marquez a very old man with enormous wings

7/29/2019 Marquez a Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

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A Very Old Man With

Enormous WingsGabriel Garcia Marquez


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Gabriel Jos Garca Mrquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, Colombia. In 1946, Marquez entered law school at the National University of Bogota. There he began

reading Kafka and publishing his first short stories in leading liberal newspapers. In 1950 he abandoned his legal studies and began writing columns and stories for El

Heraldo, a Liberal newspaper. He also began associating with a group of young writers in

the area, who admired modernists like Joyce, Woolf, and Hemingway and who introducedMarquez to Faulkner. In 1954 he returned to Bogota as a reporter for El Espectador. Marquez's first novel, Leaf Storm, was published by a small Bogota press in 1955. In 1959, Fidel Castro's guerrilla revolution triumphed and the fighters marched into

Havana. This revolution was of crucial importance to contemporary Latin American history,and its impact on Marquez cannot be overstated. That year he became the Bogotacorrespondent for Prensa Latina, the new Cuban news agency.

Three important events happened for Marquez in 1981. He was awarded the French Legionof Honor, the highest decoration France gives to a foreigner. After a warning that theColombian military had accused him of conspiring with guerrillas, he was forced to seekasylum at the Mexican Embassy in Bogota. Finally, he published Chronicle of a DeathForetold.

In 1982, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the 1980s and 1990s, Marquez lived in Mexico City and Colombia. He continued to take

an active role in politics and organization, and in 1986 he organized the Foundation of NewLatin American Cinema in Havana. He also wrote screenplays, plays, and two novels: Lovein the Time of Cholera (1985) and The General in his Labyrinth (1989).

As the century closed, he continued to live in Colombia and write, although under heavysecurity for fear of kidnapping or other crimes with which he has been threatened.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been suffering from lymphatic cancer and is receivingtreatment. He remains active in Latin American politics.
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Magical Realism

Magical Realism "Magical realism expands the categorizesof the real so as to encompass myth, magic and otherextraordinary phenomena in Nature or experience whichEuropean realism excluded" (Gabriel Garca Mrquez, eds.Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, 45).

As recently as 2008, magical realism in literature has beendefined as "...a kind of modern fiction in which fabulousand fantastical events are included in a narrative thatotherwise maintains the 'reliable' tone of objective realistic

report, designating a tendency of the modern novel toreach beyond the confines of realism and draw upon theenergies of fable, folk tale, and myth while maintaining astrong contemporary social relevance. The fantasticattributes given to characters in such novelslevitation,flight, telepathy, telekinesisare among the means that

magic realism adopts in order to encompass the oftenphantasmagorical political realities of the 20th century."


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Magical Realism Films

http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/non-fiction/top-ten-magical-realism-films/


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Gabriel Garca Mrquez uses the technique of magical realism inhis novels as well as his short stories. Marquez uses magicalrealism to blend reality and fantasy so that the distinction

between the two erases. An example of this technique comesfrom the story "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" where anangel falls to the Earth because of a violent rainstorm. When theangel is found by Pelayo and Elisenda, they are shocked to see anangel, and yet they never question its existence. The reality ofthe situation is never mistrusted; however, the angel itself is an

astounding manifestation.

Even the neighbor lady is not shocked:"He's an angel," she told them. "He must have been coming forthe child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him

down" (204).


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What effect does the

combination of magicaland ordinary details

have on the reader?


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Compare and contrastthe differing portrayal

of the Spider-Girl andthe Angel.


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Human Reception of the Supernatural The two major supernatural occurrences in the story are the old man with

wings and the girl who has been turned into a spider. The people in thestory treat the old man as an oddity, but not as a supernatural oddity:more a freak of nature than something beyond nature. The old man

appears to be nothing more than a frail human with wings, and so hisstatus as an angel is endlessly debated. Father Gonzaga thinks that hecannot be an angel because he lacks dignity and splendor. Of course thisbegs the question of whether the angel lacks dignity intrinsically, orwhether he lacks dignity because of the way he is treated - cooped up in achicken cage. Perhaps it is the people who lack dignity, not the old man.The old man's other supernatural characteristic - his incredible patience inthe face of his treatment - does not make much of an impression on the

majority of the people, who are happy to exploit him until bored with him.

The Spider-Girl is a clear contrast with the Old Man. Whereas he is difficult- if not impossible - to interpret, the Spider-Girl delights the people withthe clarity of her story. She disobeyed her parents as so was turned into aspider by god. Unlike the Angel, the people do not debate her status as aspider: it's taken for granted. This tendency of the public to acceptsupernatural explanations for such simple morality tales but to deny them

in the case of complexity and frailty (as exemplified by the old man) maybe satirical.


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A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" demonstratesMarquez's ability to tell a fairy tale or folk tale in a realistic

manner while incorporating the magic of the angel. Theangel is the catalyst for the family's recovery fromdestitution. Before the arrival of the angel, they are asimple, poor family with a dying son. Once the angel iscaptured, the son recovers and the family uses the angelfor financial gain. Marquez shows us true human nature. Anincredible being falls to the Earth and the humans use it to

make a fast buck. Eventually, the family grows to resentthe angel and they wish it would vanish. Instead of thesimplistic, happy ending of the ordinary fairy tale, thecharacters are allowed to exploit Nature until it flies offwithout a word. Consequently, the angel is never allowed tofulfill his destiny which was to take the soul of the dyingchild.

"She kept watching him even when she was through cuttingthe onions and she kept on watching until it was no longerpossible for her to see him, because then he was no longeran annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot of thehorizon of the sea" (210).


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How does the story

comment uponhumanity?


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What is Human? Just as the Old Man is described in terms of his animal

characteristics, so too he is described as human. Father Gonzaga

thinks that he must be an imposter: he does not possess thedignity that people expect from angels. Also, in paragraph two theOld Man is described as a rag picker, and Pelayo and Elisendadecide that he must be a sailor. Despite these humancharacteristics, the Old Man is treated inhumanly. He is penned upwith the chickens and displayed, forced to eat mush, andbranded. This capacity to dehumanize a creature because of oneunfamiliar characteristic - wings - quietly damns the people in thestory. They see the Old Man's humanity yet don't feel the need torespond humanely.

In contrast there is the Spider-Girl. The narrator notes that thespider girl is a much more appealing attraction because her storyis full of human truth. Because her story is simply andstraightforwardly moral, she is appealing, whereas the old man -full of mystery and complexity - is unappealing. Garcia Marquez

invites us to consider that the truly human qualities in life are theOld Man's - uncertainty, mystery, strangeness, open-endedness -whereas the trite moralizing of the Spider-Girl is actually far fromhuman experience. It merely consoles the people, whereas theOld Man - by revealing our cruelty - shows them their true nature.


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The Blurry Distinction between Natural andSupernatural

Marquez contrasts the supernatural in the story with vivid

natural details, thus conflating the supernatural and theeveryday. Pelayo does not see a large difference between anatural oddity - the invasion of his house by crabs - and asupernatural one - the invasion of his house by a decrepitangel. Indeed, when Pelayo and Elisenda build theirmansion, they secure it from crabs and angels alike, thustreating both as equal nuisances.

Moreover, the angel's wings are described in gross, vividdetail, and when he first appears they are crippled by mud.He is described in one place as a senile vulture, in anotheras a 'huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens',and in paragraph four the crowds treat him as a 'circusanimal instead of a supernatural creature.' These

comments serve to blur the distinction between the naturaland supernatural. Garcia Marquez may be suggesting thatsuch a distinction is unnecessary, or that the people aresimply blind to it.

Whether it is a failure to impose the boundary or ignore it isa matter of interpretation - and the story, ultimately, invitesinterpretation more than it invites meaning.


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Uncertainty in the Narrator Uncertain, ambiguity and doubt are constant

throughout the story, and Marquez achievesthese affects in several different ways. Forinstance, he uses a constantly changing narrativevoice to complicate both the setting and theevents in question. At first the third-person

omniscient point of view, the narrator graduallyreveals opinions on certain points, supportingsome characters and condemning other. Marquezthus always ties his story to a teller - we aren'table to get a clean read on the situation, or even

to know if it happened at all. This narrative levelof uncertainty precludes a simple moral tale thatpretends to speak universally.


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Humans Must Interpret Events

The story illustrates the human need to interpret life's events.The Old Man, an exaggerated dramatization of any strange event,is interpreted in many different ways. Individual characters - theneighbor woman, Pelayo, Elisenda, Father Gonzaga, and all theonlookers - try to attach meaning to the Old Man, or to reduce hismeaning, in terms of their own lives. Thus Garcia Marquez stagesthe inevitable situatedness of human experience. We see thingsthrough our own eyes, and the search for a universally applicablemeaning is inevitably doomed.

Still, even though we cannot settle for a simple interpretationthat applies to everyone, we can still realize that we think andfeel from our own perspective. The major failure of the people in"Very Old Man" is not that they fail to interpret the Angel, butthat they fail to acknowledge their own role in the interpretiveprocess. They cannot see themselves with any perspective, inother words. Pelayo and Elisenda never seem grateful to the

angel, though he makes their fortune. They simply imprison him.Similarly, other characters lack perspective on the Angel. Theyargue for their own interpretation of the events, then grow bored,never pausing to consider the Old Man's possible feelings, neverbothering to notice their own narrow vision.

marquez a very old man with enormous wings

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