Travels of Sir John Mandeville
December 19th, 2016
Have you ever experienced sheer, meandering morose confusion over a subject that is interesting to you but is ultimately and thoroughly unbeatable in any meaningful way? I had that feeling from my encounters with “The Travels of Sir John Mandeville”. It is an incredible book I can’t write about. Not because it’s hard for me — it isn't. It just always avoided being written about. For a while it just moved me to the realms where the only thing I could do was to question my own nature. Which is not what you want to do when you’re writing about such thing but which is kind of what the art is all about in theory.
OK, I need to specify my cause further. What was the problem?
I first stumbled upon “The Travels of Sir John Mandeville” in 2008, just after I finished high school. That summer was particularly packed with events of varying underwhelming qualities — in short I had a lot of things to do. And then this book happened and I had something of an existential crisis. Here’s one thing about me you should know — I’m a manic reader, I can read a book to the point I can reverse engineer it in my head in every possible variation. And when I started to read John Mandeville’s travelogue — I found myself unable to do it for some unknown reasons. Even more — every time I tried — it backfired on me, it gave me the taste of my medicine in its nonchalant awkward nullity. After some quite tormenting while I’ve manage to finish reading it — defeated and humiliated. I’ve promised to myself to leave it as it is — uncracked.
Years later I understood what was the problem — I haven’t got enough guts to process it. See, in order to deal with such pointless little trite of a book, you need not only talk the talk but also need to walk the walk. And that’s problematic when you’re just don’t have what it takes to deal with the book like this. That means — you need to stand against it on its terms and turn it around 180 degrees, then go another 360 and then again 180. But I’m straying too far.
For a while I haven’t thought about Mandeville even for a moment — why should I? Since then — I’ve been studying a lot, writing my own books, playing concerts, doing many other exciting things. But then I had an assignment to write an article about literary forgeries and I was doing a research and that dreadful name surfaced once again firing up an age-old itch.
There was an unfinished business to carry of. It is personal. It is matter of honor. And so here I am, older and different, standing up against my own imaginary nemesis.
THE BOOK
“The Travels of Sir John Mandeville” is, obviously, a book of travels of eponymous knight, who described his voyage across the foreign lands aka parts unknown, such as Albania, Libia, Chaldea, Egypt, Cyprus, Isle of Sicily, Persia, Babylon, Tartaria, even India and China and also cities like Constantinople and Jerusalem. He was going far and away and was bragging about it hard. Over the course of the book he reflects upon known knows and known unknowns, then discovers some unknown knowns with unknown unknowns. You know — business as usual.
It was published somewhere in between 1357 to 1371 and quickly became a reference book for many travelers. It challenged the popularity of another travelogue, written by Marco Polo. Reason for tremendous success is simple — it shared some precious information about places not many people ever heard of in a new and exciting way.
It was a source of inspiration for many emulous wanderers. It was closely studied by the travelers. Cartographers often used this book to adjust their maps. From there Christopher Columbus got an idea that it is possible to sail around the world in one direction and return home from the other. And boy, what he’d ran with that idea. In a relatively short period of time it was translated into many languages and there are almost three hundred surviving copies of its pre-print run.
Mandeville described his voyage in a very verbose and detailed way with vivid imagery and dynamic narrative. Passages are filled with clever wordplay, wallowed in folklore and are somewhat alliterative nature of descriptions, with roundels here and there. Even from a modern point of view — it’s a blast of a read — the narrative flow is smooth and clean cut. And then there’s few more crucial details.
THE MAN
But who was the man behind the text? Who was John Mandeville. There is no solid evidence of his existence. There is no information on him outside his book. Definitely, he had never existed. From what we are told — John Mandeville is a knight, born and bred in England, in the town of Saint Albans who then crossed the sea on Saint Michael’s day in 1322. Some claim he was an imposter or living in disguise or that he was accused of murdering somebody noble. Some even claimed that he was practicing black magic and alchemy. Nobody knows for sure. And most importantly, it doesn’t really matter.
It is believed to be written, among many other suspects, by Jan de Langhe (aka Johannes Longus aka Jean le Long) a benedict monk and later an abbot of an Abbey of Saint Bertin in Saint Omer. He was a big fan of travelogues, gathered a large collection of them over time and was a writer himself. It’s easy to see what motivated him to write it — he wanted to share his thoughts and idea that he accumulated over years of studying books into one coherent narrative — singular experience. You can imagine his journey across various libraries and his own collection to gather material for his own feast of words.
***
And there is also one more thing. “Travels of Sir John Mandeville” is notoriously almost completely consists of other people’s works. It borrows truly, madly, deeply from the works of such eminent scholars like Friar Odoric of Porderone, Hayton of Corycus, Giovanni da Pian and Vincent de Beauvais among many-many others. In fact, the level of appropriation is so high it can be considered as an elaborate collage, early example of cut-up text. But it’s not just an appropriation action spectacle. The way author incorporates bits and pieces of other texts is fascinating in its own way. It’s a mosaic of fragments, refined and sorted — voluntary rearranged and adapted to fit certain purposes — layer upon layer of texts — making the texture of its own kind. Knowing that this book is partially composed out of other texts makes you feel the apparition between the lines. It given an additional dimension to the text — a meta story of its own composition.
The other important thing about Mandeville’s journey is its increasingly questionable depictions of an inhabitants of the foreign lands. In short — the more you read the weirder it gets. That makes the book a unique example of simultaneously notorious artifact of literary forgery and great example of how unintended consequence turns the work into an unruly masterpiece of surrealist fiction. That stands nearby in the shadow of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and steals the show like it is its goddamned job. More on that later.
THE JOURNEY
As it was mentioned before, John Mandeville started his journey in Saint Albans on Saint Michael’s day in 1322. His original plan was to make a pilgrimage to the holy churches and sacred shrines of Jerusalem. He achieved his goal, but travelling is an exciting feat that never goes the way it is planned. And so the curiosity led the man into the rabbit hole that is the world around and so his journey lasted over 30 years and stretched over many-many foreign lands, including India, China, Java and even Sumatra. Mandeville wrote about the lives of people in places that were almost like another world — quite alien for medieval and even modern Westerners.
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Book is divided into two parts. One describes his journey to Constantinople and what he had seen there. And it sets up a deliberate pace and gently introduces us to the ways John Mandeville perceives the world. It is fascinating how much wonder and excitement are in the passages describing life in Constantinople and so on. The narrator is happy to tell all those things. And it is very effective.
Narrative leans hard on specific details about life in Byzantine Empire and by that gains some factual credibility. Then Mandeville travelled to Cyprus to visit clifftop monasteries and think about the sea hum. From there he moved through Syria to Jerusalem with a quick stop at St. Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai desert.
Second part changes the pace and tells the story of his peculiar wanderings through parts India and China with an intention to visit Java and Sumatra. And what he encounters on his way is the something to behold. It is also complete, unmitigated bollocks.
He describes some rituals of inhabitants — for example, cannibals who eat their babies and pagans who drink from their fathers’ skulls. And then while wandering he meets such folks like a tribe whose only source of nourishment was the smell of apples, women with dog’s heads, wild men with horns and hoofs, two-headed geese, weeping crocodiles, phoenixes, flying heads, giant snails, people the size of pygmies whose mouths are so small that they had to suck all their food through reeds, men with enormous testicles which dangle beneath their knees, men without heads with faces on the breasts, lizard people, , one-eyed giants who eat only raw meat and fish, the people with eyes in their shoulders, the folk that have but one foot, and the vegetable lamb and so on.
Some of the bizarre comes from an elaborate writing style that Mandeville employs, the other is probably caused by misinterpretation of the source materials and the subsequent attempts into filling the gaps with excessive use of imagination. One thing for sure — author had a vast knowledge of bestiaries.
And all this glory is described without making you question if any of the aforementioned weirdness is tacked upon — it is surrounded by accurate details of cities and places and the way it is written eliminates any trace of dissonance. That is a bit baffling. And then — fascinating.
The shift in narrative is not sharp. It gets stranger little by little. Slowly, it warps the reader, sucks him in, leads into the wormhole — and then rolls along. Even desensitized mind of a modern man is not ready for such massive smooth assault and battery on perception.
In the big scheme, the first part of the book gains the readers trust, immerses him into the fascinating world of Mandeville, lowers his fences, drops all the fears, suspends the disbelief and let him familiarize certain parts of it. It is like being put in a warm bath. And then it starts to boil. More and more. But it is so pleasant and fine reader just don’t notice it. There’s a caution growing then but not very much because the narrative runs so smooth and it is so engaging. And then it is too late to go back.
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“The travels of Sir John Mandeville” is the book that tears your mind out and burns your soul. I was thinking a lot about target audience of the book. And I thought that it must be somebody who wanted to be alone, secluded, safely confined in darkness. He was left exhausted, even devastated by the world around him. Left with humiliated confusion but haunted with longing to see if there is something else, some kind of wonderful. And then he stumbles upon this book. And the world changes. Because it is exactly what he had expected — the world is big, it is fascinating, it has a lot of mesmerizing stuff, there are so many things to know. It feels like the book cares so much for the reader there’s almost an understanding eye hidden somewhere. It tells nothing particularly new. But it reaffirms his beliefs. And the reader feels so good with it — one question just can’t get through. Why it is so? It comes as an affliction and leaves like an addiction. It is unforgettable. Because it is so vile and cynical. But then you understand that this is not intentional. It just happened this way. Maybe it is something inside, something that can’t be explained.
P.S.: I would like to think that Ultimate Warrior is actually John Mandeville reincarnated. But I will never do it because if I do so — it will start make even less sense.
