Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky at 75

The Sheltering Sky begins with one protagonist opening his eyes and ends with another refusing to open hers. These are fitting bookends to Paul Bowles’s gripping, disturbing debut novel, first published seventy-five years ago. A hypnotic story of two Americans’ respective descents into death and insanity in the postwar North African desert, the book has at its heart a paradox: nihilism as the force for the life of its characters—and its author. 

Port and Kit Moresby are a husband and wife making their way through the region. Much of their backstory is left untold. Instead, as they progress from an Algerian port town farther and farther into the dark heart of the Sahara, what draws the reader in is Bowles’s portrait of the characters’ psychology. On the first page, as Port awakens and opens his eyes, the author writes: “He was somewhere; he had come back through vast regions through nowhere; there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar.”

This “half sleep” semi-wakeful state of consciousness is the ideal one for Port, and for Bowles. Freed from the burden of bodily existence and the pain of self-recognition, one is able to contemplate—in a word—the void. 

As Port says to Kit in the passage that gives the book its title:

“The sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.” [...]
“But what is behind?” Her voice was very small. 
“Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.”

As above, so below. For Bowles, who passed away twenty-five years ago today, the desert is something like an inanimate siren, nature’s embodiment of the chaotic emptiness atop which life precariously sits, luring his characters into willful self-destruction. His masterful use of simile conveys the sense of chaos the empty landscape reflects back on the protagonists: “Already they could see the endless flat desert beyond, broken here and there by sharp crests of rock that rose above the surface like the dorsal fins of so many monstrous fish, all moving in the same direction.”

They are moving toward death. Port’s eventual demise from typhoid fever is foreshadowed when his passport—his identity in civilization—is stolen midway through his journey. Yet rather than wait to recover the document from the colonial authorities, he pushes on with Kit farther inland. Why?  

From the first pages of the novel, Bowles indirectly communicates that Port is questing for the infinite, and that his quest is as much subconscious as it is deliberate: “As he walked along, his nervousness was made manifest to him by the sudden consciousness that he was repeatedly tracing rapid figure eights with his right index finger. He sighed and made himself stop doing it.”

The reader gets the sense that Port continues his odyssey into the desert because recovering his passport would constitute surrender—to companions he no longer wants to see, to rhythms of life and travel he no longer feels in sync with, to a world he no longer believes in. “I can imagine an absolutely different world,” he tells Kit at one point. She later asks: 

“What’s the unit of exchange in this different world of yours?” He did not hesitate. “The tear.”

As the desert towns become more remote, Port’s illness worsens to the point that he becomes crippled and bedridden. What remains of his life and consciousness is increasingly given over to contemplating the silences and emptiness that we are earlier told “touched his soul.” Totally dependent on Kit for his care, unable and increasingly unwilling to use words or even mediate his thoughts through language, Port is overtaken by death in a final nightmare vision of what lies beyond the sheltering sky. 

His cry went on through the final image: the spots of raw bright blood on the earth. Blood on excrement. The supreme moment, high above the desert, when two elements, blood and excrement, long kept apart, merge. A black star appears, a point of darkness in the night sky’s clarity. Point of darkness and gateway to repose. Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose.

What makes Port’s arc a tragedy is that his quest to touch the void springs from a warped desire to seek out the divine. In a world in which God is dead, the only infinity that remains is emptiness, meaninglessness, oblivion. 

While that emptiness is an object of fascination for Port, it’s a source of relief-seeking for Kit, and one that drives her onward into the desert following his death in a bid to escape time itself. From early in the novel, Bowles depicts Kit as crippled by passivity, drawn to others only insofar as they serve as augurs for what’s to come, a future over which she has no control:

There was never any knowing or any certitude; the time to come always had more than one possible direction. One could not even give up hope. The wind would blow, the sand would settle, and in some as yet unforeseen manner time would bring about a change which could only be terrifying, since it would not be a continuation of the present.

Alone in the desert, Kit encounters a caravan, the leader of which makes her his sex slave and takes her into captivity. As her life is slowly reduced to the sense perceptions of these encounters with Belqassim, her captor, Kit’s sense of time slips away into a hellish “eternal present” in which she takes perverse comfort. It’s only some time after Belqassim brings her to his home and she realizes his three wives are slowly poisoning her that Kit begins to exit her trance of timelessness and make her escape.

And yet, once she’s free from captivity and in the care of Catholic nuns arranging her return to the American consulate, Kit initially finds herself unable and unwilling to communicate, say her name, or even open her eyes. To do so would be to throw herself back into the predicament she was so desperate to escape—that of a fallen human:

She knew that the constant references to her closed eyes were being made only in order to trap her into protesting: “But my eyes are open.” Then they would say, “Ah, your eyes are open, are they? Then—look!” And there she would be, defenseless before the awful image of herself, and the pain would begin.

The novel concludes with Kit’s disappearance in front of a hotel in Oran, right before she’s set to be reunited with a previous traveling companion. It’s as if, by refusing to open her eyes, she literally removes herself from the world, wills herself into the nothingness that lurks behind the sheltering sky. 

Bowles ends his book with the image of a streetcar making its way through the city. “At the edge of the quarter the car, still loaded with people, made a U-turn and stopped; it was the end of the line.” Finishing the novel, I couldn’t help but think of a line from another work—the greatest work of literature ever written by a North African, in fact: “You made us with yourself as our goal, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

How different Port and Kit’s lives could have been if they believed that behind the sheltering sky lurked, not absolute darkness, but infinite love. 

Nat Brown is a writer in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Image by Sergey Pesterev, from Flickr, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.