Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Dedalus European Classics

  Introduction

  Foreword

  The First Day

  The Second Day

  The Third Day

  The Fourth Day

  The Fifth Day

  The Sixth Day

  The Seventh Day

  The Eighth Day

  The Ninth Day

  The Tenth Day

  Copyright

  Dedalus European Classics

  Tales from the Saragossa Manuscript

  Jan Potocki

  “The Manuscript reveals a kind of Polish Beckford. There are gorgeous descriptions, fantastic turqueries and gothic horrors. But Potocki’s debts were in fact multiple. To begin with, the book is a compendium of eighteenth century fictional forms. There are picturesque adventures and tales of vengeance, banditry, manners and love, while shivery echoes of the roman noir jostle with reverberations from the conte philosophique and the magical, erotic conte oriental, which calls to mind Lesage, Voltaire, Crebillon fils, Cazotte, Munchausen, Restif, Diderot, the Casanova of the Icosameron and the Sade of the Historiettes. But the Manuscript is also an anthology of Enlightenment rationalism. The irony is Voltairean and the sensibility Rousseauistic. Its materialism recalls Diderot and La Mettrie. It contains more than a whiff of hermetic philosophy and, though Potocki did not belong to any known lodge, perhaps a hint of Masonic symbolism, together with clear elements of comparative mysticism derived from sources as eclectic as the Talmud, the cabbala and modern ’illuminists’ such as Saint-Martin.”

  Times Literary Supplement

  INTRODUCTION

  by Brian Stableford

  The history of The Saragossa Manuscript is at least as curious as the contents of the text, and features several unanswered questions.

  The currently accepted modern version of its provenance and nature asserts that it was the literary magnum opus of a famous Polish nobleman, whose other works are mostly accounts of his travels. The fact that only parts of it were published during his lifetime, and those discreetly, is held to be explained by his extraordinarily busy life, which is assumed to have made it impossible for him to supervise its complete publication in its proper form.

  Though this account may well be true it is not beyond doubt, nor does it settle all the problematic questions which surround the text. Some of these problems will undoubtedly remain unsolved, just as The Saragossa Manuscript itself – if such a work ought to exist at all – will never be complete.

  The fullest edition of The Saragossa Manuscript – which claims to be missing only one “lost” section – was first issued in Poland more than thirty years after the supposed author’s death. But this was a translation into Polish of material initially written in French (French being the language of the aristocratic circles in which its supposed author moved). No French edition of the work in this form ever appeared, but there are three printed documents in French which considerably antedate the Polish edition and contain material later incorporated into it.

  One of these French-language publications – untitled, unsigned, undated and with no indication of place of publication – is now said to have been published in two volumes in St Petersburg. The other two, which reprint almost all of the material in the first, though in somewhat different form, were published in four and three volumes respectively in Paris in 1813 and 1814.

  Although these documents were the source of some controversy in their day they fell into obscurity during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and were virtually forgotten until the 1950s, when Roger Caillois took the trouble to excavate them from the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Leningrad Library in order to issue a new edition of those sections which most interested him. This venture, assisted by renewed academic interest in the work in Poland, launched a new wave of interest in the work and began a concerted attempt to “restore” a full version of the text in its original language.

  The authorship of the two Paris-published documents was a matter of some dispute between the various bibliographers who attempted to bring some order to the accumulate history of French literature in the early nineteenth century. According to A.-A. Barbier, author of the Dictionnaire des Anonymes, their author was the celebrated Count Jan Potocki (an opinion endorsed by the Polish edition of 1847). The more prestigious bibliographer Jean-Marie Quérard, however, disagreeed with this view, insisting that the true author was the far more obscure Jozef Potocki (whose relationship to the aforementioned Jan he did not take the trouble to specify). A third bibliographer, Paul Lacroix, disagreed with both of them, attributing the two works to the French Romantic writer Charles Nodier.

  Caillois unhesitatingly accepts the attribution to Jan Potocki, on the grounds that Barbier knew – as the others did not – about the earlier St Petersburg document. It is not entirely clear, however, what evidence there is to support this conclusion apart from that based in Barbier’s assertions. Barbier certainly seems to have had in his possession the only known copy of the first volume of the relevant document, which was eventually presented to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1889. This has a title added in ink (which includes the words Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, and thus bestows upon the work the title by which it is nowadays known) and the name “Jan Potocki” in pencil. If these additions were made by Barbier – who is presumably also responsible for the allegation that the date of this publication was 1804 – we have no word but his to support his attribution. Normally, of course, one would not doubt him – but Jean-Marie Quérard did, and seems to have taken some trouble to make enquiries.

  Another handwritten addendum to this volume (probably also by Barbier) charges Charles Nodier with having attempted to plagiarize the work after a manuscript copy of it was given into his care. Lacroix later claimed to have had a handwritten version of at least one of the Paris documents, given to him by Nodier, but his claim that this proves Nodier’s authorship is dismissed out of hand by Caillois, who points out that this is disproved by the existence of the St Petersburg text of 1804. But how certain can we be that the text in question was published in 1804, or in St Petersburg?

  The strongest independent evidence of the provenance of the document in question is that the only known copy of the second (fragmentary) volume of the document is lodged in the Leningrad Library. There, Caillois tells us, it is filed under the heading “Potockiana”, and also has a handwritten note attached attributing the work to Jan Potocki and giving the date of its publications as 1805. Again, if we take things at face value, this settles the matter – but how and when did the document get to St Petersburg/Leningrad, and who made the handwritten note? (It is worth remembering that the other volume only reached the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1889.)

  It is not clear whether there is any independent evidence, outside of the handwritten notes added to these two volumes, of the place, date or authorship of the documents; they certainly do not constitute a real edition of the text, being only proof copies. In view of Quérard’s willingness to dissent from Barbier’s view there must remain a possibility that the attributions are inauthentic in some or all of these respects, even though one volume ended up in Paris and the other in Leningrad.

  On the other hand, it is not clear either what reason Quérard had for rejecting Barbier’s attribution; he does mention having consulted Countess Rzewuska – a member of the Potocki family – on the subject, but implies (somewhat perversely) that her testimony was that the work in question was not known to the Potocki family at all.

  Caillois, introducing his edition of the first part of a “restored” Saragossa Manuscript says that certain key fragments of the original French text had
been recently located in an archive of the Potocki family; the existence of these does seem to rule out Nodier as a putative author of the work, but does not necessarily settle the question of which Potocki was responsible. Caillois seems certain that all the texts are entirely the work of Jan Potocki, and this is obviously the most likely hypothesis – but one cannot help but wonder what foundation Quérard’s doubts may have had.

  The Potocki family was one of the great aristocratic houses of Poland for hundreds of years. It had many notable members before and after Jan, including several great statesmen, numerous distinguished soldiers and one other notable writer – the semi-repentant heretic Waclaw Potocki (1625-97), whose most famous work was an epic poem celebrating the military adventures of his people.

  Whether or not he wrote The Saragossa Manuscript Jan Potocki (1761-1815) certainly broke considerable new ground in extending the contribution made by his august family to the political and cultural life of the nation. He was a great traveller, and he published several accounts of his journeys to distant parts of the world; nor did he go as a mere tourist, for he became a serious ethnologist, historian and pioneer of archaeology, writing extensively on these subjects. He won a certain celebrity in 1789 by making a balloon ascent, and briefly served as an officer in the Engineering Corps.

  Later in life, when he was a special adviser to Tsar Alexander I, Jan Potocki was appointed head of a scientific mission which was supposed to accompany the Tsar’s embassy to Peking in 1805 (according to the note in the volume in the Leningrad Library it was this adventure which abruptly interrupted publication of the St Petersburg manuscript). Alas, the expedition was a failure; the embassy was turned back by the Viceroy of Mongolia. Afterwards, Jan’s once-glittering career seems to have gone steadily downhill; he eventually retired to his estates in 1812 – at which point he supposedly took it into his head to continue the story which he had abandoned seven years before, preparing two parts of it for publication in Paris. If he intended to do more he never put his plans into operation; he committed suicide in 1815.

  Caillois, in typical French fashion, cavalierly attributes Potocki’s suicide to the effects of “depression” and “neurasthenia”, but neither of these terms actually serves to explain anything. We may be certain, however, that if Jan Potocki did indeed write them, the two parts of The Saragossa Manuscript which were issued in Paris were produced while the author was living through a time of person troubles. This is worth noting, because the values tacitly expressed in the work are not at all those one might expect to be embraced by a contented member of Potocki’s class; they are wholeheartedly picaresque, and their view of both Church and Aristocracy are distinctly jaundiced.

  The text of the two volumes which were supposedly printed in St Petersburg in 1804 and 1805 describe the strange and macabre adventures which befall a Spanish soldier named Alphonse van Worden after he is unwise enough to sleep in a haunted inn. These extend over thirteen days, and include various tales told by him and to him, which eerily reflect and recomplicate the predicament in which he now finds himself. The text ultimately breaks off in mid-sentence. Whether any more of the work had actually been written at this point in time we do not know, though the note in the Leningrad volume implies that it had not and the eventual continuation of the narrative takes it in a very different direction.

  The first of the documents printed in Paris consists of four volumes entitled Avadoro, histoire espagnole, par M.L.C.J.P. The work begins, by way of introduction, with the last two sections of the St Petersburg text, in which Alphonse van Worden meets the gypsy chief Avadoro. It continues to relate a series of tales to Alphonse by Avadoro, including the story of his own life and various stories told to him by people he has met – but despite a certain formal similarity and a few supernatural intrusions Avadoro is markedly different in its subject-matter from the rest of the St Petersburg text, being much less strange and not really macabre at all.

  The second Paris document consists of three unsigned volumes entitled Dix journées de la vie d’Alphonse Van Worden (i.e. Ten Days in the Life of Alphonse van Worden). It comprises a slightly revised version of the remainder of the St Petersburg text, but it omits one day from the narrative and adds one extra episode to serve as a conclusion.

  The chapter of the St Petersburg text which is omitted from the 1813-14 editions is Day 11 of Alphonse’s adventure, which recapitulates two anecdotes retold from well-known classical sources. Caillois presumes that this was omitted simply because it was not original, but the eleventh day is the one during which the story undergoes its crucial change in direction: it might conceivably have been an awareness of the fact that his story had here turned a significant corner which led the author to abandon his original plan for publication of the work, in order to recast it.

  This is a point of some significance, because Caillois takes it for granted (apparently following Barbier) that the two Paris editions should be seen as mere excerpts from a much larger work which must properly be considered as a whole. In fact, the notion that there “ought” to exist a French-language work entitled Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, translatable into English as The Saragossa Manuscript, is entirely the idea of later collators and commentators. Even if we set aside doubts about the true authorship of the work and attribute it to Jan Potocki, we still cannot tell whether the two French editions represent his final intentions regarding his fictional canon or whether he might – if he had lived – have gone on to insert these texts into a much larger book, as the editor of the 1847 Polish edition eventually did. It is certainly possible that the two Parisian editions feature the author’s own preferred version of his text, and that the “whole work” which Caillois and others are striving to “restore” should be regarded as nothing more than a set of drafts for a deliberately aborted project.

  The Polish edition of 1847 was issued in six volumes, and ostensibly contained as much of the text as was then recoverable. Only a part of the French-language text supposedly used in this translation could still be found in the Potocki family archives when interest in the work was renewed in the 1950s. The task of restoring a complete text in the original language of composition, therefore, requires translation into French of about a fifth of the total wordage of the Polish edition. In these circumstances it is difficult in the extreme to make any conclusive judgement about the authenticity of the Polish text; it is at least possible that parts of it were the work of a different writer.

  When all of this is taken into account, one can only conclude that the attempt to achieve a complete restoration of an unpublished masterpiece by Jan Potocki might in the end turn out to have been a wild goose chase – but in the particular context of the early part of the story, which is here presented in a new English version, such doubts and confusions take on a certain ironic propriety; there are no other texts of the period which are quite so rich in ambiguity and deceptiveness.

  In the form which scholars are now trying to “restore” to it, The Saragossa Manuscript echoes such famous works as Boccaccio’s Decameron, Basile’s Pentamerone and Marguerite of Navarre’s Heptameron, but only faintly. These earlier models are compendia of tales which are presented as anecdotes narrated by a group of characters who have time to while away; in Boccaccio’s classic a group of young noblemen taking refuge from the Black Death take it upon themselves to collaborate in telling ten stories a day for ten days.

  Although Potocki’s story is also broken up into days, during most of which the central character tells or hears one or more stories, its structure is both much less tightly organized and much more intricate, sometimes embedding tales within other tales after the fashion of the Thousand-and-One-Nights (which had been translated into French by Galland between 1704 and 1717). This process of recomplication is intensified in its early stages by an extra dimension of uncertainty which is imported into the narrative of Ten Days in the Life of Alphonse van Worden. In the days which follow his unfortunate night spent in the haunted inn Alphonse twice wakes up
under a gallows in the company of two hanged men who may or may not be inhabited each night between midnight and cockcrow by the spirits of two playful demons. At least some of his experiences, therefore, appear to be hallucinatory, and there is an evident possibility that he has become lost in a maze of experiences in which it will ultimately become impossible to separate dream from reality.

  In the “restored” manuscript of the Polish edition this ambiguity is soon set aside, and is forgotten for most of the book before it is eventually cleared up in a rather crude and unconvincing fashion – a move which is not to the benefit of the work, and constitutes a strong argument for letting the Ten Days stand as it is instead of insisting on rejoining it to the whole. One could certainly argue that the incompleteness of the Ten Days reflects the unresolvability of the predicament in which Alphonse finds himself, and that is has a certain propriety which is lost if it is reconnected to Avadoro.

  Whether this is accepted or not, it is certainly the case that there are some very striking features of the Ten Days which deserve careful consideration in isolation from anything which happens in Avadoro or in the remaining fragments of the whole text.

  One very interesting feature of the Ten Days is the way in which the doubts which Alphonse must entertain on his own behalf (as to whether the two seductive “sisters” who promise him great wealth and sumptuous erotic delights if he will only abandon his Christian faith are really hideous demons in disguise) are reflected in the tales which he is told by other characters. The madman Pacheco suffers a similar temptation to troilism by his stepmother and her sister, who are similarly linked with the two hanged men; the cabbalist Sadok Ben Mamoun is employing his arts in a quest to discover two legendary “immortal brides” who bear the same names as Alphonse’s “sisters”.

  The repetition of this troilistic motif is not the only unusual feature of the way in which Alphonse’s temptations are represented in the Ten Days. There is also the peculiar fashion in which he retells two stories first told to him by his father, both of which feature characters who have gruesome encounters with the risen dead. Before resolving the conclusion of each story Alphonse’s father asks him whether he would have been afraid had he found himself in such a situation. In the first instance Alphonse enrages his father by admitting that he would; in the second he is careful to issue a stout – but presumably insincere – denial. Now, apparently, he finds himself in a situation of the same kind as those which have featured so significantly in his fabular education, and the question of whether he should exhibit fear seems just as acute as the question of whether his immortal soul is endangered by temptation. He certainly pretends fearlessness, both in narrating the story to an assumed reader and in talking to the other characters, but the inclusion of these two anecdotes must call into question the reliability of this appearance.