Below I’ve included a brief introduction to Bowles & The Sheltering Sky, then suggested some specific topics for discussion. It’s far more than you’ll need for one session, but hopefully it will break open the book for a good conversation.
Finally, I’ve concluded with a few words on the upcoming book, Kalimantaan.
Enjoy!
—Anne Campisi
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We’re started off this season with what may be the list’s most radical story of alienation. Certainly it’s the most philosophical.
I returned to Bowles this year through one of his many collections of short stories (this one helpfully titled: Paul Bowles: Stories).
I needed a fix: I was hunting for short, imaginative pieces with a nuanced intellect & psychological precision. Stories that didn’t waste words & would sock me in the gut. I remembered Bowles from The Sheltering Sky, which I once called my favorite book about 15 years ago. His stories are brutal, but they deliver.
Bowles played with Gertrude Stein & Tennessee Williams in New York & Paris. Married to the (allegedly lesbian) author Jane Bowles (Two Serious Ladies), Paul lived for decades as an expatriate in Tangiers, Morocco. He & Jane travel extensively through North Africa. Familiar? You’ll find caricatures of the Bowles’ in Tangier in their friend W.S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.
He’s one of the first & foremost US authors to write about Americans in the Arab world. This is even more interesting today for its unvarnished lens, which predates the 1967 & current wars, & all the literary lashes & backlashes of contemporary novels set there today. Notice, for one, how tiny a role religion plays.
The Sheltering Sky is his first novel. It was written just after WWII, in a time of great disillusionment with western paradigms of progress, freedom & morality. Also, this is written & set at a time of decolonization (esp. of the French leaving North Africa). What can it mean to be free, or to make moral choices in a world in which the previous scholars & philosophies seem morally bankrupt (the Atomic bomb, the holocaust, de/colonization)? What does it mean to chose to be FREE? It’s at this moment in history (1940s) that Jean-Paul Sartre rises as one of the most influential & popular intellectuals of the day.
Bowles knows his Sartre. As much as this is a story of losing oneself in the desert, this a existentialist’s book, minute in its studies of psychology, freedom & free will. As you discuss the book, consider these two snippets from an essay & an entry on Sartre:
Leslie Stevenson Discussing Sartre’s ‘Being & Nothingness’, in, Seven Theories of Human Nature (1974)
“ BAD FAITH is the attempt to escape anguish by pretending to ourselves that we are not free. We try to convince ourselves that our attitudes and actions are determined by our character, our situation, our role in life, or anything other than ourselves. Sartre gives two famous examples of bad faith. He pictures a girl sitting with a man who she knows very well would like to seduce her. But when he takes her hand, she tries to avoid the painful necessity of a decision to accept or reject him, by pretending not to notice, leaving her hand in his as if she were not aware of it. She pretends to herself that she is a passive object, a thing, rather than what she really is, a conscious being who is free. The second illustration of the cafe waiter who is doing his job just a little too keenly; he is obviously 'acting the part'. If there is bad faith here, it is that he is trying to identify himself completely with the role of waiter, to pretend that this particular role determines his every action and attitude.
Whereas the truth is that he has chosen to take on the job, and is free to give it up at any time. He is not essentially a waiter, for no man is essentially anything."
Sartre on Morality (From, apologies: Wikipedia)
“One of the most important implications of bad faith is the abolition of traditional ethics and morality. As being a moral person requires one to deny authentic impulses and change one's actions based on the will of a person other than oneself, being a moral person is one of the most severe forms of bad faith. Sartre has a very low opinion of conventional morality for this reason, condemning it as a tool of the bourgeoisie to control the masses, like so many signs to keep off the grass, deriving "its being from its exigency and not its exigency from its being."
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SOME of the FAR-TOO-MANY SUBJECTS FOR DISCUSSION:
NOTE: This book’s characters & certain tropes are replete with old-fashioned prejudices—sexism, anti-Semitism, anti-Arab, classism, etc. Some are simply horrid individuals altogether. That said, I’d urge you not to get mired in these as subjects in & of themselves.
• Tea in the Sahara. How does this morality play of three girls who want above all things to drink tea in the Sahara relate to the larger story? Is it an allegory? Is it Sartre’s “good faith”?
• Why are they there? The Moresby’s? The Lyles? What are their relationships to the native peoples, culture & landscape?
• Bowles’ draws his characters in large part as 3+ studies of free will. In this sense, how are Port, Kit & Tunner distinct from one another? How does each evolve through the book? How does Port’s experience of typhoid & Kit’s struggle beside it reverse, echo or answer their previous attitudes?
• These characters are also studies of deceit. It becomes ‘Bad Faith’, as Sartre calls it, when it involves personal agency. Characters rarely say what they mean. At times there’s a nearly arbitrary relationship between a character’s social communications (spoken dialogue, tone, actions, expressions) & their interior intentions & desires. That dynamic is always being highlighted. Why? How does this change over the course of the book? Do Kit, Port, Tunner, & the Lyles become more or less deceitful?
• Does Port’s dream of the train (ch 2) connect with the actual train ride (ch 10)?
• On the train, Kit has an ordeal trying to get out to the open air. This section has always struck me as a gold mine of metaphors. Metaphorically speaking: what’s the train (someone calls it the ‘epitome of life’)? Why go through the whole train, through 4th class, to get out? When she covers herself with scents (note: all 3 of which are Haram (forbidden by Islamic law)) & then passes through a Muslim crowd & finally encounters a man without a nose….Talk about what larger stories are being told here.
• When Port is sick, especially in Chapter 22, he’s trying to “get back”. He also warns that her “I don’t know whether I’ll come back.” When Kit tries to send a telegram, in Ch 28, she writes “Cannot get back”. Where is Here & where is There? What would it take & what would it mean for each of them to “get back”?
• The Sky. The leitmotiv through nearly every chapter. What does it shelter us from? (in Ch 13 Port suggests: “Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.” ) What’s beyond it & what exactly do they fear?
• The Lyles. What’s the deal with them anyway? As models of deceit. As imposters (or not) & identity thieves. Is the sexual rumor true?
• Love. Not much of it here, but many gestures aping it. Intimacy (& its challenges) is a perennial favorite subject of the existentialists & is the title of one of Sartre’s books. Both K & P are vaguely searching (or passively pining) for love again. In Ch 13 Port’s in “the cage he had built long ago to save himself from love.” When Kit’s with Port, she performs hyper-self-conscious gestures of affection without much feeling it. Later (ch 26), in stark contrast to that, she is “conscious of making the gestures of love only after she had discovered herself in the act of making them.” What’s changed?
• Daoud Zozeph, the Jew in Sba, is one the few wholly generous, sincere people in the whole book. He speaks directly to Kit’s fear & interpretation of omens in Ch 22. How much weight do you think the book invests in his words? Is he ‘right’ where Kit is wrong?
• What’s Kit’s relationship with words? She says she considers language a vessel of thought. In one of her strongest, clearest & most effective acts of will, she removes herself from both when she joins Belqassim’s caravan.
• Discuss Kit’s decisions to join the caravan & then, later, to leave Belqassim.
• On the caravan across the desert: is anyone taken advantage of? Are there any victims? Is she ever a victim?
• Kit’s four lovers get progressively darker (racially) & Bowles emphasizes their hue each time. What is this about?
• ‘Port Moresby’ is also the capital of Papua New Guinea…what do you make of this?
• I particularly admire how skillfully Bowles describes the details of some totally inscrutable act or image without judging, explaining, or claiming to represent it anthropologically. They’re just close observations. For example, I’m thinking of the ‘ancient Negro slave woman with a skin like an elephant hide’ (ch 27) performing a butter-dung whip dance before the catatonic Kit. Vivid.
We can’t fully understand the details of what she’s doing, yet the gist is clear enough. We’re even briefly in her point of view & she has our sympathies! As a writer, I find that masterful. In contrast to the characters’ prejudiced, baffled glimpses, these descriptions act as authorial bridges between what is alien & what is owned. Bowles, after all, is a stranger here himself, but he’s not alienated.
Were there other inexplicable, foreign events or images that particularly strike you?
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A NOTE for approaching Kalimantaan
Having read & loved this book, sung the author’s praise & even assigned it to you fine people, I wish the novelist who gifted me with this book had warned me in advance: hang in there through the first epistolary chapters. It’s only 31 pages, mostly ladling us essential backstory. Then it turns to prose. For my part—& you may disagree—I feel Godshalk made a poor choice starting out epistolary, because they’re letters about characters we don’t know yet & so they read little thick. I re-read the first 31 pages at the end of the book & they made ever so much more sense.
—AC
