Plot
The story is set in Tangier, Morocco. The point-of-view is in the third-person Omniscient. and opens In medias res. The work is divided into 8 sections.
Section 1: Mrs. Callender, of English and Spanish descent operates the Pension Callender, with her American husband. She caters to Western expatriates. Socially, Mrs. Callendar is a thorough reactionary on social matters related to sex and gender: "while a boy should have complete liberty, a girl should have none at all." Her daughter, Charlotte, is soon to arrive from London on her summer break from boarding school. Mrs. Callendar is anxious at the imminent arrival of the 50-something pensioner Monsieur Royer, a seasonal patron who she considers a disreputable "cad." He has the reputation of being a pedophile. She fears that he will behave disgracefully towards the pretty and chaste Charlotte. Mr. Callender is more lenient on these matters and gently reprimands his wife. The young Mr. Van Siclen is an American archeologist working on an excavation site at the village of El Menar. Mrs. Callendar confides her hostility to Royer with the handsome Van Siclen, and he casually assures her that the villagers of El Menar would leave a child molester "behind a rock with a coil of wire around his neck."
Section 2: Monsieur Royer arrives in Tangiers from his sojourn in Spain. He is escaping "prudishness he so hated" and relishes the prospect of making casual sexual conquests in Morocco. A sensualist, he revels in the scent of a jasmine garden. When a little boy persistently entreats him for alms, Royer delivers a violent blow to the child's face. After a moment of regret, Royer approaches the stunned urchin, and in a fit of rage, strikes him again and departs indignantly, "considering himself a particularly understanding friend of the Moslems." He arrives at the Callendar pension and checks in.
Section 3: Charlotte is en route by airplane from London to Tangiers. A dutiful daughter, she recognizes her obligation to visit her parents. Her relationship with her father is satisfactory: he recognizes her "as a fully formed individual." Charlotte is deeply troubled at the prospect of facing her overbearing and controlling mother. She is torn between feelings of guilt and a desire to resist. She arrives at the pensione with apprehensions about an impending struggle.
Section 4: Mrs. Callender and Charlotte are seated in the dining room. Monsieur Royer, at another table, lingers over his meal and eavesdrops on their conversation. Mrs. Callendar makes no effort to introduce him to Charlotte. Mr. Van Siclen arrives from El Menar. He is introduced to Charlotte and acknowledges her "with a minimum of civility." Mrs. Callender gushes over the archeologist. Charlotte's assessment of Van Siclen is at odds with her mother's: "He summed up all the things she disliked most in men: conceit, brashness, and insensitivity." Her dismay at her mother's apparent "denial of all values" fills Charlotte with a sense of guilt and rebelliousness. Mr. Royer suddenly approaches Charlotte and introduces himself. Mrs. Callendar is furious, but remains silent. After a few pleasantries, he departs. Charlotte is favorably impressed with "the French gentleman" but her parents assure her he is a man of low character. Mrs. Callender insists that Charlotte retire for the night. Resisting weakly, the daughter submits.
Section 5: Charlotte, unable to sleep, dresses and slips out of the house furtively. She encounters Van Siclen on the road. He remarks "I saw you come sneaking out." She finds him offensive, but when he seized her by the arm and insisted they take a ride in his jeep, she acquiesces, not wishing to appear "a whining creature - a poor sport." He takes her on a high-speed trip out of town. At a remote location, he tauntingly interrogates Charlotte as to her virtuousness. When she expresses disgust, he grabs her and bites her lip, drawing blood. He offers a handkerchief and chides her "Ah, it wasn't as bad as all that…As a matter of fact, this ride was good for you." Van Siclen drives Charlotte back to the pension.
Section 6: Charlotte rises the next morning and goes to the beach to swim and sunbathe. She does not inform her parents about the sexual assault. She encounters Royer, who amuses her with pleasantries and compliments on her "mermaid"-like beauty, which Charlotte finds inoffensive. On an impulse, and desperate for advice on the assault, she asks: "Do you think it's despicable for a man to kiss a girl against her will?" Royer utterly misapprehends the purpose of her query, believing it arises from disparaging remarks made about him by the guests at the pension. He answers the question: For a man to assault a girl "against her will" is "despicable", but local peasant girls and women of the "lower class" deserve no such immunity. He politely but indignantly takes his leave, despite Charlotte's heartfelt apologies. At that moment, Mrs. Callender appears, outraged at the proximity of Royer to her daughter. After Royer is gone, she launches into a tirade of denunciations against her daughter: "You're thoroughly thoughtless and egotistical." Mother and daughter engage in a protracted contretemps: Charlotte defending Royer, and Mrs. Callender assuring her that he will "ruin your life." That afternoon, Charlotte defiantly joins Royer at tea, but her mother declines to intervene.
Section 7: Mrs. Callendar is obsessed with her daughter's "infatuation" with Royer. She insists that he be dismissed from the pension, but Mr. Callender vetoes this draconian tactic. In desperation Mrs. Callendar enlists Van Siclen to entice Monsieur Royer to the excavation camp for several days to detach him from the pension. Van Siclen reluctantly consents. When Charlotte discovers Royer and Van Siclen's departure, she is nonplussed. Her mother interprets this lack of reaction as contrived: "She's rather a little sneak." Next morning, Charlotte goes into town and accidentally meets Van Siclen. He adopts a proprietary and familiar attitude, accusing her of harboring "hard feelings'" due to her coolness towards him. She accepts a short ride from him. When Charlotte does not return for lunch, Mrs. Callender becomes concerned. She becomes hysterical when an employee informs her that she was with Van Siclen that morning, assuming her daughter is making contact with Royer. She orders her employee to drive her to the remote village of El Menar immediately.
Section 8: Mrs. Callender arrives at El Menar after nightfall. She confronts Van Siclen: "Where's my daughter?" Momentarily alarmed that his assault on Charlotte had been exposed, he recovers and informs Mrs. Callender that Monsieur Royer is missing. He has made enquiries among the local residents, but nobody is talking. Mrs. Callender has a premonition that Royer has indulged in a pedophilic act. They depart for the pension. Royer is indeed nearby, in the company of a peasant child, and observes the departing vehicle. Moments later he is descended upon by local residents who kill him. [4]
Theme
The central theme of "The Hours After Noon" is derived from the relationship between Prospero and his daughter Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611): "How to introduce innocence to experience without tremendous or irreparable harm." Bowles applies this theme to a mother-daughter relationship, where Mrs. Callender's paranoiac protectiveness of Charlotte is a reflection of her own "aching nostalgia for her own youth" and the anxiety at passing beyond middle-age, the "Hours After Noon" in the title. [6]
Bowles links Royer's sordid demise is his failure to escape his "existential torment"—a torment that Mrs. Callender also suffers—and to acknowledge "human unity." The key to the protagonist's redemption is embodied in an epigraph Bowles provides by the poet Charles Baudelaire: [7]
If one could awaken all the echoes of one's memory simultaneously, they would make a music, delightful or sad as the case may be, but logical and without dissonances. No matter how incoherent the existence, the human unity is not affected. [8] [9]
Moments before Royer is murdered, he struggles to reconstruct a passage from Andre Gide's work on the legends of Amyntas: "Time passing here is innocent of hours, yet so perfect is our inoccupation that boredom becomes impossible." [10]
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier in the Interzone, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.
The Mystery of the Blue Train is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the United Kingdom by William Collins & Sons on 29 March 1928 and in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00. The book features her detective Hercule Poirot.
Up Above the World is a novel by Paul Bowles first published in 1966 by Simon and Schuster and in Great Britain by Peter Owen Publishers in 1967. Up Above the World was the last of Bowles’s four novels.
Allal is a short story by Paul Bowles written in Tangiers in 1976 and first published in the January 27, 1977, issue of Rolling Stone. It appeared in his short fiction collection Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977) published by Black Sparrow Press.
The Delicate Prey and Other Stories is a collection of 17 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles, published in 1950 by Random House.
"The Delicate Prey" is a piece of short fiction by Paul Bowles. It was written in 1949 and first published in Paris in the summer 1949 issue of the small literary journal Zero. In 1950, Random House presented the story in the collection of Bowles's short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories. This short story is considered one of Bowles' most outstanding and controversial works of fiction.
"Tapiama" is a short story by Paul Bowles. It was first published in May 1958 by John Lehmann in The London Magazine. It later appeared in the collection of his short fiction, The Hours After Noon, published by the Heinemann in 1959. The story was subsequently published in A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories by Ecco Press in 1988.
"The Echo" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1946 and first published in the September 1946 issue of Harper's Bazaar magazine. It was later published in a collection of his short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories, published by Random House in 1950.
"You Are Not I" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1948 and first published in the January 1948 issue of Mademoiselle magazine. It later appeared in the collection of his short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950), published by Random House.
"At Paso Rojo" is a short story by Paul Bowles, written in 1947 and first published in the September 1948 issue of Mademoiselle magazine. It later appeared in a collection of his short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950), published by Random House.
The Time of Friendship is a collection of 13 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles published in 1967 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. A number of the stories included in this volume appeared earlier "in various places during the 1950s and 1960s."
A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard is a collection of short fiction by Paul Bowles published by City Lights Books in 1962. The volume was the first collection of his works published in the United States since The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950).
"Tea on the Mountain" is a short story by Paul Bowles. Written in 1939, the story first appeared in the 1950 collection The Delicate Prey and Other Stories published by Random House. In the United Kingdom, it was published under the title "A Spring Day" in the collection A Little Stone.
"A Gift for Kinza" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1950 and published in the March 1951 issue of Esquire magazine. The story was published under the title "The Successor" in later collections such as The Hours After Noon and The Time of Friendship. The work was completed in Kandy, Sri Lanka. "The Successor" is one of the three fables that appear in Bowles's short fiction collection The Time of Friendship (1967). The other two are "The Hyena" (1962) and "The Garden" (1964).
The Garden is a short story by Paul Bowles written 1950. It was first published in the Autumn–Winter 1964 issue of Art & Literature (Lausanne). It later appeared in his short fiction collection The Time of Friendship (1967) published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Bowles completed the story in Asilah, Morocco. At only three pages The Garden, the briefest of Bowles's short fiction, is one of three fables that appear in the volume. The other two are “The Hyena” and “The Successor”. The story serves to challenge “the moral legitimacy of established religion, in this case Islam.”
"Doña Faustina" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1949 and first published in the New Directions #12 anthology in 1950. The work is included in his collections of short fiction The Hours After Noon and The Time of Friendship. Written while Bowles was living in Tangiers, "Doña Faustina" is among several works in the collection that exhibit "a maturation of style and a realization of greater complexity" in his literary talents.
"The Frozen Fields" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1957 and first published in the July 1957 issue of Harper's Bazaar. The work is included in his collection of short fiction The Time of Friendship (1967) published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. "The Frozen Fields", an autobiographical piece, is considered one of the 'most powerful" stories in the volume.
Things Gone and Things Still Here is a collection of nine works of short fiction by Paul Bowles, published in 1977 by Black Sparrow Press. The volume is the sixth collection of Bowles’s work, much of which is re-published material.
"You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in Tangiers in 1971 and first published in his short fiction collection Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977) by Black Sparrow Press.