PART II

Question #2: Discuss the townspeople's various reactions to, and interpretations of, the angel in "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." In what ways is the story concerned with artists and the reception of art?

This essay will discuss the townspeople's reactions to and interpretations of the angel in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings. Marquez is a Colombian born writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He is one of the pioneers of "magic realism", a genre of literature in which supernatural events are intermingled with the commonplace in order to form a suspension of belief that can impart a deeper meaning to textual events by allowing the reader to accept at face value the occurrences that are taking place in the story. There will follow a short discussion on the story's relation to artists and what it says about the reception of art.

Pelayo and Elisenda

The various reactions that the townspeople have to the fallen angel in Pelayo and Elisenda's yard are very interesting and telling of their social milieu. The first people to witness the arrival of the angel are the owners of the yard that he lands in. Pelayo is cleaning out the yard, killing the verminous crabs that have infested his home, when he notices the "very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings."(p. 525). Pelayo is "frightened by that nightmare"(p. 525) and runs to get his wife Elisenda to come look. This initial reaction is not exactly what one would expect upon meeting an angel face to face, but we must consider the circumstances. Pelayo and Elisenda are caring for their child who at this time has a high fever, and the appearance of such a supernatural presence would signal to them that a change of some kind is going to take place. Whether this change involves their child they have no idea, but superstition is a major motivating factor for "playing it safe". Both Pelayo and his wife seem to be unable at first to decide what this thing is, or what they should do about it. We are told that they look at the angel in "mute stupor" (p.525). They then describe what they see: he was dressed like a ragpicker" (p. 525), he had "a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth" (p. 525), all in all, they see him in this "pitiful condition" and observe that the fact that he looks like "a drenched great-grandfather had taken away any sense of grandeur he might have had." (p.525). This description of the old man is extremely disappointing to the reader who is expecting an angel, fully decked in virginal white feathers, a halo surrounding his pate and miraculous (Caucasian) beauty. However, the couple eventually come to accept his disheveled appearance, after they look for a long time, they "very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar." (p.525). This line is slightly surprising in that anyone could find the appearance of an old angel "familiar" but this is a part of the magic realism that Marquez uses in this story. If the angel continued to be something otherworldly and supernatural, the people could never relate to it or understand it in their own way. In their fear or surprise, they mislead themselves consciously (the ironic use of "intelligently concluded", shows us that this conclusion was thought about and decided) into thinking that the old man was a "lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm.". It is a type of subjective viewpoint that we are being shown; to the villagers, a supernatural event is rather commonplace and is even expected at times. This can be seen in the demise of their "viewing" venture when the girl who was changed into a spider starts to take away all their business; the townspeople are drawn to the "new' attraction in the town, and forget about the angel.

Neighbor Woman

After Pelayo and Elisenda conclude that the old man is just a sailor that has been shipwrecked, they call in their wise neighbor who knows "everything about life and death" (p.525). All the neighbor needs is one look: "He's an angel…. He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down." (p.525). This is a confirmation of the parent's worst fears, their sick child is being called into the kingdom of heaven, probably the thought that caused Pelayo to be frightened, and also to erroneously identify the old man as a sailor. The woman next door says the next day that Pelayo and Elisenda should club him to death because for her "angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy." (p.525). This line shows the paranoid fantasies that can circulate within a closed community ; the old woman would rather kill the angel than to understand it.

Father Gonzaga

The village priest is the next character to come and view the strange person who is now kept within the chicken coop, away from the gawking villagers who try to throw the old man food and try to get him to stand up so that they may examine him closer. So, he decides to take a closer look at "that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens" (p. 526). This is an interesting metaphor for the crowd that has gathered to gawk at the angel; the townspeople are "chickens"- everyday farm animals, but the angel is a "huge decrepit hen"- he is apart from the chickens, much older and wiser, even aloof. When the priest actually enters and talks to the old man, he thinks that maybe the old man is an impostor after he doesn't answer him in Latin "the language of god" (p.526) and "doesn't know how to greet his ministers" (p.526). The priest is attempting to deal with this situation in the way that he was trained to, treating the angel as an impostor because he does not fit in with the church's preconceived notions of what makes an angel an angel. We are told that when the priest gets closer he notices that the angel is "much too human: he had an unbearable smell of outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds"(p. 526). To the Father, anything as holy as an angel must not be connected with terrestrial events such as wind and parasites. Further, nothing about him measured up to "the proud dignity of angels" (p.526) which we must assume the priest has some standards for judging. In fact, he does not have the necessary experience to tell the villager what this thing is, so he embarks on a rhetorical circular argument: "… if wings were not the essential element in determining the difference between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels."(p. 526). Just because the old man has wings does not necessarily mean that he is an angel. Then, since he is the village priest and is therefore responsible for such spiritual matters, he reminds the villagers that "the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary." (p.526).The priest is trying to take control of the situation, so he tells the villagers that the angel may be the devil in disguise, and then he says that he will "write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write to his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts."(p. 526). He will employ the beauraucracy of the church in order to wrest control of this strange phenomenon from the villagers- to take away the awe and wayward thoughts of supernatural beings. The priest keeps the crowd docile with frivolous stories, waiting for word from the church, however, they are concerned with more ecclesiastical matters, preferring to know such things as: if the angel has a navel, if his dialect sounds like Aramaic, how many times he would fit on the head of a pin or if he is simply just a Norwegian with wings. This sarcastic poke at the church's dogma is just one of the many hidden yet entertaining twists that Marquez uses in this short story.

Artists and Art

If we are to view the angel as the embodiment of the artist, and the villagers as the audience to the artist's works we get a different reading of this story. The angel is seen at first as a novelty, a decrepit throwback to a time when angels were strong and mighty. This could be viewed as being a close analog of the modern view of art and entertainment. The past "masters" of the art world: Da Vinci, Mahler, Shakespeare, Beethoven et al. are being overwhelmed by more showy and spectacular exhibits of modern day, just as the angel is overshadowed by the tarantula lady. In fact, if it were not for Pelayo and Elisenda, it is probable that the angel would have been killed after all by the neighbor woman who would rather rid the earth of this ignoble beast rather than try to accept it and become familiar with it as the former couple did. Marquez is trying to make us ask the question Why is it that when confronted by something that takes a little more interpretive work to understand do we immediately turn to something more shallow and easier to swallow? Is this because we have become so accustomed to instant gratification that we are unwilling to take the time to ponder the inscrutable, to familiarize ourselves with the strange and exotic, or to accept as true what we experience? It seems that Marquez's story serves to illustrate this question well, but in the end, the aim of achieving illumination through the angel is unfulfilled, and it is Elisenda who watches as it flies away to wherever it came from, retreating slowly until "he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea." (p.529). There is also a plea from Marquez contained within this text. It asks us to question the value that we place on true art (true as in the way that the angel is a true angel, not a devilish trick) and whether we support or are indifferent towards it. Do we help to support artists in our society, or do we treat them as "annoyances" and hope that they fade from memory to become "but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea"?.

Conclusion

Marquez's story is structured much like a fairy tale would be, a mechanism widely used in the field of magic realism, for it imparts a dreamy quality to the work that aids in convincing the reader to accept what the text tells him/her. The various interpretations that the villagers take in order to attempt to explain the angel are glimpses of what Marquez wanted to achieve through writing this story. He wants us to question the mob mentality, to explore our own individuality in art and in interpersonal relationships. The fact that the angel is somehow more human than supernatural shows that Marquez wants to break down the barriers that exist for many between art and life. Life to Marquez is a fabulous fantasy and he wishes to impart the reader with his glorious view of the world, hoping that in doing so, he will allow people to enjoy without questioning so much; to experience without condemning; to love without demanding and to live while learning.