Potocki and the Spectre of the Postmodern

Yves Citton (1)

1 LIRE - Littérature, idéologies, représentations, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles

"A spectre is roaming through Europe: the Postmodern". Readers of Jan Potocki's 700-page novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa are accustomed to seeing spectres, ghosts and other forms of revenants. Such otherworldly creatures make up a remarkably high number among the dozens of characters presented in the novel, which was written in French by the Polish nobleman between 1797 and his suicide in 1815. Of course, the protagonist, Alphonse van Worden, never encounters Postmodernity as such -- even though he seems to meet everybody else (and her sister) during the sixty-six days of his journey through the Sierra Morena, from enlightened encyclopedists to American-Indian princesses, from succubes to inkmakers, from a Wandering Jew who met with Christ to the devil himself, from hermits and sheiks to bankers and rats... And yet, as I would like to suggest in this paper, what we have come to identify today by the term "postmodern" is in fact little more than a revenant, returning to haunt us from the depth of Potocki's historical and narrative imagination. Is it a pure coincidence that the Manuscript's return from the dead in the 1990s, after two centuries of quasi-oblivion, corresponded with the multiplication of popular anthologies anatomizing the Postmodern debate, in a phase Charles Jencks characterized by the publication of "critical summaries of the Post-Modern paradigm"?

Domaines: Littératures

Yves Citton. Potocki and the Spectre of the Postmodern. Comparative Criticism, 2002, 24, pp.141-165. ⟨hal-00847349⟩