Sacred Time and the Terror of History in “Twelve Thousand Head of Cattle”
Sacred Time and the Terror of History in “Twelve Thousand Head of Cattle”

Summary/Abstract: "Mircea Eliade’s “Twelve Thousand Head of Cattle” is a tale of the fantastic set in Bucharest during World War Two. Eliade’s fantastic world, Matei Calinescu observes, “is an invention or a creation but one that paradoxically, entirely mysteriously, carries ontological weight” (Permenter 2001: 98). Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which an American prisoner of war survives the firebombing of Dresden and subsequently communes with extraterrestrials, Eliade’s story illustrates Eugen Simion’s thesis that the fantastic is “not an evasion into the atemporal, but a total involvement in history” (Simion 1982: 136)."

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