32 pages • 1 hour read
Paul BowlesA Distant Episode
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Orientalism and Western Naivete in the Face of Colonialism
Content Warning: The story and this guide discuss extreme violence, captivity, and enslavement. The guide also references imperialism.
The term “Orientalism,” as popularized by postcolonial literary theorist Edward Said, refers to the way in which Westerners tend to view so-called “Eastern” civilizations as exotic, romantic, and irreconcilably different from Western civilization. Said was particularly concerned with depictions of the Middle East and the Muslim and/or Arab world that highlight those aspects of the region and people that would be the most unfamiliar, exotic, or lurid to a Western audience. “A Distant Episode,” like Paul Bowles’s work generally, has a complex relationship to Orientalism and has been read as both upholding and critiquing it.
With its emphasis on brutality, danger, and mystery, Bowles’s story may be seen as an example of Orientalism. The people in the story whom the professor encounters all seem to be inscrutable in some way, with values that differ from the professor’s. The most extreme examples of this come in the form of the tribespeople of the Reguibat and the wealthy Algerian villager who purchases the professor. Bowles presents their violence toward and enslavement of the professor as matter-of-fact—the man who cuts out his tongue does so “dispassionately”—creating a tonal disconnect that seems to perpetuate stereotypes of the Oriental subject as utterly unknowable (not to mention “savage”). In this reading, the professor’s mistake is to indulge in the “wrong kind” of Orientalism. He evidently has romantic notions about Algerian society. In a search for an “exotic” trinket—a camel-udder box associated with the region’s nomadic peoples—he is willing to expose himself to physical danger. In other words, while he understands that the people of the region may very well be different from him, he expects that difference to be a source of delight and fascination—only to find that it is instead one of danger and horror.
At the same time, the story may be read as a critique of Orientalism. It is unclear whether the professor is French or merely speaks the language, but regardless of his nationality, the Algerians he converses with clearly understand him to be associated with the colonial project. This is why, for example, the qaouaji responds to him in French rather than the qaouaji’s native Arabic, and it may even be why the Reguibat treat him as they do; notably, the Reguibat posed some of the stiffest resistance to French control throughout the colonial era. However, the professor utterly overlooks his own complicity in colonialism. He is presumably a devotee of North African culture, as he is willing to devote time to travel to the region and study its languages, but there is an air of presumptuousness in his belief that he understands the region. For instance, he decides to “test” the truth of local proverbs warning of the danger of the Reguibat rather than accepting that those with firsthand knowledge of the group likely know better. Moreover, there is a long history of colonial powers attempting to subordinate the colonized through classification and cataloguing, so the very reason for the professor’s visit—a “survey” of the local languages—is suspect. In this reading, the professor’s mistake is not so much his failure to truly understand the people of the region as it is his failure to understand his own position relative to them.
“Primitiveness,” “Civilization,” and Psychology
In the early 20th century, the field of psychology underwent a major revolution. Illustrious psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung both developed theories of psychology incorporating a notion of unconscious primal drives and urges. At the same time, colonialist attitudes led many Westerners to associate this less rational and more instinctual side of humanity with non-Western cultures. This is the case in “A Distant Episode,” where the professor’s slide into an irrational and animalistic state coincides with his journey to Northern Africa and eventual capture by the nomadic Reguibat.
The story contrasts the so-called civilized world (implicitly the Western world) with the more “primitive” world of the desert. Throughout the story, Algeria is represented as a country where civilization in the Western sense has only a tenuous hold. The French colonization project, represented by places like the decaying Grand Hotel Saharien, appears to be faltering, and the locals clearly hold the French in contempt. The Arab gentleman suggests that the professor can be sold “in Salah,” for example, because “the French there are stupid” (Paragraph 71). Meanwhile, by providing no explicit motive for the Reguibat’s violence toward the professor, the story permits them to be read as symbols of humanity’s most senseless and brutal urges.
Whether this reading “correctly” describes the Reguibat as Bowles portrays them hinges on the story’s ambiguous attitude toward Orientalism. Regardless, it is the implicit interpretation that the professor himself adopts. Surrounded by what he perceives as incomprehensible barbarity, the professor “regresses” to his own “primitive” state: He becomes animalistic, capable only of eating and defecating. Language, one of the recurring motifs in the story, serves as an implicit metaphor for civilization in the Western sense. The loss of his tongue, the source of language, is sufficient to trigger the professor’s loss of rationality, while an encounter with a language he understands (classical Arabic) restores some of the professor’s senses. It is a subsequent encounter with language, the French-language calendar, that fully restores the professor.
However, the knowledge of his state soon proves too much for him to bear, and the professor flees into the desert. This is a symbol of “primitiveness” in the Western imagination—e.g., that of the French soldier who shoots at the professor, mistaking him for local because it does not occur to him that a Westerner could behave so seemingly irrationally. Further blurring the lines between “civilization” and “primitiveness” is the soldier’s violence, which is at least as senseless as the Reguibat’s. He shoots at the professor “for good luck” (i.e., out of superstition), casting doubt on the association between Western civilization and rationality. While the story uses Orientalist tropes to explore the professor’s psychological transformation, the extent to which the story endorses those tropes is thus ambiguous, as is the true extent of that transformation; the story’s ending implies that the West was never what it believed itself to be.
Fatalism and Free Will
At least from the professor’s perspective, the story’s world is stark, chaotic, and grim. People cannot be trusted. Violence erupts abruptly. Furthermore, not only are outside forces unpredictable, but one’s own mind cannot be counted on in the face of extreme events. This precarity is mirrored at one point in the physical features of the story’s setting. The cliff that the professor is brought to by the qaouaji, just above the Reguibat’s encampment, drops so sheerly that the two cannot see what lies at the bottom. It is as if not only the earth but also life itself may descend precipitously into unforeseeable chaos at any time and regardless of any actions one might take.
Certainly, the gradual loss of personal agency characterizes the professor’s story. When the professor is led by the qaouaji out of the town of Aïn Tadouirt, he follows the qaouaji half-heartedly and with great suspicion and ambivalence. There is a sense that the professor is not only not in control of the situation, but also not fully in control of himself. In many parts of this section, rather than making decisions, the professor merely yields to impulses that seem to have nothing to do with him. Standing atop the cliff, for example, the professor is seized by “a sudden violent desire to run back to the road” (Paragraph 57)—a sensation that passes, but that is replaced by other impulses. He finds himself speaking to himself automatically, for example. Then, when he is bound and kidnapped by his captors, the professor loses his bodily autonomy. Finally, he loses his tongue and with it his capacity for reason. He loses, in sequence, control over his actions, then control over his body, and lastly control over his mind itself.
Furthermore, the very idea of personal agency is mocked via the several ironies in the story. The professor is a linguist, but his interactions with the locals are marked by failures of communication. Furthermore, he loses his tongue and thus the literal ability to speak. The message that the bus driver tells the professor about finding new languages in the south is also ironic, coming true in a way that underscores the professor’s total inability to understand or affect the world around him. All of these ironies collectively create the sense that the professor is being mocked by circumstances beyond his control.
