A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles

by Richard F. Patteson

Expatriation, the sense of being "outside" or exposed, is a central theme in the life and work of Paul Bowles. Beginning with Bowles' account of a frightening childhood memory, A World Outside explores how the dichotomies of inside and outside, safety and danger, enclosure and exposure—fundamental dualities in Bowles' fiction—have their deepest origin in the fabric of Bowles' own life and also mark his kinship with other twentieth-century writers. Like V. S. Naipaul, Paul Bowles is one of those writers who have an uncanny grasp of what it is like never to feel "at home." In this much-needed study, Richard Patteson explores how this sense of "outsidedness" characterizes one's experience in a world in which many of the traditional shelters—social, familial, religious—seem to have lost their ability to protect. He discovers that storytelling is the vehicle by which both Bowles and his characters attempt to domesticate inchoate experience, bringing it into the familiar interior of human comprehension. The music world has for decades recognized Paul Bowles' stature as a composer, but his fiction is only recently receiving the close attention it has long deserved from students of American and contemporary literature. Bowles is an author who neither sought nor received the kind of publicity often lavished on his contemporaries but one whom an ever-growing audience regards as a commanding figure of twentieth-century American literature.

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

The focalizing metaphor that extends throughout Bowles' work and links his autobiographical writings and statements with his fiction is architectural."If I'm persuaded," he has said, "that our life is predicated upon violence, that the entire structure of what we call civilization, the scaffolding that we've built up over the millennia, can collapse at any moment, then whatever I write is going to be affected by that assumption."
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It is undeniable that many Bowles characters feel compelled to place their very existence in jeopardy, and that they experience a kind of exhilaration in doing so; but I will attempt to demonstrate that they expose themselves in this way not so much from a desire for self-destruction as, paradoxically, from a longing for self-preservation. The purpose is not always fully articulate in their own minds, but they invariably trend, or drift, outward to challenge the dominance of the outside world- not to surrender to it.