What is Magical Realism

[paeng]

Magical Realism as a term is slightly misleading. The point is that what happens in these stories isn't seen by the characters as magical, or out of the ordinary.

It's supposed to be "marvelous realism," but it refers to taking things that are ordinary and make them magical. The examples I gave illustrate that.

 

[paeng]

That would be "unrealistic" in any fiction, but the reason it is "magical realism" is that this miracle isn't the subject of discussion or explanation in the story. It simply is.

It's realistic because there are clouds and men. Unrealistic would involve things like ghosts and dragons.

 

[Swank]

It's realistic because there are clouds and men. Unrealistic would involve things like ghosts and dragons.

You are wrong about what the genre "magical realism" is about. Luckily, many people who have a clue have posted throughout this thread. There are also scholarly articles and summaries available online.

 

[paeng]

You are wrong about what the genre "magical realism" is about. Luckily, many people who have a clue have posted throughout this thread. There are also scholarly articles and summaries available online.

The examples I gave come straight from Garcia Marquez's works.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Just because they appear in his works, it doesn't mean that is what the stories (or the genre) are "about." A book may include dragons or automobiles, clouds or fireflies, without necessarily* being about any of those things.

I have always thought that the reason (or one reason, anyway) why the characters in a work of magical realism don't question the magic is because if the characters did that, then readers will be questioning it, too, and looking for clues to some rational explanation that they expect the writer to provide eventually, but trying to figure the answer out for themselves, instead of concentrating on what the writer is actually trying to say—or at least explore—about human nature, about the human condition.

______
*I qualify that sentence with that word, because in some genres (and for some readers) a story might be about exactly those things.

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

I have always thought that the reason (or one reason, anyway) why the characters in a work of magical realism don't question the magic is because if the characters did that, then readers will be questioning it, too, and looking for clues to some rational explanation that they expect the writer to provide eventually, but trying to figure the answer out for themselves, instead of concentrating on what the writer is actually trying to say—or at least explore—about human nature, about the human condition.

We could counter-argue that a book that portrays as ordinary physics-breaking phenomena that would make any ordinary human seek a rational explanation for them or be, at the least, nervous, scared, awed, agitated in its presence, doesn't know squat about "human nature" or the "human condition".

 

[paranoid marvin]

We could counter-argue that a book that portrays as ordinary physics-breaking phenomena that would make any ordinary human seek a rational explanation for them or be, at the least, nervous, scared, awed, agitated in its presence, doesn't know squat about "human nature" or the "human condition".

It really depends; a world where extraordinary/impossible things are now ten-a-penny takes some of the shackles off the writer, and allows them to explore regions of experience normally closed off because of our perceived reality. 'Life of Pi' is a good example of this.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

or be, at the least, nervous, scared, awed, agitated in its presence

There is a big difference between failing to look for rational explanations and failing to react at all. If, for instance, an angel were to crash through my living room window and land in front of my TV while I am watching this week's episode of "Law and Order," I doubt I would waste a moment trying to rationalize the angel's presence. I would be too busy feeling scared, awed, agitated. I might wonder if this meant that the world was ending. I might wonder if I would have been better off had I been watching religious programming when it arrived, rather than a police procedural. I might wonder . . . well, a lot of things about what comes next and what will happen to me. But I can guarantee that I wouldn't be trying to figure out the physics of an angel's flight.

(My husband, on the other hand, being the sort of person who is obsessed with how things work, he just might. Even to the point where he was so absorbed in that problem initially that he would forget to feel awed or agitated at all.)

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

It really depends; a world where extraordinary/impossible things are now ten-a-penny takes some of the shackles off the writer, and allows them to explore regions of experience normally closed off because of our perceived reality. 'Life of Pi' is a good example of this.

I haven't read Life of Pi. But I think the value of making characters perceive the extraordinary/impossible is to study how they'd react realistically to it. If the extraordinary/impossible merits from characters only indifference to the point their whole societies and individual behavior are indistinguishable from ours despite levitating ladies and whatnot, then you haven't taken any shackles off to explore anything; you're simply writing standard psychological realism and may as well call your novel Madame Bovary. Remarkably, Lovecraft, who despised characterization, does a better job showing how psychology would actually behave face to face with the supernatural. Unsurprisingly, his characters behave the way real-life people behaved in 1938 when they though Martians were invading Earth: with fear and panic.

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

There is a big difference between failing to look for rational explanations and failing to react at all. If, for instance, an angel were to crash through my living room window and land in front of my TV while I am watching this week's episode of "Law and Order," I doubt I would waste a moment trying to rationalize the angel's presence. I would be too busy feeling scared, awed, agitated. I might wonder if this meant that the world was ending. I might wonder if I would have been better off had I been watching religious programming when it arrived, rather than a police procedural. I might wonder . . . well, a lot of things about what comes next and what will happen to me. But I can guarantee that I wouldn't be trying to figure out the physics of an angel's flight.

I'd group rational explanation and reaction together in what I'm criticizing about magical realism though: its characters are indifferent, blasé about the supernatural. You say you'd react if an angel fell in your living room. Of course you would, anyone normal would!

But there's a story by García Márquez that's precisely about a man with wings falling from the sky, and the reaction of the villagers who find him and lock him in a chicken coop is to just go about their lives normally as if a miracle hadn't just happened. Is this the "human nature" and "human condition" you were talking about? What does Gabo want me to think? Am I supposed to believe that Latin Americans are uniquely inured against the extraordinary? That they're these special people who whose everyday life is a mixt of primitivism and modernity? That they brush off angels? That'd be pretty extraordinary given the fact that every year the Christian Church officializes as miracles several instances of Latin American churchgoers claiming to have seen religious statues crying blood.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

But there's a story by García Márquez that's precisely about a man with wings falling from the sky, and the reaction of the villagers who find him and lock him in a chicken coop is to just go about their lives normally as if a miracle hadn't just happened. Is this the "human nature" and "human condition" you were talking about?

Well, not having read the book or knowing all the details, and only going by the scant description you have provided, how can I say? Did they lock him up because they were afraid? Or because they were offended or disgusted? Some people do react in each of those ways when faced with people who are "other." Either of those reactions would be in accord with human nature. Or were the villagers the kind of people who refuse to see what is before their eyes because it conflicts with their previously held opinions? "Can't be an angel—angels don't exist. But look at the wings. It must be one of those fancy chickens people breed now. Into the coop with it!" Even in Latin American I can imagine there must be people just that stubborn and narrow-minded. So, yes, human nature.

Religious experiences do sometimes terrify people, even believers. So going about their lives normally as though nothing miraculous had happened, that, too, might be a typical human reaction: denial.

And other, perfectly human, reasons for their behavior might be possible, depending on the particular people and the particular circumstances. Not everyone acts the same. And one incident from a book and it's aftermath might not reveal all that the writer wishes to say or explore about whatever the winged man is supposed to symbolize or stand-in for.

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

You can read it here:

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Being by Gabo, it's of course worth reading. It's collected in Leaf Storm and Other Stories.

 

[BAYLOR]

Jonathan Carroll

 

[paeng]

Just because they appear in his works, it doesn't mean that is what the stories (or the genre) are "about." A book may include dragons or automobiles, clouds or fireflies, without necessarily* being about any of those things.

I have always thought that the reason (or one reason, anyway) why the characters in a work of magical realism don't question the magic is because if the characters did that, then readers will be questioning it, too, and looking for clues to some rational explanation that they expect the writer to provide eventually, but trying to figure the answer out for themselves, instead of concentrating on what the writer is actually trying to say—or at least explore—about human nature, about the human condition.

______
*I qualify that sentence with that word, because in some genres (and for some readers) a story might be about exactly those things.

The Origins of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Magic Realism

"Surrealism runs through the streets," the Colombian author, who died today at age 87, told The Atlantic in 1973. "Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America."

www.theatlantic.com

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

"Faulkner was surprised at certain things that happened in life," García said, 'but he writes of them not as surprises but as things that happen every day."

Sigh, the usual Noble Savage twaddle repackaged for a new era; pretending Latin Americans have this unique ability to shrug off the strange as just part of reality while poor Westerners, with their materialist, scientific minds, split phenomena into real and unreal. I guess that's why Latin American witnesses of UFOs need to receive therapy when confronted with the strange:

UFO Sighting in Bolivia​

In April of this year 2021, in the neighborhood of Monteagudo in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra residents witnessed a UFO sighting. According to UFOlogist Javier Aliaga “As the object entered the sky, there was a crash, like thunder. Furthermore, the characteristic of this object is as if it were throwing fire.”

Eyewitnesses saw a halo of light landed in the neighborhood and a while later a small creature that residents claim looked like el Chupacabra. This creature terrorized and seemed to target children and tweens/teens. This halo then disappeared into the sky hours later and it left crop circles. The most affected by this incident had to receive therapy. A psychologist who weighed in on this incident claims that its mass hallucination and UFOlogist Javier Aliaga wants there to be a scientific study on what happened. They described it as having an oval shaped head, big eyes, and that both hands had three digits.
https://www.espookytales.com/blog/ufo-sightings-in-latin-america/

What a strain it must have been for Gabo and all his "magical realist" pals to put on this performance all their lives; couldn't let the guard day once, every time they had to pretend to be totally nonchalant about the strange so as not to disappoint the US and European suckers who went in pilgrimage to interview the last humans who still retain the primitive outlook destroyed by the Enlightenment.

 

[hitmouse]

"Faulkner was surprised at certain things that happened in life," García said, 'but he writes of them not as surprises but as things that happen every day."

Sigh, the usual Noble Savage twaddle repackaged for a new era; pretending Latin Americans have this unique ability to shrug off the strange as just part of reality while poor Westerners, with their materialist, scientific minds, split phenomena into real and unreal. I guess that's why Latin American witnesses of UFOs need to receive therapy when confronted with the strange:

UFO Sighting in Bolivia​

In April of this year 2021, in the neighborhood of Monteagudo in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra residents witnessed a UFO sighting. According to UFOlogist Javier Aliaga “As the object entered the sky, there was a crash, like thunder. Furthermore, the characteristic of this object is as if it were throwing fire.”

Eyewitnesses saw a halo of light landed in the neighborhood and a while later a small creature that residents claim looked like el Chupacabra. This creature terrorized and seemed to target children and tweens/teens. This halo then disappeared into the sky hours later and it left crop circles. The most affected by this incident had to receive therapy. A psychologist who weighed in on this incident claims that its mass hallucination and UFOlogist Javier Aliaga wants there to be a scientific study on what happened. They described it as having an oval shaped head, big eyes, and that both hands had three digits.
https://www.espookytales.com/blog/ufo-sightings-in-latin-america/

What a strain it must have been for Gabo and all his "magical realist" pals to put on this performance all their lives; couldn't let the guard day once, every time they had to pretend to be totally nonchalant about the strange so as not to disappoint the US and European suckers who went in pilgrimage to interview the last humans who still retain the primitive outlook destroyed by the Enlightenment.

To be fair to Marquez, this was 50 years ago, and from that extract he appears to be talking about Faulkner, not the whole of the western canon.

 

[paeng]

Check books like The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, and you will find earlier examples. Meanwhile, I think it was Carpentier who was one of the earlier proponents for modern fiction in the region.

 

[Sargeant_Fox]

Check books like The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, and you will find earlier examples. Meanwhile, I think it was Carpentier who was one of the earlier proponents for modern fiction in the region.

I'm currently reading a Brazilian novel by Machado de Assis (1839-1908). I think we can all agree, until evidence to the contrary, that Brazil is in Latin America. The novel is Esau and Jacob (1904). It opens with two women walking a street stealthily to go see a fortune-teller. Their fear? That public opinion will think they're silly for believing in superstitious nonsense like fortune-telling.

Do you know that every year the Church in Latin America still confirms several special happenings as miracles? Usually they concern Christian believers who see statues crying tears of blood. There's nothing extraordinary about this: the Church reports identical miracles every year in Europe and the USA. But if Latin Americans were that comfortable with the magical in the everyday, why would they give these events special importance? Why would they rush to the report to the Church authorities that they just saw something out of the ordinary? After all, a "miracle" by definition is something out of the ordinary.

I'm amazed at the resistance to the idea that Latin Americans have the same approach to the supernatural as Americans and Europeans - "Westerners" in general. I understand Gabo and crew had to sell their brand to stand out from competitors in Europe and the USA; that's just sound marketing skills; Gabo was an expert salesman as Alvaro Santana-Acuna thoroughly showed it in Ascent to Glory: How One Hundred Years of Solitude Was Written and Became a Global Classic. But it's weird how many people treat an amusing gimmick designed to sell books as a profound insight into the Latin American mindset.

Are you aware that before "magical realism" became a trend in the 1940s, Latin American literature was predominantly realist/naturalist? It had its Balzac imitators, its Flaubert imitators, its Zola imitators. They took their cues from whatever news they received from Paris. If Paris said literature was Flaubert, they wrote Madame Bovary knock offs; if Paris said Zola was out and Huysmans was in, they started churning out Symbolist novels. Of course those novels were never translated into English nor attract the attention of Anglo-American academics, who continue to pretend Latin America since its inception was producing magical realism by the cartload. It makes me wonder how the Argentinean critic Rita Gnutzmann managed to write a whole book about Argentina's naturalist fiction, La novela naturalista en Argentina (1880-1900) (1998).

Or how Juan Armando Epple Orellana found four naturalist novelists to make his study Cuatro autores naturalistas de America Latina: hacia una caracterizacion sociologica de la novela naturalista (1980)

Or how Oswaldo Voysest managed to write a comparative study between the naturalist Peruvian novelist Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera and her influence Zola: El naturalismo de Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera frente al de Emile Zola: contradicción, innovación y replanteamiento (1997)

Need I go on? How many studies of 19c Latin American naturalism will it take to convince you?

Latin American fiction followed exactly the same phases as European fiction: Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, late 19c Symbolism, early 20c modernism/avant-garde, 1930s socialist realism. "Magical realism", as I've explained elsewhere, was a label popular in Europe between the wars before it migrated to Latin America. In those years Europeans were already beginning to realize that one way of renewing fiction, which had run out of novelty because realism was exhausted (as Huysmans pointed out in the 1880s when he abandoned naturalism), was to mix realism with the oneiric, the bizarre, the fantastic, the magical. That's why after 1900 Kafka turns to fantasy in The Metamorphosis; why Woolf writes the story of an immortal, Orlando; why Sylvia Townsend Warner makes an ordinary woman discover witchcraft amid a domestic context in Lolly Willowes (1926). The fantastic, which used to belong to fiction marked as "entertainment", more and more started making incursions into semi-realistic books with literary ambitions, dissolving the artificial barrier between low and high culture.

This is a richer and more nuanced explanation of why magical realism was born than simply parroting the obtuse claim that Latin Americans are inherently, even fatalistically prone to producing magical realism. That's an unfortunate prejudice because it means all the fine writers who never showed any interest in magical realism, or were active before it was invented in the 1940s, are doomed never to be known outside Latin America, because they don't meet expectations of what "real" Latin American fiction is.

 

[Ursa major]

Newton's cosmology had turned the universe into a clockwork mechanism devoid of mysterious, without gods in the sky, and life therefore meaningless.

Sorry to go off at a tangent, but what we've discovered since Newton (and his "clockwork"), particularly at (but not restricted to) the sub-atomic level, is that the real universe is a much stranger place.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

But there's a story by García Márquez that's precisely about a man with wings falling from the sky, and the reaction of the villagers who find him and lock him in a chicken coop is to just go about their lives normally as if a miracle hadn't just happened. Is this the "human nature" and "human condition" you were talking about?

I have followed the link you provided and read the story. I was surprised to see that the story is quite different than you describe it. People just throw the angel into the chicken coop and go a out their ordinary lives? Did we read the same story? What about all the people who descend on the scene and display a wide range of recognizable human behaviors in the face of something they can't understand: hysteria, awe, curiosity, cruelty, etc. What about the priest who is so disconcerted because the angel isn't what he expects of an angel that he sends for help from his bishop? Meanwhile the people who own the house and the chicken coop decide to exploit the event by charging the curious to view the angel. All this is very much in accordance with human nature. Obviously the story is not about the angel. The angel does nothing of note (except arrive and survive winter in the chicken coop) and the angel is never explained. ( The bishop never writes back. Not surprising. Statues crying tears of blood--relatively commonplace, easily addressed. An elderly angel with wings like a vulture and parasites--altogether too much to handle, better pretend it never happened.) The story is about the myriad reactions of the villagers and those who are drawn to the village by reports of the angel. There is absolutely nothing there that is out of line with human nature as I understand it. But if you see something different, well, that is how it is with thought-provoking literature, isn't it? Like the angel it produces a variety of different reactions.