ABSTRACT
In a sense any concept of a single, unified Western culture is a construction based on a multitude of trans-cultural and transhistorical fictions that do not hold up under close inspection—too many margins, too many subcultures. The colonial project clearly drew on and manifested the conception of land dominant within Europe. Bowles clearly maintains a link between travel and madness, as (at some level) have other Western novelists who write of the unfortunate experiences Europeans encounter in non-European countries. The exotic is often marked through sexuality or, rather, is made to represent a certain kind of sexual encounter to the extent that stories of Europeans going to foreign countries and having sex with attractive natives have become a constant and persistent cliche of film and literature. Landscape paintings of the Algerian colony tended not to depict French colonials as part of the scene, and indeed many Orientalist works did not show people occupying the land at all.
