Linguist No. 2: An unnamed professor, in the short story “A Distant Episode” by Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles was an American expatriate writer and musician who lived most of his life in Tangier, Morocco. One of his recurring subjects was the clash between Westerners and non-Western cultures. In 1947, when “A Distant Episode” was published, Tangier was an international zone administered by several European governments – in effect, a European island in a Moroccan sea.
The Professor has no name in this story – a hint at the process of dehumanization that will befall him. We discover that he is “making a survey of variations on Moghrebi.” We are also informed that it took him four years to learn this dialect of Arabic. However, he still has to resort to French for certain words.
The Professor’s ability to speak the local dialect is of limited value in helping him discern and evaluate potential dangers in his immediate environment. He is abducted by some local nomadic tribesmen, who proceed to cut out his tongue, thus depriving him of the power of speech that was his particular skill in this land.
The rest of the story documents the stages of his degradation into the status of a plaything. Unable to speak any language, he seemingly also loses his ability to think. Dressed by his captors in a comical outfit made of rags and bits of tin cans, his new role in life is to entertain the nomads by dancing, grimacing and making odd noises. In this he resembles a dancing bear or other performing animal, an impression strengthened when he is sold as a kind of house slave to a new master.
After many misfortunes, it is language that eventually comes to his rescue. A visitor to his master’s house speaks classical Arabic in his presence, and “the words penetrated for the first time in many months…he had begun to enter into consciousness again.” Then he spots some French words on a calendar: “on the white paper were black objects that made sounds in his head.”
The newly conscious Professor eventually escapes from captivity. We last see him running out of town into the desert. Bowles does not tell us if he survives, or if he is ever able to resume a normal life. The impression is left, however, that somewhere a university press is out there, waiting for a survey of variations of Moghrebi that never comes.