32 pages • 1 hour read
Paul BowlesA Distant Episode
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1947A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Desert
Content Warning: The story and this guide discuss extreme violence, captivity, and enslavement. The guide also references imperialism.
In interviews, Paul Bowles expressed fascination with the desert—in particular, the North African Sahara. Speaking on the connection between “A Distant Episode” and his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, Bowles once stated: “They’re all the professor […]. What I wanted to tell was the story of what the desert can do to us. That was all. The desert is the protagonist” (Caponi-Tabery, Gena. “Paul Bowles.” Twayne’s United States Author Series 706. New York: Twayne, 1989).
In this story, the desert symbolizes a place beyond the bounds of what the professor perceives to be civilization and therefore beyond the bounds of safety. The desert is characterized by its emptiness as “white endlessness” and a “great silence,” suggesting a primal place stripped of anything human, from the trappings of society to the rational mind itself. Throughout the story, the professor is brought further and further into the desert. He begins by leaving the cool highlands to go to the “warm country” near the desert. The professor is then led away out of the town of Aïn Tadouirt into the desert by the qaouaji. Finally, he is taken deep into the desert by his nomadic captors. At each stage of his advancement into the desert, he is brought progressively further away from safety and familiarity and toward abasement and irrationality. It is fitting that in the story’s final scene, when the professor is in the midst of a mental crisis, that he runs out of town into the desert.
This depiction of the desert as beyond the pale of human civilization is one of the story’s more overtly Orientalist elements. In fact, the story’s plot hinges on the fact that the desert is not empty but rather inhabited by groups like the Reguibat. Whether the story treats the Reguibat themselves as one of the desert’s “inhuman” features is debatable; arguably, the mere fact that the professor perceives the desert in this way is enough to ensure his transformation into an animalistic state.
The Camel-Udder Box
The camel-udder box is never seen in the story, nor is it described in detail, but it plays a crucial role. The box highlights the professor’s naivete and his Orientalizing tendencies, developing the theme of Orientalism and Western Naivete in the Face of Colonialism. The name alone suggests an item that is both “exotic” and of little practical use to a Westerner, its link to camels evoking romantic stereotypes of North Africa’s nomadic peoples. Its function is unspecified, nor is it narratively important; any souvenir or trinket could perform the role that this object does. Despite the object’s triviality, the professor put himself at outsized risk to attempt to acquire it. Not only is it ironic that seeking such a minor trinket leads to the predicament that the professor falls into, but it also highlights the professor’s foolishness.
Language
Language is a recurring motif in the story that highlights the gulf between the professor and the people of Algeria. This is highlighted at the outset by the bus driver’s response to the professor’s identification of himself as a linguist: “There are no languages here: Only dialects” (Paragraph 6). The bus driver is here referring to the fact that spoken Arabic takes the form of various dialects, all of which differ from written and classical Arabic. On a literal level, the professor knows this. However, the bus driver’s comment tacitly rejects the professor’s claim to understand the region, implying that his very framework for doing so is flawed. Similar interactions occur between the professor and the qaouaji, who repeatedly replies to the professor’s Arabic in “bad French.” The modifier is telling: The qaouaji goes out of his way to use a language he is less than proficient in, presumably to highlight the colonial dynamics at play in their interactions.
The language motif develops further when the professor encounters the Reguibat, who speak a dialect that to the professor sounds merely like “guttural voices.” Symbolically, this is also when the professor loses his tongue: Presented with a people with whom he cannot communicate at all, the professor loses his ability to think, descending into the “primitive” state he earlier unconsciously associates with the Reguibat themselves. The professor’s rational faculties only begin to be restored when he overhears a conversation between the wealthy Algerian villager holding him captive and the Arab gentleman he is hosting. The Arab gentleman communicates in classical Arabic, which sparks in the professor the memories of his earlier “civilized” existence. However, the professor cannot reconcile his rational faculties and the memories of his previous existence with his new abased state, and the story ends with a final episode of miscommunication, as the French soldier, steeped in his own cultural prejudices, fails to recognize the wordlessly “bellowing” professor as a fellow Westerner.
