Ever since I realised that the protagonist in Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky is named for the capital of Papua New Guinea: Port Moresby, I've had a bee in my hat about it. In the following text, I will recount the common interpretation of this choice, my own uneasiness with it and finally reconcile myself with the author's choices in order to allow the bee to flee. Whether it does so or rather clings more deeply into my hair remains to be seen. This text contains spoilers.
Port identifies as a traveller, not a tourist, and - at the beginning of the novel - is in search of a place unspoiled by civilisation, an authentic and anonymous experience. Unfortunately for this wanderer, he possesses the name of a distant established place. On the surface, this looks like a joke. Or perhaps it is an admission from the writer that, yes, he is the puppet master and that he is determined to show his authority over the text, albeit capriciously. Most apparently take this as an irony. He wishes to wander aimlessly in the desert to find himself but his name is pinned to the map. And that may well be the fact of it.
However, I wondered if the symbolism went deeper than this. Readers of the Sheltering Sky will know that Mr. Moresby is ill-fated. He will get sick; his marriage will fail when his wife refuses to care for his disease-ravaged body, and then he will submit to death itself. Thus, does having a name which is 'on the map' imply that his end is also destined, that he will always have been travelling to this distant established place, a port indeed, an entry to another world? In that case, this novel, which was published in 1950, seven years before On The Road, will carry a similar message to its better-known cousin: that the search for meaning, although it can be seen as a kind of adventure story, does not inherently anticipate success. Indeed, gambling the coin of self-meaning in the casino of universal indifference may be an excellent way to ensure one's stake is not returned. (Kerouac, put your pen down!)
Well, this is all very well, very deep and very satisfying, but! -- this whole interpretation rests upon the eemis stane of nominative determinism. This is a school of thought whose most famous early exploration was by Plato in his dialogue Cratylus. The rolling 'r' sound of rho, ρ, is well suited to words signifying motion or flow, while plosives like 'd' and 't', which stop the tongue, are appropriate for words describing the end of motion, and so on, and so on. The reasoning that supports the link between the phonic item and its meaning rests in introspection, a feeling about a sound, which is to say - not an empirical observation, not a result found in a repeatable experiment. Try using the reasoning in the Cratylus on translations of the Cratylus itself! It therefore belongs in the group of intellectual activities that also contains numerology and astrology, often labelled 'pseudosciences' (for non-arbitrary reasons).
So what do we have now? A man with a funny name and a nasty conclusion. So far, so ignorable. But they remain together for the duration of the novel, like two words in a sentence. Bowles himself does not explicitly engage in any deterministic or other magical thinking (other than some elements of magical realism perhaps), but he leaves the reader in the company of the two, knowing - I presume - that 'This is a quirk' is not a result that will satisfy the reader of such a profound work. Coincidence places us in a dark room with two poles and allows us to connect them unobserved. It is rather insidious.
It is possible that that is it, that we, the readers, are simply the butts of the writer's dark joke. However, I will attempt a more optimistic conclusion. As can be seen by the inclusion of astrology in the group of pseudosciences, these carefully reasoned intellectual activities lean in the direction of mysticism, a system of religious belief which holds that there exists knowledge not accessible to the intellect. This is consonant with philosophical scepticism, a school of thought which, although secular, holds the same in a somewhat inverted manner, namely that true knowledge may exist but anyway is not available to us.
So, what if we employ this scepticism in our interpretation of Bowles' naming of his central character? Then it remains that the man is doomed to a miserable end and that, while his name may exist as a signpost to that destruction, the reasons forwhy Mr Moresby is star-crossed simply cannot be known. He just is, and it is his seemingly capricious naming, founded in the logically insubstantial practice of nominative determinism, by which the author communicates this impossibility.
This final interpretation may miss outright optimism. In fairness to the writer of his essay, I am looking for hope in a tragedy, but I believe I have found something resembling it. By this last effort at explication, Port Moresby's naming is neither caprice nor a joke on the reader but a meaning whose logic is seated deeply in the text and one in whose making we can be complicit with the author.
Hopefully that will be sufficient to release the bee!
