“THE HANDSOMEST DROWNED MAN IN THE WORLD,” GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
HELEN STEELE
In this magical short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the inhabitants of a village change after finding the body of a dead man on their shore. The villagers name this corpse Esteban, and through their empathy with it, realise the limitations of their own lives, and are thus inspired to improve theirselves. Through Esteban, they find unity and become more than a village, a community. Marquez is one of the most important authors of the Magical Realism movement and this short story has all the hallmarks the genre. Magical realism concerns the overlap of the fantastical with reality; the occurrence of magic and myth in the day-to-day grind of living. The protagonists accept these elements into their lives, and the reader accepts them in the story through the use of a naturalistic tone. At the beginning of the story, Marquez describes the village and, by extension, the villagers. The village has “twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers”. The settlement itself is squeezed onto the tip of a “desertlike cape” upon which nothing grows and with so little land that the people must dispose of their dead by throwing them off the cliffs. This rocky, barren environment reflects the lives of the villagers. Their lives are dry, emotionally and spiritually barren and without real joy. Constricted, they seem to have lost sight of the concept of community. It feels as if the village is deeply asleep. It takes the arrival of Esteban to trigger their dreaming and ultimately, their awakening. When the body washes up to the shore, none of the villagers are afraid or even disconcerted by his appearance. The children play with him with a naïvety and curiosity we might expect in those who do not yet live under the shadow of impending death. Their parents however, despite their age, are prepared to deal with the unusual.
This acceptance of the strange, the magical, is typical of magical realism and is so written by Marquez that we accept their attitude without question. The women undergo the first change, the first awakening, while preparing the corpse for burial. Cleaning away the layers of debris, they are peeling back the layers of Esteban himself to reveal “the kind of man he was”. When they perceive his beauty, their immediate reaction is an awakening of dormant sexual feelings. At first, they cannot even process what they see as there is “no room for him in their imagination”. Esteban is the epitome of male virility and masculinity: he leaves them “breathless.” Seeing Esteban sparks their imaginations. They imagine Esteban living in their village, in a large house, calling forth the fish from the sea and calling forth the springs from among the rocks. He becomes to them a figure of magic, a god from the sea. He makes them end up “dismissing [their men] deep in their hearts as the weakest, meanest and most useless creatures on earth” and realising that they have long accepted far less than they should. While this would seem to be a negative effect on the villagers, in fact, it rather inspires them to expect more from their husbands. The dreams Esteban kindled, “the maze of fantasy” are interrupted only by the shift from passion to compassion. Gazing upon the body, they begin the process of naming and understanding him. I think it is no coincidence that they name him Esteban, for St Stephen was the first Christian martyr and had a special concern for the needy. The need is mutual. While Esteban overtly needs them to prepare him for his funeral, the villagers need him more. He has sacrificed himself, martyred himself for their greater need.
They do not realise this however, and begin to pity the giant body, especially after they realise that he will have to be dragged to the cliffs because of his huge size. They imagine him being scorned for his size and cracking his head on the beams of houses to big to contain him. But in their
