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The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Melville House) PDF

201 Pages·2012·6.57 MB·English
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THE TRAVELS AND SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN RUDOLF ERICH RASPE (1736–1794) was born in Hanover, Germany of humble parentage. He studied natural sciences at the universities in Leipzig and Göttingen before becoming a university librarian and professor. He first gained fame for his poetry, translations, and scholarly papers, one of which Goethe called “a milestone of German science,” and another of which led to his election to the Royal Society of London. His expertise in mineralogy also led to his appointment as curator of a gemstone collection held by the local count. But in 1775 he fled to England after it was discovered that he had been secretly selling the count’s jewels to support his lavish lifestyle. In London he befriended many notables, including Benjamin Franklin and Horace Walpole … and continued to pursue schemes that often led to trouble, such as industrial spying in the nascent business of steam-engine manufacturing, and planting precious stones in supposed mineral fields he “discovered” and sold to speculators. He wrote The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen in Cornwall, in the southwest of England, having moved there to pursue his geological research. It is presumed he had met the real-life Baron Munchausen (who lived in Göttingen), but the book would later be seen as less a (terribly) exaggerated portrait than a defiant spoof of the prevalent rationalism of the Enlightenment. Soon after its completion, however, Raspe was forced to flee to Scotland when it was discovered that he had fleeced another employer. He later moved to Ireland, where he died in Kilarney of typhoid. DAVID REES is a comedian and former political cartoonist whose books include Get Your War On and How to Sharpen Pencils. THOMAS SECCOMBE (1866–1923) was a writer and assistant editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. WILLIAM STRANG and J.B. CLARK were renowned artists who collaboratively illustrated Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Strang was also a noted portraitist whose subjects included Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and Vita Sackville- West. THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. — HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET THE TRAVELS AND SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN Originally published by Rudolf Erich Raspe, London, 1785; this edition is based on the text published by Lawrence and Bullen, London, 1895 © Melville House 2012 Introduction © 2012, David Rees First Melville House printing: September 2012 Melville House Publishing 145 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.mhpbooks.com eISBN: 978-1-61219124-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2012947875 v3.1 INTRODUCTION BY DAVID REES The book in your hands proves it’s possible to be bludgeoned half to death by whimsy. Readers who have never before encountered Baron Munchausen, or know him only from Terry Gilliam’s 1988 film, may be surprised by the chaotic extent of his exploits—and the fathomless absurdity that serves as catalyst, obstacle, and handmaiden throughout this text. The first item in Munchausen’s extensive travelogue is the description of an elderly couple in a tree. (Why were they in a tree? They were harvesting cucumbers—“in this part of the globe that useful vegetable grows upon trees.”) A terrible storm tosses the tree—and its occupants— high into the air. How high? I was expecting an answer of twenty feet or so. In fact, they were tossed “at least five miles above the earth.” This is our first indication that the Baron’s is not a typical itinerary. The brief saga of the storm-tossed cucumber enthusiasts is perhaps the least outrageous event in the entire work, but it displays many of the qualities you will come to recognize as typical of the Baron’s narrative: unusual botany; extreme weather; a keen eye for the quantifiable (“considerably larger than twenty full-grown vultures;” “as near as I can calculate, I was near four hours and a half confined in the stomach of this animal”). And, of course: death. (When the cucumber tree falls back to earth it crushes a despot, upending the local political order.) Make no mistake: The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a surprisingly violent book. How violent? Animals are turned inside out (when they’re not being cut in half); a man’s decapitated head flies through the air, decapitating other men; a bridge of Munchausen’s design is adorned with skulls; communities are decimated. “When they all lay dead before me, I felt myself a second Samson, having slain my thousands.” According to my back-of-envelope calculations, the body count in this book is approximately fifty billion lives. As he traipses from one catastrophe to the next, trailing clouds of gory as he comes, the Baron earns his place among other titans of fiction. About halfway through the Surprising Adventures—shortly after Munchausen grabs a bear’s paws and simply waits for the creature to starve to death—I finally realized which classic character Munchausen most resembles, thanks to his omnipotence, the relentless forward thrust of his twin impulses to build and destroy, and the casual cruelty of his chaos-making: God. (“[W]e saved as many of the white people as possible, but pushed all the blacks into the water again.”) We rarely worry about Munchausen’s fate: Even as he’s fighting crocodiles, dispelling lions with loose gunpowder, or hitching a lift on the back of a drunk eagle, we trust in his capacity for the narrow escape and the eventual triumph. You may find yourself, in fact, vaguely resenting the good Baron for his invincibility, and wishing the stakes were a little higher for the man. Perhaps it’s best to think of Munchausen not as a protagonist in the traditional sense, but as the personification of a proactive psychological attitude. If, like me, you sometimes see the universe as a cheerless conspiracy to deny oneself peace of mind, you may take inspiration from the Baron’s nonchalance and good humor even as he’s sold into slavery, or confronted with vast islands of ice, or with a wolf chewing its way through the horse that leads his sled, or with Gog and Magog in the flesh. Indeed, it’s the Baron’s sanguineness as much as the specifics of his adventures that lend this book so much of its strange charm, and we wonder how much of this charm was to be found in the original (that is, actual) Baron Munchausen. Is the man’s personality refracted within these pages? It’s hard to tell, as the particulars of The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen are almost as surprising as the adventures themselves (see this edition’s Afterword). The book’s messy, peripatetic provenance recommended it to amendation, corruption, and confusion as authors piled on and scores of enthusiasts tried to make a little money off the good Baron’s back. Tall tales, like our merry baron, pay little heed to international borders; don’t be surprised if some of the adventures recounted herein sound familiar. To take just one example: I first learned of the phenomenon of frozen speech—a musical equivalent is encountered by the Baron in Chapter VI—from the stories of Pecos Bill I read as a child. (Pecos Bill was the legendary American cowboy celebrated for lassoing a tornado—an exercise so culturally and meteorologically specific that one can almost forgive Munchausen for not attempting it himself.) Such is the genius of tall tales—like obscene playground rhymes and urban legends, the best ones sacrifice pedigree in favor of ubiquity, and become more powerful thereby. A word of caution: As intimated above, this is not a book to be read in one sitting, or even in long stretches. The cacophony of destruction, the surreal lack of scale— not to mention the absence of any narrative logic —may fatigue even the hardiest of readers. The intensity of The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen recommends that it be consumed in bursts. This is not consommé to be sipped in deference to its subtlety; it’s tequila to be slammed, shot and shared with enthusiasm. Did I mention the man can speak nine hundred and ninety-nine languages?

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