How Do You Talk to An Angel? Exploring Magical Themes in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and Q/A: How is Magical Realism Utilized in the Piece

Another informal response essay from Short Stories class...

 

Homer: (singing) Here's the Angel, see the Angel, it's my Angel, no one else’s, next to the rags.

Lisa: Dad, it's not fair to claim this thing as an angel, there's no proof of that!

Homer: No one's calling it an angel Lisa. If you look carefully you'll notice I never once used the word 'Angel'

Lisa: What about that sign right there?

Homer: That's a typo.

-The Simpsons, “Lisa the Skeptic”

           As a child I grew up surrounded with images of slain saints speaking beyond the grave, sacred hearts, stigmata, and, bi-location all taken at face value. These were ordinary parts of life, the magically mundane, that, seen through a child's eyes held fearful plausibility of monsters and heroes existing among us. They did not live in a Narnia-like world outside our own but lurked in every shadow as if the right slant of light would reveal a world hidden within a world--the world where spiritual warfare played out in an epic battle for our very souls. Pragmatic Sunday school teachers aside, I saw very little of this world. While my father's hyacinth bush in the yard may have appeared to be ablaze with its dazzling yellow blossoms when in full bloom it never began speaking in God's voice. I scrutinized all my grilled cheese sandwiches for some visage of Our Lady but found only congealing American cheese. I discovered the things lurking in the shadows to be ordinary cobwebs containing, at worst, a couple house spiders.

           What if we lived in an era of miracles comparable to those in religious texts? What if the blind saw and the dead rose and angels fell from the sky during rainstorms? What are the practical problems of having an angel fall into your backyard? These are the questions posed by the genre of “recovering Catholics writing literature”...er magical realism, sometimes called Latin magical realism because some people don’t believe it existed before the Spanish discovered it. Magical realism is not fantasy. It does not seek to have many fantastical elements but rather a handful of magical elements presented in a realistic way. It is the greatest genre known to literature in my unbiased opinion.

           Gabriel Garcia Marquez “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” contains many examples of the magically mundane. The most notable being the enormous wings on the very old man Pelayo finds lying face down in the mud in his courtyard after a rainstorm. It’s notable that Garcia Marquez mentions the wings last throwing them in a normal detail. He also chooses to end the first paragraph with this “bombshell” of a detail. Black space is as important to prose as to poetry; this space allows a momentary gap for the reader to comprehend what is going on.

           How different this story might have been if the angel had been beautiful, but this angel lacks a certain stately grace attributed to his race. He is an angel on hard times.  He is, “dressed like a rag picker”, bald, lacking teeth and has “buzzard wings, dirty and half plucked.” Were it not for the wings, they would write him off as a dirty sailor who had been blown ashore. Pelayo and his wife seek out, “a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death.” Interestingly enough Connie’s mother is described in Oates “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” as a woman who, “noticed everything and knew everything.” Both of these characters serve as harbingers of doom but only Connie’s mother accurately foretells of trouble. The neighbor woman tells Pelayo and his wife that the man with wings is an angel and provides a likely motive for his appearance in her mind, “he must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so weak that the rain must have knocked him down.” Despite her apparent sympathy for a would-be kidnapper she immediately suggests they beat the “poor fellow” with clubs. She believes “angels in those times were fugitive survivors of a spiritual conspiracy.”

           Let’s look at the “spiritual conspiracy” she may have been speaking about. Humans and angels have had a tumultuous history since the beginning of Christian mythology. According to legend God made angels before he made man. He made them in his image but left out a key component, free will. The angels looked nice enough, sang praises perhaps even played on clichéd little harps while sitting on clouds. God gave them a moment of free will to liven things up around paradise. His most beautiful and beloved angel, Lucifer, uses this time to make a power grab for control of Heaven and is banished along with his lackeys to the bowels of Hell. God created humans and it's no secret he prefers them with their poor decision making skills and lack of cool and useful powers. Angels have various levels of contact with humans after this, sometimes good...sometimes questionable it seems this favoritism and whole foiled coup did not lay a solid basis for friendship. If the angel in Pelayo’s courtyard is a fallen angel he could be evil. The Kevin Smith film Dogma is about two fallen angels trying to get back into Heaven through what they believe to be a loophole in Catholic doctrine. They are the antagonists of the film.
          In the New Testament of the Bible an angel appears to Mary to ask her to bear God's child, this angel later appears to Joseph to let him know why his fiancée has a bun in the oven that he didn't put there. In a lesser known bible story an angel appears to Mary's cousin to let her know she's going to have John the Baptist. Her husband Zacharias is skeptical so the angel renders him unable to speak for the duration of Elizabeth's pregnancy and several months afterward. Angels can be jerks.

           The next part of the story is more interesting than the actual angel (who may actually just be a Norwegian with wings) it is how different groups of people react to the angel. The first group to visit the angel throws food into the chicken coop, “as if it weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal”, when the priest finally arrives people are suggesting the angel’s destiny. Some feel, “he should be mayor of the world, “a five-star general” or “put to stud.”  This is satirical to how different groups of people react to important events. There is this kind of conjecture seen historically and biblically and people discuss the various meanings of natural events, and the role of various messiahs. How long is it after a tragedy before someone is on the news asking “Where was God when this happened?” Had an angel appeared today in the United States there is no doubt in my mind the Westboro Baptist church would go out and protest it, with signs saying “God Hates Angels.”

           Garcia Marquez’s angel does none of these things. He does not tell anyone they are pregnant. He does not even “understand the language of God,” the priest notes with horror when the angel fails to understand Latin. The priest also notes he’s “too human” smelly and with parasites unbecoming of creature of God…um except humans apparently. It is determined that, “Nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels.” Is that a fair stereotype to make to make of all angels?

           The film Michael stars John Travolta in the title role as a mischievous angel who gets to be human for one day and teaches everyone about living life to the fullest- -singing songs about pie, drinking in bars, and, sleeping with waitresses. City of Angels is about an angel who falls in love with a mortal woman.

           Tony Kushner's magnificent play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes features an angel character who speaks in all capital letters. Though somewhat inflammatory to Mormons, this angel delivers seeing stones and tablets containing to new revelation to Prior Walter, a gay man dying of AIDs at the dawn of the new millennium. Prior chooses not to accept the revelation he knows to be divine. The angel here is not evil but rather desperate, God has abandoned his creation and changes on Earth are destroying Heaven. The angel thinks that perhaps by moving back to orthodoxy God will come home.

           Garcia Marquez's angel in “The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is representative of none of these things. However, none of the aforementioned angels is depicted as having “a proud dignity” either. Did I mention the part of the film Michael where Michael bangs the waitress? If angels are real and of the same creator as human beings would they not have the same variations among them that we do? The priest does not think so; he feels angels are a homogenous group.

It’s also important to note Pelayo and his wife charge admission to see the angel, at the going rate 45 cents less than what Homer Simpson charges to see the angel’s skeleton he finds in the Simpsons episode “Lisa the Skeptic.” This is a universal theme, the person who seeks to make a buck off a strange event.  Eventually the angels fail to be profitable. Homer Simpson’s is a ploy to launch a new mall. Pelayo’s is terrible at miracles.

In the end the angel heals and flies off much like an injured bird. He proves to be less miraculous and more of a bother to the mortals he encounters. It can be argued he is hardly the premise of the piece and that the story is about how people respond and how people idealize how they respond to unexpected and unexplained events; the characters often justifying their harsh treatment of the angel on the angel himself for failing to meet their expectations.