Discovering Eastern Horrors: Beckford, Maturin and the Discourse of Travel Literature

Abstract

The first of the two passages quoted above, a famous section of Byron’s note to The Giaour , indicates an important aspect of William Beckford’s Vathek (1786). In his praise of the work, Byron implicitly underlines the importance of ‘realism’ in the handling of certain materials and sources as a criterion for the evaluation of literature. Indeed, Byron held literary ‘correctness’ in such importance that in 1817, in a letter to John Murray, he wrote that I hate things all fiction & therefore the Merchant & Othello — have no great associations to me — but Pierre has — there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric — and pure invention is but the talent of a liar. 3 Byron emphasized what was for him a crucial aspect of literature: its adherence to fact and ‘truth’ even in its wildest inventions of fiction. Unlike Beckford, Byron knew the ‘facts’ of the East by having travelled there in 1809–11, but Beckford’s picture of oriental customs and culture, derived from secondary sources, struck him as authentic and genuine. According to Byron, Beckford had to be praised because he engaged with ‘real’ characters and events and, accordingly, offered a picture of the East which was reliable and credible even though it was presented in the usual escapist narrative conventions of a tale. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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