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?