THE AMBIGUITY OF MIRACLE IN ELIADE’S “A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD PHOTOGRAPH”
THE AMBIGUITY OF MIRACLE IN ELIADE’S “A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD PHOTOGRAPH”

Summary/Abstract: Mircea Eliade’s “A Fourteen-Year Old Photograph” is a short story about a miraculous rejuvenation. Dumitru, a Romanian immigrant, returns to a church in search of a miracle worker named Dr. Martin, believing that four years earlier Dr. Martin had cured his wife Thecla of asthma, simply by holding up a ten-year old photograph of her. According to Dumitru, Thecla was cured of her asthma and began to resemble her image in the photograph, taken when she was just eighteen or nineteen years old. A church board member tells Dumitru that not only was Dr. Martin no longer performing miracles at the church, but that he was a fraud named Dugay. Dumitru finds Dugay in a nightclub called the Three Hundred, where Dugay confesses to Dumitru that he was indeed a fraud. Dumitru continues to insist on the truth of the miracle even as Dugay becomes convinced that the true saint and worker of miracles was none other than Dumitru himself. Ultimately, the equivocal nature of the miracle is a means to revelation, gesturing to the illusory nature of the self and to such notions of Eliade as the camouflage of the sacred and the unrecognizability of miracle.

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