Next exhibition
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, investigation into a novel world

In the waning years of the Enlightenment, somewhere between the Ukrainian plains of Podolia and the byways of Spain a novel with the enigmatic title of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa gradually took shape. The book itself and the story of how it came to be would prove both turbulent and legendary. Written in French between 1794 and 1815, this monumental work of fiction sprang from the imagination of the singular Polish count Jan Potocki (1761-1815), a scholarly traveler, historian, and scientist. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was penned incrementally and underwent countless revisions while a series of publishers gathered the leaves of Potocki’s manuscript and brought out editions that were partial, abridged, or unfaithful to the original. It was only two centuries later that painstaking research established the existence of two authentic versions, dating from 1804 and 1810, which were finally published by Peeters in 2006 and Garnier-Flammarion two years after that. The first complete English translation, by Ian MacLean from the unabridged 20th-century French edition, was published by Viking in 1995.

Cut up into days and organized into “decamerons” (ten-day segments), the adventures of the young Alphonse van Worden in the Sierra Morena plunge us into the heart of a dizzying narrative construction. In a tumbling jumble of nested stories a number of traditions are tapped into, ranging from demonology, fantasy, the Bible and esoteric sources, to encyclopedias, doctrines, treatises, and yarns worthy of earlier libertine writers. As the hero gains insight into himself and the world, this kaleidoscope of tales speaks to us of both the ambition to encompass all knowledge and the fragility of certainties when confronted with the experience of multiplicity and otherness.

Bringing together a unique collection of archival documents and artworks and rare editions, the show highlights the meandering story of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which has joined the masterpieces of world literature. At the point where The Thousand and One Nights, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and M.G. Lewis’s The Monk come together, this novel world, this teeming all-embracing book calls to us with surprising relevance today. In the face of proliferating narratives, before the many systems and doctrines of our world, how do we become subjects who are free to understand and choose?