Paul Bowles and Edgar Allan Poe: The Disintegration of the Personality
1986; Duke University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 3/4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/441358
ISSN2325-8101
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoOn several occasions in his career as a writer Paul Bowles has paid tribute to the influence of Poe on his work, but it is in the stark, reiterated design of Bowles's early fiction that his heritage from Poe seems especially direct and striking. In the novels, The Sheltering Sky (1949) and Let It Come Down (1952), and in the stories collected in The Delicate Prey (1950) and The Time of Friendship (1967), the Western pilgrim abroad confronts a violent destiny in which he becomes the prey of the primitive forces which his odyssey arouses.' These forces may be external, embodied in alien peoples and hostile landscapes, or internal, aroused from the repressed areas of his own psyche. The Delicate Prey, Bowles's first collection of stories, carries the dedication, for my mother, who first read me the stories of In his autobiography, Without Stopping (1972), Bowles recalls the period of his life, at about age eight, to which the dedication refers: I remember . .. the combination of repugnance and fascination I felt at hearing the stories of Poe. I could not read them aloud; I had to undergo them. Mother's pleasant low voice and thus, by extension, her personality took on the most sinister overtones as she read the terrible phrases. If I looked at her, I did not wholly recognize her, and that frightened me even more. It was in this period that I began to call out in my sleep and enact lengthy meaningless rituals, eyes open but unconscious, while Mother and Daddy stood watching, afraid to speak or touch me.2 Although the above passage was written late in Bowles's career, testimonials to Poe's importance to him are present from early youth. In a letter written while he was at the University of Virginia in 1928, at the
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