<\/p>\n
La Questione Romantica<\/a> > Esotismo\/Orientalismo<\/a><\/p>\n Mirella Billi<\/strong><\/p>\n The fascination for the Orient pervades British culture, literature and the arts and penetrates everyday life particularly from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. Of course the influence of Oriental culture can be traced back to a more remote past: in the Middle Ages, Eastern stories drifted across Europe by way of Syria, Byzantium, Italy and Spain. Missionaries, pilgrims, crusaders helped the oral transmission of stories; Latin translations of great collections of Oriental tales made them known in England, where they were re-elaborated into metrical romances, legends and tales of adventure. In the Sixteenth century, with Soliman the Magnificent and the advance of the Turks, an interest in Oriental, especially Turkish, history and fiction developed and spread. In the Elizabethan Age, voyages, explorations and discoveries made the Orient less remote and unknown than it had been before, and Britain was increasingly exposed to the East, also through political contacts with the Ottoman Empire.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It is however in the eighteenth century, with the intensification of the relationships with Eastern Countries, and with the conquest of territories of the Indian subcontinent from 1750 onwards, that \u00abthe Orientalist dimension gradually developed from Earlier manifestations into an intersection of texts – and objects \u2013 which became increasingly pervasive, visible and accessible within British culture\u00bb 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].<\/p>\n When Alasi meets Firouz, whom he describes as \u00aba young boy more beautiful than the morning star\u00bb [BECKFORD 2001, p. 154], he addresses him with the language of love and tenderness and opens his arms to him, assuring him that \u00abno masterpiece of nature, nothing shall tear you from my side. My lands, my subjects, my very life will be used for your protection\u00bb [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 \u00abAt his tender age, he has already acquired all the perversity of heart and soul that a vicious [nature] can provide\u00bb and that \u00aban apparent simplicity and an appealing manner conceal these vices [\u2026]\u00bb [BECKFORD 2001, p. 156]. Notwithstanding the genuinely Oriental setting of and abundant local material in Vathek<\/em>, and Beckford\u2019s wide familiarity with authentic works on the Orient, the themes and spirit of Vathek<\/em> are unmistakably Western \u2013 the story of Faust lies at its heart. Like Goethe\u2019s Faust, Vathek seeks knowledge, including its forbidden variety and at the price of his soul [KIDWAI 1995, p. 12].<\/p>\n These words are justified, though to some extent reductive, since Beckford\u2019s Orientalism, apart from being strictly connected with the culture of his own age, is also interwoven with many Western literary traditions. Actually, Beckford\u2019s 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 \u2013 Dante\u2019s Divina Commedia<\/em>, Ariosto\u2019s and Tasso\u2019s narrative poems \u2013; 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\u2019s godfather, the Earl of Chatham, burned all things Oriental, \u00abthe splendid heap of Oriental drawings [\u2026] sacrificed at the shrine of good taste\u00bb, [GEMMET 1977, p. 24] apparently with the help of Beckford himself, they hardly succeeded in extinguishing Beckford\u2019s 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. 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<\/em> [BECKFORD 2001, p. 170; my italics]\n The Hall of Eblis successfully evokes the infernal effect of awe and dread, but, with its \u00abhalls and galleries\u00bb, \u00ablong curtains brocaded with crimson and gold\u00bb, \u00abchoirs and dances\u00bb, and \u00abgleam brightening through the drapery\u00bb [beckford 2001, p. 172], it looks much more like the Turkish Ambassador\u2019s palace that had struck Beckford\u2019s imagination, like his own \u00abTurkish Room\u00bb 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 \u2013 or, for that, in Dante\u2019s Divina Commedia<\/em>. 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. Her eyes\u2019 dark charm \u2018twere vain to tell, Leila\u2019s 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 \u00abgleaming marble\u00bb and of the \u00abnoble swan\u00bb are other topoi of conventional Oriental discourse. Leila is compared to a houri<\/em> \u2013though rather in a diminishing way (\u00abbeckoning through\u00bb) \u2013 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 \u2013 \u00abthe jewel of Giamschid\u00bb \u2013 is a cultural fragment from Beckford\u2019s Vathek<\/em>, or rather, more likely, from Henley\u2019s 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 \u00abobject\u00bb, or, as she is defined, \u00aba toy\u00bb. Leila\u2019s description implies not only her personal and sexual \u00abobjectification\u00bb, but also that of the Orient she embodies, equally the object and appropriation of the West. Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n La Questione Romantica > Esotismo\/Orientalismo Mirella Billi The fascination for the Orient pervades British culture, literature and the arts and penetrates everyday life particularly from the second half of the eighteenth century onwards. Of course the influence of Oriental culture can be traced back to a more remote past: in the Middle Ages, Eastern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[14],"yoast_head":"\n
\nOriental stories appeared in periodicals, for instance in The Spectator<\/em> and were popular with both scholars and a less refined and cultivated public. The most influential of these texts was Arabian Nights<\/em>, the first English version of which was published between 1704 and 1712. In the same years, French works such as L\u2019Histoire de la Sultane de Perse et des Vizirs,<\/em> Contes Turques, Le Mille et un Jour, Contes persanes<\/em>, and later Montesquieu\u2019s Lettres Persanes<\/em> became known in England, where Oriental literature continued to be translated: Turkish Tales<\/em> in 1708, and The Persian<\/em> and the Turkish Tales<\/em> Compleat<\/em> in 1714. In 1725, another Oriental collection of stories, Chinese Tales<\/em>, was translated into English, and its publication, together with that of Mogul Tale<\/em>, was to have a tremendous influence on Beckford\u2019s work.
\nBeckford\u2019s texts \u00abopen 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\u00bb [saglia 2002, p. 77], besides being a perfect example of the Romantic intersections of Oriental fictions and European literary works.
\nBeckford\u2019s 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 \u00abnever 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\u00bb [CHAPMAN 1928, p. 200].
\nBeckford is obviously attracted by the Ambassador\u2019s 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 \u00abTwelfth Night Festival\u00bb of January 6, 1797. At Fonthill House, in 1799, he transformed a room into what was later called \u00abthe Turkish Room\u00bb, referred to as \u00abenchanting\u00bb 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<\/em>.
\nThe 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 \u2013 and idealized \u2013 through the Arabian Nights<\/em> and other literary works, but also through stereotypes of Eastern luxury and splendour.
\nIn Vathek<\/em> and the Episodes<\/em>, the \u00abrealism\u00bb of the East is conveyed through the names of the characters coinciding with historical figures. Vathek, for example, is modelled on Al Wathik Bi\u2019llah, who ruled the dynasty of the Abbasids between AD 842-847, and who, in one of Beckford\u2019s reference texts (Biblioth\u00e8que Orientale<\/em> by Barth\u00e9lemy D\u2019Herbelot, Paris, 1697), is described in terms which nearly verbatim<\/em> coincide with those used to depict the protagonist of Beckford\u2019s 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<\/em>, is described as a benevolent monarch presiding over a golden age and a court largely promoting knowledge and the arts \u2013 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<\/em>, Samarah, the city actually located north of Baghdad, Motassem\u2019s military and administrative centre, becomes the site of the Caliph\u2019s 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.
\nAs in Vathek<\/em>, in the first \u00abEpisode\u00bb 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\u2019s imagination, become the appropriate setting for the superhuman characters of all four narratives. These are the projections of the author\u2019s personal and cultural aspirations and tensions between what have been described as \u00abambiguously subversive polarities\u00bb [BECKFORD 2001, p. 8].
\nThe high-born individuals of Vathek<\/em> and the Episodes<\/em> \u2013 rebels who challenge their cultural environment and aspire to absolute freedom and unlimited power \u2013 are the spokesmen for Beckford\u2019s self-exaltation and defiance of a repressive world. He identifies himself with an idealized superhuman figure, similar to those belonging to the Oriental world \u2013 the only place where such giants can exist, everything becomes possible, all desires can be fully satisfied, and boundless passions can dominate freely. Beckford\u2019s 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.
\nThe opposition between the couple Vathek-Nouronihar and the innocent Gulchenrouz marks the contrast \u2013 repeated in all four narratives \u2013 between the \u00abvital sinners\u00bb, whose unsanctioned desire brings temporary bliss but finally leads to corruption and punishment, and the \u00abangelic beings\u00bb 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 \u2013 the shepherd-genie in Vathek<\/em>, Princess Roudabah in the \u00abFirst Episode\u00bb, and Peri Homaiouna in the \u00abSecond Episode\u00bb.
\nIn the original version of the \u00abFirst Episode\u00bb, entitled \u00abHistory of the Princes and Friends Alasi and Firouz\u00bb, 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:<\/p>\n
\nFirouz\u2019s cruelty is evident in the killing of the deer \u2013 an offence against Nature similar to the shooting of the albatross in Coleridge\u2019s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner<\/em> \u2013, 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\u2019s Hell.
\nIn the \u00abSecond\u00bb and in the \u00abThird Episodes\u00bb the pursuit of unlimited passions and absolute power leads to extreme atrocity and evil. In the \u00abSecond Episode\u00bb, the handsome, impudent, and lucky protagonist, Barkiarokh, who narrates his own criminal life, is dominated by the desire for \u00abunbridled enjoyment and illicit pleasure\u00bb [BECKFORD 2001, p. 198]. Barkiarokh\u2019s 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.
\nCommenting on Beckford\u2019s works, a critic writes:<\/p>\n
\nIn Beckford\u2019s Oriental world, however, many other texts and languages interact and intersect: the Hell of Eblis echoes Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>; in his tragic grandeur, Eblis resembles a Caliph \u2013 \u00abAn infinity of elders with streaming beards [\u2026] had prostrated themselves before the ascent of the lofty Eminence\u00bb [BECKFORD 2001, p. 169]. The following passage is obviously inspired by Milton\u2019s Satan, but it also recalls and, at the same time, contradicts the Quran, in which \u00abThe 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\u00bb [KIDWAI 1995, p. 13]:<\/p>\n
\nIn the \u00abSecond Episode\u00bb, 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 \u2013 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\u2019s work, who admits his Satanic seduction, his diabolical descent and their consequences, such as his seduction of Margareta. Like Faust, Beckford\u2019s 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.
\nThe \u00abThird Episode\u00bb, under the title of \u00abThe History of Princess Zulkais and Prince Kalilah\u00bb focuses on the impious ambition of the Emir, also a seducer dominated by uncontrolled sexual passion for the Imam\u2019s 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.
\nOnce 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 \u00abEpisode\u00bb 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 \u00abreptiles with human faces\u00bb live, and by a \u00abplace of terror\u00bb paved with a flash-coloured marble marked as with \u00abthe veins and arteries of the human body\u00bb [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\u2019s terrible vision of human destiny can be associated with that phase of Romanticism which has been defined \u00abnegative\u00bb [PECKHAM 1970, p. 15]. According to this theory, Byron\u2019s works before Don Juan<\/em> (1818) belong to such a phase, including his Turkish Tales. Written after Byron\u2019s visit to the near East in 1809, they encompass a vision of the Orient which is very different from Beckford\u2019s. Byron greatly admired Beckford\u2019s works, particularly Vathek, about which, in a note to The Giaour,<\/em> he wrote: \u00abFor correctness of costume, beauty of description, and power of imagination, it far surpasses all European imitations\u00bb [BYRON 1980-1993, III, p.423].
\nThough the strong link between Beckford and Byron is certainly the \u00abpower of imagination\u00bb, 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<\/em> seems to suggest, Byron was particularly impressed by the detailed descriptions of the Orient not so much in Beckford\u2019s work (where the Orient is completely transfigured by the author\u2019s visionary imagination) as in Samuel Henley\u2019s notes for his 1786 English translation of Vathek<\/em>. Indeed these notes reveal \u2013 and explain \u2013 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.
\nMoreover, 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.
\nThe publication of Oriental poems became a profitable venture, to the point that Byron himself, in a famous letter, advised Thomas Moore to \u00abStick 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 [\u2026]\u00bb [BYRON 1973-94, III, p.101].
\nWorks 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\u2019s Turkish Tales<\/em> are the most famous example.
\nByron\u2019s stories \u2013 particularly The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, <\/em>and The Corsair<\/em> \u2013 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.
\nTheir experience of a strong emotional crisis also characterized Byron\u2019s personal history. When he wrote the Turkish Tales<\/em>, he lived a period of painful and unresolved conflicts. It is significant that the first of the Tales, The Giaour,<\/em> 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\u2019s 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.
\nAround 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 \u00abfaithless man\u00bb, according to Islam. Moreover, Leila is guilty of adultery, so her \u00abtreachery\u00bb is both religious and marital. According to McGann Leila\u2019s 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\u2019s sacrifice, the hero of The Giaour<\/em> 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<\/em>, love has always tragic consequences.
\nLeila, 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:<\/p>\n
\nBut gaze on that of the GAZELLE
\nIt will assist thy fancy well;
\nAs large, as languishingly dark,
\nBut soul beamed forth in every spark
\nThat darted from beneath the lid bright
\nAs the jewel of Giamschid.
\nYea, soul, and should your prophet say
\nThat form was nought but breathing clay,
\nBut Allah! I should answer nay;
\nThough on Al-Sirat\u2019s and arch I stood
\nWhich totters o\u2019er the fiery flood
\nWith Paradise within my view
\nAnd all his Houris beckoning through[BYRON 1980-1993, p.426].<\/p>\n
\nFrom the Tales<\/em> 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 \u00abheroic\u00bb figures: from the knight of the Medieval Romance and the Chivalric poems (in Byron\u2019s works, though, the hero always fails in saving the \u00abdamsel in distress\u00bb 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<\/em> 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 \u00abconstructedness\u00bb.
\nBeckford\u2019s 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\u2019s Turkish Tales<\/em>, 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 \u2013 not imaginative \u2013 place exists.<\/p>\n\n