THE LIVING BOOKS OF PAUL BOWLES

Doctoral research published in
Zsuzsanna Váradi-Kalmár,The Cultic Code, Buda, Hungary, 2015. ISBN 978-963-12-2131-2 
The complete dissertation has been rejected by the Hungarian Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2015.

Table of contents – a full cycle of thought

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION. A search for the essence: extraction of substance from shadows

    1. Shadow and substance
        1.1 Definition
        1.2 Problem
    2. Paul Bowles
        2.1 One song
        2.2 Four novels
    3. Process of research
    4. The live material of literature
        4.1 Critical background
        4.2 Revelativity

CHAPTER ONE. An artist, a journey, an encounter

    1. Bowles’s journey
    2. Encounter
    3. Baptism by the Absolute
    4. Cultic forms
        4.1 Ecstatic practice
        4.2 Magic
        4.3 Music
        4.4 Story-telling
        4.5 Recital
        4.6 Language

CHAPTER TWO. Separation of narrative, and observation of its metanarrative tendencies

I. Journey and encounter in the Western literary tradition
    1. Narrative as liminal
        1.1 Narrative as dynamic time
        1.2 Liminal characters
        1.3 Literature of travel: search for substance
        1.4 Liminal place of arrival
        1.5 Metamorphosis: thematic process of change
    2. Point of break-through: encounter with substance
        2.1 Orientalism
        2.2 Liminal experience

II. Colonial shadows – Problem paradigm
    1.Culturally conditioned perception
    2.Historical revision
    3.The colonial paradigm
        3.1 Orient as opium
        3.2 Alienation
        3.3 Colonial urge of subordination
        3.4 The divided self
        3.5 Linguistic schism
        3.6 Cultic schism
    4.The point of no return and no development

III. Postcolonial substance – Encounter and resolution
    1. Preliminal phase: juxtaposition
    2. Liminal phase
        2.1 Superimposition: opening to the unknown
        2.2 Identification: third position
    3. Postliminal phase: reintegration
    4. Common ground, common substance

IV. Critical shadows
    1. Lost in story
    2. Criticism as mirror to the critic
    3. Academic symptoms of colonial pathology
    4. Narrative waves

V. Hermeneutic vision of substance
    1. Ontology of reading
        1.1 Experience
        1.2 Participation
        1.3 Ontology of art
        1.4 Transformation of vision
    2. Superseding narrative
    3. Differentiation of time
    4. Reconstruction
        4.1 Operation
        4.2 Nature
        4.3 Structure
    5. Poetry
        5.1 Non-informativity
        5.2 Transgressivity
        5.3 Metaphoricity
        5.4 Poetic figures
    6. Feed-back into narrative: total form
    7. Limit of hermeneutics
    8. Revelativity

CHAPTER THREE. Identification of metanarrative, and observation of its organisation

Introduction to metanarrative textual analyses

I. The Sheltering Sky (1949)
II. Let It Come Down (1952)
III. The Spider’s House (1955)
IV. Up Above the World (1966)

V. Emblematic titles – Revelativity
    1. Emblem
    2. Riddles
    3. Enigma

VI. The cultic organism
    1. The metanarrative unit
        1.1 Narrative waves
        1.2 Atomic substance
    2.The metanarrative bind
        2.1 Character constellations
        2.2 Fields
        2.3 Metanarrative causality
    3. The cultic principles of substance
    4. Summary
    5.Inter-disciplinary perspective: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Rupert Sheldrake

CHAPTER FOUR. Resolution of the apparent divide between shadow and substance

I. Other genres, other works – Metanarrative method of reading
    1. Poetry
    2. Short stories
    3. Travel narratives
    4. James Joyce

II. Cult as myth, orality, and mode of participation
    1. Cultic paradigm: myth-based culture.
    2. Inter-disciplinary aspects.
        2.1 Literary-religious considerations.
        2.2 Myth as passage: anthropology  
        2.3 Inner process of transition: psychology
    3. The metanarrative of myth
        3.1 Magical operation
        3.2 End: fulfilled time
        3.3 The monomyth we live by
        3.4 Archetypal character constellation
        3.5 Archetypal attributes
        3.6 Vertical order
    4. Orality
        4.1 Enactment, performance
        4.2 Structure: repetition and variation
        4.3 Sound
    5. Mythical-metanarrative mode: participation

CONCLUSION. Transformed vision

    1. Synoptic paradigm of substance
    2. The body and pulse of substance
        2.1 The cultic code.
        2.2 Map
        2.3 Textual alchemy
    3. Back to Bowles
        3.1 Genius
        3.2 Existential affirmation
    4. Awakening

WORKS CITED

ETYMOLOGICAL NOTES

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my beloved mother, clinical neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and professor of child neurology Rozália Kálmánchey (1946-2011), who was a pioneer of healing and teaching, and remains to uphold the light of a worthy life; and dedicated also to my dear father-in-law, the poet-photographer Ira Cohen (1935-2011), who referred me to the Akashic field of consciousness, and who first published Bowles’s emblematic poem Next to Nothing in his Bardo Matrix Starstreams Poetry Book in Kathmandu, Nepal, 1976.