The Boy Who The Set Fire and Other Stories (21 page)

Bowles is perhaps the most completely expatriate of major American writers. He first left home in 1929 at the age of eighteen and, after two decades of moving about, settled in Tangier, Morocco, where he lives today in a small, somewhat cluttered apartment. The fact of expatriation has had an enormous impact on the development of his literary career. For half a century he has neither lived in nor, for the most part, even written about the United States. During this time contact with and interpretation of non-Western cultures has become a central feature of his work. Most of his novels and stories can in fact be seen as fields of encounter between Western and Third World (largely Moroccan) sensibilities, as Bowles has continued to traverse in his fiction the distance between “here” and “there.” Christopher Miller addresses the issue of cultural distance in a recent discussion of contemporary African literature. Can a Western reader, he asks, “read the Other, the African, as from an authentically African point of view, interpreting Africa in African terms, perceiving rather than projecting?” Miller’s answer is that the goal is “ultimately unattainable,” but there
can
be “a kind of reading that lets the Other talk without claiming to be possessed of the Other’s voice” (120-21). Michel de Certeau is more emphatic than Miller in asserting the possibilities for assuming the perspective of the cultural other. Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” he argues, “becomes the saying of the other, or it
almost
becomes it . . . .”(70) The word of the savages in Montaigne, “a distant beginning as ‘wild’ as a new and natural fruit, gradually draws closer to the place of production of the text that ‘cites’ it” (78). Neither Miller nor Certeau claims that the alien point of view can be completely assumed. You can’t be there and here. But both endorse the movement
toward
this unreachable goal. In Certeau’s useful formulation, a “discourse about the other” might become “a means of constructing a discourse authorized by the other” (68).

Bowles’s “discourse authorized by the other” has evolved in several distinct, though overlapping, phases, but even in his earliest fiction he displays considerable command over the nuances of cultural transactions. The most significant development in his work has been the degree to which he has managed to project himself imaginatively into the fabric of an alternative culture. Most of his Moroccan fiction of the forties and fifties involves relationships between Westerners and Moroccans; its perspective is usually that of a highly sensitive observer who is nonetheless external to the culture in which the story bikes place. During the same period he also wrote a few stories focusing, with increasing authority, on Moroccan life. In these tales European or American characters (if they appear at all) tend to be peripheral, and the point of view is often Moroccan. While he has never abandoned the cultural interaction model altogether, in his later stories featuring both Moroccan and Western characters the emphasis shifts noticeably to the Moroccans, and Westerners are usually seen through their eyes. One of his most recent books,
Points in Time
(1982), is a “lyrical history”
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of Morocco in vignettes from the country’s legendary and actual past. Tzvetan Todorov points out that in the year 1492 Spain, then the rising European power, repudiated “its interior other” (50) when Ferdinand and Isabella defeated Boabdil, the Moslem king of Granada. That year was, for more than one reason
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, an important milestone in the West’s relations with the rest of the world. It has been the unique task of Paul Bowles to recuperate this lost part of our own heritage, restoring the Moors to their rightful place in Western consciousness.
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In the sixties Bowles turned much of his attention to translating into English the tape-recorded tales of young Moroccan storytellers, most of them illiterate. The immediate reason for this redirection was Jane Bowles’s prolonged illness, which deprived him of the extended stretches of free time necessary to compose fiction. But it was also a natural development in a writer so artistically committed to the comprehension of another culture. It was a correct aesthetic, as well as personal, choice for Bowles to make at that time. The process of translation simplified Bowles’s own writing style and deepened his understanding of the Moroccan psyche. In his role as midwife to stories originating in Moroccan minds, Bowles has come as close as possible to the ontologically impossible point of being both American and Moroccan, both “here” and “there,” and his translations mark the ultimate stage in his imaginative assimilation and interpretation of Moroccan culture.

Although Bowles was translating Ahmed Yacoubi’s stories from the Moghrebi as early as 1954 (and had done translations of Sartre and Borges in the forties)
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, the translation phase of his career did not begin in earnest until 1964 when, as he himself put it, “I did
A Life Full of Holes
with Driss Ben Hamid Charhadi” (Evans 12). Bowles’s use of the words “I did” and “with” accentuates the confluential nature of the process. The tales of Charhadi and other Moroccan storytellers cannot be read without a continual awareness of a double authorial presence. Most of these stories were told orally into a tape recorder, then rendered into English by Bowles. Bowles’s own description of how the procedure works, in his preface to the collection
Five Eyes
, indicates several opportunities for creative collaboration. The “nearest equivalent in English” must be established first, followed by the reconstitution of the “voice” and the “attempt to reproduce in English prose the idiosyncrasies and inflections of speech . . . in the original Arabic delivery” (7). George Steiner has remarked that all acts of translation (indeed, all acts of interpretation) are “at the same time reproductive and innovatory” (26). What Bowles does, in effect, is to “read” an oral “text,” interpret it, then reconstruct it in English, bringing into being a written work that is simultaneously a version of an original and an original work in itself. In each case there is a story, authored by the teller, that was recorded on tape, and a piece of literature, written by Bowles, that is the same and yet not the same as the story. While the storyteller’s imagination is beyond doubt the conceptual source of the story, the absence of a written text of the storyteller’s precise words enhances, to say the least, the authority of the translator.

Bowles’s most successful and important collaboration, producing ten books over the past twenty years, has been with Mohammed Mrabet, and their fiction, perhaps inevitably, is a virtual spider web of intertextuality. When I asked Bowles in 1986 whether the prolonged practice of translation has affected his writing, he replied in the affirmative, noting that his own work has become stylistically simpler, but he attributed parallels in theme and subject matter merely to the fact that both he and Mrabet live in and write about Morocco. Early the next year he reiterated and expanded upon this point:

Mrabet knows nothing about my novels or short stories. I’ve never taken the trouble to describe them to him, simply because I doubt that he’d be interested. There’s certainly no influence of my work on his. Nor can I see any connection between his and mine, other than the fact that we both write about similar occurrences . . . .
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Bowles does concede that during the process of storytelling he has suggested to Mrabet that he clarify or rephrase certain sentences, and he also admits that Mrabet sometimes pitches his oral presentations to his audience, sensing when Bowles responds positively to an element in the story and then elaborating on or emphasizing that element. This instantaneous “reader response,” occurring during the act of creation and influencing its outcome, has no precedent in the translation of written texts, which are fixed in print before the translator reads them, or in the transcription of traditional oral folk tales, which lacks the dimension of collaboration between teller and writer. Indeed, the whole process by which these stories have come into being as English texts raises questions concerning origin and authority that are intimately related to the very nature of Mrabet’s fiction, particularly to its preoccupation with alterity and doubleness.

John Hollander has pointed out, in one of the earlier arguments for the distinctiveness of a written text, that a work’s written quality gives it a “property of self-contained uniqueness.” During the evolution from a “pre-literary” to a “literary” period, stories “come to be written down, and . . . this quality of authority for the text begins to emerge” (223-34). But Mrabet’s work partakes of both the preliterary and the literary: his fictions are the improvisational performances of folk tale, spun out orally,
and
the written, crafted, “authoritative” documents of literature. In some sense his tales are closer to speech acts in their oral form, but the artificiality of their telling, into a tape recorder (or even directly into the ear of a professional translator), displaces them somewhat from the realm of ordinary communication. The tape recorder itself poses yet another problem in getting at the “original” text of a Mrabet story. If the commanding feature of writing is only its permanence, then a work recorded on tape, rather than inscribed on a page, might be seen as a form of writing. If so, Mrabet’s Moghrebi “originals” would be no different from any written document later translated into another language. But there still is (in addition to the forms of collaboration I have already mentioned) the question of the sheer physicality of writing. This means, as Barthes knew, more than mere durability. Mrabet’s recorded words, while taking on something of the lingering quality of writing, nonetheless lack the mystical concreteness of the written text, adhering stubbornly to the essential characteristic of speech—communication. Their existence as literature cannot be acknowledged until their transcription onto the page.

If the notion of literature as marks on a page does little to explain the peculiar origin of Bowles’s various Moroccan translations, the idea of literature as a form of speech act does even less to enhance our understanding of them as writing. The only way to appreciate these stories for what they are is to accept the duality of their genesis. The oral discourse in Moghrebi and the written discourse in English are each, in their own way, the originals. Bowles himself has referred to the oral discourses as “spoken texts,” but it seems more useful to me to reserve the word “text” for the written documents. It is instructive to note that in blurbs and elsewhere Mrabet is nearly always called a Moroccan storyteller (to call him a writer would be wildly inexact), while Bowles is usually labeled the translator and sometimes editor. As Mrabet’s first (and really only) audience, he is also the primal listener, writing down an original text which is also a displaced version of an original oral story. The source of authority for these works is double because their “author,” in Edward Said’s sense of begetter or beginner, is double, even if we mean “author” only in the limited, preliminary sense of the person who made up the story or wrote it down. The result of this authorial confluence is a truly transcultural discourse: a web of English words revealing and at the same time concealing a haunting Moroccan voice, the words and the voice locked in a near mystical union,
almost
becoming the saying of the other, together yet apart. It is little wonder that Mrabet’s stories should dwell so stubbornly on cultural, sexual, and psychic otherness, or be so pervaded by what Bowles calls “magic and the . . . casting of spells.”
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Before the point at which they were written, and before even the point at which they were told, Mrabet’s tales also have an indeterminate number of points of origin deep within Moroccan culture, as Bowles made clear in a 1981 interview with Jeffrey Bailey: “From his early childhood he preferred to sit with elderly men, because of the stories they told. He’s impregnated with the oral tradition of his region. In a story of his it’s hard to find the borderline between unconscious memory and sheer invention” (96). Mrabet’s dominant theme is the interpenetration of the self and the other. This constitutes his truest kinship with Paul Bowles, and like Bowles, he frequently expresses that theme in terms of the invasion of Moroccan society by an immensely seductive, yet alien and dangerous, culture. V.S. Naipaul, writing about the revival of Islamic fundamentalism in Rikistan, has asked, “Could a civilization so encompassing, a civilization on which people here depended so much, be truly rejected?” (121). As if in reply to Naipaul, Fouad Ajami has recently observed that for Algeria “there are two forms of escape: to France and to the comfort and haven of the past. In other words, into the world of foreigners or the world of the ancestors” (13). Mrabet’s tales of Moroccan life often address this problem, with the past, tradition, Morocco, and ancestors lined up against the present, modernity, the West, and foreigners.
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Mrabet’s most successful extended exploration of cultural otherness is his novel
The Lemon
, in which the world of foreigners surrounds and seeps into the protagonist’s world, causing a subtle but inexorable corrosion. When Abdeslam, a boy of Tangier, is forced by his father to abandon his Koranic studies at the mosque and enroll at a secular school (with instruction in French), he leaves his father’s house. The father wants Abdeslam to be prepared to live in the modem world, the vast “encompassing” civilization of the West. Prior to this point in his life Abdeslam’s world has consisted of shelters that defined him: the family house, the mosque, and above all,
Dar-el-Islam
, the house of Islam: “Abdeslam enjoyed his life. There was the world outside, with trees and houses and places to play, and the world of words and letters in the mosque” (6). But this outside world is a source of enjoyment to him only when he is still a small child and protected by the enclosed structure of traditional Moroccan society, with its patriarchal organization and its centripetal force field. His growing up is associated with an increasing exposure to the centrifugal forces and corrupting influences of the West.