The Reality of Abstract Characters
SAMUELS, HARLES THOMAS
The Reality of Abstract Characters UP ABOVE THE WORLD By Paul Bowles Simon and Schuster 223 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by CHARLES THOMAS SAMUELS Assistant Professor of English, Williams...
...But the book lacked conviction...
...Slade, Vero compromises himself fatally, though she pays the price not figuratively but with her life...
...The Spider's House represented an obvious attempt to break out of the spiral of destructive contemplation of self into a more public reality and a more promising affirmation...
...In the hotel where all three stop for the night on their way to the nameless city in which the main action occurs, the shipmate, Mrs...
...Far from being obscurely plotted or hauntingly dissociated from humane concerns, the book is too explicitly a parable...
...she tries to make him love her, refuses to acknowledge terror, and ends up going literally out of her mind in a harem...
...By 1952, after his second novel and a volume of short stories, a reaction set in: Bowles was judged "sensationalistic" and a "dime novelist...
...Through Mrs...
...Vero and Mrs...
...Now, after 10 unnoticed years, he has just published a novel which demands his reassessment...
...As is usual with Bowles, "the war between reason and atavism" results in a pyrrhic victory for the unreflecting flesh...
...Why, for example, does Bowles introduce the child of Vero's mistress...
...Throughout Up Above the World Bowles lets his dramatization articulate his themes and, because he also scrambles his story to excite interest, the book's meaning emerges only through reflection...
...No wonder that its sentimental conclusion appealed to critics who had rejected more acrid examples of Bowles' violence and decay...
...Slade knows about her experience...
...Slade ponders, "It was sometimes possible for two people who were close to one another to be very separate indeed...
...Up Above the World is a serious novel about the bond between killer and victim...
...The book is divided into two experiences...
...Mrs...
...Moreover, the man and wife represent alternative modes of self-confirmation and alternative defeats: He studies maps, questions the forces which threaten life, and ultimately dies of fever...
...Vero is a degenerate, as his sexual games in a mirrored bed, his brutal primitive idols, and his crimes demonstrate...
...When Mrs...
...How do you keep up interest,' " she asks...
...This is unquestionably his best structured novel...
...Its actionan estranged couple traveling in Africa to "find" themselves-clearly suggests the book's themes...
...Bowles' second book, Let it Come Down, is an even more explicit, though considerably less compelling and orderly tale...
...Rainmantle, is murdered in her bed, though we are not sure of this until the last pages...
...contributor, "Kenyon Review," "Yale Review" When Paul bowles published his first novel in 1949, the critics agreed that he was not merely promising but "very good.' The book's exotic locale and macabre plot convinced even those who found it obscure or baffling that it was "haunting" and "poetic...
...Simply by allowing these activities to continue, the Slades reveal their own moral character...
...Slade's mind, wondering when her unacknowledged complicity in his mother's murder will show through her profound conventionality...
...His third novel got better reviews, but he never again received much attention...
...All this animosity, year after year, hating, hating...
...In scenes which are literally hallucinated (including three overly long but virtuoso LSD trances), Vero confronts Mrs...
...Vero Soto is a monster of nihilistic depravity...
...Nor did he ever before show such skill in maintaining interest and his Grand Guignol of horrors...
...Up Above the World, fortunately, returns to the more harrowing mood of the first novel...
...Bowles' well-known indifference to "real" characters blocks our deeper emotions, throwing us back too completely on our sense of dread...
...A glance at The Sheltering Sky and a handful of the stories, Bowles' best previous work, will show that he has always been a minor writer-his mood is marginal and his abstract method is never wholly convincing-but he is a writer who has been unjustly ignored...
...Slade's refusal to acknowledge to herself what she knows and has actually seen of the crime is what fascinates and baffles the readers...
...Reviewed by CHARLES THOMAS SAMUELS Assistant Professor of English, Williams College...
...This clause, when cut from its context, immediately suggests some overportentous significance, but in the novel it works quietly and naturally...
...Vero persuades himself "that the present was already past, that what he felt himself to be doing was already done before, so that present action became merely a kind of playback of the experience...
...But it is futile for them truly to celebrate, for as Dr...
...We're machines for realizing the inconceivable, and we go on living like animals, being subjective, with personal tastes and preferences,' " he declares into a tape-recorder on which he takes down conversations with himself...
...Merely as a perplexing adventure story, this novel is fascinating...
...But these achievements are costly...
...The book traces in a kind of sinister shorthand the efforts of the victim's son, Vero Soto, to learn what Mrs...
...one intellectual and serious, the other thrilling and, because of the very seriousness of the theme, a bit cheap...
...In none of his earlier novels does the author so embed his assertions in action...
...Slade with the truth that his life exemplifies and her pieties deny...
...Slade are inverse images of one another: what is dominant in one is present in the other, so that the shocking truth of their confrontation is their affinity...
...These characteristic defects limit Bowles' ability to project with equal force his chronicles of the sinister and dehumanizing and his notions of their human meaning...
...By ridding himself of all sense of immediacy with his surroundings, he was able to remain impervious to them to assume certain attributes of superhumanity...
...The novel's tight style and tantalizing structure make us only curious where we might have been involved...
...On the first page, the Slades, who will be dead by the end, sit down to "the coffee that would finally persuade them they were alive...
...But, isn't it boring eventually...
...Yet his nostalgia for innocence induces him to perpetrate his worst crimes through a confederate...
...Here he falls into aimless, decadent illustration, as if angst could be validated with a parade of self-flagellating dummies seen through a miasma of hashish fumes against a setting of wilting palm fronds and bestial natives...
...Moreover, through an austerity of craft, it solves the artistic problems which muffle the other novels even when they are violent and tiresomely earnestdespite their aura of Gothic indifference to actual troubles...
...his famous laconic style reaches a standard of economy and evocation previously evident only in his best short stories...
...The Slades, an elderly doctor and his young wife, are vacationing in an unidentified tropical country to celebrate their anniversary...
...From the present vantage point, it is clear that Bowles' first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was misunderstood...
...His vulnerable innocence provokes our solicitude, but he has no function in the plot...
...Some of the novel's details seem arbitrary...
...Slade befriends a lady on board the ship, her husband's annoyance demonstrates that their separation is quite as great as he thinks...
...Slade shrugs the challenge off: " 'It's not my problem.' " For "a fraction of a second" she is drawn into his glacial despair, but his entire project turns out to be useless...
...The abstractness of Bowles' characters fits his method, yet, particularly in Vero's long retrospective trance, we are given just enough credible motivation so that we want more...
...And all the while he probes Mrs...
...From his perspective above the world, Vero Soto can look with contempt at the agonies to which he submits the Slades and can use his mother's death as an emotional aphrodisiac for his mistress...
...Life makes it easy,' " he replies...
...Yet Bowles is too hard-headed to blur their differences...
Vol. 49 • April 1966 • No. 9
