Magical Realism in a Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
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Magical Realism in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
A Very Old man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a classic example of Magical Realism: it combines ordinary, everyday things with fantastic, supernatural events. The mixture of realistic, often mundane situations and extraordinary incidents creates the dreamlike, mysterious atmosphere so characteristic of the works written in the tradition of Magical Realism.
After reading Marquez’s short story, the first question that comes to mind is: who is the Old Man? The author leaves the answer open to the reader’s interpretation. The way the Old Man is first introduced suggests that he is just a very old, disheveled individual who got lost and accidentally wandered into Pelayo’s and Elisenda’s backyard. The extraordinary fact that the Old Man happens to have enormous wings is understated by his general appearance: “He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather had taken away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud.” (929). After a brief initial surprise, the couple comes to a “reasonable” conclusion that the strange being they found in their yard is most likely a castaway sailor from a foreign ship: “Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm.” (929). The way Marquez solves the issue of “the inconvenience of the wings” is a wonderful example of Magical Realism at its best.
The true identity of the Old Man is then pondered by the whole village. Even though the “old neighborhood woman who knew everything about life and death” (929) proclaims him an angel, the village priest disagrees with her opinion based on the fact that the Old Man does not understand Latin. Marquez gives the readers only some ambiguous and vaguely stated clues: he calls the Old Man “a flesh-and-blood angel” who is altogether “much too human”: “He had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds,