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.
Background
Biographical Context: Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles was born in 1910 to a middle-class family in New York City. Growing up, he had a difficult relationship with his father but was very close with his mother, who introduced Bowles to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe at a young age. The influence of Poe is very apparent in “A Distant Episode.” The story is, like much of Poe’s work, a horror story with many macabre elements.
In high school, Bowles wrote poetry and edited his school’s literary magazine. In 1928, he enrolled at the University of Virginia, but, dissatisfied with his classes, he abandoned his university studies after a single semester. He then traveled to Paris, where he was introduced to the literary and artistic circle of the poet Gertrude Stein.
Beginning in 1929, Bowles studied music under the famed composer Aaron Copland, with whom he would go on to have a romantic relationship. In 1938, Bowles married Jane Auer, who would later become a novelist and playwright. Throughout their unconventional marriage, Bowles and his wife, Jane, each had extramarital romantic and sexual relationships with members of their own sex. Bowles developed a reputation as an up-and-coming composer for musicals and plays before turning to writing fiction in the 1940s, partly inspired by his wife’s work on her own novel.
In the 1930s, Paul Bowles had traveled extensively in North Africa, with visits to Algeria and Morocco (at that time both French possessions). In letters to friends and family, Bowles describes scenes, images, and stories similar to those he would go on to write about in his fiction. Shortly after the publication of “A Distant Episode” in 1947, Bowles was offered a contract by a New York publishing company to write a novel. The contract gave Bowles the impetus to return to North Africa, where he worked on The Sheltering Sky, his first novel. Published in 1949, the novel shares many plot elements and themes with “A Distant Episode”: In both stories, a Westerner is taken captive by a desert tribe while touring North Africa and experiences a break from reality by the end of the story.
Bowles would go on to settle down in Tangier in Morocco, where he became a prominent figure for writers of the Beat Generation. He died there in 1999.
Historical Context: Algeria and North Africa in the 20th Century
North Africa was first conquered by Muslim Arabs in the 8th century, and both Arab culture and Islam have shaped the region, as evidenced by the region’s language, architecture, food, and customs. In 1830, King Charles X of France initiated a military invasion of Algeria in a bid to shore up his popularity. The French conquest of Algeria was succeeded by a period of colonization that lasted until the middle of the 20th century. Over a period of several decades, the colonial French government suppressed revolts by the local Algerians and enacted policies that favored the French colonists. In the first half of the 20th century, Algeria was already a well-known destination for Western travelers and tourists, to whom it was portrayed as exotic and romantic.
The majority of Algerians speak Maghrebi Arabic, an umbrella term for various North African regional variants of Arabic. The Reguibat, the tribal group with which “A Distant Episode” is most concerned, primarily speak Hassaniya Arabic. Though a form of Maghrebi Arabic, the dialect is very different from Algerian Arabic due to the influence of indigenous languages (hence the professor’s inability to understand his captors). These indigenous languages include the Berber languages, which predate the Arab conquest. Other tribal groups that traditionally inhabited Algeria’s interior, such as the Touareg, continue to speak languages from the Berber group.
A nomadic people, the Reguibat have traditionally occupied parts of 21st-century Mauritania, Morocco, and Algeria. At the time of “A Distant Episode,” these regions were divided between French and Spanish control, and the Reguibat were among the groups most opposed to occupation, mounting armed resistance throughout the colonial period. This helps explain not only their warlike reputation in the story but also their actions toward the professor—a symbol of Western imperialism. The Reguibat’s commitment to independence would endure even after the colonial era officially ended; when Spain transferred control of the Western Sahara to Morocco and Mauritania in 1975, the Reguibat were at the forefront of the Polisario Front movement for regional self-determination (United States, Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The Polisario Front: The Fourth Element in the Sahara Equation, 16 Dec. 1977).
