The Kugelmass Episode

The kugelmass episode is a story of a professor named Sidney kugelmass who was bored of his life and wanted to have an affair. He decides to search for a magician that could help him. He finds Persky who tells Kugelmass that he has a machine that can transport any person into whatever book they want. The professor wanted to be with a French woman and he enters into Madame Bovary´s book. Persky transports Kugelmass into the book and he meets Emma Bovary. They have a lovely affair and at the end the machine breaks down and Kugelmass finds himself trapped in an old Spanish textbook.   In this story we can find anachronism. It is easy to find it in the way in which Woody Allen shows how the Professor Kugelmass and Emma Bovary go back and forth in place and time. They transport from New York to the early France inside the book. An example of anachronism in the story could be:   After the wine, they went for a stroll in the lovely French countryside. "I've always dreamed that some mysterious stranger would appear and rescue me from the monotony of this crass rural existence" The two spent a few hours at Yonville with Binet and then remounted the Bovary carriage. Following Persky's instructions, they held each other tightly, closed their eyes, and counted to ten. When they opened them, the carriage was just drawing up at the side door of the Plaza Hotel, where Kugelmass had optimistically reserved a suite earlier. All in all, Allen uses literary figures such as humor, dialogues, and satire in his story. He satirizes the contemporary society in order to confirm his point of view about it. He makes fun of everyday situations by showing how the main character ¨professor Kugelmass¨ does everything to please his mistress and gives her what he has and what he doesn´t have just to be with her despite the reality in which he was living and his boring married life situation.