Whenever something really complicated happens in a football match (was that a foul or not? Should the referee award a penalty kick or not?) the TV producers show an action replay from the “reverse angle”. Then we can see that the player cheated and the referee was taken in. So the reverse take serves to clarify a story that presents no problems from a normal angle. And we could call Andrzej Bart the master of this sort of take, not for describing football matches, but for telling famous, serious stories from the reverse angle. In his latest novel we go back to the sixteenth century to be party to a bizarre event in history. Joanna the Queen of Spain, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, has gone mad. The ruler of the most powerful state in modern Europe is determined not to accept that she is a widow: she has cunningly got hold of her late husband’s corpse and sets off on a journey around Spain with it. The envoys of various powers head after her, each with a different task. Ferdinand’s agent is to persuade the queen to give up the crown and place herself in her father’s care; the British ambassador wants to persuade her to marry King Henry VII, as a way of initiating the emergence of a world superpower that would rule Europe, South America and half of Asia; and the Papal envoy wants the queen to understand that she is committing a mortal sin that will spread depravity among the faithful. Each of these missions demands a different rationale, a different approach to the queen, a different intellectual game at court. Don Juan is drawn into one of these games. Who else could be as gallant to a lady, who else could turn her attention back to life or steer her thoughts towards love and the world of mortals? The problem is, Don Juan is no longer twenty years old; he is now an ageing penitent who has meted out his own punishment for the sins of his youth – he has gone to live in a monastery where he cares for the incurably sick. Meanwhile the atmosphere around Joanna grows tense: Philip’s death has unexpectedly strengthened the Inquisition and weakened the papacy, given England an unclear opportunity to increase its domain, and opened up new prospects for Spain. Very soon everything will slip out of control… This is what Andrzej Bart’s reverse angle is all about: he returns a ready-made story to an incomplete state and lets us take a look behind the scenes. There we see not just the stage machinery of history and the directors, but also the hidden motives. And as this strange show progresses, at almost every turn there is a surprise in store for us. Bart never lets us think history is created purely by worthless people, or allows us to plunge blithely into the past. By constantly reminding us from what point we are reading and what sort of world we live in, he seems to be saying that while we may have no influence on the past, at least we can consider the consequences of past events. Ultimately we are the heirs of those powers.
Przemysław Czapliński
Andrzej Bart (born 1947) writes fiction, documentary films and screenplays. He has published three novels, The Man Dogs Never Barked At (1983), Rien ne va plus (1991) and A Train to the Journey (1999). He is regarded as one of Poland’s most interesting post-modern novelists.
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