SOURCE: "'Edo and Enam'—The Ironic Perspective," in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter, 1983, pp. 85-100.

In the following essay, Fuchs maintains that an understanding of Edo and Enam as an ironic story enables the reader to make sense of the story's "strangeness," namely its "digressions, internal contradictions, sudden transitions from realism to phantasy [sic, neologisms and anachronisms."]

1. Introduction

It would seem that a story as widely explained and thoroughly interpreted as Edo and Enam requires no further explanations. The numerous allegorical interpretations of this enigmatic story left hardly any detail in its originally confusing state. What the momentous critical quest for clarity failed to acknowledge, however, is the literary significance of the presumably meaningless elements in the story. Based on the proposition that in literature meaningless elements are just as significant as meaningful ones, we shall focus precisely on the enigmatic and most disturbing thematic and structural...