Strange Bedfellows - Short Stories by Bowles and Joyce

It may not be fair to place Bowles’ lesser known collection “Allal – Stories from Morocco” next to Joyce’s overwhelmingly famous “Dubliners”, but it is possible: They share the genre of the short story, so one could argue a “typological” comparison. But since I am not an employed academic who has to finagle explanations and intellectual justifications for her doing, I won’t even bother: I happened to read them because they were lying around. Their selection was determined by what was left on the shelf at the time of packing up our library, nothing more. The resulting “montage” of thoughts was as unpredictable as it was fun. Not unlike the results of cut-up theory, or in the Kuleshov method, this unexpected juxtaposition of unrelated works yielded some new and curious insights.

The problem with Paul Bowles’stories lies in their lack of immediacy. Uncle Bill (Burroughs) was right when he pointed to the fact that the author does not take any risk with his storytelling. Instead Bowles remains on the safe balcony of the chronicler from which he observes his characters without ever getting his hands dirty. One wonders where this clinical distance stems from, which results at times in an almost patronizing “hodge-podge of all the incredible things that Arabs allegedly do” (Kerouac). The primitive, or rather its depiction, is so blatant, the cruelty and misery that come with it so horrid, that there is not even room for aimless expat nostalgia (which Bertolucci’s Sheltering Sky is so rich of), leave alone Gaugin-esque or Conrad-esque fascination with the exotic. Indeed, the narrator’s detached omniscience offers little in the way of compassion, repulsion, or even judgement, as one would find in the stories of, say, Tolstoi. At the same time there is no experimentation with the narrator either: he remains one dimensional at all times. Sometimes this works, as for example in “Señor Ong and Señor Ha”, but overall it is perhaps this one-dimensional narration that corrupts the potential of Bowles’ stories. As a result most of “Allal – Stories from Morocco” (a misleading title, since a good part of the 16 stories are set in the Americas) leaves a sense of dissatisfaction, an aftertaste of gratuitous peeping into stereotypical third-world backwardness. The exceptions are “Atlájala”, “The Hyena” and “The Water of Izli”. The first not only captures, but also leaves us with the magic of an unknown, soul-inhabiting spirit, which explores the human condition and gets hooked on it. The second is a fine fable on the unexpected ways in which our destiny can be fulfilled. The last is a witty, symbolically rich and positive tale (for once) that intertwines the profane with the holy, cunning with beauty, death with life. The image of the black stallion galloping through a north-African town with his owner’s corpse tied to his back in the search for his mare is one of the strongest in the whole collection (my bias as an equine enthusiast notwithstanding).

Matters are very different with Joyce’s Dubliners. The sensibility is miles away from Bowles’ exotic chronicles, since here we have the description of the familiar from a distance. Technically it is a well thought out cycle of stories that leads from young life to death and our receding memories of those that have passed away. Joyce irritates as ever with his semantic flourishes, which produce labored imagery and an impression of stylistic self-indulgence. But he does get his hands dirty: his miserable characters live and breathe. Their suffering is never kept at arm’s length, but immanent, palpable, recognizable. When their moment of realization comes, it transcends the page and becomes tangible. This credibility makes it easy to ignore Joyce’s underlying judgement, the pinch of bitterness and the sense of reprimand or perhaps even retribution that seeps from the collection: Too many of his characters fail in almost cruelly unspectacular ways, such as Eveline, who cannot bring herself to elope into an adventurous life with her sailor and instead returns to her dull, meaningless existence, or Little Chandler, who simply resigns to the fact that his literary ambitions have come to naught and that his marriage is dead, too. The collection is littered with petty lives, characters that cannot even qualify as anti-heros, and at times it is not quite clear why one should care for them. But that is exactly the point: Historical issues of Irish national identity aside, these people are thinkable anywhere, which of course renders them into “Everybody”, as Burgess so aptly labeled them. Joyce tells cautionary tales of how ordinary life turns living people into the dead, which is, of course, exactly what Conroy realizes in the last story of that title.

In terms of impact, therefore, Joyce is, unsurprisingly, miles ahead of Bowles. But where Bowles may in turn be ahead of Joyce is in the courage of his choice of subject matter. Yes, Joyce fought serious battles against publishers and censors the world over for most of the 20th century. But all the same, Joyce wrote about what he knew. Since conviction and familiarity go well together, writing with a mission may come easier, even if the consequences of that writing (censorship, exile, etc.) translate into hardship and sacrifice. Bowles, on the other hand, took a stab at what he didn’t know. It takes courage to venture outside of your framework and expose yourself to the dangers of your own superficiality and stereotyping. A writer of the unfamiliar takes an enormous risk tackling something that speaks to him or her in a language he or she does not understand. Writing about the foreign means having to find an emotional vocabulary that permits to express what by default is incomprehensible. The consequences may not be quite as hard or immediate to such a writer (Kipling and Conrad, for example, got the post-colonial heat long after their life-time success and their demise), but the loss of one’s credibility and human integrity as a professional writer is at stake all the time when attempting to voice the Other. Bowles does not necessarily lose face with these stories, but they mercilessly expose his own struggle for comprehension and that may prevent “Allal” from reaching universal greatness. We are left with gruesome postcards from a strange existence. They provoke little more than minute shudders which get instantly sucked back into the overall ignorance of the places and people depicted.