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Chapter 5 the limits of cosmopolitanism: disgust and intercultural horror in the fiction of paul bowles Paul Bowles was only nineteen years old when he ran away from home and sailed to Europe in 1929. He first went to Paris and then, following the advice of Gertrude Stein, to North Africa, where he traveled throughout Morocco, the Sahara, Algeria, and Tunisia. The natural and cultural environment of the Maghreb made a deep impression on him, and in 1947, Bowles exchanged a quasi-nomadic life as a composer based in New York for a quasi-nomadic life as a writer based in Tangier, Morocco . With a fresh advance from Doubleday, he revisited the Sahara desert , which had impressed him deeply during his travels in the 1930s, and wrote his first novel, The Sheltering Sky (1949). And although Doubleday rejected the book on the grounds that it was “not a novel,” Bowles had made his choice. For the rest of his life he would understand himself first and foremost as a writer because, as he once explained, “There are things that cannot be said with music. . . . Music is abstract and I wanted to be very specific in describing these things” (Bowles quoted in Alameda, 223). What Bowles wanted to be specific about was the nature of human relationships. In much of his fiction, these relationships are interracial , intercultural, and transnational, and more often than not, they are fraught with emotional turmoil and physical danger. Confronting his (mostly American) readers with fascinating and alien worlds, he invites them to simulate the experiences of characters who share their Western perspective and, partly because of their cultural arrogance and lack of sensitivity, get caught in life-threatening situations that resist intercultural decoding. Often, such situations evoke a powerful sense of shock. In their exploration of the ways in which emotions and judgments can operate in problematic and often harmful ways when people are confronted with out-group others whom they do not understand, Bowles’s novels and short stories illustrate the limits of the cosmopolitan imagination. 152 cosmopolitan minds Chapter 4 focused on the literary imagination of negative emotions, such as anger, fear, shame, and transgression guilt, and their effects on readers’ empathy and sympathy. It also touched upon the emotion of moral disgust, both when considering reader responses to Richard Wright’s violent and amoral protagonists and when discussing these protagonists’ feelings of shame as a form of self-disgust. This chapter will look more closely at the role of disgust in our imagining of and interaction with outgroup others, considering its relationship not only with related emotions, such as fear and contempt, but also with complementary emotions, such as curiosity, fascination, sexual desire, and attachment. Bowles’s fiction offers an excellent opportunity to contemplate the complex interactions between these positive and negative emotions in moments of intercultural encounter. Moreover, his use of authorial strategic empathizing is of particular interest in my context here. Many of his short stories and novels invite readers to empathize with and (to a certain degree) have sympathy for American protagonists who start out as seemingly superior and morally transgressive perpetrators and end up as miserable victims of their own lack of understanding. Bowles’s rhetorical strategy therefore differs from Wright’s in that it first encourages readers’ empathic alignment with a member of the in-group and then proceeds to defamiliarize that character beyond recognition, making “sympathetic allegiance” (M. Smith, 220) with that protagonist nearly impossible.1 Whereas in the beginning these narratives tend to cue an exciting combination of curiosity, fascination, and (sometimes) sexual arousal in readers, the curiosity and/or sexual interest tend to die away swiftly, leaving the protagonist—and, in a different way, the reader—with a much less pleasurable mixture of fear, terror (or, in the reader’s case, horror), and disgust toward the end of the story. Although we will find no cosmopolitan didacticism in Bowles’s fiction , the horrible fates encountered by most of his American protagonists serve as a sharp critique of Western cultural arrogance and racial supremacy. At the same time, however, Bowles’s depiction of North Africans can be—and has been—taken to task for its participation in and reinforcement of Orientalist imaginaries. Arguably, the evocation of intercultural horror and disgust necessitates a certain degree of strategic essentialism , and we will therefore have to examine Bowles’s fiction within the force field between cosmopolitan ethics and Orientalist essentialism. From Bowles’s four novels and dozens of short...

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