The manuscript

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jan Potocki, is a weird slice of literature, and I'm pleased that it has not fallen into complete obscurity.

The narrator, a Walloon officer on his way to Madrid, recounts the 66 days of his journey. While he does share the actual events he experiences, most of the book consists of the stories told by the people he encounters along the way, and the stories of the characters within those stories.

The novel is about 200 pages too long for my liking. At just past halfway, I found myself sympathizing with the geometer:

As soon as he left, Velásquez spoke and said, "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. Sometimes the Marqués de Val Florida is telling the story of his life to his daughter, sometimes it is she who is relating it to the gyspy chief, who in turn is repeating it to us. It is a veritable labyrinth. I had always thought that novels and other works of that kind should be written in several columns like chronological tables."

The tales are labyrinthine; some intersect, others lead nowhere. The book as a whole strikes me as experimental. Potocki is playing with the form of his stories within stories, and quite consciously and deliberately, to mess with the readers' expectations regarding chronology and the conventions of traditional narrative.

Potocki experiments with style as much as with form. The stories are by turns picaresque and gothic, some historical, other faintly erotic. Most have to do with a sense of honour in the pursuit of romance and fortune.

There are some wonderful philosophical digressions, for example, on what is to be human and on the nature of faith. Indeed, religion plays a fairly significant role: we encounter the Inquisition and a secret Muslim society; the fellow travellers include a cabbalist and the Wandering Jew; many of the tales demonstrate resistance to conversion to another faith, even while characters at times struggle with their faith and confront the supernatural. It seems to me that Potocki regarded all religions as equal, and readily incorporated mystical elements into his understanding of God.

One character sets about expanding the academic work he'd previously assembled in The Secrets of Analysis Revealed, together with the Science of Infinite Dimensions. He proceeds then to classify all human knowledge in 100 volumes, and Potocki enumerates all 100 fields. The hundredth volume is devoted to analysis, "which, according to Hervas, was the science of sciences and marked the extreme limit of human knowledge." It's a bizarre exercise that does nothing to move the story forward but in itself is delightful food for thought.

The novel was filmed by Wojciech Has in 1965 (the whole of which can be seen on Youtube — I haven't watched more than a fragment, but it looks promising).

I can't recall how I came to learn of this book. It's a bit esoteric and slow-going at times; it's definitely not for everyone. The tales make for good bedtime reading, but it's really easy to lose sight of the whole of this book, so I can't really say if it amounts to more than the sum of its parts. However, the parts taken individually are both entertaining and provocative, and the structure and style give this 200-year-old novel the unique flavour of being ancient and modern at the same time.

"The Mystical Count," in The Fortean Times.