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The significance of place in literature through the analysis of Gabriel García Márquez's short story 'A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings'. The text emphasizes the role of specific details in making fictional worlds believable and engaging, using examples from the story and quotes from authors like Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor.
Typology: Lecture notes
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Unit 5: Place
Introduction
Place , the view from the window in the desert or the city, the sea breeze coming through the kitchen window, the tar bubbles on a road under the Mississippi sun... is linked so closely with any story’s believability, that it seems too obvious to mention. And yet a good story must be precisely situated in order for us to enter its world.
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Part 1: “Feelings are bound up in place”
Imagine the stories we have read so far in this course devoid of specificity about where the events happen. Kugelmass in any other city but New York, teaching at any other other college but CCNY? “Girl” in any other place but Antigua? Hemingway’s couple in “Hills Like White Elephants” having their argument anywhere else but outside a station on a hot day in Spain, waiting for a train? Eudora Welty, in The Eye of the Story in a chapter called “Place in Fiction,” writes that “ fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place... fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of what happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming? — and that is the heart’s field”(118).
The heart’s field. I know we can all call to mind a significant place from our past. Why do you remember it? Isn’t it impossible to separate the details of how it looks from how it feels?
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Assignments
Reading
Discussion Forum questions on “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”
You must choose ONE Discussion Forum question. Please indicate the number of the question to which you choose to respond.
*1. Even though García Márquez does not want us to see his story as an allegory, what could the winged man symbolize? Why do people prefer the spider woman? If you are from a provincial town or village, is there anything about the village in “A Very Old Man” that sounds familiar to you?
OR
*2. The head notes for this story (p. 569) tell us that García Márquez coauthored a screenplay of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” in which a scene is added: “ the old man is revealed as a trickster or confidence man who takes his wings off when he is alone.” But, in contradiction, the film also begins with a Biblical line from Hebrews: “ Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unaware. ’”
How could this contradiction help us understand this story’s central theme?
Questions to Ponder
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (use as a study guide for yourself):
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“Go” Further” (optional)
Considering the short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”:
Recall a place from your childhood (more particular than your town).
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movie, and where the position of the camera would be—see Unit 3.) What feeling does that spatial distance evoke in you? Illustrate how the author achieves this feeling with two specific examples from that story. Choose “The Kugelmass Episode” OR “A Good Man is Hard to Find” OR “Why I live at the P.O.” for your discussion.
Question #4:
In “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” what point of view is used? What are the strengths and weaknesses of this point of view? What might Carver’s considerations have been in wanting to tell this story using this point of view?
