Jan Potocki (1761–1815)
Author of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa
About the Author
Image credit: Portrait by Alexander G. Varneck. c. 1810, after a work by Lampi
Works by Jan Potocki
Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript: Ten Days in the Life of Alphonse Van Worden (Dedalus European Classics) (1990) 48 copies, 1 review
Avadoro, histoire espagnole 1 copy
Storia di Zoto 1 copy
Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript (Dedalus European Classics) — Author — 1 copy
Associated Works
Diabli wiedza co... — Contributor — 4 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1761-03-08
- Date of death
- 1815-12-02
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- Captain of Engineers, Polish Army
Egyptologist
adventurer
linguist - Organizations
- Knight of Malta
- Cause of death
- suicide
- Nationality
- Poland
- Birthplace
- Pików, Podolien, Polen
- Places of residence
- Uladowska, Podolia (now Ukraine)
- Place of death
- Uładówka, Podolien, Russisches Kaiserreich
- Associated Place (for map)
- Uladowska, Podolia
Members
Reviews
Opening the Goodreads app the other day I was served this quotation from Jonathan Safran Foer: "my life story is the story of everyone I've ever met." I think that's about as good an encapsulation of this unruly, beguiling novel as you could wish for. Everyone's story is everyone else's story; everything is linked; identity is defined in relation to others, if not exclusively by others. If this sounds confusing, it is. Velasquez, the eccentric geometer, surely speaks for every reader of The show more Manuscript Found in Saragossa when he complains "I have tried in vain to concentrate all my attention on the Gypsy Chief's words but I am unable to discover any coherence whatsoever in them. I do not know who is speaking and who is listening." I've read the book three times now, and the incoherence is only very slightly less.
But as Pynchon said, "why should things be easy to understand?" I love this novel because, like Pynchon's novels, it takes the world's incomprehensible profusion head-on and doesn't try to make a morsel of it. Other frame stories like the Thousand and One Nights and the Canterbury Tales use their frames like picture frames, as containers for art, or, like Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, as literary devices to situate the story in relation to the reader. But Manuscript is different: the frame is an integral part of the art; or rather, the art and the frame are one and the same. The principal raconteur of this frame-story par excellence, and the closest thing it has to a focal point, is the protean Pandesowna aka Avadoro aka the Gypsy Chief ("in changing my name I had also changed my outward appearance"). As a child he almost drowns in a cauldron of ink: pace Obelix and Achilles, the perfect superhero origin story for a super-fabulist. And as a self-designated "gypsy", he's compelled to wander, to defer conclusion, like his own wandering narratives and, of course, the Wandering Jew who tags along intermittently with our merry, motley crew.
"My life story". Life is a story, and its characters are as real as we are. But how real are we? Except for a couple of stand-alone tales near the beginning, from a book in Alphonse's father's library (and somehow like an orchestra tuning up), every story here is the story of a life, told by a character in someone else's story. Characters from one person's story show up in another's reality, because that reality is itself a story. No story exists in isolation. Manuscript emphasies stories as things that are told — it's always relevant who's telling the story; every tale is a performance. Which means there's no doctrinal form, that they might vary in a retelling, to a different audience, in a different place. "Perhaps" says the Gypsy Chief when Alphonse points out that a story he (the Chief) once heard closely resembles one Alphonse read in a book, "Romati took his story from that book. He may have made it up. But what is certain is [...] it's not important whether a story is true or not."
The nesting is obsessive, demented, dizzyingly deep. But it's the only way: stories need to work backwards in time, because a conventional forward-moving narrative doesn't really explain why things are happening. It's the unanswerable why of the annoying brat, but if its reiteration is confounding, that's because things are confounding. The perceptive Velasquez again: "all the gypsy's stories begin in a simple enough way and you think you can already predict the end. But things turn out quite differently." Or as his crush, the witty Rebecca, says, "continual surprises don't keep one's interest in the story alive. One can never foresee what will happen subsequently." In other words, one has to go back. All stories are retrospective, branching, inconclusive. The book is full of subterranean scenes, and reading Manuscript, pushing through the nested narratives, is like tunnelling (some might say boring) down through layers of reality in search of some elusive foundation or point of origin.
The book is full of seductions, physical and spiritual, and one of its motifs is the tension between the absurd code of honour Alphonse inherits from his father and the temptations of his Moorish (and very moreish) cousins Emina and Zubeida. But as they wander the enchanted landscape of the Sierra Morena, all the "first level" characters are seduced by stories, frustrated, like Shahriyar in the Arabian Nights, by the nightly deferrals. Rebecca's rather stuck-up brother Uzeda expresses the plenipotent nature of narrative when he explains the Kabbalah: "words strike the air and the mind, they act on the senses and on the soul [...] they are the true intermediaries between matter and every order of intelligence." Hervas the obsessional scholar dedicates the very first volume of his 100-vol. universal encyclopedia to grammar. It's as though stories are an intoxicating, seducing compound from which the characters are trying to extract the active ingredient — but like bees around some stupefying flower, or Pandesowna with the tintero largo, end up losing themselves in their obsession.
Many kinds of obsession are on display, to the extent that Manuscript becomes a kind of democracy of the deranged. Alphonse's duel-obsessed dad; the crazed polymath Hervas; the Kabbalist siblings raised by an equally unhinged father; Pacheco the demoniac whose three speeches are bracketed by, in order, a terrible cry, a ghastly howl, a terrible cry, a ghastly howl, a long wail, and a terrible howl; Pandesowna's ink-addled progenitor (fathers seem to be another theme...) But all these lunatics (even the quidnunc Busqueros, as close to a villain as the book contains) are sympathetic to some degree, perhaps because their craziness is a reaction to a crazy world of conspiracies and ramified connections. It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you — and the Inquisition really was out to get you. Persecution induces dissembling, secret societies, "occult" (in the sense of hidden as well as woo) activity, fiction in general — story as distraction or deception. Manuscript also tracks the revolutionary spore that was in the air of its 18th century setting, and had bloodily fruited in America and France by the time of the novel's publication. The nobility among whom most of the stories are set is deeply incestuous (perhaps even more so than the narrative with its overlapping plots), as if turning in on itself in anticipation of the coming social changes. So they're another kind of secret society. Not to mention Potocki's own rumoured incest (Potocki's life is arguably the real frame for the Manuscript).
All this blather, though, risks obscuring what I love most about this shaggiest of dog stories: its zest for life, for the experience of being in the world. It's just such a big beating heart of a book. Alphonse sums it up to himself one morning:
I was awoken just after dawn by the chirping of the cicadas, which is particularly lively and cheerful in Andalusia. I had become sensitive to the beauties of nature. I left my tent to see the effect of the first rays of sun on the vast horizon. My thoughts turned to Rebecca. 'She is right,' I said to myself, 'to prefer the concrete joys of this mortal life to idle speculation about an ideal world to which we shall all sooner or later belong. Does not this world offer us physical sensations and pleasurable impressions in enough variety to occupy us during the time of our short life?'
This gentle mockery of Enlightenment rationalism and concomittant pleasure in the physical world pops up again and again. Sometimes it's the recusant Rebecca, freed from the tedious abstractions of the Kabbalah, poking fun at the various monomaniacs around her, like Alphonse's dad ("if your father hadn't duelled with eleven officers a quarrel might well have arisen. This he did very well to avoid"); or there are Potocki's frequent digs at Velasquez's naive scientism, like the scene where the combined charms of Antonia and Marita fail to penetrate his primes and logarithms. Scholastics, says Hervas, is "the art of conducting a proof completely independently of common sense." As for the Church, it's even more useless at explaining things, figuring as a morbid instrument of chastisement, sunderer of lovers, and general fun-sponge (from Romati's story: "I am so far from superstition and credulity that theology is perhaps the only branch of knowledge that I have consistently neglected"). Understanding comes, if it comes at all, through companionship, shared experience, shared wanderings, and stories that stave off dreariness and maybe, as for Scheherazade, death. Maybe, after all the stories, we're no wiser than when we started (despite Potocki's bow-tied conclusion), but that's absolutely okay with me. Maybe by my tenth read-through I'll even figure out what the hell is going on. show less
But as Pynchon said, "why should things be easy to understand?" I love this novel because, like Pynchon's novels, it takes the world's incomprehensible profusion head-on and doesn't try to make a morsel of it. Other frame stories like the Thousand and One Nights and the Canterbury Tales use their frames like picture frames, as containers for art, or, like Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, as literary devices to situate the story in relation to the reader. But Manuscript is different: the frame is an integral part of the art; or rather, the art and the frame are one and the same. The principal raconteur of this frame-story par excellence, and the closest thing it has to a focal point, is the protean Pandesowna aka Avadoro aka the Gypsy Chief ("in changing my name I had also changed my outward appearance"). As a child he almost drowns in a cauldron of ink: pace Obelix and Achilles, the perfect superhero origin story for a super-fabulist. And as a self-designated "gypsy", he's compelled to wander, to defer conclusion, like his own wandering narratives and, of course, the Wandering Jew who tags along intermittently with our merry, motley crew.
"My life story". Life is a story, and its characters are as real as we are. But how real are we? Except for a couple of stand-alone tales near the beginning, from a book in Alphonse's father's library (and somehow like an orchestra tuning up), every story here is the story of a life, told by a character in someone else's story. Characters from one person's story show up in another's reality, because that reality is itself a story. No story exists in isolation. Manuscript emphasies stories as things that are told — it's always relevant who's telling the story; every tale is a performance. Which means there's no doctrinal form, that they might vary in a retelling, to a different audience, in a different place. "Perhaps" says the Gypsy Chief when Alphonse points out that a story he (the Chief) once heard closely resembles one Alphonse read in a book, "Romati took his story from that book. He may have made it up. But what is certain is [...] it's not important whether a story is true or not."
The nesting is obsessive, demented, dizzyingly deep. But it's the only way: stories need to work backwards in time, because a conventional forward-moving narrative doesn't really explain why things are happening. It's the unanswerable why of the annoying brat, but if its reiteration is confounding, that's because things are confounding. The perceptive Velasquez again: "all the gypsy's stories begin in a simple enough way and you think you can already predict the end. But things turn out quite differently." Or as his crush, the witty Rebecca, says, "continual surprises don't keep one's interest in the story alive. One can never foresee what will happen subsequently." In other words, one has to go back. All stories are retrospective, branching, inconclusive. The book is full of subterranean scenes, and reading Manuscript, pushing through the nested narratives, is like tunnelling (some might say boring) down through layers of reality in search of some elusive foundation or point of origin.
The book is full of seductions, physical and spiritual, and one of its motifs is the tension between the absurd code of honour Alphonse inherits from his father and the temptations of his Moorish (and very moreish) cousins Emina and Zubeida. But as they wander the enchanted landscape of the Sierra Morena, all the "first level" characters are seduced by stories, frustrated, like Shahriyar in the Arabian Nights, by the nightly deferrals. Rebecca's rather stuck-up brother Uzeda expresses the plenipotent nature of narrative when he explains the Kabbalah: "words strike the air and the mind, they act on the senses and on the soul [...] they are the true intermediaries between matter and every order of intelligence." Hervas the obsessional scholar dedicates the very first volume of his 100-vol. universal encyclopedia to grammar. It's as though stories are an intoxicating, seducing compound from which the characters are trying to extract the active ingredient — but like bees around some stupefying flower, or Pandesowna with the tintero largo, end up losing themselves in their obsession.
Many kinds of obsession are on display, to the extent that Manuscript becomes a kind of democracy of the deranged. Alphonse's duel-obsessed dad; the crazed polymath Hervas; the Kabbalist siblings raised by an equally unhinged father; Pacheco the demoniac whose three speeches are bracketed by, in order, a terrible cry, a ghastly howl, a terrible cry, a ghastly howl, a long wail, and a terrible howl; Pandesowna's ink-addled progenitor (fathers seem to be another theme...) But all these lunatics (even the quidnunc Busqueros, as close to a villain as the book contains) are sympathetic to some degree, perhaps because their craziness is a reaction to a crazy world of conspiracies and ramified connections. It isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you — and the Inquisition really was out to get you. Persecution induces dissembling, secret societies, "occult" (in the sense of hidden as well as woo) activity, fiction in general — story as distraction or deception. Manuscript also tracks the revolutionary spore that was in the air of its 18th century setting, and had bloodily fruited in America and France by the time of the novel's publication. The nobility among whom most of the stories are set is deeply incestuous (perhaps even more so than the narrative with its overlapping plots), as if turning in on itself in anticipation of the coming social changes. So they're another kind of secret society. Not to mention Potocki's own rumoured incest (Potocki's life is arguably the real frame for the Manuscript).
All this blather, though, risks obscuring what I love most about this shaggiest of dog stories: its zest for life, for the experience of being in the world. It's just such a big beating heart of a book. Alphonse sums it up to himself one morning:
I was awoken just after dawn by the chirping of the cicadas, which is particularly lively and cheerful in Andalusia. I had become sensitive to the beauties of nature. I left my tent to see the effect of the first rays of sun on the vast horizon. My thoughts turned to Rebecca. 'She is right,' I said to myself, 'to prefer the concrete joys of this mortal life to idle speculation about an ideal world to which we shall all sooner or later belong. Does not this world offer us physical sensations and pleasurable impressions in enough variety to occupy us during the time of our short life?'
This gentle mockery of Enlightenment rationalism and concomittant pleasure in the physical world pops up again and again. Sometimes it's the recusant Rebecca, freed from the tedious abstractions of the Kabbalah, poking fun at the various monomaniacs around her, like Alphonse's dad ("if your father hadn't duelled with eleven officers a quarrel might well have arisen. This he did very well to avoid"); or there are Potocki's frequent digs at Velasquez's naive scientism, like the scene where the combined charms of Antonia and Marita fail to penetrate his primes and logarithms. Scholastics, says Hervas, is "the art of conducting a proof completely independently of common sense." As for the Church, it's even more useless at explaining things, figuring as a morbid instrument of chastisement, sunderer of lovers, and general fun-sponge (from Romati's story: "I am so far from superstition and credulity that theology is perhaps the only branch of knowledge that I have consistently neglected"). Understanding comes, if it comes at all, through companionship, shared experience, shared wanderings, and stories that stave off dreariness and maybe, as for Scheherazade, death. Maybe, after all the stories, we're no wiser than when we started (despite Potocki's bow-tied conclusion), but that's absolutely okay with me. Maybe by my tenth read-through I'll even figure out what the hell is going on. show less
'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa' has been on my to-read list for at least a decade and I have no recollection of how it got there. I haven't come across any convenient library copies and most of those on eBay are heavily abridged. Finally I found an affordable second hand copy with all 600 pages. It was worth waiting for! What an absolutely delightful, hilarious, strange, philosophical, gothic novel. The labyrinthine narrative begins like this: a young Walloon officer named Alphonse is show more journeying across a Spanish desert. After losing his companions, he takes refuge in an empty inn. There he meets and is seduced by two mysterious and beautiful women who claim to be his cousins. He wakes up the next morning under a gallows, between the corpses of two bandits. Alphonse is understandably concerned that he may have had a threesome with ghosts, vampires, zombies, or demons. Pondering this mystery, he continues his journey and encounters a series of voluble personages who tell him their life stories.
These autobiographical tales invariably contain the stories of others nested within them, to the point that the reader gets three stories deep. The characters themselves comment on this and make suggestions like, "I have always thought that novels and other works of that kind should be written in several columns like chronological tables." It takes a skilled writer to make such an intricate structure work without completely confusing the reader. I admit that the novel is best read in large chunks so as to keep track of who is talking, but nonetheless found it easier to follow than expected simply because it's so entertaining. The stories involve all manner of amusing drama, including duels, war, banditry, thwarted love, cross-dressing, vengeance, secret marriages, and geometry. The characters all have distinctive and often hilariously deadpan voices, such as:
As the novel continues, the reader starts to see linkages between the stories and with Alphonse's strange experience. It's very satisfying to pull threads together and notice how stories overlap. As befits a novel of this length, there is a whole lot going on. I was fascinated by the clever and ambiguous combination of religious, supernatural, philosophical, and scientific themes, which evoke the Enlightenment better than any non-fiction I've read on the topic (which admittedly isn't much). The reader is treated to accounts from a cabbalist of his magical powers and a lecture from a geometer on how all human knowledge can be divided into subjects. Better still, these two characters discuss such topics with each other and other characters. Meanwhile, Alphonse puzzles as to whether he had a supernatural experience or was manipulated by humans for unknown reasons. The reader gets the sense of a world trying to reconcile old beliefs and new discoveries through dialogue. Potocki is a very funny writer, so everyone and everything is mocked at least a little. This manifests in farcical scenes of medical students pretending to be ghosts as they steal corpses from a graveyard for dissection, as well as discussions like this:
Potocki's comedy and melodrama are based upon great insight. For every amusing bit of byplay, there is a remarkable aside like this:
None of the tales have an obvious or heavy-handed moral message. Some end tragically, some happily, some ambiguously. Nobody is utterly villainous or utterly heroic, although Busqueros is utterly annoying. Nobody is a totally reliable narrator either. One character is, allegedly, the Wandering Jew of myth:
I've never read a novel quite like this one. The intricate structure conveys a wonderful sense of polyphony, diverse perspectives, curiosity, discovery, and demystification. The excitement of intellectual enquiry via debate is prominent amid the emotional turmoil of love, betrayal, and loss. On top of this, it manages to be both spicy and hilarious, a combination which very few novels achieve. The introduction also notes that the author and composition of the book were as mysterious as its content. Potocki had a tumultuous and exciting life, which undoubtedly informed the stories his characters tell. 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa' was apparently written some time between the 1790s and his death by suicide in 1815. It was composed in French but no complete original manuscript survives (or at least none had been found when this 1996 edition was published). The complete version has been pieced together using a Polish translation. I found the English translation readable and atmospheric, giving the novel a tone I really loved. I highly recommend following the hapless Alphonse as he wanders into a web of intrigue, adventure, intellectual investigation, and bickering. I don't know how obscure this novel is in the 21st century, but it deserves to be very well known. I intend to tell everyone willing to discuss books with me about it. show less
These autobiographical tales invariably contain the stories of others nested within them, to the point that the reader gets three stories deep. The characters themselves comment on this and make suggestions like, "I have always thought that novels and other works of that kind should be written in several columns like chronological tables." It takes a skilled writer to make such an intricate structure work without completely confusing the reader. I admit that the novel is best read in large chunks so as to keep track of who is talking, but nonetheless found it easier to follow than expected simply because it's so entertaining. The stories involve all manner of amusing drama, including duels, war, banditry, thwarted love, cross-dressing, vengeance, secret marriages, and geometry. The characters all have distinctive and often hilariously deadpan voices, such as:
"Signor Zoto," Monaldi replied, "It is somewhat surprising that you have not got the heart to administer any punishment at all to your wife but you are prepared to waylay men at the edge of a wood. But everything is possible and this is far from the only such contradiction hidden in the human heart. I am ready to introduce you to my friends [who are bandits] but you must first commit at least one murder."
As the novel continues, the reader starts to see linkages between the stories and with Alphonse's strange experience. It's very satisfying to pull threads together and notice how stories overlap. As befits a novel of this length, there is a whole lot going on. I was fascinated by the clever and ambiguous combination of religious, supernatural, philosophical, and scientific themes, which evoke the Enlightenment better than any non-fiction I've read on the topic (which admittedly isn't much). The reader is treated to accounts from a cabbalist of his magical powers and a lecture from a geometer on how all human knowledge can be divided into subjects. Better still, these two characters discuss such topics with each other and other characters. Meanwhile, Alphonse puzzles as to whether he had a supernatural experience or was manipulated by humans for unknown reasons. The reader gets the sense of a world trying to reconcile old beliefs and new discoveries through dialogue. Potocki is a very funny writer, so everyone and everything is mocked at least a little. This manifests in farcical scenes of medical students pretending to be ghosts as they steal corpses from a graveyard for dissection, as well as discussions like this:
"Good Lord," said the cabbalist to Senor Don de Velasquez the geometer, "if you don't yourself know the feeling of impatience you must have observed it occasionally in those with whom you have dealings."
"That is so," replied Velasquez. "I have often observed impatience in others, and it seems to me to be a feeling of unease which never ceases growing, without there appearing to be any law that governs the growth. One may say, however, that in general terms it is in inverse ratio to the square of the force of inertia. So that if I am twice as difficult to move to impatience as you are, I will only suffer one degree of it at the end of the first hour while you will suffer four. The same applies to all emotions which can be looked on as motive forces."
Potocki's comedy and melodrama are based upon great insight. For every amusing bit of byplay, there is a remarkable aside like this:
Like everything in this world, religions are subject to a slow, continuous force which tends continually to change their form and nature, with the result that after some centuries a religion that is still thought of as the same ends up by offering different things for men to put their faith in: allegories whose meaning has been lost, dogmas which no longer are fully believed.
None of the tales have an obvious or heavy-handed moral message. Some end tragically, some happily, some ambiguously. Nobody is utterly villainous or utterly heroic, although Busqueros is utterly annoying. Nobody is a totally reliable narrator either. One character is, allegedly, the Wandering Jew of myth:
I then spoke and asked the Jew what was the charm he found in such wilderness.
"Not seeing any humans," he replied. "And if I do meet some lost traveller or a family of Arabs, I know the lair of a lioness who is rearing her young. I lead her towards her prey and have the pleasure of seeing her devour them under my very eyes."
"You seem to have a somewhat bad character, Senor Ahasuerus," said Velasquez.
"I warned you," said the cabbalist. "He's the greatest scoundrel on earth."
"If you had lived eighteen hundred years," said the wanderer, "you wouldn't be any better than I am."
"I hope to live longer and be better than you," said the cabbalist. "But enough of these disagreeable thoughts. Continue with your story."
I've never read a novel quite like this one. The intricate structure conveys a wonderful sense of polyphony, diverse perspectives, curiosity, discovery, and demystification. The excitement of intellectual enquiry via debate is prominent amid the emotional turmoil of love, betrayal, and loss. On top of this, it manages to be both spicy and hilarious, a combination which very few novels achieve. The introduction also notes that the author and composition of the book were as mysterious as its content. Potocki had a tumultuous and exciting life, which undoubtedly informed the stories his characters tell. 'The Manuscript Found in Saragossa' was apparently written some time between the 1790s and his death by suicide in 1815. It was composed in French but no complete original manuscript survives (or at least none had been found when this 1996 edition was published). The complete version has been pieced together using a Polish translation. I found the English translation readable and atmospheric, giving the novel a tone I really loved. I highly recommend following the hapless Alphonse as he wanders into a web of intrigue, adventure, intellectual investigation, and bickering. I don't know how obscure this novel is in the 21st century, but it deserves to be very well known. I intend to tell everyone willing to discuss books with me about it. show less
A blend of Arabian Nights (in its structure and mythology) and Don Quixote (in its itinerant adventures and strict system of Honour), this epic tapestry is storytelling at its most traditionally compelling and is also definitely sexier than either with its hints (and perhaps central mystery!) of threesomes with potential demons!
How does one even critique stories of this form, of the medieval-ancient style of story-within-a-story set out with only the intention to dizzify and entertain its show more readers? Like 1001 nights, this is designed to be a classic with standout stories throughout, and perhaps better than 1001 with an overarching story that sought to link together the plots/meaning of its mini-tales.
Mystery and mysticism abound, as do swashbucklings and seductions. The range of settings, of characters, of plots, Potocki astounds me with the depth of his imagination and the interconnectedness of the worlds that he builds.
This gothic erotic mystery was ambitious, with fillers which were clearly included to pad it out to the required 66 days of storytelling. It's entertaining in its bite-sized story-inside-a-story portions, but also rewarding in how these stories jigsaw-puzzle together. It really recaptures for me the feeling of reading as a child where I wasn't aware of good writerly stuff of prose or whatever, and only cared about a great story.
An exceptional work where Potocki got to show off on his storytelling artistry and all the different genres he can pull off. show less
How does one even critique stories of this form, of the medieval-ancient style of story-within-a-story set out with only the intention to dizzify and entertain its show more readers? Like 1001 nights, this is designed to be a classic with standout stories throughout, and perhaps better than 1001 with an overarching story that sought to link together the plots/meaning of its mini-tales.
Mystery and mysticism abound, as do swashbucklings and seductions. The range of settings, of characters, of plots, Potocki astounds me with the depth of his imagination and the interconnectedness of the worlds that he builds.
This gothic erotic mystery was ambitious, with fillers which were clearly included to pad it out to the required 66 days of storytelling. It's entertaining in its bite-sized story-inside-a-story portions, but also rewarding in how these stories jigsaw-puzzle together. It really recaptures for me the feeling of reading as a child where I wasn't aware of good writerly stuff of prose or whatever, and only cared about a great story.
An exceptional work where Potocki got to show off on his storytelling artistry and all the different genres he can pull off. show less
This is an overrated picaresque 'classic' from very early in the nineteenth century. It has its moments of genuine surprise and horror - indeed eroticism - but it is also overwrought, messy and confused.
Brian Stableford has produced a solid piece of academic background for this edition. We are really not very sure of the book's origin. Is it Polish or French and, if Polish, which Potocki wrote it?
There have been great cultural claims for this book - including claims of it holding secret show more qabbalistic meaning - but it strikes me as the plaything of a bored aristocrat trying to work out his demons on paper.
The most striking aspect of this quasi-Gothic tale is the underlying eroticism of what amount to mysterious and dream-like 'threesomes' that only get dignified with their qabbalistic coating towards the end.
And, of course, we have our old nineteenth century neurotic friend - the linkage of sex and death. We find ourselves in the picaresque tale-telling world of one era and the decadent necro-sexuality of another.
I am not sure about these claims at all. It seems to me that our mysterious nobleman was trying to cope with his sexual fantasies and then finding a way to give them erotic meaning through the esoteric.
That may sound cynical until you consider how much libertine, homo-erotic and ephebophiliac sentiment was usefully hidden under neo-pagan cover right up until very recent times.
In a Christian culture of aristocratic licence and religious reaction, the worlds of myth and the esoteric have both been tailor made for turning 'base' desires and urges into something 'magical' and 'other'.
But the artistic output of sexual desire can be done well or badly. This book is so inconclusive that there is a danger of thinking its incompleteness hides some intended subtlety. I do not think it does.
What might be said, though, is that 'Potocki' straddles the world of eighteenth century aristocratic licentiousness and what would become the bourgeois decadence of the era of Huysmans in a very peculiar way.
The peculiarity of this is taken unwarrantedly for sophistication. What we have instead is an acute magpie mind, taking a number of literary influences and throwing them into what amounts to a dream novel.
The tension between the honour codes of Alphonse Van Worden and the desire to be saved from eternal damnation is also a tension between fleshly pleasures and the desire for meaning.
It could be said that the confusion and lack of completion in the book mirrors these tensions quite well but that is not enough.
The 'manuscript' deserves its place in history (for study) but it is not a great book for all that. show less
Brian Stableford has produced a solid piece of academic background for this edition. We are really not very sure of the book's origin. Is it Polish or French and, if Polish, which Potocki wrote it?
There have been great cultural claims for this book - including claims of it holding secret show more qabbalistic meaning - but it strikes me as the plaything of a bored aristocrat trying to work out his demons on paper.
The most striking aspect of this quasi-Gothic tale is the underlying eroticism of what amount to mysterious and dream-like 'threesomes' that only get dignified with their qabbalistic coating towards the end.
And, of course, we have our old nineteenth century neurotic friend - the linkage of sex and death. We find ourselves in the picaresque tale-telling world of one era and the decadent necro-sexuality of another.
I am not sure about these claims at all. It seems to me that our mysterious nobleman was trying to cope with his sexual fantasies and then finding a way to give them erotic meaning through the esoteric.
That may sound cynical until you consider how much libertine, homo-erotic and ephebophiliac sentiment was usefully hidden under neo-pagan cover right up until very recent times.
In a Christian culture of aristocratic licence and religious reaction, the worlds of myth and the esoteric have both been tailor made for turning 'base' desires and urges into something 'magical' and 'other'.
But the artistic output of sexual desire can be done well or badly. This book is so inconclusive that there is a danger of thinking its incompleteness hides some intended subtlety. I do not think it does.
What might be said, though, is that 'Potocki' straddles the world of eighteenth century aristocratic licentiousness and what would become the bourgeois decadence of the era of Huysmans in a very peculiar way.
The peculiarity of this is taken unwarrantedly for sophistication. What we have instead is an acute magpie mind, taking a number of literary influences and throwing them into what amounts to a dream novel.
The tension between the honour codes of Alphonse Van Worden and the desire to be saved from eternal damnation is also a tension between fleshly pleasures and the desire for meaning.
It could be said that the confusion and lack of completion in the book mirrors these tensions quite well but that is not enough.
The 'manuscript' deserves its place in history (for study) but it is not a great book for all that. show less
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