Paul Bowles as Orientalist: Toward a Nomad Discourse

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 7 (1998) : 37-61. Paul Bowles as Orientalist: Toward a Nomad Discourse Timothy Weiss To use the rubric “orientalist” in reference to the 20th-century American composerwriter Paul Bowles is to suggest not one but potentially many things, some of them obvious and others much less so. The one thing that I do not mean by calling Bowles an orientalist is the one thing that Orientalism for the past twenty years has become a code for: racism and imperialist sentiment. In his landmark study Orientalism (1978), Edward Said sets up the equation that still remains in place, at least to a certain degree, twenty years later: given that 19th-century Europeans tended to reduce the “Orient” to a set of essentializations,idées reçues, and stereotypes, he contends, It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. Some of the immediate sting will be taken out of these labels if we recall additionally that human societies, at least the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with “other” cultures. (203-204) In Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (1995), John M. MacKenzie examines the transformation of the term “orientalism,” which, in the wake of Said’s publication, has become, according to him, “one of the most ideologically charged words in modern scholarship” (4). MacKenzie’s own work, as well as those of others—Dennis Porter’s Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (1991); Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992); Billie Melman’s Women’s Orients (1992); Lisa Lowe’s Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (1991)—have broken apart the monolith of Orientalism and shown its complicated contours and contradictions. Porter, for example, in his analysis of orientalist travel writing, has focused on the complexity of human encounters, the mixture of emotions bound up in travel, and the traveler’s incertitude and estrangement. Such travel writing may be interpreted as “a form of experimentation at and beyond established limits”; rather than “obliteration of otherness.” A “self-transformation” of the traveler inevitably begins to take place “through a dialogic engagement with alien modes of life” (qtd. in MacKenzie 22). Similarly, Pratt, Melman and Lowe have demonstrated the diversity within orientalist discourse as well as the modifying effect of cultural encounters. Scholars have pointed out the hybridity of Orient and Occident and the two-way nature of their dialogue and exchange. One need only consider, for example, the contributions of Arabo-Islamic culture and civilization to European civilization during the Middle Ages (see, for example, Fuentes). MacKenzie notes that Said acknowledges this interaction but fails to draw out its consequences: [He] recognizes that the traffic cannot all be one way, that Orientalism was forming the West as well as the Orient. The East “has helped to define Europe” . . . [and] has been an “integral part of European material civilization and culture,” a “sort of surrogate and even underground self,” at times (as for the Romantics) even a means of regenerating the West. Thus the discourse of Orientalism seems to go further than merely highlighting the alleged superiorities of Europe. It can modify and therefore surely even challenge the West. Said never follows through the logic of this, that the example of the Orient can become the means for a counter-western discourse, that it can offer opportunities for literary extension, spiritual renewal and artistic development. Thus the Orient, or at least its discourse, has the capacity to become the tool of cultural revolution, a legitimizing source of resistance to those who challenge western conventions, introspection and complacency. (10) In short, MacKenzie maintains that there is “a complexity of western approaches to the East” that Said’s analysis does not take into account (xviii). Given these kinds of scholarly objections and qualifications, in this article I use the terms “Orientalist” and “Orientalism” to refer to western literary treatments of North African and Euro-Asian cultures and societies which are demonstrably racist or imperialist, and the terms “orientalist” and “orientalism” to refer to treatments which can not be readily classified and may, in fact, be quite mixed in their effects or have little or nothing to do with racist sentiment and imperialist attitudes. I aim to show in this article different meanings and functions of the Maghreb and oriental materials in Paul Bowles’s works, among which we certainly find the following. First, an artistic, inspirational aspect: Bowles drew inspiration from the terrains (cityscapes, landscapes), the cultural juxtapositions and interactions of North Africa, and other “eastern” or hybrid east-west places. They were to him a muse of sorts. Secondly, the fact that he found in the latter a fertile ground in which to cultivate his particular existentialist and nihilist sensibilities. Third, an alterity: for Bowles the orient is not an occasion for composing fictions that demonstrate or are imbued by a sense of western superiority; quite the contrary, he was rebelling against and escaping from things North American and European. The orient was the entry-way into an “underground self” and a means by which the expatriate living in Tangier set himself apart from things western. The orient is thus a means to a chosen alterity and a counter-western discourse. Fourth, a nomadic aspect: although cultural binarisms like East and West never disappear completely in Bowles’s writings, there is another sense in which he goes beneath and beyond them to touch his most profound subject matter, the terror and wonder of existence. For him the orient leads to a deepening of an existentialist reflection. His attitude toward the Maghreb is neither one of superiority nor unqualified embrace; it was for him a place where he felt a necessity. It was a “magical” place precisely because he believed that there he had met his destiny. But for Bowles the Maghreb is also a place of transience. It is a place of sojourn: it is a means to another end beyond itself, that is, an independence of mind and a nomadisme. In this respect Bowles’s autobiography Without Stopping (1972) could not be better entitled: his life journey moves from West to East, but the East, no matter how much it might be valued, is not the final destination. The orient is a vehicle to something else, call it a nihilism or a nomadisme, that transcends binarisms of cultural difference but for which non-European places (such as the Maghreb) serve as the inspiration, the detonator, and the sustaining environment of existentialist questioning and wandering. Bowles, better than any other western writer, has evok (...truncated)