The Orient "made Oriental": a study of William Beckford's Vathek.

Al-Alwan, Muna

I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class, or economic history, but authors are ... very much in the history of their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience in different measure.

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

BECKFORD (1760-1844) IS DESCRIBED as "one of English literature's real oddities; he lived a life of scandal and extravagance, both financial and sexual" (Norton Anthology Online 3). He seems to have been fascinated by the character of the voluptuous Vathek as portrayed in d'Herbelot's Bibliotheque Orientale (1697), one of the most influential Orientalist works.Beckford borrows from d'Herbelot but he makes Vathek more cruel and his associates in crime more horrifying and grotesquely disgusting. He depicts Vathek as totally dissolute, addicted to pleasure and extremes of luxury, far too proud, and sadistic, who deliberately chooses the path of evil; for besides "the sensuality in which he indulged," he has the "insolent curiosity of penetrating the secrets of Heaven" (Vathek 81-3). He devotes himself, partly under the influence of his sorceress mother Carathis, to the direct service of Eblis. Crime follows crime and in his journey towards the haunted ruins of Istakar (the site of the inferno of Eblis himself), he conceives a passion for the beautiful Nouronihar who is as much intoxicated by the prospect of supernatural power as he is himself. They are at last introduced by a subordinate fiend, the Giaour, to the famous Halls of Eblis where after a short interval they meet with their due reward, the eternal torture of a burning heart as they wander amid riches, splendours, opportunities of knowledge and all the other treacherous and bootless gifts of hell.

In Vathek, the Orient is predominantly evil, representing all the seven deadly sins in the persons of the royal family of the Caliph and his mother. The tale opens with emphasis on Vathek's pride and sensuality. He is a person bent totally on the gratification of the senses. His palaces, which are described in dazzling details, are dedicated to the five senses. His fifth palace represents his lust with its reference to the Houris. If there is any goodness in this world, it is presented in weak helpless persons or in the pitiable common people. In a world generally evil and devilishly grotesque, goodness and innocence cannot survive without supernatural help, provided here by the good Genii. Even "Mahomet" is helpless to protect the innocent.

Vathek's despotism and the total subservience of his subjects are highlighted throughout. The subjects are ironically referred to as "good Mussulmans" (84). Like Vathek, his subjects are sensualists; "the subjects of the caliph, like their sovereign, being great admirers of women and apricots from Kirmith, felt their mouths water at these promises" (86). The whole culture is presented as such: a culture of voluptuousness, sensuality, decadence, indolence, and ease. Even piety is derided. Pious Muslims like Fekreddin and his "old grey beards," the dwarfs with their Korans and dromedaries are sarcastically presented. Same with other dignitaries like "Mullas," "Sheiks," and "Imams." They are deliberately made to look ludicrous, always humiliated and insulted. The dwarfs are the most devoted creatures and the truest most helpless followers of "Mahomet." This definitely carries a symbolic meaning. Even references to "Alia" and his prophet "Mahomet" are accompanied by an air of lightness. Vathek is ironically described as "commander of the faithful." Thus the Muslim religion and its people are ridiculed through Vathek and the ignorance, superstition and subservience of his subjects, who no matter what he does, still venerate him as "commander of the faithful." The religion of Islam and its prophet "Mahomet" are helpless to save the "good Mussulmans" from humiliation, suffering, or death. Nor can they correct the corruption of evil. Vathek and his Giaour (the emissary of Eblis) reign supreme. Said's general statement about the Western vision of Orientals or Arabs as "gullible, 'devoid of energy and initiative,' much given to 'fulsome flattery', intrigues, cunning, and unkindness" (Orientalism 38), is aptly illustrated in Vathek.

As a work of fiction, Vathek is both a Gothic tale and an Arabian Nights-style fable, with a tone veering between horror and an often cruel sense of humor. Beckford's tale is said to be "of the greatest importance to the Gothic genre and to a lesser extent to much 19th century horror." (Norton Anthology 3). In The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, E.K. Sedgwick argues that "Beckford's Vathek is an oriental tale with strong Gothic influences." Many Gothic novels took from Vathek the demonic quest, the Gothic hero-villain, the Gothic imagery of underground confinement and enclosure, and finally the depiction of a universe controlled by evil (19). Sedgwick discusses Beckford's use of this genre and particularly concentrates on the tale's preoccupation with the Halls of Eblis. For Beckford, Sedgwick states, Gothic "became a great liberator of feeling. It acknowledged the non-rational in the world of things and events" (1).

Vathek also belongs to what is called "Romantic Orientalism" which has roots in the first decade of the eighteenth century, with the earliest translations of The Arabian Nights into English (from a version in French, 1705-08). The popularity of The Arabian Nights inspired writers to develop a new genre, the Oriental tale, of which Samuel Johnson's History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759) is the best mid-century example. Romantic Orientalism developed into the nineteenth century and parallels Literary Gothicism. William Beckford is considered an important figure in the history of both movements (Norton Anthology 1). The relationship between Gothic literature and Orientalism is succinctly summed up in the following words:

Like Gothic novels and plays, Oriental tales of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries feature exotic settings, supernatural happenings, and deliberate extravagance of event, character, behaviour, emotion, and speech--an extravagance sometimes countered by wry humour even to the point of buffoonery. It is as though the "otherness" of Oriental settings and characters gives the staid British temperament a holiday. Gothicism and Orientalism do the work of fiction more generally--providing imaginary characters, situations, and stories as alternative to, even as escape from, the reader's everyday reality. But they operate more sensationally than other types of fiction. Pleasurable terror and pleasurable exoticism are kindred experiences, with unreality and strangeness at the root of both" (Norton Anthology 1-2). [Italics mine]

It is this false representation of the Orient in Romantic Oriental tales in general, and in Vathek in particular, that brings Said's arguments to mind. For Said, the Eastern world presented in Orientalist literature is an "imaginative and imaginary world culled from the Arabian Nights and preconceived and prejudiced attitudes. It is a 'discourse' used to 'produce' the Orient--for various purposes, political and otherwise, particularly during the post-enlightenment period" (3). Said briefly refers to Beckford as he does to many other writers of fiction in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century:

Popular Orientalism during the late 18th century and early 19th attained a vogue of considerable intensity. But even this vogue, easily identifiable in William Beckford, Byron, Thomas Moore, and Goethe, cannot be simply detached from the interest taken in Gothic tales, pseudo-medieval idylls, visions of barbaric splendor and cruelty .... sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy: the Orient as a figure in pre-Romantic, pretechnical Orientalist imagination of late-eighteenth century Europe was really a chameleon-like quality called adjectivally "Oriental" (118).

Vathek is often referred to as an example of Orientalist literature. Speaking of "individual literary works," Said proposes "to read them first as great products of the creative interpretive imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire." (Culture and Imperialism 1). One cannot deny that as a work of art, Vathek is a very rich and dazzling tale. It was warmly received by Beckford's contemporaries. Byron was fascinated by it and praised it in the notes to his own Oriental tales. But what is more important to me is the way this tale reflects as Said points out, the "standardization and cultural stereotyping ... of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative demonology of the East" (Orientalism 26).

I agree with Ismail Patel when he says that it can be argued that the text is a work of fiction, and so does not claim to be an accurate account of the East. Such an argument could initially carry some weight, but several factors make it weak (127). When the text was first published it claimed to be a translation of an Arabic manuscript based on a historical figure of the East and was accompanied by learned notes about Eastern terms and practices. To Westerners in Beckford's time, this buttresses the authenticity of the tale. Nowadays it can be easily proved that the tale and the notes are greatly inaccurate. R.J. Gemmet in his critical work, William Beckford, admits that Beckford's knowledge of the East is inaccurate or that it is not based on reliable sources, "[T]he scholarship of the period," crystallized in d'Herbelot's notes in Bibliotheque Orientale, a primary source for Vathek, "was too erratic to be authoritative"(99). Most of the so-called academic notes supporting the text of Vathek are provided by d'Herbelot's work, but "almost every single definition of d'Herbelot is greatly inaccurate, if not offensive to the East" (Patel 3). Absurd notions are provided as the true beliefs of a superstitious and backward people.

Said himself has his own say on d'Herbelot and the role of his Bibliotheque in confirming the old myths about the Orient: In such efforts as d'Herbelot's, Europe discovered its capacities for encompassing and Orientalizing the Orient.... I think that the Bibliotheque did not attempt to revise commonly received ideas about the Orient. For what the Orientalist does is to confirm the Orient in his readers' eyes; he neither tries nor wants to unsettle already firm convictions" (Orientalism 65).

Before the publication of Edward Said's influential and controversial Orientalism (1978), scholars tended to view Eastern places, characters, and events pervading late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British literature as little more than stimuli for easy thrills. However, in the words of the Norton Anthology, ... this attitude has changed dramatically. Along with its well-studied interests in the inner workings of the mind, connections with nature, and exercise of a transcendental imagination, the Romantic Period in Britain is now recognized as a time of global travel and exploration, accession of colonies all over the world, and development of imperialist ideologies that rationalized the British takeover of distant territories (2). [Italics mine]

In Said's words, Orientalism became "ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them") (43). Said's vision has been embraced worldwide. Many critics, Arabs, Muslims, Europeans, and others, echo Said's ideas. Rana Kabani, in her book, Imperial Fictions, argues in the same vein: In the European narration of the Orient there was a deliberate stress on those qualities that made the East different from the West, exiled it into an irretrievable state of "otherness." Among the many themes that emerge from the European narration of the Other, two appear most strikingly. The first is the insistent claim that the East was a place of lascivious sensuality and the second that it was a realm characterized by inherent violence. These themes had their significance in medieval thought, and would continue to be voiced with varying degrees of forcefulness up to the present time. But it was in the nineteenth-century that they found their most deliberate expression, since that period saw a new confrontation between East and West--an imperial confrontation. If it could be suggested that Eastern peoples were slothful preoccupied with sex, violent, and incapable of self-government, then the imperialist would feel himself justified in stepping in and ruling (5-6). [Italics mine]

This "European narration of the Other" is also one of the major topics of Homi Bhabha's book, The Location of Culture. Bhabha agrees with Said when he speaks "of that ahistorical nineteenth-century polarity of Orient and Occident, which in the name of progress, unleashed the exclusionary imperialist ideologies of self and other" (19), but he adds another dimension to the argument: An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of fixity in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as a sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discourse strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always 'in place,' already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated ... as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial license of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved (66). [Italics mine]

This "otherness," Bhabha adds, "is at once the object of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity" (67). Three things in Bhabha's argument are surely applicable to Vathek; the "fixity" of the stereotype, its constant repetition, and its being "at once the object of desire and derision." In Vathek, the characters are all the familiar Oriental Gothic stereotypes. They are portrayed both to dazzle the imagination with their magnificently luxurious sensual life, and to arouse one's derision because of their barbaric excesses and violence. There is a vein of caricature that now and then comes to the surface, and invites a laugh without disturbing the sense of Eastern opulence and extravagance in a tale crowded with incident and action. This kind of ambivalence is characteristic of this tale. The reader is led through a myriad of attitudes and impressions: from the descriptions of exotic sensuously breathtaking gardens, natural scenes, and luxurious palaces in the style of the Arabian Nights, to the idyllic pleasurable life of princess Nouronihar and her cousin Gulchenrouz, to the shocking farce atrocities in the depiction of the caliph's "debasing habits" (86), his "malignant avidity" (98), his "importunate appetite" and "gluttony" (103), his "killing eye," unpredictable cruelty and disrespect for his subjects, and his paroxysms of passions, which make him "the most laughable spectacle" (93), his ludicrous relationships with his "harem," his numerous wives always kept and guarded in "cages" (110-11), his "degrading ... spectacle" as he is saved from fire by "one of his Ethiopian wives [who] clasped him in her arms; threw him upon her shoulder like a sack of dates" (111), to the Giaour's grotesque appearance, his satanic games, his demand for the blood of fifty innocent children and his ridiculous treatment of the Caliph, to the introduction of the magnificent Tower of Samarah, where the "wicked" Carathis, "under the guard of fifty female negroes mute and blind of the right eye," enjoys "her favourite amusements" (101), preserving "the oil of the most venomous serpents; rhinoceros' horns; and woods of a subtile and penetrating odour, ... together with a thousand other horrible oddities"(100), through which she achieves "intercourse with the infernal powers"(101), and finally to the sombre magnificence of the tragic end in the Halls of Eblis.

All these dizzying scenes and incidents make Vathek an example of what Said refers to as the "demonology of the East." The Caliph, the "vicegerent" of the "great prophet Mahomet and his queen mother are presented to be the most devoted servants of the infernal powers:

The Caliph ... betook himself to drinking anew. Carathis, whose antipathy to wine was by no means insuperable, failed not to pledge him at every bumper he ironically quaffed to the health of Mahomet. This infernal liquor completed their impious temerity, and prompted them to utter a profusion of blasphemies. They gave a loose to their wit, at the expense of the ass of Balaam, the dog of the seven sleepers, and the other animals admitted into the paradise of Mahomet (Vathek, 102-3).

On the other hand, the utter subservience of the subjects in general, and the emirs, vizirs and religious dignitaries in particular, who are portrayed as naive, easily manipulated and controlled, and who remain faithful to Vathek and his mother to the very end in spite of their suffering and the cruel injustices done to them, reinforces Said's vision of the Orientalist's well-orchestrated designs to "demonize" and "dehumanize" the East, and thus pave the way for the imperialist powers to step in and rule. In addition, the tale seems to prove what Said describes as "one of the important developments in nineteenth-century Orientalism.... the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient--its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness" (Orientalism 205).

Vathek clearly transforms the Oriental world into a nightmare by infusing it with wickedness and evil, and by painting a hell at its conclusion. Beckford's cynicism and irony, his "bizarre associations that are simultaneously shocking and grotesque" (Gemmet 95), his use of farce and caricature, and his denigration of the Eastern culture he portrays, justify this kind of reading of the tale. It is surprising therefore to find critics like Naji Oueijan and Mohammed Sharafuddin praising Vathek and "its brilliant notes," which, to Sharafuddin, "proved to be a rich cornucopia of oriental material for its Romantic successors" (xxxiv). To Oueijan, Vathek "deserves particular attention as it was the first Romantic work of prose-fiction promoting Orientalism," an original work, "ahead of its time for it addressed the needs not of its own age but rather of the following one" (7). This so-called "originality of Vathek," Oueijan continues, ... lies in its revealing two distinct worlds, the visionary world of man's soul and the concrete exterior world known through his senses. Both are fused into an exotic whole which powerfully stirs the writer's imaginative faculties into deeper dimensions of the soul and its mysteries, perhaps most strikingly in the tale of the Hall of Eblis. Such a visionary world is an outcome of the concrete, exotic East which is not only avowedly Oriental but palpably authentic as well (7). [Italics mine]

Both critics seem to admire the tale and do not see anything wrong with its obvious distortion of the reality of the East. "What its irony, its sardonic or grotesque humour, its systematic disrespect for every religious and social form (even for its protagonist's appetites, which are treated like infantile gluttony) reveal is the author's sophisticated detachment from the literary and moral conventions that he inherited," Sharafuddin asserts. He concludes by saying that "this deeply ambiguous work allows for no facile explanations" (xxxiv). Ironically, Sharafuddin's own explanations are facile and unconvincing. Actually, Beckford's techniques of the grotesque, his sinister humor, his satire, do not detach him from eighteenth-century literary conventions. On the contrary, he cleverly employs the century's typical conventions to strengthen the negative image of the East, its people and its culture.

It is important to mention that Oueijan and Sharafuddin are no admirers of Said's ideas about Orientalism to refute Said. They find in Romanticism a kind of "realistic Orientalism" (Sharafuddin xviii), while Said's is labeled "False Orientalism" (Oueijan 3). But what they find "realistic" in Romantic Orientalism, as illustrated in the works of Beckford, Byron, Moore, Southey, and others, is actually far removed from reality. Oueijan and Sharafuddin seem to deliberately choose to ignore the all-obvious negative stereotyping of the East as portrayed in the works of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth.

It is also interesting to notice that while the above-mentioned critics (Middle-eastern, as their names denote) refuse to admit the tale's prejudiced vision of the East, European critics acknowledge "Beckford's extremism in Vathek" (Beck 1), and his "more modern forms of sexuality, fantasy, and racism" (Thorn 4). Frederick Garber comments: For Beckford ... the Oriental is the Other, that which takes most of its import from its difference. The Oriental is a version of that which stands over against us and, by virtue of its unlikeness, helps us to understand what we are in ourselves...Edward Said has argued that the Orient is one of Europe's "deepest and most recurring images of the Other." "The Orient," he says, "helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience." The world of Vathek is densely and intensely Other, parading its difference with a mock solemnity (324).

Garber speaks of "Beckford's grossness or gross exaggeration," of that kind of "Orientalist tradition which sought to dazzle through every sort of extremism." To him, "Beckford was ... an instance of what a Westerner could do with one kind of Orientalism." He argues, "along with Said, that this is a gratuitous and self-serving distortion--what one might call an imperialism of the imagination" (327).

This encourages me to conclude my paper with an allegorical interpretation of Vathek. My idea may seem far-fetched but I find it logical and intriguing based on a close reading of the tale. Readers of Vathek can easily notice that unlike many Oriental Gothic tales, this tale presents no hero or heroine in the strict sense of the word. The protagonist is a kind of anti-hero who revels in wickedness to excess with no opposition of any sort, with no hero to save the good from the clutches of his evil. There is no conflict between the forces of goodness and the forces of evil, as we find in many works of the sort. Fifty children are sacrificed by Vathek to the Giaour, and the helpless angelic Gulchenrouz is pursued by the she-devil, Carathis, to be offered as another sacrifice to the forces of darkness. Later in the tale, to the relief of the reader, it is made known that the children and Gulchenrouz have been saved by the good Genii and kept in a state of eternal childhood while the rulers, Vathek, Carathis and Nouronihar, end up in everlasting hell. Allegorically, Vathek and his mother seem to stand for all despotic rulers of the indolent backward East, the children and Gulchenrouz for the helpless naive Eastern multitudes, and the good Genii for the "good" European saviors and liberators, who, with their super power and superior culture, take it upon themselves to liberate the people and keep them safe in a state of blissful ignorance and tranquility. The tale ends with the following comment: Thus the caliph Vathek, who, for the sake of pomp and forbidden power, had sullied himself with a thousand crimes, became a prey to grief without end, and remorse without mitigation: whilst the humble, the despised Gulchenrouz passed whole ages in undisturbed tranquility, and in the pure happiness of childhood (158).

Taking into consideration certain details of Beckford's life, this interpretation becomes more valid and convincing. On the one hand, Beckford was the son of an imperialist, who made his fortune in the West Indies and became one of the richest men in England. Beckford inherited this enormous wealth and lived a life of considerable extravagance. On the other hand, he was an avid reader of travel books and Orientalist accounts. Scandal surrounded his life as a Member of Parliament, traveller and collector (Blackstone 181). Such a notorious and erudite son of imperial Britain must have in one way or another thought of East/West relationship in these depicted terms.

Using Said's well-known statement, in Beckford's work, "Orient was orientalized ... made Oriental" to be easily conquered and reconstructed according to western imperial designs, (Orientalism 5). Both Orientalist and Beckford's "discourse on Islam [was], if not absolutely vitiated, then certainly colored by the political, economic, and intellectual situation" which gave rise to it. (Covering Islam I vii). Beckford cleverly exploited cultural differences to serve imperial ends. In this sense, Bhabha's following remarks can be applied to the case of Vathek: "what is being dramatized is a separation--between races, cultures, histories, within histories--a separation between before and after that repeats obsessively the mythical moment or disjunction."(82) Or, to say with Patel, "the Oriental Gothic", and similarly Vathek, "in furthering the negative portrayal of the East, directly contributed to the myths of Otherness, which created [and continue to create] division and conflict between the East and the West" (6).

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Garber. Frederick. "Beckford, Delacroix and Byronic Orientalism." Comparative Literature Studies. Spring 1981, 321-331.

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--. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

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Sharafuddin. Mohammed. Islam and Romantic Orientalism. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1994.

Thorn, Jennifer. "Eighteenth-Century British Orientalism." (file:\A:\Teaching Pamohlet#7--Thorn Article.htm).

Muna Al-Alwan is Professor of Foreign Languages at Ahlia University, Manama, Bahrain.