Narrative and the Monstrous in the Book of John Mandeville

This paper examines the relation between the representations of the monstrous and the narrative structure in the Book of John Mandeville. In order to define, delimit, and justify the distinction between the same and the other (the monstrous), the text engages with the monstrous, tries to depict and analyze it. In the process it confuses the narrative, understood as an emplotted construction which aims to produce knowledge of any form, and generic structure of the text as a whole. As a result, the text shifts from a travel guidebook for pilgrims to the Holy Land to a blend of romance, encyclopedia, satire and travelogue describing as far as East Asia. Furthermore, the text paradoxically undermines its own claims, to some extent, about the very distinction between the same and the other: the other seems to share many things with the same, and in certain instances, even possess what the same lacks. This process also works the other way: the narrative, essentially about crossing blurred boundaries due to the fact that the Holy Land is considered a Christian site in the text while at the same time being under Muslim rule, conditions itself content-wise to engage with the other and place it in a much wider spectrum, describing places such as the land of the Christian Prester John in East Asia in order to make sense. Thus, as a text written from a Christian point of view, the text has to justify why the Holy Land is in Muslim hands; as a result, it has to describe them, which results in the monstrosity of the other being blurred due to the belief in the providence of God. The representations of the monstrous, therefore, make the text itself monstrous, and the monstrous text necessitates the representation of the monstrous.