The Sheltering Sky -Paul Bowles

I read The Sheltering Sky for the first time about eight months ago. It's an absolutely stunning novel, driven by a bleak philosophy right through to the very end. I think of it as French existentialism without any of the individual freedom that Sartre insists on. Bowles reveals the redemptive quality of that system to be not so much false as it is ludicrous, unsatisfying and virtually impossible. A naturalistic fatalism pervades the landscape, characters, and even the language itself. Last night I finished my latest read (The Ballad of a Sad Café) and needed something to put me to sleep. Why then did I pick up The Sheltering Sky?

Towards the beginning of the novel, Port goes out to explore the Saharan town to which he has practically dragged his wife and friend. He finds himself walking with a local out into the desert to meet a girl. Port realizes that this is a bad idea, yet he keeps walking:

You can still break it up. Stop walking. Now. But the combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones was too powerful.

I like to imagine the two men walking in perfect synchronization, hands in pockets, each looking at each others' feet. Thematically, it's pretty simple to see what Bowles is getting at here: a sort of ambient fatalism is propelling Port to do things he knows he shouldn't do. But the power of the passage derives from its refusal to locate this force outside of the natural elements in the scene--there is only man and the desert. Port is theoretically free to turn around and walk back to the safety of the hotel. "But the combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones was too powerful." What a sentence! What an image! A battle is staged between Port's rational interior monologue and the rhythm produced by his unthinking footsteps.

Formally, the italicized "thoughts" of Port are short and jerky--increasingly so as he nears the decisive moment. The narrative that follows is an elegant, down-beating sentence with consistent hard stresses that overwhelm with sheer metrical force the fragmented interior protests. "Combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones" can almost be scanned as trochaic hexameter--that is, six consecutive stressd-unstressed feet (When's the last time you've seen one of those?). Bowles is describing "even rhythm" with even rhythm. The pathetic "You can still break it up" doesn't stand a chance.

On the imagistic level: this rhythm originates from human movement but is decidedly inhuman, usurping the very bodies which give it life and in turn acting maliciously against them. But it's not just the feet creating the rhythm; it's their resounding percussion on the stones. I should mention that Port is in the desert--these are not cobblestones. The harsh, impassive, cruel landscape has no mercy. There is no room for a false step. Each fall reverberates through the great expanse all the way to the edge of the sheltering sky. We are in Bowles's universe. It's terrifying. Tread lightly...literally.