The Spider's House
Read The Spider's House Online
Authors: Paul Bowles
Tags: #Literary, #Fiction, #Psychological, #Political
PAUL BOWLES
THE SPIDER’S HOUSE
With a Preface
by the Author
Introduction by Francine Prose
FOR MY FATHER
The likeness of those who choose other patrons than Allah is as the likeness of the spider when she taketh unto herself a house, and lo! the frailest of all houses is the spider’s house, if they but knew.
—THE KORAN
Contents
BOOK 3
THE HOUR OF THE SWALLOWS
“Ten or twelve years ago there came to live in Tangier a man who would have done better to stay away.” This wickedly portentous sentence, which begins Paul Bowles’s story “The Eye,” could—with the medieval city of Fez substituted for the cosmopolitan port of Tangier—just as easily serve as the opening of
The Spider’s House
and for most of Bowles’s novels and stories, especially if we expand the list of ill-advised travel destinations to include nearly all of Morocco and a virtual Baedeker of hellish jungle outposts in Latin America and Asia. For Bowles’s obsessive subject, to which he returned again and again, and which he wrote about brilliantly, was the tragic and even fatal mistakes that Westerners so commonly make in their misguided
and often presumptuous encounters with the mysteries of a foreign culture.
One can hardly imagine a more timely theme, one more perfectly suited to the perilous new world in which we find ourselves. Yet, strangely, Paul Bowles’s name never (as far as I know) appeared on those rosters of writers one saw mentioned in the aftermath of September 11, classic authors whose work appears to speak across centuries and decades, directly and helpfully addressing the crises and drastically altered realities of the present moment: terrorism, violence, neocolonialist warfare, revolution, and our dawning awareness of the hidden costs of colonialism and globalization. Perhaps it’s because the books that were commonly cited (
War and Peace, The Possessed, The Secret Agent
, and so forth) seemed, even at their most pessimistic, to offer some hope of redemption, some persuasive evidence of human resilience and nobility; whereas Bowles’s fiction is the last place you would go for hope, or for even faint reassurance that the world is anything but a horror show, a barbaric Darwinian battlefield.
Frequently, Bowles begins his fiction in ways that seem to promise (or threaten) the sort of narrative we might expect from other writers who have focused on the confrontation between East and West, from novelists as dissimilar as Conrad, Naipaul, and Forster, from works in which a naive colonial sightsees his way into one heart of darkness or another—and lives to regret it.
So
The Spider’s House
starts off with a prologue that could almost (but not quite) pass for the introduction to an unusually well written political thriller. John Stenham, a writer who has been living in Fez for a very long time, an American who speaks Arabic, who loves the culture with a passion bordering on the delusional, and who understands the locals as well as any Westerner can—which is to say, not at all—is being escorted home from a dinner party. His Moroccan hosts have insisted that the streets are unsafe for him to walk alone, and though Stenham resists with the insulted bravado of the foreigner who has proudly “gone native,” he accedes because the mood of the city has lately seemed restive and strange. “Ever since that day a year ago when
the French, more irresponsible than usual, had deposed the Sultan, the tension had been there, and he had known it was there. But it was a political thing, and politics exist only on paper; certainly the politics of 1954 had no true connection with the mysterious medieval city he knew and loved.” Already, the sentient reader will have predicted that this “political thing” will affect Stenham more than he could have predicted or imagined, and that the shock of his highly unpleasant awakening will give the novel the sort of arc we might find in a book by, say, Graham Greene.
But almost immediately we can watch Bowles part company with his fellow authors and enter territory that he has claimed as uniquely his own, a universe that few, if any, of us would willingly choose to inhabit—which is not to say that Bowles’s lifelong residence in that bleak and harsh (though often grimly hilarious) landscape seems voluntary, exactly.
The next long section is written from the point of view of a Moroccan boy named Amar, a complex, intelligent, and intuitive kid from a poor and pious family who, despite his own sharp instincts and good judgment, gets pulled into the very heart of the “political thing” that Stenham would so love to avoid and ignore. It’s a convincing and daring portrait—notably few European or American writers have had the courage to write from the perspective of a North African Muslim boy—and one that is absolutely necessary for Bowles’s narrative strategy. Because Amar’s experience and his view of politics, of religion, of the nature of human existence, and of the way in which the universe operates could hardly be more unlike Stenham’s ideas or those of Stenham’s chic, decadent American and British friends. This profound and unbridgeable difference creates a tension that underlies—and spikes—the pressure created by the thickening web of conspiracy, and by the growing discord and bloody violence erupting in the souks and streets of Fez.
In his characteristically distanced, clinical, quietly confident and authoritative tone, employing a rigorously unadorned, quasi-journalistic prose style, Bowles approaches his material and his characters in a way that seems relentlessly anthropological, scientific,
distanced, unbiased by either contempt and derision on the one hand or sympathy and affection on the other—or by any powerful or particular tribal loyalties of his own. Writing about expatriates and Moroccans warily coexisting in the crowded cities and desert encampments of North Africa, he depicts all these groups acting badly. Even the unusually appealing Amar turns out to be capable of committing murder (manslaughter, really) without suffering much remorse. Every community seems capable of carrying out any crime, no matter how mindless or vile—willing and able to do anything except understand one another.
What mostly (if not entirely) exempts Bowles from the charges of racism that his portrayals of brutal Moroccans have, at times, occasioned is the fact that his dispatches from the various frontiers of savagery are so evenhanded and inclusive. It’s not at all clear that the vengeful merchants in his story “The Delicate Prey” or the sadistic bandit tribe in “A Distant Episode” are any worse than the Frenchmen in
The Spider’s House
, who round up all the young males in the medina of Fez and bring them into the police station to be tortured and perhaps killed. “As far as I can see,” said Bowles in a 1981
Paris Review
interview, “People from all corners of the earth have an unlimited potential for violence.”
Readers accustomed to parsing literature for clues to the personal history of a writer, or for instruction on how to live, may be puzzled by the discrepancies between a body of work that seems to advise against ever leaving home and the facts of Bowles’s peripatetic existence. An avid and intrepid traveler, Paul (a dentist’s son from Queens) abandoned a promising career as a composer and spent much of his early adulthood in Paris and Germany, North Africa, Mexico, Guatemala, Ceylon, and Thailand. From the 1940s until his death in 1999, he was a more or less permanent resident of Tangier, where he lived with his famously eccentric and fascinating wife, Jane, author of the dazzlingly original novel
Two Serious Ladies.
He also formed a series of intimate relationships with Moroccan men and translated books of Mohgrebi oral narratives.
Bowles was immensely proud and fiercely territorial about his knowledge of North African customs, music, and folktales; about
his familiarity with Islam, his fluency in Moghrebi, his ability to understand the North Africans around him or at least (unlike most foreigners) to admit, and know why, he would never understand them. In the prologue to
The Spider’s House
, there’s a revealing passage in which Stenham (the character who, one might argue, most nearly approaches being a stand-in for the author) admits to “a small sense of superiority to which he felt he was entitled, in return for having withstood the rigors of Morocco for so many years. This pretending to know something that others could not know, it was a little indulgence he allowed himself, a bonus for seniority. Secretly he was convinced that the Moroccans were much like any other people, that the differences were largely those of ritual and gesture …”
In fact,
The Spider’s House
should top the list of novels that speak to our current condition. Set during the first upheavals that announced a more radical and violent phase of the Moroccan struggle for independence from the French, the book seems not merely prescient but positively eerie in its evocation of a climate in which every aspect of daily life is affected—and deformed—by the roilings of nationalism and terrorism, and by the damage done by colonialism. It’s chilling to hear its characters speculate on the root causes of insurrection (“If people are living the same as always, with their bellies full of food, they’ll just go on the same way. If they get hungry and unhappy enough, something happens.”) and on the grim compensations of terrorism. Listening to his father mourn the widespread sinfulness that, in his opinion, signals the end of Islam, Amar understands why his countrymen are “willing to risk dying in order to derail a train or burn a cinema or blow up a post office. It was not independence they wanted, it was a satisfaction much more immediate than that: the pleasure of seeing others undergo the humiliation of suffering and dying, and the knowledge that they had at least the small amount of power necessary to bring about that humiliation. If you could not have freedom you could still have vengeance, and that was all anyone really wanted now.”
