Upon the Occasion of Reading THE SHELTERING SKY
Posted on March 10th, 2010
The Sheltering Sky, a powerful novel (1949) written by Paul Bowles, presents a disturbing narrative in which an American husband and wife, Porter and Kit Moresby, travel in North Africa at some time in the late 40s or early 50s of the last century. At first glance, by looking at the language of the text, readers may see the novel as one built around a postcolonial theme “all having to do with the juxtaposition, sometimes tragic, but usually ludicrous, of the two incongruous and incompatible cultures” (i.e., American/European versus Arab/African). Or perhaps readers will see the novel focusing more acutely on the peripatetic Americans (i.e., people from a society that prided itself on making the world safer through their sacrifice in World War II) and their “faint thrill of excitement [. . .] to be riding past such people [as the less-than-modern North Africans] in the Atomic Age.” However, to this reader, The Sheltering Sky is a rather depressing novel about existential angst—“the perfect knowledge that there [is] no hope” and there is no possibility of “any knowing or any certitude” about life. It is about living a Godless existence about which you cannot show fear: “The mistake you make is in being afraid. That is the great mistake.” Porter (who dies of typhoid) and Kit (who disappears mysteriously at the end after a harrowing odyssey in the desert) reluctantly confront their existential terror. Porter remarks that “[d]eath is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. [. . .] And yet it all seems limitless.” Readers who want to understand Bowles’ novel, in my view, are left with the key question: Can Porter and Kit (or anyone else without hope, optimism, or faith in a higher power) find hope in their predicaments? Perhaps “[t]he coming of [each new] day promises a change; [but] it is only when the day has fully arrived that the watcher suspects it is the same day returned once again—the same day he has been living for a long time, over and over, still blindingly bright and untarnished by time.” This kind of diurnal despair is not a view of life that I choose to embrace. So, for me, The Sheltering Sky, in spite of all of its strengths and notable qualities, remains an unappealing and depressing novel.
Tags: 40s, Atomic Age, Certitude, Depressing Novel, Eath, Existential Angst, Finiteness, First Glance, Great Mistake, Husband And Wife, Juxtaposition, North Africa, North Africans, Odyssey, Paul Bowles, Peripatetic, Sheltering Sky, Text Readers, Typhoid, World War Ii
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