About book The Manuscript Found In Saragossa (1996)
POLIÉDRICO LIBRONo soy ningún entusiasta, ni mucho menos, del denominado género fantástico y gótico, salvo honrosas excepciones, sin embargo me ha sorprendido y, lo más importante, he llegado a embriagarme con esta narración. Son las múltiples caras lo primero que deslumbra esta novela trufada de cuentos. Para comentar esta obra fantástica, y para contrarrestar este término, intentaré “racionalizar” las múltiples facetas del texto basándome en conceptos filosóficos y geométricos, metafóricamente hablando.Aristóteles dividió el ente en 4 causas: material, formal, eficiente (el agente) y final (el fin). La causa eficiente, la principal de todas, es el que produce el acto, en este caso me refiero al literato: Jan Potocki. Su vida viajera y llena de experiencias junto con su vasta formación cultural (ciencia, filosofía, historia, arqueología, ocultismo y políglota) han influido de una manera más acuciada de lo normal en su única obra narrativa; el espíritu bohemio, irreverente e impetuoso lo trasladó al papel de una forma magistral. Su biografía está plagada aventuras, viajes y pasiones, cumpliendo con los cánones románticos: peligros, amoríos y, finalmente, suicidio. La causa formal, el libro en sí mismo, tiene su intrahistoria rocambolesca. Las sucesivas publicaciones están llenas de reediciones, y dentro de éstas se han modificado con hallazgos de manuscritos (parece una burla del título a través del destino) del propio autor, numerosas fuentes, borradores, trasposiciones de capítulos, adiciones, omisiones y cambios. Un galimatías que ha dado origen, si no me equivoco, a 2 impresiones diferentes que varían en número de hojas y capítulos. He leído la más corta que corresponde, en este caso, a la editorial Fontamara que consta de 159 páginas y supongo que es la misma versión de la popular edición de Alianza; y la otra publicación íntegra, mucho más voluminosa, es la abordada por Valdemar con 66 capítulos y con 800 páginas. La causa material, el estilo del texto, es, por descontado, la más sustancial de todas. Aquí converge el alma del libro y si tuviera forma sería poliédrica. Un polígono irregular (en el sentido de variable y profuso en matices) combinado por diversas caras, rectas, curvas y varios ángulos que confeccionan una historia realmente original. Las líneas principales: fantasía, romanticismo y novela gótica, se ven enriquecidas por trazos convergentes que realzan, estructuran y mejoran el escrito. La configuración del la novela, compuesta en 14 jornadas, es un eco literario u homenaje nada disimulado al “Decamerón” de Boccaccio. Es la misma disposición: dentro de la historia principal se desglosa cada capítulo en relatos cortos, incluso un mismo cuento se puede bifurcar otra historia. La vía primordial, las aventuras y prodigios que ponen a prueba al militar Van Worden, se ramifica en veredas a cual más vistosa. La novela, al ser un libro de cuentos, tiene la ventaja, una vez terminada la lectura, que se pueden releer independientemente los capítulos o sólo los relatos y leyendas que lo integran. No hay más que recordar el título, ya que la trama señala lo que se cuenta en un manuscrito. Algo similar a una “matriuska literaria” o el despliegue de las cajas chinas. Volviendo a la cuestión de los géneros literarios y dentro de la novela gótica, proliferan una caterva de personajes y espacios propios de esta corriente: ahorcados, aparecidos, muertos, vampiros, suicidios, visiones, maldiciones, torturas, castillos, cárceles, pasadizos, subterráneos, etc.; al igual que elementos románticos: amores trágicos, el honor, imágenes oníricas, ambientes orientales, ocultismo, lo macabro, y el gusto por tiempos pretéritos.Además de estas dos corrientes principales se integran unos “segmentos” que dan forma y colorean el soporte primordial. Estas peculiaridades: humor, picaresca, aventuras, viajes, sexo y erotismo, dan una pincelada particular y un toque innovador. Estas “líneas” redimensionan el argumento y enriquecen lo que podía ser una exclusiva (¿y anodina?) narración gótica. Ahondando sobre algunos temas que trata Potocki, destacan diversos binomios complementarios o antagónicos; desde parejas de personajes: hermanos/as, padre e hijo/a, madre e hijo/a, hasta diversos conceptos, como los evidentes realidad-fantasía, fe-ciencia o religión-magia. No en vano las figuras dobles, situaciones análogas y el espejo con la imagen reflejada adquieren una gran importancia y significado ambivalente en la historia.Por último, la causa final equivale a lo que experimentamos y como nos relacionamos con el texto. Aparte de entretenimiento, conocimiento, información (motivos objetivos y comunes para todos), en algunas ocasiones, no demasiadas, percibimos una sensación realmente placentera en la lectura. Sin detallar las impresiones personales, ya que me parece más importante explicar los anteriores matices menos relativos, si puedo afirmar que es uno de los libros más insólitos y especiales que he leído. Sólo se le puede “echar en cara” un final más redondo, y debido a las peripecias editoriales que padeció el escrito tiene su disculpa.Para terminar y completar “la cuadratura del círculo”, referiré brevemente la adaptación cinematográfica. Filmada en 1960 por J. Has, que si bien se puede considerar una versión fiel con un excelente ambiente fantástico y fantasmagórico, es una traslación más enfatizada en otros aspectos como son la parodia, la picaresca, la voluptuosidad y el humor. Con casi 3 horas de metraje tiene el gran merito, al igual que el texto, de ser todo un disfrute y no decaer en ningún momento.Mi nota: 8.
Potocki brought a little bit of everything to this book of tales within tales within tales: gothic horror, bildungsroman, swashbuckling adventure, picaresque reminiscent of the great Lazarillo de Tormes, philosophical and theological exposition, libertine erotica, political intrigue, travelogue—in other words, a true olla podrida of styles, narrated in an arch, dry, and ultra-witty voice that has been admirably delivered from the French original by the English scholar Ian Maclean. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, discovered by a French officer during the Napoleonic seizure of the eponymous city, is ostensibly the diary recorded—over the course of sixty-six story-filled days—by Alphonse van Worden, a young Walloon officer on his way to Madrid to join an elite regiment of the Spanish monarch. Honour-bound to make his way through the wild, rugged, and ominous Sierra Morena—a range home to fearsome bandits, gypsies, Moorish refugees, and, portentously, evil spirits and demons in service to the Archfiend—the straight-laced Alphonse, deserted by his frightened servants, determinedly lodges himself in an abandoned, haunted hostelry close to a ghastly public gallows—Los Hermanos—from which dangle the hideously disfigured bodies of two local sibling bandits. From this fateful decision the young caballero will find himself spending the next sixty-six days being regaled, tested, tempted, and discomfited by a parade of characters and entities that he encounters as he journeys through the shadowy vales and gnarled peaks of northern Andalusia; ranging from a pair of lascivious muslim sisters/succubi, to a one-eyed, emaciated automaton whose mind has been claimed by the mountain's madnesses, to the Geometer Velásquez, whose quiet and decent autodidact father—a man robbed of his dukedom and his soulmate by his eloquent and cunning Frenchified brother—provides what is perhaps the most moving and resplendent of the novel's many monologues.This is an immensely entertaining and thoroughly readable book. It becomes apparent that Potocki must have originally planned TMFIS to lean more towards the gothic horror stylings of works such as The Monk, only to subsequently steer his literary vessel away from such benighted waters and into the brighter streams of enlightenment naturalism, philosophical speculation and roguish adventure. Although this does not detract from the superb quality of Potocki's writing, it does, in my opinion, cause the story to lose some of its wonderful sense of mystery and eeriness. This transformation occurs around the time of the appearance of the verbose Gypsy chieftain—a central figure to the stories, one who functions as a hub around which the other tales encircle and entwine. The accumulation of stories range from the Old World to the New, from the ancient realm which witnessed the birth of Abraham through to the first half of the eighteenth century, though a majority of the action takes place in a beautifully and majestically rendered Spain in the waning days of the Habsburg dynasty. The way that characters and plot-lines in the various tales interact with and encounter each other—guided by the mischievous hand of coincidence and the stentorian hand of fate—proves eminently enjoyable for the reader; and the breathless declarations of love, the amorous encounters, the dashing swordplay, cunning intrigues, faithless abandonments, and devilish temptations—often pitting stoic and taciturn Spaniards against their more emotional European brethren—rush the reader headlong through the sixty-six days of historic, apocryphal, and cryptic reminiscences.In the introduction, Maclean acknowledges that several critics have complained about the ending that Potocki fashioned, about the sense of letdown in the author's method of tying up all of the various story lines and loose threads. Indeed, Potocki had written different, and differing, drafts of several of the daily chapters, and it is still debated whether the current edition represents the definitive assemblage of the Polish polymath's imaginative fiction. However, such complaints overlook the sheer readability of The Manuscript. Surrounded as I am by bookshelves, every wall bearing tomes that haunt me with the knowledge that, were I to live two lives, I might not make it through all of them, I often found myself tempted to abandon this collection of tall-tales to move on to more meaty fare; and yet, after telling myself I would partake of just one more story, I would inevitably get drawn in, held rapt while the hours whistled by and another week in textual time had passed—hours in which not the slightest trace of boredom could insert itself into page after page of crackling, razor-honed wit. That, to me, is the ultimate testament to an author's greatness: when he has drawn you once within his literary bear hug, you cannot resist the continual desire to go back for another until that melancholy moment arrives when there are no more embraces left for him to give.
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Es simplemente un libro que me hubiera gustado escribir. Las aventuras de Alfonso van Worden al cruzar la Sierra Morena desde Andalucía hacia Madrid discurren entre la fantasía y la realidad, pero también por la historia (si bien Potocki la utiliza como materia prima más que como retrato), la filosofía, las religiones, la cábala, el erotismo, las ciencias... así, en sesenta y una jornadas profundiza y desvela el misterio del protagonista, a la manera de Las mil y una noches, es decir, en relatos concéntricos que forman un universo sin fisuras, eso al menos en la versión de 1810, ya que al parecer la de 1804 había quedado inconclusa. Definitivamente es un libro para llevar a la isla desierta.Aquí mi reseña completa.
—Víctor Sampayo
From the blurbs in the front of the book: "The 100 or so stories told over 66 days are fantastic, ghostly, erotic, comic, ghoulish, philosophical and Munchausenly tall." "One of the strangest books ever written can at last take its rightful place in world literature." This has to be one of the most uniquely-written books I have read. Totally addictive, with continued inter-locking stories that are hard to put down. The book is plot-driven, but the characters within the stories are also very interesting. The stories are pretty much over the top, but entertaining. The book is long (630 pages of smaller print), but I flew through it in 5 days. I give it 4 stars rather than 5 because two of the continued stories - of the Wandering Jew and of the mathematician - weren't really my favorites. (Too philosophical.) However, these can easily be skimmed through without missing anything vital to the overall plot. Some of the inter-connected stories could get a bit complex, but the author gives you enough reminders of how they fit so that you won't be lost. I'm really glad I read this book.
—Cheryl
Unlike many so called classic texts I have read this one doesn't seem to have dated much. At least not in its first half. The writing is thought by scholars to have begun about 1809. As Salman Rushdie says in an attached blurb "...it reads like the most brilliant modern novel." I think that might be an effect of the recent English translation offered here that seems to give the text such a contemporary feel, like a modern-day historic novel.The premise is that in the 1760s a Walloon officer named Alphonse (commissioned by Philip V) while traveling on leave in Andalucia, for centuries an Islamic land until the Reconquista, finds himself skirting a realm of ghosts, phantoms, specters, kindly bandits, storytelling gypsies and cabbalists. Because he does not at first succumb to the erotic offerings of these creatures--he has a very obnoxious sense of personal honor--he is able to preserve enough presence of mind to chronicle the many weird goings on. The book is full of the so called Magic Realism used by Garcia Marquez and Rushdie himself. There are stories nested within stories nested within stories. The narrative is very straightforward. The characters wake up, go out, have dinner, come home, have sex, go to sleep, get up in the morning, and so on, and all of this action occurs during the briefest passages of text. There is the sense of the action moving full-tilt, almost out of control, but never really. It is only the impression created by the author's highly compressed style.Among the treats offered by the narrative are vast underground hideouts carved out of the stone, sun-scorched landscapes à la Don Quixote, convincing erotic encounters between men and women, abrupt murders, sometimes by the score. At a haunted inn phantoms show up at the stroke of midnight, though it is not known from whence the tolling comes. A motif of two men hanged on a gibbet, supposedly brothers of the bandit Zoto, who tells his story here, recurs throughout the early pages. At night the men leave the gibbet and get into mischief.There are strange elixirs to be drunk, seeming transportations through time and space, usually during a dream. On the whole the book a kind of onieric wonderland where men are men and women are women of a thankfully extinct old school, except when they're murdering succubi who only wish to eat young men because of the wonderful effect their blood has on the demonic constitution. Then the Walloon officer succumbs, as he must, to the charms of the two Muslim women, who from the start have told him they are his cousins. A man who watches their erotic encounter sees only Alphonse sexually intimate with the two hanged men. From then on Alphonse seems to take some leave of his senses and is never sure if those Muslim women are his cousins / defacto wives or not. He sees them here in a pair of gypsy sisters, there in two women walking in the desert, but again it's not them. Later, he casts caution to the wind when he goes to meet them in an underground chambre d'amour. Who can blame him? It's either go insane or enjoy great if perhaps demonic sex with hot sisters!In the meantime the gypsy leader tells his story, the geometer or mathematician tells his, the Wandering Jew tells his, the two Muslim "cousins" tell theirs, the male cabbalist tells his, the female cabbalist tells hers, and so on. All of the characters seek to tell stories that seem realistically within their realm of competence/experience. It is only the geometer's tale that seems to falter in the mid to late stages. One gets the impression that author Potocki had committed himself to a line of disquisition that he could not sustain. An astonishing novel of enormous complexity that is nevertheless highly readable, even difficult to put aside when sleep calls. Please read it.PS. Some time later I began reading Matthew G. Lewis's The Monk. It seems unlikely that it was not a model for Potocki.
—William1
