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Magical Realism

A literary mode rather than a distinguishable genre, magical realism is characterized by two

conflicting perspectives, one based on a so-called rational view of reality and the other on theacceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. Magical realism differs from pure fantasy

primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans andsociety. It aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites; for instance, it challenges binary

oppositions like life and death and the pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial present. According to Angel Flores, magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the

fantastic, or as he claims, “an amalgamation of realism and fantasy.” The presence of the

supernatural in magical realism is often connected to the primeval or magical “native” mentality,which exists in opposition to European rationality. According to Ray Verzasconi, as well as other

critics, magical realism is “an expression of the New World reality which at once combines the

rational elements of the European super-civilization, and the irrational elements of a primitiveAmerica.” Gonzalez Echchevarria believes that magical realism offers a world view that is not

based on natural or physical laws nor objective reality. However, the fictional world is not

separated from reality either.

Background

The term “magical realism” was first introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic, whoconsidered magical realism an art category. To him, it was a way of representing and responding

to reality and pictorially depicting the enigmas of reality. In Latin America in the 1940s, magical

realism was a way to express the realistic American mentality and create an autonomous style of literature. Yet, magical realism is not confined to Latin American literature alone, for many Latin

American writers have influenced writers around the world, such as Indian writer Salman

Rushdie and Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri.

Characteristics of Magical Realism

Ben Okri, The Famished Road, 1991

http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/salman-rushdie/






Hybridity: Magical realists incorporate many techniques that have been linked to post-

colonialism, with hybridity being a primary feature. Specifically, magical realism is illustrated

in the inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural and Western andindigenous. The plots of magical realist works involve issues of borders, mixing, and change.

Authors establish these plots to reveal a crucial purpose of magical realism: a more deep and

true reality than conventional realist techniques would illustrate.

Irony Regarding Author’s Perspective: The writer must have ironic distance from the magicalworld view for the realism not to be compromised. Simultaneously, the writer must strongly

respect the magic, or else the magic dissolves into simple folk belief or complete fantasy, split

from the real instead of synchronized with it. The term “magic” relates to the fact that the pointof view that the text depicts explicitly is not adopted according to the implied world view of the

author. As Echevarria notes, the act of distancing oneself from the beliefs held by a certain social

group makes it impossible to be thought of as a representative of that society.

Authorial Reticence: Authorial reticence refers to the lack of clear opinions about the accuracy

of events and the credibility of the world views expressed by the characters in the text. Thistechnique promotes acceptance in magical realism. In magical realism, the simple act of

explaining the supernatural would eradicate its position of equality regarding a person’sconventional view of reality. Because it would then be less valid, the supernatural world would

be discarded as false testimony.

The Supernatural and Natural: In magical realism, the supernatural is not displayed as

questionable. While the reader realizes that the rational and irrational are opposite andconflicting polarities, they are not disconcerted because the supernatural is integrated within the

norms of perception of the narrator and characters in the fictional world.

Themes

The idea of terror overwhelms the possibility of rejuvenation in magical realism. Several prominent authoritarian figures, such as soldiers, police, and sadists all have the power to torture

and kill. Time is another conspicuous theme, which is frequently displayed as cyclical instead of

linear. What happens once is destined to happen again. Characters rarely, if ever, realize the

promise of a better life. As a result, irony and paradox stay rooted in recurring social and political aspirations. Another particularly complex theme in magical realism is the carnivalesque.

The carnivalesque is carnival’s reflection in literature. The concept of carnival celebrates the

body, the senses, and the relations between humans. “Carnival” refers to cultural manifestationsthat take place in different related forms in North and South America, Europe, and the

Caribbean, often including particular language and dress, as well as the presence of a madman,

fool, or clown. In addition, people organize and participate in dance, music, or theater. LatinAmerican magical realists, for instance, explore the bright life-affirming side of the

carnivalesque. The reality of revolution, and continual political upheaval in certain parts of the

world, also relates to magical realism. Specifically, South America is characterized by theendless struggle fora political ideal.



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Magic Realism

RATIONALE

I.

"Magic realism" has become a ubiquitous term to describe various contemporary works, yet acertain ambiguity surrounds it. Much of the critical work on magic realism has focused on the

history and usage of the name itself, rather than the actual characteristics of the movement,

which I see as an evolution of traditional mimesis initially exploring changing perceptions of the

visual and the real, and culminating in a totalizing epic view of history based on therepresentation of the collective memory of a people. The term originated in Europe during the

1920's, in the writings of the German art historian Franz Roh who presented magic realism as areaction to expressionism, and independently in the Italian journal Novecento, edited by writer and critic Massimo Bontempelli. It was adopted during the 1940's by Latin American authors

who combined the theories of Roh and Bontempelli with French surrealist concepts of the

marvelous, and incorporated indigenous mythologies within traditional mimetic conventions intheir quest for the original Latin American novel. From the 1960's to the present, there has been a

strong current of magic realism within the general movement of post-modernism, especially in

British and North American literature.

While a considerable body of criticism exists on twentieth-century responses to realism and therole of fantasy and the imaginary, the term "magic realism" in the context of the literatures of

Europe and the United States appears, for the most part, only obliquely or as a passing reference.Recently in Germany there has been a renewed interest in the art and literature of the 1920's,especially the "neue Sachlichkeit" movement on which Roh based his theory of "magischer

Realismus." I plan to demonstrate not only that magic realism exists as a continuous presence in

twentieth-century literature, but that it presents an alternative to more established movements

such as surrealism and post-modernism through its privileging of the mimetic function and itsemphasis on the representation of history. For the purposes of this study, I will work within three

subcategories:

— the novel of the 1920's and 1930's: theories of Roh and Bontempelli; works by Kafka,

Junger and Musil, and the German movement "neue Sachlichkeit" (originally called "magischer

Realismus") represented by Doblin; French novels by Breton, Aragon and Gracq which developthe new theories of "le merveilleux."

-- the Latin American movement of the 1940's and 1950's: theories of Carpentier and Flores;

works by Carpentier, Borges, Asturias, Uslar Pietri.

— the contemporary novel: the fabulists such as Grass, Rushdie, Garcia Marquez and Carter;works structured around multiple layers of reality: the Anglo-American tradition (Fowles, Barth,

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Pynchon and Nabokov); the French tradition growing out of the Nouveau Roman (Simon, the

later novels of Aragon).

The topics I wish to consider include the relationship of magic realism to pre-established genres,the questions of derealization and defamiliarization; fabulation, historiography and the role of

history.

II.

The representation of the banal and the quotidian is a central tenet of nineteenth-century realism,

and magic realism continues this project. Like many modernist movements, however, magicrealism rejects nineteenth-century positivism, the privileging of science and empiricism,

returning instead to mythologies, folklore and mysticism in what Jameson calls "a reaction

against the reification of realism." This in no way represents an abandonment of history; in fact,the representation of historical conflict is central to magic realist prose, and I would argue that in

contemporary literature magic realism presents a way of restoring a historical dimension to the

post-modern novel.

Central to early magic realism is the emphasis on perception. There is nothing inherently newabout this: both the nineteenth-century fantastic, which excels in the representation of unreal or

uncanny effects, and nineteenth-century realism strongly privilege the role of the visual.

However, new visual technologies (electricity, photography) which challenge traditionalconceptions of space and time lead to a new perception, taking the form of a sudden apparition

within the context of the quotidian and characterized by simultaneity, unusual juxtapositions and

an extreme precision of language. The advent of psychoanalysis also contributes to this

phenomenon by establishing the importance of perception in the structuring of the Unconscious,and leads to a conscious interest in the Repressed. While the surrealists draw on paradigms of the

Freudian Unconscious and its fantasies, magic realists, with their gaze typically turned outwardrather than inward, generally prefer the Jungian Unconscious and its collective archetypes. Bothmovements use the word play and collage/montage techniques of dadaism, but for the magic

realists the mimetic function remains primary. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, for example, the city as

a historical and ontological reality is the constant referent of Doblin's montages, mythologizingand formal word play. How does this compare to the representation of Paris in Nadja and Le

paysan de Paris, or to Joyce's and Dos Passos' representations of the metropolis?

The original theory of magic realism as defined by Roh expresses a desire to go beyond

traditional mimesis and to represent the hidden, hitherto unperceived connections betweenobjects within the quotidian. This heightened reality perception (Ringer's Das Abenteuerliche

Herz) leads to the principal characteristics of magic realism, already strongly evident in Kafka,

Mann and Musil: derealization (a sudden sense of detachment from the reality of the surroundingobject world) and defamiliarization (the representation of familiar objects through a language or

descriptive technique that causes them to appear new or shocking). In the derealized and

defamiliarized world(s) of magic realism, the unusual juxtaposition of objects throws traditional

descriptive systems into disarray, and the boundaries of an assumed "real" are stretched untillevels of reality obeying different ontological laws coexist metonymically. In post-modern magic

realism, the multiplicity of realities reaches such a point that it is no longer a question of



alternate worlds flowing into one another while still maintaining a certain internal coherence (as

in Nabokov or Queneau) but rather the interfacing of what Jameson refers to as

"semiautonomous subsystems" which are themselves in a constant state of mutation (Pynchon).

The disconcerting multiplicity of realities in magic realism emphasizes rather than denies the

historical dimension of these narratives. The exploration of the quotidian in early magic realismincreasingly gives way to the representation of conflict, which is often but not exclusively

generated by a crisis of national/cultural identity resulting from the overlap of several layers of

history and culture within a given geographic area, such as Latin America or the Indiansubcontinent. Many magic realists write in the language of an established national literature from

which they feel excluded, such as Kafka's use of German, Nabokov's use of English, and the

post-colonial writers' use of the language of their colonizers, be it Spanish, French or English.

The movement follows a pattern of increasing historiography, the creation of elaborategenealogies (Borges, Nabokov) and mythologies (Jahnn) as a means of writing the "history" of a

people or geographic area, and culminates in the contemporary fabulist movement. Although this

development is often dismissed as mythomania, I would argue that it is a new form of the

historical novel, which can be interpreted either as the reflection of a historical reality already of a fantastic nature (as Carpentier and Garcia Marquez claim) or as the result of a sense of

historical impotence brought about by the reduction of all discourse, including history, to anamalgamation of semiotic systems.

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