‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.’ The gothic is a central seam of the fantastic, and in this episode Marina and Adam turn to two writers in that mode who lived over a hundred years apart but drew on the period of the Napoleonic wars: Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym of Karen Blixen). Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805) is a complex sequence of tales within tales, written from the point of view of the early 19th century but describing events in Spain in the 18th century. It’s a powerful commentary on the preoccupations of the Enlightenment and the repression of historical guilt. In Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Dinesen confronts some of the most unsettling aspect of sexual guilt and desire with psychological astuteness. Adam and Marina discuss the ways in which, in both works, the gothic was able to explore areas of human experience that other genres struggled to accommodate.
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Read more in the LRB:
On Potocki:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n02/p.n.-furbank/nesting-time
On 'Out of Africa':
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n12/d.a.n.-jones/the-old-feudalist
On Denisen's letters:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n10/errol-trzebinski/perfect-bliss-and-perfect-despair
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