Paul Bowles’ Aesthetics of Containment: Surrealism, Music, the Short Story

Abstract

This thesis aims to reposition the critical understanding of Paul Bowles, away from the traditional North African focus that has guided interpretations of his work, and place him instead within an interdisciplinary framework that is particularly attentive to his mid-century American context. Focussing on Bowles’ initial collection of short stories, The Delicate Prey, it investigates its reception by contemporary critics, and its place within the wider cultural and political climate of postwar America, with specific attention to ideas of freedom and containment. Turning to his involvement in the surrealist movement during the 1930s in Europe, it then suggests ways in which Bowles’ fiction reworked aspects of surrealism within a new aesthetic framework. This framework was also indebted to Bowles’ earlier career as a classical composer, and the third chapter of this thesis focuses on the influence of his musical career on the form and content of his short fiction. Finally, the thesis considers Bowles’ conceptualisation of the short story as a genre, and the ways in which his writing used form to disrupt his readers’ wider ideas about fiction and society. Throughout, this thesis positions Bowles within an alternative literary tradition, arguing that Bowles deliberately drew on practice from visual arts and music in order to develop a distinctive literary idiom. It considers why Bowles’ short fiction failed to find the same support from critics that it found with other writers, and offers a model for understanding this reaction and, ultimately, why the initial critical response has continued to guide the interpretation of his work.