A tawdry place of salvation: The art of Jane Bowles

Skerl, Jennie, ed. 1997. A tawdry place of salvation: The art of Jane Bowles.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. $34.95 hc. ix + 185pp.

In Jane Bowles's unfinished novel, Going to Massachusetts, a character whose goal is to "be like God" tells her lover, "I can find no rest, and I don't think you should either. At least not until you have fully understood my dilemma on earth" (Feminine Wiles 30, 31). Like her characters, Bowles's work reaches out to insist that her readers try to understand the dilemmas of life-a challenge that did not make her a popular success in her own time. She did win wholehearted support from such critics as Tennessee Williams, who called her "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters," and John Ashbery, who praised Bowles for her ability to produce consistently "the surprise that is the one essential ingredient of great art" (qtd. Skerl 10, 12). She completed only one novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943; reissued 1965), a play, In the Summer House (first produced in 1953), and some short stories (compiled by Paul Bowles as Plain Pleasures, 1966); these and her fragments, some published at Tennessee Williams's instigation as Feminine Wiles (1976), provide fascinating reading. Bowles's characters have a sense of purpose obsessively directing them towards or away from their own comfort; their anxious self-centeredness could be simply miserable, but Bowles's style blends in a comic sense.

Jennie Skerl's preface and introductory essay in A Tawdry Place of Salvation, "Sallies into the Outside World: A Literary History of Jane Bowles," argue that from the 1940s to 1960s, just when Jane Bowles was confronting issues of "identity, gender, displacement, disorientation, and isolation" (vii) and undermining rigid definitions of social structure, her audience was particularly invested in maintaining those definitions. Bowles's elliptical style, troubled characters, and open-ended narratives did nothing to simplify problems of gender identity and alienation, which discomfited the general audience of her time. But expectations have changed. Today's critical climate, Skerl suggests, has the interest and the apparatus to illuminate Bowles's oeuvre. The other essays in the book uphold that assertion: the place of Jane Bowles's salvation is postmodernism.

What makes Bowles's work a good candidate for postmodern study is that her deconstruction of cultural assumptions, her examination of power structures, the fragmentary nature of her work and characters (enabling multiple interpretations), and the issues she deals with seem to be an early register of "the fissures and cracks of consciousness and culture so acutely felt" (153) today, as Allen E. Hibbard suggests in his philosophical overview, "Towards a Postmodern Aesthetic: Indeterminacy, Instability, and Inconclusiveness" in Out in the World. Hibbard examines this unfinished novel to show Bowles's characteristic themes and techniques in a raw form: postmodern impulses of wit; the overturning of social and narrative conventions; how Bowles plays with different versions of characters' personalities, names and fates; and her use of the "`problematic,' examining, confronting and sometimes challenging our accepted notions of power, identity and `the real"' (154). Of course an incomplete novel (even eight notebooks' worth) must be open-ended, and Hibbard also warns of the problem of intention: Bowles considered her fragments signs of failure, not of a new style. Yet her completed works are similarly marked by sudden, apparently arbitrary shifts-promoting amusing, intended incongruities of attention and plot-and as the postmodern insists, according to Hibbard, they require us "to rethink the nature of discipline-how it is imposed and the price of its imposition" (166).

Challenge to the status quo is an essential aspect of postmodernism, and the critics Skerl has collected agree that Bowles's work has this quality, whether they discuss it by way of queer theory, neocolonial studies, psychological analyses or feminist readings. Carolyn J. Allen's "The Narrative Erotics of Two Serious Ladies" focuses on Bowles's destabilizing of gender identity, but also shows how she used and resisted modernist psychological tenets by playing them off against "postmodernity's attention to surfaces" (19), subverting "any serious attempt to read individual moral struggle as central" (21). Stephen Benz in "`The Americans Stick Pretty Much in Their Own Quarter': Jane Bowles and Central America" and John Maier in "Jane Bowles and the SemiOriental Woman" turn to her examination of the ambivalent area between cultural boundaries. Benz shows how Bowles's Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield portray "two distinct ways of dealing with tropical peoples" (41), opposing passive sightseeing to a willingness to "abandon the pretense of positional superiority" (43), admitting attraction to the unfamiliar in oneself as well as in the Other. Maier draws on sociolinguistics to consider miscommunications in Bowles's story, "Everything Is Nice": Moroccan and English speakers frustratedly recur to the banal word "nice" and look for refuge in an idea of "home" that the story's rhetoric has erased.