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The Spider's House

This essay analyses Paul Bowles' The Spider's House and interrogates its representational strategies. While readings of Bowles' work have often prioritized interest in the existential dilemmas of his western characters in their encounter with foreign cultures, I read the text from the positionality of a native Moroccan. The essay argues that Bowles posits the native as a relic from the past whose presumed pristine state needs to be preserved to serve as a cultural commodity. Submerged in cultural anachronism and deprived of any historical consciousness, the native, represented in the character of Amar, is locked in an untenable position between localized foundational discourses and the narrative of modernity advanced by French colonial rule. The essay thus locates The Spider's House within a tradition of western discursive penetration that relegates the Other to outer rims of political, historical and cultural centres. The essay concludes that instead of opening new venues for the native that gesture toward a postcolonial moment of agency and self-representation, Bowles revalidates essentialized conceptualizations of cultures, ethnicities and histories.