LEADERS
Long-time partners in life and learning Denise Ahlquist and JJ Patton are wondering if they’ve been beckoned by cabbalists and charged with endlessly discussing tales about tales. Nevertheless, they’re willing to be your guides through Potocki’s fantastical mountains in search of fun, insight and adventure. Denise’s passion for good stories and years of leading Shared Inquiry discussions with the Great Books Foundation are complemented by JJ’s wry sense of humor and knowledge of anything else that might matter.
BOOK
The Manuscript Found In Saragossa
Author: Jan Potocki
Translator: Ian MacLean
Publisher: Penguin, 1996 edition
ISBN-9780140445800
“A seductively lurid Gothic-Romantic near-masterpiece, packed with overheated and often attenuated tales of extravagant adventure, philosophical speculation, unrequited love, and supernatural visitation.” [Kirkus Reviews, May 1995]
In the Andalusian hills “piteous wailing could be heard above the roar of the torrents and the howling of the storm; travellers were lured from their path by will-of-the-wisps, and invisible hands propelled them towards bottomless abysses.” So begins The Manuscript Found In Saragossa, a strange text discovered by a nameless prisoner-of-war who convinces his captors to translate it for him. “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.” Thus commencing the saga of Alphonse van Worden, Captain of the Walloon Guards, a man “bound by the sacred laws of honor to take the shortest route to Madrid without considering whether it was the most dangerous.”
This wonderful book, nesting story within story within story yet entrancingly accessible, is clearly indebted to the nimble connectiveness of The Tales of the Arabian Nights, and is regularly compared to the Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Written in the late 18th century by aristocratic Polish adventurer, diplomat and polymath Count Jan Potocki, this fascinating frame narrative slowly reveals and relates 66 days worth of intertwined stories told by beautiful women, gypsies, bandits, geometers and others who may or may not be hallucinations, but whose narratives cleverly span a variety of genres, including gothic horror, picaresque adventures, comic, erotic, and moral yarns.
Potocki’s unique blend of tales and tellers raises intersecting questions around truth and illusion, honor and integrity, the power of story, the complexity of ancestry, politics, religion and how “nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Quirky, fantastical, oftentimes funny, with a surprisingly tolerant multicultural worldview for the time period, it inventively foreshadows post-modernist literary concerns with time and narrative. It is definitely a text you’ll enjoy exploring with a group of helpful caballeros. Come along with us to mine this motherlode of literature in the magical Spanish Sierra Morena!
Practical details
Once you register, you’ll get an order confirmation. We’ll send you the Zoom link and a welcome letter from your leader about 3 weeks before the seminar starts.
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