A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

March 30^th, 2013

Gabriel Marquez – A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Mr. Garrioch / World Lit

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     “It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.” –Gabriel Marquez

     Gabriel Marquez is an eminent Latin American writer largely known for his magic realism pieces. Magic realism, also known as magical realism, is a literary movement in which the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts. (Luis Leal, Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris) Though he used many apparently unrealistic and magical elements, Marquez had certain realistic issues he wanted to portray via his stories. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, one of his famous short stories, also takes real problems of the world.

     The story illustrates how people judge the supernatural. The old man with wings is a stranger to the town. No one of the townspeople can assure who the man is. The neighbor woman of Pelayo claims the man is an angel. But the man, with “a few faded hairs left on his bald skull, and a very few teeth in his mouth”, and “huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked”, in no sense accords with the angel they imagine, with a pure white dress and silky blonde hair. Thus they start treating the angel more like an animal than a holy creature. Moreover, Father Gonzaga doubts the man being an angel because in his measure, angel should speak Latin. Whereas humans are not omniscient and might not be able to fully understand the supernatural, the people in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings appraise the angel on their worldly and imperfect criteria.

     Readers can further get a sense of people’s superiority they feel over the old man. When Pelayo and Elisenda first find the old man with the wings, he regards the man as a “nightmare”. Even after they hear from a neighbor woman that the man is an angel, Pelayo “drags him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop.” That night, when Pelayo’s child wakes up without a fever, he feels “magnanimous” and “decides to put the angel on a raft for three days.” If the angel were a human being, Pelayo would not let that man on a raft and regard that as a behavior of magnanimity. Nor would Pelayo let the angel whom he truly regards as angel sleep on a raft when he feels magnanimous. Such decision to put the angel on a raft is driven not from Pelayo’s respect for the angel.

     Yet Pelayo is not the only one to regard the angel as a weak inferior. At the end of the story, when the angel loses his popularity but still does not leave the house, Elisenda gets “exasperated and unhinged”. The whole neighborhood has fun with the angel “without the slightest reverence”, as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal. Later on, the neighborhood and hundreds of people from distance away come to see this unusual being, as if it is a zoo animal. Elisenda takes benefit by charging five cents admission to see the angel. Every single character in the story does not show, as the author writes, the “slightest reverence” to this injured and aged winged man but rather a superiority we feel over animals.

     But the old man is not the only supernatural being presented in the story. Numerous people from faraway all visit Pelayo’s house to see the caged angel. The popularity of this angel seems like it would last for a while until the spider woman appears. The spider woman claims that she turned into a tarantula for not obeying her parents. This woman, who clearly knows (or assures she knows) how she became a tarantula, quickly fascinates the majority much more than the unidentified and wordless old angel does and the man is soon forgotten. But the people desire for a great lesson from the tarantula girl – such as to never disobey parents’ words. It is rather plausible to say that they are chasing anything unusual and surprising, just like a group of reporters running after hot issues for eye-catching headline. Marquez himself received public’s attention after publishing his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel won him many prestigious awards such as Noble Prize and Romulo Garllegos Prize as well as great popularity and critics’ acclaims. However, Marquez goes to live in Spain. He said that his book was not worthy of such attention and he knew the vain of such popularity. In this sense, the old angel in his book may be a portrayal of himself who is overburdened by the unwanted public attention.

     There are certain words that are hard to juxtapose with each other. ‘Magic’ and ‘Realism’ are some very typical ones. ‘Magic’, as Merriam-Webster defines, is the ‘use of means believed to have supernatural power over natural forces’, whereas ‘Realism’ is a literary movement basically focusing on replicating the true nature of reality. But this seemingly self-contradicting word has been used for decades to characterize a renowned novelist named Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Marquez effectively conveys realistic themes through unrealistic characters.

+) I tried hard to not go over 900 words. The journal is solely about our second story only- and perhaps I should post another one about the handsomest drowned man later?