A journey through moral nihilism

I was intrigued by the substitution of Fes for Ouehrane in the opening sequence. My own memories of Fes are constituted by details – a man leading his wife on a donkey weighed down by blue jugs, shouting ‘Balak! Balak!’ to clear the path; the emptiness and cleanliness of the streets in the Jewish quarter; the blue-green mosaic interiors, hidden behind shabby walls and doors; and the graffitied, sundrenched schoolyard below my hotel window on the outskirts of the medina. It is in the details that I am able to rediscover my sense of Fes and it is in the details that I can separate it from Essaouira, Rabat, Marrakech, Ouarzazate and any of the desert towns between Morocco and Algeria.

Despite its status as a work of fiction, I struggled to accept this substitution as merely a device to simplify the travel itinerary or an inability on Bowles’ part to imagine (or recall) a more authentically Algerian opening setting. Perhaps, it is completely insignificant, but it is potentially indicative of Bowles’ assumptions about his readers. An even more compelling possibility was implied in Tennessee Williams’ 1949 New York Times review of the novel. While ‘The Sheltering Sky’ can certainly be read as a “first-rate adventure story,” it operates on another, more complex frequency. It could be, as Williams suggests, an allegory for a spiritual journey, a journey to the heart of the psyche. Alternatively, the novel can be read as an ideological journey – with Port’s life and death and Kit’s demise an adventure in moral nihilism and an exploration of the space after the death of existentialism (or an existential(ist) as the case may be).

In some ways, as a reader, I hope that the substitution of Fes for Ouehrane makes the space for a novel that is only superficially a travel fiction. In some sense, the novel is like the hotel bar. “Here in this sad colonial room […] each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room” (50). Only the artifice of ‘The Sheltering Sky’ is that of a travel novel and in this inconsistency of detail is where its distance from its cloak of being a travel novel is most glaring.