Inhabiting the Exotic: Paul Bowles and Morocco by Bouchra Benlemlih B.A. (Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University) M.A. (Toulouse-Le Mirail University) Ph.D. (Toulouse-Le Mirail University) Thesis submitted to The University of Nottingham in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2009 1 Abstract The American writer Paul Bowles lived in Morocco from 1947 until his death in 1999, apart from visits to North Africa, Europe, Ceylon, India and the United States during this period. Bowles‘ expatriation and subsequent itineraries are quite well known, but this thesis explores his interest in – indeed, preoccupation with – mediations and a state of being ‗in-between‘ in a selection of his texts: the translations, his autobiography and his fiction. Only a few commentators on Bowles‘ work have noted a meta-fictional dimension in his texts, possibly because the facts of his life are so intriguing and even startling. Though not explicitly meta-fictional, in the manner of somewhat later writers, Bowles does not tell us directly how he understands the various in- betweens that may be identified in his work, and their relationship to the individual and social crises about which he writes. His work unravels the effects of crises as not directly redeemable but as mediated and over-determined in complex and subtle forms. There are no explicit postmodern textual strategies; rather, Bowles draws on the basic resources of fiction to locate, temporally and spatially, the in-between: plot, character, description and background are intertwined in order, at once, to give a work its unity and to reveal, sometimes quite incidentally, a supplementary quality that threatens to undermine that unity. Bowles‘ experimentation with different genres and forms may be understood as part of this problematic, even as a form of textual travelling that leaves no single genre or form as a summation of his achievement. ii Using close, even – at times – deconstructive readings of a selection of texts across different genres, the thesis supplements the dominant approach to Paul Bowles‘ relationship with Morocco, namely a life-and-work approach. It develops what might be called a postcolonial approach to Bowles, but, again, through close reading and an in situ use of theory that is appropriate to the texts in question, rather than through a heavy-handed theoretical approach. For instance, liminality as an encounter with the ambivalent process of hybridity is useful across Bowles‘ work. Further, narrative ambivalence is helpful in the chapter on the translations, while Derrida‘s exploration of a general versus a restricted economy informs my discussion of Let it Come Down. Bowles is, of course, vulnerable to a postcolonial critique that focuses on the exotic, and I share some of these concerns, as will be apparent in the following chapters. Chapter 2, for instance, deals with translation and argues that Bowles‘ role moves between simple translator and facilitator to initiator and creator of the text in complex and often creative ways, especially in relation to Larbi Layachi and Mohamed Mrabet‘s stories. In Chapter 3, the fictional treatment of the transitional stages in Bowles‘ journey are analysed to show how Bowles enacts liminality as a non- unitary mode of understanding. The thesis concludes by arguing that there is always a pattern in Morocco. It suggests that Bowles is more subtle and more ambivalent than some of the simple oppositions might suggest. This subtlety is conveyed in the first part of my title, ‗Inhabiting the Exotic‘. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements vi Chapter 1: Introduction: Realising the Textual Space: Meta-fictional Speculations in Paul Bowles’ Work 1 Chapter 2: Moroccan Oral Stories: Translation and Mediation 44 Dialogic Encounters: Moroccan Oral Stories Go Modern 63 Problematic Authorship 101 Speech / Writing 115 Chapter 3: Without Stopping: The Memory of that Memory 120 Inhabiting the Exotic / Deferring Memory 120 A Baroque Scopic Regime in Without Stopping 139 Flâneur in a Magical City 177 Brotherhood Ritual: A Magical Scene at the Fringes of Civilisation 192 The Double Face of Travel 207 Chapter 4: Selected Fiction: The Myth of the Fall into Modernity 212 ‗Here to Learn‘ and ‗A Distant Episode‘: The Edge of Anger 213 Towards a General Economy of the International Zone: Mediations, iv Madness and Monstrosity in Let it Come Down 244 Chapter 5: Conclusion: Morocco: Paul Bowles’ Peripheral Centre 300 References 304 v Acknowledgements I find pleasure in expressing my gratitude for all the assistance that has made this thesis possible. I am especially grateful to my supervisor and co-supervisor, Professors David Murray and Douglas Tallack. Without their intellectual guidance and support, this project could never have been completed. They both offered me hospitality and friendship that I will treasure after this thesis has faded from memory. Recognition and special thanks must be given to my friend and colleague Dr. Asma Agzenay, who served as an advisor. She instigated the broad topic and encouraged me to study for a doctorate at the University of Nottingham. I thank Asma, for getting me started and for the many conversations along the way! I am deeply indebted to all my supervisors. In Columbus, Ohio, during my sabbatical leave at Ohio State University, I learned so much about the intersections of semiotics, literature, and culture. A special word of thanks is due to Professor Amy Shuman for the semiotic group meetings we regularly held, the last of these on Paul Bowles‘ work. In Morocco, the fabulous students in my ‗semiotic and critical studies‘ seminar for fourth year students at Ibnu Zohr University enriched this project with their dynamic responses to the material. Recognition and special thanks must be given to many other friends and to my family who have always encouraged and supported my endeavours. I thank, especially, my parents Houria and Abdelhak Benlemlih, for far more than I can mention here, and also my mother in-law, Zoubida Zemmama. I am grateful to vi Hossin and Melynda Benlemlih and all my brothers and sisters on both the Slaoui and the Benlemlih sides. The encouragement and support of all these people have made the completion of this thesis possible. To my grandmother, Habiba Idrissi, I ask that she forgives me my absence but I hope that she understands the way she has inspired me. Neither this dissertation nor the seven years of academic work that preceded it could have been accomplished without the moral and emotional support of my immediate family. I would like to thank my husband Fouad A. Slaoui and my children, Bouthaina and Mohamed, for their patience during the time I was working on my dissertation in Morocco and at the University of Nottingham in England. To them, I am greatly indebted. vii Chapter 1: Introduction: Realising the Textual Space: Meta-fictional Speculations in Paul Bowles’ Work Morocco has long been a crossroads of civilisations, a point of intersection for various encounters, and a site coveted by different writers. Among those to be attracted to Morocco, and even to fall captive to what they regarded as its magical spell, have been Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Jean Genet, Tennessee Williams, the Beat generation and their friends and associates (notably, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Alfred Chester and William Burroughs), George Orwell, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. American anthropologists Clifford Geertz, Paul Rabinow and Vincent Crapanzano have also had access to Morocco as a supposedly alien space that they would wish to have speak. Paul Bowles was an important part of this trek to Morocco and, in particular, to Tangier, its international city where he lived as an expatriate for fifty-two years. One can hardly mention Paul Bowles without evoking Tangier. The city and the man are connected to the extent that it seems logical to end this study with Let It Come Down, a novel set in the International Zone. As I argue in the thesis, Paul Bowles has his limitations, his blindness and insights. Still, if we compare him with most, if not all, of those mentioned above, Bowles is, arguably, a much more perceptive traveller in Morocco. He travelled extensively and showed tremendous curiosity in what we tend to call ‗the other‘. He knew the local dialect (Moroccan Arabic). He collected folk music and translated Moroccan oral stories. This engagement 1 with other cultures as well as his own literary abilities make him a writer of unusual complexity and distinctiveness. Paul Bowles was born in New York in 1911. At the age of nineteen, he left home and country and travelled to Paris, seeking the company of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and other literary expatriates. He stayed only briefly, before Stein and Toklas suggested that he travel to Morocco. In the summer of 1931 he headed, with Aaron Copland, to Tangier, which he came to love more than any place he had ever seen in his life (Caponi 1993: 10 and 41). So strong was the impact of his first trip to Morocco that Bowles returned again and again over the next decade. During the Second World War, he lived in New York and Mexico, but in 1947, he went back to Tangier. Bowles‘ travel to Morocco was distinctive. Unlike a tourist who visits a place for a while and returns, Paul Bowles inhabited Morocco. And, unlike the expatriates of the 1920s who settled in metropolitan centres of Europe such as Paris, Bowles was less attracted to these cultural hubs. He made other distinctions, referring to a ‗new ―lost generation‖ which America turned loose on the world after the recent war‘. This one, he continues, ‗is so thoroughly lost that the generation which came before seems undeserving of the epithet‘ (Bowles 1951: 654).