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Supernatural Insufficiency
The blood all humans share is a subtle and powerful force, uniting all individuals and races with their single origin. This connection seems to go even deeper for those people of the same ethnic heritage, and no group is an exception. Literature or other works produced by or about any specific culture always seem to share more than a few mutual themes. Within Latin American works, one subject that seems to stand out is the idea of lofty ideals that are never quite attained-- efforts or existences that never seem to be quite enough.
Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and the Glory, contains a few striking examples of this theme. The unnamed “whisky priest,” on the morning of his execution, thinks of his own failures as a priest and his ultimate failure to attain sainthood: “...he had to go to God empty-handed, with nothing done at all. It seemed to him, at that moment, that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint” (210). Despite any positive influence or importance of his long flight, at the end of his life, the priest feels that he has failed indelibly-- missed happiness and what he was truly meant to be by just a little. Much earlier in the novel, the thoughts of the lieutenant who relentlessly pursues the priest parallel and oppose these at the same time as he remembers the priests of his own boyhood, “...with the collecting-bag taking their centavos, abusing them for their small comforting sins, and sacrificing nothing at all in return – except a little sexual indulgence. And that was easy, the lieutenant though, easy” (23). Although he is thinking of something base rather than ideal, the idea of a single inadequacy being enough to destroy the entire structure and of things not living up to what is expected of them is still present.
Gabriel García Márquez expresses matters of a similar nature in his short story, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings. Although the old man discovered in the village is apparently an angel who is able, to some extent, to perform miracles, the townspeople find him more of a curiosity than something to be revered and admired. In the end, a messenger from God is upstaged by a woman who has been changed into a spider, not only because the admission to see her is lower, but also because “...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”. In this story, even a holy instrument of divine will is ultimately unimpressive and does not match up to the hopes of the townspeople; when he finally regains the strength to fly away at the story’s end, it is a relief to the family who has been housing him.
This idea of insufficiency resurfaces in the 1986 Roland Joffé film, The Mission. Two Jesuit missionaries, Father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons) and Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro) choose contrasting approaches in their struggle to save the South American natives from slavery to the Portuguese-- Gabriel with pacifism and prayer, Mendoza with violence and organized attack. Both lie dead at the film’s conclusion with their purposes unfulfilled, despite them having poured their most ardent efforts into saving the mission and the natives. Mendoza himself presents a second example of inadequacy; though he toils to find penance and transcend his sordid human nature in the priesthood, he is never able to master his violent tendencies.
The common thread of inadequacy, insufficiency, futility that connects these works seems to paint a negative picture of the basic mindset in Latin American culture. However, all end on a note of hope. Though the priest is killed, he dies as a martyr and his inspiration keeps the faith going. Though the angel is disappointing as a miracle-worker, he survives against all odds to rise once again into the heavens. And though the Jesuits are defeated and their mission destroyed, their legacy lives on. The concept of shortcoming is offset in the end by the infinite worth of the absolute. It would somehow seem that the real message behind the works of this culture is something much simpler: Humans are never strong enough until they are supported by something greater.
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