Being William Beckford, or the Elusiveness of the Author

The category of pseudos has been so widely employed in Beckfordian criticism as to become a critical commonplace (pseudo-orientalist, pseudo-musician, pseudo-writer, pseudo-traveller), culminating in biographical portrayals of Beckford as a serial liar, often grounded in the anecdote that he allegedly composed Mozart’s aria Non più andrai. This article argues that Beckford’s self-fashioning is more fruitfully understood as an aesthetic strategy of authorial elusiveness. Since Borges’s seminal essay, Beckford has appeared as a figure of paradox, notably as the author of Vathek, a work whose ‘original’ version is famously unfaithful to its translation. By situating Beckford’s practices of incompletion, collaboration, and authorial withdrawal at the intersection of a pre-Keatsian sense of belatedness and a distinctly eighteenth-century, Shaftesburian paradigm of politeness, the article reads elusiveness as a historically situated mode of authorship. In this perspective, Beckford’s cultivation of comic opacity emerges as a strategic response to the demands of originality and sincerity that underpin the modern novel.