In class I made a brief comment on how the dead bird in Guatemala 1954- Funeral for a Bird made me think of the angel in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, and I wanted to use this blog post to delve further into that. For those who don’t know about Marquez’s story, in short it tells the tale of an “angel” who fell from the sky and crashed into the backyard of a random family. The angel is quite deformed and realistic-looking, and it endures quite the maltreatment from the locals who come to see it. This tale made me think of the bird from our short story, both because of the two links (an old man, and a feathered thing falling from the sky), and more importantly perhaps, because of the way it is treated.

In both stories, the thing that falls from the sky becomes part of a sort of ritual with the locals who find it. In Marquez’s story this is used to show that curiosity and carelessness seem to be some of the first reactions humans have towards the divine/unknown if they aren’t in the proper circumstances. In Arias’ story, it seems to me like the bird serves at first a quite different function – the funeral orchestrated by the children shows that humanity is still present even during despair, and that the ignorant still try and give proper respect and dignity to things they properly identify as deserving it. The old man, however, brings the story closer to Marquez’s by revealing how the children have lost touch with the proper ways of handling these things.

In both cases, there is something quite powerful being conveyed through humanity’s interaction with something that fell from the sky. On one hand, this interaction shows humanity’s distance from the divine because of its inability to understand and respect the things above it, but on the other hand, there is a certain, visceral closeness that is brought to attention through the corporeal detail present in both stories. Altogether, it leaves me a bit confounded as to what is being signified through these stories – I am filled with both a feeling of the “magical” in its positive aspects, and one of “otherness” and even derangement. Perhaps, this specific effect of the uncanny is what was intended, as it conveys a sense of horror when humanity is forced to deal with matters of the divine and death with which it should never have to deal with directly.