What Has deemed fantastic and blatantly surreal, then, were not merely the first Gothic-novel episodes of the book, but the whole setup built around Alphonse. It seems that Has, fascinated and perplexed by the utterly surreal character of van Worden’s adventures, saw the opportunity to make a movie that casts doubt precisely on the explanations given to poor Alphonse at the end of the novel. This is precisely where Wojciech Has takes up the story. Indeed, only someone as naïve and simple-minded as Alphonse van Worden, protagonist of book and film, can be the unwitting pawn of as enormous an intrigue as he is and not suffer persecution mania for the rest of his life. But the book can also be read as a huge novel on paranoia. Potocki thus wrote a novel about an enlightened world emptied of its magic. The message of the Manuscript, then, as Rosset and Triaire put it, would be that “all roads are good, as they all allow us to reach the goal the problem is that, in the meantime, the goal has been emptied of its substance.” 3 Except when the main characters, summoned by the Great Sheikh, go down to the bottom of the mine, what they find out is that the gold vein, which for a thousand years had been exploited and seemed inexhaustible, is finally worn down. 2 But where do all the stories, where do all the historical, religious, philosophical and scientific disquisitions usher? At the end of Potocki’s book, all roads lead to the underworld kingdom of Sheikh Gomelez. ![]() Together with a huge sample of human types (from noblemen to merchants, bandits, gypsies, moors, cabalists, inquisitors, men of science, rascals, jealous husbands or libidinous women, to name but a few) and their respective worldviews, the book deploys a near-full spectrum not only of literary genres, but also of kinds of discourse, all of which parade on an equal footing. Thus, as in any Enlightenment novel worth its salt, old dogmas are scorned and derided, untested certainties and beliefs are brought to trial, and authority figures like fathers and priests are made into fools. A case in point is Toledo’s highly unlikely series of coincidences (which Has takes up in his feature): a presumed voice from the afterlife is finally revealed as no more than the voice of a guy who mistakenly knocked at your window the very same night your best friend was dueling and had promised to tell you about the after-world should he die (which he did). But, as stories unfold and ever more points of view join the scene, what had looked like the product of supernatural powers progressively finds a totally natural explanation in terms of human agents (and a good dose of chance, too). ![]() It begins in a world in which everything seems to be the work of mythical forces such as demons, evil spirits and enchantments. In Chojecki’s as well as in Potocki’s versions, the novel is a voyage of initiation of its main character, or rather a Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age story of the man of the Enlightenment. (By the way: René Radrizzani had to struggle with Chojecki’s version in order to arrive at the first complete French version, which had to wait until 1989 - at some points he, Radrizzani, was so baffled that he gave up and translated straight from Polish - while Radrizzani’s version in turn served as the original for all subsequent translations, e.g. ![]() The result was a cut and paste carnage of fragments that hardly fit together, or a masterpiece of intertextuality. ![]() Except that, of course, Chojecki’s translation was not really the translation of one single work, but a potpourri or chimera consisting of a rather arbitrary assemblage of those of Potocki’s manuscripts Chojecki could get his hands on. At the time Has shot his film, 1964, the only “full version” of the novel that existed was the 1847 Polish translation by Edmund Chojecki. None of the novel’s auto-graphic versions, however, could have served as the basis for Has’ film, since they were only unearthed in 2002, when two Potocki scholars, François Rosset and Dominique Triaire, subjected all of the known surviving materials to close scrutiny. Notably, there are three cuts of the film and, so far, three known versions of the novel. T he Manuscript Found in Saragossa, the French-written book by count Jan Potocki and the eponymous adaptation by Wojciech J.
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