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Sublime Elements in Of Love and Other Demons Essay

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Sublime Elements in Of Love and Other Demons

The book Of Love and Other Demons (1994), written by the Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has more characteristics of sublime literature than of magical realist literature. Magical Realism and the sublime are so closely related that distinguishing between the two is hard. They are more closely related than magical realism and the fantastic.

Of Love and Other Demons has elements of magical realism. Of all the magical elements, the most important and the most obvious is the dream that is shared by both Sierva and Delaura before they meet. The long red hair of Sierva is an example of a magic realist element that is hidden. The death of Father Aquino and other mysterious …show more content…

they also partake of a dreamlike quality which aligns them with a host of other magical realist devices and motifs" (Theim 237). This device is also similar to Weiskel's third phase of the sublime, the reactive phase (qtd in Sandner 52). During this time, "the mind recovers the balance of outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object" (qtd. in Sandner 52).

Another way in which the story may correspond with the sublime is Sierva's long red hair that had not been cut from the day she was born until the end of her excorcism. Wordsworth says, about the sublime, "Even in the scenes drawn from ordinary life, [the authors] would throw over them a certain coloring of the imagination" (qtd. in Sander 60). This effect is exactly what Marquez does with Sierva's hair. He alluded that there may be something supernatural about it. "The sublime affirm[s] a spiritual dimension to fantasy and explores, through fantastic images, the meaning and existence of spirit" (Sandner 145). Transformation, another sublime characteristic, is used to show how one's perception of something changes (qtd in Sandner 51). Instead of being just hair, it was a promise to Dominga's god. Defamiliarization, which is a characteristic of both the sublime and magical realism (Simpkins 150), is used in Of Love and Other Demons. It focuses one's attention on something, such as hair, that he or she would normally think nothing

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