The Journal of American Culture and Literature
, Editors, Dr. Gonul Ucele, Dr. Bilge Mutluay -- 1997 -- 15 th Anniversary Special Issue -- Department of American Culture and Literature, Hacettepe University Ankara, Turkey. Co-Published with the Poetry/Rare Books Collection, SUNY BuffaloSOUND EFPECTS AND THE VOID IN THE FICTION OF PAUL BOWLES
David Espey
Paul Bowles represents the unusual case of a composer of music who later turned to the writing of fiction. A student of Aaron Copland, Bowles developed a reputation in the 1930's for creating sophisticated background music and sound tracks to accompany the work of such playwrights as William Saroyan and Tennessee Williams.
After World War II, Bowles began writing fiction which dramatized a modern sense of horror. Of all the postwar American writers who devoted themselves to negation and despair, Bowles was "the most subtle as well as the most uncompromising." His sense of the terrifying and the depraved "made the nihilism of the early Homingway seem like a pleasant beery melancholy" (Solotaroff, 29). In the words of Norman Mailer, "Bowles opened the world of Hip. He let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death of the square, the end of civilization" (468).
Bowles's stories and novels--set exotically in North Africa and Latin America--are filled with the sorts of sound naturally associated with terror. As a young man he was greatly influenced by Edgar Allan Poe and set some of his poems to music. There exists in Bowles's narratives a kind of sound track, a series of sound effects, unsettling peripheral noises which gradually heighten to overpowering crescendos and dramatic silence. Like background music in a movie, they evoke a place and a culture, supplement dialog and action, suggest mood and state af mind.
According to Copland, who wrote music for several movies himself, the purpose of a film score is to "create a convincing atmosphere of time and place, underline psychological refinements, and build up or round off a scene" (Thomas, 21-22). Sound effects also help express what is beyond language. They become in effect a kind of non-verbal language supplementing the text. A character's fear, for example, is signalled by the ominous cry of an animal. His pain is echoed in the accompanying wail of the wind. Miklos Rozsa, a musicologist and composer of music for film who won three Oscars for movie scores in the 1940's and 1950's, stresses the emotional and non-rational aspect of background music: "The music serves the drama and creates in the subconscious an idealistic and sometimes irrational dimension against which the naturalistic components play" (Thomas, 34).
In many of Bowles's narratives, music and sound function precisely in this way, to evoke the irrational and express what is beyond the characters' consciousness or powers of articulation. And frequently, this background sound breaks through to the foreground, overwhelms the speech and thought of his characters, and expresses the power of forces hostile to language. In a scene at the end of "The Delicate Prey," the title story of Bowles's first collection of short stories (dedicated to "my mother, who read me Poe"), a murderer has been punished by being tied and buried in the desert until only his head remains above the surface. His captors abandon him as he raves:
When they had gone, he fell silent, to wait through the cold hours for the sun that would bring the first warmth, then heat, thirst, fire, visions. The next night he did not know where he was, did not feel the cold. The wind blew dust along the ground into his mouth as he sang. (288-89)
In this scene, human speech is obliterated as the wind blows the dust into the murderer's mouth. Beyond is the vast impersonal silence of the desert.
Silence, the absence of sound, is perhaps the most natural aural equivalent of the void. For the modernist writer, silence could be a philosophical as well as a technical problem. On the subject of silence and modernism, Frederick Karl remarks:
Silence was to be an essential ingredient of modernism, the furthest extreme.... What occurred is the denial of sound as routine communication . . . The entire nature of intervention underwent transformation in order to suggest silences. (29)
Bowles experienced the inherent difficulties of trying to express modernist themes of emptiness and sterility. The fact of cosmic silence can frustrate the creative impulse. Perhaps the truest representation of the void is no writing, the blank page, or no page at all. Bowles was intrigued by the experimental compositions of Samuel Beckett and John Cage, who offered long stretches of silence to their audiences.
The title of Bowles's collected poems, Next to Nothing, suggests both the central theme and the main problem for a late modernist. When one writes about nothingness, one risks having nothing to say. In a typical line from the young Bowles, writing in the shadow of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land imagery, expression yields to the stifling of breath and speech: "We are all unsuited to dwe!l on this plain / There is no way out but strangling" (Nothing, 8).
Gertrude Stein, an early mentor of Bowles, was not impressed by his poetry. She told him that he wasn't even a bad poet, he was "no poet at all" (Stewart, 9).
Bowles explains in his autobiography, Without Stopping, how as a young man he decided that ". . . the world was too complex for me to ever be able to write . . ." (262). He devoted himself to composing music, a purer, more abstract form of expression than language, a medium less encumbered with the problems of making sense out of human behavior.
Bowles always felt, with a musician's prejudice, that hearing was an underrated faculty: "There is no doubt that hearing is considered a secondary sense, one which is less directly connected with the intellect than sight . . . auditory esthetics are pretty much unevolved" (View, 28).
This undervaluing of sound as an aesthetic element was especially apparent in the sound tracks of movies. As music critic for < I>The New York Heraid Tribune, Bowles criticized both the quality of sound tracks and public ignorance of the art of film music. "Perhaps the trouble comes from the American mistake of considering music a form of decoration rather than a system of thought." Most Hollywood music was trite, he felt, too heavily instrumental, "like the quilted satin walls of Hollywood interiors." Bowles thought that film music could be ideally "a form close to opera, wherein words and music are combined and juxtaposed with precision to make an auditory version of the visual action" (Tribune, 7).
One pie ce of background sound that he praised was in a thriller starring Edward G. Rob inson. In one scene, the distant puffing of an approaching locomotive accompanies the reading of Robinson's palm by a fortune teller; the sound of the engine increases until the climactic moment in which the woman cries out the crucial word "Murder!" as the engine shrieks (Tribune, 6).
Bowles later adopted a similar technique in a short story, "The Echo." The main character is a disturbed adolescent girl who has been replaced in her mother's affections by a lesbian lover. The girl attacks the lover, then erupts in a scream of anguish when her mother expels her from home. The scream, which climaxes the story, echoes off a blank wall of rock in an abyss. The human voice is reduced to a primal scream which is projected into an inhuman void and returns futilely upon itself-a striking modern image of isolation, solipsism, and despair.
Bowles's most famous story, "A Distant Episode," is a further reduction of the human voice to mere sound, an assault upon the organ of speech itself. A linguistics professor is captured by desert nomads, who cut out his tongue. It is as if they have performed a lobotomy upon him. Deprived of speech, he loses his capacity to think and becomes a kind of performing animal. As the story ends, he is covered with tin bangles which rattle as he gallops into the great silence, the "lunar chill" of the desert.
The story betrays an anger at the pretensions and the limitations of language, and a corresponding fascination with the cosmic silence of the desert. Bowles, like the Professor in his story, was drawn back to North Africa in the 1940's by both the memory of earlier travel and an interest in the primitive. Bowles valued the silence of the Sahara, especially in contrast to the noise of a modern industrial city. Living in New York, he had written an essay attacking what we would now call "sound pollution." The city was intolerable, he said, for anyone like himself with acute sensitivity to sound. He complained of omnipresent Muzak, "machines which can do anything but keep quiet, radios which augment the sound of the human voice beyond any conceivable necessity." "Total deafness," he concluded, "might be a delight" (View, 28).
The opposite of this modern cacophony was the silence of the S4hara, which Bowles evoked in an essay about the desert:
Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails.... There is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were conscious force, which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape . . . even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your hears beating. (Heads, 1283
This is an experience of the void, both frightening and compelling, and it is perceived more by the ear than by the eye.
Bowles's first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949), was in his mind the story of the tongueless Professor enlarged and extended. An alienated young American named Port and his sexually estranged wife Kit venture deep into the Sahara in vague search of psychic deliverance. He dies wretchedly of typhoid fever and she succumbs to white slavery and madness. An array of carefully orchestrated sound effects accompanies this action: the screech of an operatic soprano on the radio, the crowing of cocks, the baying of dogs, the whine of locusts, the dirge-like Arab music. In climactic scenes of death and madness, sound explodes to increase the terror of a nihilistic vision. As he dies, Port sees the sky split like a canopy above him, and his final cry of agony is engulfed by the scream of the wind--an image of the human voice swallowed by the void. "His cry was a separate thing beside him in the desert. It went on and on."
(Sky, 2A3) The sound in the extended death scene alternates between the purity of the silence which Port had sought in the desert and the savage crying of the wind, an expression of the void outside the small room where he lies. These sounds invade his consciousness; the wind seems like "a senseless monologue," a language stripped of meaning and reduced to nothingg but sound. As Port raves, words "slipped into his head like the wind blowing in a room." Language becomes as meaningless as the sound of wind.Kit survives her husband and continues the journey into the abyss. Sound punctuates her departure from civilization and consciousness. Drums from a desert ceremonial throb in the background as she sheds her clothes and inhibitions and bathes in an oasis pool. Taken into a harem, she descends to a purely sensual existence; she stops speaking, since she does not know her captor's language, and her powers of speech and thought atrophy. Rescued by French authorities and flown back to Algiers, she goes insane. The scream of the airplane engine at takeoff and the thrust of the plane into thc sky repeat the aural imagery of Port's death scene and precipitate her madness.
The sudden roar of the plane's motor smashed the walls of the chamber where she lay. Before her eyes was the violent blue sky-nothing else . . . Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind." (Sky, 312)
The void invades the mind through the ear as well as the eye, and the power of the invasion is expressed more in images of sound than in sight. Both of these scenes are intensified by violent sounds which express a nothingness inimical to human language and consciousness.
In Bernardo Bertolucci's film version of The Sheltering Sky, visual elements dominate. The cinematography exploits the landscape of the Sahara. Despite the visual beauty, the film was generally received as a disappointing adaptation of the book. Ironically, a novel which owes a great deal to Bowles's apprenticeship as a creator of sound effects, loses much of the power and subtlety of its sound when it is translated to the screen.
In Bowles's second novel, Let It Come Down, the assault on language and consciousness continues. The violence of "A Distant Episode" is repeated, but this time. the organ of hearing rather than the organ of speech is mutilated. Instead of having his tongue cut out, a character has a nail pounded into his ear.
The penultimate scene occurs on the edge of an abyss in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco. The pratagonist, an American named Dyar, has stolen money in Tangier and fled to a hut overlooking a precipice. His Moroccan accomplice has led him to an impasse, and to dull the pain of consciousness, Dyar smokes hashish. As in The Sheltenng Sky, the roar of the wind pervades the scene. A raging mountain storm causes the door of the hut to bang repeatedly, reminding Dyar of the real abyss below and the emptiness of his own fate. He takes a hammer in hand, to nail the door shut and keep out the noise of the void. But, in his drugged state, the void occupies his mind. "The mountain wind rushed through his head, his head that was a single seashell full of grottoes. . . ." Uttering distorted fragments of language, he turns from the door, falls to the side of his sleeping Moroccan guide, and drives the nail through the man's ear into the floor--as if to still the sounds of his own consciousness. "The nail was as firmly embedded as if it had been driven into a cocoanut . . . That warm, humid breeding ground for ideas had been destroyed" (Down, 302).
As in the earlier fiction, sound effects move from the periphery to the center. The exterior sound, which forms the background to characters' thoughts and actions, overwhelms the insignificant human sound of consciousness and reduces it to silence. The emptiness of the physical universe, representied in the imagery of sound, invades the mind and reduces it to nothingness. The void outside joins the void within.
Bowles has remarked that as both a composer and a writer, he thinks of language as primarily sound.1 His fiction demonstrates the nihilism inherent in that view, a nihilism that denies significance to consciousness and its instrument, language, but reduces both to meaningless sound. In this sense, language is ultimately just another sound effect, something secondary to the primary realities of non-human sound--wind, echo, or silence. In his own way, Bowles expresses the modernist's ambivalence towards language, the very medium of his art. Like his fellow modernist William Faulkner, Bowles echoes in his fictional world the sentiment that the tale of life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Notes
1 From a recorded conversation between Bowles and the author in Tangier Morocco, March, 1978.
Works Cited
Bowles, Paul. "The Baptism of Solitude." Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue. New York: Ecco, 1957.
-. The Delicate Prey. New York: Random House, 1950.
'4Elegy." Next to Nothing: Collected Poems, 1926-1977. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1981.
-. Let It Come Down. New York: Random House, 1952. . "The Jazz Ear." View. April, 1943.
-. Review of "Flesh and Fantasy." The New York Herald Tribune. January 17, 1943. Section IV.
-. The Sheltering Sky. New York: New Directions, 1949.
-. :'" trout Stopping. New York: Putnam, 1972.
Karl, Frederick. Modern and Modernism. New York: Harper, 1985.
M-iler, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam, 1959.
Solotaroff, Theodore. '4The Desert Within." The New Republic. September 2, 1967.
Stewart, Lawrenc ~ Paul Bowles: The Illumination of North Africa, Carbondale~ Southern Illinois, 1974.
Thomas, Tony, ed. Film Score: The View from the Podium. New York: Barnes, 1979.