Oriental Fantasies in Beckford and Byron: The language(s) of romance

[SAGLIA 2002, p. 76]. The popularization of the Orient took the aspect of superficial fashions and a taste for objects, as in the turquerie and chinoiserie manias of the eighteenth century, or, later, of the nineteenth century, for Indian and Spanish-Moorish articles. These were closely connected with the rise and development of a consumer society and the diffusion of goods and commodities, many of which were imported from Eastern countries, for which there was a «steadily broadening market» [WILLS 1993, p. 133]. Together with this ever-widening «consumer Orientalism» there was a diffusion and popularization of texts, which went along with the growing «materiality» of Oriental consumerism, even in imaginative and visionary writers such as William Beckford.
Oriental stories appeared in periodicals, for instance in The Spectator and were popular with both scholars and a less refined and cultivated public. The most influential of these texts was Arabian Nights, the first English version of which was published between 1704 and 1712. In the same years, French works such as L’Histoire de la Sultane de Perse et des Vizirs, Contes Turques, Le Mille et un Jour, Contes persanes, and later Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes became known in England, where Oriental literature continued to be translated: Turkish Tales in 1708, and The Persian and the Turkish Tales Compleat in 1714. In 1725, another Oriental collection of stories, Chinese Tales, was translated into English, and its publication, together with that of Mogul Tale, was to have a tremendous influence on Beckford’s work.
Beckford’s texts «open up a suggestive and emblematic vistas into the overlapping of material and discursive, written and experienced orients within the literature and culture of the Romantic era» [saglia 2002, p. 77], besides being a perfect example of the Romantic intersections of Oriental fictions and European literary works.
Beckford’s Orient, imaginative and fantastic, is also based on the knowledge of the real East [mackenzie 1995], not only through the works of Western scholars, the teaching of the most incisive of his tutors, Alexander Cozens, who taught him Persian and Eastern literature and art, or the books of his magnificent library, where, as a passionate bibliophile, he had collected a huge number of volumes, but also through actual contacts with the Oriental people he met during his journeys. When he was visiting Spain, his acquaintance with Ahmed Vassif Effendi, the Turkish Ambassador in Madrid, was particularly striking. Ahmed is described in a luxurious setting, and looks like the embodiment of the Orient: Beckford «never was more delighted than upon entering a stately salon, spread with the richest carpets and perfumed with the fragrance of wood of aloes. In a corner of the apartment sat the Ambassador, wrapped up in a pelisse of the most precious sables» [CHAPMAN 1928, p. 200].
Beckford is obviously attracted by the Ambassador’s sumptuous attire, by the wonderful objects surrounding him, by the rows of slaves attending him, and particularly by the authority, power and downright despotism of his central all-male figure. The fascination for the material aspect of the Orient is inextricably combined with the attraction for a kind of superhuman condition which he thought to be possible only in the palaces of the Oriental world. These were seen by Beckford as a priviledged space to foreground his own uniqueness, and onto which to project his desires and aspirations. It is not surprising that ten years after meeting the Turkish ambassador in Madrid he had a tent in the Turkish style erected for the «Twelfth Night Festival» of January 6, 1797. At Fonthill House, in 1799, he transformed a room into what was later called «the Turkish Room», referred to as «enchanting» by a visitor and described in detail in publications dealing with the architecture and interiors of the most important estates of the country. In these texts it is depicted as extremely splendid and sumptuous, with its vaulted ceiling made entirely of gold, its painted arabesques and wreaths of flowers, its satin curtains, with fringes of silk and gold, its candelabra, Japanese vases, and piles of silk cushions, which reminded the visitors of the magical recesses of the enchanted palaces in the Arabian Nights.
The Turkish room reveals how, in Beckford, actual and imaginary Orients are mixed up in a combination of reality and fiction, visual objectivity and subjective interpretation, cultural reconstruction and personal emotional response, and how his vision of the Orient is filtered – and idealized – through the Arabian Nights and other literary works, but also through stereotypes of Eastern luxury and splendour.
In Vathek and the Episodes, the «realism» of the East is conveyed through the names of the characters coinciding with historical figures. Vathek, for example, is modelled on Al Wathik Bi’llah, who ruled the dynasty of the Abbasids between AD 842-847, and who, in one of Beckford’s reference texts (Bibliothèque Orientale by Barthélemy D’Herbelot, Paris, 1697), is described in terms which nearly verbatim coincide with those used to depict the protagonist of Beckford’s story, that is to say, as a man who ate and drank to excess, enjoyed women to excess, and had so frightening a gaze that, when he looked at his servants, they fell to the ground. Beckford makes Vathek the son of Motassem, who actually ruled between AD 833-842, and the grandson of Haroun al Rashid (AD 786-809), the legendary Caliph, who, in Arabian Tales, is described as a benevolent monarch presiding over a golden age and a court largely promoting knowledge and the arts – an idealized and to some extent fictionalized portrait. Not only the characters, but also the places are real and imaginary at the same time: in Vathek, Samarah, the city actually located north of Baghdad, Motassem’s military and administrative centre, becomes the site of the Caliph’s fabulous palace, where each of the five senses are sumptuously gratified, though, according to historical records, the place was finally abandoned by Motassem because of its frequent insurrections and risings.
As in Vathek, in the first «Episode» the places have correspond to real ones, but they are transformed into nightmarish Gothic landscapes merged with pre-romantic gloom and Sublime terror. The spaces where the characters live their passions are given extreme and oneiric dimensions by being removed to a fabulous exotic world in a remote time. The luxury and power connected with the Eastern world, re-elaborated by Beckford’s imagination, become the appropriate setting for the superhuman characters of all four narratives. These are the projections of the author’s personal and cultural aspirations and tensions between what have been described as «ambiguously subversive polarities» [BECKFORD 2001, p. 8].
The high-born individuals of Vathek and the Episodes – rebels who challenge their cultural environment and aspire to absolute freedom and unlimited power – are the spokesmen for Beckford’s self-exaltation and defiance of a repressive world. He identifies himself with an idealized superhuman figure, similar to those belonging to the Oriental world – the only place where such giants can exist, everything becomes possible, all desires can be fully satisfied, and boundless passions can dominate freely. Beckford’s Orient is undoubtedly such a world, inhabited by figures possessed by passions which morality and society forbid, indifferent to the pain caused to other individuals, who become their companions in perversity and in the extreme transgression of all limitations. Sexual desire and ruthless ambition lead them to a devastating end, into a terrible Hell redeemed by Sublime grandeur. Vathek is exemplary in his rebellion against a benign but restrictive Islam, in order to experience sexual freedom and to attain forbidden knowledge. He evokes the inhuman Giaour to satisfy his desires: first, to attain eternal sensual repletion in the arms of the enchanting and ambiguous Nouronihar, whose mischievous allure dazzles him, and secondly, to enjoy the effeminate charms of Gulchenrouz, the angelic boy.
The opposition between the couple Vathek-Nouronihar and the innocent Gulchenrouz marks the contrast – repeated in all four narratives – between the «vital sinners», whose unsanctioned desire brings temporary bliss but finally leads to corruption and punishment, and the «angelic beings» uncorrupted by ruthless desire. The sinners are totally selfish in their passions, their sensibilities are lethal, and they never accept the warnings of those characters who anticipate the terrible fate threatening them – the shepherd-genie in Vathek, Princess Roudabah in the «First Episode», and Peri Homaiouna in the «Second Episode».
In the original version of the «First Episode», entitled «History of the Princes and Friends Alasi and Firouz», the latter embodies the violence of passions, in particular his boundless sexuality. His cruelty and ruthlessness contrast with the tender and melancholy nature of Alasi, who indulges in dreamy solitude, in the pleasure of poetry and music, and whose favourite place is a forest pavilion with refined interiors, by a stream of crystalline waters, where he loves to rest in solitary meditation. As his favourite setting is that of the hero of sentimental stories, so his language belongs to the code of a noble Man of Feeling, and of a benevolent and generous prince of romance. This is the way he draws his own portrait:

My taste was fastidious, exquisite, my pleasures refined; through a goodness of soul rare in a sovereign, I did not want to please myself at the expense of my subjects. I hoped that they would be as happy as I. I encouraged extravagance in the rich to make the poor more comfortable and to that end I put on elaborate festivities which usually tired me to death [BECKFORD 2001, p. 152].

When Alasi meets Firouz, whom he describes as «a young boy more beautiful than the morning star» [BECKFORD 2001, p. 154], he addresses him with the language of love and tenderness and opens his arms to him, assuring him that «no masterpiece of nature, nothing shall tear you from my side. My lands, my subjects, my very life will be used for your protection» [beckford 2001, p. 154]. Whereas Alasi sounds and is sincere, Firouz only uses the language of feeling in order to attract Alasi and take advantage of the ardour of his emotional response. Though unable to resist him, Alasi understands that «At his tender age, he has already acquired all the perversity of heart and soul that a vicious [nature] can provide» and that «an apparent simplicity and an appealing manner conceal these vices […]» [BECKFORD 2001, p. 156].
Firouz’s cruelty is evident in the killing of the deer – an offence against Nature similar to the shooting of the albatross in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner –, in his persecution of Princess Roudabah, and in his corruption of the defenceless Alasi, whom he drags into a passion unsanctioned by society and alienated from the values of his culture, till he falls into the abyss of hatred, solitude, and despair of Eblis’s Hell.
In the «Second» and in the «Third Episodes» the pursuit of unlimited passions and absolute power leads to extreme atrocity and evil. In the «Second Episode», the handsome, impudent, and lucky protagonist, Barkiarokh, who narrates his own criminal life, is dominated by the desire for «unbridled enjoyment and illicit pleasure» [BECKFORD 2001, p. 198]. Barkiarokh’s actions are indeed atrocious: incest and paedophilia (with his twelve-year-old daughter), necrophilia (towards the unconscious body of his unfortunate wife), murder and parricide.
Commenting on Beckford’s works, a critic writes:

Notwithstanding the genuinely Oriental setting of and abundant local material in Vathek, and Beckford’s wide familiarity with authentic works on the Orient, the themes and spirit of Vathek are unmistakably Western – the story of Faust lies at its heart. Like Goethe’s Faust, Vathek seeks knowledge, including its forbidden variety and at the price of his soul [KIDWAI 1995, p. 12].

These words are justified, though to some extent reductive, since Beckford’s Orientalism, apart from being strictly connected with the culture of his own age, is also interwoven with many Western literary traditions. Actually, Beckford’s education accounts for the complexity of his cultural background, where the knowledge of and the admiration for the Classics (thanks to his tutor, the Reverend John Lettice, he read Homer, Livy, Cicero, and Horace in the original language) are combined with many other influential components, such as: the reading of the great Italian masterpieces – Dante’s Divina Commedia, Ariosto’s and Tasso’s narrative poems –; the practice of music; the study of ancient and contemporary art; and finally an extraordinary interest in and curiosity about all fields of knowledge and all kinds of intellectual experience. Though Lettice and Beckford’s godfather, the Earl of Chatham, burned all things Oriental, «the splendid heap of Oriental drawings […] sacrificed at the shrine of good taste», [GEMMET 1977, p. 24] apparently with the help of Beckford himself, they hardly succeeded in extinguishing Beckford’s passion for the Orient, transmitted to him by Alexander Cozens, who turned out to be the most incisive influence in his life. Indeed the burning of the precious Oriental objects did not at all reduce to cinders his admiration for all things Oriental; on the contrary, it might have even increased it and further stimulated his rebellion against all restrictions on his imagination and freedom.
In Beckford’s Oriental world, however, many other texts and languages interact and intersect: the Hell of Eblis echoes Dante’s Inferno; in his tragic grandeur, Eblis resembles a Caliph – «An infinity of elders with streaming beards […] had prostrated themselves before the ascent of the lofty Eminence» [BECKFORD 2001, p. 169]. The following passage is obviously inspired by Milton’s Satan, but it also recalls and, at the same time, contradicts the Quran, in which «The angels prostrated themselves in obeisance to Adam, all of them together, but not so Eblis: he was haughty, and became one of those who reject faith» [KIDWAI 1995, p. 13]:

On top, upon a globe of fire, sat the formidable Eblis. His person was that of a young man, whose noble and regular features seemed to have been tarnished by malignant vapours: his flowing hair retained some resemblance to that of an angel of light [BECKFORD 2001, p. 170; my italics]

The Hall of Eblis successfully evokes the infernal effect of awe and dread, but, with its «halls and galleries», «long curtains brocaded with crimson and gold», «choirs and dances», and «gleam brightening through the drapery» [beckford 2001, p. 172], it looks much more like the Turkish Ambassador’s palace that had struck Beckford’s imagination, like his own «Turkish Room» or like the interior of Fonthill Splendens, full of many fashionable objects of Oriental luxury, than the ghastly, bottomless pit described as Hell in the Islamic tradition – or, for that, in Dante’s Divina Commedia. Moreover, Eblis is made the creator of a daemonic Zoroastrianism that has nothing to do with the benevolent religion of Persian kings in the pre-Islamic era (recalling Christian values) but is used as an instrument of revenge on humankind, particularly on the selfish, passionate, and rebellious people who aspire to a God-like power. Onto his characters Beckford clearly projects his own rebellion against the maternal repressive Puritanism which affected his upbringing.
In the «Second Episode», Barkiarokh is the Oriental version of the eighteenth-century libertines and seducers described by Sade, who affirms that man is prey to two weaknesses, the need to prey and love. Moreover, he is the expression of the attitude to and the fear of the dark side of desire, with which the century revealed its underside and obscure terrors – as most Gothic novels, superficially, though often disquietingly, do in the characters of their villains. The Faustian aspect in Barkiarokh manifests itself in his attraction to inadmissible desire; he reminds us of Faust in Goethe’s work, who admits his Satanic seduction, his diabolical descent and their consequences, such as his seduction of Margareta. Like Faust, Beckford’s characters cannot conceive intellectual desire as dissociated from all other desires. This desire drives them to the extreme yearning of being God himself, the possessor of absolute power.
The «Third Episode», under the title of «The History of Princess Zulkais and Prince Kalilah» focuses on the impious ambition of the Emir, also a seducer dominated by uncontrolled sexual passion for the Imam’s daughter, who does not resist his ardour and becomes pregnant with the twins Zulkais and Kalilah. Emir wants to know and control the future through occult arts, and, by deciphering hieroglyphic messages, he tries to have access to fragments of divine wisdom.
Once again, the blasphemous desire to be God, together with illicit passion, generates rebellion, viciousness and tragedy, all embodied in the twins, whose childhood tenderness for each other climaxes in active desire and incest. The «Episode» suddenly ends in a typical Beckfordian setting, where echoes from Oriental works are mixed with the Gothic nightmares of his age: Zulkais is led into a Gothic labyrinth bordered by wells where «reptiles with human faces» live, and by a «place of terror» paved with a flash-coloured marble marked as with «the veins and arteries of the human body» [BECKFORD 2001, pp. 330-331]. The Hell of Zulkais and Kalilah is no longer the Hell of Eblis but the space of their psyche tormented by anguish and remorse. Beckford’s terrible vision of human destiny can be associated with that phase of Romanticism which has been defined «negative» [PECKHAM 1970, p. 15]. According to this theory, Byron’s works before Don Juan (1818) belong to such a phase, including his Turkish Tales. Written after Byron’s visit to the near East in 1809, they encompass a vision of the Orient which is very different from Beckford’s. Byron greatly admired Beckford’s works, particularly Vathek, about which, in a note to The Giaour, he wrote: «For correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination, it far surpasses all European imitations» [BYRON 1980-1993, III, p.423].
Though the strong link between Beckford and Byron is certainly the «power of imagination», and though both authors see the Orient as the spatial projection of exquisitely Romantic feelings and aspirations, Byron represents it as a more worldly place, in particular as a great scenery populated by heroes and heroines in colourful, sumptuous, and sensually enticing settings. As his comment on Vathek seems to suggest, Byron was particularly impressed by the detailed descriptions of the Orient not so much in Beckford’s work (where the Orient is completely transfigured by the author’s visionary imagination) as in Samuel Henley’s notes for his 1786 English translation of Vathek. Indeed these notes reveal – and explain – an impressive texture of references, narratives and intersections underlying the book that were to inspire, influence, and be used by Byron as well as other Romantic poets writing on the Orient.
Moreover, new socio-cultural elements became decisive in the change and development of Oriental Romantic discourse between the last decade of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. A wider practical knowledge of oriental countries, due to political and commercial connections as well as to the direct experience of many English travellers to the East, brought about a new approach to and a popularisation of the East, as is evident, for instance, in many successful theatrical productions of the time.
The publication of Oriental poems became a profitable venture, to the point that Byron himself, in a famous letter, advised Thomas Moore to «Stick to the East. Stael, the oracle, told me it was the only poetical policy: the North, South, and West, have all been exhausted: but, from the East, we have nothing but S[outhey] unsaleables […]» [BYRON 1973-94, III, p.101].
Works on the East were undoubtedly very successful. Some of them significantly exemplify the crucial changes and developments from eighteenth-century literary Orientalism and to Romantic writings on the Orient, of which Byron’s Turkish Tales are the most famous example.
Byron’s stories – particularly The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, and The Corsair – are dominated by towering male figures, contemptuous and rebellious against conventional morality, defying fate and the world, passionate, proud, moody, even cynical, though never extreme or daemonic in their passions. They are always the protagonists of intense but unhappy love stories with fascinating and sentimental heroines. Love is, for most of them, the ruling passion of their lives, and they remain faithful, in true Romantic fashion, until death. They are often outlaws, but noble at heart, and repress their inner dismay under a shell of sternness, fighting against their cruel fate to the end.
Their experience of a strong emotional crisis also characterized Byron’s personal history. When he wrote the Turkish Tales, he lived a period of painful and unresolved conflicts. It is significant that the first of the Tales, The Giaour, is based on a real episode, which he describes in a letter, and in which he was apparently deeply involved [BYRON 1973-94, II, p.311]. It tells the story of Beautiful Leila, who deceives Hassan, her Muslim lover and master by falling in love with the non-Muslim hero, the Giaour. When Hassan discovers Leila’s unfaithfulness, he orders that she be drowned according to Muslim custom. The Giaour kills Hassan in revenge and spends the rest of his life in a monastery, fate-stricken, and haunted by the vision of the lost Leila.
Around this tale of love, passion and revenge, Byron weaves a texture of distinctly Oriental design and full of Oriental images, in which religious, national and cultural issues and conflicts are implied and expressed. The love story between the Giaour and Leila is doomed because of their different nationalities and religions: as any Muslim woman, she cannot marry a Westerner and Christian, thus a «faithless man», according to Islam. Moreover, Leila is guilty of adultery, so her «treachery» is both religious and marital. According to McGann Leila’s tragedy can also be read as a political and cultural allegory, which is consistent with a recurrent narrative element in the stories: a conflict which, given its complexity, cannot be resolved by love [MCGANN 1998]. The two lovers are the victims of this conflict, which results in their separation and final death. Equally, the worlds they represent, the West and the East, can never be united. Through Leila’s sacrifice, the hero of The Giaour will live in total solitude and deep unhappiness after her death. Leila, the Oriental woman, seems to be condemned by her very beauty, which first attracts the hero but then becomes the cause of her terrible punishment. So beauty, instead of joy and salvation, brings suffering and destruction. In all the Tales, love has always tragic consequences.
Leila, as all the women in these dramatic poems, is described as the conventional Oriental female subject to tyranny and segregation, deprived of personal and sexual freedom. She is extremely beautiful and sensual, loaded with exoticism by the rich Oriental imagery surrounding her. The beauty of her face is extolled, together with her grace of movements and gentleness of temper:

Her eyes’ dark charm ‘twere vain to tell,
But gaze on that of the GAZELLE
It will assist thy fancy well;
As large, as languishingly dark,
But soul beamed forth in every spark
That darted from beneath the lid bright
As the jewel of Giamschid.
Yea, soul, and should your prophet say
That form was nought but breathing clay,
But Allah! I should answer nay;
Though on Al-Sirat’s and arch I stood
Which totters o’er the fiery flood
With Paradise within my view
And all his Houris beckoning through[BYRON 1980-1993, p.426].

Leila’s description is a sort of collage of Oriental stereotypes: the reference to the gazelle, apart from suggesting her gracefulness, also implies the tameness of a pretty animal. In the following description she is assimilated to pomegranates and Hyacynths, to the perfumes and colours of Oriental nature. The mention of the «gleaming marble» and of the «noble swan» are other topoi of conventional Oriental discourse. Leila is compared to a houri –though rather in a diminishing way («beckoning through») – which conveys the related image of the Islamic Heaven, according to a stereotype connected in many works with the Oriental woman. The passage is full of similes, one of which – «the jewel of Giamschid» – is a cultural fragment from Beckford’s Vathek, or rather, more likely, from Henley’s notes to its English version: it evokes mythical treasures, an overused allusion to the Orient as a fabulously rich place. Conventional imagery and cultural fragmentation, instead of giving a cohesive image of the woman, make it an obvious compound, a western cultural and literary construct, an invention of Western fantasy, and confirm her condition of «object», or, as she is defined, «a toy». Leila’s description implies not only her personal and sexual «objectification», but also that of the Orient she embodies, equally the object and appropriation of the West.
From the Tales it appears obvious that Byron is more favourable to the dominating Turks than to the subjugated Greeks. Nevertheless, all these heroes belong to the western world, and their characters are modelled on male figures of the western tradition. Whereas the Turks, like Hassan, are described according to the conventional image of the Oriental tyrant, as great in his cruelty as in his valour and bravery, the Byronic protagonist is a compound of diversified Western «heroic» figures: from the knight of the Medieval Romance and the Chivalric poems (in Byron’s works, though, the hero always fails in saving the «damsel in distress» and even causes her death), through the impressive characters of the Elizabethan tragedy, to the increasingly tame villain of the Gothic novel, the noble outlaw exemplified by Schiller in Die Rauber and appearing in most seventeenth-century heroic plays set in a conventional and fictitious Orient. The heroes speak the language of conquest and war, the code of epic; the heroines, mostly silent and subdued, speak the language of feeling and tenderness, or the code of the novel of sensibility. Hence their association with the female characters of the English sentimental romance, which adds to their complex cultural and literary «constructedness».
Beckford’s Orient is interwoven with references to Western culture, often even predominant as far as themes and characters are concerned. However, the narrative discourse of his Oriental tales, with its grotesqueries, fragmentation, and deferrals, deconstructs the quest-motif of Western literature into a series of pilgrimages through exotic landscapes, fantastic diversions, and sudden flights and falls along the visionary and symbolic dimensions of the Romantic Sublime. In Byron’s Turkish Tales, the plots are repeated all over, only with minor variations, and the progression of events, in each of them, seems to be blocked not only by the connection with actual historical situations, but by the collage-like narrative technique, which, if on the one hand is effective in creating colourful images and attractive tableaux, on the other it prevents all narrative development, progression and evolution. The East never finds a fusion with the West, while it seems to provide only a richly adorned backdrop, a painted theatre wing behind which only an imaginary – not imaginative – place exists.

Bibliography

• BECKFORD, W.: Sketches of Spain and Portugal, in The Journal of William Beckford in Spain and Portugal 1787-88, ed. By Boyd Alexander, London, Hart-Davis 1954.
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• ——: Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. By Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols, London, John Murray. 1973-1995
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• MCGANN, J.J.: The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 1998
• PECKAM, M.: The Triumph of Romanticism, South Carolina, South Carolina University Press. 1970
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