THE KUGELMASS EPISODE

"The Kugelmass Episode," first published in the May 2, 1977,

issue of The New Yorker, is Woody Allen's fantastic tale of a
dissatisfied humanities professor who has himself transported
into the fictional world of Gustave Flaubert's Madame
Bovary. Professor Kugelmass, unhappily married to his
second wife, wants to have an affair, so he has a magician-
entertainer named The Great Persky project him into
Flaubert's novel, where he embarks on a passionate affair
with the title character, the spoiled and beautiful Emma
Bovary. Allen presents a hilarious look at what happens when
living out one's fantasy becomes a reality and satirizes
contemporary society in the process. The story's humor
comes not only from its bizarre situation but from its broadly
drawn characters, parody of the entertainment industry, spoof
of the male midlife crisis, ironic look at literature and its study,
and satirical depiction of Jewish culture and manners.
Although the story is a farce and immensely funny from
beginning to end, "The Kugelmass Episode" does tackle the
serious question of the human condition in modern times.
Kugelmass, like Allen's heroes in other stories and films, is
a schlemiel, or hapless bungler who finds himself the victim of
circumstances (often of his own making) in an absurd and
confusing world. The story draws on Jewish humor and
culture as well as classical and modern literature, using
lowbrow humor to spoof high art. "The Kugelmass Episode,"
which was published the same year Allen won his first
Academy Award for the movie Annie Hall, won an O. Henry
award for best short story in 1978. The story was included in
Allen's collection Side Effects in 1978, and has been widely
anthologized. It appears in the 2003 collection, Fierce
Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New
Yorker.

Like the Flaubert novel whose main character it appropriates, “The

Kugelmass Episode” examines the futility of the quest for personal
happiness. Although it is cast in a comic key, Woody Allen’s story,
like Madame Bovary, is organized around a logic of disillusionment. Each
stage of transcendence is a disappointment, and the more that Kugelmass,
who has already been through two marriages at the outset of the story,
reaches for something exotic that is beyond his grasp, the more miserable
he becomes. It is appropriate that he is last seen hounded by the verb tener,
a graphic reminder of the elusiveness of the heart’s desire: People cannot
have what they want and do not want what they have.

Allen is best known for his achievements in film—as a prolific director,

writer, and performer. Many of his cinematic works explore the complex
relationship between art and life by being playfully metafictional; when
characters mug to the camera or are themselves artists, the medium
becomes aware of itself. “The Kugelmass Episode” is a similar fiction about
fiction. Its interaction between “real” and invented characters anticipates
the premise of Allen’s film The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a film
character walks off the screen and into a romance with a woman in the
audience.

La metalepsis narrativa se define como el traspaso de la frontera entre el nivel diegético

del narrador y la diégesis, es decir el mundo narrado por el narrador. Siguiendo la
primera definición del término, propuesta en 1972 por el teórico literario francés Gérard
Genette, los narratólogos han destacado varios tipos de metalepsis narrativas. El más
chocante de estos tipos es la metalepsis ontológica, es decir cuando un personaje
novelesco o cuando el narrador auctorial parecen superar literalmente la frontera entre
el mundo real y el mundo diegético. Este tipo de metalepsis aparece sobre todo en obras
postmodernas, como el cuento "El episodio Kugelmass" de Woody Allen, donde un
profesor de humanidades se introduce en el mundo novelesco de Madame Bovary para
conquistar a la heroína.

Trade quips at 21
http://events.nytimes.com/mem/nycreview.html?res=9E02E4D8143FF937A25750C0A
961958260
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money paid to a spouse after a divorce
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a minor character in Madame Bovary
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comparative Literature
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