Jean Potocki: pérégrinations by Kinga Miondońska-Joucaviel (review)

In 2006 François Rosset and Dominique Triaire transformed the way we view Jean Potocki’s most famous work, Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, by publishing a new edition that comprised two separate versions (1804 and 1810) of the Polish nobleman’s French-language roman à tiroirs. Rosset and Triaire, who also published a biography of Potocki in 2004, are among the contributors to the short but pithy collection of articles edited and introduced by Kinga Miondońska-Joucaviel. Triaire’s article, ‘Pérégrinations espagnoles’, analyses Potocki’s fascination with Spain, his travels within the country, and his literary treatment of the common stereotypical representations of Spaniards at the end of the eighteenth century, which Potocki ‘démonte méthodiquement et radicalement’ (p. 33). Rosset’s contribution, ‘L’Homme des Lumières et son for privé: l’écriture du voyage selon Potocki’, provides several categorized excerpts from Potocki’s numerous travel writings. As its subtitle indicates, the focus of this collection is Potocki’s legacy of travels, intercultural observations, and cosmopolitanism. As Remi Forycki points out in ‘Jean Potocki et la Russie ou l’identité en crise’, the author today best known as an innovative novelist was also a wide-ranging scholar and historian: ‘Potocki passe aujour-d’hui pour le père de l’ethnographie moderne’ (p. 61). A point reinforced in ‘Voyager dans le monde de la pensée: Potocki et Leibniz’ by Luc Fraisse, who describes Potocki as ‘l’ethnographe historien des civilisations’ (p. 79). For his part, Christophe Potocki situates the scholarly work of the Polish ‘explorateur’ and writer within the context of Russian imperial expansionism: ‘[s]es voyages et [s]es recherches ont pu servir tour à tour les intérêts de son pays et ceux de l’oppresseur’ (‘Jean Potocki explorateur politique’, p. 70). The ‘pérégrinations’ motif of the collection’s subtitle carries over into Potocki’s literary endeavours. In ‘Les Pérégrinations théâtrales de Jean Potocki’, Marek Dębowski examines the author’s little-known theatrical works, particularly his Parades (1793), and finds that ‘sa vision du monde réel présentée dans tous les écrits narratifs dévoile son irrésistible penchant pour la mise en scène’ (p. 141). Following ‘une piste qui se veut hypothétique et surtout intuitive’ (p. 106), Anna Wasilewska attempts to establish a surprising literary parallel in ‘Jean Potocki, fou littéraire par analogie et oulipien par convergences: une conjecture anticipée’. However, the conceptual links she posits between the works of Potocki, Raymond Queneau, and Georges Perec are tenuous at best. In ‘Les Contextes cachés du film Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse de Wojciech Has’, Marcin Maron sheds light on one of the rare attempts to produce a cinematic adaptation of Potocki’s masterpiece: ‘Le chemin du protagoniste du film ressemble aux voyages mi-réels et mi-métaphoriques des héros romantiques’ (p. 144). The last article, ‘Manuscrit trouvé a Saragosse: idéalité du texte et hypothèse musicale’ by Frédéric Sounac, proposes an intriguing ‘idée d’un paradigme musical formel pour le roman’ (p. 151) to account for the exceptionally complex structure of framed narratives that Potocki developed. Readers of this collection will also find two letters written by Potocki as well as a useful bibliography. Jean Potocki: peregrinations will be of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike.