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Summary and Analysis of the first half of the story
SummaryA rainstorm drives legions of crabs into Pelayo and Elisendra's house. After killing the crabs and dragging them to the sea, Pelayo returns to find a very old man in his courtyard, struggling to get up but held down by huge, mud-soaked wings. Pelayo calls Elisenda, who was attending to their feverish baby, and they both attempt to speak to the old man. He replies in a dialect they do not understand. The two try to explain his wings away, guessing that he must be shipwrecked sailor, before fetching a neighbor woman who "knows everything about life and death." This neighbor woman declares that the old man is an angel who was likely coming for the soul of their sick child but foundered in the rainstorm. The neighbor woman advises that Pelayo and Elisenda club the old man to death, but they lack the heart to do it; instead they lock the old man with wings in the chicken coop. The rain stops in the night, while Pelayo and Elisenda continue to kill crabs. Their child awakes hungry the next morning, his fever gone, and Pelayo and Elisendra, grateful for their child's health, decide to put the angel on a raft with enough supplies for three days. When they go to the chicken coop, however, they find the whole neighborhood gathered before the angel. Some joke with him as though he were a carnival attraction; others have more serious responses, suggesting for instance that the angel be made a five-star general or used to breed a race of winged men. Father Gonzaga, the local priest, responds to the old man from a Catholic point of view. He confronts the angel, speaking Latin, which he considers to be the language of god, but the angel does not understand. Father Gonzaga also objects to the angel's shabby appearance. He decides that the angel must be an imposter, and warns the people not to follow him, while promising meanwhile to write his bishop for a final verdict on the old man's angelic status. The crowd continues to grow as news of a captured angel spreads throughout the country. Troop with bayonets are called in to control the crowd before they knock Pelayo and Elisenda's house down. Elisenda spends so much time sweeping up after mob that her spine curves. She gets the idea to charge an admission price of five cents to see the angel. AnalysisThe story begins with odd, quasi-allegorical references to time. "On the third day of rain," "The world had been sad since Tuesday," and other statements conflate time, the weather and human emotion in a way that seems mythic and magical. On top of this, the world behaves strangely, supernaturally. The swarms of crabs that must be killed, the darkness at noon-these strange events seem to foreshadow the eerie arrival of the otherworldly visitor, the Angel. Note, however, that this supernatural setting does not greatly affect the people in the story, who respond to the crabs with mere annoyance, and to the angel with less awe than confusion. He is a curiosity, yes, but also very ordinary. His wings are choked with mud. This image in itself captures the balance of sublimity and crudity that dominates the story. The old man is an angel, yes, but a decayed, aged angel. He is a surreal coupling of the holy and the profane, and this trend continues throughout the story. Surreal techniques permeate aspects of the story beyond these images. Marquez's narrative language also combines realistic and unrealistic elements. For instance, he writes that Pelayo and Elisenda were surprised by the man's appearance at first, but "very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar." Marquez does not provide us with a reason why they find him "familiar" so quickly; he just tells us that they do. This is a technique familiar in legendary literatures-like the Bible, where events seem to happen "out of time" and without causal explanation. Marquez's very language, thus, balances a concern with realistic detail and characterization with a mythic lack of concern for causality and natural law. The miraculous and the realistic coexist, thus, at the level of both image and language. Other motifs, such as the angel's speech, cement this surreal coupling of "magic" and "realism." The angel speaks in a dialect like a sailor's, though no one understands him. He may well be speaking the language of God, but to human ears it sounds crude. Father Gonzaga believes dogmatically that if the angel were a heavenly creature he would speak the official language of the Catholic Church-Latin-and when he doesn't the priest assumes that he must be an imposter. Each character interprets the angel's language differently, thus, without ever speaking the angel's language. No one has any curiosity to learn the dialect and communicate with the angel-in other words, to understand the angel's own perspective-they are happy rather to interpret events and write the angel off. Again, they respond to signs of divinity with surreal indifference. Many other motifs convey this same balance, such as the neighbor woman, who is both convinced that the angel is an angel, and suggests clubbing him to death; she senses the angel's otherworldly power and yet proposes a brutal and undignified end for the being. In general, people experience the angel very differently and suggest very different responses-some treat him as a mere carnival freak, others as a potential general or breeder of superior beings-but respond in a uniformly sedate manner. No one is particularly awestruck by a besmirched old man in a chicken coop, wings or no wings. Marquez thus suggests that the presentation of an object-its staging-is more important than the object itself. If the angel were clean, dressed in white and seated on a throne, folks would be far more likely to venerate him rather than adjudicate him. In addition, causal connections between what people perceive and how they respond are left purposefully vague. For instance, we never learn why the neighbor woman thinks the angel is a danger and recommends killing him. Nor do we learn in detail why Pelayo and Elisenda's baby was cured-whether by the angel, or because the angel failed to take the baby's soul away, or by the natural course of the illness. Ambiguity reigns, and the people in the story-like the readers of the story-merely interpret events, never understanding them. Thus the story defies attempts at interpretation even as it stages the human need to interpret. In short, it is more concerned with the fact that we interpret than with what we interpret. It's a fairy tale without an interpretation; rather, it's a fairy tale about interpretation.
Summary and Analysis of the second half of the story
SummaryCountless people arrive-invalids come to be healed, a carnival arrives-and everyone pays to see the angel. In less than a week, Elisenda and Pelayo have crammed their rooms with money. The angel, however, seems aloof from the events. He eats nothing but eggplant mush and exhibits "supernatural" patience as he is paraded for profit before the crowds, appearing indifferent as chickens peck him and troublemakers pelt him with rocks. He only exhibits anger when they attempt to brand him. Father Gonzaga tries to control the somewhat unruly crowd while awaiting word from Rome about the old man's possibly angelic status. A carnival attraction arrives in town, featuring the Spider-Girl, a girl who was turned into a spider by brimstone from heaven after sneaking out of her house for a dance against her parents' order. The carnival charges less than to see the old man, and the Spider-Girl responds from questioning from the crowd. This spectacle, full of 'human truth and with such a fearful lesson' draws the people away from the 'haughty' angel. The angel's reputation had already begun to decline because the miracles associated with him-a blind man regained not his sight but three teeth; a lame man came close to winning the lottery after visiting the angel-were second-rate at best. The courtyard deserted again, Father Gonzaga is cured of his insomnia. Pelayo and Elisenda build a mansion with their new fortune, specifying that neither crabs nor angels can invade it. Pelayo also quite his job as bailiff and set up a rabbit warren, and Elisenda bought fashionable clothes. Meanwhile, they neglect the chicken coop and the angel, merely washing it occasionally to lessen its horrible smell. Over time, their child learns to walk, and though at first they keep him away from the chicken coop, they grow accustomed to the angel and the smell and allow their child to play with the angel. A doctor examines the angel and finds his vital signs very weak indeed; the practicality of the angel's wings impresses the doctor and he feels that all humans should have them. The neglected chicken coop collapses, freeing the angel to roam about their house. Elisenda becomes very irritated at chasing the angel from room to room. She notes that he seems to be everywhere at once. The angel grows more and more ill, barely eating. He molts his feathers and gets a fever. On the verge of death-the prospect of which worries Pelayo and Elisenda, because they don't know what to do with a dead angel-the angel recovers. He grows new feathers in December, keeping his improvement a secret and singing sea shanties to the moon at night. One morning, as Elisenda cuts onions in the kitchen, the angel tests his wings. He appears clumsy at first, but eventually flies off to the horizon, leaving Elisenda very relieved indeed. AnalysisThe surreal, comic tendency of human beings to greet the miraculous with indifference or ennui continues as the Angel is displayed for money. For instance, an acrobat with wings arrives, but he's ignored because his are batwings, not birdwings. People in general behave as though the Angel-and the other miraculous oddities of the world-owe them something. Invalids come to be healed, even of illusionary diseases (such as the woman counting her heartbeats, or the sleepwalker who undoes his day's activities by night). These details are not only funny, they also comment on human greed. It's not enough to be an Angel: you have to be a healing Angel who benefits the absurd and ignorant humans who keep you captive. Even then, the Angel is treated worse than an animal. He's like a cow, kept in a pen and milked for money and miracles. The crowd, meanwhile, treats the Angel like a puzzle. They try to determine his identity by provoking him-by feeding him different foods, by pelting him with rocks. They never, notice, try to learn his language. Instead, they attempt to assert ownership, even violently, as when they brand him, the only event that draws a violent response from the Angel. To consider this attempt to "brand" the Angel more closely, one very fruitful way to read this story is as an allegory for the reception of an artist. Garcia Marquez wrote the story after achieving fame for One Hundred Years of Solitude, a novel that provoked enormous critical and public debate. He possibly relates to the Angel, a divine being who is penned up and "branded" by society. The artist, too, is prodded, interpreted, provoked by critics and moralists and religious authorities, and "branded" as "Marxist," "Feminist," "Latin-American," "Realistic," "Magical-Realistic"... Marquez resists such simple branding, and so does the Angel. Both speak a strange, magical language that people don't even attempt to learn. Both sing strange, secret songs. Both patiently endure the prodding of humanity-until they bring out the branding iron. Along these lines, the arrival of the Spider-Girl is a kind of a literary joke. The Spider-Girl, unlike the Angel, invites clear, moralistic interpretation. She may represent the moralistic weaver of tales (the spider image is associated with storytelling in mythology, as in the story of Arachne or the African figure Ananse) who offers audiences reductive proverbs rather than complex human truths. The audience, in turn, rewards her with their business, abandoning the difficult, "haughty" Angel and his paradoxical miracles for the simple, watered-down moral lesson of the Spider-Girl. Whether you agree with this allegorical reading of the Angel and Spider-Girl as two different kinds of artists, it's clear that her simple pandering is preferred to the Angel's mysterious privacy and patience. After the Angel has made their fortune, Pelayo and Elisenda neglect him pointedly and horribly. They leave him in the pen, stinking and ill, until the structure collapses. Indeed, by specifying that they want their new mansion to be both crab and angel-proof, they conflate the miraculous appearance of the Angel (who made them a lot of money, after all) with the surreal annoyance of the crabs. They never understood the Angel, merely exploited him. Their child, on the other hand, seems to understand the Angel. They play together intimately. Perhaps the Angel merely tolerates the child, perhaps they have an honest connection. But the child certainly behaves toward the Angel with an openness that the adults lack. The tale, after all, is subtitled "A Tale for Children," perhaps suggesting that children read Angels better than adults. They experience such beings, perhaps, rather than interpreting them through their own selfish concerns. The close of the story reiterates the balance of the mundane and the supernatural that Marquez has developed throughout. The Angel's appearance everywhere at once in the mansion is one such ambiguity-perhaps this ubiquity represents the presence of divine forces, or angels, everywhere in our lives; perhaps not. At any rate, Elisenda responds to the Angel's presence with typical shallowness, chasing him out of her life like a mere nuisance. His sickness and recovery are similarly ambiguous. The causality of his illness is unclear-could be the chickenpox (a joke, by the way, given that the Angel was caged with the chickens), could be something else. Causal relationships are ambiguous throughout the story. But his near-death and resurrection has a Messianic ring to it. Again, Marquez stimulates our instinct to interpret without offering us clear interpretations. During the Angel's recovery, he emphasizes his own privacy. He grows his feathers back in secret and sings mournful shanties to the moon. The reader might be reminded in these moments of how little we know about the Angel. He seems to have an intense private life, to miss his home country, and no one in the country has explored this life at all, though all of their actions have centered on him. When he finally spreads his wings and leaves, Elisenda manages to feel nothing but relief. Again, Marquez juxtaposes the miracle of a flying being with the mundane details of Elisenda's superficial relief as she chops onions. But in Elisenda's defense, the end of the story makes it clear that taking care of a supernatural being-when that supernatural being is a feeble old man with diseases and molting problems-truly is a mundane task. Perhaps rather than see the Angel as the artist, we are invited to see Elisenda as an artist of sorts. A work of the imagination, while it is being written, takes on mundaneness quite unsuited to its ultimately ephemeral being. A writer has to worry about dull details-how does so-and-so enter the room? what is she wearing? what do they have for dinner?-before the work takes on a completeness, a poetics that identifies it as art. Just so, Elisenda has had to clean up after the Angel, chase him from room to room, until he finally takes off. Maybe the Angel is the art-arriving uninvited in the courtyard-and the husband and wife the artists. Perhaps the Angel never belonged among people-he was never an Angel at all as a real body, but becomes divine only as an idea. At any rate, the Angel flies off into the horizon, vanishing from reality, becoming purely imagined and remembered. Which, as a piece of the divine, and as a piece of Marquez's own imagination, is exactly where he belongs.
ClassicNote on A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
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