Varieties of the Fantastic in Fiction

In contrast with most stories that have been read within the context of the class, the outstanding fantastic element is not only explicit in the first paragraph but within the title “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The troublesome thing about this story is the emotions, resonance, and empathy towards the old man that this story elicits, the way that this “angel” is treated. A fear and fascination of the unknown turn into ignorance and mistreatment, putting him in a chicken coop and later charging for admission to see him as if he was a circus animal. A being that is usually regarded as sacred and with glory is deemed dirty with parasites and “half-plucked” in Marquez’s rendition. The old man is exploited for money, miracles, and entertainment. Moreover, it is because he is not the perfect or assumed vision of an angel, exemplified by the priest Father Gonzaga and then the townspeople, that this once in a lifetime experience is taken for granted and abused. He is then later forgotten, except when he was directly interfering with them, as an annoying child does.

While reading “Salt Slow,” I instantly noticed many similarities between the story and Julia Armfield’s other work, “Smack.” It seems as though this collection of her stories have a recurring theme of ocean life or the ocean in general; however, there were more noticeable similarities between “Salt Slow” and “Smack.” At the start of the two stories, they both describe an ocean organism, washed up and decaying. They describe the ocean, what time of day it is, and the bodies of the creatures.

The jellyfish come with the morning – a great beaching, bodies black on sand. The oceans empties, a thousand dead and dying invertebrates, jungled tentacles and fine, fragile membranes blanketing the shore two miles in each direction. They are translucent, almost spectral, as though the sea as exorcised its ghosts. Drowned in air, they break apart and bleed their interiors. A saturation, leeching down into the earth. (129)

They find the lobsters in white water. Bobbing belly-up, claws thrown out, like a strewing of tulips. That they float is unsurprising. The salt is heavy here – dead sea, its bodies buoyant. In the thin morning, the lobster shells gleam a slick vermilion, spreading southward like a bleeding on the tide. (169)

Upon further reading, there were more similarities between the two stories, but they were handled different between the characters. For instance, in “Smack” the male character that initiated the conversation about the group of jellyfish can be described as dominance due to him stating false information, passing it off as true. His female co-worker corrects him and tension between the two characters are noted. In “Salt Slow,” the male character merely asks the female character for the answer, rather than just assume and state the information as correct. The tension is not present during the little exchange during this story.

And in local news, a shoal of jellyfish has been causing consternation for tourists at one of the more popular pleasure beaches. Certainly not what you’d expect coming up for a long weekend, is it, Cathy? – Actually, Tim I think you’ll find a group of jellyfish is called a ‘smack.’ (130)

What’s the name for a group of lobsters? he asks now, dumping an armload at her feet. You know, like a school or a smack. His sleeves are soaking to the elbows, fingertips already splitting from the salt. She tells him it’s a risk and he laughs his usual brief laugh, takes up his apple knife, and slits a lobster from tail to sternum. (171)

Another recurring theme, or aspect that repeats throughout “Salt Slow” is the passage of time and importance of weekdays. At first, the days of the week were not significant, the female protagonist merely just describes the days as they pass; categorizing the days depending on the description or what characteristics the days contained.

They label their days as they find them, names to correspond with the poem his mother used to recite to new parents on the obsterics ward – Monday’s child fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace. Days of hard squalls and difficult rowing they call Saturdays, days of sunnier aspect they designate Mondays. Thursdays occur only when the horizon seems so distant as to be impossible. There are very few Sundays. (170)

As the story prolongs and we journey throughout her pregnancy with her, we see the importance of the days link with her overwhelming emotions of loss, abandonment, and pain. In the beginning, the passage of time seems less important in comparison to the chores that needed to be done or survival on the open water.

The numbering of days has been gradually sacrificed to more pressing concerns; the counting up of cans and bottles, the maintenance of nets, the catching and drying out of fish and strange crustaceans. Time, in its clearest sense, has been abandoned somewhere in the long sleeps and the hourless drifting. (169)

Towards the end, we see the shift that makes the importance of which day of the week it was, or described to be, more prominent. With the loss of her second child, or what we thought was the loss after her partner “killed” it, the creature (her child) returns. She remembers the pain and significance of both pregnancies, which she loses both.

Somewhere low in her hips, an ache is spreading, though it is only the ghost of a pain, a shade of something already passed. She remembers it was a Tuesday on land when her first child bled out of her, though by the time the second came on the water, she was no longer very certain of time. I’m glad you came back, she wants to say, whatever day it is. (190)

Her mother gives her the impression that with love, comes pain, therefore the protagonist believes that she is in love when the pain of her love is persistent throughout the relationship. She expresses her fear of abandonment in the beginning of their relationship.

Fall in love with someone who makes you ache, her mother had always told her. When I fell in love with your father my appendix exploded. I think it was the stress. (177)

When they had first fallen in love, she had kissed him with an intensity which imagined him already halfway out the door. A grasping period – nights spent holding him overlong and too tightly, the ravenous dig of her fingers into skin. Over time, this sense of frenzy had eased as she had gradually grown more confident in his staying power. It had still been easier to sleep with one hand at his wrist, but the depth of her panic had subsided a little. Most mornings, it had been possible to wake up without immediately reaching for him across the center of the bed. (187)

In her time of need, the miscarriage of her first pregnancy that neither of them had wanted, she had been alone that morning.

Ultimately, of course, she had only been pregnant a grand total of three months and seven days, the first time around. Even so, the memory of that morning had persisted will beyond the bleeding. A very slender sort of betrayal, the deliberate absence from a room. (188)

One other note to mention, when her partner informs his mother, a midwife, about the pregnancy, she automatically assumes that the protagonist was reckless and did it purposely, blaming her for the miscarriage. It seems as though, the one person that could help them with the situation, blames her for the miscarriage, instead of help her in her time of loss and stress.

His mother was a midwife and had asked him loudly on the phone whether she had drunk a lot of alcohol or taken too many baths, done something foolish or intentional to cause this catastrophic wringing out. You tell me she knew she was pregnant, that you both knew. You have to appreciate what that makes me think. He had scrabbled to mute the speakerphone and later had suggested the trip as a way to distract them both. (178)

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” he is writing it in a very similar style as Franz Kafka’s  “The Metamorphosis.” As they both have normal people turning into something different and it becomes a struggle for them to get up and do what they usually do in their everyday life.  

        “He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.” (217)

  Marquez must have an understanding of angels, as it was written that the angel fell into the backyard of a sick child.   He wanted to show that angels were sent to you in a time of need. He could have also sent the angel to this family so that they could make money off of him, as they could have been in a time of need. Gabriel was having the neighbor blaming it on something else, was saying it was just fate bringing someone like him to their house.

“He’s an angel, she told them. He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.” (218)

    The woman who turned into a spider is also similar to “The Metamorphosis,” as she wasn’t born like a spider. By this woman turning into a spider for disobeying her parents show that her parents also had something mysterious about them and makes one wonders what happened to the parents for them to be able to make her change into something else as well.  

      “ It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents.” (222)

In “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez shows how humans are always looking for the next interesting thing. When the old man is found, many automatically assume he is an angel. Some people turn to him for miracles, hoping he will heal them, but more interestingly, many people do not seem to care that a holy being has arrived and treat him cruelly. Even Pelayo “did not have the heart to club him to death,” showing that he at least considered it, and later they “decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas” (218). People came to see him, not as a religious figure, but rather to “[toss] him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal” (219). They did not care about his health or safety, instead viewing him simply as a new form of entertainment.

This is further shown with the arrival of the woman who had been turned into a spider. People immediately became more invested in seeing her than the angel: “A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a  fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals” (222). Despite believing him to be a religious figure, the people are not scared or in awe of him, and instead move on to the next best thing. Even at the end of the story when the angel flies away, Elisenda watches him leave “because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea” (225). The angel goes from being an annoyance to something considered imaginary, something that may never have been there at all, and something that may ultimately be forgotten.

This goes against everything we might expect if people were to find an angel. We would expect people to treat the angel with kindness or reverence, to become more religious. In addition to this, the treatment of the angel in the story makes me curious about its subtitle, “A Tale for Children.” Most children’s stories, especially fairytales, tend to provide some sort of lesson. If this were like most children’s tales, the people who treated the old man like a circus animal would have gotten some kind of karma, and the story would have ended on a much happier note than Elisenda still thinking of the angel as an annoyance. Perhaps what makes this a tale for children is not the idea that it is a fairytale, but instead the fact that it shows how humans truly behave.

“The Resident” is a short story with many twists and turns. The main character is struggling with multiple difficulties during her time at the residency: sickness, temptation, loneliness, social conflict, and flashbacks from the troubles she faced in her youth.

Throughout her time at the residency, the main character began to create a sharp eye and a keen observation toward everything that surrounded her.

I was reminded, for the umteenth time, of Victor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning. When I’d first begun to experience this phenonmenon, I’d been too young to understand what it was; certainly too young to consult a reference book. The first time, I lay down on the floor examining the metal-and-rubber foot of our family refridgerator. wreathed in dust and human hair. and from this point all other objects begin to change. (198-199)

This made me think of the discussion we had in class about anxious objects, and how we can search for a simple, aesthetic value in the most boring and ordinary objects. I suppose some readers could argue that this could be a breaking point and it even could be used as a premise for an argument that disputes how she truly is a “madwomen” however, I think it is quite lovely how she finds such grand and beautiful detail in ordinary objects.

“The foot, instead if being insignificant, one of four, et cetera, suddenly became everything: a stoic little home at the base of a large mountain, from which one could see a tiny curl of smoke and glinting, illuminated windows, a home from which a her would emerge, eventually. Every nick on the foot was a balcony or a door. The detritus beneath the fridge became a wrecked, ravaged landscape, the expanse of kitchen tile a rambling kingdom waiting for salvation. (199)

Carmen Maria Machado’s  Difficult at Parties is making the reading constantly having questions about what is going to happen.  Machado is doing this on purpose, as she is enticing you to continue reading to see if the questions you are forming are answered later in her writing.  She is wanting you to question what is happening to this person when she is going to parties and what is happening possibly after the parties she is attending. 

 Around his eye, a smoky-dark bruise is forming. (220)

Machado starts Difficult at Parties off with a mystery plot of why one of the main characters is in the hospital.  She uses that to grab your attention and then continues to bring in more of a plot of what could have happened.  She brings in the wife getting drunk at the house warming party, which hints that when she is at other parties she could be causing difficulties by getting drunk, so drunk that she doesn’t know what’s happening.  Which then brings up what happened to her that would have been the reason to go to the hospital. She then brings up a point that hints at a possible rape situation that could have been a horrible situation for her health and done something bad to her. 

An orgy, now. (238)

Carmen Maria Machado also uses repetition so that you don’t question things that she wants to be known from it’s first mention.  She is also using repetition to foreshadow what could possibly be happening in the story. She wants certain words or phrases to stick out to you, so that you can use this to also help lead you down the right path of what is going to happen and that can help you form an opinion on what is going to happen.  

 Tuesday is speaking to me, in Tuesday’s voice. Open up, it says. Open Up. (219)

Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Resident” exists in the realm of psychological horror. In an interview with The Atlantic, Machado states, “In my work, I think non-realism can be a way to insist on something different. It’s a way to tap into aspects of being a woman that can be surreal or somehow liminal — certain experiences that can feel, even, like horror.” This comes through in almost if not all of the stories in this collection but feels certainly true with “The Resident,” which, as hinted in the text, relates to the “mad woman in the attic” trope.

From the beginning, Machado infuses her story with elements that are typical of the horror genre. We begin with our narrator driving alone to a new place and stopping in a small, dead town:

“The town was rundown and gray, like so many of the old coal and steel towns that dotted the state. I’d describe the houses that lined the main thoroughfare as ramshackle, but ramshackle suggests a charm that these lacked. A traffic light hung above the lone intersection, and except for a cat that darted behind a garbage can, there was no movement.” (170)

She then has a strange interaction with the man at the gas station, we come to learn that there was an “incident” that happened at the nearby Girl Scout camp during her childhood (leaving us wondering what this incident was and how it is going to relate to the story), and then right before she arrives at the residency, she hits a rabbit with her car:

“I got out of the car and looked beneath the chassis. There, the black, lifeless eyes of a rabbit met mine. The lower half of her body was missing, as neatly as if she were a sheet of paper that had been ripped in two.” (175)

This is another typical trope of horror movies, as the protagonists often crash their car or hit an animal before the real chaos begins. The narrator herself even wonders if this is an omen.

It is after she arrives at the residency that we begin seeing elements that relate more specifically to the “mad woman” trope. We sense the narrator’s nervousness from the beginning when she is trying to park her car:

“Two cars–one ancient and dirty blue, the other red and glinting in the sunlight–were parked haphazardly next to the hotel. I pulled in beside the red car, and then, nervous, pulled out again and parked next to the blue car instead. I suddenly felt self-conscious about the number of possessions in my trunk and backseat.” (176)

Her feelings only increase as the story progresses, as she has  a vision of a hand reaching out from under her bed and grabbing her ankle (180), wonders why she hasn’t received any letters from her wife and ponders whether her wife would love her more if she were a “more relaxed” version of herself (181), and gets sick and relates it to a time she got sick at camp (190). She also continues to think about omens:

“The surprises came all at once: First, the earth was not as hard as I had imagined it; it yielded as if it were loam. The sun, which had been hidden behind Anele’s body, was now uncovered and glowed between her legs like some mythical entreaty. I heard the dry click of the shutter, the sound of some insect biting down. There was lightning then, distinct, forking across the sky and over the distant hotel. So many omens.” (194)

By now, both the narrator and the readers are expecting something bad to happen. It feels as if it’s just a matter of time.

It is only a few pages later that the madwoman in the attic is brought up in relation to the narrator and the story she is writing. Lydia says:

“You know. That old trope. Writing a story where the female protagonist is utterly batty. It’s sort of tiresome and regressive and, well, done… don’t you think? And the mad lesbian, isn’t that a stereotype as well? Do you ever wonder about that? I mean, I’m not a lesbian, I’m just saying.” (203)

After this, our narrator becomes more troubled, stating that “Here, at Devil’s Throat, everything felt wrong,” and we even get a parallel to the dead rabbit at the beginning of the story. As the story ends, the narrator begins to spiral into her own thoughts more and more and ends up referring to herself as a “madwoman in her own attic” and throws her novel notes and laptop into the lake before leaving the residency.

Because of all of the psychological horror elements presented in the story, it would have been easy for Machado to present her narrator as crazy, to make us think she was delusional by the end of the story. However, no matter how “crazy” her actions may seem from the outside, the narrator’s decisions and thoughts all seem very rational. This, in turn, turns the madwoman trope on its head. Our narrator does not seem crazy; she is instead someone caught in battle with her own mind.

In Steven Millhauser’s “The Tower,” the audience is introduced to a tower that represents that of the Biblical tower of Babel. While we are all aware that the people of Babylon failed to build a tower reaching up to heaven, Millhauser uses the horizontal and vertical world as a tool to present different problems that are relatable to the human experience. One main problem Millhauser focused on was the dire changes in our environment that are starting to mold into normalcy. In addition to this, Millhauser presents the problem (or lack thereof,) of communication, with the exaggeration of stories to sound more appealing than what happened. This relates to how in the human experience we often exaggerate events that we witnessed so that our version of the stories we tell, and our life, appear more interesting. This can be paralleled to the Biblical tower of Babel, where God mixed up the language of the people of Babylon in order to prevent the tower from being built.

Was it possible that the great Tower didn’t actually exist? After all, no one had ever seen the entire structure, which kept vanishing from sight no matter where you stood. Except for a handful of visible bricks, the whole thing was little more than a collection of rumors, longings, dreams, and travelers’ tales. It was less than a memory. The Tower was a prodigious absence, a soaring void, a pit dug upward into the air. It was as if each part of the visible Tower had begun to dissolve under the vast pressure of the invisible parts, operating in every direction.