Ending in Infinity: William Beckford's Arabian Tale

Ending in Infinity: William Beckford's Arabian TaleJohn Garrett William Beckford's Vathek (1786), subtitled An Arabian Tale, displays an imagination and moral vision deeply penetrated by the perfumes of Arabia and the essence of Islam. Beckford's enthusiasm was not merely simple-minded ecstasy in a falsely perceived "Orient" of "sensuality , promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic pleasure, intense energy," like that which was seized upon and utilized, as Edward Said has shown, by his contemporaries.1 Although Beckford succumbed to the temptation of projecting his fantasies onto an unknown and unknowable "other" world—a fictional Orient—his "Arabian" tale also offers evidence of a deeper intuition, in particular a sympathy with Islam (or what he took Islam to be) that lifts Beckford and his narrative beyond the bounds of the traditional English (and Christian) tale. Beckford's East is self-evidently grotesque, without any attempt at historical or geographical veracity. Yet under its wild and extravagant surface Beckford was attempting to introduce a new way of conceiving experience which, while not authentically "Eastern," was not conventionally "Western" either.2 Vathek was influenced in its characterization, its description, its philosophy , even its structure, by the practices of the East as Beckford understood them; its consequent lack of conventional guideposts and its 1 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 118, 5. 2 The terms "East" and "West" refer, in this article, to a discrimination in Beckford's Weltanschauung rather than to any objectively demonstrable bifurcation. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 1, October 1992 16 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION unsettling ambience have disconcerted and annoyed critics. The Monthly Review (May 1787), for example, adopted a tone of paternalistic rebuke , chastising Vathek for its failure to keep within the perimeters of eighteenth-century fiction, remarking that the novel "preserves the peculiar character of the Arabian Tale, which is not only to overstep nature and probability, but even to pass beyond the verge of possibility, and suppose things, which cannot be for a moment conceived."3 A century later Wilbur Cross, though more enthusiastic about the novel, resorts to terms such as "extravagance," "sarcasm," and "love of grotesque horror " to characterize it,4 while thirty years after that, Edmund Wilson reduced Beckford's deployment of irony to the need "merely to satisfy a perverse impulse."5 The inadequacy of these readings is the result of Beckford's overlaying of one cultural topography (English, Christian , known) upon another (Arabic, Islamic, unknown) in order to give himself a new arena, a fresh "orientation," for the exploration of the ageold topic of a man's relationship with his soul. This article will attempt to chart the terrain of Vathek from the dual perspective of East and West, which is how Beckford himself viewed it. In the course of Vathek's examination of the individual's relation with his or her soul the shadow of the Protestant ethic falls across the novel's pages; the final horror of Vathek's and Nouronihar's separation from God is deeper because it has been self-willed and could have been avoided: "Vathek beheld in the eyes of Nouronihar nothing but rage and vengeance; nor could she discern aught in his, but aversion and despair " (p. 119). The intrusion of Christian eschatology into the hall of Eblis—the Islamic hell—raises the question of whether Beckford intended to merge the two religions. As a proto-orientalist he seems to have subscribed to the conventional wisdom about fundamental disparities between East and West. According to Said, the division between East and West was an artificial boundary drawn by Europeans to mark off their fears of the "other" and to project all the features that their culture could 3 Quoted by Roger Lonsdale in his Introduction to William Beckford, Vathek (London: Oxford University Press, 1983). References are to this edition. 4 Wilbur L. Cross, 77ie Development ofthe English Novel (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 103. 5 Edmund Wilson, The Shores ofLight: A Literary Chronicle ofthe Twenties and Thirties (London: Allen, 1952), p. 266. WILLIAM BECKFORD'S ARABIAN TALE 17 not assimilate onto a fictional "Orient." Having created this alien entity and assigned territorial limits to it, they then attempted, through the...