Fantasmi in biblioteca. L’Antichità nel Manoscritto trovato a Saragozza

Abstract

The present study deals with some references to ancient sources, especially in ghost stories, in the Manuscript Found in Saragossa, by Jean Potocki. Alongside stories that recall episodes of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (in particular from book I and book X), Potocki (who loves to confuse and even disguise his sources) shows references less expected to texts, such as the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus and the epistle of Pliny the Younger to Licinius Sura, in which Pliny inquires his correspondent’s faith in ghosts. The result is a thematization of the question of the book-source: the books become a source of information, a source of knowledge, a source of entertainment. The works of the ancients, with their authority, participate, in the same way as oral histories, to the construction of a universe in which the hero of the romance must learn to distinguish the true from the false, the real from the imaginary – or from the artificial.