Gabriel García Márquez

“The world had been sad since Tuesday.”

Reading the stories of Gabriel García Márquez reveals that we have been incomplete all this time. A delirious current of imagination and critique runs like live electricity through the masterful Colombian writer’s prose, and his stories envelop readers in a sensual and richly affective world where all stray details, all passing observations, and all chance descriptions contribute to something generous, wise, and powerfully weird. His is a world where the stray, the passing, and the chance take centre stage. (Cue our bedraggled old man with sorry wings.) My advice to approaching such richness is to be aware of critical appellations, but also to engage with the stories on their own terms. Magic realism, the term most often used to describe García Márquez, has many definitions. We should at least know that the Colombian’s penchant for blending fabulous and fantastical with the heartrendingly real can be traced to the children’s stories his grandmother would tell him when he was young. That disclaimer made, allow me to present you with today’s offering by way of a wish to have it included in the weird fiction canon: “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” / “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (in Gregory Rabassa’s translation).

What we have is a children’s story about a place warped by sadness and visited by a distressed, lost Daedalus. It bears comparison with Franz Kafka’s best fables, Herman Melville’s shortest stories, and Angela Carter’s dangerous fantasies (or, equally as good, those of Silvina Ocampo). Yet its vibrant colour is all its own. It is – and I’m looking at you, weird reader – a story deeply imbricated in the febrile plenitude of fiction’s constitutive strangeness and in the complex relationship we as humans have with ambiguity and with each other. That sounds like a tall order but it’s a very simple draw. Like so much of García Márquez’s writing the story aches with a luxurious language of sadness and beauty. Let me rephrase my sales pitch, then. The story is a marvel and a wonder.

“Against the judgement of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death.”

To begin, who is our eponymous figure? An angel? An old man? A movie star or a dramatic actor? (Let’s not get distracted by the adaptations of this tale in film, in 1988, and on the stage, in 2002 and then in 2005.) He’s got wings but little will to use them. Perhaps he is Daedalus, the great artificer who flew with his son Icarus on self-devised wings – the father who saw his son fall to sea and drown in the same wings he made. The old man speaks neither Latin nor Spanish but some “hermetic” tongue. (Although I silently implore Father Gonzaga to address him in Greek, the meddlesome priest does not even oblige a response.) Perhaps the old man is the angel of death, as the neighbor suggests, his wings the ragged remnants of heavenly garb. He is – this is certain – the narrative pretext for the villagers’ actions: his aberrant nature and abrupt presence precipitate events of passing strangeness. Answers are not forthcoming from the story itself. Readers must draw their own conclusions.

“The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world.”

Never mistake the simpleminded for silliness. There have been worse politicians than incomprehensible foreigners. To be led by signs or ciphers – our angel raving in a sailor’s voice – is the fate of all readers. If there is in our old man a sign mistaken for a wonder, then, as his changing fortunes demonstrate, the villagers bear him little allegiance. (Beware the competing spectacle of a spider woman!) The story raises a question: to what degree are people led by the spectacular and the strange, only to capriciously and suddenly shift their allegiances and interest? You would not be mistaken to hear faint if distorted echoes of Guy Debord. What should our relationship with the clearly inexplicable be? This is the territory speculative fiction charts; in it, the weird overlaps with magical realism to create a magnetic, alluring relationship asking us to evaluate our perspective on things we don’t understand. An old man with enormous wings is a thing to be seen, but is he a sign of political allegiances? Is he something less than that? Something more? Perhaps he is just an old man with wings.

“The curious came from far away.”

Readers and not critics are the best agent provocateurs of recalcitrant fantasies, just as those interested in the old man and his wings come from great distances to get a look for themselves. We all need physical immediacy to gawk and marvel. It’s worth taking a minute to understand where we’ve come to, however, and place the story in its moment of origin.“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was first published in the pages of the New American Review (1955), much before the majority of his work and twelve years before One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), probably the most familiar of his stories. Some critics point to La Violencia, a tumultuously violent time in Colombian history, as the key to understanding the actions of the community composed of Pelayo, Elisenda, Father Gonzago, and the rest of the vaguely cruel villagers. Thus, as John Goodwin argues in Explicator (2006), the story reflects the influence of religion and political instability in social crises.

García Márquez wrote “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” long before his Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), itself a novel which exposes the pathology and fascism of tyranny in its centroamericano or suramericano guises (norteamericanos do tyranny differently). Nonetheless, the endeavours have a certain resonance. Quoting from the United States Government Printing Office’s Area Handbook for El Salvador in her own Salvador (1982/3), Joan Didion provides some illuminating passages about General Maximiliano Hermández Martínez, El Salvador’s tyrant from 1931 to 1944 and an inspiration for Autumn of the Patriarch. “He kept bottles of colored water that he dispensed as cures for almost any disease, including cancer and heart trouble, and relied on complex magical formulas for the solution of national problems,” one sample goes. Another: “During an epidemic of smallpox in the capital, he attempted to halt its spread by stringing the city with a web of colored lights.” Any magic realism or weird fiction does not far diverge from the Colombian writer’s chosen antagonist: political reality. As Didion concludes in Salvador, “I began to see Gabriel García Márquez in a new light, as a social realist” (59). It is for this reason that, in his 1982 essay “The Critic and Society,” Wole Soyinka describes García Márquez’s work as a “haunting fusion of magic and revolutionary history.” We would not be far off to read this early story along similar lines.

And yet the story is not as simple as mere political allegory. Look at the brilliant lines of feverish dream with which the angel’s entrance changes the villagers’ lives. Remember the airs and sounds of the sea; remember Pelayo and his many dead crabs. Magical realism – the weirdness in which García Márquez’s story is deeply imbued – disrupts the political intractability of fiction’s traditional relationship with its social origins, but that disruption retains and even clarifies a hard nub of political violence and communal ethics. Weird fiction sets itself out against a particular milieu of social, literary, and political influences but does not cut its ties to the world as we know it.

“The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act.”

The mystery of the old man with enormous wings remains intact. Our be-winged Bartleby is no allegory; Gabriel García Márquez is no John Bunyan. Remember if you will, and only briefly, Melville’s great character Bartleby from “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853). (The continental affiliations between these two American literary giants are powerful.) In that story, a man whose only forlorn utterance is the inimical “I would prefer not to” moves from a dead letter office to an early grave in a mental hospital. Along the way he betrays deep philosophical differences with the milieu in which he is placed and with the literary carriage that carries him. At one point many commentators read Bartleby as a clinically depressed man, but nothing could be further from the truth, as readers attuned to the weird should see clearly. Bartleby is strange. Better yet he is estranged. His refusal of the demands to which his interlocutors attempt to interpellate him delineates a clear space of non-possibility, a space of freedom in an age whose possibilities have been thoroughly colonized by the Wall Street of Melville’s short story. So too does our old man with wings refuse the explanatory allure of allegory. He proves utterly unreadable and alien to the villagers who at one point, with the pointless violence of those easily bored and lacking any critical conscience, cruelly brand his side. (Knock on the glass at the zoo, kid; wake that snake up from its sleep.) Like Bartleby, the old man with wings is weirdly different. He is of and only himself.

“His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience.”

These introductory remarks must draw to a close. The old man waits, lending his body to the townspeople’s amusements and depredations in what García Márquez describes as “a cataclysm in repose.” Our story patiently waits to bear meaning for its interpreters. The parallels hold but should not frighten us. Daedalus gave Ariadne the key to the maze he had created; before that, he built for her a dancing floor. García Márquez has given us something elusive and ethereal, but its brief and elusive reading has a strength which novels and epics would strain to match. Like the old man the story can give us much, if we give it mind. Draw your own interpretations. García Márquez’s world is vast. I invite you to enter in, once again.

The post Four Stories: “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

This article is part of our series about the four stories not included in

The narrative of Philip K. Dick’s “The Preserving Machine” is conventional in structure, straightforward even, and deceptively so for a work of what is ultimately high quality weird science fiction. Dick’s writing is deft and wastes no time in getting straight to Doc Labyrinth and the initial mention of his titular Machine. By the end of the second paragraph, we get the nameless narrator speaking to Doc Labyrinth, asking what is essentially the propelling question for this entire story: “Then the Machine did work the way you expected?” This, of course, begs the question of what the machine does, and what it does is rather strange indeed.

It is a shame that this story never made it into The Weird, for Dick truly is one of the great weird science fiction writers. The large scale picture of Dick is familiar to most readers: he was a warped prophet of reality and unreality, obsessed with writing stories that closely examined the fabric of our environments and our ontologies before flipping them over entirely and proposing often bizarre alternatives. It is a testament to the skill and power of these stories that many still find them provocative and startling today. I have fond memories of reading “Faith of Our Fathers” for the first time in college and looking up from my book, feeling like the lines of people’s skin and the corners of walls were going to blur away at any minute. I also still admire the final twist of Ubik that I dare not reveal here (because if any of you haven’t read it yet, go do so now, or as soon as you can). All I will say is it may affect the way you see your pocket change.

But those stories are essentially later-period Dick, much more confident and overt in their weirdness than “The Preserving Machine,” which is subtler and ultimately smaller in scale than these examples, though no less provocative. The weirdness in this story is, of course, enabled by the Preserving Machine itself, born out of the apocalyptic fears of Doc Labyrinth (call this story “pre-apocalyptic” if you wish; the label is fairly appropriate here). In the time and setting of this story, Labyrinth is worried that “civilization [is] going the way of Rome,” that “[his] world, our society, would pass away as theirs did, and a period of darkness would follow.” The specific cause of these worries is never revealed in the story directly, but it is indirectly hinted at, with references to war, to bombers and bombs, and walls going “down in a roar of rubble and plaster.” To consider context a bit here: this story was written and published in 1953, well into the heyday of the Cold War, and tensions were still running high for many, including Dick, who played off of Cold War fears quite often in his early science fiction.

It is in the reverie of a dark vision of the world’s destruction, combined with the good doctor’s fears that all proof of human art and civilization will disintegrate, that the kernel of the idea of the Preserving Machine itself is revealed:

And then, in Doc Labyrinth’s vision, he saw the score come borrowing out, like some buried mole. Quite like a mole, in fact, with claws and sharp teeth and a furious energy.

The mole, in this case, is a musical score, like “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or “Ride of the Valkyries,” somehow transmuted into living, breathing, surviving physical form, because ideally an animal, driven by instinct, would fare better in any apocalypse than a simple piece of sheet music. And then, once the apocalypse is over, the animal can be turned back into its original, sheet music form.

This is a truly bizarre, cognitively challenging idea, when you really take the time to consider it. Transformation is a well-worn trope of science fiction and weird fiction, and it was so even in the time of this story. But this is something entirely different. This is synesthesia given literal, science fictional form. Instead of hearing particular musical notes or melodies which provoke unanticipated physical sensations or changes in mood or visual perception, here we literally have the transference of something from purely conceptual, non-tactile form into literal shape and existence, one that we can feel, see, touch, etc. directly for ourselves. This is a philosophically loaded idea at its core, with resonances of Plato’s theory of Forms, something else Dick loves to play with in other stories. (I think of the regressing historical forms of objects and settings in Ubik, which threaten to ultimately turn into the purest, most conceptually ideal Forms of themselves.)

With this setup, Dick has a great deal of fun imagining what actual pieces of music would look like in literal, animal form. There is, of course, the “Mozart bird” which is “pretty, small and slender, with the flowing plumage of a peacock,” and the “beethoven beetle,” “stern and dignified” in its hard-shelled manner. Even with these initial successes, however, Labyrinth questions the results of his experiment: “He had expected an army of stout badger creatures, equipped with claws and scales, digging, fighting, ready to gnaw and kick. Was he getting the right thing?” And yet, Labyrinth goes on with what is the quintessential Mad Scientist answer: “it was too late to turn back, now.”

The remainder of the story is indeed a story of survival, but one unintended by Labyrinth: the music-creatures proceed to go to ever-loving combat with each other, much the same as predator and prey would in the wild. (Naturally, the Wagner animal is the apex predator.) With each turn of the story, Labyrinth (and perhaps the reader) is increasingly puzzled and dismayed by the results of the transmutations, which defeat his expectations for these music-creatures entirely. It’s evident that Labyrinth though these creatures would be more dignified somehow, more well-behaved and, to put it bluntly, domesticated. It’s like this assumption is grounded in the fact that these creatures are based on music composed by humans. Once they’re in the animal kingdom, though, Nature’s rules take over.

I want to wrap up here, before I spoil the entirety of the story for readers, but suffice it to say Dick has one last twist up his sleeve, with more wrinkles in both the function of the Machine and the future of these music-creatures to reveal and leave readers to think about. In the end, this story is a fun, yet heady meditation on ideas and composition in general, grounded in the notion of translating the conceptual to the literal and the composition of form by human hands, versus the composition of forms by Nature – and the rewriting of those forms through the intervention of strange technology. It may have surprised Doc Labyrinth, but it probably shouldn’t surprise us that weird machines yield weird results.

The post Four Stories: “The Preserving Machine” by Philip K. Dick appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

Where should we draw the line between the Weird and magical realism? In Stephen Graham Jones’ Flowchart of the Damned, he draws the line between weird fiction and other forms of fantastic literature like magical realism and surrealism by asking whether the strange elements are assumed. If the characters naturally accept the bizarre occurrences, then it’s magical realism. If not, then it’s weird. But what if we have a narrator we cannot trust? What if the narrator is so disturbed that we’re not sure if the narrator’s assumptions are those of a sane mind? Such is the case in Otsuichi’s “The White House in the Cold Forest.” This short story is a tale from 2009 collection Zoo penned by Japanese author and filmmaker, Otsuichi.

I tend to agree with Stephen Graham Jones on his distinction between weird and other forms of strange literature. However, like most rules in literature, there are exceptions and I think that “The White House in the Cold Forest” is one of them. In Otsuichi’s story, the narrator is raised by his aunt and uncle, who ostracize him by forcing him to live in a barn out back while his family lives in the house. Eventually the narrator runs away after he comes of age, and ventures deep into the forest where he builds a house out of corpses. This house reminds him of the barn he was raised in and in it we can see the dichotomy of weird and magical realism. To be able to build a house purely of corpses is strange or downright impossible but to want to build a house of corpses is weird. So again, is this weird fiction or magical realism?

Another piece of this puzzle occurs when a girl, sister to one of the house’s corpses, offers herself in place of her brother so that his corpse may be returned home. She assumes the position of her brother’s corpse and remains there for days until she passes.

She slept standing upright. After a while she spoke less and less. Her face grew whiter and eventually became the same color as the other corpses around her.

This seems almost natural and accepted by the girl but we have two doubts here as well. First, we never know the girl’s thoughts. Perhaps the house of corpses is as strange to her as it is to the reader. Secondly, the girl is a third person in this story and is only seen through the eyes of the narrator. Certainly, there is no shock or dismay described but maybe that’s because the narrator, who is disturbed and unreliable, doesn’t pick up on it or denies its existence.

The style of Otsuichi’s writing also allows the reader to interpret the story in different ways. He writes in a very simple manner with very direct sentences. Perhaps only once do we ever see the narrator experience any emotion: when the girl dies he “[feels] a stab of regret.” In the first part of the story, the narrator details the horrible alienation and abuse he suffers at the hands of his relatives. However, we see no emotion, no anger, no despair. With so little to go on in terms of how the narrator feels, it’s hard to determine whether or not any of the story’s events are assumed or not.

Despite the simple style of Otsuichi’s writing, we have a story with all the dark, eerie atmosphere of any classic weird tale. Moreover, his simple and concise style creates a fairy-tale-like prose where the interpretation of what’s happening is largely up to the reader. Without a doubt though, the narrator’s strange and unsettling behavior in this story make it one of the great works of the Weird.

The post Four Stories: “The White House in the Cold Forest” by Otsuichi appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“The Drowned Giant” by Shafeen Alam

The work of J.G. Ballard occupies a unique space that exists at the intersection of science fiction, horror, satire, and post-modern literature. All of these tendencies can be witnessed even within the short space of a story like “The Drowned Giant.” First published in the aptly-named 1964 collection, The Terminal Beach, in it we witness the bizarre appearance and lingering effects of a mysterious giant’s corpse. The story features many of Ballard’s perennial themes—physical grotesqueries and society’s fascination with them, alienation, the juxtaposition of life and death, and a sense of bleakness that pervades the human condition. His themes and stylistic experimentation have traditionally placed him in the science fiction New Wave movement with the likes of other weird authors, such as M. John Harrison and Harlan Ellison, but much of his work resists even this nebulous categorization.

In “The Drowned Giant”, our narrator, along with numerous other anonymous onlookers, witnesses the appearance of a deceased monstrosity and observes the manner in which it decays, undergoes various mutilations, and is distributed piecemeal throughout the unnamed city nearby. The story operates on a number of levels— an exercise in abjection and body horror, a kind of fairy tale in reverse, and a commentary on the fluidity of identity. Ballard deliberately creates no expectation of a rational explanation for the giant’s corpse, as the opening presents the body in a non-emotive, matter-of-fact manner. From the beginning, one can clearly see that the story is going to develop along a trajectory that deliberately goes against the expected narrative development; the story is less about solving the mystery of the giant’s origin (as it ironically decomposes and is dismantled) than it is about exploring the effects upon the town that discovers and distributes it.

In Ballard’s work, humanity’s strange fascinations and conflicting drives become a lens through which we can conceive of our existence as an exercise in weirdness. As time passes and the giant becomes more repugnant, its pieces are severed and repurposed into totems, decorations, and horrific adornments. The relative anonymity of the story’s “I” and “we”–the only identifiers for the characters other than the giant—creates an intensifying sense of unease and makes it clear that Ballard is commenting on the dehumanizing effects, on both observer and observed, of spectacle consumed en masse. Simultaneously, the persistent mutilations—in the name of science, entertainments, and other motivations—serve to erode the identity of the one distinct character in the story. We witness it disintegrating and regressing from “the body of a drowned giant” to something no longer bearing resemblance to a human (“the human likeness I had noticed earlier had vanished again”). As it continues to lose any recognizable identity, it becomes a skeleton, and eventually even its unity as a skeleton is dismantled as “the high curved bones are deserted, battered by the breaking waves, but in the summer they provide an excellent perch for the sea-wearying gulls.”

The anti-gestational tendency of the story forces the reader to confront a fundamental problem found in much of the best literature and science fiction: what is it to be human? If one loses something as crucial as a limb, is one’s identity retained? What about several limbs? A head? As in other of Ballard’s works, this selection illustrates a kind of uncomfortable view of evolution and adaptation; as components of the body are faced with selective pressures, they often adapt other functions that were previously impossible, culminating in a recognizable, distinct specimen made up of such parts.   In “The Drowned Giant,” the process occurs in reverse until a distinct identity becomes impossible, but one can never quite pinpoint at what moment it ceases to be a giant and becomes a skeleton, or a disfigured collection of parts. Are the components now discrete wholes of their own and divested of their connection to the strange colossus?

The systematic dismantling of the body is focused on with excruciating detail, often calling to mind the detached, clinical depictions of morbid processes in the works of Kafka, such as the torture mechanism in “In the Penal Colony”. This narrative style is a crucial part of what makes the story so profoundly unsettling; the giant is clearly not too distant a relative from humanity, and yet its fetishized destruction is a product of the all-too-human urge to reappropriate. We are, after all, makers and users of tools and totems. Although the story turns upon a weird premise, the behavior subsequent to the giant’s appearance seems all too normal and loses its spectacular qualities. “With this loss of identity, and the few traces of personality that had clung tenuously to the figure, the interest of the spectators expired.” Like Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People,” there is a kind of unsettling consonance to the human behavior depicted—a challenging effect to achieve for any writer.

While the giant itself is of obvious significance, so too is the manner in which news of its arrival is disseminated and consumed.   The anonymous “I” and “we” are linked to the circulation of news about the spectacle that is the giant. Note, particularly, the distinct use of the passive voice in the first two sentences; the giant’s body is acted upon, and the consumers of the news are similarly acted upon, which subtly reinforces the theme of spectacle consumption as a numbing agent. From the beginning, “accounts of the giant circulated around the city” in a fashion that morbidly parodies the later circulation around the city of its constituent limbs, bones, and other assorted components. Over time, the giant’s arrival has been forgotten, but his constituent parts remain and begin to show up in seemingly-random locations. Instead of a giant, it is now a jaw bone, a humerus, a square of skin, etc. Instead of novelty, its pieces are now unremarkable. In keeping with the story’s ironic trajectory, the abnormality of the giant becomes progressively more mundane–a likely commentary on the numbing effects of superficial mass entertainments.

The juxtaposition of the mundane and the spectacular is just one of many such contradictions present in “The Drowned Giant” and the rest of of Ballard’s work. Presented here are life and death, the animate, anonymous collective and inanimate, identifiable singular, utility and futility, the mysterious otherworldly and the rational investigations of science. Decades after publication, Ballard’s speculative work remains as weird as ever, with just as much disquieting relevance to current readers.

The post Four Stories: “The Drowned Giant” by J.G. Ballard appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

“The Preserving Machine” by Philip K. Dick

“The Preserving Machine” is a short scifi story from Philip K. Dick first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1953. It’s a companion piece to another Doc Labyrinth story, “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford.” Like many of Dick’s works, it demonstrates Dick’s love for classical music.

“The Drowned Giant” by J. G. Ballard

J. G. Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant” is about a large humanoid that washes on shore. The story was published in Ballard’s 1964 collection The Terminal Beach. It was also reprinted under the title “Souvenir” in Playboy magazine in 1965. The story can be found in several of J.G. Ballard’s collections such as The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.

“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez is perhaps best known for his magical realism in novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. But Márquez also wrote short stories too such as “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”) in 1955.

“The White House in the Cold Forest” by Otsuichi

To try to describe Otsuichi’s work is very hard. It’s a blend of surrealism, horror, the Weird, and fairy tales. Otsuichi, born in 1978, hails from Japan where he is both a writer and a filmmaker. “The White House in the Cold Forest” appears in Otsuichi’s 2009 collection, Zoo. The prose in Zoo is very simple but Otsuichi still manages to create all the weirdness and unease you’d expect from a weird story.

These are four amazing and pivotal weird stories that demonstrate all the facets and the varied history of the Weird. They are as much a part of The Weird compendium as the stories that appear in the physical book. Thus, we really hope you join us over the next few weeks and read the stories along with us. It should make for a very weird time!

The post Four Stories: An Introduction appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.