A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

The crux of magical realism is its blending of the supernatural with the natural, familiar, and mundane. “A Very Old Man” contains several fantastic elements: the old man with wings who may be an angel, the talking spider woman, the carnival acrobat with wings of a “sidereal bat,” the “unfortunate invalids” with strange illnesses, and the “consolation miracles” that ruin the angel’s reputation (Paragraphs 7, 10). These characters give the story a fairytale-like tone, which the narrator’s observations strengthen. When the story notes that the angel’s “only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience” (Paragraph 8), it is teaching a moral lesson the way a traditional fairytale would.

However, this fairytale doesn’t rely solely on fantasy to make its points; instead, its supernatural elements appear alongside more realistic ones, like the old man’s baldness, or the chicken coop the family imprisons him within. What’s more, the story approaches its outlandish plot from a psychologically realistic angle. For example, the old man’s plight as a captive outsider is made even more tragic by his apparent resignation to his fate; he remains reticent and unresponsive, highlighting his mystique but also his depressing isolation. His anger surfaces only briefly during his branding: “He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world” (Paragraph 8).

The branding scene in fact encapsulates the juxtaposition of the celestial and the terrestrial that characterizes magical realism; the actions are human, but the context—the “gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world”—is fantastical. To the characters, this supernaturalism seems ominous. The episode recalls the neighbor woman’s claim that “angels […] are the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy” and deserve death (Paragraph 3). This unease may stem partly from the old man’s uncanniness—the fact that he closely but imperfectly resembles a human. As Freud explains it, the uncanny tends to elicit fear, suspense, or disgust, but its definition largely parallels that of magical realism; both involve the blurring of the familiar with the strange, often in a way that makes the familiar seem strange itself. However, “A Very Old Man” proposes a different emotional response to this strangeness. The fact that the man looks so ordinary apart from the feature that marks him as potentially angelic implies that what seems normal is often not only strange, but outright miraculous. By blending the mundane and the fantastic, magical realism therefore works to inject a sense of wonder into our everyday lives.