THE READING RHEUM: VATHEK (1786)

 

Following the first European translation of a version of The Arabian Nights in the early 1700s, various European authors attempted to emulate the freewheeling charms of the famous Oriental story-collection. The English lord William Beckford produced one of the most enduring such works of the period. Apparently he fell in love with the Nights in his early twenties and wrote VATHEK in a white-hot expression of literary ardor. Then Beckford never wrote fiction again, according to Lin Carter, who edited the Ballantine Adult Fantasy paperback of this unique effort, a favorite for such authors as HP Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

I say "unique effort" advisedly, because I don't consider VATHEK great literature, even of the sort produced by Lovecraft and Smith. The book feels a bit like Marlow's Faust festooned with Oriental tropes and suffused with Beckford's perception of the casual cruelty in the original stories. Beckford also copies the paper-thin characterizations and wandering narratives of the Nights, and though neither of these is necessarily a bad thing, one does have to be prepared for this style of writing. VATHEK doesn't capture the wilder fantasies of the Arabian Nights, though, because the main narrative-- as well as three side-stories-- all share the theme of the Satanic overreacher. 

The Caliph Vathek, ruling in the city of Samarah in the Abbasid period, only appears to be the defender of the Muslim faith. In truth he's a thoroughgoing hedonist who thirst after forbidden knowledge, much like his mother Carathis, a sorceress who follows the fire-worship attributed to the Zoroastrians (frequent villains in the Nights). One day Vathek is visited by a Giaour ("non-Muslim foreigner") who slowly draws the caliph into renouncing Allah to gain knowledge. That the Giaour is clearly not a human being is shown by an amusing scene in which he somehow morphs into a ball and lures Vathek and the rest of his subjects into becoming a huge soccer-team, kicking the animated ball all the way out of Samarah and up to the edge of a cliff. Beneath the level of the cliff is a literal doorway to the Islamic Hell, where rules the Islamic Satan "Eblis." At the cliff's edge Vathek receives a private message from Eblis' servant The Giaour: Vathek can gain supreme knowledge if he will sacrifice fifty Muslim children to Hell.

That Vathek does not succeed in delivering this sacrifice is not for lack of trying. But in Vathek's single-minded, impious quest, a lot of innocents do perish-- including fifty Samarah citizens who attempt to save Carathis from what they think is a raging fire, and who all end up getting killed by the witch's servants. Vathek and his mother make excellent, utterly conscience-less villains.

Unfortunately, in the second half Beckford's narrative vacillates. He has Vathek and a great entourage leave Samarah to visit an Emir, whose daughter Vathek eventually weds. This romantic subplot drags the narrative pace downward, partly because Beckford initially suggests that the Emir's daughter Nouronihar will resist Vathek because she's in love with her nancy-boy cousin Gulchenrouz. Then for no clear reason Beckford changes Nouronihar's character, so that she joins Vathek because of greed. Carathis, hearing about the effeminate Gulchenrouz, thirsts to sacrifice the youth. However, a beneficent genie rescues the cousin and takes him into a bower of immortal existence, along with the fifty children Vathek tried to sacrifice to Eblis. (Beckford does not explain why the genie didn't return the children to their parents in Samarah.)  Then eventually Vathek and Nouronihar make their way to the Islamic Hell, thinking they're going to enjoy the fruits of paradise, only to become, like all other damned souls, bereft of joy and hope.

Before coming to this dolorous conclusion, Vathek listens to the testimonies of three other damned souls about what deeds brought them to Hell. I lost interest in the first, "Prince Alasi," which just seemed like a reprise of Vathek's own career, and so have little to say about it. The third story, "Princess Zulkais," is a little better. It starts out with another tyrant who goes to extremes to push his only son into becoming a great ruler. The trouble is that son Kalilah really has a passion to stay in the company of his twin sister Zulkais. Beckford never shows any incestuous act, but Zulkais also goes to extremes to stay within the orbit of her brother, makes a deal with the devil, and so they both end up hopeless in Hell.

The middle story is meatier if still uneven. The eponymous narrator of "Prince Barkiarokh" is like Vathek an overreacher who hungers for anything he cannot have. By dumb luck a female peri, Homaiouna, falls in love with Barkiarokh at first sight, and maneuvers things so that he marries her and she sets up him up to ascend to the throne of Berdouka. However, Prince B. doesn't want to live the virtuous life Homaiouna expects him to observe. He betrays her with a mortal woman, hires thugs to knife his peri-wife over and over just to make her go away (he's aware it won't kill her), and finally falls in lust with his grown daughter by his mortal wife. Again, the main attraction of this story is much the same as the main one: to see just how ruthless a villain Barkiarokh can be, just as the main story focuses on the iniquities of Vathek and Carathis.

Scholars of the period have seen Vathek as a precursor of the obsessed Byronic hero (not least because Byron admired the book and wrote a narrative poem called "The Giaour") and of the Gothic villains who arose mostly in the 1790s (in belated reaction to Walpole's OTRANTO in 1764). But I find Beckford's concentration on over-the-top intense sadistic scenarios to have more in common with the works of the Marquise de Sade. Beckford began VATHEK four years before it was published, and the year after VATHEK was published in 1786, Sade wrote the work that made him famous, JUSTINE, which when published four years later would comprise an introduction to his doctrine of libertinage and Sadean excess. I'm not arguing direct influence. But it seems as if something was in the wind around that time, even though Beckford and Sade were in most other respects utterly unalike.      

             

CUTTING REMARKS ON SWORD-AND-SORCERY

 I've been trying to find time to review Brian Murphy's 2019 book FLAME AND CRIMSON: A HISTORY OF SWORD-AND-SORCERY, which I basically liked. with reservations. But I happened to make a remark about the book on one online forum, and it occurred to me that I might justify it in advance of a formal review, since the crux of the book is the question as to how to define "sword-and-sorcery" as a genre, as well as its place in history.

FLAME, in addition to charting the predecessors of S&S and its provenance within pulp magazines, also advances a theory as to the subgenre's relative downturn after a surge in mass popularity in 1960s magazines and paperbacks. That theory is loosely a restatement of Gresham's Law-- "bad money drives out good"-- but substituting "bad product/good product." I'm not entirely opposed to that interpretation, though I think the matter might be more involved. The crux of the interpretation depends heavily on what one defines as "escapism" and what different people expect from it. The remark I made was as follows:

"At one point Murphy twitted Lin Carter for his view of S&S as escapist, yet Murphy said something similar at the end of CRIMSON."

To provide a little more context to the statement, Murphy extolls the essential creator of the subgenre, Robert E Howard, as a rare voice of genius within pulp fiction, and he has similar glowing praise for such innovators in the subgenre as Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock and Fritz Leiber. But he considers that much of the less innovative works of the 1960s, by such authors as Lin Carter, John Jakes and Gardner F. Fox, to be generally responsible for the subgenre's downturn in the 1980s. Carter, for those not in the know, was a lifelong devotee of fantasy, though he wrote work in other genres. I have not read or reread any of Carter's books in many years, but I recall only liking a handful of works. I wouldn't credit Carter with much more innovation than Murphy does, and indeed, Carter's statements as Murphy reprints them indicate that Carter sincerely believed that S&S was meant to be "completely derivative" and thus not really defined by innovation. And one must admit that Murphy was hardly unique in denigrating the Conan-imitations of the 1960s, the various works by Carter, Jakes and Fox, as "escapist and wish-fulfillment" (p. 171).

Yet Murphy, as I said above, attempts to define "escapism" in such a way as to validate REH and other esteemed S&S writers-- who to this day are still not really embraced as "real literature"-- as being a cut above the rest. In the last chapter, Murphy says:

"Fantasy is the literature of escape, and sword-and-sorcery falls squarely into this tradition. It offers a glimpse at existence beyond our ordinary round, awakening world-weary hearts to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion." 

Murphy cites Tolkien and a couple of others as champions of this interpretation of fantasy and thus of all its subgenres. However, the author never quite defines what makes "good escape," as opposed to "bad escape." If a given story depicts any sort of fantastic entity or contrivance, doesn't it possess a power to take readers "beyond our ordinary round?" Or is there some special level of communication that a story in any genre should have, to open hearts "to the possibilities of productive disruption and rebellion?" In the "escapist and wish fulfillment" remark Murphy makes on page 171, he ventures a comparison between paperback sword-and-sorcery and the similar light women's entertainment known as "bodice-rippers." My impression is that the majority of these-- not counting offshoots like Gothics and supernatural romance-- are without fantastic entities or contrivances. But if those stories lack the power to bring forth "good escape," is it because they lack fantastic elements, or do the stories lack something else, something that can also be found in non-fantasy books by Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, as much as in the greatest fantasy-authors?

I have my own solutions to these conundrums, of course, and maybe Murphy does too. His purpose in writing FLAME was obviously not to propound a synoptic definition of "fantasy literature vs. realistic literature." Still, any time one uses the word "escapism," it opens some of these pitfalls, into which anybody, even with the best intentions, can fall.