Magical Realism
Who first used the term “magic (or “magical”) realism?”The term “magic realism” was first used by a German art historian named Franz Roh in 1925. Roh used “magic realism” to describe a visual arts movement emerging throughout Europe. He explained that magic realism was a “counter movement in art through which the charm of the object was rediscovered.” Magical realism, according to Roh, faithfully portrays the exterior of an object, and in doing so the spirit, or magic, of the object reveals itself.
How did the term “magic realism” go from the visual to literary arts?
Roh expanded the essay in which he first used the term “magic realism” into a book, Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus (Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism). The essay was quickly translated into Spanish and published, in part, in José Ortega y Gasset’s widely read journal, Revista Occidente, in Madrid in 1927. In Spanish, the book’s title was Realism Mágico, Post Expresionism, a position that gave the new term added prominence.
What techniques does magic realism use to blend the “magical” and the “real?”
In literature, magical realism uses a backdrop of realistic elements with instances of the magic in order to portray an unconventional reality to the reader. Writers often use magical realism to represent events that many of their readers may not understand as reality, but are a part of the writers’ cultural or political experience. These writers interweave elements of magic and reality through their representations of common events and characters with elements of myths and fairy tales. In this way, the authors create rich worlds that are at once familiar and, at the same time, dreamlike. In their stories, “magic” is perceived as ordinary. What one understands as “real” is expanded and transformed to juxtapose elements normally considered opposites – life and death, waking and dreaming, civilized and wild, male and female, mind and body, love and hate. As a result, magic stretches the boundaries and definitions of reality. Magic becomes normal, admitted, accepted, and integrated into the characters’ everyday lives. Unlike literature of fantasy, which is set in a fictional world, magic realism is grounded in our own landscapes – cities, living-rooms, beds, where suddenly something happens which demands our lack or suspension of disbelief.
What are the political implications of magical realism?
Magic is often presented as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality materiality, and motivation. The political is part of magic realist works because the blending of the “magic” and the “real” is often represented as a colliding of cultures or civilizations – one “primitive” and in touch with magic, the other “civilized” and generally associated with the realistic. As such, magical realism forces us to question the “real” by which most of us live. In addition, many of the themes that appear in magical realist texts relate to situations, problems, and ideologies in the societies that they represent.
Why is magic realism so closely associated with Latin American writers?
Many twentieth-century Latin American writers- Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz of Mexico, Clarice Lispector of Brazil, Julio Cortázar and Julio Borges of Argentina, Alejo Carpentier of Cuba, María Luisa Bombal and Isabel Allende of Chile – have used the techniques of magic realism in their most successful works. What in Latin America encourages its writers to be magic realism? Why do these authors have such an affinity for the genre?
Natural landscape.
Indigenous cultures and their spiritual traditions.
Highly developed religions. Intricate cosmologies, vast pantheons of deities, rituals and legends wereintertwined with secular experience. In addition, foreign religions were blended with ongoing spiritual traditions in a way that requires the participant’s active faith in the mysterious and promote the writers’ leaps of
imagination.
Political Scene. Magical realism has been a natural vehicle through which to describe and bear witness to the challenges of daily life. the invasion of the conquistadors, the oppression of indigenous populations, the forced migration of Africa slaves, the domination of the Catholic Church, battles to liberate the colonies from European nations, US imperialism and exploitation of natural resources, extremes of wealth and poverty, and radical shifts in the government – all have provided inspiration for Latin American authors.
Influence of African American myth on Latin Americans.Magical Realism Characteristics
Works of magical realism violate, in various ways, standard literary expectations by drastic - and sometimes highly effective - experiments with subject matter, form, style and temporal sequence. Magical elements are accepted by the characters without much remark or surprise. These elements are not explained by the author. Some characteristics of magical realism are:
1. The magic is centered within a place, such as a community, or within a character, and is often a result of that person or place, and something they’ve done or felt. The story is set in an otherwise ordinary world, with familiar historical and/or cultural realities. Story events are not always explained by universal laws or familiar logic.
2. Descriptions in magical realist texts involve: the five senses, isolation or meticulous details of objects, metaphors and similes, hyperboles, foreshadowing, symbolism, and irony.
3. Includes elements of the “carnivalesque,” which celebrate the body, the senses, or the relations between humans. It is apparent with the particular language or dress, as well as the presence of a madman, fool, or clown. Dance, music, or theatre also portray the “carnivalesque.”
4. There is a juxtaposition of binary opposites, such as: magic and reality, life and death, love and hate. Reality and magic co-exist within the story, within the chapter, and even within the same event. Unusual elements are associated with usual or normal people or settings. Everyday, common activities or behaviors are fused with the fantastic, the mythical, or the nightmarish. This blurs traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.
5. There is a distortion of time. Time may be displayed as concentric, in that the story is retold from different perspectives, or cyclical instead of linear, this shows that what happens once is destined to happen again.
MAGICAL REALISM:
Elements and Examples
Directions:
As you look for elements of magical realism in our texts, consider the
question:
How is there truth in fiction?
ELEMENT
EXAMPLE & EXPLANATION
Otherwise Ordinary World “Transformation of the common
and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal.”
- Angel Flores
Magical Language
“Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward
reality that can be expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate
or rustic styles in closed or open structures. In magical realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human
acts.” - Luis Leal
“Carnivalesque”
“The marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration
of reality (the miracle)” - Alejo Carpentier
The Juxtaposition of Binary Opposites
“Reveal the intimate interdependence between reality and fantasy”
The Distortion of Time “Time exists in a timeless fluidity”
– Angel Flores
Various Definitions of Magical Realism
Magical Realism--We recognize the world, although now--not only because we have emerged from a dream--we look on it with new eyes. We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world
that celebrates the mundane. This new world of objects is still alien to the current idea of Realism. It employs various techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal
mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things. This [art offers a] calm admiration of the magic of being, of the discovery that things already have their own faces, [this] means that the ground in which the most diverse ideas in the world can take root has been reconquered--albeit in new ways. For the new art it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world. – Franz
Roh
(Franz Roh, Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism (1925).Magical Realism. Ed. L. P. Zamora and W. B. Faris. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. p. 15-32.)
Lo real maravilloso americano--The marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality an
unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality perceived with particular intensity by virtue
of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state. To begin with, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith. – Alejo Carpentier
(Alejo Carpentier, On the Marvelous Real in America. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, p. 85-86).
The marvelous real that I defend and that is our own marvelous real is encountered in its raw state, latent and omnipresent, in all that is Latin American. Here the strange is commonplace
and always was commonplace. – Alejo Carpentier
(Alejo Carpentier, The Baroque and the Marvelous Real. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, p. 102-104).
In magical realism we find the transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal. It is predominantly an art of surprises. Time exists in a kind of timeless fluidity
and the unreal happens as part of reality. – Angel Flores
(Angel Flores, Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, p. 113-116).
Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality that can be expressed in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles in closed or open structures. In magical
realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts. The principle thing is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds but the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances. In
magical realism key events have no logical or psychological explanation. The magical realist does not try to copy the surrounding reality or to wound it but to seize the mystery that
breathes behind things. – Luis Leal
(Luis Leal, Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, p. 119-123).
Magical realism offers a multifaceted fiction that incorporates metropolis thinking, rejects some components of it, and also incorporates and shapes the traditions of indigenous cultures. –
Amarull Chanady
(Amaryll Chanady, The Territorialization of the Imaginary in Latin America: Self-Affirmation and Resistance to Metropolitan Paradigms.
Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, 125-144).
Magical realism--is not a realism to be transfigured by the supplement of a magical perspective, but a reality, which is already in and of itself magical or fantastic. – Frederic Jameson
(Frederic Jameson, as quoted in Simpkins, Sources of Magic Realism. p. 149).
[Realismo mágico] is mainly realism, but with the aid of magic additional planes of reality are possible – but always realistic. Realismo mágico is not marvelous or fantasic in the sense of fantasy. That is to say, everything that happens in the story remains within the ream of reality. However, many times that which transpires would ordinarily not occur were it not for the magic
that allows such a development. – Lee A. Daniel (Lee A. Daniel, Realismo Mágico – True Realism with a Pinch of Magic, p. 129)
Magical realism turns out to be part of a twentieth-century preoccupation with how our ways of being in the world resist capture by the traditional logic of the waking mind's reason. The magical realists' project to reveal the intimate interdependence between reality and fantasy is
shared by modernists, but magical realism and modernism proceed by different means. Magical realism wills a transformation of the object of representation, rather than the means of
representation. Magical realism, like the uncanny projects a mesmerizing uncertainty suggesting that ordinary life may also be the scene of the extraordinary. – David Mikies (David Mikics. Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer. Magical Realism. Ed.
Zamora and Faris. p. 372).
Magical realism's most basic concern [is]--the nature and limits of the knowable. Magical realist texts ask us to look beyond the limits of the knowable. – Lois Parkinson Zamora
(Lois Parkinson Zamora, Magical Romance/Magical Realism: Ghosts in U.S. And Latin American Fiction. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, 498).
Magic realist novels and stories have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizably realistic merges with the unexpected and the inexplicable and in which elements of dreams, fairy story, or mythology combine with the
everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence.
(Oxford Companion to English Literature)
A chiefly literary style or genre originating in Latin America that combines fantastic or dreamlike elements with reality. (American Heritage Dictionary)
Magic realism--[is characterized by] the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic, bizarre and skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the elements of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific
(A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory)
Magic realism--the frame or surface of the work may be conventionally realistic, but contrasting elements--such as supernatural myth, dream fantasy--invade the realism and change the whole basis of the art.
(Handbook to Literature, Harmon ed.)
Magic realism--the capacity to enrich our idea of what is 'real' by incorporating all dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in magic, myth and religion.
(Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia)
Gabriel García Márquez
“I began writing quite by chance, perhaps only to prove to a friend that my generation was capable of producing writers. After that I fell into the trap of writing
for pleasure and then into the next traps of discovering there was nothing in the world I loved more than writing.1”
Family Influence:
An important resource Márquez used for developing his stories come from his own childhood and what he remembers from growing up with his grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, and grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. Both his grandparents were great storytellers and through his grandparents, Gabriel García Márquez became well acquainted with the legends of his Columbian ancestry. His
grandfather and grandmother were great storytellers. His grandfather focused on stories of a realistic nature; however, Márquez’s grandmother often told him stories filled with the magical elements that permeate Márquez’s fiction today. In fact, some of Márquez’s stories are transformed versions of stories his grandmother told him. Márquez’s
imaginary city of Macondo is based upon cities in Colombia, particularly that of his
birthplace Aracataca, a banana town. The people inside Macondo are based upon people he knew or people that appeared within his grandmother’s stories.
Career:
Despite his passion to be a writer, Garcia Marquez, at the age of 19, enrolled in a law program at the Universidad Nacional in Bogota in order to respect his parents’ wishes that he have a “practical” career. However, Garcia Marquez spent more time reading and writing literature than studying the law. So, he dropped out of the law program and
1Plinio Apuley Mendoza, “Gabriel García Márquez on Wriitng: Conversation with Plinio Apuley Mendoza. Writing, Inspiration, Magic
began a career in journalism. Garcia Marquez wrote and published stories that he supported and believed. Yet, the Colombian government did not approve of or endorse them. As a result of the controversial nature of his work, Garcia Marquez’s editors frequently sent him to different locations abroad to write pieces. In 1980, Garcia
Marquez was not welcome in Colombia and from 1962 – 1996 he was not allowed into the United States. During his career, Garcia Marquez has also written several novels. His most popular is One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has had incredible success internationally and won several awards. Garcia Marquez uses his experiences with journalism to write his novels, arguing that every line of his novels is based on a real incidence.
Marquez's obituary in the The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/books/gabriel-garcia-marquez-literary-pioneer-dies-at-87.html?_r=0
