Hi everyone,
I was just interviewed by Kevin Barrett. Kevin pointed out that right after 9/11, this Bowles story ["A Distant Episode"] was cited by several commentators as evidence of Islamic barbarism.
That is a very distorted reading. In "A Distant Episode," the fictional tribe that cut the Professor's tongue is shunned and held in contempt by ordinary Morrocans. That's why the waiter gets angry when he's asked by the Professor about camel udder boxes.
As a linguist, the Professor is a scholar of tongues, so it's only appropriate that his presumptuous tongue is cut out. This, Paul Bowles does, not any actual Moroccan.
Interviewed by Barrett, I said that Bowles was interested in unusual solutions, let's say, to life's basic problems. Interested mainly in boys, Bowles was married to a lesbian nymphomaniac, Jane Bowles.
In his "Pages from Cold Point," Bowles has a rich white teenager paying black boys and men for sex on a fictional Caribbean island. This scandalizes the village, whose mores are traditional. Not sated, the teenager even tries to seduce his own father, by lying naked, uninvited, on the old man's bed.
Though the father refrains from such congress, his rumination is creepy enough:
"I stood looking at him for a long time, probably holding my breath, for I remember feeling a little dizzy at one point. I was whispering to myself, as my eyes followed the curve of his arm, shoulder, back, thigh, leg: ‘A child. A child.’"
A normal father would say, "What the fuck are you doing?! Get out of my bed!" This father, though, spends the entire night next to his naked son, whom he suspects is not sleeping, for the suspense.
"He lay perfectly quiet until dawn. I shall never know whether or not he was really asleep all that time. Of course he couldn’t have been, and yet he lay so still. Warm and firm, but still as death. The darkness and silence were heavy around us."
So Bowles was certainly interested in decadence and corruption, but in this story, he's indicting the white father and son, not the dark natives, and in "A Distant Episode," he punishes the Professor for his presumptiousness, if not hubris.
Linh
4 comments:
Linh, it never ceases to amaze me how you find these extraordinary details of history and literature. And I considered myself well-read.
Can't thank you enough for bringing light to the hidden world.
hi linh,
i read all sorts of new writers i learned of from reading gore vidal. bowles and christopher isherwood were among them. i found both of them refreshing, mind-expanding, really different--and stimuli to my personal growth, i felt. this was around 1999.
now i'm not at all so sure. the more i look at art and artists--certainly from the past century--the more i notice their sickness, perverseness, decadence, amorality, degeneracy. vidal himself and his good friend tennessee williams are two more examples. what about william burroughs? it was a seriously perverse, jewish century, the last one. jane bowles, much worse yet susan sontag--who needs them? and when did artists stop having children? in the past century it's almost a pre-requisit set by the artistic gatekeepers (critics, curators etc) to being an artist: being gay, childless, man- and/or human-hating, incredibly selfish and narcissistic, jewish at the very least in thought, sick, perverse, creepy, disturbing (many other similar adjectives also work). why? where's all the wisdom--life-affirming wisdom--which comes from parenthood? the entire art world, literature included, strikes me as a disgusting, anti-life cesspool.
cheers man,
dan
I agree with Dan. Bowles was an absolute pervert. Who knows what he got up to in North Africa. Don't know why you're quoting him Linh.
Tangiers attracted some odd characters. William S. Burroughs was another resident of Tangiers Morocco, although not so long as Paul Bowles. For quite some time Tangiers was an international city, jointly ruled by several European countries, but in practice was pretty much left to it's own devices. So things would happen there that couldn't have gone on in other parts of Morocco. Paul Bowles actually made a living for a long time writing music for Broadway plays, although he seemed to prefer writing novels and short stories.
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