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The corpses of Zoto’s two brothers were not hanging from it but were lying on either side of me. “When at length I awoke, the sun was burning my eyelids…How can I express in words the horror which filled me then? I was lying below the gibbet of Los Hermanos. Take for example, when early in his odyssey (at the conclusion of the first day), van Worden exhaustedly drifts off into unconsciousness in the salacious embrace of his cousins (within a lucid dream no less), the two Moorish beauties, Emina and Zubeida. These bookish acrobatics are usually associated with Twentieth Century literary fiction practitioners such as Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, and Mark Z.
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This Matryoshka chain reaction forces the reader deeper into the novel’s narrative substructure. These encounters are the backbone of the book the interactions are what gives this novel its sense of wonder and conversely, depending upon the nature of the interaction, dread. Each chapter represents a single day’s journal entry. The Manuscript is the diary that van Worden kept during his sixty six-day sojourn in which he transcribes his various encounters with his fellow travelers. It is this narrative thread that is the keystone to all the others.
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In 1739, the young man is traversing the Sierra Morena, on his way to Madrid to join his regiment. The remainder of The Manuscript revolves around the second narrative layer that of Walloon Guard officer, Alphonse van Worden. The Spaniard is grateful to do so, as the found manuscripts relate a family history from the previous century. The nameless officer is then captured by Spanish forces and his warden agrees to translate the found journals into French. The introductory layer, in the book’s foreword, takes place in 1809, when a Napoleonic officer finds several handwritten journals in an abandoned house in the captured Spanish town of Saragossa. It goes deeper and deeper as you keep turning the pages of the novel. This frame sequence accretes layer upon layer of narrative upon itself. This is a work on par with the likes of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, Antoine Galland’s translation/adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.Īn overarching metanarrative, contained within it, a legion of smaller stories. Potocki’s opus stands directly on the shoulders of such literary giants that were constructing such frame narratives well before the Nineteenth Century. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa follows in the time-honored tradition that spans the breadth of world literature through the course of history, that of the frame narrative.
#Saragasso manuscript full
A work that at its heart, combines aspects of the philosophic, gothic, adventure and arabesque, into an exhilarating piece of weird fiction or as the nameless French officer states “It was all about brigands, ghosts and cabalists nothing could be more suitable to divert my mind from the rigors of the campaign than to read a novel full of strange adventures. A book that mirrors a life remarkably lived. The Manuscript is unabashedly informed by Potocki’s myriad interests, concerns, and travels in essence a fictional mélange of his life’s enthusiasm. His steadfast curiosity and thirst for new and novel experiences certainly imbued his writings, especially with regards to his fiction. A sprawling entertainment that touches upon a wide variety of genres. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is Potocki’s contribution to the world of literature and much like his life, it contains multitudes. In addition to all of these lifetime accomplishments, this Saint Germain like adventurer also wrote a novel. There are varying accounts of the tale but story goes that this polymath crafted a silver bullet from the knob of his teapot (or the handle of a sugar bowl), had it blessed by the castle chaplain, retreated to his library and shot himself in the head. Even the matter of his death was a (dark) reflection of his grandiose life. This was a man who exemplified the Age of Reason paradigm of all knowledge is worth knowing. Judging by the milestones that he achieved throughout his lifetime, it is plain to see that Potocki was a restless individual. During his sweeping and storied life, Potocki amassed a larger than life CV, which included being one of the first aeronauts, a novice Knight of Malta, an army officer engineer, a political activist (to a variety of causes), an ethnographical researcher, a publisher and a supposed freemason. This Polish noble was a mover and a shaker on the European stage during the late Enlightenment era. Count Jan Potocki seems like he stepped out of a grand piece of adventure fiction.