WorldLit #5: A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

             In the realism story <The Lady with the Dog>, the part I thought the most realistic was that the transition was made by not an enormous milestone event but a trivial event that can occur any time in our lives. Gurov went indignant by a vain joke “The sturgeon was a bit too strong!” and made the grand decision of travelling to where Anna lives. Surely our real lives are not composed of dramatic events; rather a continuum of mundane routines eventually makes up a change.

             In the magical realism story <A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings>, the transitions are apparently not at all realistic. Suddenly an angel appears in the courtyard, brings enormous wealth to Pelayo’s family, and flies away again abruptly. However, those changes are described in such a mediocre tone that they seem to be some of our gradual and mundane routines. For example, the first encounter of Pelayo and Elisenda and the angel is described as follows:

“They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar.”

Pelayo and Elisenda’s feeling is no more intense than what they might feel when they find an abandoned dog and decide to nurture it in a chicken coop. They will not be familiar with the angel if the angel is a landmark event in their lives. Moreover, his “miracles” are trivial “consolations”, such as making a blind man grow three new teeth, which are far from grandiose events. Even when the angel flies away, he starts with a clumsy failure, while Elisenda is “cutting some bunches of onions”, an everyday routine. Generally, the angel, possibly a source of significant supernatural transitions of this story, is actually a decrepit man with wings full of parasites, and merely a part of a monotonous routine. This brings the magic elements of the angel into the pool of realism.

This story is also realistic in that it describes the selfish human nature. The relationship between the humans and the angel is absolutely based on needs. After the angel cures their child’s fever, the humans feel magnanimous, and consider releasing the angel on a raft with provisions. However, after they discover that he is a potential source of enormous profits, they confine him in a chicken coop and let him be tortured by the equally selfish crowd. As he no longer becomes a fortune, Elisenda shouts “that it was awful living in that hell full of angels.” Their calculating relationship perhaps reflects the connections prevalent in our contemporary society which lack warmth and altruism.  

The spider woman is another notable theme that conveys how myopic humans are. The spider woman’s provocative story, supported by awful visual evidence, conveys a direct moral to the crowd. The crowd suddenly feels no need to meet the angel, whose miracles do not provide a direct cure, and therefore disintegrates. Even if their motivation to meeting the angel was a religious conviction (regarding that Catholic has been dominant in Latin American society), such belief is abstract and therefore easily overwhelmed by sensual experiences. People tend to take the short and clear paths of which the endpoints are immediately seen in their eyes, rather than the long and obscure ones, which potentially have bigger rewards. Moreover, fear, represented by the spider, more easily prompts people to act right away than hope, symbolized by the angel. In these ways the spider woman portrays our shortsighted nature, a realistic trait of humans.

Personally, I thought that the depiction of Elisenda at the last part was also very realistic. When the angel flies into the air, her feeling is closer to regret than to freedom from a nuisance, as she fastens her gaze on the “imaginary dot”. The ending perfectly portrays how humans recognize a value of an existence only at its absence, just as we realize that we have to serve our parents with devotion only after they pass away. Whether the angel was a source of profit or a source of discomfort, Elisenda gets to miss him when he is no longer there.

<A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings> is a work that successfully blends the magical elements into a realistic tone and theme, as the story depicts magic as a banality, and deals with realistic human nature, such as selfishness and myopia. I really loved the way how magical realism makes sense. During my research I found that this genre is greatly affected by Latin American folklores. I am looking forward to read other magical realism works and perhaps the folklores that underlies as the basis of this genre.



Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Old_Man_with_Enormous_Wings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Garc%C3%ADa_M%C3%A1rquez