Sufism, Sorcery, and the Sly Provocations of the Real: Bowles’ “Hallucinatory Realism” and the North African Storytelling Tradition

Author’s Note: This chapter is part of a broader work-in-progress examining Paul Bowles’ literary engagement with Moroccan folklore. As a component of the larger study “Between Worlds: The Liminal Figures of Moroccan Folklore in Paul Bowles’ Fiction,” this preliminary analysis explores one facet of Bowles’ complex relationship with Morocco’s rich mythological landscape. Further chapters will expand upon related themes, characters, and cultural intersections in Bowles’ work. The arguments and interpretations presented here are open to refinement as the project develops.

The revised version maintains the key information while presenting it more professionally and providing additional context about the work’s scope and nature. Let me know if you’d like me to modify it further :)

I. Introduction: Paul Bowles and the Moroccan Imaginary

In his haunting short story “The Hyena,” American expatriate writer Paul Bowles delves deep into the wellsprings of Moroccan folklore and spiritual tradition to craft a dark fable about the perils of misplaced faith and the untamed power of animal instinct. Set in the liminal space of the desert mountains, the tale stages an uncanny encounter between a migrating stork, an archetypal figure of wisdom and piety in Islamic oral tradition, and the eponymous hyena,A dark personification of craftiness and duplicity that roams the borderlands between man and beast. Through his deft interweaving of Quranic allusion, Sufi symbolism, and mythic tropes drawn from the rich storytelling heritage of the Maghreb, Bowles conjures a stark parable of innocence and experience, divine immanence and creaturely cunning, that reads like a postmodern gloss on a classical beast fable.

At the same time, the story’s ironies and psychological ambiguities make it difficult to interpret as a simple allegory. Instead, they reveal Bowles’ deep fascination with the complexities of the psyche and the contradictions inherent in the sacred as an existential concept. Like many of Bowles’ Moroccan writings, “The Hyena” unfolds in an oneiric landscape at once mythic and mundane, where the stark polarities of orthodox belief and popular superstition, civilization and savagery, the rational and the unconscious, collide and blur into one another. In its terse, almost laconic style and its air of brooding, unresolved menace, the tale exemplifies what poet and critic Ammiel Alcalay has called the “arid and darkly subversive reimagining” of North African lifeworlds that characterizes Bowles’ oeuvre (Alcalay, 1993).

To unpack the story’s rich symbolic valences and psychological resonances, we will draw on a range of interpretive frameworks and theoretical paradigms, including Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, structuralist anthropology, and postcolonial theory. we will bring a variety of hermeneutic lenses to bear on Bowles’ enigmatic text, teasing out its complex dialogue with both indigenous narrative traditions and modernist literary sensibilities. At the same time, we will situate the tale within the wider context of Bowles’ career-long engagement with Moroccan culture, tracing the ways his “ethnopoetic” appropriation and transposition of local folklore serves to “defamiliarize” Western codes of meaning-making and structures of feeling.

Central to our argument will be an exploration of the story’s titular figure, the hyena, and its dense web of cultural associations. In Moroccan folklore, the hyena is often viewed as a liminal creature, embodying both fear and reverence. It is associated with trickery, the supernatural, and the boundaries between civilization and the wild. Examining these cultural dimensions will illuminate how Bowles engages with North African storytelling traditions in crafting his narrative. As anthropologist Paul Rabinow notes in his classic study Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, the hyena is a profoundly ambivalent symbol in Maghrebi folk taxonomies, an “anomalous” creature that straddles the lines between the domestic and the wild, the earthly and the demonic, the pitiable and the predatory (Rabinow, 2007). Excluded from the realm of the literal umma or Islamic community by virtue of its outcast status and its distance from the mytho-spiritual order of creation, it figures in oral tradition as a consummate boundary-crosser and shape-shifter, an embodiment of the “return of the repressed” within the social imaginary.

At the same time, the hyena’s outlaw cunning and its unclean yet strangely seductive corporeality link it to the nefs or unruly lower soul in Sufi psychology, the untamed zone of instinct and appetite that must be subdued and sublimated on the path to spiritual realization (Corbin, 1969). In its enigmatic coupling of abjection and shrewdness, purity and pollution, the hyena thus emerges as an archetypal “trickster” figure in the Maghrebi bestiary, a kind of daimonic double or shadow self that both mirrors and mocks humanity’s loftier pretensions.

It is against this backdrop that we will read Bowles’ staging of the fateful confrontation between stork and scavenger as a koan-like meditation on the psychodynamics of faith and skepticism, the seductions of the imaginal and the constraints of the Real. Through his artful manipulation of focalization and perspective, his subtle play of symbolic correspondences and sensory impressions, Bowles immerses us in the “dialectical lyric” of a consciousness caught between archaic myth and existentialist irony, sacral meaning and savage matter (Foucault, 1987). In so doing, he invites us to confront the unresolved antinomies of our own relationship to the sacred as a cultural and psychological category, to grapple with the enduring power and ambiguity of the mythological imagination in a disenchanted age.

From Folktales to Black Magic: The Symbolic Power of Hyenas in Moroccan Culture

In the shadowy realm of Moroccan witchcraft, known as “shawafa,” an unlikely creature holds the key to unlocking desires and shaping destinies: the elusive striped hyena. Native to the wilds of North and East Africa, this nocturnal predator is imbued with mystical properties in the eyes of those who seek to harness its power.At the heart of this age-old tradition lies a peculiar obsession with the hyena’s brain, or “mokh dbaâ.” Believed to grant irresistible charisma and success, this coveted substance commands jaw-dropping prices on the black market, with a single gram fetching up to 500 Moroccan dirhams. For the truly devoted, an entire hyena can set them back a staggering 100,000 to 160,000 dirhams — a small fortune for most, but a worthwhile investment for those desperate to change their fate.

Take Salma, a 42-year-old woman who once scoffed at a shawafa’s prediction that she would never marry. Two decades later, still single and convinced she was cursed, Salma found herself on a frenzied pilgrimage, consulting over 100 shawafas in a bid to break the spell. Or consider Bouchra Saaidi, a 32-year-old driven to the brink of despair by an unfaithful lover. With the help of a shawafa’s arcane rituals and trinkets, she hoped to mend her broken heart and erase the painful memories.

In a society where love, marriage, and financial security are paramount, yet often feel frustratingly out of reach, the allure of the shawafa is undeniable. For those grappling with infertility, unemployment, or even malevolent forces, these practitioners offer a glimmer of hope and a culturally sanctioned path to salvation.But the world of shawafa is not without its shadows. Denounced by Islam as a pagan and satanic rite, witchcraft remains illegal in Morocco, with practitioners risking hefty fines and legal repercussions. Yet despite these threats, the enduring power of belief ensures that the trade in hyena parts and supernatural services continues to thrive, a testament to the unshakable hold that shawafa maintains on the Moroccan psyche.

In this land of ancient magic and modern aspirations, the hyena remains an icon of both fear and fascination — a totem of the desperate lengths some will go to in pursuit of their dreams, and a haunting reminder of the primal forces that still shape our lives in ways we may never fully understand.

II. The Stork and the Hyena: Wisdom and Wildness in the Moroccan Imaginary

“Integrity’s a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They’re pure hyena.” — Jonathan Franzen

The opening vignette of “The Hyena” establishes the story’s symbolic terrain with an oneiric economy and imagistic precision that exemplifies Bowles’ gift for surrealist “insolite narrativity” (Leary, 2016). In a few deft strokes, the author sketches a liminal landscape poised between the baleful aridity of the desert wastes and the austere sublimity of the mountain heights, an interzone of stark contours and vertiginous depths that mirrors the psycho-spiritual threshold we are about to cross:

> A STORK WAS PASSING over the desert on his way north. He was thirsty, and he began to look for water. When he came to the mountains of Khang el Ghar, he saw a pool at the bottom of a ravine. He flew down between the rocks and lighted at the edge of the water. Then he walked in and drank.

Into this starkly elemental scene glides the figure of the migrating stork, an embodiment of the “realm of light, or angelic world” in Islamic cosmology (Bakhtiar, 1976). As a denizen of the air, the stork is associated with the element of spirit and intellect (aql), the supernal domain of pure Being that hovers above the flux of becoming and decay. At the same time, its cyclical peregrinations between North and South, its seasonal passage from the fecundity of temperate climes to the ascetic purity of the desert, link it to the archetype of the wandering mystic or dervish, the spiritual nomad who renounces the settled life of the town for the unencumbered way of divine love and gnosis.

In Sufi lore, the stork is often depicted as a sage and saint, a messenger between heaven and earth whose lofty perspective and untainted nature render it a mirror of the God-seeking soul. The 13th-century Persian mystic Fariduddin Attar, in his allegorical master-work The Conference of the Birds, portrays the stork as a paragon of detachment and single-minded devotion, a winged ascetic who has “withdrawn from the world’s business” and “cleansed the pathway of the mind” in its quest for union with the Absolute (Attar, 1984). Perched on a single leg in a posture of existential abandonment, it images the fana or self-annihilation of the ego before the divine beloved, the realization of the “unity of existence” (wahdat al-wujud) that lies on the far side of multiplicity and difference.

Bowles signals his stork protagonist’s affiliation with this hagiographic tradition through its association with the sacred polarity of water, the providential sign of grace and new life amidst the desert wasteland. The pool at the bottom of the ravine figures as a kind of geomantic center or “well of souls,” an axis mundi that bridges the gap between celestial and terrestrial, spirit and matter, recalling the Quranic description of God as the one who sends down rain as a merciful boon to His creatures (Sura 35:9). The stork’s descent to drink from this secret oasis thus reads as a sort of ritual benediction or baptism, a hierophanic irruption of the timeless into time that recapitulates the primordial “alighting” (nazul) of the divine word into the physical cosmos.

Yet even as Bowles establishes his avian hero as an emissary of the sacred, he subtly undercuts its symbolic status through the introduction of a note of corporeal urgency and natural need. We are told that the stork is “thirsty,” that it searches for water to slake its bodily cravings, a seemingly innocuous detail that nonetheless hints at the way the most ethereal of spiritual yearnings remain tethered to creaturely instinct and appetite. The fact that it must “walk” into the pool to drink further emphasizes its implication in the world of flux and contingency, the inescapable drag of gravity that weighs down even the most exalted of beings.

It is at this metaphysically freighted moment that the story’s titular figure makes its unsettling entrance, appearing as if conjured by the stork’s all-too-earthly thirst:

> At that moment a hyena limped up and, seeing the stork standing in the water, said: “Have you come a long way?” The stork had never seen a hyena before. “So this is what a hyena is like,” he thought. And he stood looking at the hyena because he had been told that if the hyena can put a little of his urine on someone, that one will have to walk after the hyena to whatever place the hyena wants him to go.

The hyena’s sudden materialization at the edge of the pool signals a rupture in the fabric of the ordinary, a “return of the repressed” within the story’s symbolic order. With its sly, sidelong approach and its aura of scabrous intimacy, the outcast scavenger emerges as a classic trickster figure, a creature of the margins and thresholds whose transgressive liminality threatens the integrity of settled boundaries and hierarchies. As Lewis Hyde notes in his seminal study of the trickster archetype, such characters frequently adopt the form of “deformed or deviant bodies” that flout natural categories and social norms, serving as living embodiments of the “open” secret of contingency and flux that haunts the “closed” world of structure and stasis (Hyde, 2010).

In Moroccan folklore, the hyena is a profoundly ambivalent figure that indexes both the perils and the possibilities of life on the social and ontological periphery. On one level, it is viewed as a demonic entity or ghul, an unclean and insatiable consumer of carrion whose nocturnal depredations render it the object of fear and revulsion. As Edward Westermarck notes in his classic study of popular beliefs in the Maghreb, local informants often attribute occult powers of bewitchment and shape-shifting to the hyena, associating it with “black magic, the evil eye, and diabolical possession” (Westermarck, 2014). To be touched by the animal’s urine or other bodily effluvium is to fall under its uncanny spell, to be “polluted” by contact with the impure forces it embodies and drawn helplessly into its orbit.

At the same time, the hyena’s status as an eater of the dead and its perceived ability to traverse the boundaries between worlds lend it an air of otherworldly wisdom and chthonic potency. In some Berber communities, as Paul Rabinow observes, the hyena is viewed as a kind of “saint-sorcerer,” a privileged interlocutor between the realm of the living and the domain of ghosts and spirits (Rabinow, 2007). Its howls and cries are interpreted as prophetic utterances or encoded messages from the land of the unseen, while its scavenging habits are taken as a sign of its power to “digest” and transmute the rites of corruption and decay. Inhabiting the paradoxical space between the sacrilegious and the sacred, the hyena thus figures as a kind of inverted mirror image of the mystic or ascetic, an unorthodox adept of the “left-hand path” of gnosis.

Bowles activates this complex cultural imaginary in his depiction of the stork’s initial encounter with the hyena, foregrounding the uneasy mixture of fascination and dread that colors their exchange. The hyena’s “limping” gait and ingratiating manner immediately mark it as a figure of deception and cunning, a Hermes-like emissary from the shadow side of the psyche. At the same time, the stork’s fearful absorption in the tales of the creature’s occult powers betrays a kind of morbid enchantment, a subterranean affinity between orthodox piety and the lure of the forbidden. Caught between its lofty self-image as a paragon of rectitude and its visceral attraction to the hyena’s aura of transgressive alterity, the bird already stands exposed as a “split” subject, a house divided against itself.

As the story unfolds, this internal fissure will widen into a full-blown crisis of faith and identity, as the hyena’s riddling words and shiftless gestures gradually erode the foundations of the stork’s worldview. In a series of sly rhetorical maneuvers that recall the “crazy wisdom” of the Zen koan or the Sufi shathiyat, the scavenger chips away at the bird’s confidence in the fixed categories of religion and morality, reason and magic. Through a canny deployment of what anthropologist Michael Taussig calls the “mimetic faculty,” the hyena appropriates and parodies the stork’s own language of piety and rectitude, using it to undermine the stability of the sacred/profane binary itself (Taussig, 1993).

When the stork accuses the hyena of trafficking in black magic and flouting the will of Allah, the beast turns the tables by invoking the omnipotence of the divine in its own defense:

> “Why did Allah give you a head, I wonder? You have not learned how to use it.” But the hyena spoke in so low a voice that the stork could not hear him. “Your words got lost,” said the stork, and he let himself drop lower. The hyena looked up again. “I said: ‘Don’t come too near me. I might lift my leg and cover you with magic!’” He laughed, and the stork was near enough to see that his teeth were brown.

Here, the hyena’s mockery of the stork’s naive faith in its own immunity to sorcery shades into a deeper questioning of the bird’s claim to privileged insight into the workings of the cosmos. By ventriloquizing the stork’s own invocation of Allah’s name and turning it back against the hapless bird, the scavenger hints at the way all such metaphysical pronouncements are always already infected by a kind of bad faith, a secret complicity with the very forces they seek to abjure. The laughter that punctuates the hyena’s taunt, with its flash of rotting teeth, reads like a memento mori, a grim reminder of the presence of death and decay at the heart of life.

As the stork continues to press the hyena on the sources of its “bad name,” the beast’s rejoinders take on a more enigmatic and oracular quality, blurring the line between profane jest and mystic paradox:

“If you really understood, you would know that magic is a grain of dust in the wind, and that Allah has power over everything. You would not be afraid.”

With these gnomic words, the hyena seems to gesture towards a higher order of truth that dissolves the conventional opposition between faith and sorcery, divine necessity and creaturely contingency. To “really understand” the all-encompassing scope of Allah’s dominion, it suggests, is to grasp the way in which even the most outlandish and aberrant of phenomena partake of the sacred unity of existence, the undifferentiated ground of being that underlies the multiplicity of names and forms. From this perspective, the fear of magic and pollution that haunts the stork appears as a symptom of its own spiritual immaturity, its inability to reconcile the transcendent and the immanent, the celestial and the terrestrial poles of reality.

At the same time, the sheer obscurity and indeterminacy of the hyena’s utterances resist any straightforward allegorical decoding, hinting at the way the most exalted of mystical insights remains entangled with the most abject of bodily drives and material processes. The fact that the creature’s “teeth were brown,” a sign of its feasting on carrion and waste, serves as a graphic reminder of the shimmering ambivalence of the occult, the way in which the highest flights of gnostic speculation are always shadowed by the dark energy of the libido and the unruly appetites of the flesh.

As the story reaches its shocking climax, with the stork’s attempt to flee the moral and epistemological conundrum posed by the hyena ending in its brutal slaughter and devouring, this sense of metaphysical vertigo rises to a fever pitch. In a final twist that reads like a black-comic inversion of the traditional Sufi fable of the sage and the fool, the hyena triumphantly declares that its conquest of the bird was a result not of magic, but of its God-given “brain,” a sly rationality that trumps the stork’s pious simple-mindedness at its own game. In a final, savage irony, the bird’s desperate attempt to chant the shahada or Islamic declaration of faith as it succumbs to the jaws of its adversary dissolves into a mere gaping of its beak, a silent parody of the divine word that consecrates its own negation.

Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Fabulist Critique: Animal Allegory as Trojan Horse

“A lion does not flinch at laughter coming from a hyena.” — Suzy Kassem

Kalila and Dimna, like many classical animal fable collections, operates on multiple levels of meaning and address. On the surface, it presents itself as a “mirror for princes,” an educational manual designed to instruct rulers in the arts of statecraft and the maintenance of power. Through a series of nested tales and dialogues, often delivered by sagacious talking animals, it purports to offer practical wisdom and moral guidance to help navigate the treacherous currents of courtly life.

However, as many scholars have noted, this didactic veneer often serves as a kind of Trojan horse or decoy, a narrative ruse that smuggles in a more subversive and critical perspective under the guise of innocent entertainment. By displacing human dramas onto the allegorical plane of the animal kingdom, Ibn al-Muqaffa is able to explore the dark undersides of power and probe the limits of orthodoxy with a boldness and impunity that might otherwise court censure or punishment.

Central to this strategy is the figure of the animal trickster, the wily and unruly creature who transgresses social norms and hierarchies and exposes the contingency and hypocrisy of human institutions. In tales like “The Lion and the Ox” or “The Ring-Dove,” we encounter a menagerie of cunning foxes, crafty jackals, and wise serpents who use their wit and guile to outwit the strong and challenge the authority of kings and clerics alike. These trickster figures serve as a kind of narrative “fifth column,” an insurgent force that destabilizes the very moral and political order the stories ostensibly aim to reinforce.

At the same time, the use of animals as protagonists and mouthpieces allows Ibn al-Muqaffa to explore the darker and more instinctual sides of human nature with a frankness and immediacy that might seem jarring or impious in a purely human context. By cloaking his insights in the language of fable and fantasy, he creates a kind of imaginative “free zone,” a liminal space where the ordinary rules and pieties of society can be suspended and the raw truths of power and desire laid bare.

Bowles’ Hyena as Subversive Fabulis

It is not hard to see how this tradition of animal allegory as Trojan horse resonates with Bowles’ use of the hyena figure in his own sly fable. Like Ibn al-Muqaffa’s trickster beasts, Bowles’ scavenger serves as a kind of narrative “mole,” an agent of disruption and subversion that burrows beneath the foundations of the sacred and exposes the “rotten joists and worm-eaten floorboards” of orthodox belief (Burroughs, 1987).

From the moment of its uncanny appearance at the edge of the pool, the hyena signals its affinity with the unruly forces of nature and instinct that lurk beneath the veneer of human civilization. Its “limping” gait and its aura of sly intimacy mark it as a creature of the margins and thresholds, a “privileged interlocutor” between the realms of the sacred and profane (Crapanzano, 1981). At the same time, its association with carrion and waste aligns it with the abject and the impure, the “matter out of place” that threatens the symbolic order and the integrity of the self (Douglas, 1966).

As the story unfolds, the hyena’s riddling words and paradoxical provocations work to undermine the stork’s confidence in the fixed categories of religion and morality, blurring the lines between piety and pollution, wisdom and wildness. Through a series of canny reversals and inversions, it appropriates and parodies the bird’s own language of rectitude and spiritual aspiration, using it to cast doubt on the very coherence and stability of the sacred as a ground of meaning.

When the stork presses the hyena on the source of its “bad name” and its rumored traffic with sorcery, the beast’s gnomic reply — “If you really understood, you would know that magic is a grain of dust in the wind” — reads like a dark twist on the classical Sufi dictum of the “unity of existence,” the doctrine that all created things are but fleeting emanations of the one divine reality. In the scavenger’s mouth, this spiritual cliche becomes a kind of nihilistic koan, a riddle that dissolves the boundaries between faith and heresy, metaphysical truth and rhetorical trick.

Similarly, when the hyena mocks the stork’s pious horror at its transgressive laughter — “Why did Allah give you a head, I wonder? You have not learned how to use it” — it is not only deflating the bird’s smug sense of spiritual election, but also hinting at the ways in which orthodox pieties can serve as a kind of cognitive “straitjacket,” a set of ready-made formulas that constrict thought and stifle the wilder energies of the imaginative faculty. In this sense, the scavenger emerges as a kind of inverted Sufi master or “Mullah of the Shadows,” a heretical sage who uses shock and sacrilege to jolt the disciple out of the “sleep of reason” and into a more radical apprehension of the real.

This subversive appropriation of religious tropes and archetypes finds its most searing expression in the story’s devastating climax, when the hyena brutally dispatches the stork even as it stammers out the shahada, the Muslim testament of faith. In a final, savage irony, the scavenger attributes its victory not to any occult power or magical talisman, but to the simple, God-given gift of a “brain,” a native wit and cunning that trumps all the bird’s lofty pretensions to spiritual election.

Through this shocking inversion of the classical fable’s moral economy, Bowles stages a kind of “profane illumination,” a dark epiphany that lays bare the contingency and fragility of all human claims to transcendent meaning. Like the talking beasts of Kalila and Dimna, his hyena serves as a mocking mirror for the vanities and follies of the anthropocentric worldview, a reminder of the ways in which our most cherished pieties are always haunted by the specter of their own negation.

At the same time, the scavenger’s laughter, in all its nihilistic excess and exuberance, gestures towards a kind of “acephalic” or “headless” gnosis, a paradoxical wisdom that revels in the destruction of meaning and the dissolution of the self. In its very refusal of the codes of allegory and fable, its embrace of the absurd and the unthinkable, it beckons us towards a more radical and uncompromising encounter with the real, a “knowledge in excess of knowledge” that shatters all illusions of human mastery and control (Bataille, 1986).

In this sense, Bowles’ hyena can be seen as a kind of bearer of “mana,” the uncanny and ambivalent force that anthropologists have long associated with the sacred in its most elemental and unpredictable forms (Mauss, 1972). Like the trickster gods and animal familiars that haunt the margins of so many mythological traditions, it embodies the “left-hand path” of transgression and taboo-breaking, the occult current of sacred violence and creative destruction that flows beneath the surface of all religious orthodoxies.

At the same time, its very monstrosity and alterity serve as a kind of apotropaic figure, a “scapegoat” or “pharmakos” whose ritual sacrifice allows the community to purge itself of the impurities and contradictions that threaten its symbolic order (Girard, 1977). By “devouring” the stork and reducing its pious certitudes to a pile of bones, the hyena enacts a kind of “cleansing laughter,” a cathartic release that clears the way for a more authentic and unencumbered relationship to the real.

III. The Hyena’s Laughter: Trickster Hermeneutics and the Limits of the Sayable

“I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry. I will laugh like a hyena, and that when thou art inclined to sleep.” ― William Shakespeare, As You Like It

To fully grasp the implications of this shocking denouement, we must situate it within the wider context of Bowles’ oeuvre and its complex dialogue with both Islamic tradition and modernist sensibilities. As many scholars have noted, Bowles’ Moroccan writings are marked by a profound fascination with the unruly, the heterodox, and the marginal, the “lines of flight” that escape the coding apparatus of orthodox religion and classical Sufism (Hibbard, 2004). In tales like “The Hyena,” “Allal,” and “The Circular Valley,” he returns again and again to figures who incarnate the “outside” of the social order and the symbolic economy, the disruptive “others” who haunt the margins of the human world and subvert its claims to self-contained plenitude.

In this regard, Bowles’ fiction can be read as a kind of “trickster hermeneutics,” a mode of interpretation that foregrounds the semiotic instability and indeterminacy at the heart of all cultural meaning-making (Vizenor, 1993). Like the mythic trickster who operates as both a culture hero and a cultural saboteur, Bowles’ narratives work to unsettle the binary oppositions and fixed hierarchies that structure our apprehension of the real, exposing the contingency and ambiguity of the categories we use to make sense of our lives. By staging uncanny encounters between representatives of the “straight” world of religion and rationality and avatars of the “bent” logic of magic and madness, he invites us to confront the “excluded interior” of our own epistemic and existential frameworks.

In “The Hyena,” this trickster hermeneutics finds its most searing and enigmatic expression in the figure of the laughing scavenger itself, a creature whose very being seems to embody the “fundamental bisexuality” and “radical indeterminacy” of the real (Baudrillard, 1990). With its sly appropriation of human speech and its mockery of the stork’s moral and metaphysical pieties, the hyena emerges as a kind of “acousmêtre” or disembodied voice, a spectral presence that haunts the margins of the sayable and destabilizes the frontiers of the known (Chion, 1999). Its gnomic pronouncements and paradoxical injunctions, at once cryptic and clear-sighted, sacred and profane, resonate with the “impossible” utterances of the Zen masters and the mad mystics, the “words without a place” that pierce through the veil of conventional wisdom to the heart of the matter itself (Foucault, 1987).

At the same time, the hyena’s laughter, with its Nietzschean echo of the “laughter of the heights,” operates as a kind of meta-commentary on the limits and contradictions of the linguistic order as such (Nietzsche, 2001). In its savage irony and gleeful nihilism, its sheer jouissance in the face of the abyss, it gives voice to what Slavoj Žižek calls the “obscene” underside of the symbolic law, the fetishistic and phantasmatic energies that both sustain and subvert the austere edifice of the sacred (Žižek, 1992). Like the grinning skull at the bottom of the allegorical emblem, the hyena’s cachinnation reads as a “memento mori” in reverse, a death’s-head rictus that strips the flesh from the bones of meaning and dissolves all human significations in the corrosive acid of the real.

In this sense, the stork’s fate at the teeth of its adversary can be seen as a kind of literalization of the psychoanalytic process of “subjective destitution,” the traumatic encounter with the void that lurks beneath the fragile artifice of the self (Lacan, 1998). Like the analysand who must “traverse the fantasy” that structures his or her existence in order to access the truth of desire, the bird is forced to confront the constitutive “split” at the core of its being, the gap between its imaginary self-conception as a spiritual paragon and its implication in the world of instinct and appetite. Its brutal devouring by the hyena thus figures as a kind of “second death,” a passage through the crucible of abjection and disintegration that shatters the illusion of autonomy and plunges it into the night of the world.

And yet, even as Bowles’ bleak fable performs a radical nihilation of the metaphysical sublime, it also gestures towards the possibility of a “higher” gnosis, an apprehension of the real that transcends the binary of affirmation and negation. In its very excess and obscenity, its sheer exorbitance to all rational accounting, the hyena’s laughter hints at a kind of “knowledge in excess of knowledge,” a “learned ignorance” that stands as the threshold to a more profound understanding (Bataille, 1988). Like the Sufi “annihilation in the divine” or the “satori” of the Zen adept, it points to a state of consciousness beyond the duality of self and other, a rapturous “being-in-the-world” that dissolves all fixed identities and positions in the fires of ecstatic union.

In this light, the stork’s pitiful attempt to recite the shahada with its dying breath takes on a quasi-mystical resonance, a last-ditch effort to anchor itself in the certitudes of faith even as it is swept away by the flood of chaos and contingency. Its failure to complete the ritual formula, its devolution into a mere empty gaping, reads like a dark parody of the Sufi “dhikr” or remembrance of the divine names, a negative invocation that consecrates its own disappearance. At the same time, the very incompleteness and indeterminacy of the utterance, its hovering between sense and nonsense, meaning and materiality, hints at the way in which the highest truths always remain in excess of language, resistant to the closures of representation and the stabilizing structures of the symbolic.

In the end, then, Bowles’ troubling tale leaves us suspended between a corrosive skepticism and a “negative” faith, a destructive doubt and an apophatic affirmation. Like the hapless stork, we are left grappling with the ruins of our metaphysical certainties, forced to confront the abyssal groundlessness that lurks at the heart of all our attempts to impose order and intelligibility on the flux of experience. At the same time, the story’s very “failure” to provide a stable moral or meaning, its stubborn refusal of narrative closure and allegorical decoding, can be seen as a kind of Beckettian “fidelity to failure,” a willingness to dwell in the interstices of sense and to bear witness to the unresolved tensions and aporias of existence (Beckett, 2009).

In this sense, “The Hyena” emerges as a kind of koan or aporia in its own right, a work that simultaneously invites and frustrates interpretation, that both demands and defeats our hermeneutic desire for mastery and meaning. Like the laughing scavenger at its heart, it stands as a kind of “impossible” object, a textual trickster that mocks our efforts to plumb its depths even as it lures us on with the promise of hidden truths and cryptic revelations. In its very resistance to the strategies of allegory and exegesis, its “failure” to conform to the protocols of the “serious” literary work, it beckons us towards a more radical mode of reading and being, an “ethics of the real” that strives to honour the alterity and excess of the world in all its uncanny strangeness (Levinas, 1969).

IV. Conclusion: Bowles and the Radical Ambiguity of the Real

In the end, Paul Bowles’ “The Hyena” emerges as a work that both invites and frustrates our hunger for narrative closure and metaphysical certainty. Through its artful deployment of animal archetypes and religious tropes drawn from the rich imaginary of Moroccan folk culture, it stages a stark confrontation between the forces of spiritual aspiration and carnal appetite, divine necessity and savage contingency. At the same time, the tale’s ironic inversions and semiotic slippages work to undermine the binary logic of these oppositions, gesturing towards the way in which the sacred and the profane, the transcendent and the abject, are always already enmeshed in a complex dance of intimacy and alterity.

Central to this “trickster hermeneutics” is the figure of the hyena itself, whose sinister laughter and cryptic utterances serve as a kind of leitmotif for the story’s haunting meditations on the limits of language and the radical ambiguity of the real. With its transgressive liminality and its mockery of human pretensions to knowledge and mastery, the scavenger emerges as an embodiment of the unruly excess and indeterminacy that lurks at the heart of all our attempts to make sense of the world. At the same time, its very abjection and monstrosity hint at the possibility of a “higher” gnosis, a paradoxical wisdom that dwells in the interstices of meaning and plunges into the void beyond all names and forms.

In this regard, “The Hyena” can be seen as a kind of “impossible” text, a work that simultaneously demands and defeats our interpretive protocols, that both invites and frustrates our desire for stable truths and determinate meanings. Like the Sufi “shathiyat” or the Zen koan, it operates as a kind of aporia or paradox, a discursive stumbling block that brings us up against the limits of our own understanding and forces us to confront the radical otherness of the real. In its refusal of allegory and its embrace of ambiguity, its willingness to dwell in the space between sense and nonsense, the tale beckons us towards a more capacious mode of reading and being, an “ethics of the impossible” that strives to honour the alterity and excess of the world in all its uncanny strangeness.

At the same time, Bowles’ story stands as a powerful testament to the enduring vitality and relevance of the Moroccan storytelling tradition, its ability to give voice to the deepest perplexities and perturbations of the human condition. By tapping into the rich archive of folk narrative and sacred lore, the author forges a “hallucinatory realism” that defamiliarizes our everyday assumptions and perceptions, casting the quotidian world in a strange and unsettling light (Geesey, 1996). In his hands, the stark landscapes and preternatural denizens of the Maghreb become mirrors for our own unacknowledged fears and desires, conduits for the “return of the repressed” within the psyche and the socius.

Ultimately, “The Hyena” emerges as a kind of dark jewel in the crown of Bowles’ literary oeuvre, a distilled expression of his career-long fascination with the unruly energies and transgressive potentialities of the North African imaginary. Through the interplay of folklore, mysticism, and postmodern irony, Bowles constructs a landscape where the boundaries between civilization and savagery dissolve, forcing readers to confront the fragility of their own cultural certainties. In this way, the story not only encapsulates Bowles’ broader thematic concerns but also challenges the reader to reconsider the ways in which narrative itself shapes perceptions of the real. Like so many of his canonical tales, it invites us to venture beyond the reassuring confines of the known world and to risk an encounter with the radical other — figures that disrupt established norms and challenge preconceived notions of reality. In this case, the hyena embodies that radical otherness, acting as both a trickster and a destroyer of illusions. The tale compels us to submit ourselves to the laughter of the abyss and the sly provocations of the scavenger-sage, forces that unsettle our sense of order and certainty. In so doing, it issues a summons to a more capacious and clear-eyed mode of being-in-the-world, an “ontological hygiene” that abjures the lies we tell ourselves about our place in the order of things and dares to look upon the naked face of the real (Bowles, 1979). For as the hyena knows all too well, it is only in the depths of disillusion and self-reckoning that the path to true wisdom begins.

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