Ending in Infinity: William Beckford’s Arabian Tale
John Garrett, Sultan Qaboos University
Volume 5, no. 1, October 1992
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ABSTRACT
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. 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.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Beckford” include:
The Architectural Design of Beckford’s Vathek
by SANDRO JUNG (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
The Author in the Novel: Creating Beckford in Vathek
by R.B. GILL (ECF 15.2, January 2003)
Vathek: le choix d’une écriture cursive et piquante
by CARMEN FERNANDEZ ALAMOUDI (ECF 15.1, October 2002)
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