Magic Realism
Magic Realism
A Background Reading/Primer for Teachers of Fourth – Eighth Grade Students
Who first used the term “Magic (or “Magical”) Realism”?
Magic Realism is a term coined by art historian Franz Roh in 1925 to describe a
visual arts movement emerging throughout Europe. By the 1920s leading art critics had
determined that Expressionism (which seeks to convey personal inner experience through
the distortion of natural images) had run its course. Several artists were beginning to
experiment with a new form, labeled Magischer Realismus (Magic Realism) by Roh, and
Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) by German museum director Gustav Hartlaub.
After a famous exhibition in 1925 entitled Neue Sachlichkeit, Hartlaub’s term prevailed,
temporarily, over Roh’s; Magischer Realismus did not reappear until the 1960s, during
which time increased attention to German art generated many exhibitions and
publications.
In a list of characteristics describing the two styles, Roh called Expressionism
ecstatic in subject, rhythmical, extravagant, dynamic, loud, hot, rough, and thick in
texture; in contrast, the New Objectivity, or Magic Realism, he deemed sober in choice of
subject, representational, severe, static, quiet, cold, smooth, and thin. But how could such
a style be considered in any way magical? For Roh, the key was a “reengagement” with
the real, what Zamora and Faris [see below] say is a “renewed delight in real objects,” the
represented surface behind which magic, in Roh’s words, “hides and palpitates.” A
statement from 1936, by artist Grethe Jurgens, makes even clearer how this “new
objectivity” can also be magical: “It is the discovery of a totally new world. One paints
pots and rubbish piles, and then suddenly sees these things quite differently, as if one had
never before seen a pot. One paints a landscape, trees, houses, vehicles, and one sees the
world anew. One discovers like a child an adventure-filled land.”
How did the term “Magic Realism” make its way from the visual to the 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. The
book, too, was translated into Spanish; both were distributed not only in Spain but in
Latin America as well. In Spanish, the book’s title was Realismo Mágico, Post
Expresionismo, a positioning which gave the new term “Magic Realism” additional
prominence. Within a year, the term Magic Realism was being applied to the prose of
European writers in the literary circles of Buenos Aires.
The term’s currency was shortly reinforced by emigrants from Europe to the
Americas in the 1930s and 1940s. More than one-fifth of the half million persons who
fled Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria between 1933 and 1941, including many
noted artists and art historians, settled in Central and South America. Influential essays
by Alejo Carpentier, in 1949, and Angel Flores, in 1955, further defined both the genre’s
characteristics and its pertinence to contemporary Latin American literature. Although
Zamora and Faris point out that Magic Realism is, indeed, an “international commodity,”
with important antecedents in such European modes as pastoral, epic, and romance, it
was certainly in Latin America that the term was first applied to a literary genre. The
international success of such Magic Realist writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel
García Márquez has only confirmed the association of the genre primarily with literature
from that continent.
How does Magic Realism differ from fantasy?
Magic Realism transcends literary realism by acknowledging the magic inherent
in reality —a feat which, Zamora and Faris admit, is “a simple matter of the most
complicated sort.” “Magic” is perceived in the ordinary. What one understands as the
“real” is defamiliarized: it expands, shifts, transforms to juxtapose elements normally
considered opposites—life and death, waking and dreaming, civilized and wild, male and
female, mind and body. Magic Realism stretches the boundaries of realism in order to
stretch the definition of reality. Magic becomes ordinary, “admitted, accepted, and
integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism.” But, no matter how
elastic that definition, Magic Realism stays grounded in the phenomenal world, unlike
fantasy, which is set in the unreal.
Locally based writer Kathleen Alcalá looks to anthologist Alberto Manguel, in his
foreword to “Blackwater 2,”a collection of fantastic tales, for further explanation of the
difference between “the literature of fantasy” and “fantastic literature,” a term he equates
with Magic Realism. “Unlike the literature of fantasy, in which the world itself—Narnia
or Middle Earth—is unreal, fantastic literature finds its bearings in our own landscapes,
our cities, our living-rooms, our beds, where suddenly something happens which
demands not so much our belief as our lack of disbelief.” Manguel acknowledges that “in
the Anglo-Saxon world, ‘realistic’ is a term of praise and, in spite of centuries of ghost
stories and tales of wonder, fantastic literature is regarded as a sort of poor relation. The
answer lies perhaps in that, at its best, fantastic literature is never explicit, and readers are
made uneasy by the misty mirror it holds up to them. Hundreds of scholarly articles
discuss at length whether Banquo’s ghost did or did not exist; none questions the
existence of Macbeth. The power of fantastic literature lies not in the answers it dutifully
provides, but in the questions.”
What techniques does Magic Realism use to blend the “magical” and the “real”?
Start with hyperbole, a technique which Professor Lauro Flores singles out: the
exaggeration of an element until it comes to seem “magical.” A classic example of its use
in Magic Realism comes from Clarice Lispector’s “The Smallest Woman in the World”:
“In the Eastern Congo, near Lake Kivu, he really did
discover the smallest pygmies in the world. And—like a box
within a box within a box—obedient perhaps, to the necessity
nature sometimes feels of outdoing herself—among the smallest
pygmies in the world there was the smallest of the smallest
pygmies in the world.
Among mosquitoes and lukewarm trees, among leaves of
the most rich and lazy green, Marcel Pretre found himself facing a
woman seventeen and three-quarter inches high, full-grown, black,
silent—who lived in a treetop with her little spouse.”
To revivify and expand our sense of the “real,” Magic Realism also rediscovers
“the charm of the object,” by looking in a fresh, childlike way at the familiar, with such
attentiveness and intensity that it is defamiliarized, and once again becomes a source of
awe and wonder. In a passage from Century of the Wind, called “1944: New York:
Learning to See,” Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano describes just such a moment:
“It is noon and James Baldwin is walking with a friend through the
streets of downtown Manhattan. A red light stops them.
‘Look,’ says the friend, pointing at the ground.
Baldwin looks. He sees nothing.
‘Look, look.’
Nothing. There is nothing to look at but a filthy little puddle of
water against the curb.
His friend insists: ‘See? Are you seeing?’
And then Baldwin takes a good look and this time he sees, sees a
spot of oil spreading in the puddle. Then, in the spot of oil, a
rainbow, and even deeper down in the puddle, the street moving,
and people moving in the street: the shipwrecked, the madmen, the
magicians, the whole world moving, an astounding world full of
worlds that glow in the world. Baldwin sees. For the first time in
his life, he sees.”
A renowned example of this technique occurs in Gabriel García Márquez’s One
Hundred Years of Solitude, often considered the quintessential work of Magic Realism.
Children beg their father to be allowed to see the marvel gypsies have brought to town:
“They insisted so much that José Arcadio Buendía paid the thirty
reales and led them into the center of the tent, where there was a
giant with a hairy torso and a shaved head, with a copper ring in
his nose and a heavy iron chain on his ankle, watching over a
pirate chest. When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a
glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent
block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset
was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing the
children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio
Buendía ventured a murmur:
‘It’s the largest diamond in the world.’
‘No,’ the gypsy continued, ‘it’s ice.’”
The block of ice, guarded by such an unusual attendant, adorned with the language of
“glacial exhalation” and “infinite internal needles” does indeed take on the glamour of
“the largest diamond in the world.” The technique is more than a joke or a trick played on
the reader (and the children); it asks, rather, that the reader re-envision what is amazing in
the mundane.
Or perhaps the “unreal” is described in such clear-eyed and extensive detail that it
can be incorporated into an expanded version of the “real.” In the following excerpt from
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the artfully assembled list of familiar minutiae (the
everyday “clothes hangers” and “pots with trailing plants” next to the more esoteric
“cable cars” and “terraces like gondolas”) creates the impression of all-encompassing
abundance, which must reify the one impossible detail. The reader has little choice but to
“choose to believe”; of course the spider-web city exists.
“If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell how
Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between
two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two
crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little
wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you
cling twixt the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for
hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther
down you can glimpse the chasm's bed.
This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as
passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung
below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes
hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits,
baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for
children's games, cable ears, Chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.
Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia's inhabitants
is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last
only so long.”
The same process is at work in García Márquez’s short story, “A Very Old Man
with Enormous Wings.” The story begins:
“On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs
inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard
and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a
temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench.
The world had been a sad thing since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a
single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March
nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud
and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when
Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the
crabs, it was hard to see what it was that was moving and groaning
in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it
was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who,
in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his
enormous wings.”
In this uncommon “stew of mud and rotten shellfish,” the man’s “enormous wings” are
still more surprising than might be a peg leg or shackles or even an enormous tumor in
impeding his movement. But the descriptive and narrative momentum carries the reader
onward (as they do the villagers, who are soon distracted by a traveling carnival, which
features “the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her
parents.”):
“His only supernatural vice seemed to be his patience.
Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him,
searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and
the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with,
and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him
to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they
succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an
iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many
hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start,
ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he
flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind
of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not
seem to be of this world.”
By this point in his stay, when he has become an “annoyance” to the couple in whose
back yard he is cooped, what has become “supernatural” about the old man is not his
wings but his “patience.”
Finally (in this brief discussion of techniques), Magic Realist texts often
acknowledge their challenge to the standard version of reality, and in this way become
self-reflective and metafictional. (Dear Teacher/Reader, please skip this section if you
have no interest in literary high jinks) For example, in “A Very Old Man with Enormous
Wings” a doctor is called in to tend to the ailing old man, and finds himself, like the
reader, eventually accepting the reality of wings.
“What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his
wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human
organism that he couldn’t understand why other men didn’t have
them too.”
Magic Realism often shifts focus from the text to the reader, engaging the reader’s
consciousness of the act of reading. The writing holds up a mirror to the reader caught in
the act of reading. This self-consciousness is well described by Jon Thien, in his essay
“The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction.” Thien has been reading a
novel by Argentine writer Julio Cortázar.
“Here I sit in my armchair, a comparatist, reading
Cortázar’s “Continuity of Parts.” I read the first sentence: “He had
begun to read the novel a few days before.” A few sentences later
I read that the reader is “sprawled in his favorite armchair.”
Reading the last sentence of the story I learn that a murderer is
sneaking up behind the man in the armchair who is reading a novel
in which, at that point, a murderer is sneaking up behind a man in
an armchair reading a novel. I become keenly conscious of the
fact that I too am sitting in an armchair reading a story about a man
in an armchair reading, who is about to be murdered. Involuntarily
I turn my head and look behind me. Safe. But I have been reading
a story about a man reading a story. The first man becomes, or is,
the man in the story he is reading. Am I, or could I become, the
man reading the story about the other man reading a story? Are we
all in the same story? Are we all the same reader?”
What are the political implications of Magical Realism?
Magical Realism is inherently political, for it challenges assumptions of order.
Unlike realism, which presents its version of the world as uniquely “true” or “objective,”
Magical Realism encourages relativity, diversity, variety. In the words of Zamora and
Faris, “In magical realist texts, ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and
cultural disruption: magic is often given as a cultural corrective, requiring readers to
scrutinize accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation.” David
Young [see below] agrees: he points out that the political is part of Magic Realist work
because the blending/colliding of the “magic” and the “real” is often represented as “a
colliding of cultures or civilizations, one ‘primitive’ and hence in touch with magic, the
other ‘civilized’ and presumably ‘realistic,’ i.e., committed to science and wary of
illusion and superstition.” He says that, “it is important to recognize this collision in
cultural terms because its very scale helps us understand that magical realism is not so
much a challenge to the conventions of literary realism, as it is to the basic assumptions
of modern positivistic thought, the soil in which literary realism flourished. Magical
realism’s inquiries drive deep, questioning the political and metaphysical definitions of
the real by which most of us live.”
Indeed, many writers use the conventions of Magical Realism to write quite
directly about the extreme political conditions under which they exist. If they cannot
freely criticize political and social oppression, their metaphors and hyperbole serve to
express their sentiments. In 1955, five years into Colombia’s violent civil war, García
Márquez wrote the following passage in “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor.”
“Everyday at five, astonishingly punctual, the sharks arrived. Then
there was a banquet around the raft. Huge fish would jump out of the
water and, a few moments later, resurface in pieces. The sharks, crazed,
would silently rush up to the bloody surface. So far, they hadn’t tried to
smash the raft, but they were attracted to it because of its white color.
Everyone knows that sharks are more likely to attack things that are white.
Sharks are myopic and only see white or shiny objects. Then I
remembered another of the instructor’s recommendations: “Hide all shiny
things so as not to draw the sharks’ attention.”
The sailor, trapped on his raft and subjected to daily attacks of bloodthirsty sharks, is like
the innocent person who must tread carefully in order to survive. The deadly ocean
parallels an environment of war, oppression and injustice.
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 of Argentina, Alejo Carpentier of Cuba, María Luisa Bombal and Isabel Allende
of Chile, even the influential fantasist, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina—have used the
techniques of Magic Realism in their most successful works. What in Latin America
encourages its writers to be Magic Realists? Why such an affinity for the genre?
A most important influence is certainly the continent’s natural landscape. The
variety of terrain, from lush vegetation to high desert, the variety of unique animal
species, brightly colored and wildly variable flora, its volcanoes, waterfalls, snow-capped
Andes, and Amazon basin: the land itself presents an extravagance and intensity of
experience. Combine its variety with its grandiose scale, beside which the European
shrinks and pales. Influential essayist Alejo Carpentier points to this factor in the
following description:
“How could America be anything other than marvelously real, if
we recognize certain very interesting factors that must be taken into
account? The conquest of Mexico occurs in 1521, when Francois I
ruled France. Do you know how big the urban area of Paris was under
Francois I? Thirteen square kilometers. In Garnier’s Universal Atlas,
published less than one hundred years ago, we are told that the
metropolitan area of Madrid was twenty kilometers in 1889 and that the
area of Paris, capital of capitals, was eighty kilometers. When Bernal
Díaz del Castillo laid eyes for the first time on the panorama of the city
of Tenochtitlan, the capital of Mexico, the empire of Montezuma, it had
an urban area of one hundred square kilometers – at a time when Paris
had only thirteen.”
Indigenous cultures are another strong influence, not just because they still exist
but because of their spiritual traditions (for example, Young says of South America,
“Peasants, whom we tend to see both as wiser and more credulous than ourselves, still
constitute a large segment of society.”). In The Warrior and the Princess, for example, an
anthology of South American children’s tales, the reader finds a world in which the
people are fiercely challenged to prove their love, devotion, or bravery. In order to prove
their worth under seemingly impossible circumstances, people often enlist the aid of a
wise grandmother figure whose herbs help sway the events. Sometimes, the people find
help from the animals that surround them.
“Suddenly, something extraordinary happened: the night came
alive with rustling sounds. You would have thought that all the
hummingbirds in the world had decided to meet at Macanaura’s cabin.
There were thousands and thousands of them, and all looked exquisite
with their multicolored feathers. With their beaks they began to pluck
off their lightest and most beautiful feathers, dropping them in front of
the bewildered young man.”
Human beings change form at will, becoming alligators, birds, and jaguars, as needed.
Boundaries of physical identity are transgressed, and the hierarchy of the species is
leveled, undermining any notion that the form of the human being is inherently superior
to that of animals.
When Europeans arrived, they found indigenous societies practicing highly
developed religions. Intricate cosmologies, vast pantheons of deities, rituals and lore
were intertwined with secular experience, helping the people to understand their intense
natural world. Spanish missionaries were relentless in their efforts to convert the natives
to Catholicism, a task that resulted in several outcomes. In some cases, Catholicism won
outright; in others, indigenous religions thrived covertly, cloaked in Catholic traditions.
Other regions reached a compromise that resulted in syncretism, in which the native and
the imported religions blended to create a new version of both. In any case, ongoing
spiritual traditions require the participant’s active faith in the mysterious, and promote the
writers’ leaps of imagination.
Finally, given the political, social, and economic upheavals in Latin America
during the past five centuries, 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 African
slaves, the domination of the Catholic Church, the battles to liberate the colonies from
European nations, US imperialism and exploitation of natural resources, extremes of
wealth and poverty, and the influence of leftist ideologies which have generated many
radical shifts in government—all have shaped the human landscape from which Latin
American writers draw inspiration.
Notes: Should this primer whet your appetite for more thorough examples of Magic
Realist stories and theory, consult Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology, and Magical
Realism: Theory, History, Community, (see below for publication details). On the Web,
find Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism, “a free-access, noncommercial literary
anthology published perpetually and worldwide in electronic form by Tamara Kaye
Sellman of Bainbridge Island, WA., at www.angelfire.com/wa2/margin/. It includes
many Web links, a glossary, and recommended readings, as well as original fiction,
nonfiction, and poetry. Finally, magic realism can be found in other forms as well - most
notably, in drama, and most outstandingly, in the work of Spanish poet and playwright
Federico Garcia Lorca. Please look to his play Blood Wedding, where the extremes of
the natural landscape of Southern Spain are paralleled with the emotional repression and
release of its personae.
Bibliography: Magic Realism
Alcalá, Kathleen. Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist. Corvallis, Oregon: Calyx
Books, 1992. Collection of short stories by award-winning, Seattle-based Mexican-
American author.
Allende, Isabel. Cuentos de Eva Luna. New York: HarperLibros, 1989. In the tradition
of the Stories of 1001 Arabian Nights, a collection of short stories by noted Chilean
author, in the original Spanish.
Allende, Isabel. The Stories of Eva Luna. New York: Atheneum, 1991. In the tradition
of the Stories of 1001 Arabian Nights, a collection of short stories by noted Chilean
author.
Carpentier, Alejo. Los Pasos Perdidos. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1985. Novel,
in which a composer takes a journey deep into the jungle, on the pretext of collecting
primitive musical instruments. In the original Spanish.
Carpentier, Alejo. The Lost Steps. New York: The Noonday Press, 1989. Novel, in
which a composer takes a journey deep into the jungle, on the pretext of collecting
primitive musical instruments.
Cortázar, Julio. We Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales. New York: Knopf, 1983.
Collection of short stories by
Galeano, Eduardo. Memory of Fire: Century of the Wind. New York: Pantheon Books,
1988. Third book in a trilogy chronicling the history of the Americas in short
journalistic, narrative.
García Márquez, Gabriel. Collected Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.
Collection of short stories by noted Colombian author.
García Márquez, Gabriel. La Increíble y Triste Historia de la Cándida Eréndira y de su
Abuela Desalmada: Siete Cuentos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1972. Seven
short stories in the original Spanish.
García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Harper & Row,
1970. Epic award-winning novel, of one man and his family living in a fictional
Colombian village.
García Márquez, Gabriel. The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. New York: Knopf, 1986.
Journalistic recreation of a sailor’s ordeal, fighting for survival off the coast of Colombia.
Young, David, & Hollaman, Keith, eds. Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology. New
York: Longman, Inc., 1984. A collection of short stories and excerpts from Latin
American, European, Russian and North American writers of Magic Realism.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson, & Faris, Wendy B., eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History,
Community. London: Duke University Press, 1995. A collection of essays by writers,
artists, critics, on the history, development and implications of Magic Realism.
