The Sheltering Sky

Ned Rorem describes Paul Bowles' novels as "icy, cruel, objective, moralistic in their inexorable amorality, and occurring mostly in exotic climes," and certainly The Sheltering Sky felt like a blast off Lake Michigan in the depths of a Chicago winter after my recent dose of Erica Jong. Fittingly enough for a novel with several important dream and hallucination sequences, the entire narrative feels a bit like "dream logic": after finding ourselves in medias res, with no explanation of who these three people are, we're confronted by a series of apparently random happenings in the midst of purposeless travel. This is very much a world without God or ultimate meaning; the blue sky "shelters" the characters from what we're repeatedly told is absolute nothingness. In Middlemarch, George Eliot remarks on our necessary "deafness," as it were, which keeps our subjectivity together. Port Moresby, by contrast, yearns to dissolve himself into the nothingness--which he accomplishes only by dying. But all of the characters are terminally incapable of communication; their quarrels, desires, observations, and even acts all fail to establish a link between self and other. This point is brought out most forcefully in the case of the creepy Lyles, who are eternally quarrelsome, inveterate liars, and probably incestuous. (While a funny novel this isn't, there's some comic relief in Port's inability to figure out why Eric keeps staring at him.) When the "thickest" of the three main characters, Tunner, strikes Eric Lyle at Eric's request, there's literal contact but no comprehension.

As Port dies, slowly and unpleasantly, of typhoid, the novel shifts focus to his wife, Kit. Port, we're told, considers himself not a "tourist" but instead a "traveler": "the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking" (6). When Port finds his passport stolen--a bit like Jane Eyre leaving her package in the coach--he reacts as though his self has vanished along with the official marker of his identity. But then he seeks to escape Tunner, who has reclaimed the passport. In other words, Port cannot bear to be "marked" again by his own civilization; what he seeks is perfect isolation, non-belonging. Port himself has been Kit's reason for living throughout: she travels to please him (although with increasing bad humor--they aren't exactly a cuddly couple) and once he dies, the coherent narrative thread of her life disappears along with him. While she tries to construct a kind of romance plot around her sometimes violent adventures in the desert, it too fails the "only connect" test. The characters who survive intact are those who not only swaddle their interpretations of events in fixed stereotypes, but also remain permanently unconscious that they are not making a connection.

Comments

[enass]

thanks for providing us with this summary
i wanna ask where i can find deep good interpretations for this novel?thanks a gain