![]() And then the strangest of the strange is perhaps the one who gives the most hope in his own way. Man on the way, or the travelling man, is often a strange man, or at least he is a stranger. Hence, by analogy, hope is deviation, hope is strange, hope is even bizarre. Furthermore, since hope is a knowing which outstrips the unknown2, in a way, hope represents an excess. Regardless of how different existential travelers are within and among themselves, no matter how various they sound like and how we are accustomed to perceiving them, after all, they represent some expression of hope-an escape of the terrifying and insurmountable issues that weigh above the human situation. He is so irresistibly attractive probably because the existential traveler is homo viator par excellence, most vividly expressing the idea of the modern mobility in a broader sense-as freedom and search through the world, but also into oneself-and expressing hope eventually. Since the time of Modernism the so-called existential traveler turned into a preferred character in the vast literary field. ![]() And thus man on the way is precisely a man of hope, whether traveling in space, time, imagination, oneself, etc. ![]() (…) It is precisely the soul that is the traveler it is of the soul and of the soul alone that we can say with supreme truth that "being" necessarily means "being on the way" (en route)"1. I almost think that hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism. In "Homo viator" Gabriel Marcel says: "We cannot help seeing that there is the closest of connections between the soul and hope. Amusingly, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa mirrors the shift happening in contemporary studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction, a move away from a realism-based account of the novel and towards a more global approach that focuses on the development of the concept of fiction. What makes his novel so interesting is the way that it strives to think past the dichotomies of East and West, realistic and marvelous, towards a more holistic understanding of the way that fiction triangulates between experience and imagination, and shapes a person's perception of reality. Potocki's novel is hard to place: a Gothic-Oriental hybrid, a travel narrative whose protagonist ultimately decides to stay, a fantastic story that never entirely clarifies its stance on the supernatural, a work that stages the clash between the exotic Orient and the rational West in a way that calls both categories into question. The paper considers Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa in light of its intervention into nineteenth-century debates between what were called the ‘romantic’ and the ‘novelistic’ strains of literature.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |