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.

The Ministry of Pain and The Pugilist at Rest

This morning I finished Dubravka Ugresic’s book The Ministry of Pain. Dubravka’s book has been patiently waiting first on my desk and then on my bedside table for over a year until the right moment came to read it: This early, rainy July in Dublin is ideal because her tale speaks so eloquently of issues I grapple with at this particular point in time. Of course I cannot relate with more than ordinary compassion to the pain and trauma of Yugoslavia’s victims. (God, I don’t even know what to call the affected region – Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania – for fear of a misnomer! So why not just take a shortcut to the misnomer straight away? “Yugoslavia’s victims” it is!) No, I cannot fathom what it is like to lose your home to war and deal with the savagery inside and outside. But I do know what it means to leave your country and I have an inkling of what it means when you don’t recognize it on a contemporary political map as the one you grew up in. The difference is, of course, that Germany reunified, while Yugoslavia fell apart like the oft mentioned china-cups in Dubravka’s book.

While reading I wondered whether the piercing nostalgia in The Ministry of Pain is comparable to the “Ostalgia” that perks up in Germany. I am thinking of films, mainly. Goodbye Lenin is an obvious example, as is The Lives of the Others. Anything really that approaches the oppressive communist past with a touch of sweetness. Of course, the premise is different in Deutschland, because no blood stained German soil when the era ended. The wall came down without death, rape and mutilation, whereas the Balkans drowned in misery, mass graves and bombs. It must be this lack of blood that makes it less bitter for German writers and even to approach the issue with humor, provided that the evil and horror of the regime is never really questioned. What remains, however, is an occasional yearning for a time when the world was clearly split between “us” and “them” (to borrow Dubravka’s distinction) and change happened imperceptibly. I am increasibgly convinced that the nostalgic malaise is not only confined to places in the “East”; this is also known to “us” in the “West”, a Westalgia, if you like. Perhaps we are simply overwhelmed by the Tsunami of changes that relentlessly reshaped the world as we know it over the last two decades. Hence we yearn for the hindsight security of an earlier age, when things were as they had always been, because now they certainly aren’t anymore. My generation will remember, for example, the grey of the concrete bridges with their green railings that cross the Autobahn everywhere in the former FRG; the political other that you could identify and oppose when you watched politicians on one of the five available TV channels; your Haribo and Kinderschokolade which seemed unfathomable without German print on their package. And so on.

There is one passage that particularly struck me in The Ministry of Pain: It states that after years in a host culture the futile urge to return takes over the emigrant. S/he then gives up all they accomplished to go back to their country of origin only to utterly fail to reintegrate. Eventually s/he returns to the host country, broken, ruined, and homeless. Any emigrant can read this as a stark generalization, for sure, but also as a strong warning. It depends what you left behind in the first instance as well as the second. And why you left your country of origin. If you are a war refugee your motivation to return will be very different from that of an economic or even cultural émigré or refugee.

I finished the book before I got out of bed. Once upstairs I felt that my reading urge had not yet subsided and continued with Thom Jones’ The Pugilist at Rest. It turned out that Dubravka’s painful tale is well complemented by this short story. Jones tells of the hard male, the warrior, the broken man of force. He relates the fate of a brutal marine, a boxer and sadistic fighter. On the surface this is a world apart from Dubravka’s female literature teacher in Amsterdam, but both stories with their uncanny insights into their character’s shortcomings achieve a comparable profundity: In a powerful scene between main character Tanja, a temporary lecturer of Yugoslav Literature at the University of Amsterdam, and her slighted student Ivan, Dubravka confronts us not only with a hint of physical perversion, but much more importantly with emotional perversion stirring together sexual tension, love, pain, hate and denial into a potent delivery of a pathetic human being. Jones’ horrendous battle scene is not the actual culmination of this Vietnam vet’s tale – rather it is his timid admitting to his swindling to get decorations that reaches the same effect as Dubravka's scene: the baring of an emotional perversion resulting in the delivery of a pathetic human being.

When I finished the story, I sat down at my machine to check my mail and read the news. On BBC’s home page today’s top story begins like this: “Islamic rebels kill 14 Philippine marines, beheading 10 of them, in a fierce clash in the south, the army says.” It seems that no matter how deep some of us peer into the abyss of the human soul, and how many times we deliver it on paper, reality will always find a way of proving that true perversion cannot be invented, no matter how skilled and gifted we are as writers.