Paul Bowles as Orientalist: Toward a Nomad Discourse

Year 1998, Issue: 7, 37 - 61, 01.04.1998

Timothy Weiss

Abstract

To use the rubric “orientalist” in reference to the 20th-century American composerwriter Paul Bowles is to suggest not one but potentially many things, some of them obvious and others much less so. The one thing that I do not mean by calling Bowles an orientalist is the one thing that Orientalism for the past twenty years has become a code for: racism and imperialist sentiment. In his landmark study Orientalism 1978 , Edward Said sets up the equation that still remains in place, at least to a certain degree, twenty years later: given that 19th-century Europeans tended to reduce the “Orient” to a set of essentializations,idées reçues, and stereotypes, he contends

References

• The Arabian Nights. Trans. Husain Haddawy. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1990.
• Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee, Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986.
• Bakhtin, M. M. and P. N. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. Albert J. Wehrle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
• Barthes, Roland. Alors la Chine? Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1975.
• Barthes, Roland. L’empire des signes. Paris: Albert Skira, 1970.
• Barthes, Roland. New Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.
• Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
• Bowles, Paul. Collected Stories 1939-1976. Introduction by Gore Vidal. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1980.
• Bowles, Paul. Days: Tangier Journal, 1987-1989. New York: Ecco Press, 1991.
• Bowles, Paul. Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World. 1957. Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1984.
• Bowles, Paul. In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles. Ed. Jeffrey Miller. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994.
• Bowles, Paul. Let It Come Down. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1952.
• Bowles, Paul. One Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1962.
• Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. 1949. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.
• Bowles, Paul. Without Stopping: An Autobiography. 1972. New York: Ecco Press, 1985.
• Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. 5th ed. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1970.
• Charles-Roux, Edmonde. Un désir d’orient: jeunesse d’Isabelle Eberhardt, 1877- 1899. Paris: Grasset, 1988.
• Charles-Roux, Edmonde. Nomade j’étais: les anneés africaines d’Isabelle Eberhardt, 1899-1904. Paris: Grasset, 1995.
• Eberhardt, Isabelle. Dans l’ombre chaude de l’Islam. Paris: Charpentier et Fasqeulle, 1926.
• Eberhardt, Isabelle. The Oblivion Seekers and Other Writings. Trans. Paul Bowles. San Francisco: City Lights, 1972.
• Eberhardt, Isabelle. Oeuvres complètes I: Écrits sur le sable. Eds. Marie-Odile Delacour and Jean-René Huleu. Paris: Grasset, 1988.
• Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: Francois Maspero, 1981.
• Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952.
• Fowler, Edward. The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishosetsu in Early TwentiethCentury Japanese Fiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.
• Fuentes, Carlos. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
• Gide, André. L’Immoraliste. 1902. Paris: Henri Jonqières, 1925.
• Kojin, Karantani. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Trans. and ed. Brett de Bary. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
• Lapierre, Dominique. The City of Joy. Trans. Kathryn Spink. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.
• Lawrence, T. E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.
• Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
• MacKenzie, John M. Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
• Memmi, Albert. Portrait du colonisé et portrait du colonisateur. Utrecht: JeanJacques Pauvert, 1966.
• Monod, Théodore. Meharées: explorations au vrai Sahara. Le Mejan, Arles: Actes Sud, 1994.
• Mrabet, Mohammed. The Beach Café and The Voice. Taped and translated from Arabic by Paul Bowles. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1980.
• Mrabet, Mohammed. The Big Mirror. Trans. Paul Bowles. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1977.
• Mrabet, Mohammed. Love with a Few Hairs. Trans. Paul Bowles. 1967. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.
• Mrabet, Mohammed. The Lemon. Trans. Paul Bowles. 1969. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.
• Naipaul, V. S. An Area of Darkness. London: André Deutsch, 1964. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.
• Porter, Dennis. Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
• Rushdie, Salman. East, West: Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
• Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. 1978. London: Penguin Books, 1995.
• Sawyer-Lauçanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1989.
• Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
• Wheeler, David L. “The Death of Languages.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (20 April 1994): A8-9, 16.
• Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.