Between the Waking Life and Dreams, Another Type of Travel

Timelessness in the desert, a dreamy journey

"Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. It was often on trips that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary" (98).

When Paul Bowles wrote The Sheltering Sky, he was searching for something. Alone, and away from his home, he decided to write a novel in which his semi-autobiographical characters could act on his behalf; travel and seek what he was seeking. Indeed, perhaps this is how literature functions: as a fantasy vehicle for one's own real exploration. In letting his characters play out their stories, Bowles found an outlet for his own inner turmoils and those ever human emotions we all experience, suffer from, and learn by. In the desert, away from anything familiar, he embarked on his own wilderness journey through his writing, as his characters went on theirs.

His his article, Interiors and Exteriors, Richard Patteson describes that "Paul Bowles' expatriation began, in his own mind, shortly after he was born." Bowles' experiences and worldview surely say that he created Port in his own image: a lost character who, through his constant traveling, cannot seem to find a grounded place in life. In fact, Port seems to lost between two worlds, that of reality, with its harsh exteriors and tangible, ownable objects, and his dreams, literally those in his sleep and figuratively, the dreamy desert setting he wanders through. Though the novel begins with Port awakening, we see that his presence in the waking life is frightening, one that he finds "difficult to accept" (4). As his story progresses, Port's oscillation between dream-like, fantastic settings (the desert, and oases, with their mysterious many colors) and places like Bou Noura, where he aimlessly finds "the proofs of civilization" (128) serve to confuse and aggitate his spirituality and well-being. One night, he wakes from a sleep sobbing, "with no memory of any dream save the faceless voice that had whispered: 'The soul is the weariest part of the body'" (117-118). In focusing on his dreams, Port attempts to cope with the waking life, as "their particular meaning with regard to his own life scarcely mattered. For in order to avoid having to deal with relative values, he had long since come to deny all purpose to the phenomenon of existence - it was more expedient and comforting" (67). Where is the difference between dreams and reality for him?

In chapter xvi, Port comes to an understanding: "a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, but there never would be a return, another time" (126). Passing alone through the dark, red hills of his new setting, Port experiences feelings of timelessness, of mysteriously existing outside reality, and brings himself back to ponder the difference between these two worlds.

In this light we see that Port must die, to rest in one final place and end his constant traveling, constant searching. Bowles writes in the novel's preface, "I knew that the death was necessary because what I wanted, above all, was the experience of dying, not as seen by observers, but from the inside - I had to be the dying person." Through Port, Bowles was able to find a sort of strange solace for himself, and left Kit, another extension of himself, to freely explore and survive as she can and as her character would in the real world, where timelessness does not exist and dreams can end. We cannot live only in dreams, trying to escape from our own living nightmares and travel between what is real an what is not - and we should translate this dreamy travel to waking tourist travel, which, when it is aimless and used as a background for our own self-exploration, is not experiencing anything real (as Bowles shows us with Eric and his mother). Rather, we must confront our own reality, as Bowles does when he chooses to write, and as we can through our own art and expression.