Writing the Journey: June 1999 | Department of English

"Sleeping With Camels: Cultural Dissonance and Imperious Perspective in Paul Bowles's 'A Distant Episode'"

Gregory Wolmart
University of Pennsylvania
gwolmart@english.upenn.edu

Paul Bowles led a nomadic existence. At seventeen, Bowles left the United States a self- declared expatriate and committed himself to an itinerant life devoted to writing and musical composition. His extensive travels throughout South America and Northern Africa --especially Morocco--provided the thematic and situational basis for nearly all of his writings, including his early, heavily anthologized short story, "A Distant Episode." Set in Morocco, "A Distant Episode" relates the tortuous journey of an unnamed linguistics Professor who travels to Ain Tadouirt (an imaginary place somewhere in southern Morocco) to study its local dialects, collect camel-udder bags, and visit a friend he made during his last visit ten years earlier.

The Professor soon discovers, however, that his friend is dead and that he is an unwelcome intruder. After a surprisingly cold reception, he is (mis)led by a guide towards an encampment down in the Sahara where he thinks he will purchase camel- udder bags. There he is met by a band of Reguibat tribesmen who mutilate, enslave, and sell him as a carnivalesque freak for the amusement of his buyers. Though he briefly recovers some semblance of sanity and escapes, the story ends abruptly, yet suggestively, with the Professor's maniacal flight into the Sahara at the sound of a shot fired by a French soldier at a colonial outpost. The parallels between the Professor's journey and his psychological descent into fear and madness, as well as the seeming inscrutability and irrationality of the "natives" depicted in this story, reveal what may be identified as Bowles's primitivism. But the Professor's fate, I argue, marks a significant departure from traditional primitivist narratives in which the oppositions between self and other, culture and nature, are reclaimed by the end; rather, in "A Distant Episode," they are violently and irreparably torn asunder. Moreover, the Reguibat's systems of social stratification and exchange present a far more complicated picture of the cultural Other, one that inverts rather than re-affirms the dynamic between colonizer and colonized, West and East. I examine the implications of this departure as it pertains to France's colonial presence in Morocco, and Bowles's own status as modernist and perennial outsider.

Gregory Wolmart
Department of English,
University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA 19104.
gwolmart@english.upenn.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999