Distant Episodes: The Portrayal of Islam in the Literature of Paul Bowles

Photo taken in Morocco by Allen Ginsberg

Paul Bowles was the author of The Sheltering Sky. He is one of my favorite authors.

I am currently reading a novel by Bowles entitled The Spider's House. Nico, who is an ex-Muslim, has also agreed to read it and we will eventually do a post on our thoughts about the work.

I have a memory of having read a long article about Paul Bowles and Islam sometime shortly after 9/11. I believe the article was in the New Yorker or the Atlantic. Periodically, I scan Google searches looking for it, but alas, it is, for some reason, impossible to locate.

Today, I found this review of a book of Bowles' short stories. The review is dated October 21, 2001:

Always admired by his fellow writers, Bowles achieved wider public fame with Bernardo Bertolucci's 1990 film version of his 1949 novel, ''The Sheltering Sky.'' Like that longer work, over half of the 62 stories in this collection are set in the Muslim world; indeed, most are intended to portray Muslim experience and sensibility. 

In these stories, Bowles employs a style purged of American idiom and liberally sprinkled with Arabic words, which are inserted for coloration but also to fill the cultural gaps that language cannot traverse (just as our front pages nowadays use ''jihad'' or ''fatwa'').  

It is precisely in such uncharted territory that Bowles likes to situate his narratives. His representation of the relationship between Islam and the West is, to borrow another term from our current war lexicon, ''asymmetric.'' Here the Westerner is fascinated by the Muslim. The Muslim is, at best, incuriously aware of the Westerner.  

I received the review copy of this collection in late August and was rereading it in the second week of September. Events transformed what was in my hands.  

One story in particular, ''A Distant Episode,'' read differently after that awful Tuesday. The story was first published in 1947, shortly after Bowles's expatriation. In it, an unnamed, middle-aged French professor comes to ''the warm country'' (Saharan Morocco) to undertake research on variations in the Moghrebi dialect. The region, still a French possession, is evoked sensuously, with a redolence of ''orange blossoms, pepper, sun-baked excrement, burning olive oil, rotten fruit.''  

In addition to his linguistic investigations, the professor wishes to acquire some ''little boxes made from camel udders.'' By night, he is taken to the poor quarter of the town, where he is assured he can buy such bric-a-brac. He is instead robbed, beaten up, savaged by dogs and abducted by traders traveling into the desert by camel train.  

The reader is lulled into expecting a familiar captivity narrative. The expectation is brutally subverted.  

One of the traders pinches the professor's nose, then yanks out his tongue and slices it off. The atrocity surprises the professor and shocks the reader: ''The word 'operation' kept going through his mind; it calmed his terror somewhat as he sank back into darkness.''  

The student of Arab tongues now has no tongue. His captors have more than torment in mind for him. They deck him out in a head-to-toe costume made from the circular bottoms of tin cans strung together. Clad in this mock armor (the detritus of his Western civilization), he is now ''a valuable possession'' -- a tin box, no less.  

Over the following months, the professor is trained to caper for the postprandial entertainment of his owners. He is taught ''obscene gestures'' that ''elicit delighted shrieks from the women.'' He grunts hilariously. In the course of time (they are, after all, traders) the professor is sold and then stranded in a remote town. He throws himself on the mercy of a French soldier. ''Tiens,'' the poilu exclaims, ''a holy maniac,'' and takes a potshot at him, driving the comical tin man, clanking and gibbering, into the cold desert night -- an unwelcoming yellow road.  

One can allegorize this enigmatic story any number of ways: as a fable of mutual exploitation, mutual incomprehension or the casual sadisms engendered by decaying imperialism. 

The question that presses, however, is: does the professor know more about Muslims when he is a mutilated clown than he did when he was an academic? Must one suffer -- extremely -- at the hands of one's opponents to understand their extremism? Kurtz's ''exterminate all the brutes'' is the easier response. Bowles does not surrender to such easiness.