#97: The Sheltering Sky

#97 The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky is a landmark of twentieth-century literature. In this intensely fascinating story, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans' incomprehension of alien cultures leads to the ultimate destruction of those cultures.A story about three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky explores the limits of humanity when it touches the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the desert.

I finally finished The Sheltering Sky , but I was at a bit of a loss as to how to write a review of it.  It wasn't until I had a conversation about it with a friend that it became a little clearer.

Initially I was unsure how to describe all of the strange turns that the characters took, and why.  Why did they wander, seemingly aimlessly, through the desert from harsh, desolate place to harsh, desolate place?  Their personal histories are vague, and the reader never knows a great deal about their original motivations from before the start of the story.

Once I finished the story I was left adrift, so to speak.  I couldn't figure out how I wanted to feel about it.  The Sheltering Sky turned out to be a lot more than the meandering, ennui-bloated tale that I thought it would be.  I'm not sure how to describe all of the turns the characters took, and why--when I finished the book almost six months ago, I didn't have a feel for what the author was painting, and it was weird.  But is that a hallmark of a great book?  Like an amazing man, putting you off of all other men for a while while you figure out exactly what happened.  He went that-a-way, officer.  Except The Sheltering Sky is the kind of man who unapologetically chain-smokes and smells of BO, maybe he takes you to weird, scary places and movies that consist entirely of black and white vignettes of fruit decomposing while you listen to Frank's Wild Years.  That kind of thing.  It's not fun, but it's interesting.  (Though, TBH, I enjoy some stuff on Frank's Wild Years.)

As I tried to feel my way around it with a friend via chat:

me
well, you know how it is--when you read a fantasy novel, you're unconsciously drawing on the Tolkien tradition

D
this much is true
the word foundational comes to mind

me
When you read Poirot, you recall what you know about Agatha Cristie era Brits and combine that with 30's style
you know, you piece together what you know to form a picture

D
I have to wonder if there's a genre in which that doesn't apply
present day fantasy, maybe

me
Sheltering Sky is a lot about existential despair and lost wandering.  I haven't read anything like that since Nausea, and that was in high school when I was full of angst, anyway.
I guess what it is, is that despair is such a highly personal thing, and I'm not sure how to feel my way around another character's despair

D
hmm
I... have nothin for you..  I think you're right on about that
moreso in the gravity of despair than the source or the experience

me
Like, why did these characters wander aimlessly around the desert, from harsh desperate place to harsh place?  I have really no answer to that question, because the author does not give much, if any, information about their pasts
They're like souls in torment

D
even if you had the why, do you think you'd be able to tap into their despair?
that's another thing, you know..  people always want the why with despair or hardships..
understanding isn't much of a comfort

me
i guess it would be like looking at a map--if i am at point A and I want to get to point B, you only have to show me point B and I will trace the route to it
I guess point B is the characters as they appear in the novel, but point A is the unknown--their origins

D
I can see the frustration in that

me
so it is like being on the road itself and trying to find point A, but not having the map

D
it's part of my downfall as a writer - I'm in love with the why
I dig where you're coming from
picking up what you're putting down
without Point A, every action lacks a meaning

me
i think that's true of most people, but i guess that some stories don't have a definite "why", and therein the author brings US into the same existential despair as his characters

D
well, I think I might safely move that one to the bottom of the list for a while lol

me
lol

If anyone, anyone out there, has also read this novel, I would enjoy hearing your impressions on it.  The text that follows after the jump below are my notes, impressions, and sometimes bafflement on the story as I read it, so it's chock-full of spoilers.  I could try to hammer it into a blog post, but I have already been stymied by The Sheltering Sky for six months.  It is time to move on to the next lighthearted romp in the Modern Library's 100 Greatest list:  Sophie's Choice.

But before I get to that, I'll be reading Neuromancer for the book club.  Sending my mind back to a pre-internet mentality will be an interesting exercise for that one.  I also highly recommend Stephen King's 11/22/63, which I read last fall.  I tried to follow that up with Oswald's Tale:  An American Mystery but could never quite get going on it.

Thoughts on The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky is a novel about three Americans traveling through northern Africa after World War II.  

At this point in the story, the predominant points that've come out to me have been:

The characters express their love for Africa and their apathy for Europe (mostly Ms. Lynch (?)), however I have trouble seeing where they find their joy in Africa at all.

Kit spends her time in a state of perpetual terror and dread, and each new scene that appears seem to her to be a sure indicator that destruction is just around the corner.

Port is the farthest removed from this fear, though his greatest joy in Africa seems to be the fact of its wildness and non-European-ness.  This is a person who perhaps has lost his identity and who revels in the flavors of the "other" identity as substitute.  He is always searching.

Tunner is almost reassuring in his typical American-ness…though American in an unflattering sense.  Kit sees him as false and fake, and he makes every effort to get her in bed in the most tried and true ways possible, ultimately getting her drunk with champagne and taking advantage of her on the train.  To me, as I said, this is almost reassuring--I flatter myself into thinking that I am no Kit, all signs and portents, flying into hysteria at every strange sight, but I would be disturbed by the difference in culture and a sleazy douchebag like Tunner becomes positively comforting, because that creature falls within my realm of experience.

Eric Lynch and Ms. Lynch are a strange, diseased-seeming pair.  In fact, all of the characters…except Tunner…seem mentally diseased, either by the heat, the outside culture, or the strain of those combined and the travel.  I anticipate something terrible happening because of those two, especially Eric--even though Ms. Lynch is an old racist of the most obnoxious type, Eric is more likely to be harmful to the main characters of the story, and I fear that he has or is planning to rob Port of his money.

The back of the book points out that the heart of the novel is the way in which these Americans, by their presence, corrupt and destroy the pristine cultures that they want to experience.  To be completely frank this was not immediately apparent to me, probably in no small part due to the fact that I am an American myself and therefore naturally a little dense to the feelings of individuals in the third world, including those who ultimately devote their livelihoods to the service of first world patrons.  But it is not all me, because all of these characters, but especially Kit and Port, give the sense of being super-dense objects, like black holes that cannot help but draw and pull and warp on the culture and environment around them.  On another level so do these characters warp and draw my attention down to them, to the exclusion of the narrative of the natives.

I feel that the author, Paul Bowles, however, may himself be tainted and unable to portray the Arabs in the book as fully formed people, and less as caricatures.  However I am not yet sure and am only halfway through the book...

So Port is dead.  He experienced an increasing chill, developed typhoid, and died.  The unutterable denseness of ennui and self-searching I felt from Port and Kit at the beginning of the novel has begun to lift, though, and it is finally becoming apparent that the author has this in mind all along…that trite emo characters aren't his exclusive MO.  I doubt that he considered the fact that many readers would lose interest in Part 1 of the novel and stop there before any other characters came onto the scene.  Kit has become more interesting, though, and after Port's death she struck out joyfully into the desert, disguised in a burnoose with a valise containing all of her valuables.  It seems that now, finally, she can stop her hysterics and enjoy life again.  But why now?  Was it because of Port's inexpressible ennui bringing her down?  Because she has some ability to blend with the population, to immerse herself in it so as to cease her disruptive Western "pull" and move about like a shade in the night, untroubled and untroubling?  I don't yet know, since the book hasn't located her yet.

Tunner is waiting for news of her with the French Lieutenant.  Port made a great effort to leave the French Lieutenant's town before Tunner could arrive with Port's passport, which was stolen by Eric Lyle and sold to a legionnaire.  Was this because he suspected that Kit slept with Tunner, which she did, and sensed a danger to their relationship in allowing Tunner back into their lives?  (As an aside note, Tunner, despite showing all those "American" characteristics that I've been told are so odious yet which I find to be so reassuring, acts like a real creep at every opportunity with Kit and always seems poised for the opportunity to get into her pants.)  I think it is more likely that Port craved being lost in the uncharted desert more even than that… for some reason, and unless I have skimmed over it (which is entirely possible) the book has not mentioned why.  Is it because he is tainted by the events of the war--broken and shell-shocked, is he searching for some new self in people and cultures that he simultaneously views as both simple and admirable yet dismissible?  The book describes his as looking like an adolescent…interestingly not until the middle, when he consults the French Lieutenant about the loss of his passport.  There have been many young soldiers, but I dare to guess that most of those have not been rich, so it stands to reason that he was not one of those.  From another angle, who spends years traveling?  Is this a thing that people at the turn of the century used to do?

Who was the Arab who helped Kit around the city of El Gurub (?) while Port was incapacitated?  What was his purpose to the story, and why was he so kind to her?  The sections of story that describe Kit's interactions always leave doubt as to the motives of the people with whom she interacts, so his motives as described in her passages are unclear.

Typhoid fever takes about a week to really get going and can be transmitted by contact with food or water contaminated with feces, or by flies who come in contact with feces.  Port shows signs of abdominal pains, delirium, and, of course, the high fever of typhoid.

So Kit joyfully made her way into the desert, connected with some camel drivers, and was totes okay with doing sexual favors for them every night.  What?  Okay?  With the one who molests her first she ends up developing a sort of sex-based relationship, ultimately disguising herself as a boy, infiltrating his home, and becoming his wife.  She is then confined to a bedroom where she has sex with him all the time, meanwhile they daily dose her with poison (for some damned reason), which she discovers, escapes, then spends the rest of the novel fighting the near miraculous way the authorities attempt to rescue her and drag her back to civilization.  Result:  the novel ends with her totally bugshit crazy.

This would have been a fascinating novel to discuss in a literature class.  I was struck at how completely harmless the "natives" are to the visitors.  These doughy, adolescent Americans spend their days schlepping around totally foreign cities with money practically bristling from their pockets, absorbed in their own ennui, and only once does a native attempt to take any money from them.  (Port with the exotic prostitute early in the story.  She is unsuccessful, btw.)  The natives consistently regard the visitors as though they are some natural phenomenon to be ignored or bewildered by, but never a part of the human culture of the region.  Tunner even notes that the children in a crowd used his body as though he were a tree, to gain momentum and push himself through the crowd.  This emphasizes how far removed the visitors are from the culture around them.  Kit is the only one who begins to successfully assimilate, but it serves only to help drive her mad in the end.