2. William Beckford (1786), Vathek
Sunday, 15 March 2020 16:21![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_complexThis is one of two books I read in preparation for this Dracula Society trip to Bath in mid-May, the relevance being that the author lived there in later life and there is a museum about him there in a tower which he commissioned. Though the trip hasn't been officially cancelled yet, it's pretty obvious that it will be, which is a pity. Nonetheless, reading good Gothic literature is never a waste, and maybe we'll be able to reschedule the trip for 2021?
It's an Orientalising novel whose title character is loosely based on a real ninth-century caliph named al-Wathiq who had a palace at Samarra (spelt Samarah in the novel), but I would say the relationship between character and namesake is similar to that for Dracula. That is, a name and general setting have been borrowed, but otherwise the character and the story are entirely fantastical. Obviously an 18th-century westerner writing Orientalising literature is indulging in a form of Othering, but it's only fair to acknowledge that there is a spectrum of these things, and that while this certainly isn't the ideal response to or form of interaction with another culture, it is much benigner than some. Unfortunately I haven't read The Arabian Nights, which was the leading inspiration for this sort of literature in Beckford's day, or indeed anything much else in this vein, so I wasn't able to situate it within its wider literary context. But I enjoyed it, and certainly learnt a lot of new Arabic-based words for supernatural beings as I went along.
Vathek, our central character, is above all a devotee of the pleasures of the flesh. His palace is replete with costly luxuries including harems full of women, a tower with 11,000 steps (I assume inspired by the real spiral tower of the Great Mosque at Samarra) and five pavilions devoted to each of the five senses. But above all, his favourite indulgence is food. He is vain, selfish and arrogant, and like anyone with such privilege, he is also perpetually hungry for yet more power, wealth and luxury and quite ready to commit violence when he doesn't get his own way or his desires are impeded. But precisely because he is so privileged already, he also can't really conceive of what hard work in pursuit of a goal would look like, and certainly lacks the self-direction to undertake any great endeavour. This fundamental contradiction within him is where a lot of the drama and humour of the story comes from.
The main plot begins when a stranger comes to Samarah offering wondrous goods. He claims to be from India, but actually turns out to be a (literally) blood-thirsty demon, and he asks Vathek to devote himself to him in return for entry to the underworld, where he will be able to claim ownership of vast repositories of treasures and legendary artefacts. The cost of this bargain is to be the blood of fifty of the most beautiful sons of the vizirs and great men of in Vathek's kingdom - a price which he is all too happy to accept. He arranges to provide it by tricking his leading families into believing that their sons will be participating in a sporting competition at the edge of a chasm where the demon lurks, but it turns out that this was only stage one of the arrangement. The demon then announces that he won't deliver the goods until Vathek has travelled across his kingdom to the mountains of Istakar, and further that he must not enter into anyone's dwelling along the way. You'll never guess what Vathek then proceeds to do the first time he encounters some mild inconvenience on the journey and a local emir offers him hospitality...
Vathek's mother, Carathis, is set up to complement his lazy vanity, and for me she was the best character in the book. Described by one character as 'like a chameleon' who can 'assume all possible colours', she is clever, resolute, and absolutely steely in her determination. She is also Greek (historically true of al-Wathiq's mother), and as such knows many 'sciences and systems' which are foreign to Samarah. She does magic using Egyptian mummies and has a faithful retinue of fifty female negroes who are deaf, mute, and blind in their right eyes, with whom she communicates using signs understood only to them. She is pretty unimpressed with her son's manbaby-ness, but also wants the untold riches and powers of the underworld and knows she can only get them through him, so she helps and advises him, and indeed steps in and sets his mission to Istakar back on track when he has wandered off piste, fallen in love with the emir's daughter, Nouronihar, and is busy hanging out with her in the bath. She gives him a proper piece of her mind when she discovers this, yelling "Glutton that thou art... Were it not for me, thou wouldst soon find thyself the commander only of pies." Actually, Nouronihar herself is also a well-developed and enjoyable character with considerable intelligence and a great sense of mischief. But it was Carathis whom I most enjoyed.
Beckford clearly revelled in both Vathek's sensory indulgences and Carathis' steely scheming, making the whole novel enormous fun to read. He does stick a moral on the end about how the eternal torment which all three of Vathek, Carathis and Nouronihar end up being condemned to is and should be the just desert of the wicked - but it rings pretty hollow after a whole book of essentially cheering them on. He wrote the novel originally in French, and the English version which I read was translated for him by a friend called Samuel Henley, so the rich descriptions and detached ironic humour are a joint effort, but the latter in particular was brilliant. Beckford / Henley have consistent fun with understating or even romanticising the horrible, nicely demonstrated for example when Vathek has commandeered a great and splendid caravan to accompany him on his journey to Istakar, including some wheeled cages containing favoured members of his harem. The eunuchs charged with guarding the women "having remarked certain cages of the ladies swagging somewhat awry, and discovered that a few adventurous gallants had contrived to get in, soon dislodged the enraptured culprits, and consigned them, with good commendations, to the surgeons of the serail" - that is, sent them off to be punished with castration.
Byron was greatly enamoured with this book, calling it his 'Bible', and it is certainly easy to see how its general celebration of decadence and indulgence would have appealed to him. More specifically, the demon who strikes up the terrible bargain with Vathek is referred to throughout as the Giaour, while the book as a whole was apparently a major source for Byron's poem of that name - though I can't really judge as I haven't read the whole thing. Carathis, journeying after Vathek to put him back on track after he has become distracted from his mission, also performs necromancy in a cemetery, inducing ghouls to rise from their tombs and give her guidance, which may have more than a little to do with the scenes set in a 'Turkish cemetery' in Byron's vampire Fragment. Certainly, there is a pretty clear line of connection between this description of Nouronihar:
Given these fantastical details and the lavish descriptions of splendid palaces and supernatural creatures throughout, I was rather surprised on checking the Wikipedia page that there is no mention there (or anywhere else I can find) of any screen adaptation of it. I guess this kind of Orientalising literature simply went out of fashion before the technical capacity to do that became available, which I would say is when it became possible to do feature-length animations in colour. However, Google tells me that there is a French-language graphic novel, which is something at least.
It's an Orientalising novel whose title character is loosely based on a real ninth-century caliph named al-Wathiq who had a palace at Samarra (spelt Samarah in the novel), but I would say the relationship between character and namesake is similar to that for Dracula. That is, a name and general setting have been borrowed, but otherwise the character and the story are entirely fantastical. Obviously an 18th-century westerner writing Orientalising literature is indulging in a form of Othering, but it's only fair to acknowledge that there is a spectrum of these things, and that while this certainly isn't the ideal response to or form of interaction with another culture, it is much benigner than some. Unfortunately I haven't read The Arabian Nights, which was the leading inspiration for this sort of literature in Beckford's day, or indeed anything much else in this vein, so I wasn't able to situate it within its wider literary context. But I enjoyed it, and certainly learnt a lot of new Arabic-based words for supernatural beings as I went along.
Vathek, our central character, is above all a devotee of the pleasures of the flesh. His palace is replete with costly luxuries including harems full of women, a tower with 11,000 steps (I assume inspired by the real spiral tower of the Great Mosque at Samarra) and five pavilions devoted to each of the five senses. But above all, his favourite indulgence is food. He is vain, selfish and arrogant, and like anyone with such privilege, he is also perpetually hungry for yet more power, wealth and luxury and quite ready to commit violence when he doesn't get his own way or his desires are impeded. But precisely because he is so privileged already, he also can't really conceive of what hard work in pursuit of a goal would look like, and certainly lacks the self-direction to undertake any great endeavour. This fundamental contradiction within him is where a lot of the drama and humour of the story comes from.
The main plot begins when a stranger comes to Samarah offering wondrous goods. He claims to be from India, but actually turns out to be a (literally) blood-thirsty demon, and he asks Vathek to devote himself to him in return for entry to the underworld, where he will be able to claim ownership of vast repositories of treasures and legendary artefacts. The cost of this bargain is to be the blood of fifty of the most beautiful sons of the vizirs and great men of in Vathek's kingdom - a price which he is all too happy to accept. He arranges to provide it by tricking his leading families into believing that their sons will be participating in a sporting competition at the edge of a chasm where the demon lurks, but it turns out that this was only stage one of the arrangement. The demon then announces that he won't deliver the goods until Vathek has travelled across his kingdom to the mountains of Istakar, and further that he must not enter into anyone's dwelling along the way. You'll never guess what Vathek then proceeds to do the first time he encounters some mild inconvenience on the journey and a local emir offers him hospitality...
Vathek's mother, Carathis, is set up to complement his lazy vanity, and for me she was the best character in the book. Described by one character as 'like a chameleon' who can 'assume all possible colours', she is clever, resolute, and absolutely steely in her determination. She is also Greek (historically true of al-Wathiq's mother), and as such knows many 'sciences and systems' which are foreign to Samarah. She does magic using Egyptian mummies and has a faithful retinue of fifty female negroes who are deaf, mute, and blind in their right eyes, with whom she communicates using signs understood only to them. She is pretty unimpressed with her son's manbaby-ness, but also wants the untold riches and powers of the underworld and knows she can only get them through him, so she helps and advises him, and indeed steps in and sets his mission to Istakar back on track when he has wandered off piste, fallen in love with the emir's daughter, Nouronihar, and is busy hanging out with her in the bath. She gives him a proper piece of her mind when she discovers this, yelling "Glutton that thou art... Were it not for me, thou wouldst soon find thyself the commander only of pies." Actually, Nouronihar herself is also a well-developed and enjoyable character with considerable intelligence and a great sense of mischief. But it was Carathis whom I most enjoyed.
Beckford clearly revelled in both Vathek's sensory indulgences and Carathis' steely scheming, making the whole novel enormous fun to read. He does stick a moral on the end about how the eternal torment which all three of Vathek, Carathis and Nouronihar end up being condemned to is and should be the just desert of the wicked - but it rings pretty hollow after a whole book of essentially cheering them on. He wrote the novel originally in French, and the English version which I read was translated for him by a friend called Samuel Henley, so the rich descriptions and detached ironic humour are a joint effort, but the latter in particular was brilliant. Beckford / Henley have consistent fun with understating or even romanticising the horrible, nicely demonstrated for example when Vathek has commandeered a great and splendid caravan to accompany him on his journey to Istakar, including some wheeled cages containing favoured members of his harem. The eunuchs charged with guarding the women "having remarked certain cages of the ladies swagging somewhat awry, and discovered that a few adventurous gallants had contrived to get in, soon dislodged the enraptured culprits, and consigned them, with good commendations, to the surgeons of the serail" - that is, sent them off to be punished with castration.
Byron was greatly enamoured with this book, calling it his 'Bible', and it is certainly easy to see how its general celebration of decadence and indulgence would have appealed to him. More specifically, the demon who strikes up the terrible bargain with Vathek is referred to throughout as the Giaour, while the book as a whole was apparently a major source for Byron's poem of that name - though I can't really judge as I haven't read the whole thing. Carathis, journeying after Vathek to put him back on track after he has become distracted from his mission, also performs necromancy in a cemetery, inducing ghouls to rise from their tombs and give her guidance, which may have more than a little to do with the scenes set in a 'Turkish cemetery' in Byron's vampire Fragment. Certainly, there is a pretty clear line of connection between this description of Nouronihar:
Vathek extended his arms towards the hill, and directing his eyes with an anxiety unknown to him before, endeavoured to keep within view the object that enthralled his soul; but her course was as difficult to follow as the flight of one of those beautiful butterflies of Cashmere, which are at once so volatile and rare.these lines from Byron's The Giaour
As rising on its purple wingand these from Polidori's 'The Vampyre':
The insect-queen of eastern spring,
O'er emerald meadows of Kashmeer
Invites the young pursuer near,
And leads him on from flower to flower
A weary chase and wasted hour,
Then leaves him, as it soars on high,
With panting heart and tearful eye:
So beauty lures the full-grown child,
With hue as bright, and wing as wild:
A chase of idle hopes and fears,
Begun in folly, closed in tears.
The light step of Ianthe often accompanied Aubrey in his search after antiquities, and often would the unconscious girl, engaged in the pursuit of a Kashmere butterfly, show the whole beauty of her form, floating as it were upon the wind, to the eager gaze of him, who forgot the letters he had just decyphered upon an almost effaced tablet, in the contemplation of her sylph-like figure.M.R. James may also have been squirrelled away the detail that when Vathek, Carathis and Nouronihar get to the cavernous halls of the underworld, they find themselves amongst a vast multitude, 'incessantly passing, who severally kept their right hands on their hearts, without once regarding anything around them.' This turns out to be because their hearts are perpetually burning, rather than because they have been torn out and eaten like the poor children in Lost Hearts, but their overall demeanour struck me as very similar all the same. And, although obviously operating in a different way in the context of children's literature, I felt I recognised quite a few of the most fantastical elements of Vathek's kingdom from the Oz books, including the underground caverns which felt rather like the domain of the Nome King, and the green glasses which Vathek uses to prevent himself from being dazzled when inspecting glittering sabres presented to him by the Giaour.
Given these fantastical details and the lavish descriptions of splendid palaces and supernatural creatures throughout, I was rather surprised on checking the Wikipedia page that there is no mention there (or anywhere else I can find) of any screen adaptation of it. I guess this kind of Orientalising literature simply went out of fashion before the technical capacity to do that became available, which I would say is when it became possible to do feature-length animations in colour. However, Google tells me that there is a French-language graphic novel, which is something at least.
