Alien Terrain: Paul Bowles's Filial Landscapes

With the exception of James Baldwin, Paul Bowles is perhaps America's most distinguished living expatriate writer. Since 1947 Bowles has lived abroad, primarily in Tangier. Virtually all of his fiction is set abroad, either in North Africa or Central or South America; only three of his thirty-nine short stories are set in the United States. Critics have emphasized Bowles's "foreignness," his fascination with the non-Western mind and remote, often inhuman landscapes. Lawrence Stewart calls North Africa Bowles's "home territory."1 Gore Vidal claims that the triumph of Bowles's art can be traced to the fact that he laudably ignored "that greatest of all human themes: The American Experience. . . Bowles is still odd man out; he writes as if Moby Dick had never been written."2 Leslie Fiedler comes nearest to identifying Bowles's persistent psychological themes when noting the writer's obsession with "images of alienation, flight, and abysmal fear."3 Yet Fiedler relegates Bowles to a circle of "minor novelists" writing in the gothic tradition of "highbrow terror-fiction" that runs from Charles Brockden Brown through John Hawkes, ultimately dismissing Bowles as a kind of voyeuristic peddler of "horror-pornography."4 Stewart, Vidal, and Fiedler are all equally drawn to three of Bowles's most shocking stories. All three discuss "The Delicate Prey," which depicts castration, torture, and murder. Interestingly, Stewart and Vidal choose that story and two others, "Pages from Cold Point" and "A Distant Episode," for the focal point of their arguments. The latter two stories describe homosexual incest, violence, and madness. While there is no gainsaying that the fictional world of Bowles is often one of violence and aberration, we must recognize that that is but one