Magical Realism and the Sublime in The Monkey
"The Monkey" is a short story written by Isak Dinesen. The story was published in 1934. "The Monkey" is a form of gothic sublime. In this story, I encountered many elements that related to magical realism as well as the sublime.
"The Monkey" has many magical elements. The beginning of the story mentioned a purple-eyed young fallow deer (109). The element appears to me as being a magical element rather than an element of the sublime. Another magical element was the tortoise being more than one hundred years old (109). A person knows that no tortoise is capable of living to be more than one hundred years old. Aunt Cathinka says that she will give Boris her experience of life in a little pill, sugar-coated by poetry to make it go down (115). I feel this part is another magical element. If anyone was given a pill to make him or her experience someone else's situation, then life would go much easier. People have to learn from their mistakes to see what they are doing wrong.
There were not many realistic elements in this story. However, one realistic element that I did see was that the air smelled of fir leaves and toadstools and was so fresh that it made Boris yawn (120). The enviroment around him was his natural surroundings. People can imagine this as being a real element because they can recall this happening to them.
After reading the story, I felt that the relationship between the real and unreal elements was non-problematic. I understood how the author compared the sublime characteristics with the magical characteristics. The author put the elements in different order to make them stand out.
After reading the article on The American...
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...sier to pick out the sublime elements rather than the magical elements. Many sublime elements made up this story. However, I felt that there were many similarities between magical realism and the sublime. I did not notice many fantastical elements in this story. I thought that the fantastic elements did not relate to the sublime as well as the magical characteristics did. I learned a lot of interesting information on sublime literature. Sublime literature is not used much in writing; however, I think that the sublime needs to be fulfilled.
Works Cited
Arsenburg, Mary. The American Sublime, NY.: State University of New York, 1986.
Dinesen, Isak. "The Monkey", NY.: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc., 1934.
Longinus. On The Sublime, Cambridge.: Harvard UP, 1995.
Sandner, David. The Fantastic Sublime, Conneticut.: Greenwood Press, 1996.
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