Magical realism is a literary mode in which magical
events occur inside an otherwise realistic world, and the narrative
treats them as ordinary. It is one of the most influential modes of
the 20th century, and one of the most commonly misused. Not every story
with magic in it is magical realism.
The origin of the term
The phrase magischer Realismus was coined in 1925 by the
German art critic Franz Roh to describe a school of post-Expressionist
painting. It crossed into Latin American literary criticism in the 1940s
and 1950s through writers like Alejo Carpentier (who preferred
lo real maravilloso, "the marvelous real") and Arturo Uslar
Pietri.
The mode reached its full form in the 1960s with the so-called
"Boom" generation of Latin American writers — above all Gabriel García
Márquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) became its
canonical text.
The defining features
A realistic frame. The setting is recognizable
— specific place, history, social texture, food, weather. Magical
realism is not set in a fantasy kingdom.
Magical events. Things happen that cannot happen
in our world: a character ascends to heaven while hanging laundry,
another lives 200 years, a rain of yellow flowers covers a town.
Matter-of-fact tone. The narrator describes these
events without surprise. The magical is treated as part of the
texture of reality, not as a breach of it.
The reader's unease. The reader is the only one
who experiences the magical as strange. The characters and
narrator do not.
What it isn't
Fantasy builds a second world with its own rules
and treats magic as a known system. Magical realism keeps our
world and lets the impossible into it.
Surrealism distorts reality through dream-logic
and the unconscious. Magical realism preserves the daytime
reality the magic intrudes on.
Allegory uses one thing to mean another. Magical
realism's marvels can be allegorical, but they are first of all
themselves. (See our
entry on allegory vs.
symbol.)
The canonical writers
Gabriel García Márquez — One Hundred Years
of Solitude (1967), Love in the Time of Cholera
(1985).
Jorge Luis Borges — closer to fantastic than
magical realism strictly, but a major influence.
Isabel Allende — The House of the
Spirits (1982).
Salman Rushdie — Midnight's Children
(1981) ports the mode to the Indian subcontinent.
Toni Morrison — Beloved (1987) ports
it to the history of American slavery; the ghost is real and is
a person.
Murakami — a Japanese version, often with
modernist and pop-cultural layers.
Why writers use the mode
Magical realism is often the form chosen for histories that
realism cannot quite hold. Colonial trauma, dictatorship, slavery,
genocide — when the historical truth is, in itself, more violent and
strange than realism can frame, magical realism gives writers a
language adequate to it. The dead can speak. Time can compress. A
massacre can be remembered as a rain of flowers.
How to read it
When you read magical realism, do not ask "is this real?" — that's
the wrong question. Ask what historical or emotional truth is the
magical event making visible? The mode is a kind of strategic
literalism: feelings, histories, and political situations are
materialized into events the reader cannot ignore.
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