Magical and Sublime Characteristics of A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

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Magical and Sublime Characteristics of A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

"A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" is a short fiction story written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1955. It has both characteristics of magical realism and of the modern sublime. Therefore, Magical Realism and the Sublime seem to be related in many ways depending on how a person looks at a story. From all of the research I have read, magical realism and the sublime help to explain the characteristics of one another.

This story definitely meets the criteria for magical realism and the sublime because of the many elements described. The very old man with wings, the unusual miracles, the woman spider, and the crab infestation, represent elements of the sublime and magical realism. Marquez makes these magical elements seem like the natural thing to occur. Angels, miracles, crabs, spiders, and money -making events are very real, but in this story he makes them sound so real and normal, whereas in real life they would be crazy and hard to believe.

I discovered that that this story is based on a spiritual subject rather than something that is just completely not able to be related to some certain thing or place.

Longinus talks about different authors stating that "the import of the sublime is clearly that it plumbs the depths of natural, visible reality to evoke an aesthetic and psychological experience of its hidden and invisible dimension of mystery, magic, and

spirituality"(461). Sublime, having spirituality as a characteristic, and magical realism, having magic as a characteristic, are mixed in the story. The very old man with wings is sublime and magical because of its spirituality and the magic he made as he lived in the town. It is a r...

... middle of paper ...

...all based on opinion. I know that there will be many people will place the two genres in different categories based on what they see. When a magical element is given, not everyone gets the same view out of it. I stand by my point, though; magical realism and the sublime are more alike than different.

Works Cited

Arensberg, Mary. The American Sublime. Ed. Mary Arensberg. Albany; N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1986. 1-5.

Faris, Wendy B. "Magical Realism : Post Expressionism. "Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community." Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham; N.C.: Duke UP, 1995: 163-190.

Longinus. On the Sublime. Cambridge. Harvard UP, 1995.

Shopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea! Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Eds. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 448-468.

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