The Imperial Quest and Modern Memory from Conrad to Greene by Rawa Julia;

Author:Rawa, Julia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Chapter Five

The Sheltering Sky:

Double Turns and Tea in the Sahara

“Like any Romantic, I had always been vaguely certain that sometime during my life I should come into a magic place which, in revealing its secrets, would give me wisdom and ecstasy—perhaps even death …”

—Paul Bowles

The Western quest is (again) a version of the archetypal quest that has been shaped by the prevailing ideologies of Western culture. Despite the critical achievements of post-war Modernism (post 1945), we can see these nuances in many post-war Modern novels. Paul Bowles’s existential masterpiece, The Sheltering Sky, was published just after World War II in 1949. Mailer notes that Bowles “opened up the end of civilization” (Advertisements 468) in The Sheltering Sky. Bowles explores the deficiencies of Western rationalism, capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism in this novel about three Americans roving in French North Africa after World War II. Solotaroff argues that Paul Bowles was “the most subtle as well as the most uncompromising” of all the post-war writers who wrote about Modern life (The Desert Within 29); the Bowlesian take on Modern alienation “made the nihilism of the early Hemingway seem like a pleasant beery melancholy” (Oates qtd. in Kendle). The Sheltering Sky was published as the colonial situation in North Africa became increasingly tense. The French had colonized North Africa and “displaced the Algerians with Europeans” (Prochaska 85). The Algerians were pushed to the margins “while France reproduced itself in Algeria” (Prochaska 85). Important intellectuals like Frantz Fanon and Jean Paul Sartre supported North African nationalism in the post-war period. Paul Bowles broke from the West to take up residence in Morocco at this time. Some critics see Bowles as an iconoclastic renegade who criticized Western incursions into Morocco and Algeria. Others take issue with his exploitation and representation of North Africa and North Africans. His American characters descend upon Morocco to quest and possess in this existential travelogue. The protagonists’ movement from place to place is central to the structure of The Sheltering Sky. There is a clear move from New York to North Africa where the Sahara is the locus of destination and culmination. The narrative focuses on characters who struggle to understand themselves, each other, and the world; their quests take on radical nuances via movement from the Symbolic to the Semiotic in this “travel book about an inner journey through states of consciousness” (Caponi 127–33). There is substantial evidence to support the idea that The Sheltering Sky is constrained by the Western eye; however, other dimensions of the text suggest more expansive movement.

The Sheltering Sky exhibits all the powers of high Modernism, yet reproduces the trope of the Western hero who embarks upon a quest based on fantasies of invasion, objectification, and aggression. Bowles describes the post World War II period as “the Atomic Age” in The Sheltering Sky. His very Modern characters move in a context of post-war malaise and are “appropriate to a period of fear and desolation” for they are “empty, deracinated, and hopeless, the hollow men of T.

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