Paul Bowles has often been considered a cult writer, a literary
renegade: he lived more than fifty years as an expatriate in Morocco,
and according to Norman Mailer, his works "let in the murder, the drugs,
the incest, the call of the orgy, the end of civilization." In recent
decades Bowles has found greater acceptance as a serious writer, as
evidenced by the two-volume, 2,000-page Library of America edition of
his works published in 2002. Still, he has rarely if ever been seen as
having written in the antinomian tradition of Emerson and his literary
descendants. The present book makes the case for doing so by
demonstrating basic Emersonian attitudes and objectives in Bowles' life
and works, especially in his focus on human consciousness and perception
and on the need for the individual to escape from the trammels of social
and cultural conditioning. Bowles' intellectual pursuits seem to have
developed at first from his own spontaneous attitudes, which were then
reinforced by his conservative and individualistic New England
background on both sides of his family and deepened by a serious study
of anthropology, Emersonian transcendentalism, and related "Oriental"
thought such as the theosophy of Krishnamurti. Despite his half century
in Tangier, Bowles is a writer who is thoroughly "in the American
grain."
BARRY CHARLES THARAUD is Professor Emeritus, Colorado Mesa University,
and is the editor and publisher of the international scholarly journal
Nineteenth-Century Prose.
