Apostles of Modernity: American Writers in the Age of Development

3. "You were in on the last days of Morocco": Paul Bowles and the End of Empire

 The fascination and importance of Paul Bowles’s work lies in its catholic encompassing of a range of discourses that frame the encounter between the United States (as embodied in the American traveler in North Africa) and Islam.His life and work in Morocco as a novelist,translator, photographer, and ethnographer form one of the broadest and most complex representations of the Islamic world by an American artist.1 It would be a mistake, I think, to see these various discourses as having a single, foundational logic. Bowles’s career was instead a varied workin -progress, a heterogeneous “writing” of Morocco through a variety of discourses. If there is a center to his enterprise, then it is probably in the space where storytelling, translation, and ethnography meet and inform one another. In a 1982 preface to the 1955 novel, The Spider’s House, Bowles discussed the politics of writing and his reading of the postcolonial moment in Morocco. Long resident in North Africa, Bowles explicitly addressed the politics of decolonization and the end of the French protectorate : “For more than two decades I had been waiting to see the end of French rule in Morocco.”2 Bowles’s sense of expectation emerged not from sympathy for the liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, but out of romantic yearning for a North Africa lost: “Ingenuously I “You were in on the last days of Morocco” Paul Bowles and the End of Empire 3 56  “You were in on the last days” had imagined that after Independence the old manner of life would be resumed and the country would return to being more or less what it had been before the French presence.” Bowles acknowledged that he had misunderstood the modernizing drive of anticolonial nationalism, a force he figured in an image of motorized energy. The French had abandoned the “governmental vehicle,” and the Moroccans had driven off “in the same direction, but with even greater speed.” The preface presents Bowles’s recognition of the modernity of the nationalist movement as an accident. Bowles’s intention had been to write about what he terms “the traditional life of Fez”; now he would have to address “its dissolution.” He then imagined his adopted homeland as a decaying body: “My subject was decomposing before my eyes, hour by hour; there was no alternative to recording the process of violent transformation ” (all quotations from the preface, no page reference).3 The Spider’s House deploys a central protagonist seeming to embody the views of Bowles himself. Stenham, the expatriate American writer, is an aesthete and an avowedly apolitical observer of the North African scene. Simon Bischoff notes of The Spider’s House, while discussing a photograph Bowles took of his friend Ahmed Yacoubi in the late 1940s, that its “protagonist Amar is based on the young Yacoubi. Bowles himself takes on the role of Stenham.”4 Bischoff flagrantly neglects the usual interpretative injunction to keep author and character clearly separated. But the preface to The Spider’s House suggests that Bischoff is right: there is indeed a strong correspondence between author and character. Stenham’s meditations are often congruent with Bowles’s own statements on Morocco and the West. In a conversation with Millicent Dillon , Bowles acknowledged that Stenham’s loss of faith in Marxism paralleled his own political disillusionment.Indeed,Dillon insisted in their dialogue, in many ways Stenham’s life-story (including his religious feelings) echoed those of his creator.5 Like Bowles, Stenham will stress the quasi-anthropological seriousness of his engagement with Morocco. Like Stenham, Bowles displays little fondness for the West, or for modernity or progress.And like Stenham,Bowles seems at first to be a classic “Orientalist,”although one at pains to develop a highly idiosyncratic vision of what he as a Westerner makes of Maghrebi culture. “You were in on the last days”  57 I want to examine the ways in which Bowles found himself writing a recent political history of Morocco,in spite (as he claimed) of his intention not to write such a work. What kind of political novel results from this strange process, where the novelist abjures an engagement that will nonetheless draw him in? And how does this unduly neglected novel represent political change, transition, and development? The Spider’s House addressed a country in the throes of what anthropologist Ernest Gellner described as the “acute period of the crisis from...