The story is written along the lines of Magic Realism and refers to a couple Pleyano and Elsendna who discover a man with enormous wings covered with grime and lying covered with mud. Is he an angel or a supernatural being or just a man masquerading as an angel? Marquez using the technique of magic realism portrays him as an angel.
Soon a crowd of people assemble in the house to watch the actions of the angel. The hoi polloi are rife with speculations about the angel's plight. Some rant that he is a part of a supernatural conspiracy. Others accept that he belongs to the underworld. The crowds flock to the house to seek his blessings. Soon Pelyano and Elsenda lock him in a chicken coop and start charging a fee for watching this supernatural being. The parish priest also interferes and dispatches a letter to Rome seeking to give a status to this angelic being. Pelyano and Elsenda become rich and change their lodgings to a double storey house. They come to a point where they want to get rid of the angel as they have become fed up of it. To their surprise new feathers sprout on the wings of the angel and one fine day it makes a flight and disappears.
As a technique of magic realism the portrayal of the angel becomes a fiction where belief is left to the credibility of the readers. One has to be convinced that fairy tales are true. The reader has to force his or her imagination to live to the standards of fiction. The enigma of the created angel does not surprise the reader or astonish him or her. Marquez exploits the older genres of the fairy tale to create this bizarre concoction.
The creation of the Angel proceeds from Marquez' hotchpotch Catholic beliefs and becomes an amalgamation of an archetype that has a cosmic dualism of the divine and the profane. This can be seen as a conjecture of a writer coming to terms with writing a fiction that is highly immature. All of the content in his fiction is highly hyperbolic and has the ambience of an aura that is carnal and frivolous. The creation of the archetype proceeds from the unconscious of the writer. Archetypes have a rational explanation that is a sublimation of unconscious instincts to a more conceivable and acceptable norm. On the one hand we can conceive his depiction of the angel to the fallen one and on to the other a human portrayed with majestic features. There is a gutter in the grandiose, a gutter with puddles of angelic fallibility.
The couple who discover the fallen angel belong to the proletariat. Their aspirations are caught up in the human thread for affluence. No doubt after the discovery of the angel, they rise in their social positions of class and become very rich by charging a fee to see the angel. The author has a false conception of class and promotes his ideal to belong to the bourgeoisie.
The plot of the story isn't at all convincing. After being covered with grime and mud, all of sudden new feathers sprout on his wings and he starts to fly. There isn't a credible plot at all. Postmodern fiction is moving to a realm of creating stories where the plot is a minimal construct. For one thing an angel is fiction and his resuscitation from the fallen to flight can be considered as a hyperbolic fictional adornment.
By
Bose Anand