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Episode 419 - A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (Patreon)

Published:
2018-09-14 18:47:56
Edited:
2025-05-18 02:28:41
Imported:
2026-06
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Tune in as we discuss some magic realism in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel García Márquez!

Special thanks to our reader, Andrew Staton! Check him out in The Toybox - available September 18th!

Next up: Three Skeleton Key by George G. Toudouze

Comments

Clara Meath

Don't worry Chad--every time you make a joke I say, "That Chad Fifer is no angel." But seriously, I loved this episode and it hit on--briefly--a horror theme I've been seeing a bit more of lately in comics like Mignola's 'Lord Baltimore' and the like, where crustaceans, rather than the more typical cephalopods, are the aesthetic of doom, decay, and general nautical weirdness. It may be just my predilection, but I felt such a tone of unease throughout this story just because it started with such an unpleasant idea as a profusion of indoor crabs.

Robert Daniel Pickard

Man I really dislike Gabriel García Márquez's books. They're so tedious. Don't think this story will turn me around.

Elizabeth Parséls

LOL I've heard that crabs can end up being a nuisance in certain island towns especially if the town is in the trajectory of a migratory path. Try searching for 'crabs invading town" or "crab migrating through town" instead of "crab infestation" to get some interesting imagery :) Haha There's a photo of a giant coconut crab chilling on the side of someone's trashcan (you can check this photo out here: <a href="https://i.redd.it/nej8yb6a2opy.jpg)," rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://i.redd.it/nej8yb6a2opy.jpg),</a> and it's pretty terrifying. Imagine a couple of those hanging around your yard... "Hey, honey, have you seen Bozo the cat? I hope our crazy neighbor hasn't summoned an otherworldly goat creature--Oh, it's the giant coconut crabs outside? Yeah, that's normal."

Elizabeth Parséls

PS - Just realized you guys have done two shows in a row dealing with people making a profit off of the existence of weird/strange beings. Have you considered calling this month 'Supernatural Exploitation Awareness Month', or perhaps even a simple 'Squidsploitation Month'? :D

Alan Ricks

Jibrayil (The Archangel Gabriel) in Islamic tradition is described as having six hundred wings and covering the horizon from end to end.

Daniel Restione

"Something Else to Think About," Deeply Disturbing Esoterica from the mind of Chad Fifer. I'd read it!

Daniel Restione

BTW- I just found a copy of the novel "The Night Ocean" about the HPL/Barlow incident. I'd never heard of it- have you-all? Gets a thumbs up from Andrew's HPL Society and deals with the whole gay question. I remember Chad thinking about some slash fiction on the issue.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

This sort of story really is my jam. I like horror as much as the next guy (my neighbor is really into horror) but weird does not have to be terrifying. My read on this one was that rewards and punishments come in unexpected ways. You can't control them. You can't anticipate them. You roll with them. So much of my own life has been random. Schools I happened to attend. Courses I signed up for on a whim. That one book on an esoteric topic that my university library happened to have a copy of. The cousin who happened to go to Japan for a job because he just felt like a change. A diversion on my walk home one evening that ended up getting me married. 20+ years now in Japan because interesting projects happen to come my way. There has been good and there has been bad and not one bit of it has been what I thought it would.

Sanjay Mathew

Re the priest refusing to accept the legitimacy of the angel- the characters are Roman Catholic. In Father Gonzaga's cosmology, the authority of the Church derives directly from Christ, through Peter and his heirs the Popes. Any legitimate communication from God to the World should therefore come in a form recognisable as such by the Church. It's not as if an angel outranks Church authority after all- they're just messengers of God without free will. Since this supposed angel isn't communicating with a representative of the Church in a way the Church can recognise, it must ipso facto not be a legitimate messenger. The Roman Catholic Church is way more strict on the codes than the Galactic Empire, no "It's an old angel but it checks out" here. As you point out the priest's belief is predicated on faith- it's accepting any old angel that would be a compromise of that faith.

Mark Brett

I've always thought this story was more a surrealist farce than anything else, a satire of human nature. Presented with something strange and other-worldly, people either drag it down into the mundane (gawking at it, abusing it, and trying to make a buck off it), or they invest it with too much divinity in the hope of improving their own lives (seeking healing or an end to various strange afflictions). Meanwhile, the church completely rejects the old man's divinity because he doesn't speak a couple of dead languages. They're so wrapped up in their own dogma that they don't even try to understand him. And that, I think, is the ultimate point: nobody really tries to understand who or what the old man is. They all just see him through the lens of their own self-interest.

Necropolis Railway

I take the difference between magical realism and weird fiction (which I would in turn define as a subgenre of speculative fiction that leans more on the unknowable strangeness of supernatural goings-on than either traditional science fiction or sword and sorcery fantasy) to lie in their different aims. *Realistic magic* in SF aims to use all the tricks and tools of verisimilitude, rather like a stage magician, to persuade us to believe, at least for the duration of the story, that the supernatural could be real, causing awe and shock at the temporary conviction that unearthly beings like the Mi-Go might really exist somewhere(!). Meanwhile, *magical realism* aims to use dream logic and magical thinking-- carrying bizarre objects and acts into mundane reality rather like a surreal performance artist-- to provoke us into questioning status quo reality. One result of this difference in aims is that magical realism fully accepts and emphasizes the incongruities between the magical elements and reality, in order to use them as spurs to get us to look at our accepted understanding and interpretation of reality in a new light. Meanwhile, SF attempts to suppress or smooth over these incongruities as much as possible in order to maintain the suspension of disbelief. (The fun in going back to works of SF and pointing out these incongruities-- e.g. "There seem to be an awful lot of copies of this Necronomicon just carelessly tossed in some grandpas' attics for a thing that could potentially destroy the universe"-- is similar to the fun in going back to a stage magician's performance and noticing the seams in his tricks.) For instance, one question that the dream-like incongruity between the presence of an angel and the repulsively mundane responses of the locals might raise is: why do their responses seem shocking while we accept similar responses in our society to the elderly, whom some societies venerate as angels?

MonsterTalk

So - the lady turned into a spider for dancing... do you suppose that was a Spanish pun/joke about the Tarantella? (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantella)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarantella)</a> The spider's name and the dance are certainly associated with each other, and with the weird Medieval "dance mania" which has its own strange folklore and facts associated with it. When you guys were talking about it, this popped in my head immediately but I don't know how widely known the association is now or was when the story was written. But you know I do love me a good pun, and when they turn up in literature it's hard to believe they're accidental.

Jennifer DeFord

Excellent episode! I remember doing a short presentation on this story in college, but that was a while ago, so I don't remember much. And while I imagine you've already done so, you may want to listen to Vincent Price in the old-time radio adaptation of "Three Skeleton Key." It's very good (obviously—it's Vincent Price). Looks like it's available via YouTube and other places.

Cacodaemoniacal

I've always thought that the video for REM's "Losing My Religion" had images from this story, beginning at about 2:04/4:54. I love varying degrees of surrealism in my sci fi/horror. In this case it's an allegorical restatement of the author's impressions of religion, dogma and the actual significance a miracle would hold in these people's lives. Especially a grotty miracle like this one. Maybe the state of the angel corresponds to the state of their spirituality. In other words, they get the angels they deserve. think the reading experience would be very different for a religious person than for a non-believer.

Erin G.

I love Márquez’s work, I was so excited when I saw you guys were going to talk about this story. Thanks to you guys I have it in my mind that Footloose ended with everyone turning into spiders in an alternate timeline. In that timeline all movies that have dance plots to save the rec center and that sort of thing end with a mass spider transformation. Lambada, You Got Served, and of course Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. It’s that timelines version of a morality play. Black Swan plays out pretty much the same way, except she turns into a crazy ballerina spider instead of a swan.

Richard Horsman

On Strange Eons, the upcoming Blochtober book: anyone have a line on an ebook? I managed to find a paperback that didn't cost upwards of 50 bucks, but not sure when it will get here. Also if anyone's searching for a copy, be careful: there's a store selling multiple copies of just the jacket on Abebooks, and it's buried in the fine print that it's not the actual book.

David Halstead

Don't know if anybody mentioned it, but made me think of the Kafka story "The Hunger Artist"

David Azzageddi

I just listened to the episode while walking to work, and only have a little time before class, so I haven't read the comments in detail yet, but I don't think anyone has mentioned that Borges read Lovecraft. In fact, he wrote a Lovecraftian story that he dedicated to Lovecraft: "There Are More Things," published in 1975. If I remember correctly, it's quite similar to "The Shunned House," and more of a parody than an homage. Borges said critical things about Lovecraft a few times, and seemed to have a rather low opinion of him, but funny that he would say things about him in interviews and even dedicate a story to him. I got the feeling that Lovecraft was Borges' guilty pleasure.

David Azzageddi

Also, Footloose with giant-spider transformation would have to be titled Feetloose.

Scott McCrate

Crab infestations (of the aquatic kind) do happen. Look up images and videos of Christmas Island red crab migration.

G. Monaldo

Magical realism is a response to political, economic, and social chaos in Latin America where the impossible and unreal became the everyday. I learned about it first in Argentina regarding writers like Cortázar and Borges during the Proceso where the far right military dictatorship murdered thousands of people along with the aid and support of Ronald Reagan (the “dirty war”). In Chile, similarly the absurd became everyday as the far right government dissapeared its opponents, then simply claimed they did not know where they were. Colombia’s issues were different but the result was the same: the strange had become ordinary. Perhaps now as the United States enters an era where “this is not normal” - as so many north American newspapers claimed during the past presidential campaign, has become not only normal but your entire government and society, Magical realism may be more intelligible to North American audiences. The "not normal" is now the "entire reality" just as much as spider women or men with wings, you open the news to view the impossible, everyday, all the time.

Allison Albright

I also thought this story was sort of a comment on human nature. When we encounter something we don't immediately understand we tend to jump to sometimes weird and unlikely conclusions about it (unexplained lights in the sky are aliens, etc.) rather than just admit that we don't know what it is. Also, we're as likely to kill something miraculous as not and if we can't make a buck off it then we'll probably throw rocks at it for entertainment. I liked how the winged man had parasites and didn't do much. It made him seem more banal, as most things, even miraculous things, usually are.

Allison Albright

PS - Being turned into a tarantula the size of a ram would be awesome. It might be harder to make new friends, but that's really the only downside I can see.

Ethan Cordray

Did my comment about angels in the Bible being super scary get eaten?

Runninghead

So pleased this story’s being covered! I did my thesis on the parallels between magic realism in literature and art but I’ve no insights as to what Márquez intended the deeper meaning for this one to be. I guess one thread might be that people are further from the divine than they imagine, or that they’re just mean. He seems to be having fun with the idea of what would really happen if an angel washed up in a village though.

Elizabeth Parséls

Aww I'm so bummed that my comments disappeared. :( I'll never lose hope that this month might be called "Squidsploitation Month" to raise awareness about the exploitation of weird, strange, and horrifying beings and to help cut down on squid-trafficking.

Ben Mund

Loved this show. And as far as the "realism" part goes, I have directly experienced A Very Old Man with Enormous Ears, so that's pretty close.

Cacodaemoniacal

When I read this story as a kid, I couldn't decide if I wanted him to be completely angelic, non-angelic or something uncomfortable in between. This time, I think that’s exactly that he is.

Terrence Edwards

I enjoyed this story. March or May should be Magical Realism month.

James Anthony

I heard of this writer before, but hadn't realized it was the same guy. The book I read was One Hundred Years of Solitude. I think it was a pretty good approximation of the repetitive epic, at least in form. I'd highly recommend it to anyone who liked the feel of this story.