Birthing the Blog (1 of 4): Beckford’s VATHEK

Technorati Code: SXHCJ8FANYK5

To celebrate the rebirth of my personal blog as a study of the Gothic, I am reposting four entries from years past.  They are a little musty and damp, but they’ll give a sense of what this blog is going to sound like in the weeks and months to come.

This first installment is a review of the book Vathek by 18th century British author William Beckford.

The fact that so many casual readers dispute Vathek’s status as a Gothic novel says more about perceptions of the genre than the writing as a whole.

A lot of this is a throwback, for us, to high school. While I’m grateful that the movements of the Enlightenment and Romanticism were discussed at all, the “two tables, a vs. b” model I received in 11th grade Lit were unnecessarily reductive. They seemed to indicate that the Enlightenment was a movement comprised of one group of people with a clear agenda, who were later outmoded and opposed by another group of people with an oppositional agenda. Quite simply, this is historically incorrect.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a mounting flood of scientific discovery coupled by the extensive potential for economic growth demonstrated by colonialism put a constant and mounting pressure on more restrictive and antiquated practices and institutions. The Enlightenment, then, was a reactionary movement, inasmuch as it boiled down to a mistrust of established traditions because they restrained the promise embodied by each discovery. The movement, however, didn’t spring up all at once, but had been gradually evolving since the Renaissance. By the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment had finally gained enough momentum and recognition to define itself and alter the political, social, and religious institutions of the time.

The emergence of Romanticism from the Englightenment was just as clouded and disrupted a development. While Romanticism was largely a reaction to the upheaval of the French Revolution, the conclusion that “rational thought has limitations” was a quintessentially Enlightened observation.

It is this final observation that most high school Literature classes fail to make.

It’s one thing to talk about Victor Hugo railing against the Neoclassical school, but the truth is that 1) we cannot simply apply this logic to, say, put Voltaire and Hawthorne at odds, and 2) such comparisons between “classical” vs. “modern” approaches to literature had been made for centuries. The point is not that Romantic thought refuted Enlightened thought, but that the one was a logical and reasonable extension of and response to the other.

This point is particularly important when talking about the Gothic Novel, because the genre emerged during the murkiest intersections of the two spheres.

So: The argument is made that Vathek is not “Gothic” because it eschews the traditionally “Gothic” medieval European setting in favor of the Middle-East. Instead, I’d argue, the choice of the Middle-East is to inspire a sense of the strange and exotic in the reader; ultimately the same intentions that led other writers to a choice of medieval Europe. The themes are macabre, supernatural, inexplicable, and menacing, and the characters behave with an extremity that is not borne of allegorical convenience but as instruments of primal desires. These qualities make Vathek a quintessentially gothic novel.

…

On to the novel itself. (Beware of spoilers.)

The deliberately crude prose in much of Vathek brought to mind the style of The Castle of Otranto, but the intention of the novel is much different. In Otranto, Walpole created an atmosphere of despair and foreboding, but it’s essentially a plot-driven story. The main question that the reader asks is what is going to happen, and to whom. Vathek, on the other hand, while his characters are angry, personal, and very self-conscious (not, as I said, allegorical), establishes the direction of the plot almost from the beginning. There is little doubt as the final destination and fate of almost all of the characters, and while this is not directly indicated in the internal monologues of Vathek (the antihero) or descriptions of the Gaiour and his domain, it is indirectly shouted by other cues.

Vathek is theme-driven.

When Caliph Vathek murders fifty boys early on in the novel (there’s a lot of that going on in my blogo-solar-system these days) we should not be disappointed at our lack of empathy and suspense regarding the protagonist. We should realize at once that we’re tagging along for a tour into atrocity and Hell, and that, unlike Dante, we’re following someone who will not be permitted to leave. As Sufjan Stevens sings, “I know, I know, my time is past.”

The reader, then, begins to ask a different set of questions: Who will Vathek drag down with him? What sensations and promises are delicious enough to tempt them along? What punishments are they risking (and ultimately succumbing to) as payback for their momentary gratification?

…

A novel based on such a premise must naturally rely extensively on its sensory vividness. This is part of what the genre is known for, and Vathek does not disappoint. It is a short novel, but in 120 pages manages to cycle through 1) Vathek’s compound with a palace reserved for the gratification of each sense, the “touch” gratification being… you get it, 2) the initial appearance and gifts of the Gaiour, 3) the torment and presumed murder of the Gaiour, 4) the sacrifice of the children, 5) another sacrifice during a Satanic rite, 6) the slaughter of Vathek’s entourage on their trip to Persepolis, 7) the seclusion of Fakraddin’s community in the forested mountains, 8) the final descent into Hell. This is just a partial list, but each of these segments depicts either an extremity of idyllic beauty or encompassing misery. Regardless of which extreme is depicted, the emphasis is on the senses: names of flowers and plants, the quality and movement of water, and the words are mythic and direct.

It was a story Artaud may have admired.

Additionally, while the plot did not create much suspense on its own, it was nevertheless intricate in the number of different perspectives it offered, wildly different settings, and unexpected (inexplicable?) twists. The interplay of these elements did not deviate from the Faustian arcs of each character, but it did allow Beckford to show the conflict from a variety of different vistas.

…

From a modern standpoint, the novel was surprisingly circumspect. Last year I read both the Qu’ran and the Hadiths, and I assumed that a story written by a man who had probably encountered only a couple Muslims in his life, would have been packed with inaccuracies and bias. Certainly, the book is not particularly sound, but more surprising, it takes the beliefs of its characters at face value, as one would expect it to if written from a Christian perspective. The characters who are more sympathetic and ultimately escape from the trip to Hell (most particularly Gulchenrouz, but also embodied in the figure of the Emir and Morakanabad) are unambiguously and unabashedly Muslim, and in fact they cleave more strictly to their faith than the protagonists.

I did wonder if perhaps there is was a critique of Catholicism embedded in the text, since Vathek was Caliph and might be paralleled to the pope. I don’t know enough about Beckford, however, to guess at his theological bias, and even if this was his thrust it seemed unlikely to upstage the human passions that plague his characters. Allowing Vathek to be Caliph might have simply been a device to raise the stakes; to allow the tyrannical tyrant greater heights from which to fall.

Just as unexpected was its treatment of women. On the one hand, there are inevitable problems from the perspective of a modern reading. All of the women mentioned by name are ultimately evil. That said, they include, in the form of Nouronihar, the most complex and interesting of any character, and in the form of Carathis, the most galvinizing and powerful mortal.

Vathek himself, despite his supernatural predilections (most apply summed up by his “terrible eye” that kills people when he is angry) lacks the ambition to vie with demons. His desires are seemingly limited to local control, good food, and good sex, meaning he might content himself to be a petty tyrant.

Carathis, his mother, on the other hand, drives and propels him, as well as Nouronihar and the other characters he meets along his journey, for her own benefit. She is unrepentantly evil, and easily creates more than half of the novel’s body count. Which means that she is also effective.

Nouronihar was the one character who moved me, and while Beckford builds in her the same consuming avarice that does in all the others, we see it existing alongside an awareness of limitations, of the equally attractive temptation to simply be human and live a life of mortality and injury. She succumbs, of course, after being separated from Gulchenrouz, and from a psychological standpoint, we might define her quandary in terms of Fakraddin and his subjects. In which case the story does become more suspenseful and character-driven, and might have been a step toward a more three-dimensional romance had the story been told from her perspective throughout.

…

In the end, Vathek is a dense and complex story, far more so than The Castle of Otranto, and one which actively engages (without explicitly acknowledging) the drives and contradictions of the Gothic movement. It lacks the transcendence of Ann Radcliffe’s writing, but in spite of its lack of plot-driven tension, is still something of a page turner.

I can’t hope to write enough on it now, but I do expect to reread it soon if I have the change, and I’d certainly recommend it as a source of inspiration to the Gothic Funk.