![]() Younger cinephiles for whom Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1993) is the alpha and omega of nonlinear storytelling may find themselves helplessly adrift upon the peregrinations of The Saragossa Manuscript, which interrupts its main narrative, stalls, doubles back and reconnoiters repeatedly to the point of origin (at one point telescoping five flashbacks) to tell thirty stories in one. Count Potocki's employment of overlapping and interlocking story sequences was a natural for the instant transitions of cinema the novel was adapted for the screen in 1965 by Polish filmmaker Wojciech Has, who had made a reputation for himself for art that eschewed politics in favor of psychology. To give a framework to the countless folk tales he heard in his travels, Potocki leaned heavily on the example of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic romance The Mysteries of Udolpho. ![]() Potocki was also intrigued by the existence of secret societies and may have himself been a Freemason. ![]() As a "frame-tale," The Saragossa Manuscript is in the tradition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.Ī renaissance man with a passion for travel, languages, ethnology and the occult, Count Jan Nepomucen Potocki was also a thrillseeker who once ascended over Warsaw in a hot air balloon alongside pioneer aviator Jean-Pierre Blanchard in 1790. Written originally in French and never published in full in Potocki's lifetime, the sprawling tale is chockablock with soldiers and sorcerers, lovers and liars, pilferers and princesses, imps and inquisitors, Catholics and cabbalists, Jews and gypsies - all squeezed into the framing tale of an infantryman's discovery in 1809 of the eponymous manuscript in a Saragossa ruin during the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps during those long and tedious sittings, the local artist and the world traveler swapped tales of the grotesque and arabesque, with the result leading to what is now commonly referred to as The Saragossa Manuscript. Goya knew Potocki and was commissioned twice to paint the Polish aristocrat and career soldier's portrait. Although Goya has never been cited as a direct influence on Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse ( A Manuscript Found in Saragossa), the novel by Jan Potocki (1761-1815) is Goyaesque in the extreme. The painter and portraitist Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), whose folkloric depictions of the horrors of witchcraft, warfare and a host of non-supernatural but thoroughly evil human tendencies were an inspiration to the Impressionists, hailed from the countryside around Saragossa, capital city of the former Kingdom of Aragon in northeast Spain.
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