A Novel Marketplace - Evan Brier

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that even deep in the Sahara, good writing will be impossible. Port’s decision to forgo a necessarily compromised kind of writing signifies at once his capacity for artistry and the impossibility of artistry, a contradiction made possible by the equation of artistry with the refusal to engage. If Port, the self-proclaimed “traveler” (as opposed to mere tourist, a distinction crucial to the novel as a whole) who chooses death in the Sahara over life in New York, is not detached enough to write, no one could be. But where does this leave Bowles, and what does this say about the status of The Sheltering Sky as a work of art? That somehow the novel’s declaration of the impossibility of art becomes a source of the novel’s artistic stature, rather than an implicit statement of the novel’s inevitable artistic failure, is itself a kind of marketing triumph.

      That triumph rests on the problematic notion that Port and Bowles are alter egos. Williams was the first of many to make this claim: “Were it not for the fact that … [Port] succumbs to an epidemic fever, it would not be hard to identify him with Mr. Bowles himself” (7). But Port’s death is not an accidental difference between author and character. The novel hints that it results from his refusal to be immunized by Western medicine before the trip; to the extent that this refusal constitutes another, supreme rejection of the West, it is an important part of Port’s character. The novel’s view of art is more extreme than the review’s, ultimately because Port, by virtue of his quasi-suicide and his refusal to write, is a more detached version of Bowles. The paradox is that, as the romanticizer of Port’s detachment, Bowles gains symbolic capital from it, even as he exemplifies, in writing and publishing a novel, what Port rejects. Symbolic capital accrues not from detachment but from the representation of and advertisement for detachment.

       The Commercial Interruption

      The relationship between this symbolic capital, or artistic prestige, and the representation of detachment becomes clearer in the chapter in which Bowles delineates Port’s attitude toward writing, not just because of the view of art it espouses but also because of the way it interrupts the narrative and thereby undermines what is distinctive about its form. At this point, Kit and Port are in a truck on their way to Sba, alone, and Port is sick with the typhoid that will eventually kill him. The chapter opens this way: “As he lay in the back of the truck, protected somewhat from the cold by Kit, now and then he was aware of the straight road beneath him. The twisting roads of the past weeks became alien, faded from his memory; it had been one strict, undeviating course inland to the desert, and now he was very nearly at the center” (198). The description of the “undeviating course inland” captures not just Port’s feelings about the trip but also something of the logic of the novel and the process by which it was composed: “It would write itself, I felt certain, once I had established the characters and spilled them out onto the North African scene” (Without Stopping 275). As Bowles described his own method, he never knew what would happen next in his novel because it always depended on what happened to him that day.38 A distinctive feature of this method, and an important part of Bowles’s aesthetic, is that he does not attempt to develop his characters’ pasts. In the plot of the novel as in Port’s own conception of his journey, memory is faded and the story moves forward only.

      In one of the first looks at the novel, John W. Aldridge suggested that Port and Kit’s lack of a past was a sign of the author’s immaturity; to Aldridge, the novel’s nihilism was unmotivated and therefore uninteresting (186–87). But there was a rationale for it. On principle, Bowles disdained the idea of character development. He conceived of the Sahara as the main “character” of the novel; his purpose was to show the ways in which the desert could make any of us, regardless of our history, culture, or class, submit, and he appeared to regard the awareness of this fact of human existence as supremely important: “The destruction of the ego has always seemed an important thing. I took it for granted that that was what really one was looking for in order to attain knowledge and the ability to live” (qtd. in Stewart 152–53). The kind of Jamesian character development that Aldridge sought would undermine the point Bowles was trying to make about the ego because it would draw attention to those aspects of human existence—job, personal relationships, class—that Bowles deemed superfluous and deceptive.39 The ties between his disinclination to develop his characters’ pasts and the form of the novel are summed up by the Kafka quote that serves as the epigram for the final section of the novel: “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached”; that Bowles identified with this kind of forward movement is apparent in the title of his autobiography: Without Stopping. Port’s unwillingness to stop traveling signifies his (the character’s) detachment from conventional American life; the novel’s unwillingness to stop—that is, Bowles’s refusal to develop his characters—signifies the same for Bowles.

      At just this point in the novel, however, two-thirds of the way through and immediately after announcing Port’s journey as “strict” and “undeviating,” Bowles does what both his aesthetic and his characterization of Port would seem to dictate against: he stops and turns back, offering the novel’s only glimpse of Port and Kit’s pretrip past. Much of what one might expect in the first chapter of a more conventional novel, about Port’s family and career, for example, is given to us here, and these are just the kinds of details that Bowles would be expected to disdain as irrelevant to his thesis about what we are beneath the dress of Western civilization. Something about this flashback is decidedly unnovelistic, as it comes without any impetus from the plot. So what is this scene—this uncharacteristic look back—doing here? Coming so late in the novel, Bowles’s decision to “stop” cannot be said to serve the conventional character-developing function that he disdained; rather, it serves the strategic function of advertising Port’s (and, by extension, Bowles’s) detachment by transforming it into a theory of the (im)possibility of art in the postwar age. The point would hardly be worth making but for the fact that the flashback constitutes a concession to the conventional storytelling methods the novel otherwise eschews and the absence of which, throughout the rest of the novel, is meant to signify the novel’s artistic integrity. Art requires a kind of detachment made impossible by the demands of contemporary Western culture, the novel suggests, but Bowles can only make that point, and implicitly make his case for his own artistry, by using those conventional, nonartistic methods. The flashback is like a commercial interruption, a built-in advertisement for the novel and its author.

      In that advertisement, the narrator recounts actions that took place before the start of the novel: first, Port’s rejection of a career in New York, then the insistence of immigration officials that he identify his profession on his arrival in Africa. Port’s refusal to answer brings to mind Williams’s assertion that Bowles “has deliberately rejected … rabid professionalism”; the episode as a whole recalls Williams’s assertion that Bowles has achieved artistry by forgoing career concerns. Kit tells the immigration officials that he is a writer, and Port is intrigued: “The idea of his actually writing a book had amused him. A journal, filled in each evening with the day’s thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth from the beginning—namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing—should be clearly and calmly demonstrated” (199). Port’s vision of a writer is a solitary teller of unpleasant truths, a notion of a piece with Bowles’s own reputation but far removed from the growing network of literary production that enabled Bowles’s sojourn. Just how solitary is soon made clear: “He had not even mentioned the idea to Kit; she surely would have killed it with her enthusiasm.” Writing is serious work; the remark suggests that Port is rejecting the trappings of literary success, the admiration of a fan thrilled not necessarily by the quality or “truth” of the writing but by love of the romantic figure of “the writer.” Port elaborates moments later: “Kit would be too delighted at the prospect; it would have to be done in secret—it was the only way he would be able to carry it off” (199). Port conceives that the fan’s admiration precludes good writing.

      Tunner presented a greater obstacle than Kit to Port’s literary ambitions. Port attempted to write at the beginning of the trip but found himself unable to produce anything because “he could not establish a connection in his mind between the absurd trivialities which filled the day and the serious business of putting words on paper.” He attributes his inability

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