Murder as Social Impropriety: Paul Bowles's "Evil Heroes"

Abstract

It may seem as if references to drawing-room carpets are distinctly inappropriate to a discussion of Paul Bowles's works, the vast majority of which are set in regions far beyond the reach of drawing-room civility, in places such as 1940s Morocco or 1930s Mexico. Yet only a few of the stories, and none of the novels, are purely about the indigenous inhabitants of these settings. Instead, most of his fiction deals with the meeting between these untamed parts of the world and the rigid expectations of Europeans and Americans. It is in the clash of these two sets of rules-the confrontation, as it were, between the drawing room and the desert-that Bowles finds his subjects. The clash of cultures is not, in itself, a topic unique to Bowles. Prior versions of it appear in Forster's A Passage to India, Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, and (if one counts nineteenth-century America as the wilderness) most of Henry James's novels. Where Bowles differs from these earlier writers is in the touchstone he uses to distinguish the attitudes of the two cultures. For James, the distinguishing element was money or class; for Lawrence, it was virility; and for Forster, faith. But for Bowles the touchstone is violence.