A Distant Episode

Content Warning: The story and this guide discuss extreme violence, captivity, and enslavement. The guide also references imperialism.

“A Distant Episode” is a psychological horror story that uses foreshadowing, symbolism, imagery, and irony to create a mounting atmosphere of menace and to chart the professor’s psychological transformation. The story explores the themes of Orientalism and Western Naivete in the Face of Colonialism, “Primitiveness,” “Civilization,” and Psychology, and Fatalism and Free Will. As with many of Paul Bowles’s works, the story concerns a Western traveler’s ill-fated adventures in a foreign land.

The first half of the story consists of the professor’s visit to the town of Aïn Tadouirt, a fictional Algerian town toward the country’s interior. From the outset, the locals’ reactions to the professor characterize him as slightly naive and out of his depth. Although he can speak the language of the region, having taken “four years” to learn Algerian Arabic, the locals do not treat him with friendliness or regard. The bus driver who talks with him at the beginning of the story treats the professor with a “scornful” attitude. There are also signs that in spite of the professor’s eagerness and fond memories, the town is not what he would like it to be. Despite its name, the Grand Hotel Saharien is a decaying, squalid building, and his only contact in the town, Hassan Ramani, has passed away. These details establish an ominous tone and frame the professor as something of a victim of both circumstances and his own preconceptions.

Besides serving as the inciting incident, the exchange in which the professor asks the qaouaji to take him to the Reguibat in search of a camel-udder box elaborates on the nature of those preconceptions. For the professor, the box is an exotic object with value rooted in its association with a romanticized vision of “authentic” local culture. This is why the request irritates the qaouaji:

‘Sometimes the Reguibat bring in those things [camel-udder boxes]. We do not buy them here.’ Then insolently, in Arabic: ‘And why a camel-udder box?’

‘Because I like them,’ the Professor retorted. And then because he was feeling a little exalted, he added, ‘I like them so much I want to make a collection of them, and I will pay you ten francs for every one you can get me’ (Paragraphs 16-17).

This exchange is typical of the cultural miscommunication that occurs throughout the story. The implication is that the qaouaji looks down on the Reguibat as uncivilized and the professor as dabbling condescendingly in North African culture. The professor grasps the former but plays into the latter, essentially asserting that he understands North African culture better than the qaouaji himself. He then compounds the insult by offering to pay the qaouaji to help the professor satisfy his own whims—something entirely outside the qaouaji’s job description, and which presumes the qaouaji’s poverty while enlisting him in a quasi-servile role. Moreover, his remark that he wants to make a “collection” of the boxes evokes the colonialist impulse to study and systematize the cultures of colonized peoples. As the story takes place in the context of French rule in Algeria, this is not an insignificant detail; though the professor’s enthusiasm for the local language and culture seems genuine, both it and he are enmeshed in the colonialist project.

Almost as soon as the qaouaji begins to lead the professor out of town, the tone of the story becomes very tense and menacing: “He may cut my throat” (Paragraph 27), the professor thinks to himself, recognizing the qaouaji’s animosity but again failing to connect it to the colonial context. The pacing in this section is slow and deliberate, written in such a way as to highlight the mounting tension as the professor begins to trust the qaouaji less and less. Each element of the professor’s journey out of town is described in detail, with imagery that highlights the signs of decay that surround the professor: There is a broken wall, a “ruined marabout” with “clumps of stunted, useless palms” behind it (Paragraph 45), and a winding road surrounded by rocks.

The horror in this section consists of the horror of anticipation—the pervading sense of dread and menace that these successive images create. The dialogue is also crucial in creating this atmosphere of menace. The professor repeatedly tries to engage the qaouaji in conversation, attempting to ascertain the man’s intentions, but the answers given by the qaouaji are (at least from the professor’s perspective) cryptic and ambiguous, which feeds the professor’s perception of the land and its people as fundamentally incomprehensible. As they hear flute music from the Reguibat’s camp, the professor tells himself, “These people are not primitives” (Paragraph 55), but the very fact that he does so implies that to a certain degree, he does think of the people of Algeria as primitives. By this time, the sense of menace is at its height. The physical setting reflects this, as the cliff that the professor and the qaouaji stand upon just above the Reguibat encampment represents both a physical drop and a metaphorical one, mirroring the possibility of how rapidly the situation may change for the worse.

In the second half of the story, comprising the professor’s captivity at the hands of the Reguibat, the story shifts to psychological horror. The professor has encountered a devastating fate. Not only is he enslaved, but he has also lost his cognitive faculties. When the professor loses his tongue, he enters a state of shock from which he never recovers, regressing to an animalistic state and capable only of eating, defecating, and dancing when bidden to: “Even when all his wounds had healed and he felt no more pain, the Professor did not begin to think again” (Paragraph 66). This is not meant to be a realistic portrayal of a trauma response. Instead, the story takes on an almost dreamlike (or nightmarish) quality in its portrayal of the psychological change that the professor goes through. Language plays an important part in the story, and the symbolism is clear. The capacity for speech is intimately connected with rationality: When the professor loses his tongue, he undergoes an almost supernatural regression to a “primitive” state.

That he is surrounded by people whose language he cannot understand contributes to his transformation. At the very beginning of the story, the bus driver tells the professor that if he goes further south, he’ll find “some languages [he] never heard before” (Paragraph 6). This foreshadows the story’s events. When the professor is taken captive, he is brought south and is indeed introduced to a new language: that of the Reguibat. Furthermore, he is also introduced to metaphorical new language of violence and abasement, for which he again has no frame of reference. Because he does not recognize the violence of the colonialist impulse he embodies—the intrusion of his presence in the camp, the ends to which his “survey” of the local languages might be put, etc.—he also does not recognize the Reguibat’s violence as a response. The Reguibat instead remain utterly foreign to the professor: an embodiment of the supposed savagery and mystery of the colonized subject.

Conversely, exposure to languages he understands—classical Arabic and French—causes the professor to regain some of his faculties. The psychological horror of the story reaches its peak at the story’s conclusion. When the professor regains some of his cognitive faculties and his memories, he races into the desert, presumably devastated by an understanding of how far he has descended into an abased state. That said, the heavy irony of this moment complicates any straightforward reading. Like many Western texts, “A Distant Episode” uses the desert to symbolize a space that is “primitive” and unreached by Western “civilization”; for the same reason, it is associated with the unconscious mind. However, when the professor runs out into the desert, he is more lucid than he has been for over a year. What strikes the French soldier as “holy mania” (and, relatedly, evidence that the professor is a local) is in fact the professor’s own horror at his self-awareness. Moreover, the soldier is no more rational and no less violent than the Reguibat, shooting at the professor “for good luck” (Paragraph 75).

Such details complicate readings of the story merely as exoticizing. The story’s portrayal of Algeria and its people has many hallmarks of Orientalism: the tendency of Westerners to view “Eastern” (particularly Middle Eastern) cultures as exotic and irreconcilably different from Western culture. Ultimately, the degree to which one reads the story as itself Orientalist hinges on the extent to which the professor’s perspective is the story’s own. The final scene is therefore crucial because it pulls away from the professor’s point of view. Although the French soldier operates under his own misconceptions, the gap that separates his perspective from the professor’s destabilizes many of the binaries that traditionally underpin Orientalism—e.g., the association of the “West” with rational thought and the “East” with emotion, superstition, and instinct.