Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. - book reviews

Although these two books are somewhat similar, they are both important because they attest to the continuing interest in Bowles. He has in the last 15 years, since the publication of his Collected Stories in 1980 and Jeffrey Miller's massive Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography in 1986 (both by Black Sparrow Press), moved from "outsider" to significant "insider." He has, if you will, been "canonized." And with the publication of Selected Letters, by Farrar Straus Giroux in early 1994, he will continue to be viewed as one of American literature's great short fiction writers.

Poe is, without a doubt, a major influence on Bowles. His mother read Poe's stories to him when he was a child - the dedication to The Delicate Prey acknowledges this fact - and led him to attend the University of Virginia where Poe had once been a student. Bowles, like Poe, has suffered from an incorrect view of his artistic intentions. Perhaps most critics use such words as "primitive" and "exotic" to characterize his fiction. They don't completely see him as a philosophical writer; but he is strongly interested in the movements of consciousness - an epistemologist of sorts. Nor do they see him as a student of language in relation to knowledge. He believes that words cannot convey the ideas - or the obsessive or illogical motives - we try to communicate. Thus Bowles must be read in a more comprehensive way than he has been.

The first of the two books listed above is valuable in many ways. These interviews, or conversations, are gleaned from many obscure or foreign periodicals, such as La Vanguardia Magazine and El Pais setional (both from Madrid). And there are a few interviews that have never been published. The Ira Cohen interview, for example, previously existed only in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University.

Caponi's collection alerts us to the fact that Bowles has always liked to be interviewed (although, of course, he says just the opposite). Bowles recognizes the futility of "conversation"; he deliberately deceives the interlocutor, offering diverse, ambivalent remarks. The interview is used to assert Bowles's power, to make cryptic remarks that fly past the interviewer. Thus in all of the interviews, Bowles tends to subvert the situation. He offers suggestive answers meant to be obscure; he functions as a mercurial oracle. In one interview Bowles says, for example. "The man who wrote the books didn't exist. No writer exists. He exists in his books and that's all." Bowles questions the usual definitions of "existence." How can a writer exist in his language? Is language human? By distancing the writer from biographical investigation, he privileges the text, and at the same time adds to his legend as invisible man. Thus his "offhand" remark serves several purposes.

In another interview Bowles claims: "I no longer know anybody. Outside of living here. I have cut off relations with almost everybody. They have been cut off. Here I have no friends." These remarks arc perverse because he is not a recluse: he attended the Forbes party; he "acted" in Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky. He knows that others will come to see him. His seclusion is a myth, an enigmatic presence."

Although Hibbard's study follows the guidelines of the Twayne Studies in Short Fiction - there are sections devoted to the texts, to the writer, to the critics - it is an excellent overview of Bowles; it is more than a guide or introduction.

Hibbard makes several valuable points. I think, for example, of his close reading of Poe's "Philosophy of Literary Composition" as a guide to Bowles's stories. After quoting Poe, Hibbard writes: "There is, then, a casual rigor, a kind of |formal determinism' in shaping the story. The writer does not so much force the story as let it enter his consciousness and give birth to itself, sui generis, on its own terms." These comments are subtle; they suggest that Hibbard understands the act of creation.

Hibbard is a wonderful reader of Bowles's collections, which are explored as unified achievements. The collection A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard, for example, is rigidly constructed. The stories interact they are meant to register the reactions of consciousness after smoking kif.

Hibbard also reprints material from Bowles's notebooks, choosing some intriguing entries. Here is Bowles. "If you are looking for a category for the story ["Atajala"], I'd suggest making one in the vicinity of science fiction rather than allegory." Notice the brilliance of this remark and consider it in the context of Burroughs's work, and Poe's Eureka. Bowles writes as a scientist; he places his characters under the microscope of altered consciousness and lets them act on their own. Thus Bowles on invisibility: "The classical childhood fantasy of invisibility serves as a springboard to assist the reader in imagining a kind of consciousness which is as yet undifferentiated, not dependent upon the human condition." The comment is elusive, fascinating and revelatory.