolute transgression, that is, universal law (ibid.).

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But is it really so? Modernity, as suggested by the coordinates of Kafka, reveals the searing power of law and of language. For instance, in The Penal Colony, the war machine is a machine of inscription. The condemned man doesn’t need to know his sentence for he experiences it on his own body: “It would be useless to tell him. It will be put to him physically,” says the officer (Kafka 9). And whatever the sentence is, namely the words of punishment to be inscribed on his body by the inscribing machine, it is irrevocably a death sentence. The sublime unity of the machine (read universal law) makes all men bend their heads to it, but in the end it suddenly explodes and falls to pieces. So much for the absolute excess of law at work. However, Bowles is not interested in the excesses of law, nor in morality itself, even when perceived as mostly dark and transgressive. Similarly, in “A Distant Episode,” he enacts a process of thought glitches that transforms languages into dialects, and a linguist into a speechless tin can groovy machine: “The words penetrated for the first time in many months. Noises…” (220). So much for the absolute excess of language at work. “Up Above the World” proposes something else. It rejects excesses of law and language and foregrounds an interstitial space, beyond good and evil, provoking techniques of noise and violence to create a different relational field and new textures of knowledge. So that if language cannot fully express the complexity of experience, will music and noise used as torture further develop the forces of becoming in the novel? The work has no single point or identity, no closure but resonance, and multiple dynamics. In what way do these sensations (its inner rhythm) and aesthetic drives mould the vibrational field of the work? Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “No-one shall be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (Amnesty International/CODESRIA). And the “Music Torture: Research Perspectives” handout on torture issues (MCS), also notes:2 … music rarely occurs “alone” in these contexts, and is generally not the only medium through which the people concerned are mistreated .… Often, music may be used to mask the use of torture, and to underline the basic power relations – absolute power versus absolute powerlessness – that are central to the infliction of torture. (2)

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In Bowles’s novel, we can see how this parametric field of torture pulls out what was already virtually present in the narrative.3 After arriving at their destination, the Slades are invited by Grove, the noise man, to his exquisite apartment on top of the hill, knowing neither his background nor his plans: Dr. Slade watched the young man as he walked away across the terrace. He frowned. The all-enveloping charm of his young host made him uneasy; without hesitation he rejected it. There was no chance of its being real. (931)

However, in spite of his suspicions, Slade went on living there. Grove, who killed his mother while she was asleep in the same bedroom occupied by Day, the wife of Dr. Slade, fears she might know something about the incident and rather meticulously starts building a complex “no touch torture” narcosonic system to extract the truth out of the couple. Dr. Slade is sent to Los Hermanos, a farm in the middle of the jungle, and closed up in a dark room under the pretext of being infected with a new virus, the Newbold, invented by Grove. Slade feels lost with no spatial or visual references and begins to think he is surrounded by “invaders from outer space” (950). There’s a whole vibrational force (infrasounds) that through drugs and noise is cutting his relational field of communication, reducing the spectrum of his perceptions, but at the same time, increasing his auditory capacities – unique source for self-control: … he listens and hears frogs singing, but they sound far away (946); He holds his breath, listens again. Frogs. A dog yaps in the distance (947).4 [He thinks himself still part of a terrible dream] bristling with fear, this unchanging silent house with the men somewhere in it waiting to catch him. (947)

Concurrently, Day, Dr. Slade’s wife, is trapped in Grove’s “prepared” apartment. She begins hearing a strange music, a “never-ending music, a music that was silent, yet present; it was like the wheezing, low notes of a harmonium” (943). Silence here (silent house – silent music) is the vibrational field of violence, the limitless desire, that spreads throughout the text like an insidious low resonance - a spectral presence whose sound cannot be articulated but reverberates. (Silence here is used as a potential source of sound following John Cage’s musical aesthetics. Drawing on a politics of amplitude through the

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silence-noise axis, the same effect of disruptive behaviour is produced.) The narcosonic effect of LSD and this “silent music” are, in effect, a pansensory design of control that produces a particular set of neurophysiological responses: “Vigilant control is no longer merely panoptic but pansensory” (Goodman 64). For Day, “a vast novel was unfolding. She recognized the backdrop as a sinister distortion of the actual landscape outside the apartment” (943). She feels unwell, starts moaning and shivering of nervousness and wonders how “it is possible to be in so decentralized a state and yet be aware, not only of everything inside and outside herself, but also of the fact that the disintegration was still in process” (945). This decentralization and disintegration of personality is what historian and expert on the subject of the CIA and torture, Alfred McCoy, writes about: Although seemingly less brutal, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological scars. The victims often need treatment to recover from trauma far more crippling than physical pain. (The Boston Globe)

Psychological manipulation, drugs and forced positions, humiliation, creating a sense of unfamiliarity, disorientation and isolation or sensorial privation and, finally, using sound to produce and modulate fear cause more damage than physical torture and no visible traces remain. Grove, the agent of torture, knows the power of such vibrational field of violence, of its death force, when he intentionally forbids Luchita, his lover, to put on some music: “Please don’t monkey with the tape recorder or the phonograph. I’ve got them both set up the way I want” (944). Gradually the field of resonance of the novel, its low-frequency infrasonic tones, starts operating at a personal level, insecurity breaks through and feelings start to be felt and heard beyond concealment and deception. It is appropriate to note that in a previous version of the novel curiously named “Where the Slades Went,” Bowles explicitly talks of torture connected with psychological pressure and post-hypnotic trauma. As Grove tries to figure out what Day remembers of the crime in Puerto Farol, he pushes her back to traumatic events she wishes to forget, making her feel again a victim of torture:

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There had been an evening several years earlier, before she had become Knight’s [Slade] secretary, when she allowed herself to be hypnotized by a friend who was a professor of psychology. She had found the post-hypnotic suggestions a kind of torture to carry out; it had made her very unhappy at the time. In front of the statue, as he [Grove] talked, his words had pulled her back there by the hair of her head. (173; emphasis mine)

Felt-thought, the inner rhythm of noise, is a skin that thinks and Day begins feeling this creative rhythm of sensations in her own skin. She finds Grove’s voice terribly familiar – “it was like a sound she had known all her life” (969) – and she also feels strange that she feels “she knew Grove so well.” She even feels his body “practically vibrating with hostility.” Day knows without knowing: [Grove and Thorny, his assistant, have been] feeding them LSD, shooting them full of scopolamine and morphine, putting them under and bringing them out again, and providing special sound effects for each phase of the program. (1007)

Tape recorders were a fundamental musical device: [the room] at Los Hermanos had to be kept dark, and at times there was an endless whispering, scarcely loud enough to hear …; then the repeated phrases seemed to grow in volume and fill every corner. (ibid.)

Besides infratones and subliminal messages (“dawn will be breaking soon”), Free Jazz and Cecil Taylor are also used to produce certain sonic “effects” in the text. They underline the flight from a revealing axis and express their non-sequential nature, noisy and free soothing resolutions. But while Free Jazz stands for change and a libertarian attitude, privileging improvised forms, in this particular novel, Bowles makes it more of a model of cerebration, like progressive jazz, with an additional turn on violence and conspiracy. Just after arriving from San Felipe Tonatan, so Grove told Luchita, Thorny seems very nervous and tells about the running over of a dog on their way back. Grove makes him drink and tells him in a conspirational tone not to talk about it. Thorny starts drinking again and says: “Put on the new Cecil Taylor” (911). Still listening to the jazz he tells Luchita Grove’s

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mother is dead. In fact, they both killed her and made it look like an accident. Accordingly, Free Jazz and Cecil Taylor respond antiphonically to the burst of violence and noise that emerges from the narrative and its events. (For Bowles’s thoughts on progressive jazz see “Notes on Musicological Recordings from Morocco” 57A.) Back to the beginning, we can see how noise pushed beyond its limits becomes a source of torture and pain and how excessive sound in the environment affects its victims. This also can be used as a weapon and Grove quite ironically illustrates it when recording his “guerrilla” monologues and sonic data through the microphones that “often reminded him of a machine gun. A metralladora, modelo bolsillo, he thought, and smiled” (928). However, Day, who is one of the victims of this treatment, responds to it in an ambiguous fashion. She can feel/hear Grove’s body “vibrating with hostility” with perfect lucidity: “Several times during the day she had been nettled by his air of insolent triumph as he looked at her” (969). Grove is underlining his superiority of knowledge (of the conspiracy) over her, so typical of power versus powerlessness, the core of power relations in torture. So what is the matter with her? Why doesn’t she run out of the house and save herself and her husband? Actually, she does. She runs to the village by the end of the novel, but to finally meet Grove again and follow him without resistance. The manuscript of the novel, entitled “Where the Slades Went,” gives a hint about this apparent passivity by suggesting a deeper bond between Day and Grove. When they were in the kitchen, their dialogue in this previous work is more developed and a more pronounced perceptual connection between both characters is felt: She went on looking at him, aware suddenly that there was a shadowy bond between them. It was at that instant when she first felt physically afraid of him. And for some hidden reason she hoped never to discover he was afraid of her. (n.pag.)

Actually, there is in Up Above the World a slightly modified version of this block quote on the third part of the novel (992), but the manuscript still doubly emphasizes that perception by further suggesting a sexual project to seduce Day:

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To Thorny’s way of thinking there had been a grave flaw in the fabric of this plan: it astonished him that Grove should have included the sex project with Day, a procedure which involved starting the old man’s treatment several hours before hers. (226)

And, in fact, that’s what happens on the novel, that is, Dr. Slade fells ill before Day. Later Thorny comments: “It was this willingness to take the risk of counting on his own charm to assure the desired result that had shocked Thorny” (ibid.) It seems clear then that Bowles intended somehow to suggest a deeper bond between the two characters Day and Grove. It is not that suddenly they fell in love with each other, like Stenham and Lee in The Spider’s House, one betraying Dr. Slade, the other ones their beliefs and Amar. Although a “shadowy bond between them” does exist, Day is the only one in the novel (besides Thorny) who knows how “desperate and final [is] his manner” and finally in the milieu of the fiesta, she discovers what he is up to and how he is trying to manipulate her: She considered him a moment. He still thinks he can manipulate me, she thought scornfully …. He expects me to put up resistance. An unexpected compliance could throw him off balance, and she might seize the initiative in the battle. (1013)

The singular force of transformation, then, is that Day is also an agent of noise. Her defiant schema and vection is a means for the “battlefield to knowledge” through noise, this turbulence that symbolizes an increase in complexity in Day’s behaviour and presents the possibility of a break with the past, of a new beginning, a “soundfigural clinamen.” (A stochastic musico/sound literary phenomenon which causes turbulence in the narrative and goes beyond its own sense or system of meaning, looking for an alternative space, immeasurable, improbable and heterogeneous.) And it is fitting that this revelation should take place during a fiesta. The fiesta in its most primitive form gathered both sacred and secular forces for the renewal and regeneration of crops and the tribe. It is inseparable from music as it is symbolizes a time for liberation of popular expression and often the breaking of patterned behaviors. Thus, it is reasonable to assume, with Attali, that the fiesta/music is

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the ritualization of noise as the simulacrum of ritual murder, the sacrifice needed to appease violence and its death force: [Day] saw the shiny painted masks: skulls, monkeys, demons – and the purpose of the fiesta came to her. It was not meant to celebrate the glory of God, or the saint in whose honor it was named. Instead, it was a night of collective fear, when everyone agreed to be frightened. (998)

And Day wants to be a part of it. Not to see the dead end of its return to order out of chaos, not to reconcile herself with Grove, the other agent of noise, but to immerse herself in the vibrational field of the force, for she is the one who “stands at all times in daring …” (Heidegger qtd. in Zizek 59), dealing with the active and the reactive dimensions of the field, making them multiple in each new beginning, wondering where it will take her, experimenting. She follows Grove and they go into a booth and sit down side by side on a small bench: Without getting up, he leaned over the railing and looked downward. There was only the darkness there, and she knew it as well as he, yet she too found herself staring out at the same part of the invisible countryside. (1015)

Day and Grove both stare at the unseen, at the unsaid and to the powerful dimension of the force, its furor, like in “a purely hypnotic reaction” to the ever-desiring machine of sound and noise.

NOTES 1

The musical sound as a form of expression and deterritorialization, in the sense of non organized sound, i.e. noise, is also found in Kafka’s works. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. 2 Music, Conflict and the State (MCS) research group, based in the U Gottingen, Germany, cesead to function on April 29, 2014 (e-mail communication 29.04.2014). 3 Torture not always was defined as a thoroughly negative social behaviour. In Society Against the State, the anthropologist Pierre Clastres argues that Kafka and his fiction (The Penal Colony, curiously) anticipate what is an irreducible issue: the connection between law, language/writing and the body. However, in primitive societies, namely

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the Guayaki, which he studied extensively, suffering by extreme uses of body torture, teaches the individual in unpredictable ways. Scars, deep marks on body and face, are inscriptions to remember the law, and the body is a vessel of memory. However, instead of saying “honour your superiors” as is the case in Kafka’s work, the body marks declare: “Do not covet power, do not be a slave” (my translation 182). 4 Reports from victims of torture usually reveal the auditory sense as the only spatial reference and privileged connection with the exterior world while being shackled and hooded in dark rooms. Sensorial disorientation also makes them feel like being out of the world or disconnected. In 2003, an Algerian worker made prisoner reports while being taken to a dark prison where people would shout at him: “You are in a place that is out of the world. No one knows where you are, no one is going to defend you” (Cusick 1). In a very suggestive manner Grove’s house on the top of the hill can be also seen as a place out of the world and conductive to isolation and violence. See Suzanne G. Cusick.

WORKS CITED Amnesty International/CODESRIA. Monitoring and Investigating Torture and Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment, and Prison Conditions. Russel Press, 2000. Attali, Jacques. Noise: the Political Economy of Music. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Bowles, Paul, Collected Stories & Later Writings. New York: The Library of America, 2002. ––––. “Notes on Musicological Recordings from Morocco.” MS. Special Collections. University of Delaware Library. Delaware, 1959. ––––. “Where the Slades Went.” n.d., MS. Paul Bowles Collection, Harry Ransom Center, Austin. Cage, John. Silence. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. Caponi, Gena Dagel. ed. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993, 52. Clastres, Pierre. A Sociedade Contra o Estado. Trans. Bernardo Frey. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1975. Cusick, Suzanne G. “Music as Torture/Music as Weapon,” Trans – Revista Transcultural de Música. 2006. Web. 14.2.2012. ––––. “You are in a place that is out of the world: Music in the detention camps of the Global War on terror.” Journal of the Society for American Music. 2. 1. (2008): 1-26. Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010.

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Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Kafka, Franz. Na Colónia Penal. Trans. Susana Gabirro. Lisboa: Tempus editores, Lda. n.d. ––––. In the Penal Colony. Trans. Michael Hofmann. London: Penguin Classics, 2011. Latour, Bruno. “Of Whales and the Amazon Forest: Gabriel Tarde and Cosmopolitics,” Interview by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. 24 Nov. 2008. Web. Micropolitics: Exploring EthicoAesthetics, Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. 3. (October 2009):1-15. Lyotard, Jean-François. Discours, Figure. 5th ed. Paris: Klincksieck, 2002. Manning, Erin. “Creative Propositions for Thought in Motion.” Inflexions 1.1 “How is Research-Creation? May 2008, Web. 14.02.2012 McCoy, Alfred W. “Torture at Abu Ghraib followed CIA’s manual,” The Boston Globe 14 May, 2004. Music, Conflict and the State. “Music Torture: Research Perspectives.” eds. M. J. Grant, Anna Papaeti and Stephanie Leder. Background Paper for the Workshop on 29 April. U Gottingen: Gottingen, 2011. Rodowick, D. N. Reading the Figural or Philosophy after the New Media: Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001. Swan, Claudia. ed. Paul Bowles’s Music. New York: EosMusic Inc, 1995. White, Eric Charles. “Negentropy, Noise, and Emancipatory Thought,” Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Chicago: The University Chicago Press, 1991. (263-277). Zizek, Slavoj. Violence. London: Profile Books Ltd, 2009.

IV NO MAPS FOR THESE TERRITORIES: BOWLES, BURROUGHS AND BEYOND

AESTHETIC TOURISTS: THE SHELTERING SKY’S CRITIQUE OF MODERNISM CHRISTOPHER LESLIE

This paper considers The Sheltering Sky as a late generation of modernism. The misadventures of Kit and Port are a way of showing what happens when modernist aesthetics goes beyond literary experimentation and becomes a lifestyle. Wanting to be free from the constraints of culture and language is possible – for a moment, in a Parisian salon. Modernism did provide a mechanism for artists to take an outsider’s look at language and society, but it was unable to assist real people in contexts radically different than the ones they were used to. In their role as modernist tourists who have confused artistic representation with a fashion statement, Kit and Port are unable to obtain the true promise of the modernist movement. Their unfortunate fates encourage Bowles’s readers to see modernism as a form of expression, instead of as a way of life.

As is often reported, Paul Bowles encountered Gertrude Stein’s work while in high school in 1927 and it was she who encouraged him to visit Morocco. Before Bowles’s career was underway, Stein’s work was reaching its full influence, and so it is easy to think that The Sheltering Sky (1949), coming after Stein and the other modernists of the thirties and forties, has little to do with modernism. Nevertheless, there are several points where the novel directly touches upon Stein’s work. By seeking out Steinian moments in The Sheltering Sky, it is possible to see the novel as a critique of the modernist project. This paper proposes that the calamities of Kit and Port, the modernist tourists, are a way of showing what happens when artistic representation is confused as a way of life. By contrasting Stein’s Three Lives with Sheltering Sky, one can see Bowles reevaluating the modernist project, exhorting his readers to see modernist style as a literary experiment and not a lifestyle. Wanting to “make it new,” wanting to be free from the constraints of culture and language, is possible – for a moment, in a Parisian salon. The Sheltering Sky presents what happens the rest of the time. Bowles’s critique

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demonstrates that something more needs to come after one breaks with tradition and makes it new. While modernism did provide a mechanism for artists to take an outsider’s look at language and society, it was unable to assist real people in contexts radically different from the ones they are used to. As such, Bowles provides a much-needed and useful critique of modernist aesthetics. The connection between Bowles and the first-generation modernist Gertrude Stein is well documented, demonstrating Bowles’s involvement with modernist circles. While in high school, the 17year-old Bowles searched out a copy of the Paris literary magazine transition. In that year, transition featured parts of James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake. As documented by Christopher SawyerLauçanno, Bowles became a regular reader and placed his first professionally published poem there in 1928 alongside the work of Stein and others (44). In December 1930, Bowles solicited contributions for a special edition of The Messenger from William Carlos Williams and Stein (Carr 63). As told by Bowles in his autobiography, Without Stopping, he arrived in Paris on April 10, 1931 when he was twenty years old. He called on Stein, and she said he did not appear as she expected. From his letters she had thought he was a gentleman of seventy-five – Toklas interjected a “highly eccentric” gentleman (106). After Copland joined him, the famous suggestion came to Bowles that he should visit Tangier. Lawrence D. Stewart’s study Paul Bowles: The Illumination of North Africa documents the connection between the pair well. In addition to an extensive discussion based on the correspondence between Bowles and Stein, Stewart also taped a conversation with Bowles in Santa Monica, California, over six days in January 1969. One of Stewart’s remarkable findings is that, in spite of what Bowles writes in his autobiography, it is Toklas and not Stein who suggested the trip to North Africa. When getting ready to leave Bilignin, Stein asked Bowles where he was going. He said he would go to Villefranche, where Jean Cocteau was, because it would be nice to be in that kind of environment. Stein said, “O shame on you! Anybody can go there. Why don’t you go somewhere worthwhile?” He countered that he wanted to go somewhere pleasant by the sea, and Toklas – not Stein – suggested, “Why doesn’t Fred go to Tangier” (12). The trip that Toklas proposed ended up bearing unfortunate resemblance to The Sheltering Sky. As told in Without Stopping,

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Bowles and Copeland bought tickets on the Iméréthie II (after Copland was reassured that they had pianos in Tangier). They sailed from Marseilles in late July, bound for Morocco. Just as they got on board, though, they found out that the ship was not going to Tangier. Instead, the first port call would be Oran, in Algeria, incidentally the place Bowles made the starting point of The Sheltering Sky. Bowles says Oran is “beautiful and terrible” after a one-day layover (WS 125). During this voyage, he took side trips, including one to a fortress, reminding the reader of Bowles’s fiction. The autobiographical connections in his writing continue with another trip back to Tangier in 1932 (WS 149). Bowles made a trip to Fez, remaining locked in with Abdallah Drissi in Fez for fourteen days. The way Bowles crafts the story is much like Kit’s experience. He writes how he is locked in the apartment with no visitors and tells the passing of time only from the activities in the yard. He reports that all he could see was a “square of sky” that changed color during the day (WS 150); this is much like Kit’s observation in Chapter 27 of The Sheltering Sky, where next to her mattress was “a tiny square window with iron grillwork across the opening” (222). Bowles continued to exploit the biographical similarities when he returned to Paris in May 1932, learning he had typhoid. Here, he must stay in the hospital for two weeks packed with ice, unable to comprehend the events around him. This echoes the experience of Port, save for of course Bowles was fortunate enough to have fallen ill where he had access to medical care. Later in Tangier, after he had started to write The Sheltering Sky, Bowles tantalizes his readers with another detail: he reports recurring meetings with a pair just like Eric and his mother in hotel lobbies in Fez, Tangier, Algeciras, and in Córdoba. By the time they had gone their own way, Bowles says they had been “firmly implanted” in the book as secondary characters, stating that he regrets turning them in to caricatures (TSS 277). This kind of art based on autobiography is a modernist technique espoused by Gertrude Stein. In explaining how Eric and his mother came to be part of the novel, Bowles states that his writing process had been well established at that point: the landscape came from memory, presumably from his 1931 travels, and those memories were augmented by “details reported from the daily life” while he was writing. “I never knew what I was going to write on the following day because I had not yet lived the following day” (WS 278). This is not unlike what Stein had already done to make her novel Three Lives. As

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reported in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein mediated on the sentences for her novel Three Lives while she was sitting for Picasso’s portrait of her. The “poignant incidents” that she noticed walking down the hill from the rue Ravignan were integrated into the life of Melanctha (Three Lives 46). The portraits of Kit and Port, in spite of their autobiographical overtones, nevertheless lack some essential characteristics. The differences between Bowles’s biography and the characters is the reader’s first glimmer that that the apparent autobiography is not an uncritical use of lived experience but, instead, artistic representation. Bowles himself traveled with more purpose. Greg A. Mullins points out that Bowles was unlike Port, increasingly less a traveler and “more like an anthropologist,” fluent in the local languages, and critical of colonialism. Bowles began a project of making translations from Maghrebi Arabic, especially of tales based on traditional folk tales, and also made recordings of Moroccan music for the Library of Congress. So the brash, ethnocentric Port is far removed from the author’s biography. What Bowles writes in his autobiography also contrasts with Kit and Port’s attitude while traveling in the Maghreb. In Morocco with Harry Dunham, Bowles writes that his typical attempt of “pretending not to exist” while traveling was not working because he was so blond. He says that he wanted everything that was happening to “continue exactly if I were not there,” but this was not Dunham’s plan: [Dunham] expected his presence to change everything and in the direction which interested him. I told him that was not an intelligent way to travel. Obviously he could not change; he continued to make his presence felt in situations I believed we should both strive for invisibility. (131-2)

In an important contrast, the characters Kit and Port demand attention when they travel, whereas Bowles reports that he himself sought to be unobtrusive. Thus, we might understand the novel better if we align Kit and Port with Dunham and contrast them to Bowels. The setting of the novel also serves to indicate a disconnect between real life and the experiences of Kit and Port. Certainly, what we know of the International Zone of Tangier in 1947 does not quite fit with the story. Michelle Green describes the allure of this area:

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Since few questions were asked of new arrivals, any fugitive could shed his [sic] sullied persona and take on the coloration of a solid citizen; spies, war criminals, Nazis, remittance men, disbarred lawyers, unlicensed doctors and defrocked priests had all been reborn in Tangier. Poseurs could alter themselves with abandon: In Tangier’s rarefied climate, social climbers metamorphosed into bluebloods, bank clerks became barons, and shopgirls, grandes dames. (10)

Green describes the sybaritic pleasures that made expatriates stay away from home; one can presume that Tangier was alluring because it provided freedom from normalcy and glamorous enticements. This is far from what one reads in the novel. The description in The Sheltering Sky seeks to distance the reader from presuppositions of what it is like to live in the International Zone. One does not read of international espionage and colonial privilege, but of the everyday experiences of local people. This disruption should be a further clue that neither the narrator nor the characters should be thought to present the author’s biography. Disconnecting the biography of Bowles from the characters of Port and Kit, in fact, provides an opportunity to consider the novel as an analysis of a personality type instead of a biographical exercise. Port exclaims early in the novel that he is a traveler, not a tourist. He wants to get to know a place beyond the touristic spots. But if one is open to the idea that this is not a cloaked Bowles speaking, it is easier to see that this exclamation is somewhat in bad faith. Port travels almost randomly, seeing experience by jumping from place to place without a plan. As noted by Richard F. Patteson, The Sheltering Sky is one of Bowles’s “most striking accounts” of the dangers of travelling. And while Port says he is a traveler and not a tourist, hoping to penetrate some interior somewhere, Patteson reminds us that all Port does is travel “just about to the suburbs and get lost” (167). Indeed, Port is barely able to communicate with the local people, and he has unreasonable expectations of the places that are unfamiliar; he expects there to be accommodations for visitors in every town, and he expects that people will be willing to help him. This is not getting to know a place; at best, it is making the place get to know him. Bowles has given us a clue as to how we can move away from presuming that he is one of the main characters of this story. In his autobiography, Bowles says that the novel is an elaboration of the professor’s experience in his 1947 story “A Distant Episode.” In this

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story, a linguist who is studying dialectical variations of Maghrebi travels to an unnamed “warm country” to find an old friend. The narrator notes how the local people bristle at the presence of this scrutinizing tourist. At a café he asks the proprietor if he sells a box made of a camel udder because he is making a collection of them. This request makes the man angry at first, but then he calms himself and says sometimes the Reguibat has them and promises to take him to find a visiting caravan. The proprietor takes him out of town to meet the caravan. Finally, they arrive at a quarry where there is a flute playing. “‘These people are not primitives,’ the Professor found himself saying in his mind” (5), giving readers a sense of the Professor’s disrespect for local cultures. Soon enough, some Reguiba men hold him up. The character’s thoughts further reveal his insensitivity. He remembers hearing that they are sinister, but now can test if the reputation is accurate and, in the end, learn about the people: He did not doubt for a moment that the adventure would prove to be a kind of warning against foolishness on his part – a warning which in retrospect would be half sinister, half farcical. (7)

And so the Professor, who studies culture, has forgotten that the culture he studies is not an inert object, to his downfall. He is not led into danger by his work, however. He has left the relative safety of the town in pursuit of a curio, the box made of a camel udder. The story presents a strange tension here: he is not a tourist, he is a professional – but as a professional he has led himself into a difficult situation because of his false sense of security. One finds it hard to gain sympathy for him because it is not the pursuit of his profession but his love for mementoes that leads to his fate. In the morning, the assaulted professor is brutalized. His tongue is cut out, literally taking the lingua out of the linguist. The Professor is curiously incapable of reacting to the incident with feeling. Instead, Bowles records his analytical thoughts: “The word ‘operation’ kept going through his mind; it calmed his terror somewhat as he sank back into darkness” (7). At a rest stop the next night, the men take him out and, for their own amusement, wrap him with girdles made of the bottoms of tin cans “until he was entirely within a suit of armor that covered him with its circular metal scales.” With this process, the

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Professor is “no longer conscious”; “he existed in the middle of the movements made by these other men” (9). Then they put him back in the sack. The Professor’s wounds heal, but he “did not begin to think again” for a long time, only making his crazy dance to amuse the children with a jangling racket. A year later, the trained Professor is used for levity after large meals: he can perform a handspring, make growling noises, and dance with a grimace – and also he obscenely gestures to delight the women: He easily fell in with their sense of ritual, and evolved an elementary sort of “program” to present when he was called for: dancing, rolling on the ground, imitating certain animals, and finally rushing toward the group in feigned anger, to see the resultant confusion and hilarity. (10)

They sell him to a man in Fogra who enjoys his act. When he hears classical Arabic, the words penetrate his delirium, causing the Professor pain: “he had begun to enter into consciousness again” (11). He refuses to perform his dance. He escapes and runs out of town. The last image is at the end of the day; we hear the thoughts of a soldier who fires a “pot-shot” at him. The soldier watches smilingly as the rattling of the Professor’s tin recedes into silence beyond the gate. Somehow, Bowles readers’s should see the story of the Professor as a key to understanding The Sheltering Sky. The Professor is not a biographical, idealized vision of Bowles the translator and preserver. Instead, the Professor’s personality is the classifying and evaluating philologist of the nineteenth century who, like the contemporary naturalists, was bent on describing the Other in order to establish its essential differences. In the same way as Bowles’s friend Dunham, the Professor is intrusive and expects that the foreign land will adapt to him and serve his needs. The local people despise this personality and the Professor is made into a toy for their amusement. In spite of the autobiographical overtones of The Sheltering Sky, therefore, we need to sever the novel from a biographical reading. The ill-fated, modernist manner in which Kit and Port perceive the world is the way to best understand this derogatory portrait. Although the narration of the story is typically realist in style, the free indirect discourse of the story often does see the world through Kit and Port’s modernist sensibilities.

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This is obvious at the start of the novel. In the same way that modernism attempted to strip its characters of their history and culture, Kit remarks that “the people of each country get more like the people of every other country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture – nothing, nothing” (8). Port, on the street, in a section of stream of consciousness, feels as if everyone he sees is inscrutable: “Their faces are masks” (12). This way of seeing the world recalls the modernist aesthetic, and the idea of the mask is a specific allusion to Picasso’s portrait of Stein. When Port is watching Eric and his mother, the narrator remarks that he is “fascinated as always” when a human being is reduced to an “automaton or caricature.” This kind of person delights him, no matter what the circumstance and by whatever means they are reduced (38). This use of modernist aesthetics is most pronounced when Kit is on the train and crosses through the fourth-class carriage. Here, time slows down and we are presented with Kit’s encounter with insulting minutia: Now all she needed was to get to the door. Barring her way was a wild-faced man holding a severed sheep’s head, its eyes like agate marbles staring from their sockets. “Oh!” she moaned. The man looked at her stolidly, making no movement to let her by. Using all her strength, she fought her way around him, rubbing her skirt against the bloody neck as she squeezed past .… She gripped the iron railing and looked directly into the most hideous human face she had ever seen. The tall man wore cast-off European clothes, and a burlap bag over his head like a haïk. But where his nose should have been there was a dark triangular abyss, and the strange flat lips were white. (6364)

The multiple, disjointed images of a decrepit humanity point to a modernist way of seeing the world. Aestheticizing the mass public, painting masks instead of faces, reducing individuals to their essential characteristics, turning to the primitive for inspiration: these are all modernist techniques. But the novel does not present these ideas as paintings. Instead, Bowles has demonstrated this aesthetic as part of dramatic characterization: this is their activity of seeing the world, and through this action, we are able to judge their character. The end result is not at all flattering to Kit and Port. It is clear that the characters in The Sheltering Sky are portrayed as using a modernist sensibility. However, this way of seeing the world

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in an environment that does not lend itself to this methodology is not honored by the narrative. The second and third books of the novel demonstrate what modernism would be like if it were a lived experience instead of an approach to art. Port in his illness is described as becoming dehumanized, and later, Kit’s imprisonment strips from her a sense of time and space, both recalling Stein’s use of the “continuous present” that she employs in Three Lives. Here are two visions of truly living outside language: both characters get the modernist experience they sought after, but they had not realized the consequences of getting what they wanted. The reader, however, is taught that modernism is an approach to poetry and does not offer an actionable way of seeing the world. Book 2 demonstrates Port’s downfall. In Chapter 19, Port says he wants to penetrate to the true nature of existence – to “penetrate to the interior of somewhere” (129). This is the modernist dream, to strip away the encroachment of civilization and live a more genuine life. In Chapter 21, on the way to El Ga’a, Kit is amazed at a particularly tall man and refers to him as “that one,” an echo of the Professor’s classifying nature. Port is beginning to feel sick, but Kit is coming alive; she notes, “It is rather wonderful … to be riding past such people in the Atomic Age” (143). The phrase “such people” aptly illustrates her outsider status at the same time that it calls attention to her failure to appreciate difference. Kit and Port cannot find hotels or accommodations; they truly have left the sphere of the familiar. It is here – in an area that is “without any visible sign of European influence” (145) – that Port disintegrates. He loses his passport and he falls prey to the plague. As he sickens, Kit notices him reduced from his humanity, but she cannot find the joy that she had earlier found in observing other people reduced: “He’s stopped being human,” she said to herself. “Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary.” (167)

This reminds us of Stein, but in a new light. Perhaps her interest in the involuntary is simply to see what is left after we strip off civilization. Book 3 dramatizes Kit’s downfall: Kit, in remembering Port’s death, enters into a new relationship with time. In the early hours after Port dies, she sees objects clearly. For the first time in her life, she is

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amazed by the grandeur of existence (194). In Chapter 26, escaping from the settlement, Kit encounters a caravan. She does not know the language, she has no power, and she is subjected to sexual abuse. Belqassim dresses her like a man and keeps her in his home until she is discovered; then, Belqassim takes her as one of his wives and he “owned her completely” (229). In the captivity of Chapter 27, the bright clear sky seems outside of time in her little room. She has lost contact with her being: “She sat there, frozen inside her skin, knowing at once that she did not know anything – neither where nor what she was” (225). We learn that the rational, achieving mind is part of a privileged environment. A modernist would want to be free from the encrustation of language and the tyranny of tradition, and in this project Kit succeeds. In the cloister of the harem, she cannot communicate except by primitive means, so she has been freed from her culture and her history. Here Bowles creates a vision of truly living outside language, achieving the modernist aesthetic, but the result is that she leads a life without meaning. Thus, this vision is not the triumphant newness of the modernist project. The novel offers an empty sense of closure with Kit’s rescue. Patteson, in A World Outside, describes well the overall effect of the repeated peripatetic episodes. Kit and Port often return safely from their excursions, and this creates a sense in the reader’s mind that the “final return” will be a typical homecoming found in travel literature: But the emptiness at the end where something is expected and even hoped for, the plot’s final falling open into centrifugality despite all of its centripetal pressures is also the deepest expression of Bowles’s major theme. (98)

Kit returns alone from the desert to meet a functionary from the U.S. embassy who is lighthearted, nearly vapid. Kit has seen things that few people can witness, and yet she is not enriched by the experience. Instead of obtaining a new aesthetic that provides her with a better language to describe the world, her experience has degraded her. The Sheltering Sky presents a feeling of disenfranchisement as modernism had become popular. Modernism was supposed to be an extreme, outside look at language and society. The exhortations to make it new and to use other cultures to reform art were not something that tourists should be able to accomplish. In creating this portrait of modernist tourists, Bowles has given us characters that

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think of the aesthetic of modernism as a lifestyle. Having confused the artistic representation with a fashion statement, Kit and Port are unable to obtain the true promise of the modernist movement. In this way, Bowles encourages his readers to see modernism as an experiment, not as a way of life. WORKS CITED Bowles, Paul. “A Distant Episode.” (1947). A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. ––––. The Sheltering Sky / Let It Come Down / The Spider’s House. New York: Library of America, 2002. ––––. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. (1972). Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1985. Green, Michelle. The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades of Tangier. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Mullins, Greg. Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Patteson, Richard F. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Grove Press, 1999. Stein, Gertrude. “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage, 1990. (4-237). ––––. Three Lives. New York: Vintage, 1936. Stewart, Lawrence D. Paul Bowles: The Illumination of North Africa. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.

AMERICAN EXISTENTIALISM AND SURREALISM IN PAUL BOWLES’S “THE SCORPION” AND “BY THE WATER,” JACK KEROUAC AND WILLIAM BURROUGHS’S AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS BENJAMIN J. HEAL

Paul Bowles’s early short fiction and Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs’s And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, examine a range of themes that reflect the ontology of an America caught between post-war malaise and economic dominance, and demonstrate many of the central concerns of French and American noir film and literature. This interaction with contemporaneous French thought and literature and their subsequent interest in non-Western cultures can be seen to allow for a reaffirmation of American frontier values, which maintain these writers’s current and seemingly contradictory status as authors of “outsider” fiction and as iconic figures in mainstream American culture. This paper explores the major themes and influences of the transatlantic dialogue that inscribes these texts.

The exchange of ideas between France and the U.S. in the run-up to the end of the Second World War had a profound effect both on Paul Bowles’s early short fiction, in particular “The Scorpion” (1945) and “By the Water” (1946), and Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs’s And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (completed 1945, first published 2008, hereafter referred to as Hippos). These texts are revealing examples of American literature in dialogue with transatlantic and transnational ideas – particularly Existentialism and Surrealism – that reflect the cultural impact of American involvement in the war, including increasing urbanization and modernization, postwar emotional trauma and the resulting uncertainty and “loss of innocence.” Paul Bowles had a close relationship with European culture, having lived in Paris and Berlin for a time in the 1930s. He also had a good knowledge of Surrealism having had his poetry published alongside

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André Breton in the magazine transition in 1927 (“Spire Song”), and he was well versed in Sartrean Existentialism having translated JeanPaul Sartre’s Hui Clos in 1945. Bowles was also translating myth-like stories and Surrealist poems for Charles Henri-Ford’s View magazine at around the same time. “The Scorpion,” Bowles’s first myth-like story published in View (1945), is a surreal parable. It is about an old woman who has been placed in an uncomfortable cave. She is aware that the end of life is near. She is neither happy nor sad in this condition, despite the presence of scorpions and the constant dripping of water, as “she could eat everything she found without having to share it. And she owed no one any debt of thanks for the things she had in her life” (The Stories of Paul Bowles 49). An old man occasionally sits near the cave, close enough for her to recognize him, and she dislikes his presence. One of her sons arrives and tries to enter the cave. He then tells her to go with him to a place beyond the town where her sons live. The story ends with the woman dreaming of the town and of a scorpion crawling into her mouth. She wakes and leaves the cave willingly. As they leave the man who occasionally walks near the cave has “an expression of deep surprise on his face, as if a miracle had just occurred.” He calls “goodbye,” and the son asks the woman if she knows him. She says no and he replies, “you’re lying” (52). This story can be seen as an examination of Existentialism. The old woman represents the self separated from others; placed in the cave by her sons she states she likes the solitary existence and the freedom it offers. It is the gaze of the Other, specifically from the old man who “had an unfair advantage over her and was using it in an unpleasant way” (49) that causes her discomfort. The gaze curtails her sense of freedom: “To him, while he is observing me in this way, I appear as an object, rather than a free subject” (49). The advantage he holds is giving the old woman the recognition of how she appears to him, as an alienated object-self. The old woman exists in such a condition, but is “neither happy nor unhappy” as she is not part of any social system. It is only when she becomes an object-self through the gaze of the man that she recognizes herself as alienated. Schaft and Kaufmann outline this interpellative effect: In Sartre’s view I am not merely an object, a thing among other things. Rather, my nature is to be conceived in terms of freedom. Thus it is my possibilities, and not simply my

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determinate characteristics, which are definitive of my existence. The Other, however, Looking at me, sees only my determinate characteristics. To him, while he is observing me in this way, I appear as an object, rather than a free subject. (Schaft 221)

This examination of the alienated object-self is combined with an examination of folklore and mysticism. Fear of progress and community are symbolized by the town and represented through the son’s mistrust in the final line. The old woman therefore represents the difficulties and loss of freedom inherent in moving from primitivism toward modernity and urbanization, a theme that would work in reverse in The Sheltering Sky (1949). Another Surreal parable-like story is “By the Water,” written by Bowles shortly after “The Scorpion,” and published in View in October 1946. It follows Amar, a young Moroccan who visits a local city where he has been told some cousins of his live. Finding it cold and unfriendly, he takes refuge in a hammam or public bath though his status as an outsider gets him into trouble with the owner, the strange and monstrous Lazrag. Lazrag tells Amar to leave, and then Amar kicks Lazrag in the head before running away. A young boy from the hammam, Brahim, takes Amar to his grandfather’s house. The grandfather reacts to Amar’s presence with hostility and they are forced to leave. Amar and Brahim hitch a ride to the sea where Amar is startled by a crab and hits his head on a rock. Brahim shouts “Lazrag” at the crab, which disappears. Brahim then says, “I saved you” to Amar who replies “yes” (The Stories 8). This story is also informed by Bowles’s knowledge of Existentialism, North African folklore and Surrealism. It is a story about Amar’s Existential journey to find himself, as defined through his experiences with others. In a similar fashion to the old woman in “The Scorpion” Amar embodies the alienated object-self, as he is introduced as “being alone in the world” and his attempt to exercise his freedom and find himself (by trying to trace his relatives) is to “visit a neighbouring city” (4). Amar has a problem with his own insignificance as an outsider in the hammam; the fact that Lazrag does not know him makes him react with violence to his own Existential status. This Sartrean encounter with the Other marks the point where Amar must struggle to maintain himself.

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In an interview Bowles points to how his attitudes are similar but not identical to Existentialism: The destruction of the ego has always seemed an important thing .… It’s the stripping away of all the things that differentiate one person from another person .… What’s important, in other words, is not the ways in which you’re different from other people but the way in which you’re conscious of being like other people. (Stewart 152-53)

In “The Scorpion” this corresponds to the old woman’s denial of knowing the man, as it is only when she leaves the cave and becomes a social being that, despite her denial, she knows the man. In “By the Water” this is represented through Amar: he is adaptable to his situation, and his relationship with Brahim progresses from distrust to dependency. Hippos is a fictionalized account of the events leading up to the murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, both close friends of Burroughs and Kerouac. It follows a group of friends as they get drunk, visit bars and parties, discuss Rimbaud and take drugs. The plot follows Ramsey Allen (Kammerer)’s awkward, obsessive relationship with the precocious Phillip Tourian (Carr) that ends with the killing of the former. Burroughs and Kerouac wrote alternate chapters under the pseudonyms William Lee and John Kerouac, with Kerouac’s sections being narrated by merchant seaman Mike Ryko and Burroughs’s by bartender and part-time private detective Will Dennison. The style employed by Burroughs and Kerouac is marked by the influence of Existentialism as Burroughs remarks in his 1988 biography: “[It was] very much in the Existentialist genre, the prevailing mode of the period, but that hadn’t hit America yet” (Hippos 195). This indicates that their text was introducing European ideas to an American market that was not commercially aware of Existentialism as a “genre”. Though true in terms of the French Existentialism attached to Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Burroughs’s statement is not entirely factual. The text is in the hardboiled/noir style that clearly had hit America at that time, with James M. Cain’s influential The Postman Always Rings Twice, which Camus cites as an influence on L’Etranger, having been published in 1937, and noir films such as The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity being shown in cinemas in 1941 and 1944 respectively. Burroughs was also interested in Dashiel Hammett and Raymond

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Chandler at the time (Word Virus 12). Several contemporary reviews of Hippos have referred to it as “Dashiell Hammett meets Albert Camus” (Nicosia and Paton n.pag.), and this allusion to hardboiled detective fiction is apt, as can be seen in Burroughs’s opening line: The bars close at three a.m. on Saturday nights so I got home about 3:45 after eating breakfast at Riker’s on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue. I dropped the News and Mirror on the couch and peeled off my seersucker coat and dropped it on top of them. I was going straight to bed. (Hippos 3)

This first person narrative reads like something straight out of Hammett. However, instead of leading into some kind of crime mystery or thriller set-up, Burroughs’s narrator Dennison proceeds to describe a drinking session with his friends. The chapters written by Kerouac, while still trying to follow the hard-boiled aesthetic reveal a more poetic, literary style that lacks the cold tone of Burroughs’s writing, with sentences such as: The June sun was all over the room and when I turned on the cold jet it was like diving into a shady pond back in Pennsylvania on a summer afternoon. (12)

In this sense Burroughs’s chapters feel more “American,” Kerouac’s more “French,” perhaps in part due to Kerouac’s French-Canadian parentage.1 It is unlikely Burroughs or Kerouac had read Camus or Sartre at that time, given that L’Etranger was not translated and published in the U.S. until 1946 and Nausea not until 1949. The Existential aspects of Hippos are therefore drawn from other sources. Burroughs’s statement about the novel’s Existential nature distracts us from one reason the novel was unpublishable: its depiction of homosexuality. It also underlines the fact that Burroughs and Kerouac were looking beyond America for their influences, at ideas that “hadn’t hit America yet” (Hippos 195). It appears that even though the French Existentialism of Sartre and Camus was not widely acknowledged by the US press until the “Existentialism” article in Time magazine in January 1946, Burroughs and Kerouac were working out their own form of Existentialism in Hippos, influenced by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Andre Gidé (the writers would act out scenes from The Counterfeiters) and Arthur Rimbaud’s visionary poetry

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(Rimbaud is referenced six times in the text), alongside the tradition of American Existentialism from Herman Melville to Hammett. The figure of Freud hangs over Surrealism much as it does Hippos: Burroughs’s $200 allowance cheque held the condition that he continued to see a psychiatrist, and he performed amateur analysis on both Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac at the time Hippos was being written (Morgan 112). The absurdist title And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks provides a startling and quite surreal juxtaposition of word and image that appealed to Burroughs above Kerouac’s more existential working title “I Wish I Were You.” The further impact of Surrealism on Hippos is revealed by the reference to Pavel Tchelitchew’s painting Cache Cache (Hippos 174), which connects Surrealism, homosexuality and the 1933 collaborative novel The Young and Evil by Tchelitchew’s partner Charles Henri-Ford and Parker Young. This novel shares several similarities with Hippos, as Jed Birmingham notes, “in terms of subject matter, method of composition (a collaboration), and atmosphere” (see Reality Studio). The Tourian/Allen relationship in Hippos also demonstrates the Surrealist concept of amour fou, defined as passion “undisciplined by reason, expressive of irrational impulses and therefore assertive of freedom” (Matthews 169). As Birmingham states of Burroughs and Kerouac’s characters: [by] Citing the Surrealist, Dada, and proto-Surrealist texts that formed the philosophy of the early Beats, it could be argued that killing Kammerer was Carr’s most inspired and most terrible poetic act. (Reality Studio)

An act that would form a central part of the mythology of the early Beats. The influence of Surrealism on Bowles’s stories is shown through his account of the experiment in writing that resulted in “The Scorpion:” Little by little the desire came to me to invent my own myths, adopting the point of view of the primitive mind. The only way I could devise for simulating the state was the old Surrealist method of abandoning conscious control and writing whatever words came from the pen. (WS 261)

This is the clearly defined basis of the Surrealist text, and Hippos, demonstrates that although influenced by Surrealism, is not a

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Surrealist text. Assuming we believe Bowles’s testimony of automatic writing, “The Scorpion” follows the Surrealist manifesto as an example: Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. (Breton 26)

As such “The Scorpion” is particularly resistant to analysis because of its surreal nature. There appears to be an underlying meaning or moral lesson to take from the story that is always just out of reach, as Allan Hibbard notes: “Since its meanings are not readily apparent, we either accept it as Surrealistic nonsense or ask ourselves ‘what does this allegory of the cave stand for?’” (Hibbard 9). Here is the critical tension in Bowles text: that Surrealist automatism deflects analysis away from allegorical meaning, hence the tendency to accept it as “Surrealistic nonsense.” Bowles’s use of scorpion imagery provides a connection with the documentary scene at the beginning of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1930 Surrealist film L’Age d’Or. The use of the scorpion in both Bowles’s story and this film reveals the Surrealist application of this imagery: the desire of both to “adopt the point of view of the primitive mind” (WS 261), and react against modernity and urbanization. In “By the Water” Lazrag is presented as a person afflicted with Ectrodactyly, sometimes known as “Lobster-Claw Syndrome” (Leroi 108): “The lower part of the trunk ended in two flipper-like pieces of flesh. From the shoulders grew short pincers” (The Stories of Paul Bowles 4). His apparent transmogrification into a crab at the end of the story, while to some extent Surreal, marks the importance of folklore. The crab, like the scorpion, performs a symbolic function by representing evil (as the embodiment of Lazrag), protection (that Brahim provides Amar) and the possible sexual attraction between Amar and Brahim. It is also reminiscent of (Surrealism inspired) Magic Realism, associated with South American writers like Jorge Luis Borges whose work Bowles was already familiar with, having translated “Las Ruinas Circulares” for an edition of View magazine (Caponi 97). Amar can be seen to represent the loss of innocence in

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modernity, while Brahim, whose innocence is underlined by the narrator referring to him as “the boy” (The Stories 8), represents primitivism. Magic is to some extent real to Brahim, with his initial claim that Lazrag will turn the protagonists into birds. It is an ironic twist that allows modernity to make this magic real. As the protagonists ride atop a truck Brahim declares, “Lazrag has found us and changed us both into birds” (7). He concludes by stating Bowles’s desire for authorial erasure, “No-one will ever know us again.” This blending of the real and the imaginary is clearly in Surrealist territory: the shift in narrative point of view from Amar to Brahim and back again confirms the text is indeed playing a game with reality. Like Amar who allows himself to be led by Brahim’s primitivism, we are taken through the story not knowing where we are going, and unsure of who to trust. Bowles’s attraction to the European idea of “primitivism,” a romanticized perspective on non-Western art popular in the 1930s (Spiteri 122) reveals his affinities with some aspects of Surrealist politics. However despite having been a member of the Communist Party, Bowles failed to share the Surrealist spirit of revolution, and his later texts, while keeping aspects of Surrealist technique (such as the typhoid hallucination in The Sheltering Sky, 181-86), resist the wider preoccupations of the movement. The material and thematic differences between these texts make comparative analysis problematic and their very different publishing and reception histories further complicate this. However the links between their time and location of composition, their analysis of identity and the impact of European thought upon them are compelling features, and highlight the importance of these writings in understanding the development of American literature in the immediate post-war period. They share a trajectory toward post-war modernity in presenting an American literature that has “lost innocence,” encapsulated by Lucien Carr’s murder of Kammerer, and in Bowles’s stories presented through the old woman being taken to the town and Amar’s vulnerability as an outsider. The impact of Existentialism allows these writers to position their texts in a debate about identity, which is destabilized by the influence of Surrealism. These stories mark the confluence of these ideas in the minds of these American writers, and end with their protagonists at a precipice: the old woman must respond to her son, Amar is perhaps dying in the sea, and Dennison and Ryko await the consequences of their friend’s

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actions. Like the immediate post-war world they are apprehensive, lacking trust, waiting for the consequences.

NOTES 1

Literary influences were of course also a factor, and at this stage Kerouac seems more influenced by French literature than Burroughs. For a detailed discussion of the influences of the early Beats see John Lardas, The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

WORKS CITED Birmingham, Jed. “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.” Reality Studio. 2008. Web. 5 Jul 2010. Bowles, Paul. “By the Water.” View Oct. 1946: 27-29. ––––. “Spire Song.” transition Mar. 1928: 120-122. ––––. “The Scorpion.” View Dec. 1945: 38-42. ––––. The Sheltering Sky. London: Penguin, 2000. ––––. The Stories of Paul Bowles. New York: Ecco Press, 2001. ––––. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. London: Owen, 1972. Breton, Andre Robert. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Helen R. Lane and Richard Seaver. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974. Buñuel, Luis. L’âge D’or. 1930. Burroughs, William S. Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader. eds. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg. London: Flamingo, 1999. ––––.and Jack Kerouac. And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. London: Penguin, 2008. Caponi, Gena Dagel. ed. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Ford, Charles Henri, Catrina Neiman and Paul Nathan. View. Parade of the Avant-Garde: An Anthology of View Magazine (19401947). New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.

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––––. and Parker Tyler. The Young and Evil. The New Traveller’s Companion. Paris: Olympia, 1933. Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne’s Studies in Short Fiction Series. New York: Twayne, Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993. Lardas, John. The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Leroi, Armand Marie. Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. New York: Viking, 2003. Matthews, John Herbert. Toward the Poetics of Surrealism. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1976. Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Nicosia, Gerald. “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.” San Francisco Gate. 9 Nov. 2008. Web. 20.06.2012. Paton, Fiona. “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.” The Beat Review Jan. 2009. Web. 09.06.2012. Sartre, Jean-Paul, and Stuart Gilbert. No Exit (Huis Clos): A Play in One Act & the Flies (Les Mouches) a Play in Three Acts. New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1947. Schacht, Richard, and Walter Arnold Kaufmann. Alienation (with an Introductory essay by Walter Kaufmann). London: Allen and Unwin, 1971. Spiteri, Raymond, and Donald LaCoss. Surrealism, Politics, and Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Stewart, Lawrence D. Paul Bowles: The Illumination of North Africa. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.

“WHAT YOU DO IS NEARER TO WHAT YOU ARE THAN WHAT YOU THINK IS”: THE IMPORTANCE OF PLACE AND SPACE IN PAUL BOWLES’S SHORT FICTION ISABEL OLIVEIRA MARTINS

Focusing on Bowles’s late novella, Too Far from Home (1993), and also on the short story “At Paso Rojo” (1948), it is possible to argue that different places, and particularly what is felt by some characters as being confined space(s), or a particular situation can be read as an effective means of conveying the character’s inner nature. Place allows for the perception of the confrontation of the characters (mostly Americans) with “Otherness,” but places/situations can also be seen as an integral part of what one comes to realize about those characters: the awareness of their fundamental nature, which is usually dark and violent and which, even if they had not come face to face with a different reality, already lies within them.

Although Bowles might be more popularly known as the author of such novels as The Sheltering Sky, turned into a celebrated major boxoffice movie by Bertolucci in 1990, or as the unconventional author who left the United States and adopted Morocco as his home, one cannot forget that his reputation as a writer began receiving critical attention with the publication of his Collected Stories in 1978 and with Jeffrey Miller’s work Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography in 1986. In fact, it can be argued that it was during the eighties and particularly the nineties that Bowles became a sort of canonized American author if one takes into account the amount of critical production about his works during those years. However, before that he had already published extensively in the field of short fiction. Bowles’s first American collection of short fiction The Delicate Prey and Other Stories appeared in 19501 and he continued publishing short fiction until the final decade of his life, which resulted in at least 12 well known anthologies.2 Numerous short stories also appeared over the years, some in various well-known magazines.3 In 1979, in his Introduction to Paul Bowles Collected

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Stories, 1939-1976, Gore Vidal stated: “his short stories are among the best ever written by an American” (n.pag.). While attempting to present a short summary of Bowles’s life and literary production, Vidal also tries to assess why Bowles was not an attractive object of study for the American academic at the time. He argues rather ironically that this might be due to the fact that Bowles, together with Henry James, Edith Wharton and Vladimir Nabokov, not only did not live “in the greatest country in the world ...” but also did not write about “that greatest of all human themes: The American Experience” but instead he seemed to write as “if Moby Dick had never been written” (ibid.). On the other hand, Vidal also argues that this is an “apparent foreignness” and identifies Bowles’s stories as falling roughly into three main categories: first, stories dealing mainly with locale/place, because landscape plays an all-important role in a Bowles story, with the main settings being foreign lands such as Mexico or North Africa (to which one could add Latin America in general, Sri Lanka, the Caribbean islands and Thailand); second, what Vidal identifies as “how the inhabitants of alien cultures regard the creatures of our civilized world;” and third, what he calls the “stories of transference” – in other words, stories in which identity is transferred in such a way that it becomes difficult to discern who is who or what is what. Although not specifically mentioned as a separate category, Vidal also stresses that “there are a number of more or less realistic stories that deal with the plain incomprehension of Americans in contact with the natives” of various places, while affirming that Bowles’s characters “reveal themselves through what they say or do not say.” Albeit succinct, Vidal’s introduction spotlights what one can present as essential in a reading of Bowles today. Focusing particularly on Bowles’s late novella, Too Far from Home (first published in 1993), but also on another short story produced in the 40’s, “At Paso Rojo,” it is possible to argue that different places, and particularly what is felt by some characters as being confined space(s), or a particular situation or circumstance can be read as an effective means of conveying the character’s inner nature. In fact, not only does almost every place allow for the perception of the confrontation of the characters (mostly Americans) with different physical and social realities, with ‘Otherness,’ but places/situations can also be seen as an integral part of what one comes to realize about those characters, that is to say, the awareness of

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their fundamental nature, which is usually starkly dark and violent and which, even if they had not come face to face with a different reality, already lies within them. In this way Bowles’s writing does indeed invoke Moby-Dick, as in the end it is another type of reflection on what it means to be human in an age that Bowles recognizes as intolerable and that has to be confronted with violence: If I’m persuaded that our life is predicated upon violence, that the entire structure of what we call civilization, the scaffolding that we’ve built up over the millennia, can collapse at any moment, then whatever I write is going to be affected by that assumption. The process of life presupposes violence, in the plant world the same as the animal world. (Bailey n.pag.)

On the other hand, and even if it may sound riskily generalist, one can also emphasize that particularly after World War II some American fiction authors have had a propensity to present a central character who is usually at odds with his or her own identity, most of the time feeling unable to find any kind of positive answer either in other people or in the society in which they are inserted even if (or precisely because) this is the “idealized” American one.4 With this in mind, it might be argued that Bowles’s use of foreign settings serves to underline the generalization mentioned above. There is perhaps no better way to know one’s own society or to come to terms with one’s inner self than when one is confronted with difference, with the Other. This is, in fact, at the core of almost every kind of travel writing. Traveling to a different place, typically in order to know more about it, usually corresponds to a journey into self-knowledge. In fact, a travel book can be considered as writing about what happened to someone in some place, and one can argue that most of Bowles’s stories are indeed journey/travel fictions in which most of the characters undergo some kind of revelatory experience, even if it is a destructive one. In this sense Bowles’s Too Far from Home is paradigmatic. Written at a later stage of his career and thus perhaps not conforming to the typical gruesome pattern of such Bowles stories as “The Delicate Prey” or “A Distant Episode,” the novella nevertheless also portrays a dark situation. Alternating between a third person narrator and some first person letters written either by the main protagonist, Anita, or Tom, her brother, Too Far From Home deals first and foremost with Anita’s experience in a foreign land – the Niger River

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Valley in the middle of the Sahara desert, more specifically in the Gao region of Mali. Her coming to Africa is shown as being the ideal solution to deal with the depression that has affected her after divorcing her husband, Peter. Her brother Tom is a painter on a Guggenheim fellowship and she decides to join him in a land that, along with its inhabitants, promotes ambiguous feelings in her from the very beginning. “By day her empty room had four walls, and the walls enclosed a definite space. At night the room continued forever into the darkness” (141). This is the initial paragraph of Bowles’s story and it abridges almost the whole of it. Surrounded by people she considers to be strange if not inferior, immersed in a landscape and climate that she views as different and therefore threatening, Anita’s character is defined not only by her actions (which will be revealed as having dark consequences) but also by the strange relation between her and the room in which she sleeps. The very same day she arrives, her brother shows her the house and introduces her to several employees including Sekou of whom she “had the instant impression that he resented her presence” and who has “the face of a tyrant ... and if he were white, he’d have a different face” (141-42), according to her own words. At the end of the day, when returning to her room she notices the maid has changed the position of her rug and mattress, and she can’t help feeling disturbed although she doesn’t know why. The enclosed space of the room and the way it is described points towards a facet of Anita’s character that she tries desperately to deny in the letters she writes to two female friends. While she expresses her contempt for the place: “it’s really the end of the world” (142); for the house: “They don’t believe in windows here, so the house is dark inside, and that gives you a shut-in feeling” (146) and for the natives, she portrays herself as someone who at last feels free, a kind of master of her own destiny: I can have my own thoughts .... All feelings of guilt evaporate. This is all very personal, of course. But in a place like this you become autoanalytical. (143)

Even so, and from the very beginning, one sees how Anita is emotionally disturbed and how she is facing not only a new land but also herself. The almost compulsory contact with the black servants makes her realize the sort of paradox in which she is living:

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In New York there had always been two or three black servants around the house. There she thought of them as shadows of people, not really at home in a country of whites, not sharing the same history or culture and thus, in spite of themselves, outsiders. Slowly, however, she had begun to see that these people here were masters of their surroundings, completely at home with the culture of the place ... it was something of a shock to realize that the blacks were the real people and that she was the shadow .... (144)

With this realization she begins the slow process of internalization of what she thinks is a communal consciousness that she affirms she hates but that comprises a subtler appreciation of the people she deals with: “They’re all black, but nothing like “our” blacks in the States. They’re simpler, more friendly and straightforward and at the same time very remote” (145). Going on an errand to the nearest village in the company of Sekou, she has a confrontation with two young Americans on a motorcycle who almost run her over and hurt Sekou. Whereas Sekou does not pay any attention to the young Americans, later remarking that tourists are always ignorant, Anita expresses her anger and to a certain extent tries to recover her own identity by establishing the difference between her and the other Americans whom she calls “monsters:” You’ve gone too far from home, my friends, and you’re going to have trouble .... Trouble! And I hope I’ll have the chance to see it. (153)

This internalization of what she thinks might be the nature of her commitment to her new identity will soon find its dark completion. Later, on a trip to Gargouna with her brother, and while waiting for him to go to the nearest village, she inadvertently sees in the distance the bodies of the two boys who have suffered an accident in the middle of the desert. Instead of trying to find help, she feels elated by the vision and does not warn anybody, thus sealing the boys’s death. In that moment when she calls them monsters, she is not yet completely aware that it is she who is the monster: She was surprised now to recall that her first feeling upon seeing the wreck of the motorcycle had been one of elation.

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She could still induce the little chill of pleasure that had run through her at that instant. (157)

From that moment on, the room in which she sleeps seems to gain life and resonate with guilt since she always has the same dream, or rather, a nightmare. In it she enters Yindall & Fambers, Apothecaries and finds herself in a cellar where a man, who first identifies himself as Mr. Yindall, then as Fambers, takes her into the cellar where he forces her to suck the blood flowing from Mr. Fambers, also previously identified as Yindall, and thus described: [with] Two muscular thighs growing from a man’s shoulders, the legs bent at the knees. Between the thighs a thick neck from which the head has been severed. The arms, attached to the hips, hang loosely, the fingers twitching. (159)

Then she finds herself vomiting and choking and she wakes up into “the open black air around, sickened by the nature of the dream” (160). The nightmare is terrifying not only because she knows that it will recur but also because she believes it is being governed from without, from another mind, which she believes to be Sekou’s. She feels Sekou’s presence although she does not seem able to discern what he wants or understand why she is having these dreams. In the end, when she and her brother are preparing to leave Africa, Sekou explains that he had seen she was very angry with the boys and put a curse on them and so he dreamed that he had gone to her room and spoken to her so that she might be able to forgive the boys. He also declares that everyone should always forgive everyone else, because otherwise the anger inside a person will act like a poison (171). Sekou is not aware that the two boys are dead and that Anita is in fact to some extent responsible for their death since they did not die of their injuries but were killed by the sun as her brother has previously explained: ... they must have lain there naked for two or three days, getting more burned and scorched by the hour. It’s a mystery why nobody from the village saw them before that. But people don’t wander around in the dunes much, of course. And by the time somebody did see them, the sun had finished them off. (169)

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Even though Anita is the only one who knows “it all and she promises herself that never would anyone else hear of it” (173), she also knows that Sekou is the only one (a black/dark one but also the innocent/primitive one) who has had a glimpse of her darker side, a side that corresponded after all to a basic instinct already embedded in her, and which acts, as is described in the text, according to basic emotions that have “their own language” (172), and which apparently only “primitive” beings can understand. At the end of the story Anita feels ambivalent towards her departure. On the one hand she is stimulated by the idea of leaving the “endless lightstruck emptiness” but she has also begun “to care for the flat sand-colored town” and she knows she will never find another person “with the same uncomplicated purity of Sekou” (172). However, there is no ambivalence regarding her actual situation. Knowledge of having committed some sort of sin does not lead the female character – Anita – to self-destruction. Quite the opposite: it seems that coming to a foreign land and having experienced this kind of ordeal has made it possible for her to gain a better awareness of herself and of who she really is. She seems able to cope with this new revelation, this new darker side she has discovered in herself. Almost 50 years earlier, “At Paso Rojo,” a short story published by Mademoiselle magazine in 1948, had presented almost the same view. In this story, which again has a woman – Chalía – as the central character, Bowles once more portrays what one can do in a moment of impulsiveness driven by basic and perverse emotions. After their mother’s death, Chalía and her sister Lucha decide to visit their brother at his ranch in Costa Rica. Reacting in a similar way to Anita, both Lucha and Chalía loathe the people: “Indians, poor things, animals with speech” (238). Chalía in particular has a peculiar reaction to the land and to her room. The third person narration allows for the construction of several metaphorical connections between what Chalía feels and what surrounds her: “she had decided to put off going to bed – that way there was less darkness to be borne in case she stayed awake” (237). Remembering the lines of a poem, she suddenly realizes that the night can be threatening and later discovers that the room has a darker side: The wall was faced with small stones which had been plastered over and whitewashed indifferently, so that the surface was very rough and full of large holes .... All the holes, large and

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small, were lined up with whitish funnels. She could see the long, agile legs of the spiders that lived inside, sticking out beyond some of the funnels. “Lucha, this wall is full of monsters!” she cried. A beetle flew near to the lamp, changed its mind and lighted on the wall. The nearest spider darted forth, seized it and disappeared into the wall with it. “Don’t look at them,” advised Lucha .... (238-39)

She then pulls her bed into the middle of the room and lies back in the darkness while the “sound of the nocturnal insects was unbearably loud – an endless, savage scream above the noise of the wind ... it was absolutely dark” (239). After an hour she gets up from her bed and sits on the veranda where she watches the wall until very late. This depiction describes metaphorically exactly what Chalía will do. Like a (monstrous) spider, she tries to seduce one of her brother’s Indian employees and when she is rejected, she makes him lose his job by having him accused of stealing some money. After causing this wrong, the story ends when she goes to bed but this time she does not mind where the bed is and the narrator’s description is elucidative: Chalía shrugged her shoulders, got into the bed where it was, blew out the lamp, listened for a few minutes to the night sounds, and went peacefully to sleep, thinking of how surprisingly little time it had taken her to get used to life at Paso Rojo, and even, she had to admit now, to begin to enjoy it. (251)

Most of the time, Bowles’s characters are victims but they are also predators. In this case, Chalía does not really commit such a serious crime as Anita but she has indeed altered or even perverted life at the ranch, the foreign place. And once again, place and particularly the space of the room are symbolically interwoven with the character’s inner self, which has also revealed itself as being starkly dark. In both stories, the main characters act with an almost compulsive behavior that is in some ways mirrored in the natural environment, or in the closed spaces if they are not one and the same. One can indeed recognize what Bowles commented on a 1970s’ interview with Daniel Halpern regarding the characters in his fiction: It has always seemed to me that my characters act naturally, given the circumstances; their behavior is foreseeable. Characters set in motion a mechanism of which they become

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a victim. But generally the mechanism turns out to have been operative at the very beginning. (Halpern 528)

Furthermore, he also confirms the complementary relationship between place/space/landscape and character when he states that the characters are: … generally presented as integral parts of situations, along with the landscape, and so it’s not very fruitful to try to consider them in another light .... The typical man of my fiction reacts to inner pressures the way the normal man ought to be reacting to the age we live in. Whatever is intolerable must produce violence. (529)

Although in these two stories the violence does not exactly match that found in other Bowles stories, it does have a “therapeutic purpose”, because after all “only man can conceptualize violence. Only man can enjoy the idea of destruction” (Bailey n.pag.). Thus, in this reading of Bowles’s two stories, one can conclude that place and space are not used as mere backdrops in the narrative structure or as exotic constructions. Character and place or space conceal and reveal each other: together they provide a reading of Bowles’s fiction that points towards the topos of inner self and to what Bowles considered a main feature of human actions: “What you do is nearer to what you are than what you think is” (Bowles Archive, qtd. in Campbell 205). The characters do not regain a state of innocence after reaching a region of self-negation, something that Bowles regards as the “Romantic fantasy” (Halpern 530). In these stories what Bowles regarded as still being important is not denied either: Continuing consciousness, infinite adaptability of human consciousness to outside circumstances, the absurdity of it all, the hopelessness of this whole business of living. (Halpern 538)

Ultimately, both stories (as well as other Bowles’s fiction) incite the reader to confront, or at least not to accept unconditionally, any kind of given idea concerning human nature and life.

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NOTES 1

In fact, Bowles’s first published collection, A Little Stone, came out in England in August 1950, three months before the American edition. “A Delicate Prey” and “Pages from Cold Point” were omitted in the British collection because Bowles’s British publisher, John Lehmann, feared the book might be censored owing to their violent content. 2 Such as A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard (1962), The Time of Friendship (1967), Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977), Midnight Mass (1981), and Unwelcome Words (1988), just to mention a few. 3 Paul Bowles’s stories were published regularly in a variety of literary journals, including Antaeus, which he co-founded with Daniel Halpern and helped edit, and The Threepenny Review, a publication with which he was also associated. 4 Many authors could be included in this generalized assumption, but one has just to mention a few, such as J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac or later Raymond Carver, to see how this framework might be useful even if these authors do not use foreign settings.

WORKS CITED Bailey, Jeffrey. “Paul Bowles, The Art of Fiction No. 67.” The Paris Review. Fall 1981. Web. 10 July 2013. Bowles, Paul. Collected Stories 1939-1976. 1978. Introduction. Gore Vidal. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980. Campbell, Neil. “The Unfinished Scream: The Disintegration of the Self and Society in the Works of Paul Bowles.” PhD thesis. Aberystwyth: U College of Wales, 1987. Halpern, Daniel. ed. and pref. Too Far From Home: The Selected Writings of Paul Bowles. Introduction. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Vidal, Gore. Introduction. Paul Bowles: Collected Stories 1939-1976. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980.

EXPERIENCES OF DEATH AND DISSOLUTION IN PAUL BOWLES’S THE SHELTERING SKY AND JACK KEROUAC’S DESOLATION ANGELS AND THE DHARMA BUMS NUNO MARQUES

Climbing a mountain and crossing a desert are both experiences of confrontation with Nature presented as a distant and separated force that acts upon the characters of these novels. Death or dissolution of the ego is the outcome of such confrontation. A real possibility of achieving a larger meaning through this experience is denied: Nature remains unknown, terrifying, unbearable to a certain American civilized man.

The novels addressed in this article perform the displacement of civilized, urban characters into wild places where a confrontation with nature takes place. Either by the symbolic meaning climbing of a mountain in Desolation Angels or by the dream-like world of the desert in The Sheltering Sky, they use natural spaces to assert the impossibility of achieving a larger meaning in the relationship of the civilized contemporary man with nature. In The Sheltering Sky an undeclared pathos forces Port and Kit deep into the desert, a heavy feeling of anguish that hopes to find echo and an answer in nature represented by the African sky and the vast desert landscapes. This obscurity of motives for travelling is the opposite of the clearly stated intention of achieving spiritual awakening made by Kerouac’s alter ego Duluoz in Desolation Angels, but a common trait to these novels is not only the search for a larger meaning in a relationship with nature, but also, its impossibility: When I get to the top of Desolation Peak … and I’m alone I will come face to face with God or Tathagata and find out once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering .... (26)

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Nature “is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece” (Richardson 18) when the drama played is between Nature and God, as Richardson notes when writing of Emerson, describing a drama representing itself through the eyes of the one who sees it; but the top of a mountain and the desolate desert are no spectacle for any divine play, they are instead a mirror of the character’s psychological drama. Failing to undergo the end of “all mean egotism” (Richardson 18) Duluoz is unable to stand the dissolution of the self, which would later take the form of a mystical experience in Big Sur. The same is true of Kit in The Sheltering Sky, to whom Port’s death in the confrontation with the obscure forces played by the natural world is but an element of her relationship with nature, one in which she heads towards the dissolution of the self, only to find it unbearable and return to Western civilization. The natural world, believed to have an ulterior meaning from which Man is cut-off, assumes the role of the Other, of a violent opponent to the character’s need for liberation. This impenetrable other “always wears the colors of the spirit” (Richardson 19) but, if spirit and nature are connected and are able to have a communion, such possibility is denied in Desolation Angels, whereas in The Sheltering Sky the spirit is forced to discover its connection with nature. By mirroring the characters’s psychological dramas, Nature is, in fact, presented as a distant and separated force that acts upon them. There’s a certain naïveté in Dulouz’s ascent to the mountain, in his well humoured accounts of small episodes and anecdotes, hopes of cure and self-knowledge that echo a superficial ecological stand for the possibility of communion with nature through a solitary retreat. Duluoz describes Mount Ozomeen, where he was to hold a lookout position for seventy days, as “… the most beautiful mountain I ever seen, like a tiger … sheer magnificent Prudential mountain …” (Kerouac 25-26). This naïve look is also a condescending look towards nature, one that while hoping to achieve some form of religious revelation in the natural world does not consider the possibility of a real communion with it. Kerouac’s alter ego embarks on a meditation retreat as part of his Buddhist teachings that reflect the influence of Zen Buddhism in the Beat Generation, which was introduced by Gary Snyder and exploited in The Dharma Bums. References to Zen Buddhism are clearly stated as Duluoz recounts some anecdotes of the Zen poet Han Shan. But if Zen Buddhism teaches silence, Duluoz speaks without end. In fact,

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nature in Desolation Angels is more of a canvas upon which words are thrown than a set or a living thing with which Duluoz may relate. Alienation from nature thus takes the form of the need to create it with words that ultimately mirror Duluoz’s psychological stance. Anthropomorphic descriptions of Mount Ozomeen may well be the creation of a more human natural other, one that is bored, has mighty redbrown pinnacles, where the “… wind whirls desolate of song … with trees black with claws” (29). This natural Other will nevertheless, point back at Duluoz that, in the top of Mount Ozomeen had come “… face to face with myself, no liquor, no drugs, no chance of faking it, but face to face with ole Hateful Duluoz Me” (Kerouac 26). Alienation from nature is also clearly stated by questions posed by Duluoz to the mountain: “Desolation, Desolation, / wherefore have you / Earned your name?” (77) or “Every night I still ask the Lord, “Why?” (55). But to these questions “The sound of silence is / all the instruction / You’ll get” (ibid.). This is the point where the dissolution of the self is the only possible solution for the desired end to alienation from nature, but Duluoz leaves the mountain and the first part of the narrative ends. Nature is the other either by anthropomorphic characterization or by a totalizing description of the natural as the “Void,” either way reinforcing the distance between the natural world and the novel’s character in Desolation Angels which may better be described in The Sheltering Sky by the notion of wilderness. As Mogen notes, nature in Bowles’s novel is characterized by the use of elements of the gothic wilderness, rendering it “… a profoundly American symbol of an ambiguous relationship to the land…” (qtd. in Lloyd-Smith 94). This ambiguity, Mogen continues: [has its roots in] a terror of the land itself, its emptiness, its implacability; simply a sense of its vast, lonely and possibly hostile space that informs the American Gothic and, ultimately, resists any rational explanation …. (ibid.)

In the novel, nature is characterized as wildernesses through the image of the desert, “a sandy wasteland” (TSS 192) or later still with a “pale, infected light of daybreak” (215). The natural world is also made of omens that build an ever-rising sense of terror and premonitions of death. The short story of the tree women driven by the beauty of the desert to death in the Sahara or the

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Arabs described as “heavy shadows” (256) that inhabit a “… stony territory, too parched to shelter even the locusts…” (75) are some examples. In this sense, the natural world in The Sheltering Sky is presented as a dark lurking force that drives Port and Kit deep into death and dissolution. Thus, the desert is not just a representation of nature; it is also a frame for an image of the natural world, which the reader must enter with Port and Kit. This is a frame, or window, of a world were death and madness are expected to happen. The ecology of this natural world is one of the loss of civilized notions. Eric and Mrs. Lyle, the Europeans affected to the point of obsessive behaviour, and Port’s dream of dying in the opening of the novel, thus characterize elements of the natural world where nature takes the form of dreams and omens, a source of magical and dangerous events. In a sense that nature is the possible equivalent to a landscape of dreams, alienation from it is not clearly asserted and we may even say that there is a sense of connection between Bowles’s characters and the natural world into which they enter. Kit is portrayed as someone who is given to interpret life through omens; the feeling of doom felt by her is on the same magic and subterraneous force expressed in the natural world. Nature acts upon Port and Kit but it’s the result of that action that proves to be painful. By contrast with Desolation Angels, the need for language is discussed only to be denied by nature’s action. Driven by the desert through illness, Port, is unable to resist this confrontation with nature’s strong and dark force, ultimately dying. A profound realization of the absence of meaning takes place during Port’s delirium, illustrated by the comprehension that language lacks meaning. Words are an impossible fixation of an underlying stream of force and vitality and “They slipped into (Port’s) head like the wind blowing into a room …” (230). The landscapes of his fever duplicate the exterior landscapes, a vivid and unfixable force in which Port’s anguish and intellectual questioning is destroyed and meaningless. On the other hand, Kit enacts an evasion into nature in which she abandons civilized notions, most importantly language. This evasion is also a union, symbolized by a bath in the moonlight; a rite of passage where the stripping off the clothes is the last gesture of departing from civilization. With Port’s death Kit is set free from all the civilized conventions and constraints that separated her from a union with the desert, and by extension, with the natural world that was to kidnap her

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through Belqassim’s character. By the end of the novel Kit “… had no feeling of being anywhere, or being anyone …” (315) and words “…meant absolutely nothing.” (321). To Kit, the dissolution of the ego is the result of the confrontation with nature, but the ultimate meaning is failed and she returns to Western civilization. Bowles’s novel postulates the possible presence of a subterranean nature within the characters, one that may not be diverted by Western civilization and that expresses itself by acute feelings of anguish. The civilized man succumbs to his dark hidden primitive forces. In conclusion, both novels address a displacement either driven by a religious impetus as in Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, or by a personal sense of existential anguish that may represent the displacement of the civilized American of the post-war period in Bowles’s novel. Nature is either the incomprehensible other in Desolation Angels or a living force and a narrator in The Sheltering Sky but, in spite of these different uses of nature, the final goal of religious enlightenment or of understanding of the self and of life is condemned to failure. Kerouac’s alter ego is unable to perform that mystical union, and nature, perceived as the other, points back to civilization. The dissolution of the self is too frightful and nature too distant. Port faces death, unable to grasp the meaning of life that is disclosed to men through Nature’s omens and signs, and Kit is left adrift in a non-place. Both novels present the impossibility of achieving a larger meaning through the relationship of the civilized contemporary American man with Nature in which he must either die or suffer the dissolution of the self. WORKS CITED Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. London: Grafton Books, 1983. Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Angels. New York: Bantam Books, 1966. Lloyd-Smith, Alan. “Frontier Gothic, Gothic Nature,” in American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York, London: Continuum Books, 2004. (69-132). Richardson, Robert D. Jr. ed. and fwd. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures, And Poems. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc, 1990.

V YOU ARE NOT I – FILM AND TEXT

GOOD FILM HUNTING: SARA DRIVER, PAUL BOWLES, AND TANGIER FRANCIS POOLE

While attending a conference in Tangier, Morocco in 2008, I was contacted by Paul Bowles’s heir, Abdelouahed Boulaich, about examining some materials that had belonged to the author. Mr. Boulaich had kept the items in a small apartment following Paul Bowles’s death in 1999. During several visits to see the materials and document them, I noticed a battered container that held two unidentified reels of film. After viewing the film, I discovered that it was a copy of You Are Not I, a 1981 film by filmmaker Sara Driver, which was based on a short story by Paul Bowles. After contacting Ms. Driver, I learned that the film we had discovered in Tangier was the only surviving print. During the next two years extensive efforts were made to preserve and restore You Are Not I so that it could be seen again.

I still sometimes dream that I am crawling around on the floor of a dark room digging through piles of crumbling papers, books, strange objects, and discarded clothing, not knowing what I am searching for. The following account may explain why. Paul Bowles was a noted American composer, writer, and translator who lived as an expatriate in Tangier, Morocco for over fifty years until his death in 1999. He was married to the legendary and brilliant novelist and playwright Jane Bowles who died in 1973 after a long illness. Bowles’s most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, was made into a feature film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990, starring Deborah Winger and John Malkovich. While in Tangier in May 2008 to present a paper on Tangier and the Beats at a conference, I was contacted by Abdelouahed Boulaich, Paul Bowles’s longtime personal assistant and heir. Tall, graying, and handsome, Abdelouahed had the presence of a tribal leader, and you liked and respected him at first meeting. My colleague Tim Murray, Head of Special Collections at the University of Delaware Library, and I had previously worked closely with Paul Bowles and Abdelouahed in the 1990s to acquire a treasure trove of Bowles papers, manuscripts, books, photographs, audio tapes, and

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other literary items. The materials we gathered, when added to previous Library holdings, made the University of Delaware Library’s Paul Bowles Collection the largest in the world. Abdelouahed said that he had some additional papers, books, and artifacts that once belonged to Paul Bowles, which the Library might be interested in. He asked if I would like to meet with him to view the materials, which he had kept for ten years. I was delighted to receive the invitation and immediately said yes. Abdelouahed met me at my hotel and we took a taxi to a vacant house in a nondescript neighborhood in Tangier. We entered a door that opened onto the street. The ground floor room was windowless and lit by a single light bulb which illuminated a floor covered with letters, photographs, paintings by Brion Gysin and others, papers, pottery, pieces of African and Asian folk art, furniture and various personal items once belonging to Paul Bowles. In a small dining area there were several filing cabinets, and Bowles’s low, round wooden table, covered with several carved wooden masks, Moroccan ashtrays, kif pipes, a curved bone-handled knife, and pill bottles. One prescription label I recognized was for Valium. I wondered if tenyear-old Valium would still be effective. The smell was reminiscent of Bowles’s apartment, and included a mixture of old patchouli incense, musty books, mildew and a strange chemical odor. I immediately began to take digital photographs to document the room’s contents. As the camera lens moved from one thing to another I noticed an old battered film container near the bottom shelf of a bookcase. Sitting on the shelf above were the typewriters belonging to Paul and Jane Bowles. Like everything else in the room the film case had been dusted with a white powder. Suspecting that the powder might be insecticide, I asked Abdelouahed what it was. “Insecticida for the bugs,” was his reply. For a second I felt like I was in one of the bug powder scenes from David Cronenberg’s film of William Burroughs’s novel, Naked Lunch. There were even letters from Burroughs to Paul Bowles scattered around the floor, some of which also had insecticide on them. As I continued to take pictures I kept wondering what the film case contained. In the poor light I could barely make out a label on the cover addressed to Paul Bowles with a faded name and a Bowery, New York City return address. Abdelouahed said he had never seen it and did not know what the film might be. “It belonged to Pablo.” Despite the huge quantity of material I was documenting, I managed to take several photographs of the film case for reference. In

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2009, Tim Murray and I traveled to Tangier to sort and pack up the Bowles materials for shipment. It took us approximately two weeks to get all the Bowles papers, letters, and photographs ready to send back to the United States. We worked nine and ten hour days in an apartment with just one door and no windows and no fan or ventilation. Abdelouahed was able to purchase shipping boxes at the post office and somehow found large bundles of old French and Moroccan newspapers which we would use to wrap and pad the contents of each box. At about noon each day, Abdelouahed appeared with a delicious lunch that his wife had prepared. The three of us sat together around a low table to enjoy the meal in the dusty salon. It was a welcome break from sorting and packing. Usually Abdelouahed would bring a Moroccan salad, bread, boiled potatoes from his garden and fresh grilled Grouper or some other seafood dish. For dessert he would offer a cluster of golden dates from a grove in the south, sliced melon, almond cookies, and mint tea. Often when we left in the evening our clothes would be soaking wet with perspiration and covered with the white powdered insecticide. After a while Tim began referring to our jeans as “poison pants.” Back at the hotel we would clean up and then drop our sweaty clothes off at a nearby hand-wash laundry. Later in the evening when the air had cooled we walk down to the legendary Dean’s Bar for beers and tapas and plan the next day’s work. As we neared the end of the packing job we were left with the problem of what to do with the film case. Abdelouahed offered to mail the boxes of books and papers through regular post. However, we had been advised by several shipping agencies that in order to export the film it could take weeks for the necessary paperwork to be processed. That was time we did not have. Our other concern was that the film might be damaged or lost in transit. So at the last minute, I taped University of Delaware stickers on the case and managed to fit it in my carryon bag for our flight from Casablanca to Madrid and then to the United States. Fortunately the trip back went smoothly with no problems at airport security or customs. It wasn’t until the film was safely transported to The University of Delaware Library that I began to realize the significance of the discovery. The film case contained a copy of the 1981 film, You Are Not I, written, produced, directed, and edited by Sara Driver. It was the copy that Sara had sent to Paul Bowles and which had remained among his possessions for some thirty years. You Are Not I premiered

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at the Festival Figueira da Foz, Portugal in September 1981. It premiered in the U.S. at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in New York City and was featured at many international film festivals. In their end-of-the-decade critic’s survey, Cahiers du Cinéma declared it to be one of the best films of the 1980s. Besides You Are Not I, Sara Driver also directed the critically acclaimed Sleepwalk (1986), and When Pigs Fly (1993). From 1996-1998 she taught directing at New York University’s Film School. For the past several years Sara has been writing and developing feature film projects: the original screenplays, Deaf, Dumb and Blonde, Gone with the Mind, and They Live Among Us. By doing some quick research online, I also learned that You Are Not I had been co-written with Jim Jarmusch, director of such acclaimed films as Permanent Vacation (1980), Stranger in Paradise (1983), (winner of the Camera d’Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival), Down by Law (1986), Night on Earth (1991), Dead Man (1995), and The Limits of Control (2009). Jim Jarmusch was also credited as the cinematographer on You Are Not I. When I removed the film reels from the battered case I had no idea what I would find. After running the print on an RTI CineScan 16mm film viewer, I was astonished to see that the film was in relatively good condition despite having been kept in a damp, sometimes hot and often smoke-filled North African apartment for decades. Paul Bowles was a heavy kif (cannabis and tobacco mixture) smoker and I wondered if there might not even be kif residue on the print. Exposure to such poor environmental conditions over many years could have significantly damaged or destroyed the film. Yet, the film was in good condition. Perhaps the insecticide and kif smoke had helped preserve the film! The print had a few scratches and showed the effects of grime and age but it appeared salvageable. In finding the print of You Are Not I, I was faced with many challenges as a film librarian/archivist and realized that the film’s restoration and preservation would require professional expertise. The next step was to inform Sara Driver of the discovery of her film, but I had trouble tracking her down. I think I called and emailed all my contacts in the film archive and library world before finally getting a lead from my colleague, Anne Morra, Associate Curator of Film at the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. After several calls in an attempt to reach Sara, I finally spoke with Jim Jarmusch’s assistant and left a message that a copy of You Are Not I had been found in Tangier. Soon after

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that I received a call from Sara who said that she was thrilled with the news. She told me that the original negative, the inter-negative, the inter-positive and the sound mag track had been ruined in a flood in a New Jersey warehouse. The few prints that had been struck for distribution in Japan, Australia, France, Portugal, and Spain were also lost. Sara made the film in 1981 on a shoestring budget in six days near her parents’s house in New Jersey. Since she couldn’t afford to stage a train wreck (the disaster which begins the Bowles short story) Sara spent a good portion of her resources on buying junk cars, which were used to simulate a horrific auto accident. She was also able to recruit members of a local volunteer fire department and EMTs to help. The film stars Suzanne Fletcher as an escaped mental patient. Melody Schneider played her older sister. Sara also cast her friends, the writer Luc Sante, and the photographer Nan Goldin, in the film. The original answer print was delivered to Paul Bowles in Tangier in 1981 by writer and director Guy Zimmerman who helped arrange a screening for Bowles. To Sara’s surprise and delight Bowles liked the film very much and a correspondence between the two ensued. Interestingly Sara had made the film before receiving permission from Paul Bowles’s agent but that ceased to be an issue following Bowles’s approval of her finished work. The letters from Bowles are currently in her possession but will eventually be added to the University of Delaware Library Paul Bowles Collection where the film is kept. You Are Not I was Sara Driver’s first film and the first film to be made based on a Paul Bowles story (Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky came out in 1990). Unlike most of Paul Bowles’s stories and novels which are set in North Africa or South America, You Are Not I takes place in the Northeastern United States. In the Bowles short story, the plot focuses on two sisters, one of whom is mentally ill and who walks away from an asylum during the confusion following a nearby train wreck. She is picked up by rescue workers and taken to her sister’s house by mistake. While there she experiences a psychic shock that results in an exchange of identities between the sisters. Even though the location and characters are not exotic but rather are typical of rural or small town America, the story and film both demonstrate that Bowles could infuse even a seemingly mundane world with a disturbing sense of psychological displacement. It is Bowles’s ability to expose the fragility of human consciousness and perception in his fiction that Sara Driver successfully brought to life through her film.

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After Tim Murray and I met with Sara and discussed her film and her relationship with Paul Bowles it seemed obvious that You Are Not I was an important intersection between Bowles’s literary history and film history. The film is also significant for its association with the “No Wave” scene, which originated in lower Manhattan in the late 1970s and early to mid-1980s. “No Wave” was a satirical play on “New Wave” and was a direct descendant of the “Punk Rock” movement. In an email exchange with me, Sara Driver had this to say about that period: It was a very particular time in New York City. The city was in bankruptcy but clawing its way out. The community of young artists and students was pretty small. One could work on their art and subsist by having a part-time job. The Bowery to the East Village was a cheap, stimulating but also a tough place to live. The different scenes – dance, film, music, painting – all cross-polluted each other. Even if you didn’t know how to play the guitar you picked one up and started a band. The films were made by sheer perseverance. (November 2010)

Their neighbors included William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Jack Smith, and Robert Frank who became cult heroes and were sought after and emulated by the younger New York artists. Some of the young filmmakers were inspired by the French New Wave (films by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette) and New German films (by Fassbinder, Herzog, etc.) that were being shown in the many retrospective and art house cinemas of the time. By absorbing these cinematic influences and being stimulated by the flow of creative energy from each other, they picked up movie cameras and started to make their own films based on their own vision. The group of filmmakers included Amos Poe, Eric Mitchell, Jim Jarmusch, James Nares, and Vivian Dick. Among them, Sara Driver emerged as one of most talented and important, not only as a writer and director but as a producer on films such as Sleepwalk (1986) and Stranger in Paradise. The rediscovery of the surviving print of You Are Not I has reclaimed a vital part of the history of the “No Wave” scene, which had been lost. Beginning in May 2010, the Paul Bowles print of You Are Not I underwent extensive technical analysis, evaluation, cleaning, restoration by the University of Delaware Library and COLORLAB Film Services with the goal of producing a digital copy in time for a

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special screening at the Reykjavík International Film Festival in September, 2010. A digital copy of the film was also shown at the Portuguese Cinematheque in October 2010 during the “Do You Bowles” Paul Bowles Centenary celebration sponsored by the University of Lisbon. The screening was a highlight of the event. In February 2011, Sara Driver was invited to show You Are Not I as part of the “Bowles at 100: A Celebration of Multi-Artistry” conference at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Once again the film received an enthusiastic response from the attendees. During a question and answer session following the screening, celebrated author and keynote speaker Edmund White called the film, “brilliant.” In spring 2011 Sara Driver received the Lois Bianchi Award of the NYWIFT (New York Women in Film and Television)/Women’s Film Preservation Fund which supported a complete restoration of You Are Not I and the creation of a new negative and prints made from the original surviving print held by the University of Delaware Library. On October 6, 2011 a newly restored copy of You Are Not I was screened at the 2011 New York Film Festival in the Masterworks series. The showing was held at Lincoln Center at the Walter Reade Theatre. Among the sellout crowd attending the screening were Sara Driver; Richard Peña, the American film program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Steve Buscemi; Bette Gordon, director; Abel Ferrara, director; Suzanne Fletcher, the film’s “Ethel;” Willem Dafoe; Jim Jarmusch, director, Susan Lazarus, producer, and Regina Weinreich, director of the documentary Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider (1993). Sara Driver also invited Francis Poole, Tim Murray, and Meghann Matwichuk of the University of Delaware Library to attend the screening. In November 2011, following the New York Film Festival, Sara Driver and You Are Not I were featured in a retrospective of her work at the Thessaloniki (Greece) Film Festival. As I wrote in my first email to Sara Driver after speaking with her on the phone: You could probably sense how excited I was when you called. I had no idea when I found the film in Tangier what we had ... until I viewed it. I’m so glad (thrilled actually) that this is good news for you. Something kept that film from being lost all those years. It could easily have vanished forever following Paul Bowles’s death. (June 2010)

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Coincidentally, a few months before learning that You Are Not I had been found, Sara Driver received a request from the Portuguese Cinematheque to show the film in their June, 2010 program. She replied that unfortunately it would not be possible since she had no print or usable copy. Another odd stroke was that the film was discovered just prior to the international centenary celebrations of Paul Bowles’s birth. Was the unexpected find of this lost film print merely an accident or was something else happening? To paraphrase William Burroughs in The Place of Dead Roads: In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. (217)

Or perhaps as Bowles suggested in Regina Weinreich’s documentary, “Plans make themselves.” WORKS CITED Burroughs, William. The Place of Dead Roads. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. Weinreich, Regina and Catherine Hiller Warnow. dirs. Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider. First Run Features, 1993. DVD.

A RESISTANT TEXT: “YOU ARE NOT I” YOSHIAKI KOSHIKAWA

One of the main themes in the fiction of Paul Bowles is that of “traveling,” and the characters he presents are depicted as “travelers.” They move through the borders between two different locations, and have to encounter a variety of unfamiliar social conventions. In “You Are Not I,” Paul Bowles uses an experimental style to portray a “schizophrenic” traveler, Ethel. Bowles challenges the stereotypical discourses which determine the social boundaries between “sanity” and “insanity,” and Ethel demonstrates that such boundaries are arbitrary ones, reinforced by Puritan ideology. In this essay, I focus on the syntactically incorrect sentences which Ethel constructs, and conclude, through my analysis of these sentences, that “You Are Not I” is a “schizophrenic” text which resists social conventions, and which forces us to look at the contradictory nature of the world, through her eyes.

The “Travel” Narrative One of the major elements that characterize Paul Bowles’s short stories is “travel” and the characters in his stories are, in fact, travelers. In many cases, their acts of “traveling” draw attention to the existence of a boundary that exists between two locations. Indeed, throughout Bowles’s work, there are frequent images that represent certain kinds of boundaries. For instance, in his earlier short story “The Scorpion” (1944), a “curtain of water drops” (CS 27) is a typical example of such a boundary, in this case separating a cave in which an old woman lives from the outer world. In another story, “Doña Faustina” (1949), “an impenetrable curtain of leaves” (207) shuts away the house where two sisters are living in seclusion from society. Even in short stories that lack such distinctive “boundary” images, there are images that signify and highlight movement from one location to another. In these stories, comparative adjectives are used to

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indicate movement. In “By the Water” (1945), for instance, when Amar, the protagonist, goes to the next town, he ponders how, in comparison to home, “the snow was even deeper in the streets, and it was colder” (31). In short, the town is, for him, an “unfriendly town” (ibid.). For Amar, as a traveler, the next town is an unfamiliar, ominous, and gloomy world, even though it is not far from where he belongs, which he describes as “a better and larger city.” As the later episode reveals, this different “world” has its own mechanism of taboos, which can indiscriminately exclude anybody who violates them. Another short story, “Under the Sky” (1946), presents a young man named Jacinto, from a village of the mountains in Latin America, who travels to a town and is driven, it is implied, to commit a sexual assault by the burning heat of the town. The town is thus described: [as a place which] [p]eople who lived outside in the country, and even some of the more educated town-dwellers, called … “the Inferno” because nowhere in the region was the heat so intense. (77)

In this regard, Stephen Koch is right when he says, “Bowles is an artist of landscape” (242). He continues by explaining that “[w]hether set in Morocco, Mexico, or the New York subway, the Bowles scene is invariably ominous with secret terrors” (ibid). However, I would argue that Koch’s reading reduces the multiple meanings of movement, displacement, and travel in Bowles’s texts to manipulation of the Other, as Edward W. Said fully explained in the book Orientalism. He historiographically defined it, saying: Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. (3)

Indeed, a counterargument can be made to Koch’s statement that the typical Bowles character is “a rationalist, therefore a naïf – disoriented in some seductive, alien Elsewhere” (242). Contrary to his reading, I would suggest that the protagonists in Bowles’s fiction are not necessarily “rational and naïf” Westerners. In Bowles’s fiction, protagonists almost always yield to the overwhelming power of the

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scenery of “foreign” places regardless of whether the protagonists are uneducated Arabs or irrational Americans. Nevertheless, it is only the human mind that assigns meaning to “scenery” in “foreign” places by applying attributes to it such as “mysterious” or “romantic;” or more negatively, “savage” or “uncivilized.” Those labels are nothing but a product of the imaginations of the travelers who cross boundaries and borders. Thus, no matter how familiar or unfamiliar the scenery seems, Bowles’s fiction with the motif of “traveling” announces the hard fact that there is no intrinsic meaning in scenery itself. If this is the case, then, what happens if we replace the idea of scenery in this context with the idea of law and taboo (or social custom and convention)? Boundaries that divide nations, genders, ethnicities and social classes rely on pre-determined beliefs and the trust of the people in a community in ideas of law and taboo. In other words, law and taboo are both supported by the existence of the boundary. However, Bowles’s travel narratives reveal the vulnerability of those seemingly distinct “boundaries” and expose the arbitrariness and relativity of law and taboo that are accepted as natural by people who live inside of the boundaries. Boundaries That Determine “Insanity” Among Bowles’s works, “You Are Not I” (1948) makes a critique of society that is relevant even today, despite the fact that the story was published more than sixty years ago. The story radically questions the basis for Western discourses about boundaries which differentiate between “sanity” and “insanity.” First, it is worth paying attention to the motif of this story. It is about a character’s escape from an asylum, a social and cultural institution, which segregates the “insane” by setting up a “boundary.” In the story, the “cyclone fences” (157) of the asylum, to which the patients flock together when a train accident occurs, signifies the boundary separating inside from outside. The fences in this text function as a cultural demarcation of “insanity.” Secondly, it should be noted that the story presents the narrator and protagonist, Ethel, as a “crazy person” (at least on the surface), who attempts the transgression of this particular boundary in the text. For instance, when she sees the dead and injured victims of the train accident, she remarks, “how everyone could get so excited I still fail

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to understand” (ibid.). She also describes the patients who flock together at “the cyclone fence” as “a lot of monkeys” (ibid.) and the derailed train as “an old worm knocked off a plant” (ibid.). Even when she sees the horrific scenery of the crushed dining car with its broken windows, she notes “[a] robin kept whistling in a tree above” (158), as if she does not care about the disaster and scene of the many dead and injured people which is unfolding in front of her. To the worldview that prioritizes the centrality of human beings over other creatures, Ethel’s behavior is a deviation from the norms of law and taboo; thus, she is labeled “abnormal” or “insane.” However, once the anthrocentric view embedded in Christianity and Western rationalism (which oftentimes supports the productivity and efficiency of capitalism without any global and ecological concerns) is problematized, Ethel’s act from her “primitive” sensitivity might no longer be considered “abnormal.” Although the comparison and conflict between “modern Western civilization” and “non-Western Nature” and between “Christianity” and “non-Christianity” are not fore grounded to a large degree in Bowles’s short stories, they are important motifs which run throughout other texts. For instance, the Americans in The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let It Come Down (1952) and Up Above the World (1966) experience the loss of “rationality,” commit brutality, and become obsessed with nightmares in the non-Western landscape such as the African desert, the conspiratorial “International Zone,” and the Latin American jungle. “Call at Corazon” (1946), unlike other short stories, deals with this theme. The story is set in a jungle in Latin America and features an American protagonist who eventually commits an irrational, brutal act. It is ironic that, even though the protagonist believes in his own imperturbable and rational standpoint, he ends up committing an astonishingly impulsive act. It is in this moment when the text reveals that his “primitivism” is nothing more than a sort of excessive romanticism toward Nature, or toward the life of non-Western natives. “Call at Corazon” is a story about the American honeymoon couple who travel into the Latin American jungle - an unknown world for them. What they experience through the trip is the fact that the partner who each is supposedly intimate with is, in fact, a stranger. The story ends with the bizarre behavior of the husband in the depth of anxiety and despair caused by an increasing lack of confidence. However, what distinguishes the story from a typical sentimental melodrama is

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the deep pessimism embedded in the text. Throughout the narrative, Bowles persistently writes not just about the frustration of the young couple but also about the vulnerability of human bonds and about the codes in society such as law and convention. Put differently, Bowles felt disillusioned with the modern rationalism and American Puritanism in his youth, and the “otherness” in him, in this context, can be read as “primitiveness” or “violence” in his selfhood which cannot be domesticated by rationalistic thought. In this respect, “Call at Corazon” is a reflection of the “anti-modernity” of his thought as well as a journey made by the protagonist to find his own “otherness” inside of himself. At any rate, Bowls’s texts constantly suggest skepticism toward the beliefs of Christian civilization and the same happens outside his novels. In one interview, he asserted that “Since Christianity entered into its catabolic phase, no philosophy has been evolved which provides for comfortable acceptance of death.” This “catabolic phase,” he explains, is “a state of progressive decline, and that the decline will continue until it reaches the point of zero, where it started” (Spilker 143). The Boundary as a “Power Apparatus” According to Michel Foucault, “mental illness has its reality and its value qua illness only within a culture that recognizes it as such” (60). In other words, pathology in a certain society is, actually, a mirror that reflects the culture of the society. For example, a patient with an ability to see visionary images labeled as “crazy” in one culture may in a different cultural environment be regarded as “holy” or “miraculous.” Bowles is drawn to the “irrational,” which has been excluded or marginalized by the Western modern society. In Morocco, the people’s awe towards magic and supernatural power remained even though the modernization of the late 1950s exceedingly caused the disappearance of such pre-modern, folk religious customs. However, Bowles’s works are not a mimetic reflection of “pre-modernity” but an expression of the “anti-modernity” in his thought. For instance, in “The Wind at Beni Midar” (1962) and “A Friend of the World” (1960), there appears narrative devices such as the “evil spirit” and the black magic drug. They symbolize something supernatural towards

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which people fear and feel awe. No matter how modernization proceeds, this fear cannot be erased from people’s minds. In one scene from “You Are Not I,” Ethel tries to put stones, which are laid along the railroad track, in the mouths of the dead bodies from the train accident. Her action, rather than being just a quirk or accidental, seems to have some religious and ritualistic meaning to her, because she seems to desperately persist in putting stones in the mouth of each corpse regardless of whether it is open or not. She even thinks, “I might not have enough stones for them all” (CS 158). Concerning this scene, Paul Bowles commented to his friend Ira Cohen; she only put stones in the mouths of dead people. That was amusing because several years after that I remember reading an account of tribal customs in Melanesia, I think, and that was one of the customs. I had never heard of it – putting stones in the mouths of dead people. It’s amusing – one knows without knowing it. (“Interview with Paul Bowles” 12)

Bowles’s comment suggests that Ethel’s act would be considered as a “normal” expression of spirituality in a society with a different worldview, even if Judeo-Christian society considers it “insane.” Nevertheless, both the man who grabs her arm and says “[a]re you crazy?” (CS 158), and the “cyclone fences” that differentiates “insanity” from “sanity” are supported by the hegemonic ideology of institutional Christianity in the society where she lives. Moreover, these norms are internalized in people’s minds. The boundary between “sanity” and “insanity” is not a transparent norm but a “power apparatus” endorsed by the hegemonic ideology. The following words by Ethel reveal one such boundary as a “power apparatus” which forecloses individual freedom: There was always somebody to stop people from doing what they wanted to do .... Perhaps what we want to do is wrong, but why should they always be the ones to decide? (158)

However, Ethel challenges the “power apparatus” endorsed by the hegemonic ideology almost unwittingly. She bursts through the “boundary” of the fence via “the main gate” without difficulty, but ends up finding herself in a paradoxical situation. She remarks, “it seemed to me that life outside was like life inside” (ibid.). “Life

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outside” literally means a life outside the asylum, but what does Bowles really mean by the expression that “life outside is like the life inside?” In her essay on this text, Naoyo Ogushi states: [i]n the condition in which Ethel is inevitably forced to be taken back to a new asylum as long as she is herself, the only way to escape from such a situation is to replace herself with her sister. The only way out is to exchange the self inside with another woman. Nevertheless, her final destination is ironically an asylum called “Home.” (201)

The narrative of this short story can be read as being presented by Ethel’s sister, who is, in fact, taken over by Ethel herself (in that Ethel believes she has become her sister). However, the last scene suggests her new room, which should be more liberated and bright than the asylum is nothing more than another gloomy space: If I look up I can see the square window of colored glass over the stairs. Purple and orange, an hourglass design, only the light never comes in very much because the house next door is so close. Besides, the rain is coming down hard here, too. (CS 164)

According to Lidia Curti, windows in popular cultural media such as a soap opera often symbolize the “confinement, enclosure, and sacrifice” (147) of women in a society. In this avant-garde short story also, the window image is used as a metonymy of “home”, denoting the prison/asylum that confines Ethel. To follow Ogushi’s statement, whether the narrator is Ethel or her sister, the final destination of the female narrator and protagonist is a “home” that is, in fact, a confining “asylum” evoked by the dark window and constantly dropping rain. And yet, if the “life inside” refers to Ethel’s internal mind, and “life outside” refers her “external world”, the paradox of her “transgression” can be negated and another interpretation is possible. If such is a case, the text also suggests that once Ethel is mentally free from the “power apparatus” that defines “insanity,” she becomes independent from the “external world.” It does not matter whether she has been taken back to the asylum or stays inside her sister’s house. The ending of the text suggests a new beginning of her life.

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Distorted Syntax In “You Are Not I” the theme of the conflict between “sanity” and “insanity” appears together with another theme, that of the “double” or “other” in the self. At the end of the story, Ethel achieves the exchange of herself with her sister (or so she believes). Allen Hibbard points out that the moment at which this exchange is completed is the moment when the first person pronoun of the narrator changes to “her,” the third person pronoun. He suggests that having an unreliable narrator such as Ellen makes the pronoun change possible: “Blurred are the lines distinguishing right and wrong, security and vulnerability, interior and exterior, sanity and insanity.” (41) Indeed, in the scene in which Ethel thrusts a stone into her sister’s mouth, there are several “contradictions,” such as the depiction of Ethel’s own teeth as bleeding, and the comment that the stone is inside the sister’s pocket rather than Ethel’s. In order to understand the narrator’s contradictions, we need to pay attention to the sentences with strangely distorted syntax that appear before the scene of the body exchange between “I” and “her.” There are two such sentences in the text, both of which involve something Ethel hears, but it is not clear who speaks those words. One of these sentences appears in the scene where Ethel hears her sister say to the driver: “She don’t look well yet to me” (CS 160). This scene is particularly significant since it is the only place where Ethel makes a basic grammatical “mistake.” This sentence suggests confusion between “I” and “her;” where “self” and “other” appears in Ethel’s consciousness on the level of syntax. In a way, it is not so “unnatural” for her to use the auxiliary verb “don’t” because the “her” in the sister’s sentence refers to Ethel herself, that is, “I” for Ethel the narrator. In other words, if the sister is speaking, the sentence should be “she doesn’t look well yet to me”, but if it is Ethel, it should be “I don’t look well yet to her.” The distorted syntax in the text thus signifies the blurring of the “boundary” between subject and object as a result of the use of both “she” and “I” as the subject of the sentence. The other example of this kind of distorted sentence appears in the scene where Ethel is listening to Mrs. Jelinek. Ethel hears her saying: “I thought they was keeping her” (161). The sentence in formal grammar would be “I thought they were keeping her,” but for Ethel, it can be “She thought I was still kept there.” The sentence in the text thus suggests the associative connection and confusion of opposites in

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Ethel’s consciousness, and the confusion of the distinction between the person who confines and the person who is confined; the subject and the object; “I” and “they.” These syntactically distorted sentences are produced by Ethel’s heightened consciousness of socially negative and marginalized labels such as “disease” and “confinement.” In spite of being grammatically incorrect, they indicate Ethel’s struggles to express her internal motives. In either case – whether she attempts to objectify the self or to subjectify the other – these sentences can be seen as a kind of “natural” speech act with its own logic. The Resistant Text: A Conclusion Another short story by Bowles, “If I Should Open My Mouth” (1952), also features a “schizophrenic” protagonist. Like “You Are Not I,” this story is a text with a narrative where it is impossible for the reader to distinguish between what really happened and mere fabrication. The protagonist and narrator of “If I Should Open My Mouth” is a 55-year-old, socially maladjusted man who has a plot to place poisonous gums in the vending machines in the New York subway stations. However, while he narrates the details of the day when he supposedly carried out his mission, he also writes that he did nothing except reading a newspaper in the garden all that same day. In another passage, even though he writes that he “delivered twenty gums,” he also remarks that he is astonished to find all of the gums remaining in his pocket. Thus, this short story has several “contradictions” in the text just as “You Are Not I” does. These two texts are similar in the way they present the act of writing (écriture). The unreliable narrators and the forms of “private writing” – in the case of “If I Should Open My Mouth,” the form of a private daily journal – are the constitutive element of both texts. Neither texts explicitly discuss the ontological anxiety or identity crises of the protagonists; rather, they present “contradictions” through the actual discourses of the narratives. This being the case, it is not enough to point out the “contradictions” embedded in the texts from the outside of the text (from the meta-level). Since there is no clue in the text by means of which the reader can discern whether the narrative is factual or fictional, it is impossible to utilize mundane or pathological labels such as “insanity” and “mental disorder.” Bowles’s texts demand that, by closely reading “schizophrenic” texts,

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the reader is forced to see the contradictions of the world in which he or she lives. In this respect, these two short stories are resistant texts that shed a critical light on the stereotypes or common assumptions of readers. While Hans Bertens states that “[t]hese stories have the presentation of insanity as an end in itself” (194), Richard F. Patteson goes so far as to say that “[t]he stories they tell, no less than those of “sane” people, give structure to their reality and make it bearable” (118). Patteson also remarks on Ethel’s narrative that “it is the telling of stories, her only defense against complete mental chaos, that marks her as insane from the point of view of others,” (119) and refers to the paradoxes of the distorted syntax and the contradictory details in the texts. Paul Bowles explores the domain in which the “boundary” between “sanity” and “insanity” becomes indiscernible by dealing with the human mind – more specifically, the mind, which is either simply ignored or categorized as “schizophrenic”. His texts reveal to the reader the arbitrariness of mundane and hegemonic discourses on “insanity.” However, Bowles is one of the few writers who understands the internalized boundary that binds people as a “power apparatus” to quite the same degree, possibly because Bowles himself had witnessed the human activities from the margins of the society and transgressed multiple borders of disciplines of the world to which he belongs. In this sense, “You Are Not I” endures a great deal of significance in resisting the “power apparatus” of ethics endorsed by traditional institutional Christianity.1

NOTES 1

The other places where Bowles examines the arbitrariness of “boundaries” which define “insanity” are three short stories in the monologue style: “New York (1965),” “Massachusetts (1932),” and “Tangier (1975),” all written after “You Are Not I.” In these short stories published in Unwelcome Words (1988), the reader is forced to examine both the incidents narrated and the consciousness of the narrating subjects. The analysis of the extremely distorted narratives in these texts makes the reader realize that a variety of boundaries in society, such as ethnic and gender differences, are social and cultural constructions. In other words, Bowles’s texts urge the reader to

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question the naturalized ways of thinking by revealing that the norms cannot function in different contexts.

WORKS CITED Bertens, Hans. The Fiction of Paul Bowles: The Soul Is the Weariest Part of the Body. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1979. Bowles, Paul. Collected Stories: 1939-1976. Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1979. Cohen, Ira. “Interview with Paul Bowles,” in Conversations with Paul Bowles. ed. Gena Dagel Caponi. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. (9-21). Curti, Lidia. “What is Real, What is Not: Female Fabulations in Cultural Analysis,” in Cultural Studies. ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. New York: Routlege,1992. (134-53). Foucault, Michel. Mental Illness and Psychology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Koch, Stephen. “Paul Bowles: The High Stylist of Tangier.” The Washington Post Book World 9 Aug. 1979. Rpt. in Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. ed. Allen Hibbard. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. (242-43). Ohgushi, Naoyo. “Rezu wo Aishita Otoko tachi” [“Men Who Love Lesbians”]. Yuriika: A Literary Journal Mar. (1994): 196-205. Patteson, Richard F. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1987. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Spilker, John. “Paul Bowles Interviewed,” in Conversations with Paul Bowles. ed. Gena Dagel Caponi. Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1993. (135-44).

VI ON INTERCULTURAL MEDIATIONS

TOWARDS AN ABSENT ORIGIN: THE EDGE OF ANGER IN PAUL BOWLES’S “A DISTANT EPISODE” BOUCHRA BENLEMLIH

The essay shows how “A Distant Episode” operates in the shadow of LéviStrauss’s seminal autobiography-cum-travel-book-cum-ethnography, Tristes Tropiques. “A Distant Episode,” like Tristes Tropiques, conveys the drama and self-doubt that must attend any self-aware anthropologist as he/she ventures into the sphere of the other in order to rescue it, but comes to realize that he is an agent of its potential destruction. The paper seeks to shed light on the way the soul-destroying knowledge in Tristes Tropiques is in tune with Bowles’s in “A Distant Episode,” which holds the seeds for several themes Bowles will explore in other stories and novels, notably The Sheltering Sky. It shows how both Bowles’s and Lévi-Strauss’s works are turned towards an origin that is absent.

The feeling of modernity ruining a faith in essence and origins is dominant in Bowles’s writing and closely connects his works to LéviStrauss’s seminal autobiography-cum-travel-book-cum-ethnography Tristes Tropiques (1955). Bowles’s short story “A Distant Episode” is a compelling example. Indeed, Lévi-Strauss’s leitmotif of ethnographic mourning, emblematised in the title Tristes Tropiques, is applicable to “A Distant Episode.” Tristes Tropiques is a commentary on Lévi-Strauss’s fieldwork, and has quite a personal, even autobiographical, dimension to it. In some senses, it stands in a similar relationship to Lévi-Strauss as a professional anthropologist as does a story or novel to the author who draws closely upon his own experiences. What is intriguing about Tristes Tropiques is that it conveys the drama and self-doubt that must attend any self-aware anthropologist as he or she ventures into the sphere of the Other or, at least, the unknown, in order to rescue it or, at least, to acknowledge it, but comes to realize that he puts that which he values at risk through his actions. There may well be a science of anthropology or something approaching a set of methods and protocols. However, the science is always already attended by the anthropologist’s knowledge that he or

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she is a participant in the drama of engagement with another culture, and, to some extent, that he or she is an agent of its potential destruction. It is in this enacting of a relationship that Tristes Tropiques approaches the status of a literary text, one definition of which is that it is aware of its own status. It would be too much to claim that any one text of Paul Bowles captures that drama, but, in this paper, I hope to show that along with much blindness can be discerned key insights. Paul de Man has remarked, when coining this opposition: The eye remains trained on the darkness knowing it to hold a secret that the flash will disclose. The flash is not the secret but the occasion of the moment when all is in the light; the reward of peering into the dark. (xx)

In “A Distant Episode,” the protagonist is a “Linguistics Professor.” His name, then, is wrapped up in specialized knowledge and academic training. Such expertise in language may give the impression that the Professor is distantiated from reality. But this is a Professor who is something of an anthropologist, and therefore a traveler, rather than a frequenter of libraries. He undertakes a trip to Ain Tadouirt, an imaginary setting somewhere in the south of Morocco, to study “variations on Moghrebi” (CS 39), collect camel-udder bags, and visit a friend he made during his last visit ten years earlier. In its concern for Moroccan local dialects, the story reveals from the very first page an ethnographic dimension. “A Distant Episode” opens our eyes onto a world of senses – rather than a world of the intellect – that Bowles has created. The story starts on the bus when the Professor “closed his eyes happily” and loses his self in reverie, to live alone with nature. The story thus opens up a journey into “a purely olfactory world” (ibid.), many elements of which permeate Bowles’s works and tie “A Distant Episode” to the world of The Sheltering Sky, “A Friend of the World,” and “The Echo.” In “A Distant Episode,” the color, sounds, and particularly smells are very strongly accentuated in the Professor’s world: “orange blossoms, pepper, sun baked excrement, burning olive oil, rotten fruit” (39), all fill the Professor’s air as well as the reader’s imagination. The Professor links this world of sensations to a visit he made ten years ago to the same village. His remembering, “visualizing” and “imagining” the past, as the narrative opens, is suggestive, so much that it reveals the Professor as a poetic soul who shakes off the

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temporal, rational world, to live, even if only “for an instant” (39) in a realm of vision. Invoking the past, merely a reminiscence of an evanescent occurrence, announces that the story that follows will trade on repetition, the repetition of happy sensations of the past or rather the Professor’s desire and attempt to recapture that instant, that moment of euphoria and preserve it from amnesia and forgetfulness. The temporal succession of the narrative gives way to the atemporality of memory structures, and of symbolic systems. The story spends some time working out transformations. The Professor, as a Western researcher, assumes that the village will not have changed, that it is timeless, out of (Western) time: “Does this café still belong to Hassan Ramani?” and ‘“Tell me,’ he said, as the other started away. ‘Can one still get those little boxes made from camel udders?”‘(40). The recurrence of the adverb “still” in the Professor’s questions, as well as his interest in “the camel-udder box,” relics of the past that he wants to collect as little “exotic” trinkets, are all quite revealing. They set up the village in a changeless state that endures, frozen in time, notwithstanding the inexorable progress of history. Such a fixed and ahistorical essence or identity of the other echoes what Port says in The Sheltering Sky: “Time doesn’t exist for them” (177). It is pervasive in ethnographic writing. It is, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, a “structure of feeling” (Marxism and Literature 1977). It is a view that denies the fact that ways of life can die and vanish, that even the most rural part of the world is connected to the modern, and that traditions are constantly changing. But the Linguistics Professor is dangerously detached from reality. The Professor’s desire to live right up to the edge of, if not outside, modernity is countered by his own civilized self. Such a fissure in the Professor’s character traverses the narrative to severely distance him from the real world as he walks into it, emphasising thus the Professor’s fragility and folly. He is immersed in the empirically knowable physical reality around him without being a part of it. It is that opposition, that superimposition of one world on another that is significant. Such a radical juxtaposition of two incongruous opposites, what John Huntington calls a “two-world system” (“The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells” 35), is central to Bowles’s imaginative structure in “A Distant Episode” and many of his stories. The superimposition reflects an attitude of cultural ambivalence, for, as Hibbard points out, at the same time “the Professor turns his back on home, he recalls his native sympathies” (“Some Versions of Ironic

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(Mis) Interpretation” 75). This ambivalence is gradually uncovered by the growing discontinuity in the Professor’s empirical and intellectual selves, dramatizing and even caricaturing his condition of blindness. Travelling in the direction of Lévi-Strauss, “A Distant Episode” expresses feelings of grief, as nature, land, raw materials and also people are transformed. Indeed, Bowles’s configuration that “mass society” will only reduce the world to a “cultural vacuum,” a “malaise” that Hibbard argues will sink the world further into boredom (Paul Bowles 158), comes very close to that of Lévi-Strauss as he travels up the Amazon into the heart of Brazil, collecting myths and artefacts, and lamenting the worn, debased world that emerged from the war. He writes: Mankind has opted for a monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass …. Our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom. (38)

Like Lévi-Strauss, Bowles suspects that the world is a vast emptiness superimposed upon emptiness. The reader remembers what Port of The Sheltering Sky says: “Everything’s getting gray, and it’ll be grayer. But some places’ll withstand the malady longer than you think” (16). What is most urgently being mourned is the loss of a human landscape in which the source of feeling is that it is natural because it is native. Where for Bowles, for Port, the Linguistics Professor and Lévi-Strauss, change means disorder, the argument, as it goes, unfolds that the oppositions I am going to discuss are not fixed, but rather unstable. Melancholy and regret connect the tristesse of Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, with “A Distant Episode” and The Sheltering Sky. Bowles’s reflections may be understood by invoking Raymond Williams’s discussion of “structure of feeling” (Marxism and Literature 128-135): [in which what modernity is] most visibly destroying is “Nature”: that complex of the land as it was in the past and in childhood, which both ageing and alteration destroy. (138)

Bowles’s stories handle the anger, guilty feelings in which “not only innocence and security but peace and plenty have been imprinted” (Williams, The Country and the City 139). Such a feeling figures in

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“A Distant Episode,” and also in The Sheltering Sky, where in the latter Port investigated “a small ruined building” (131). He found it occupied by an old man, and “around the trunk he had built a shelter’ (131). In all these narratives, existence among fragments is depicted as a process of ruin and cultural decay. The reader also senses this feeling of existence among fragments in Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue, where Bowles, like Lévi-Strauss, sees the “byproducts of our civilization” as a disease that ravages “alien cultures” (viii). This said, “A Distant Episode” operates within a version of the myth of the “Fall,” that is the fall from grace of Adam and Eve when they sinned and were ejected from the Garden of Eden. The fall as it appears in modern literature is usually from a natural environment into the modern city. In contrast, the Professor’s search for dialects and peoples that have escaped the ills of modernity takes him into the desert. Indeed, the “edge” and “abyss” are topographic signs that alert us to, but also sustain, the myth of the fall and reflect the Professor’s movement from the familiar, verifiable and predictable into a subterranean abyss, an alien ill-defined universe peopled with confused sensations and cacophonous “guttural voices that he could not understand” (45). The choice of metaphor also suggests how writing and travel feed each other, how Bowles relates what he knows to what he does not know, and how practical consciousness relates to new consciousness through new relationships. In a curious way, Bowles shows how linguistic reality remains beyond the Professor’s grasp. His construction of the desert is not enough. The Professor must compare his construct with the others and see the common ground. The linguist’s construct is not against the Other’s construction of the desert and therefore fails. In “A Distant Episode,” the Linguistics Professor is brutalized into a speechless clown, and stripped of his title. His purpose is thwarted as his tongue is cut off. The Professor’s aspiration to survey the Moghrebi dialects and to preserve them in text is brought to nought. Giving himself the opportunity “of testing the accuracy of such statements” (44) the Professor puts his very being on trial, which leads him to odd contexts of captivity as the Reguibat dress him up with rags and tin-cans and teach him how to dance obscenely for their enjoyment, inducing metaphorically a great silence:

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The men took him out, still in a state which permitted no thought, and over the dusty rags that remained of his clothing they fastened a series of curious belts made of the bottoms of tin cans strung together. One after another of these bright girdles was wired about his torso, his arms and legs, even across his face, until he was entirely within a suit of armor that covered him with its circular metal scales. (45)

“Clothing”‘ and armour thus separate the Linguistics Professor from the inhabitants of the desert. The Professor, like Bowles and LéviStrauss, is in the space between as he has cultural luggage, based on what Fredric Jameson calls, in another context, “a very peculiar and specialized social and historical phenomenon (112). The most sustained description of the Professor is when he “watched nervously, like a dog watching a fly in front of its nose” (CS 48). The Professor, who seeks to salvage meaning from exotic lives, accelerates his doom. His travel into the desert – his anthropological experience and empiricism – is a total alienation. It is not only a stripping away of professional or civilized status, but also a stripping away of thought as the fragments “still in a state which permitted no thought” (45) show. This is the drama of self-aware anthropologists. It connects “A Distant Episode” to Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. In Tristes Tropiques, as mentioned, Lévi-Strauss knows that his self is implicated in the process of viewing the other culture. He asserts that knowledge destroys the subject of its study. It cannot be scientifically detached. To know the object is to transform it for oneself: Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favour of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favour of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began. (411)

Thought, for Lévi-Strauss as for the writer of “A Distant Episode,” separates person from object. Thought continually intervenes to split them. The Professor’s old identity ceases to exist, like Kit Moresby’s in The Sheltering Sky. He becomes a mindless functioning clown with no control of his consciousness of life, with no traces of humanness. According to Bowles, the Professor must strip the layers of his armour in order to regain his being. The Professor’s state of being brings to

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mind Lévi-Strauss’ assertion: “we can discover the truth in the form of a mutual exclusiveness of being and knowledge” (411). Like LéviStrauss, Bowles comes to realize that he puts the other culture he values at risk through his mobility and his actions, mixing in, but often in partial, specific manners. Such a realization projects a division in the writer’s self as much as the natural world he traverses and idealizes. Wandering into the desert is for the Professor – and Bowles in his less insightful moments – a flight from human society in the attempt to flee the human condition. Such escape figures in Tristes Tropiques, too. Lévi-Strauss writes: Human culture has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; … the only privilege of which [man] can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison. (414)

Levi-Strauss’s resolution of the tension and his response to what he perceives as soul-destroying knowledge in Tristes Tropiques are in tune with Bowles’s in “A Distant Episode.” In the final scene of “A Distant Episode,” we track the Professor as he “finally broke,” bellowing, galloping and widely gesticulating “in an access of terror” (CS 48). He runs out of the house where he was being kept, climbing through the opening he has made, and destroying everything in his way. This suggests retreat in solitude to lose the self by removing it from the escalating process in order to restore one’s lost humanity. The Professor’s solitary, helpless being is thus emphasised. He drives himself into an impossible situation. To use Raymond Williams’s words: … an essential isolation and silence and loneliness have become the only carriers of nature and community against the rigours, the cold abstinence, the selfish ease of ordinary society. (Marxism and Literature 131)

The final scene of “A Distant Episode” also suggests that Bowles cannot fully distance himself from some of his less enlightened characters because he is caught up in the precarious relationship. Retreat in solitude is the path of a continuing alienation that transfers

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from society to an aloof writer, eventually Paul Bowles. It is a flight in the attempt to substitute for the human conditions a pure, infinite and possible space. And yet Bowles, like Lévi-Strauss, is riddled with paradox. The authenticity and spontaneity that they think allow them to escape the omnipotence of Western society is of no historical significance, because they refer to an absent center, or origin. The linguist’s atemporal view of the Moghrebi other approaches them in terms of the disappearing past. But searching a bygone past, he locates the set of possibilities on one axis only, neglecting thus a host of other possibilities. As such, the Professor retreats into the precipice, reminding us of the tragic in life. Like Kit Moresby in The Sheltering Sky, he becomes what he is – a wanderer, “a holy maniac” (48). Sometimes, the balance is lost, as it is in Tristes Tropiques. But as Derrida has convincingly explained in his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” “the structurality of the structure” is to be considered (280). “A Distant Episode,” along with The Sheltering Sky, turns towards a past that no longer exists. The mourning, regret and nostalgia in these stories are in tune with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s leitmotif of ethnographic mourning. They show how both Bowles’s and Lévi-Strauss’s works are turned towards an origin that is absent, but whose other side is “affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming” (Derrida 292). Things have changed in Morocco as well as in the Professor’s and Port’s own world. In The Sheltering Sky, Kit finds that the world is becoming a monoculture, defined by its sameness and its deadness, and so too were the minds of its inhabitants. She says: The people of each country get more like the people of every other country. They have no character, no beauty, no ideals, no culture – nothing, nothing. (16)

Similarly, in “A Distant Episode” the Professor’s friend Hassan Ramani is “deceased” (CS 40), and there is nothing outside of the economic circuit for Reguibat. All these are textual proofs of transformation, mobility and change, which alter the relationship between Bowles’s characters – and Bowles himself – and the world. The absent origin attests to incessant change and denatured nature, which affirm, to borrow Derrida’s words, “a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active

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interpretation” (292). The center does not hold, because there is no absolute center from which one can properly analyse or reform one’s social construct. In “A Distant Episode,” the characters construct the other from a fixed vantage point, but there is no fixed vantage point that is not implicated in the structure. The Professor’s stable view of the other culture derives from the timeless simplicity of logical constructions like binary oppositions. They determine the notion of structure with which Claude LéviStrauss hopes to reconcile nature and culture. The cost of losing this dialogue haunts “A Distant Episode” and The Sheltering Sky. The oppositional structures in “A Distant Episode”‘ are like the arbitrary signs of language: they at once assume meaning and undergo change. In this sense, problems specific to structural interpretation appear in the story. These problems become acute when the Linguistics Professor’s structuralist “logic” becomes both rigid and arbitrary, when the logic of opposition begins to impinge on the flexibility of the other as a significant element. Being caught up in nostalgia for an absent origin, the Professor of “A Distant Episode” reveals blindness. There is always a pattern in Morocco, and in the United States. Culture will always be inhabited by nature and nature will always be inhabited by culture. They are always already interrelated. WORKS CITED Bowles, Paul. Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue. New York: Random House, 1963. ––––. The Sheltering Sky. New York: The Ecco Press, 1977. ––––. Collected Stories 1939–1976. Santa Barbara: Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1979. Caponi, G. D. Paul Bowles. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. ––––. ed. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Jackson: University Press of Mississipi, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Hman Sciences,” in Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 278-95. Hibbard, Allen. “Some Versions of Ironic (Mis) Interpretation: The American Abroad.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, Interpretation and Hermeneutics/ al-harminutiqa wa al-Tawil 8. Spring (1988): 66-87.

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––––. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Huntington, J. “The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells,” in Science Fiction: A Critical Guide. ed. Patrick Parrinder. London: Longman, 1979. (34-50). Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Man, Paul De. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. London: Routledge, 1983. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973. ––––. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

THE IMPOSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE “OTHER” IN “THE TIME OF FRIENDSHIP” FERNANDO GOMES

This essay demonstratse that of all Bowles’s short stories, “The Time of Friendship” probably most subtly represents the complexity of human relations and the essence of the author’s perception of the confrontation between the West and its alterity: the presumptive attempt to assimilate the “other’s” culture and the impossibility of a genuine relation between peoples where cultures diverge fundamentally. I will also try to show how this particular short story summarises the favorite themes of the author, particularly the criticism of both the colonialists and the separatists in their annihilation of a geopolitical ideal, as well as his nostalgia for colonial and pre-colonial times; a perspective that indicates an orientalist bias.

Written in 1962, “The Time of Friendship” is in essence a rewriting of the theme depicted in “Tea on the Mountain,” i.e. a Western woman’s quest for a romantic ideal analogous to orientalist imagery that she embodies in a young Arab boy. However, as a result of the experience acquired in contact with the alterity and Paul Bowles’s improved skill in writing fiction, the short story reveals a deeper and more subtle depiction of the complexity of human relations, specifically the confrontation between two cultures, one fundamentally Islamic and the other Christian. Allen Hibbard establishes an interesting parallel between the female protagonist, Fräulein Windling, and the Swiss novelist Isabelle Eberhardt, on the basis that Bowles translated some of her texts collected in The Oblivion Seekers (1975), which he also prefaced. This reveals Bowles’s knowledge and admiration for this woman who, at the turn of the XIX century, disguised herself as an Arab man and embraced the desert and Islamism (56). Stewart recalls that, in a manuscript version of the story, Fräulein Windling also disguises herself as a man, which gives her the freedom and the opportunity to deal more easily with Arab men (140-41). Moreover, Greg A. Mullins,

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arguing the banal practice of homosexual interaction at that time, sees in this disguise, the opportunity for the woman to have sexual affairs. However, Mullins claims that this is not, in fact, the attitude of the protagonist, who is seeking a more genuine relationship (30). Finally, Gena Dagel Caponi believes that this short story, due to the true tenderness shown, is emotionally “closer” to Bowles’s own friendship with Ahmed Yacoubi (175). The characters of “The Time of Friendship” – Fräulein Windling, a Swiss teacher who adopted the desert as her second home, Boufleja, the hotel employee, and Slimane, the young Arab – as well as the choice of the place, Timimoun – all result from an encounter during the author’s journey in the desert, in the Winter of 1948-49, namely in Taghit, when writing The Sheltering Sky (WS 282). Paul Bowles confesses to Laurence Stewart that the impossibility for this woman to return to Taghit, because of the Algerian War, inspired him (Stewart 136). This fact brings to mind Bowles’s predictions exposed in “The Moslems” [“Africa Minor”] article published in 1959: The crucial Algerian struggle is to the fifties rather what the Spanish Civil War was to the thirties. Friendships break up as a result of bitter arguments …. But regardless of how the tragic episode terminates, no part of North Africa will again be the same sort of paradise for Europeans that it was during the past fifty years. (Stewart 136)

This short story is the culmination of the author’s feelings towards North Africa, an elegy commemorative of that loss. Fräulein Windling embodies the essence of the feelings that motivate most of Bowles’s Western characters when confronted with the geographical and human alterities often considered adverse and primitive. In 1974, Bowles confesses to Michael Rogers his pessimism concerning the Rousseauian fantasy of the return to nature and more specifically, to the attempt, somewhat widespread among his generation, to integrate, regardless of their identity, an archaic culture: … there is no such thing as going backwards, really .... If a Westerner encounters an archaic culture with the idea of learning from it, I think he can succeed. He wants to absorb the alien for his own benefit. But to lose oneself in it is not a

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normal desire. A romantic desire, yes, but actually to try and do it is disastrous. (77)

Disillusioned by modern society, the Westerner seeks to reestablish the contact with nature that humanity has lost and believes that this would be possible in the desert: “What we have lost they still possess” (“The Time” 218). This simple sentence summarizes the motivating force behind the journeys, the stays and the expatriation of the characters, including the author’s, in North Africa. Like the Moresbys in The Sheltering Sky, Fräulein Windling doesn’t appreciate the port – Oran – which she regards as a gloomy city, modernized by colonialism. She believes that the Algerian cities similar to Oran reflect the exteriorization of degeneracy, the fruit of the hybridism (225). Thus, the stays in the desert function as authentic peregrinations to ancient times, which regenerate her both physically and morally: Her first sight of the desert ... had been a transfiguring experience; indeed, it seemed to her now that before coming here she had never been in touch with life at all. She believed firmly that each day she spent here increased the aggregate of her resistance. (218)

Fräulein Windling’s conception of alterity is based on the search for cultural purity. As for Kit in The Sheltering Sky, the charm of the desert resides in the fact that it is not contaminated by European culture – “without any visible sign of European influence” (TSS 181). In her Swiss winters, Windling likes to entertain her students with tales about African primitive life in the “great desert”, eluding, deliberately, the aspects that pervert the picturesque culture, such as using empty oil tins for carrying water, instead of the goathide bags of a few years before (216-17). Her appreciation of primitive cultural identity provokes a condemning attitude: She had tried to discourage her friends among the village women from this innovation, telling them that the tins could poison the water; they had agreed, and gone on using them. (217)

Having failed in her attempt to maintain the purity of tradition, she concludes by depreciating the native woman: “‘They are lazy,’ she

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decided. ‘The oil tins are easier to carry’“ (217). This judgment is not only a sign of her egocentrism, but also of a colonialist, if not a racist, attitude as it is based on the laziness which Albert Memmi indicates as one of the mythic characteristics of the colonized (101). Emphasizing, right at the beginning of the short story, the protagonist’s tendency to impose her models, Bowles signifies the weight of the egocentric as well as the colonialist positions and attitudes on the collapse of the relation with the “other.”1 In truth, Fräulein Windling’s understanding of the alterity, as with Stenham in The Spider’s House, derives, to a great extent, from an idealization of the desert’s primitive nature, anchored in orientalist imagery. The author criticizes this attitude because it invalidates an impartial perspective. Thus, she admires the native women and their capacity to find wood, regarding them as superior because the “virus” of European culture does not infect them, but depreciates their difficulties in dealing with the desert (217). In the same way, being the author’s alter ego, she laments the increasing impact of colonial culture on the primitive and, although understanding the nationalist claims, she avoids the political reality, namely the growth of separatist insurrections and their subsequent reprisals (216). In fact, she prefers to harmonize the silence of the natives with her illusion: In the meantime people did not talk; life was hard but peaceful. Each one was aware of the war that was going on in the north, and each one was glad it was far away. (216)

She is, nevertheless, sufficiently perceptive to apprehend the change in the younger population’s behaviour but she prefers to avoid thinking about it, to “put it resolutely out of her mind” (219). As she doesn’t interpret the silence of the natives, she seems to be unable to recognize a possible reaction to her presence as a Westerner and, by extension, as a colonialist. Furthermore, she is upset by the attitude of the young Arabs because it disturbs the quietude of her sojourn in the oasis. Consequently, she decides to establish contact with them, however, her motivation is not to communicate but to dominate, to impose her presence and restore the respect she believes she deserves (219). The propensity to impose her ideas is gradually revealed in the relationship she establishes with Slimane. In fact, through this relationship Bowles exposes the protagonist’s incoherence in her

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interpretation of the native culture, and from a larger perspective, the incoherence of the colonialist belief in the kindness of his interference on the identity of the “other,” either to maintain traditions or to establish progress. Like Amar in Stenham’s view, this young boy embodies the ideals Fräulein Windling is looking for in the desert. What she admires the most is “his aura of purity and innocence” (226), but, diverging from the Westerner in The Spider’s House who defends the non-interference on the Muslim identity, she is incapable of fully accepting his new friend. Imbued with eroticism,2 the friendship between both is authentic and, according to Allen Hibbard, based on reciprocal curiosity about their mysterious worlds: “Each is, for the other, a symbol of the unknown; friendship is the means by which each one tries to tame, penetrate, or master that unknown” (57). Still, there are significant differences in the way each one faces the alterity. Slimane’s relation with the Westerner seems to be genuine. The major proof of his friendship is probably the fact that he tells her his real name, which reveals, according to the local tradition, a great trust in the foreigner (221). His feelings almost equal veneration. Except on religious matters, which he is always reluctant to discuss, arguing the Nazarene incapacity to understand Islam (223), he always listens to her with great attention, and always serves her with contentment (222). Slimane’s feelings seem to be pure – among others, his sadness because of Fräulein Windling’s departure to Switzerland (224) and because he thinks she is upset by his destruction of the Nativity scene (244) – and he accepts her stay in the oasis without any cultural or religious restriction. In contrast, Fräulein Windling’s feelings reveal egocentrism: her intent to teach him how to read during her first sojourn; the feeling that it was “difficult not to lose patience with him” (222) faced with his inability to understand the simple basis of reading; and finally abandoning this project, exploiting instead his physical capacities – the widespread attitude in colonial times – she decides to use him in her routine (222) and provide him with a more universal education. This is the reason why, in the second year, she decides to instruct him in the subjects that she considers essential for his cultural maturity, mainly in religious matters, taking care to “keep Jesus distinct from the Moslem prophet Sidna Aissa” because “she could not agree for an instant with the Islamic doctrine according to which the Savior was a Moslem” (222-23). She also talked about her country – “casually stressing the cleanliness, honesty and good health

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of her countrymen in short parables of life” (222). Here, Bowles is particularly ironic, exposing the Westerner’s emphasis on Swiss cleanliness, the honesty and the sanitation, which strongly contrast with the sanitary conditions in North Africa, as with the stereotype image from the colonialist discourse about the dishonesty of the natives. Preoccupied with preserving the “aura of purity and innocence” (226) that she saw in Slimane, Fräulein Windling doesn’t fully perceive that her presence itself, her contact with the young boy, and moreover, the instruction that she wants to give him are factors of cultural transformation, thus of possible alienation from the other young boys and from the rest of the oasis people. From the beginning of her relationship with the young Arab, the Westerner adopts a protective attitude, which goes beyond the normal relationship between an adult and a young boy and takes on colonialist tones. In fact, right at the beginning, she sympathizes with the boy’s poverty – “‘Poor child! If I ever buy anything for him it will be a pair of sandals’“ (221), and she offers him food and “for discipline’s sake,” “a piece of candy only every other day” (221). This discipline is, however, rapidly neglected; favouring ostentatious gifts despite knowing these would be commented among the other natives (223). The interference in the education and consequently in the relationship between Slimane and the other villagers diverges from her admiration of the oasis’s primitive identity. In addition, she is conscious that these gifts make the relation with Slimane possible, keeping his “father from forbidding him to spend his time with her. Even so, according to reports brought by Slimane, he sometimes objected” (“The Time” 223). Nevertheless, she believes that her young friend is not perverted by the consumerism of colonial interaction, that he “wanted nothing, expected nothing” (223). In truth, she prefers to maintain the illusion that she has succeeded in establishing contact and so is an integrated part of the oasis. She doesn’t consider the colonial features of the means used to this end, neither does she ponder on the real motives of the paternal reticence, or on the satisfaction showed by Boufelja when Slimane couldn’t eat at the hotel (232). It is, however, believable that she doesn’t act in bad faith; simply depending on Western reference points, she doesn’t foresee the outcome of her intervention and its limits. Equally demonstrative of this incapacity are the episodes of the tip given to Boufelja, which is “much larger than she could afford” (241), as well

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as the episode where she offers money to Slimane for his return to the village but which, ironically, allows him to stay in Colomb-Bechar and join the nationalists. Paradoxically, Fräulein Windling emerges as an instrument of cultural decline, and what she wants to mold the most is Slimane’s religious credo (223). During a picnic, when she hears the boy giving thanks to Allah for the refreshing wind, she openly disregards his faith and gets upset by the boy’s fervent reaction (227). She reacts by deciding to build a Nativity scene, anticipating the pleasure of sharing the religious experience with him; a decision that reveals the ambiguity of her respect for the native primitive purity. By means of the Nativity scene, she intends to convince the boy: She hoped the scene would be recognizable to Slimane; he might then be more easily persuaded of its poetic truth. She wanted only to suggest to him that the god with whom he was on such intimate terms was the god worshipped by the Nazarenes. It was not an idea she would ever try to express in words. (228-29)

And to better his understanding she makes use of local materials in the construction of the scene, suggestive of a “Moslem religious chromolithograph” (228). One could see a symbolic confluence of cultures in this combination of native materials with Christian tradition, but Bowles invalidates such a reading. In fact, Fräulein Windling’s effort is in vain: Slimane, immovable in his religious beliefs, is unable to distinguish Christ from the Muslim prophet. The incapacity of the “other” to recognize the materials used in the scene (235) symbolizes the failure in communication. Altered in their essence for exotic purposes, the materials became unrecognizable, like any native after losing the authenticity of his cultural identity due to contact with Western culture; this is the danger Bowles expresses in his reading of the surah of The Spider, which he uses as an epigraph in The Spider’s House: The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she takes unto herself a house, and lo! The frailest of all houses is the spider’s house, if they but knew. (The Koran 29.41)

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This verse is a parable meant to dissuade the search for other Gods but, from the Bowlesian perspective, it refers to the Muslims who adopt Western values to the detriment of ancestral traditions, also alerting them to the subsequent dangers of acculturation. Slimane doesn’t recognize the symbols of the Nativity scene and naturally transforms it into a battlefield and eats the gifts carried by the Magi (236). Confronted with this Fräulein Windling finally recognizes the presumptuousness of her intentions in the contact with the “other”: Across the seasons of their friendship she had come to think of him as being very nearly like herself .... Now she saw the dangerous vanity at the core of that fantasy: she had assumed that somehow his association with her had automatically been for his ultimate good, that inevitably he had been undergoing a process of improvement as a result of knowing her. In her desire to see him change, she had begun to forget what Slimane was really like. (237)

Fräulein Windling intended to mold Slimane more to her own liking, that is, a fantasy that would be oriental on the surface – in clothing, for example – but Western in his essential identity.This posturing indicates a general perspective, idealized and distorted, of the primitive identity, detrimental to the specific understanding that would permit her to comprehend the young Arab and to recognize his political maturation. Although she foresees that, due to the worsening conflict, her third winter with Slimane will be the last one, she ignores the significant changes occurring in the village during her absence (226). Equally, knowing Slimane’s attempt to escape from the village to join the nationalists and bothered by his eulogy of killing French (226), she opts to keep silent and maintain the illusion of the boy’s purity and innocence, in order to preserve the regenerative internal peace which she seeks in her quests to the oasis (226). It is only on the train going home that she finally becomes conscious of Slimane’s mutations – “Each detail of his behavior as she went back over it clarified the pattern for her” (246) – and that she made his involvement with the nationalists possible when she accepted his company to travel to this city, so hastening what she believes will be his loss. Even so, the experience of the contact with the alterity doesn’t affect her egocentrism. In fact, she is not convinced that, soon or later,

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the young Arab would have followed his chosen path, and also denies the possibility that he and his community could mature living in a different way from the one she idealized: “Maybe Slimane would be among the fortunate ones, an early casualty” (246). Emblematic of her attitude, her last thought is for herself and not for the boy’s possible misfortune: “‘If only death were absolutely certain in wartime,’ she thought wryly, ‘the waiting would not be so painful’“ (246). Fräulein Windling is aware of the alterations that have occurred to the cultural identity of the village. Despite the distance from the tumults, she feels that life in the oasis is not the same anymore: men have been arrested or have left to “kill French” (226). If, at first, she incriminates the colonialism, she soon perceives the existence of a higher force behind these alterations: But beyond that she had the irrational and disagreeable conviction that the countryside itself had connived in the betrayal that it was waiting to be transformed by the struggle. (240)

Like many orientalists, according to Said’s perspective, Fräulein Windling intends to maintain and hold in time an idealized cultural identity. However, like Stenham, she discovers the inexorable force of History and the will to modernity existing in the heart of the traditional culture: At some point there had been a change: the people no longer wanted to go on living in the world they knew. The pressure of the past had become too great, and its shell had broken. (240)

Regarding this contradiction, Hibbard observes: “She is in the awkward position of wishing for the others a way of life that they themselves are inclined to be rid of” (60). The petrol pump, a piece of Western civilization is a sign of the exteriorization of that force and also a symbol of modernity, of a new era that will, implacably, substitute the one that Fräulein Windling appreciates so much: Standing in the wasteland between the hotel and the fort, she looked down at the countryside’s innocent face. The padlocked gasoline pump, triumphant in fresh red and orange paint,

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caught the pure early sunlight. For a moment it seemed the only living thing in the landscape. (241)

Significantly, it is not that image she wants to take back with her: She turned around. Above the dark irregular mass of palm trees rose the terraced village, calm under its morning veil of woodsmoke. She shut her eyes for an instant, and then went into the hotel. (241)

The message is clear and revealing of Bowles’s nostalgia: as in The Spider’s House, the so criticized modernity under colonial influence seems meant to be substituted by a dreadful modernization after independence. In truth, Fräulein Windling doesn’t succeed in her relationship with the alterity because of personal and political motives. Having decided to maintain a cultural status quo, idealized upon an orientalist imagery in which she rejects any intromission of modernity, she doesn’t fully comprehend the evolution of the natives, which is why she is incapable of participating effectively in their life. Paradoxically, there is, in this attitude of preservation of the primitive identity, a will to interfere and to “improve” (237) the “other,” her young friend Slimane, without considering the possibility of his physical and cultural alienation from the village. Furthermore, as mentioned by Hibbard (59) the political and social also interfere in the improvement and the total effectiveness of this friendship. Omitting the cultural divergences, it’s clear that the colonial regime establishes social barriers between races – Slimane can’t feast with Fräulein Windling because access to the dining room is forbidden to the natives at dinner time (231) – it is the growing rebellion against the colonial regime that subverts the life in the oasis and it is the threat of increasing violence that puts an end to the friendship. In a final analysis, the time of friendship ceases with the end of colonial times, and this consciousness is, we believe, the source of Bowlesian nostalgia. “The Time of Friendship” is in fact, as noticed by Greg Mullins “a sad story, saturated with … colonial nostalgia” (29). Here, Bowles reiterates his pessimism regarding human relationships and also towards the difficulty of establishing contact, especially when confronted with a different cultural identity. However, based on mutual affection, the friendship between the Westerner Fräulein

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Windling and the Muslim Slimane is, as observed by Richard Patteson, the most effective in Bowlesian literary works (77-8). Regardless of the obvious erudite knowledge about Muslim culture – Lawrence Stewart observes that, nowadays, Bowles is considered an authority on Moroccan behavior, “the chronicler of Moroccan life” (2) – considering the Daniel Henri Pageaux statement: “le texte, projet de définition plus ou moins exhaustive de l’Autre, révèle l’univers fantasmatique du Je qui l’a élaboré, énoncé” (145), “The Time of Friendship,” as in The Spider’s House, reveals an orientalist bias, mainly by exposing an ideal of civilization based on a socio-political status quo. In conclusion, in this short story, Bowles subtly represents his perception of the confrontation between the West and its alterity: the presumptive attempt to assimilate the “other’s” culture and the impossibility of a genuine relationship between peoples where cultures diverge fundamentally.3

NOTES 1

We use the distinction between “Other” with a capital “O” (the colonizer) and “other” with a small letter “o” (the colonized), indicated by Ashcroft et al (169-71). 2 The critics (Stewart 142-43, Hibbard 56-7, Mullins 29-33) mention the eroticism in this short story, but point out, however, the more explicit sexuality in the handwritten drafts. Bowles, who in life and in his writings avoids speaking openly about sex (WS 100), removed those sections. In the published version, the sexuality and the eroticism implied, as in “Pages from Cold Point,” are very subtle. 3 Questioned by Bailey about his relation with Moroccan people, Bowles confesses that he feels “apart,” but he states that such attitude in the relationship between the Westerner and the native is normal and reaffirms the presumption of those willing to become native: “The Foreigners who try to ‘be Moroccan’ never succeed, and manage to look ridiculous while they’re trying” (129).

WORKS CITED Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. eds. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. London: Routledge, 2000. Bailey, Jeffrey. “The Art of Fiction LXVII: Paul Bowles,” in Conversations with Paul Bowles. ed. Gena Dagel Caponi. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. (111-34).

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Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. 1949. New York: The Ecco Press, 1999. ––––. The Spider’s House. 1955. London: Peter Owen, 1985. ––––. “The Time of Friendship,” in Stories. London: Penguin Books, 2000. (216-46). ––––. Without Stopping: An Autobiography by Paul Bowles. London: Peter Owen, 1972. Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993. Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé, Portrait du colonisateur. 1957. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Mullins, Greg A. “Paul Bowles: Colonial Nostalgia, Colonial Desire,” in Colonial Affairs: Bowles, Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. (20-48). Pageaux, Daniel Henri. “De l’imagerie culturelle à l’imaginaire,” in Précis de littérature comparée. eds. Pierre Brunel e Yves Chevrel. Paris: PUF, 1989. (133-61). Patteson, Richard E. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Rogers, Michael. “Conversations in Morocco: The Rolling Stone Interview,” in Conversations with Paul Bowles. ed. Gena Dagel Caponi, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. (5985). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage Books, 1994. ––––. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Stewart, Laurence D. Paul Bowles: The Illumination of North Africa. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.

VII MOMENTUM NO SPEED: FILM, BOHEMIA AND THE UNCANNY

THE FILM NARRATOR PAUL BOWLES KOSTOULA KALOUDI

In the transcription of his novel The Sheltering Sky for the screen by Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Bowles makes a personal appearance as the narrator. A narrator-observer of the characters that he himself has created, he follows the cinematographic recreation of the pages of his work. Through his presence in the film, the author returns to retrospective evaluation of his life and work. Their reconstruction takes place in front of his eyes, through images of which he is also a part.

I discovered Paul Bowles in my late teens, at the time when the first edition of The Sheltering Sky came out in Greece (1991). The writing of Bowles stayed in my mind as a great literary experience for many years, so I felt very happy when I had the opportunity to study Bowles in my field of study, the cinema, on the occasion of the Bernardo Bertolucci film. In my paper, I will not attempt an analysis of the transfer of the novel, nor a comparison of the image with the text. What I want to do is to discuss the presence of Bowles in the film, the role of the narrator that he plays in the film, the dimensions this role takes on and the thoughts that it inspires in me. Thoughts on the ability of film to evoke a real or imaginary past, on its relationship with magic, on the indirect reference to the personality of Jane Bowles in the film. First of all I would like to point out that the presence of such a narrator is not at all common in a fiction film: a narrator who is an author, attending the transfer of his work on screen, or a role that could be identified with the true personality of the performer. Some small correspondences with Bowles’s presence and role in the film could be identified, for different reasons, in the following cases. In the presence of William Burroughs in the film Drugstore Cowboy by Gus Van Sant (1989), Burroughs played an unusual, lonely priest long addicted to drugs. In Edie Sedgwick, a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory, starring in the film Ciao Manhattan (1971), the boundaries

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between herself and the role she plays are unclear and indistinct; we see it also in the case of the police film The Girl Hunters (1963) by Roy Rowland, with writer Mickey Spillane playing the role of the Detective Mike Hammer, which he had created. Yet, who is the narrator Bowles and what is ultimately his role in the film? Is it a constructed character, or is it clearly the author himself, who is attending his own work? You could say that the presence of Bowles is particularly puzzling, but seeing him in the film, I would say that he fits perfectly the definition of the traveler, as supplied by Port in the book (TSS 11) and Kit in the film. For, the filmic Bowles looks like someone who has long been in North Africa, perfectly familiar with what is happening around him. The film narrator and author Bowles closely follows his work, seen through the eyes of another artist-director. If we take into account Bertolucci’s view that The Sheltering Sky was an autobiographical novel (see The Desert Rose), in spite of Bowles’s view to the contrary – he claimed that he had used only his diary accounts of his first trip to Morocco in the early 30’s, (Sawyer-Lauçanno 145) – in this case we can say that biographical information is embedded in the book transfer, and Bowles watches a fragmented depiction of his life again through the eyes of another. Bertolucci himself believed strongly in the autobiographical dimension of the book and in the fact that “the character of Kit drew on the personality of Jane Bowles” (SawyerLauçanno 145). It was this dimension that he highlighted, creating a Kit that resembles Jane Bowles and by having Port state his profession as “composer” at the beginning of the film. Thus, clear references to Bowles’s life are created, and the film becomes even more charged than simply as a film version of a literary work. So, Bowles is the film narrator, the observer of the characters he created but also observer of a version of his own life. Yet, how does Bowles observe his characters and one aspect of his life? Through film, which can transcend time and evoke the past, haunt the mind of the viewer with memories and shadows, bring the dead to life – this is the unique, magical quality of the cinema, at any rate. This magic of the cinema meets the magic of the author Bowles, as well as the magic of another, invisible world inhabited by spirits, which we know that fascinated Bowles (see Hibbard). Let us suppose, then, that the magic of the cinema meets the magic of the charming and enigmatic Bowles. And that the writer, attending with his presence in the film the transfer of his novel in the light of a

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biographical approach, in a way reveals a private part, that of emotional involvement in relation to his work, but also to his life, which he generally preferred not to publicize. Bowles appears in three sequences of the film, in two of them before the journey of Port and Kit to the desert and in the closing sequence, when Kit returns, completely changed, to civilization. The first sequence, which introduces the encounter of Port, Kit and Tanner with North Africa after their arrival at the port, starts with outdoor shots of the town. In them, we see a film theatre, Ciné Alcazar, screening a Max Ophuls film (Sans lendemain, 1939). Immediately after come indoor shots of the cafe, where the protagonists are. It is a particularly vibrant space, full of music and voices, where Bowles is also sitting. The shots following his gaze indicate that he is carefully watching the three characters who outside of their verbal evocation in the book, have materialized and move in the narrative space of the film. The mirrors and enormous windows of the interior create a sense of reflection, seeming to usher the narrator Bowles into a world of reflections and ghosts, emphasizing the sense of dual status of the characters, between the fictional and the real. The characters he has created are in front of him, untouched by time; Debra Winger seems to be surrounded by the aura of Jane Bowles: The past comes alive again, under the unperturbed eye of the narrator. The image of the actors could be for the narrator Bowles “the little cinema that we all have in our minds,” to paraphrase Edgar Morin’s description of the power that film is able to exert on the mind of the viewer during a screening (207). The distanced presence of Bowles, who remains for the time being invisible to the film characters, is also reminiscent of Hitchcock’s cameo appearances in his own films (in 39 out of 52 films), as well as the fleeting presence of the director Jean Eustache in his great film La maman et la putain (1973) where he finds himself opposite Jean Pierre Léaud, who is in fact his cinema idol, leaving open the question whether the film is ultimately autobiographical. The placement of the narrator Bowles, which turns him into a viewer of Port and Kit, reminds us of the, beyond the technical, ability of film to lead the viewer to a mental state similar to that of a seer, or a magician, when in the images displayed in front of him he thinks he can recognise elements from his past, or project his future. The cinema, a place of “magic, illusion and sleight of hand” (11) according to Youssef Ishaghpour has the power to offer to the viewer

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a very strong emotional experience. To lead him, that is, on a journey in space and time, to another, dreamlike world of shadows and spirits, where there is no distinction between illusion and reality, true and false, the living and the dead. The existence of objects such as mirrors, which inspire associations about the dual reality, illusion and reflection, is evident in all three sequences of the film in which Bowles appears. The mirrors also very often in films mark the passage from the real to the imaginary, as remarked by Maxime Scheinfeigel in her study Magic and Cinema, in which she links the presence and meaning of “magic” with the art of the cinema. Reaching the point of Port telling his dream, Bowles’s gaze seems to transform it into a prediction about the outcome of the journey, along with Kit’s excitement, which considers it as an omen. The narration of the dream in the film, charged by Bowles’s intense gaze, is reminiscent of Bowles’s phrase about Morocco, “I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy, perhaps even death,” a phrase which Allen Hibbard (1719) correlates with the character of Port and his pursuits during the journey. After the mirrors, reflections, images, the omens and the dream strengthen the references to magic as it emerges in the first sequence in which Bowles is present in the film. The few phrases by Bowles at the end of the sequence, words from the pages of the book, highlight the vague relevance of the characters with time and the dreamlike quality of the scene in relation to himself. Yet, the very attitude of Bowles in the film until this point can be identified with a phrase of his, related to his first trip to Morocco: “I wanted to see whatever was happening continue exactly as if I were not there ...” (Sawyer-Lauçanno 115). In the second sequence in which the author appears, he remains detached from Port and Kit, an “invisible spectator,” to borrow the title of Sawyer-Lauçanno’s biography. Bowles watches another critical moment, the decision for the trip with Lyle mother and son, in which reference is once again made to omens, with the sudden power failure and the coming of darkness. Is it yet another sign from the world of shadows and spirits? The characters, however, under the eye of their creator, seem to take on another kind of reality, beyond the boundaries of the screen, much in the same way as the protagonists in the film within a film in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo. And here we must note again the relation of the film’s Kit with Jane Bowles, which has already been mentioned.

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The character of Kit in the film is reinforced, as I said before, by Bertolucci’s point of view, and the first strong similarity is the decision of the director to create a female figure that strongly resembles the real Jane Bowles as confirmed by certain photos from the 1940s, that is, the same time period which the film evokes. Similarities are also observed in the hair, the pose of the body and in certain shots, even in the gaze. And if Bowles distinguished literature from life, and his personal from his public image, speaking of the film The Sheltering Sky, he described his memories of their travels in Gabriella Christiani’s film, which were very reminiscent of the accounts of the arrival of Port and Kit in the film vis-à-vis the number and size of luggage, a detail emphasised in the Bertolucci film. Jane Bowles herself, as stated in her biography, considered that the character of Kit reflected her way of life, even though Bowles denied it (Dillon 176). She also said that the presence of Kit in the novel was more than a simple likeness and that the final path to madness and self-destruction was practically prophetic for her own life (Dillon 176), an element that charges even more the cinematic Kit with the aura of the real Jane. At his meeting with the reflections of his characters, Bowles also encounters a film version of Jane Bowles. In its realization by Bertolucci, the “little cinema” (Morin 207) of Bowles comes alive in the first two sequences of his appearance, until the author-narrator will have an enigmatic, almost “ghostly” meeting at the end of the film. Is it ultimately a meeting with Kit or with Jane? At the end of the film, when Bowles appears again, we witness Kit’s return to civilization, after Port’s death, her wandering in the desert and her descent into madness. Here, there is a different ending than that of the novel, which seems to result from the presence of Bowles in the film. Although this presence was short and fragmentary, it can be considered as important and crucial to the narrative. In the final sequence, we return once again to the same road, which this time seems different: There are traces of rain, Ciné Alcazar is closed, the Max Ophuls film is not on. In the café, however, the same din, the same song, the arrangement of the people all inspire the feeling that everything has remained the same while waiting for Kit. She comes out of a taxi but does not move in the direction of the city traffic to get on an unknown tram, which will take her to the “end of the line” (TSS 333), but towards the café, giving the impression of returning to a familiar place. Walking beside the mirror, she moves with joy in her eye towards the corner where Bowles is seated at the

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same place. In the film, the mirror sometimes brings alive the past, and sometimes gives form to the invisible, or to fantasies of the characters (Leutrat 70-71). What is the woman who walks by her reflection? Kit or Jane? Was it Kit in the film, after all, or the film version of Jane Bowles that recognises the narrator Bowles and smilingly goes towards him? And Bowles himself, does he encounter, through the magical dimension of film, an image “haunted” by Jane’s presence, and therefore by his past, which this time seems to be identified with his work, in spite of his objections? “Are you lost?” he asks Kit/Jane, as if he has also recognised her. There is no way of knowing whether the question concerns the course of the real Jane, or Kit’s adventure; it is an ambiguous phrase, not clear whether addressed to the fictional character of the literary work, or to a filmic shadow. It lifts, however, the boundaries between fiction and reality, and develops a strange uncertainty, which also prevailed in the two earlier sequences featuring Bowles. With his last words, the narrator Bowles gives an end to the film. These are Port’s phrases from his deathbed delirium, speaking effectively about the passage of time. As heard here, they give an impression of a retrospect made by Bowles of his life, but also of a comment on the trajectory of Kit/Jane and her inglorious outcome. Is it the author’s opinion, or Bertolucci’s view? We cannot know, and thus they remain enigmatic phrases, enhancing the hidden, private side of the personality of Paul Bowles. Yet, the film narrator Bowles is led to a “disclosure” by his featuring in the film, when he goes public with a comment on a field drawn out of his life and his work, where the boundaries amongst the imaginary, the real and the personal remain unclear. The narrator Bowles agrees to see his work and the references to his life being himself present at its evocation, thus recalling his personal and literary memory. “In the cinema, wrote Jean Cocteau, the ghosts force us to go to them” (Sheinfeigel 106). In Bertolucci’s film, the narrator Bowles encounters, at an old age, the ghosts of his characters but also the “shadow” of Jane Bowles. Open to seeing and meeting with them through the magical power of film, he embarks on an “expansion of self-awareness.” If “every film is an enigma and not what we expected to see” (Blonde 35), the film version of Sheltering Sky is not simply the screen adaptation of a novel, but it becomes a mirror which reflects the image of the author, thus furthering the mythology of the personality of Paul Bowles.

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WORKS CITED Blonde, Didier. Les Fantômes du Muet. France: Éditions Gallimard, 2007. Bowles, Paul. Without Stopping. 1972. New York: The Ecco Press, 1985. ––––. The Sheltering Sky. 1949. London: Panther Books, 1984. ––––. Τσάϊ στη Σαχάρα, Αθήνα: Απόπειρα, 1991. [Tsai sti Sahara. Athens: Apopira, 1991]. Daniels, Danny Aiello. Orion Pictures, 1985. Film. Desert Roses: The Making of The Sheltering Sky. Dir. Gabriella Cristiani. In “Extras,” The Sheltering Sky. Dir. B. Bertolucci. Warner Bros, 1990. Film. Dillon, Millicent. The Life and Work of Jane Bowles. Canada: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. Hibbard, Allen. Magic & Morocco. San Fransisco: Cadmus Editions, 2004. Ishagpour, Youssef. Le Cinéma. 1996. Tours: Farrago, 2006. Leutrat, Jean-Louis. Vie des Fantômes le Fantastique au Cinéma. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile / Cahiers du cinéma, 1995. Morin, Edgar. Le Cinéma ou L’homme Imaginaire. 1956. Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1995. The Purple Rose of Cairo, Dir. Woody Allen, Perf. Mia Farrow, Jeff Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator. New York: Weidenfeld, 2004. Scheinfeigel, Maxime. Cinéma et Magie. Paris: Armand Colin, 2008. The Sheltering Sky. Dir. Bernardo Bertolucci. Warner Bros, 1990. Film.

GOTHIC SHORT CIRCUITS IN PAUL BOWLES’S FICTION MARIA ANTÓNIA LIMA

Bowles based his sense of the world on the unreasonable conviction that certain parts of the earth were more magic than others, and by “magic” he meant a secret place able to establish a bridge between the natural world and the human conscience, a direct but hidden passage, that caused a short circuit in the brain. His short fiction allows us to penetrate into this obscure but enlightening realm, where his delicate spare style and a dark exotic mood produce a haunting symmetry between beauty and terror. Preserving the Gothic obsession with the dark underside of the middle-class psyche, Bowles’s universe is a realm of shocking cruelty and cold detachment, which led the Gothic genre to new directions. Impenetrable jungle forests and the blinding emptiness of the desert lead us into the meanderings of his protagonist’s minds haunted by a sense of dark fatefulness which creates a dark but potent magic.

Bowles based his sense of the world on the unreasonable conviction that certain parts of the earth were more magic than others, and by “magic” he meant a secret place able to establish a bridge between the natural world and the human conscience, a direct but hidden passage, that caused a kind of short circuit in the brain. His short fiction allows us to penetrate into this obscure but enlightening realm, where his delicate spare style and a dark exotic mood produce a haunting symmetry between beauty and terror. Preserving the Gothic obsession with the dark underside of the middle-class psyche, Bowles’s universe is a realm of shocking cruelty and cold detachment, which led the Gothic genre to new directions. Impenetrable jungle forests and the blinding emptiness of the desert lead us into the meanderings of his protagonists’ minds haunted by a sense of dark fatefulness, which preserves the connection to a life-energy full of beauty and cruelty where tragic emotions produce a dark but very powerful magic. Reading Bowles’s existential fiction, our minds can be stimulated by strong mental shocks provoked by clear contrasts and polarities intentionally created to fight against alienation and to develop a

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necessary power of perception that many of his Western characters lack for being victims of a fatal solipsism from which they can’t escape. This solipsistic condition is a characteristic of an important part of the contemporary American fiction produced not only by Paul Bowles but also by Carson McCullers, Nelson Algren, Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer, a fiction that Alfred Kazin compared to “a nightmare from which the dreamer may never escape into the unpatterned relief of the real world” (238). Consequently, the presentation of what Jonathan Baumach called “the landscape of nightmare” is the central theme of Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (1949), which was published one year after The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer), but where alienation is more personal and metaphysical rather than political. The unsurpassable state of isolation where many characters seem to live, and justify their search for exotic places and experiences that produce violent confrontations for which they don’t seem physically or psychologically prepared, and contributes to increase their awareness but also to aggravate their incurable depressions and neurosis. This aspect seems to create a connection between the psychological implications of contemporary American Gothic and Bowles’s fiction. Irving Malin, in the New American Gothic, observes that in some very famous American novels the narcissism of the characters drives them so deeply into their private worlds that they become totally isolated: … characters are isolated; they do not and cannot belong to the outside world. This lack of communication creates anxiety. They do not know where to turn for assistance and comfort .… Their isolation is complete. (15)

The connection to the American gothic fiction exists, in spite of Bowles’s refusal to be strictly connoted with this genre; basically he considered himself a realistic writer. The author’s negative reaction to Leslie Fiedler’s statement about his work is known, however it is interesting to recall the critic’s words when he wrote, in Love and Death in the American Novel: American fiction from Charles Brockden Brown to William Faulkner or Eudora Welty, Paul Bowles or John Hawkes is a gothic fiction, sadistic and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation. (28-29)

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Joyce Carol Oates, presented the same point of view in her introduction to American Gothic Tales, where she stated: Paul Bowles, in particular, has written numerous macabre and disturbing stories; the problem for the anthologist is which to select among “The Delicate Prey,” “A Distant Episode,” “Call at Corazón,” “Pages from Cold Point,” “The Circular Valley,” and the hallucinatory tale … “Allal.” Appropriately, Bowles dedicated his first story collection, The Delicate Prey (1950), “to my mother, who first read me the stories of Poe.” (8)

This last information was given by the author of Up Above the World, where guilty characters are driven to paranoia following the formula of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and it seems to prove that Bowles’s fiction is really very close to the main psychological and philosophical concerns of a literary mode that has been occupying a more central position in American fiction than in any other national literature, which led Fiedler to conclude that “of all the fiction of the West, our own is most deeply influenced by the gothic, is almost essentially a gothic one” (142). However, this concept should not be associated with a conventional and artificial categorization, but with a mode or a kind of literary imagination that depends on a certain vision and apprehension of human existence, because as this critic also concludes “the whole tradition of the gothic is a pathological symptom rather than a proper literary movement” (5). Split between two careers, two continents and two sexualities, it’s quite natural Bowles felt attracted by the transgression of frontiers and of many social, ethnic and moral categories that separate and alienate individuals without considering their ambivalent natures. Developing a structural device that depends on the surprising effects of reduplications, mirrorings and magical exchanges, Bowles had to be very interested in the gothic theme of the double or in a Jekyll and Hyde mentality that transverses many of his short-stories, and is especially present in Mejdoub, where we can find some similarities with Poe’s “William Wilson” or “The Man of the Crowd.” As Richard DiMaggio reminds us, in The Tradition of the American Gothic Novel: … paradox lies at the heart of the character and circumstance in Gothic fiction. The Gothicist is commited to exploring the duality of existence, the divided nature of man. (8)

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If the perils of psychic disintegration and the reality of human perversity were very central themes for Edgar Poe, Bowles also felt very deeply attracted by these themes, developing an acute sense of premonition of the breakdown of western civilization so present in all his fictional images of fear, alienation and violence. Like Poe, he also knew that civilized repression and patriarchal oppression create the conditions for outbursts of violence. In an interview to Jeffrey Bailey, Bowles declares: It’s unsettling to think that at any moment life can flare up into senseless violence. But it can and does, and people need to be ready for it. What you make for others is first of all what you make for yourself. If I’m persuaded that our life is predicated upon violence, that the entire structure of what we call civilization, the scaffolding that we’ve built up over the millennia, can collapse at any moment, then whatever I write is going to be affected by that assumption. The process of life presupposes violence, in the plant world the same as the animal world. But among the animals only man can conceptualize violence. Only man can enjoy the idea of destruction. (122)

Bowles was a writer who really enjoyed the power his fiction had to recreate this idea, inventing characters whose paradoxical personalities made them victims of uncontrollable destructive and perverse impulses, similar to those experienced by Poe’s narrators and villains. Like the author of “The Imp of Perverse,” Bowles wrote very coherent and conventional narratives to express the disordered states of mind of his characters, which inevitably commit the most extreme, bizarre, sadistic and menacing actions in stories told with a spellbinding logic. In exploring extremes, whether of cruelty, rapacity and fear, his fiction seems to use some of the well-known hallmarks of the Gothic, because they also include a desire to investigate the limits pushing toward excess without losing credibility due to the existential depth of their characters and situations. The uncanny situations, with which he confronts his readers, have the power to be at the same time very strange and very familiar, possessing a duplicity that turns what seems quite unbelievable into a very credible circumstance, leading us to conclude that it’s very normal a man should turn into a snake, as it happens in the grotesque story “Allal;” or that a boy could seduce his own father as in “Pages from Cold Point;” or that terrible acts of

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torture can really be practiced by a very primitive perversity as in “The Delicate Prey.” Paul Bowles had a real recipe to transform something very familiar into an incredible experience, giving us the impression that everything that happened to his characters could happen to us tomorrow. This authenticity was created because western people should be prepared to confront themselves with the most terrible aspects of the existence from which they were completely alienated. It was important to place them in extreme situations so that they could “feel the pangs of anxiety” (CS, “Call at Corazón” 46) and their hearts could beat violently in order to make them recognize their naïveté through the impact created by terror. Their resistance to this recognition is the cause of many misfortunes and the reason why many of his short stories can be true narratives of disasters. One of these examples is a very unreliable recipe ironically invented by an idealistic writer, who couldn’t perceive the danger that made him loose his wife, which means he shouldn’t be so worried in dissolving impressions of hideousness, but in perceiving their presence. Here are his words: Recipe for dissolving the impression of hideousness made by a thing: Fix the attention upon the given object or situation so that the various elements, all familiar, will regroup themselves. Frightfulness is never more than an unfamiliar pattern. (38)

Bowles was never interested in dissolving the uncanny power of unfamiliar experiences, because it’s one of the main purposes of writing concerned with the clash of civilizations, which allowed him the power to sustain the irreconcilable dichotomies and paradoxes that are generally pervasive in gothic fiction. His magic recipe was to put together different cultural, ethnic, and sexual concepts and made them clash to produce a shocking effect through which the psychic disintegration produced by the decadence of Western civilization could be more clearly revealed. Consequently, Bowles can be considered a kind of magician who knew how to create a kind of short-circuit between different polarities, thereby producing very enlightening effects from the connection between the modern and the primitive, the real and the fantastic. His recurring use of violence has to do with the powerful discharge of energy of the most shocking images and situations, as it happens in “A Distant Episode,” where an ethnologist, who goes to study a distant tribe and is drugged fed

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mushrooms, has his tongue cut out and made to dance before the tribe, enduring several tortures till he later falls into a complete delirium. However, his “screams of fright” and accesses of terror do not impress our minds more than the anguish of a terrified young woman in “How Many Midnights.” This means that, like in Poe’s stories, Bowles’s sources of physical terror aren’t more disquieting than the existential terror or the “terror of the soul,” that leads characters to their grotesque fates. They can be couples on honeymoon, hotel keepers or photographers, westerns or Arabs, European or Africans living in exotic places like Morocco, Mexico, or Thailand, but all of them are depressed egocentric and lonely men and women trapped in a hostile universe. Like the gothic characters, they are caught in a web of repetitions caused by their unawareness of their own unconscious drives and motives, repetitions which justify the uncanny character of many short-stories. As we know, Freud identified repetition as one of the central characteristics of the uncanny and, in American Gothic Fiction, Alan Lloyd-Smith defends that the Gothic is about the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present which explains his defense that any study of the genre is a study of repetitions. Being a hallmark of the Gothic, repetitions are also a very meaningful characteristic of Bowles’s fiction, where as Llyod-Snmith notes characters, like Gothic characters, “are often shown as struggling in a web of repetitions caused by their unawareness of their own unconscious drives and motives” (2). If repetition figures in a Gothic understanding of trauma Frontier experience, inherent solitude, potential violence and racial issues, it can also be very useful to reveal some of the disturbing secrets of the intercultural clashes so frequent in Bowles’s shortstories. This possible association between the Gothic and Bowles’s fiction created a magic or gothic realism, which was able to produce a strong emotional impact in his characters as in his readers. All this resulted from the very magic of a place that had so deeply impressed himself and where he could, like the Atlájala in “The Circular Valley,” experience “a rich profusion of perceptions” and expand his desire to know “the mysterious life of man.” As Bowles confesses in Without Stopping:

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I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which in disclosing its secrets would give me wisdom and ecstasy- perhaps even death. (125)

It’s interesting to notice that he conciliates death with wisdom and ecstasy. This was really what Bowles succeeded in doing in his fiction, from where pain, suffering and death are not excluded, giving origin to a landscape of nightmare, both physical and moral, “a landscape, where shadows were not shadows” (CS, “Allal” 495), but something at the same time terrible and mysterious or even as beautiful as a snake. Noël Carroll, who took the paradox of fiction very seriously, identifying it with our paradoxes of the heart, was interested in the ontological status of fictional beings which could enable us to clarify the way they can simultaneously repel and attract their readers by provoking an emotion of art-horror where conflicting aesthetic categories collide, but are also able to coexist due to the fictional nature of beings that have objective realities, but not formal realities like most characters in Bowles’s short stories. Their transgressive and contradictory nature horrifies as if they were monstrous beings, because they seem to lie outside cultural categories, which are for us totally unknown. In The Philosophy of Horror (1990), Noël Carroll concludes: … with special reference to the paradox of horror, monsters, the objects of art-horror, are themselves sources of ambivalent responses, for as violations of standing cultural categories, they are disturbing and disgusting, but, at the same time, they are also objects of fascination - again, just because they transgress standing categories of thought. That is, the ambivalence that bespeaks the paradox of horror is already to be found in the very objects of art-horror which are disgusting and fascinating, repelling and attractive due to their anomalous nature. (188)

Possessing the same gothic-grotesque sensibility of gothic writers, Bowles also shares with them Melville’s premonition in Moby-Dick that “Nature absolutely paints like the harlot” (1001), because beneath an exotic and attractive façade are the potentialities of violence and chaos, savagery and death. His narratives produce many doubts and fears, because they function like that guilty dream, Anita was so worried about in Too Far From Home, allowing us to contact with the dark side of human mind, something the American Gothic has always

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desired. If there is a very negative approach to life in Bowles’s short stories, it is because he wants to partake with his characters and readers his awareness of the perils of a constant disintegration that attacks every life form. His gothic short-circuits come from this very dark vision that plays a very significant role in his fictional universe, a creation that, like Poe’s stories, depended on destruction to exist, being proved once again, like in “Eureka” that “In the Original Unity of the First Thing lies the Secondary Cause of All Things, with the Germ of their Inevitable Annihilation” (1261). Provoking a similar nihilistic electric discharge, completely unexpected at the very beginning of a story, the narrator in “Pages from Cold Point” observes: Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. (86)

WORKS CITED Bailey, Jeffrey. “The Art of Fiction LXVII: Paul Bowles,” in Conversations with Paul Bowles. ed. Gena Dagel Caponi. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. (111-34). Baumbach, Jonathan. The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. New York: NYU Press, 1965. Bowles, Paul. Collected Stories. London: Penguin, 2001. ––––. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1985. Carroll, Nöel. The Philosophy of Horror, or the Paradoxes of the Heart. New York & London: Routledge, 1990. DiMaggio, Richard S. “The Tradition of the American Gothic Novel.” PhD Thesis. U Arizona, 1976. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. Illinois: Dalkey Archieve Press, 1997. Kazin, Alfred. “Psychoanalysis and Literary Culture Today,” in The Partisan Review Anthology. eds. William Phillips and Philip Rahv. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962. (238240).

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Lloyd-Smith, Alan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. London: Continuum, 2004. Malin, Irving. New American Gothic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. Melville, Herman. Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick. New York: The Library of America, 1983. Oates, Joyce Carol, ed. American Gothic Tales. New York: Plume, 1996. Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales. New York: The Library of America, 1984.

LITERARY FRIENDSHIP: THE BOWLESES AND TENNESSEE WILLIAMS KRISZTINA DANKÓ

Tennessee Williams first met the Bowleses in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1940. Some years later, when he was writing the drafts of his first real success, The Glass Menagerie, and the script called for a variety of visual and sound effects as well as background music, he thought of Paul Bowles, who composed music for the theatre that had the quality of poetry. He asked Bowles to compose and orchestrate the score, and their cooperation was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. The Bowleses and Williams often travelled together, they mutually admired each other’s work, what is more, Williams considered Jane Bowles “the greatest writer of our century in the English language.” My paper explores the development of this valuable literary friendship and attempts to detect the mutual influences as well, for example, how the Bowleses appeared in Williams’s poetry.

In Palimpsest, Gore Vidal rather sarcastically remarked that his “ancient friend Paul Bowles[‘s.] … life was mostly spent in the company of people more famous than he” (100). Tennessee Williams, however, was still an unknown poet and trainee playwright when he first met the Bowleses in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1940. His friends in New York gave Bowles’s name to him. In his Memoirs Williams remembered that “Jane and Paul” were staying at a pension: Paul was, as ever, upset about the diet and his stomach, namely, what he could eat in Acapulco that he could digest, while “poor little Janie” hopelessly tried to come up with solutions …. I thought them a very odd and charming couple. (59)

And they became close friends for the rest of their lives. The garden of the house that Bowles had rented in Acapulco was full of exotic birds and mammals, and the scenery became an artistic inspiration for Williams. Bowles later told his biographer Spencer Carr:

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As I think back on it, the setting of Night of the Iguana, which Tennessee Williams started as a short story, then rewrote as a play, was not much different from the house we were renting when he visited us in September of 1940. (145)

At that time Bowles had already had some reputation as a composer, and he was also composing music for plays, which “in those days ... were literally melodramas; dramas with musical accompaniment” (Vidal, Navigation 106). Some years later, in the fall of 1944, Williams again appeared at the door of Bowles’s flat in New York, told him that he had just finished a new play, The Glass Menagerie, and asked him to compose the music for it. The play became a huge success; it ran in New York for a total of 556 performances, and won the 1945-46 Drama Critics’s Circle Award as “Best Play.” Bowles also wrote the musical score for Summer and Smoke (1948), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963), and Williams dedicated his novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950) to him. Williams wanted to collaborate with Bowles on other plays as well, but for different reasons he did not always manage to do so. In February 1948 he wrote to Bowles from Rome: Paul, I was terribly disappointed that we couldn’t get you to write music for Streetcar. I insisted that you should be contacted but you had already departed for Africa. However, I hope that you will work with us on Summer and Smoke .... Would you have the time or the inclination? ... the set and all the plastic and atmospheric elements will be tremendously important and it really needs a musical score like Menagerie had. I would send you a script immediately except that I am still working on it. How much time do you require, that is if you are able to undertake it? If we can get together at some point on the map of Africa or Europe, it would be of great advantage. (Selected Letters 166)

In the autumn of 1952, Williams wrote to Bowles that he wanted him to compose the music for his new play, Camino Real. Bowles assured him that he “would be delighted to write a score for the show” (qtd. in Carr 228), later, however, he learned that Molly Thatcher, the director Elia Kazan’s wife and a producer of the play changed her mind: and vetoed his being asked to do the music on the basis of “gross immorality” in The Sheltering Sky; furthermore she

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insisted that her husband have nothing more to do with Bowles or to use him in any other show. (Carr 229)

Williams commented the decision in a letter from Key West, Florida: Frank, Audrey, and I worked very hard on Gadg [Elia Kazan] to get you for Camino .... He does like your music, but I think he and Molly Kazan have a real phobia about your writing. This comes from Molly, not Gadg. She is a dedicated person, the self-appointed scourge of Bohemia .... I can’t help thinking this attitude toward your writing has influenced Gadg against you as a composer. (Selected Letters 460)

Bohemia had, of course, been widely understood as euphemism or code word for homosexuality since the nineteenth century. In Vidal’s opinion, the homophobic atmosphere of post-war America, a phenomenon that Williams also despised and suffered from, caused Bowles’s “final break with the US”. Bowles wrote in a letter: I’ve always been afraid to tackle America; I know quite well that my hatred would show ... and about the hatred of America: naturally I mask it, because I mask everything. (Navigation 112)

Vidal added that “[t]he criminalizing of drugs and sex is very much a sign of that malign primitivism which has always reigned in Freedom’s Land. For Bowles, Morocco was freedom” (113). Williams expressed similar a view on the McCarthian era: “I dread going back to the States, I feel that the country is simply galloping into totalitarianism ... [it] strikes terror in me,” he wrote in a letter while travelling to Tangier in October 1953 (Selected Letters 500). In 1953 Luchino Visconti had asked Williams to write the English dialogue for his film Senso that was shot with American stars in two languages, English and Italian. Williams had some health problems and did not want to do it but suggested Bowles instead. He wrote to Bowles: I dare say there would be a sizeable increment ... there is American backing with stars ... it might be worth your while if you are looking for “loot”.... He wants to pay both of us but ... I would ... turn over whatever I received to you. (Selected Letters 483)

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This was typical of Williams; “Tennessee was very generous to his friends and especially good to me, and to Jane, over the years” said Bowles (Carr 233). When Visconti was not satisfied with Bowles’s script, Williams agreed to rewrite parts of it, especially three love scenes that – according to Visconti were not “tender enough” (ibid.), and they shared the credits on the film. At the beginning of 1959 Williams managed to persuade Kazan to invite Bowles to write the music for Sweet Bird of Youth. Bowles agreed to have the score completed within six weeks. “The music is extremely soft,” he wrote. Brook Atkinson later reviewed and praised his “spidery and tinkling music of exquisite texture” (Carr 255). Leonard Bernstein also admired Bowles’s evocative music. While describing his work to Gore Vidal, Bernstein extended both hands, “After all these years I can still feel his music in my fingers. Perfect miniatures” (Navigation 108). Bowles obviously had a talent for the short form and brief pieces of music. No wonder that four of Williams’s short lyrics, “Heavenly Grass,” “Lonesome Man,” “Cabin,” and Sugar in the Cane” captured his imagination and set them to music in a song-cycle called Blue Mountain Ballads (1946).1 Williams had a high opinion of Bowles’s art. When the Hollywood film version of The Glass Menagerie was in the making, Bowles hoped that the music he composed for Broadway could be used in the forthcoming film. In November 1949 Williams wrote to him: I wish I had some good news to give you about the Menagerie music. All I can definitely say is that we made a great effort … [but] yes is the most ambiguous word that you can get out of them …. You may be sure if they don’t use your music it is simply because they are too stingy and the music too good. They only like music that goes Blah-blah-blah like a Brahms symphony by Irving Berlin, and always swelling to great inspirational crescendos. (Selected Letters 270-71)2

Bowles was practically unknown as a writer until 1949, when the The Sheltering Sky appeared. John Lehmann, who was Williams’s English publisher and friend as well, published it in September 1949. “Lehmann in London is very happy over advance reactions to Paul’s novel and I suspect it will make a real impression there,” wrote Williams in March 1949 (Selected Letters 252). In October 1949 Williams’s American publisher, New Directions, founded by his

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friend the poet James Laughlin, published The Sheltering Sky in New York, too. Williams wrote to Bowles in November: There has been great excitement over your book in New York, especially the reviews, in which I am involved. Harvey Breit of The New York Times called me up and asked if I would review it. I said, Yes, indeedy, pie! …. It is a very favourable notice, of course, and I hope you will like it. (Selected Letters 271)

In The New York Times book review on December 4, 1949, Williams “singled him out among American writers as ‘a talent of true maturity and sophistication’” (Notebooks 214). Williams was rather paranoiac and unfairly accused his friend Gore Vidal, who also wanted to review it for another paper, of hindering the publication of his review. Although Williams later apologised, he was still bearing a grudge against Vidal in 1950, unfavorably comparing him to Bowles in a letter written to James Laughlin: “Vidal is not likable, at least not in any familiar way, but he and Bowles are the two most honest savages I have met. Of course Bowles is still the superior artist” (Selected Letters 288). In Vidal’s formulation: Paul and Jane Bowles were both significant cultural heroes in that small New York world which honored the arts. Jane’s witty stories and sardonic conversational asides were much quoted while his music with its Arabic themes became something of a cult. (Navigation 108)

Williams also admitted that he had “a sort of hero worship” for Paul (Notebooks 591), but revered Jane Bowles even more. “You are very fortunate to have Jane … with you,” he wrote to Paul (Selected Letters 166). In Memoirs he paid tribute to Jane as follows: Jane Bowles, whom I regard as the finest writer of fiction we have had in the States. You will probably think this is a wild opinion but I must stick to it. She had a unique sensibility in all her work that I found even more appealing than that of Carson McCullers. And she was a charming girl, so full of humor and affection and curious, touching little attacks of panic – which I thought at first were merely bits of theatre but I soon found were quite genuine. When Jane Bowles succumbed to a long illness in a convent-hospital in Málaga, Spain, in 1973, she left

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an irreplaceable vacancy in the lives of all who were so fortunate to know her. (159)

Williams considered Jane’s Two Serious Ladies “a novel of unique quality,” while her short stories “truly equaled in sensibility by the work of no other writer of her time” (Memoirs 159-60). In a letter he wrote, “I finally got hold of Two Serious Ladies and it is one of my favorite works of all time, it is altogether original and has a reality all its own, which is fearfully real” (Selected Letters 461). He thought that In the Summer House was “a curiously underestimated play:” I feel impelled to offer the opinion that it is a dramatic work of such profound sensibility, mixed with Jane’s unfailingly acute admixture of humor and pathos that it stands quite superbly alone among works for the American theatre. (Memoirs 160)

Williams enthusiastically concluded, “I consider her quite the greatest writer of our century in the English language. And Harold Pinter told me he thought so, too” (Memoirs 170). When Jane’s collection of miscellaneous work Feminine Wiles appeared in 1976, Williams wrote the introduction and, again, he described her as one of the most important writers of prose fiction in America. Williams had always been fascinated by the marital connection of some of his famous contemporaries. In the play I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1951) he described the fictionalized version of D. H. Lawrence’s death, and his ambivalent love and hatred for his wife, Frieda. In Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) Williams depicted the stormy and tragic relationship between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and was probably planning a play on Paul and Jane Bowles as well. Margaret Bradham Thornton, the editor of Williams’s Notebooks, mentions in note 369 that “a fragment of a dialogue exists between two characters whom Williams named Paul and Jane (presumably Bowles). In the dialogue Paul mourns the loss of poetic powers: ‘The mysterious bird ... has flown away from me.’ Jane attempts to console Paul and the dialogue ends with their making love” (216). Williams probably thought that Jane’s husband mistreated her. He wrote to Maria St. Just on June 7, 1973: Did your notice of Jane Bowles’s death [May 4] ever appear in the London papers? What a pig Paul is to have left it

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unannounced for so long. I’m afraid all that kif has dehumanized him a bit. (Five O’Clock Angel 297)

Williams also demanded that The New York Times print an obituary, which it did three weeks after her death. Throughout his life, Williams remained a devoted friend of the Bowleses. He visited them in Tangier on numerous occasions; they also travelled and had lots of fun together. Gerald Clarke, Truman Capote’s biographer, called Tangier a melodramatic place for the expatriates living there. It was a romantic, decadent, and dangerous shelter where smuggling was the main source of getting rich, while drugs, sex, and promiscuity were everyday habits (224). Williams had a rather ambivalent view on Morocco. In January 1949 he wrote in his letters: The African Adventure was a mistake, as we arrived at the start of the cold, rainy season … Paul had told me there was wonderful swimming in Morocco, but there was none. The weather was too cold and the pools were closed … the natives might have been beautiful if they did not nearly all have scrofula or cataracts or ring-worm: anyway a visual appreciation of them was enough! I can’t deny that Morocco is a mysterious and beautiful country, in spite of these things, and I am going back: not during the rainy season, however. (I still love Paul!) (Selected Letters 225, 226, 229)

In June 1954 he wrote about “the sick atmosphere of Tangier, which was only relieved by the beach and charm of Jane and Paul Bowles who make their home there” (Selected Letters 534). Williams also remarked to Maria St. Just that “[t]he Americans and Europeans here are a sort of last-ditch Bohemians” (Five O’Clock Angel 80). He wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) at the Sun Beach, a beachfront restaurant while on holiday in Morocco and the setting for Cabeza de Lobo in Suddenly Last Summer (1958) was the seaside town of Asilah, Morocco. The Bowleses were not only popular hosts among their friends but also much liked travelling companions. Gore Vidal characterized the year 1948 with the following words: … a pack of queens were on the move that summer in Europe … they converged on Rome and Paris and Tangier … the

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peripatetic group … centered on Tennessee, Capote, the Bowleses – not me, I was fugitive. (Palimpsest 176)

At that time Williams was madly in love with Frank Merlo, who became his long-term partner and companion for almost fifteen years. In Memoirs he recalled their voyage to Europe and how jealous he was of the young man: … in early December when Frankie, Paul Bowles and I took passage on the Italian liner Vulcania ... my sexual feeling for the boy was inordinate. Every evening I would cross his bunk in the stateroom. Aware of my sexual intemperance and what its consequences could be, I began to entertain a suspicion that something was going on between Frankie and Paul Bowles, Nothing was, of course, except friendship – and perhaps they also may have shared an interest in some derivative of Cannabis, as many of the “in” people did in those days. (159)

Williams should not have worried about Bowles for as he remarked in a letter: “Paul [was] terribly squeamish about any physical contact with anything not Arab and not under fifteen” (Selected Letters 320). During the same journey Bowles asked him to read a short story of his “The Delicate Prey,” which became the title story for a collection published somewhat later. Williams thought it was quite incomprehensible to Bowles that he, who published such stories as “Desire and the Black Masseur,” was shocked: I recognized it as a beautiful piece of prose but I advised him against its publication in the States. You see, my shocking stories had been published in expensive private editions by New Directions and never exhibited on bookstore counters. (Memoirs 159)

In Memoirs Williams also recalled an anecdote about “the fantastic difficulty crossing the frontier of Spanish Morocco” after they had spent a few days in Tangier and set off for Fez, “where Paul’s very young friend Ahmed was waiting for him” (160). The suspicion of the Spanish authorities at the frontier was provoked by the fact that “Bowles always travelled with at least a dozen pieces of luggage” (ibid.). To make matters worse, there was a terrible thunderstorm and, while they had to remove every piece of luggage to the customshouse “for a maniacally thorough inspection,” the brakes of their Buick

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Roadmaster “weren’t holding and … it was rolling rather rapidly backward straight toward a deep ravine.” Frank Merlo had to dash out and stop the car “just before it reached the drop-off. It was quite a display of courage, which he never lacked” (ibid.), Williams concluded. In the end, the authorities tried to confiscate Williams’s typewriter and also several pieces of Bowles’s luggage so they had to return to Tangier. Their travels became quite regular. Five years later, in October 1953, Williams wrote to Audrey Wood: We have arrived in Tangier with Paul Bowles after a ten-day trip through Italy and Spain in the two Jaguars, Paul’s and ours, and many vicissitudes and adventures along the way. (Selected Letters 501)

Paul Bowles was mentioned in one of the most beautiful poems of Williams, “Tangier, the Speechless Summer.” It appeared in 1970 in the first issue of the literary quarterly Antaeus – founded by David Halpern and Paul Bowles – and became the closing piece in Williams’s second collection of verses, Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977). The poem was written in 1962, some months after Williams’s breakup with Frank Merlo, who was suffering from lung cancer and died a year later. During that period Williams fell into a deep depression that lasted for a decade. In 1962 he travelled to Tangier with his new companion, the young poet Frederick Nicklaus, who was “[f]air as Adonis” (Androgyne 90). In Memoirs he also recalled that “[i]t was a curiously difficult summer” because he was “beset by inner torment, the most explicable of which was an inability to talk to people” (187). In “Tangier, the Speechless Summer” Williams was haunted by Merlo lying on his deathbed: “the imminence of it / is drawing much tighter the tight muscles of my throat / this summer’s home of my torment” (89). His new companion “seems to be succumbing to [his] iron of silence / which is so desperately unwillful” (90). “Can he still, at times, like me?” (ibid.) the poet laments. The only person he is longing to speak to is Paul Bowles, but can Paul really fathom the depth of his sorrow? Punctually at one my friend Paul comes, and we walk through the Medina. (Is is thatch-roofed?

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Stitches of light seem to kindle the crisp curled gold of his hair and his thin-burned face which is always so concentrated.) Do I talk to him? Only a few precisely spaced and forced observations of what I imagine he must have daily observed and nothing at all of the panic of which I longed to speak to him. He says, “oh, here,” and enters a shop, and while he is bargaining for purchases I lose myself in a confusion of shoppers, hoping that he will ascribe my disappearance to this easily-lost confusion . . . I love Paul, but once he said to me: “I’ve never had a neurosis.” (89)

At the end of the poem Williams meditates on the soothing effect of drugs: Or go on “H.” Shouldn’t everyone go on “H” before they die …. How pleasant it surely would be, to drift above the tree tops, invisible, unheard, unsuspected serenely detached from the troublesome matter of speech, all panic locked in a closet, yes, elect the cool death. (91) It was Jane’s witty humor that could really help and cure him even in such a hopeless situation: One afternoon I was alone with Jane Bowles, and I said to Janie, “Janie, I can’t talk anymore” She gave me one of her quick little smiles and said, “Tennessee, you were never much of a conversationalist.” ... it made me laugh and laughter is always a comfort, as Jane was always a comfort. (Memoirs 187)

But Paul had an equally good sense of humor. He commented on William’s death in 1983, “One accepts car accidents, bathtub accidents, falling from a ladder while painting the kitchen, and those more common causes of death. But swallowing the top of a bottle of eye-drops seems very far-fetched of fate” (Carr 310). Gore Vidal even

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interpreted Williams’s death from the Bowlesian perspective when he declared: In Streetcar Blanche DuBois thought that she would die of an unwashed grape. The Bird [Williams’s petname], as grotesque as always in detail … died from inhaling the plastic cap of a nasal spray container: suffocation, the worst possible death for a claustrophobic, or as I put it in a letter to Paul Bowles, “There is a Bowlesian principle at work; what is most feared fearfully happens.” (Palimpsest 406)

One may raise the question, what was so common in the Bowleses and Tennessee Williams that their friendship could endure both the geographical distance and the vicissitudes of several decades? Williams had always been tormented by the different forms of fear; sickness, blindness, pain, inability to speak, incapability of writing, panic attacks, hypochondria, claustrophobia, and so on. He found solace in the company of similarly sensitive people who could understand his problems and yearning for warmth and human understanding. As he formulated it on December 30, 1953: I would like to see Bill Inge tonight for some reason. Also Paul Bowles and Janie. They’re all as frightened as I am, you know. Just as frightened, only about other matters. There is a tender comradeship in fear when others have it. (Notebooks 615)

NOTES 1

Williams’s agent, Audrey Wood, had previously sent Williams’s collection of folk verse “Blue Mountain Blues” to Douglas Moore, a Columbia University Professor. He “liked the folk verse ‘immensely,’ but nothing seems to have come out of his interest,” wrote Williams (Notebooks 314). During the closing concert of the “Do You Bowles? Paul Bowles Centennial International Conference,” on October 23rd 2010, Anabela Duarte (soprano) and Irene Herrmann (piano) had a wonderful performance of Paul Bowles’s Art-Songs – The Blue Mountain Ballads included – at the Museu do Oriente, in Lisbon. Some extracts of the concert have also appeared on Youtube since then. 2 In fact Williams was extremely dissatisfied with the vulgarized Hollywood version of Menagerie, and not only from the musical perspective. See Selected Letters 252.

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WORKS CITED Carr, Virginia Spencer. Paul Bowles: A Life. New York: Scribner, 2004. Clarke, Gerald. Capote. Trans. Miklós M. Nagy. Budapest: Európa, 2006. Vidal, Gore. Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York: Penguin, 1995. ––––. Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir (1864-2006). New York: Vintage, 2006. Williams, Tennessee. Androgyne, Mon Amour: Poems by Tennessee Williams. New York: New Directions, 1977. ––––. Five O’Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just (1948-1982). New York: Penguin, 1991. ––––. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, 1975. ––––. Notebooks. ed. Margaret Bradham Thornton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. ––––. The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams. vol. 2. ed. Albert J. Devlin and Nancy M. Tischler. New York: New Directions, 2004.

CONTRIBUTORS Assaad, Younes Riyani El is Professor of Cultural Studies at Abdelmalek Es-ssaadi University Tetouan, Morocco. His research project focuses on American representations of Morocco during the Protectorate period. He has published many articles in edited books and participated in national and international conferences. He is a member of the International Center for Performance Studies based in Tangier, and a member of the research group of Performance Studies at the Faculty of Humanities Tetouan, Morocco. Benlemlih, Bouchra is Full Professor at the English Department, Ibnu Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco. She received her doctorate (1992) in semiotics from Toulouse le Mirail University, France. She was a visiting scholar at OSU. She received another PhD in American Studies from the University of Nottingham, U.K.. Benlemlih’s research has involved a sustained exploration of American Studies, namely Edgar Poe and Paul Bowles’s writings on Morocco. She has presented papers for international conferences in Morocco and abroad. She is currently a member of ACLA. She supervises doctoral dissertations in ‘Race, Ethnicity, and Alterity’ in Literature and Culture. Bevan, Greg is an Associate Professor of English at Fukuoka University in Fukuoka, Japan. In studying Bowles, his aim is to bring new attention to an underappreciated oeuvre by moving past the Existentialist context in which it is often framed, and highlighting its relevance to current tensions between Islam and the non-Muslim world. His studies of Bowles’s novels and stories have appeared in The Journal of the American Literature Society of Japan and numerous other journals. He also contributed a study of the novelist Richard Ford to Postmodern America: American Novels of the 1980s (2009), and his own fiction has appeared in Northwest Review, Salt Hill, and other American literary journals. Bialas, Zbigniew is Professor of English, Head of the Postcolonial Studies Department at the University of Silesia, Katowice (Poland) and a prize-winning novelist. He was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in Germany and Fulbright Senior Fellow in the U.S.

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His academic books include Post-Tribal Ethos in African Literature (1993), Mapping Wild Gardens (1997) and The Body Wall (2006). His novel Korzeniec (2011) was awarded “Silesian Literary Laurels,” won the title of “Best Polish Prose of 2011” and was turned into a successful theatrical play. The second novel, Puder i pył, was published in 2013. Zbigniew Białas edited/co-edited twelve academic volumes, wrote over sixty academic essays and translated English, American and Nigerian literature into Polish. Blankenship, Carole, soprano, is Associate Professor of Music at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr Blankenship is heard regularly in recitals, chamber music concerts, oratorio performances, and solo recitals nationally and internationally. Her research is in American song, particularly the songs created under the supervision of the Federal Music Project 1935-1940. She and Irene Herrmann have co-edited Paul Bowles’s Three Songs from the Sierras and Cuatro Canciones de Garcia Lorca. Dr. Blankenship teaches voice and a writing seminar titled “Twentieth-Century American Music and Politics.” She currently serves the National Association of Teachers of Singing as Vice President for Artist Awards. Brandabur, Clare is an Assistant Professor in the Doctoral Program in Comparative Literature at Fatih University in Istanbul. Her areas of concentration are archetypal criticism, mythology, modernism, contemporary Arabic literature, post-colonial criticism, and human rights issues. Her PhD in Comparative Literature is from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Dr Brandabur has taught at Birzeit University in Occupied Palestine; Al-Ba’ath University in Syria (Fulbright); Bilkent University and METU Universities in Ankara; Bahrain University; Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan. She has published articles on Beckett, Joyce, Naquib Mahfouz, Graham Greene, Jean Genet, T.E. Lawrence, and Yaşar Kemal. Campbell, Jennifer L. is Assistant Professor of Music Theory and History at Central Michigan University. She specializes in twentiethcentury American music, focusing on composers Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Paul Bowles. Her current scholarship explores connections between music, politics, and cultural identity, examining the U.S. government’s use of music as a diplomatic tool in the early 1940s. She has presented her research at national and international conferences, is a contributor to the second edition of The New Grove

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Dictionary of American Music, and has a recent article on musical exchange and cultural diplomacy in the journal Diplomatic History (January 2012). Dankó, Krisztina graduated from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, pursued PhD studies at Kossuth Lajos University, Debrecen. She is Associate Professor at the Teacher Training College of the University of Reformed Theology in Debrecen, Hungary. She teaches various subjects in the Foreign Languages Department, including English and American literature. Her main field of interest is American drama, especially Tennessee Williams; her essays on Williams have been published in Spain, Serbia, Germany, Austria, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. She is also doing research in gay studies, gender studies, and moral philosophy. She was a member of the editorial board of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies for thirteen years. Duarte, Anabela received her PhD in American Studies from the University of Lisbon, with a thesis on Paul Bowles’s music and literature, in 2014. She has a BA and an MA in Anthropology and holds an MA in Comparative Literature and publishes for Rodopi, academic journals (Poe’s Studies, Music and Politics, etc) and art magazines (Umbigo, Arte Capital). She works as an independent singer, composer, producer and music/arts researcher. She was an FCT fellow and currently is a researcher at ULICES (University of Lisbon Center for English Studies). Gomes, Fernando is Assistant Professor at the University of Evora. He teaches French (Language and Culture) and American Literature. Research areas: French and American literature, Comparative literature. He obtained his doctorate with a thesis on Paul Bowles entitled “Diálogos com a alteridade nas obras literárias de Albert Camus e de Paul Bowles.” Relevant publications include: “Eaux noires dans la ville de Michel Butor et de Raymond Chandler” (2004), “Paul Bowles’s first literary insight into the interaction with NorthAfrican alterity in ‘Tea on the Mountain” (2012), “Entre Prospero et Caliban: du caractère hybride de Camus” (2012). Heal, Benjamin J. is writing a PhD thesis entitled “Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs’s Literary Works: The Transatlantic Influences of Existentialism, Surrealism, Primitivism and Film Noir” at the University of Kent, supervised by Professor David Ayers. His Masters

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thesis “Novel or Anti-Novel? An Examination of Narrative Strategies in William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch” was awarded a commendation. He is also a published poet and short story writer, with an interest in experimental and science fiction, an executive member of the European Beat Studies Network and organized a multi-platform event in the U.K. as part of the worldwide Nakedlunch@50 celebration in 2009. Hibbard, Allen is Professor of English and Director of the Middle East Center at Middle Tennessee State University. He has written two books on Paul Bowles (Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction (1993) and Paul Bowles, Magic & Morocco (2004)), edited Conversations with William S Burroughs (2000), and published a collection of his own stories in Arabic (1994). His research and teaching interests include modernism, postmodernism, literary theory, the novel, translation, transnational movement, and globalization, with a focus on interactions between the United States and the Arab world. Hussey, Andrew is Professor and Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP). He writes regularly for the the Guardian, Observer and New Statesman. He is the author of Paris – The Secret History (2006). His latest book is called The French Intifada – The Long War Between France and its Arabs (2014). Kaloudi, Kostoula is a Lecturer at the Department of Theatre Studies at the University of the Peloponnese. Her doctoral thesis concerns the relationship of the Greek cinema and history. She has contributed articles to academic reviews and she has participated in international conferences. She has taught courses on film at the Ionian University on Corfu, the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki and the University of the Peloponnese. Her research interests focus on the relationship of cinema and history, the representation of individual and collective memory in the cinema, and the cinematic techniques for narrating the past. Koshikawa, Yoshiaki is a Professor of English at Meiji University, Tokyo. He is a co-editor and translator of the Japanese edition of Paul Bowles Selection published by Hakusuisha, Tokyo. He stayed in Tangier in the early 1990s for his “small talk” with Bowles and wrote a long essay about the talk in a Japanese journal. He has recently done a lot of fieldwork on the US-Mexico borderland and in Cuba to investigate the voices and songs of the historically “invisible” people.

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He published A Migrant Bird with a Guitar: En Alabanza de Poemas Chicanas (2007), and A Long Journey of a Chile Pepper: A Cultural Study on US-Mexico Borderland (2006). He is now a Santería priest in Cuba, preparing a book on Afro-Cuban culture and religion. Leslie, Christopher is an Instructor of Science, Technology and Media Studies at New York University’s Polytechnic School of Engineering in Brooklyn, New York, and is codirector of the Science and Technology Studies program there. Dr Leslie’s research considers the cultural formations that surround technology, science, and media in the 19th- and 20th-century United States. He teaches courses in science and technology studies, the international history of the Internet, the history of science and race, multicultural US literature, modernism, and science fiction. In 2007, he took his doctorate from the City University of New York Graduate Center in English with a focus on American Studies. He is currently preparing a book manuscript based on his dissertation, tentatively titled “The Future Has No Known Competitor: Innovation in US Science Fiction from Hyperspace to Hypertext.” Lima, Maria Antónia is an Assistant Professor who teaches American Gothic Literature at the University of Évora in Portugal. She coordinates a Master Course in Contemporary Literary Creations and is a member of the International Gothic Association and of the American Studies group at the University of Lisbon Center for English Studies (Ulices). She was President of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies, has participated in some international gothic conferences and published several essays in international and national literary magazines. She has written many literary reviews for two widely read Portuguese newspapers (O Independente and Público). Her publications include Tragic Emotion and Impersonality in Modern Poetry and a PhD thesis entitled “Brown, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville: Terror in American Literature.” Marques, Nuno after leaving the Portuguese Navy as a correspondent of the on-board Tall Ship Sagres newspaper, graduated in North American Studies from the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon where he held a Grant from the University of Lisbon/Amadeu Dias Foundation for research on the Beat Generation. Having finished his Master in American Studies with the thesis “Gary Snyder’s New

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Nature Poetic – Buddhism and Ecocriticism in His Work,” Nuno is a Scholarship Holder in the CILM Project – City and Insecurity in Literature and Media and works on Literature and Environment. Martino, Andrew received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University in 2003. Since 2005 he has taught global literature at Southern New Hampshire University (SUNY) in the US. He maintains an active scholarly agenda with a focus on contemporary world literature, and the contemporary novel in particular. He is currently associate professor of English at Southern New Hampshire University and since 2010 he has served as the director of SNHU’s University Honors Program. Martins, Isabel Oliveira is an Assistant Professor in the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, New University of Lisbon). She is also a member of several national and international literary associations and holds a PhD in Contemporary American Literature – “The Good War: Perspectives and Contributions of the American Novel.” Her main research and teaching interests are connected to four areas – Anglo-Portuguese Studies (mainly British and American travelers in Portugal), Portuguese-American Studies, North American Literature and Translation Studies. She has published and taught in these areas since 1987. Mergal, Luis Hernández is Professor at the Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico, where he lectures on Music History, Musicology, Philosophy of Music and Ethnomusicology. His areas of research include the history of Spanish Renaissance music theory (“Francisco Salinas and Spanish Siglo de Oro Literature”), Puerto Rican twentiethcentury music (“The Nationalist Movement: Campos Parsi, Amaury Veray, Luis Antonio Ramírez,” “American Composers in Puerto Rico”), Caribbean traditional music (“The music of Afro-Caribbean Religions: Haitian Vodun and Cuban Santería”), and European music of the eighteenth century (“Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier,” “The Piano Sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven”). Mogl, Verena studied Historical and Systematical Musicology and Modern German Literature at the University of Hamburg. In 2007 she finished with a master’s thesis on the music and literature of Paul Bowles. Thereafter she worked as scientific assistant in the DFGresearch project “Pauline Viardot” at the Hochschule für Musik und

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Theater Hamburg. In 2010 she received a scholarship of the GerdaHenkel-Foundation for her dissertation-project “Komponieren in Zeiten des Sozialistischen Realismus – Mieczysław Weinberg (19191996) und die sowjetische Kunstdoktrin” Composing in the era of Socialist Realism – Mieczysław Weinberg (1919-1996) and Soviet artistic policy. Poole, Francis is a Film Librarian and Archivist at the University of Delaware Library. He first traveled to Morocco in 1973 where he stayed with a family in the Rif Mountains near Ketama. In 1979 he met and became friends with Paul Bowles while teaching at the American School of Tangier. In the 1980s he lived in Portugal and taught at the Universidade de Évora and the American Language Institute in Lisbon. He co-edited with Kevin Lacey, Mirrors on the Maghrib: Critical Reflexions on Paul and Jane Bowles and Other American Writers in Morocco. He has written on film for Salem Press and Dow Jones News Retrieval. His essay on Hollywood’s depiction of Moroccan Moulay Ahmed al-Raisuli in The Wind and the Lion, was published in The Arab-African and Islamic Worlds: Interdisiplinary Studies. A collection of his poems, Snakeskin Raincoat, was published in 2013. Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher is the author of the first biography of Paul Bowles, An Invisible Spectator (1989), which was named a “Notable Book of the Year” by The New York Times. His other books include The Continental Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944-1960; E.E. Cummings: A Biography; The World’s Words: A Semiotic Reading of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Rabelais’ Gargântua et Pantagruel; and Les Mots Anglais. Among the many books he has translated are works by Rafael Alberti, Garcia Lorca, and Panait Istrati, as well as the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam. From 1982 until his retirement in 2006 he taught writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is currently Visiting Professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. Weinreich, Regina is a co-producer/director on the documentary Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider and a writer on The Beat Generation: An American Dream. The author of the critical study, Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics, she edited and compiled Kerouac’s Book of Haikus and wrote the introduction for Kerouac’s You’re a Genius All the Time. She has contributed to numerous essay

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Contributors

collections and literary journals including The Paris Review, Five Points, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction. A Professor in the Humanities Department at The School of Visual Arts, in New York, she is currently researching a book on William S. Burroughs.

INDEX A Abu Ghreib 96 African folk 15, 16 Age of Monsters 5 Al-Quaeda 123 “Allal” 58, 350 American Ballet Caravan 151,180 Amine, Khalid 131 Anarchism 5 And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks 265, 268, 270 Assaad, Younes R. 12, 65, 369 “At Paso Rojo” 20, 55, 275, 281 Attali, Jacques 18, 235, 247 B Blankenship, Carole 15, 370 Baudrillard, Jean 13 Benlemlih, Bouchra 22, 369 Bertens, Hans 12, 73, 76, 102, 105, 110, 310 Bertolucci, Bernardo 53, 293, 339-40 Bevan, Greg 10, 369 Bialas, Zbigniew 17, 369-70 Bohemia 24, 359 Boulaich, Abdelouahed 293295 Brandabur, Clare 11, 370

Burroughs, William 2, 4, 9, 11, 14, 18, 19, 21, 38, 39, 45, 48, 51, 64, 85, 96, 125, 128, 265, 269, 339 Bowles, Jane 40, 47-49, 54, 88, 96, 203, 293, 342-44, 357, 361, 366 “By the Water” 265, 267, 271, 302 C “Call at Corazón” 304 “Caminata” (song) 155-56, 180 Campbell, Jennifer 15, 370-71 Carr,Virgínia Spencer 93, 136, 357 Casablanca 88, 117 Chester, Alfred 38, 39, 65 Choukri, Mohammed 11, 36, 45, 48, 65, 85-86, 89, 91, 93-95, 124-125, 144 The Clash of Civilizations 63 “The Circular Valley” 352 Cocteau, Jean 16 The Complete Outsider (film) 54 Copland, Aaron 4, 54, 160, 169, 171, 176, 203-04, 209, 225-26, 254 Cronenberg, David 21

378

Index

D Dankó, Kriztina 24, 371 Deleuze, Gilles 4 “The Delicate Prey” 53, 94, 277, 351, 364 Denmark Vesey 15 Derrida, Jacques 3, 4, 227 Desiring Arabs 86, 96 “A Distant Episode” 22, 53, 55, 56, 140, 257, 277, 315-16, 351 “Doña Faustina” 301 Driver, Sara 20, 293, 295, 297, 300 Duarte, Anabela, 1, 235, 367, 371 E “The Echo” 55,56 Écriture Automatique, 16 Edwards, Brian 12, 72, 77, 88, 113 “El Índio” (song) 153, 159-60, 164-65, 180 “El Salón México” (music) 160 “Elegy” (poem) 64 “Eureka” 354 Existentialism 19, 58, 265-66, 268 F Fanon, Franz 74, 76 Fiedler, Leslie 94 For Bread Alone 36, 89, 90-91, 94, 124 Ford, Charles Henri 4, 15, 265 Foucault, Michel 4, 305

Fourth World 13 “A Friend of the World” 365 “The Frozen Fields” 54, 93-94, 137, 139 G “The Garden” 47 Genet, Jean 12, 125 Gibson, William 18 Ginsberg, Allen 11, 38, 48, 64, 270 The Glass Menagerie 24, 35758, 360 Glanville-Hicks, Peggy 82 Gomes, Fernando 22, 371 Gothic 24, 347, 352 Gottlieb, Eli 5 Goytisolo, Juan 132 Gramsci, Antonio, 5 Gulf War 63 Gysin, Brion 4, 38, 39, 45, 293 H Halpern, Daniel 95-96, 135, 365 Heal, Benjamin 19, 371-72 Herrmann, Irene 211-12, 226 Hibbard, Allen 9, 325, 334, 342, 372 Holman, Libby 39, 49 Horror 3 Hubs, Nadine 5 Hussey, Andrew 11, 12, 85, 372 I International Zone 256-57, 304

Index

Interzone 88 Islam 10, 13, 63, 118, 123 Istiqlal 12, 79-80, 82, 101, 105, 109, 113 The Invisible Spectator 136 “If I Should Open my Mouth” 310 In Touch 94

379

Let it come Down 5, 9, 41, 42, 56, 57, 60, 62, 143-44, 186, 195, 304 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 22, 315, 318, 321 A Life Full of Holes 53, 54 Lima, Antónia M. 24, 373 Lorca, Federico G. 203 Lost Generation 4

J M Jehiliya 1 Jelloun, Tahar Ben 11, 65, 86, 88, 92 K Kaloudi, Kostoula 23,38, 372 Kerouac, Jack 11, 19, 20, 265, 268-69, 286 Kif 41, 42, 45, 50, 71, 122 Kirstein, Lincoln 14, 151, 15354, 180 Koch, Stephen 71-72, 83, 302 Koshikawa, Yoshiaki 21, 37273 L Latin America 56, 59, 161, 172, 177, 302, 304 Latin American Music 15, 54, 178, 181 Latouche, John 4, 39 Layachi, Larbi 53, 54 The Lemon 53 Leaving Tangier 86-87, 91 Leslie, Christopher 19, 373 Les Incorruptibles 3

Madrid 12, 118, 122, 129 Maghreb 73, 145, 256 Marques, Nuno 20, 373-04 Martino, Andrew 13, 374 Martins, Isabel O. 19, 374 Mergal, Luis H. 15, 374 “Memnon” (song) 210-212, 215, 222 Mexico 151-52, 169, 180, 302, 352, 357 Miller, Jeffrey 60, 95, 212 Modernism 19, 254, 262-63 Mogl, Verena 16, 374-05 Moroccan music 15 Morocco 63, 73, 77, 89, 90, 102, 107, 118, 130, 254, 302, 352, 363 Morocco Bound 65, 88 Mottram, Eric 4, 5, 7 Mrabet, Mohammed 32, 33, 35, 36, 40, 45, 48, 50 Mullins, Greg 85-88, 111, 256, 325, 334 Murray, Tim 20 Music as torture 18 Music and titerature 8, 16, 17 Music for a Farce 58

380

Index

N Naked Lunch 9, 11, 14, 21, 52, 295 Next to Nothing 206-07 Night Waltz 54, 191-02 Nihilism 5 No wave 21, 298 Noise 18, 236 O O’Hara, Frank 17 Orientalism 65, 78, 81, 89, 302 Orwell, George 4, 12 Owen, Peter 95 P “Pages from Cold Point” 55, 60, 350, 354 “Pastor Dowe at Tacaté” 56 Pastorela 14, 151-53, 160, 16263, 180 Pateson, Richard F. 75, 146, 257, 310 The Penal Colony 242 Poe, Edgar Allan 24, 54, 34950 Points in Time 63 Poole, Francis 20, 21, 375 Primitivism 1 Puerto Rican Music 174 Q A Quarrelling Pair 49 The Question of Palestine 87

R Rael, Juan B. 152, 158 Ramey, Philip 203 Rautavaara, Einojuhani, 17, 225-26, 229 Revueltas, Silvestre 171, 176 Rif 11, 89-90, 120 Roditi, Edouard 39,40 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 181 Rorem, Ned 2, 5, 16, 203-04 S Said, Edward 72, 78, 80, 87, 131, 145, 302 Sartre, Jean-Paul 268 Satie, Eric 16, 174 “The Scorpion” 181, 265-67, 271, 301 Security 13, 135, 140, 146 The Sheltering Sky 8, 19, 20, 23, 42, 47, 52, 56, 73, 141, 186, 195, 198, 226, 229, 253-55, 257, 259, 267, 272, 275, 286, 288, 293, 316, 318, 320, 322, 340, 348, 361 Six Chansons 1930-1931 16, 203, 206 Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet 204 Soundscape 228 Sound-figural Clinamen 247 The Spider’s House 6, 10, 12, 35, 50, 62, 71, 73, 82, 10102, 104, 107, 114, 138-39, 195, 247, 328, 331, 335 Stein, Gertrude 19, 45, 54, 187, 203, 209, 253-54 Stravinsky, Igor 170, 175

Index

Surrealism 19, 265, 270 Swayer-Lauçanno, Christopher 8, 73, 91, 254, 342, 375 T Tangier 11-12, 32, 38, 45, 49, 59, 64, 85, 88, 91, 117, 124, 254, 257, 293, 359 Tapiama 56, 57 Taprobane 46, 59 Tea on the Mountain 325 Terror 7, 347 Terrorism 12 “The Time of Friendship” 22 Their Hands are Green, and Their Hand are Blue 61, 319 Thomson, Virgil 2, 39, 58 Toklas, Alice, 254 “Too far from Home” 20, 56, 275, 353 Transition 254, 266 Tristes Tropiques 22, 315, 318, 320 Two Serious Ladies 54, 362 U “Under the Sky” 302 “Unwelcome Words” 65 Up Above the World 9, 18, 41, 55, 56, 60, 195, 235, 237, 246, 304, 349

381

V Vidal, Gore 14, 38, 93, 276, 357, 360, 366 View (magazine) 265, 271 W War on Terror 235, 239 Weinreich, Regina 9, 300, 37576 Williams, Tennessee 24, 38, 39, 47, 50, 53, 54, 125, 203, 357 The Wind Remains (opera) 53, 191 “The Wind at Beni Midar” 305 Without Stopping 2, 4, 53, 55, 93-94, 204, 254, 352 A World Outside 262 The Wretched of the Earth 74 Y Yacoubi, Ahmed 4, 32, 38, 46, 48,61, 65 Yankee Clipper (ballet) 154, 180 Yerma (opera) 191 You Are Not I 20, 21, 293, 29597, 301, 303, 306, 308, 310 Z Zizek, Slavoj 2, 227

Appeared earlier in the DIALOGUE series

Called to Civil Existence Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of The Rights of Woman Volume 17 – Edited by Enit Karafili Steiner East of Eden: New and Recent Essays Volume 16 – Edited by Michael J. Meyer and Henry Veggian Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men Volume 15 – Edited by Michael J. Meyer and Hugh J. Ingrasc Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s Salome Volume 14 – Edited by Michael Y. Bennett Wise Blood: A Re-Consideration Volume 13 – Edited by John J. Han The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective Volume 12 – Edited by Joe Moffett A Recipe for Discourse: Perspectives on Like Water for Chocolate Volume 11 – Edited by Eric Skipper Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark Volume 10 – Edited by Debra L.Cumberland Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek Volume 9 – Edited by Cecilia Donohue Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives Volume 8 – Edited by Sascha Pöhlmann More titles: www.rodopi.nl

r o d o p i [email protected]–www.rodopi.nl

Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity Pratchett, Pullman, Miéville and Stories of the Eye

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2014. 276 pp. (Postmodern Studies 52) Paper €60,-/US$84,E-Book €54,-/US$76,ISBN: 978-90-420-3858-5 ISBN: 978-94-012-1100-0

Andrew Rayment

“The books are true while reality is lying …” Championing the popular Fantasy genre on the same terms as its readers, Rayment casts a critical eye over the substance and methods of political critique in the Fantasy novels of Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman and China Miéville. Ranging across subjects as diverse as exquisite fundamentalism and revolutionary trains, encountering pervert-priests, dwarf hermaphrodites and sex-scarred lovers and pondering the homicidal tendencies of fairy tales and opera, Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity develops a theoretically wide-ranging and illuminating account of how the novels of these writers do and do not sustain politically insightful critique of the real world, while bringing intellectual and ethical concerns to bear on the popular Fantasy form.

USA/Canada: Rodopi, 228 East 45th Street, 9E, New York, NY 10017, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): T: 1-800-225-3998 F: 1-800-853-3881 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations

r o d o p i [email protected]–www.rodopi.nl

Sexual Feelings Reading Anglophone Caribbean Women’s Writing Through Affect

Amsterdam/New York, NY 2014. VIII, 217 pp. (Cross/Cultures 174) Paper €48,-/US$67,E-Book €43,-/US$60,ISBN: 978-90-420-3860-8 ISBN: 978-94-012-1102-4

Elina Valovirta

The present book offers a readertheoretical model for approaching anglophone Caribbean women’s writing through affects, emotions, and feelings related to sexuality, a prominent theme in the literary tradition. How does an affective framework help us read this tradition of writing that is so preoccupied with sexual feelings? The novelists discussed in the book – chiefly Erna Brodber, Opal Palmer Adisa, Edwidge Danticat, Shani Mootoo, and Oonya Kempadoo – are representative of various anglophone Caribbean island cultures and English-speaking backgrounds. The study makes astute use of the theoretical writings of such scholars as Sara Ahmed, Milton J. Bennett, Sue Campbell, Linden Lewis, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Lizabeth Paravisini – Gebert, Lynne Pearce, Elspeth Probyn, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Rei Terada, as well as the critical writings of Adisa, Brodber, Kempadoo, to shape an individual, focused argument. The works of the creative artists treated, and this volume, hold sexuality and emotions to be vital for meaning-production and knowledgenegotiation across differences (be they culturally, geographically or otherwise marked) that challenge the postcolonial reading process.

USA/Canada: Rodopi, 228 East 45th Street, 9E, New York, NY 10017, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): T: 1-800-225-3998 F: 1-800-853-3881 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations

r o d o p i [email protected]–www.rodopi.nl Amsterdam/New York, NY 2014. VII, 341 pp. (Textxet 77) Paper €75,-/US$105,E-Book €67,-/US$93,ISBN: 978-90-420-3885-1 ISBN: 978-94-012-1168-0

Caribbeing Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures Edited by Kristian Van Haesendonck and Theo D’haen

From wide-ranging overviews of the entire region to close readings of specific works, this volume opens a fascinating window on the literatures and cultures of the Caribbean, covering texts in the multiplicity of languages used in the wider Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and the region’s many creoles. Authors and works discussed range from luminaries such as Derek Walcott to hitherto practically unknown works in Antillean creole languages. Underlying is the idea to foster the study of the Caribbean literary, artistic and visual text through a comparative lens, a firm proposal to think beyond the persisting linguistic barriers and scholarly divides in the field. As such, Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures brings a new approach to the Caribbean embracing the region’s linguistic multiplicity and complexity without eschewing the many theoretical challenges and obstacles such a scholarly endeavor entails. Because of its ample scope this book will appeal to scholars and students working on the Caribbean and Latin America, but also to those interested in the broader fields of postcolonial and cultural studies.

USA/Canada: Rodopi, 228 East 45th Street, 9E, New York, NY 10017, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): T: 1-800-225-3998 F: 1-800-853-3881 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations

r o d o p i [email protected]–www.rodopi.nl Amsterdam/New York, NY 2014. VI, 162 pp. (Costerus NS 205) Paper €37,-/US$52,E-Book €29,-/US$41,ISBN: 978-90-420-3882-0 ISBN: 978-94-012-1165-9

Literature along the Lines of Flight D.H. Lawrence’s Later Novels and Critical Theory Hidenaga Arai

This book presents new readings of D.H. Lawrence’s later novels from the perspective of established critical theory and contemporary thought: a specific critical theory or critical perspective is selected and applied to each novel in order to present particular interpretations of each. Although remaining faithful to one’s personal desires without being unduly concerned with the outside world is considered a Lawrentian virtue, I would like to show another Lawrence who was sensitive enough to the outside world and to the social discourses of his time to employ elements of them in his novels, although subtly, and with critical shifts and displacements. Lawrence is a writer who continually draws lines of flight to escape from capitalist societies that ascribe essential value and power to money.

USA/Canada: Rodopi, 228 East 45th Street, 9E, New York, NY 10017, USA. Call Toll-free (US only): T: 1-800-225-3998 F: 1-800-853-3881 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. +31-20-611 48 21 Fax +31-20-447 29 79 Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations