THE DEEP ONES: "The Third Episode of Vathek" by Clark Ashton Smith

"The Third Episode of Vathek" by Clark Ashton Smith

Discussion begins August 10.

From ISFDB: "First published in the Summer 1937 issue of Leaves as "The Story of the Princess Zulkais and the Prince Kalilah" by Beckford and "Conclusion to Wm. Beckford's story of Princess Zulkais & Prince Kalilah" by Smith."



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/217/the-third-episode-of-vath...
http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/misc/ashSmithVathek.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1367501

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Abominations of Yondo
The Maker of Gargoyles and Other Stories
The Maze of the Enchanter: Volume Four of the Collected Fantasies Of Clark Ashton Smith

MISCELLANY

http://zinewiki.com/Leaves
http://tinyurl.com/hx3lu84
http://alangullette.com/lit/smith/
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2012/02/18/vathek-illustrated/
http://tinyurl.com/j9aqb9v
http://tinyurl.com/hq66zuc

Online for me, probably.

An annotated online version of William Beckford's original novel (i.e., Vathek) is here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42401

An online version of The Episodes of Vathek (minus CAS's continuation) is here:

https://archive.org/details/episodesofvathek00beckuoft

CAS' tale "The Ghoul", while also influenced by The Thousand and One Nights, also appears to be set in the Vathek "mythos":

http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/80/the-ghoul
http://tinyurl.com/jtjjrld

I have Vathek on my shelves, still waiting my attentions. Perhaps I'll break it out, at least to read the relevant episode. Though the annotations in the online version posted in >2 artturnerjr: could be quite helpful.

The CAS definitely online for me.

>3 elenchus:

Does your edition of Vathek have the Episodes incorporated into the body of the text?

I ask because the edition I've read (the translation by Herbert B. Grimsditch, originally published in 1929) reads as if it's been crudely edited:

"When he had finished his painful narration the young man who had spoken to him began his own story as follows.
(Story of the two friends, Princes Alasi and Firouz, shut up in the Palace of Subterranean fire.
Story of Prince Barkiarokh, shut up in the Palace of Subterranean Fire.
Story of the Prince Kalilah and Princess Zulkais, shut up in the Palace of Subterranean fire.)
The third prince was in the middle of his story when he was interrupted"...

However, it would really disrupt the flow of the novel if, after following Vathek's story, (which is pretty fast-paced despite the ornate language, and has no digressions that I can remember), at page 121 of a 125-page novel, you instead stopped for three stories-within-stories in the style of The Thousand and One Nights (and, the three Episodes, without CAS conclusion to the third, are easily half as long again as the main story, which would surely unbalance the novel as a whole).

I have also got a Penguin Classics edition of Vathek and Other Stories which prints an edition of the novel edited by Kenneth W Graham "as part of his doctoral thesis in the University of London" (in 1971). This edition, based on an examination of all English and French editions, smoothes over the transition to the Episodes as follows:

..."and Vathek began, not without tears and lamentations, a sincere recital of every circumstance that had passed. When the afflicting narrative was closed, the young man entered on his own. Each person proceeded in order; and, when the third prince had reached the midst of his adventurers {that's got to be a misprint!}, a sudden noise interrupted him, which caused the vault to tremble and to open."

The way things play out in the novel, it is clear that the Prince Kalilah never finishes reciting his story, leading me to wonder whether Beckford ever intended to write a complete version for the Episodes (and after all, "fragments", like pastiche scraps of medieval legend - and faked-up mediaeval ruins on a nobleman's estate - were a significant element of the early development of Gothic).

Edited to fix a typo; Edited again to correct "theses" to "thesis".

I should say I read this in another '70's UK CAS paperback I found, a 1974 edition of The Abominations of Yondo. I also looked at The Episodes of Vathek ("Translated from the French by Sir Frank Marzials") in a Dedalus paperback from 1994.

>4 housefulofpaper:

I see now my 1970 Oxford Paperbacks edition of Vathek (based on the 1816 English translation by Beckford, with various corrections I can't quite figure out now) omits the episodes entirely. So no option for me there.

But the transition passage (in my edition, not a transition but simply a paragraph near the end of the novel) reads much as your Penguin edition, sans typo of "adventures".

>6 elenchus:

Ah, I shouldn't have called it a transition, as the Penguin doesn't print the Episodes, but simply reports that they happen, just as I quoted, and evidently just as the passage appears in the Oxford edition.

I imagine, then, that no edition has combined the novel and the episodes into one continuous narrative.

When I first read this, I wasn't aware it was a continuation, but assumed it was a pastiche. I was clued in by the footnote in The Maze of the Enchanter pointing out where Beckford's text ends and CAS's begins - which transition I'd undoubtedly missed otherwise, the latter succeeding quite well, I think, in capturing the former's voice.

Can't say I'm too fond of it however - I like CAS better when he writes as himself.

It's been a while since I read Vathek, but it seems like Smith really got Beckford's style (and substance) cold here. He uses the conclusion of Vathek as a basis for the conclusion of this Episode.

I like that this story is compounded Oriental decadence. On the one hand, you have the medieval Muslim setting with its riches and harems, used by Beckford and kindred writers to evoke decadence. But within this story we have ancient Egypt, with its forbidden sciences, picture-writing, and incest, viewed by the Muslims themselves as a locus of decadence.

*slaps forehead*

And only now do I note the parallel between Kalilah and Zulkaïs' incestuous love and pharaonic practice.

(Absurdly, the spell checker on this computer wants to turn "pharaonic" into "philharmonic".)

I suppose this story should have a joint byline for our purposes, since CAS only wrote the conclusion, and the majority of the prose was Beckford's.

I've read Vathek in Everett F. Bleiler's Three Gothic Novels omnibus. However, that was about ten years ago, and my notes are none too detailed, and I don't own the book so I don't recall if this episode was in there. Clute's entry on Beckford (http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=beckford_william) in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction doesn't resolve the matter.

I liked this story, particularly Beckford's ironic mocking of Islamic fatalism. Ironic because, ultimately, Princess Zulkais wishes she had listened to all those Moslem holy men.

I was in Bath, UK in 2006, but I didn't make it to Beckford's Lansdown Baghdad. There's an article on it at http://www.rictornorton.co.uk/beckfor3.htm.

So does anyone doubt that Zulkais and Kalilah's relationship was truly incestuous?

I had read this before, but only Beckford's incomplete version. When I started reading it in The Abominations of Yondo I couldn't remember where it ended and I assumed/misremembered the fragment as quite short. So I assumed I was reading CAS when it fact it was 100% Beckford.

I was left with the impression that CAS took a lot of his style from Beckford.

The three episodes, and Vathek, have an unavoidable similarity in that they all end with the protagonists tempted into eternal damnation in the halls of Eblis.

What impressed me with CAS conclusion was that he did "ventriloquise" Beckford very well. He also moved things along at quite a pace without seeming to rush events to a conclusion (those "things" being very important to the story: the introduction of the demon, Omoultakos, and the temptation of both Zulkais and Kalilah - the "con", as I found myself thinking of it).

He also got a dirty joke of a sort in there, after the demon has been waving his tail around for several pages, all aflame with sparks coming off it, we are told "Know, young prince, that it is the nature of my tail to burn in this manner, and the sensation it affords me is, in its degree no more painful, or extraordinary, that that which women experience from the flushing of their cheeks, or men from an excitement of the blood." - isn't Omoultakos saying that's his tail is equivalent to an erection?

And there's a "callback" right at the end of the story which puts a sombre, even tragic, spin on this gag: Zulkaid and Kalilah await the moment when their hearts burst into flame in their chests (the fate of the damned as we learn from the final pages of Vathek): "but, alas! {our hearts} shall derive unutterable anguish, like the hearts of all other mortals, from that flame in which is the ecstasy of demons."

>12 RandyStafford:

So does anyone doubt that Zulkais and Kalilah's relationship was truly incestuous? - I don't.

>13 housefulofpaper: I had a similar experience. Though I had read the story out of The Maze of the Enchanter before, I thought I was reading CAS at the beginning instead of Beckford.