Magical Realism/”Lo real maravilloso”

The following is an adaptation from M.H. Abrams' A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1993) as cited by Dr. Robert P. Fletcher of West Chester University.

The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England. These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales. Robert Scholes has popularized metafiction as an overall term for the large and growing class of novels which depart drastically from the traditional categories either of realism or romance, and also the term fabulation for the current mode of free-wheeling narrative invention. These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic -- and sometimes highly effective -- experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.

Definition: The term magic realism describes contemporary fiction, often from Latin America or the third world, whose narrative blends magical or fantastic elements with reality. Magic realist writers include Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Isabel Allende.

The term was coined first by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925, and Alejo Carpentier first described its current usage in the prologue to his book, "El reino de este mundo." According to Raymond L. Williams (writing for Twayne's World Authors Series Online), "For Carpentier, this special reality finds its roots in the marvelous nature of the American cultural experience and history. He proposes there are similarities between this marvelous American reality and poetic epiphany."

But as the poet Dana Gioia reminds us in his article, "Gabriel García Márquez and Magic Realism," the narrative strategy we know as magic realism long predates the term: "One already sees the key elements of Magic Realism in Gulliver's Travels (1726)...Likewise Nikolai Gogol's short story, "The Nose" (1842), in which a minor Czarist bureaucrat's nose takes off to pursue its own career in St. Petersburg, fulfills virtually every requirement of this purportedly contemporary style. One finds similar precedents in Dickens, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Maupassant, Kafka, Bulgakov, Calvino, Cheever, Singer, and others."

Magical realism

Meaning

A literary genre in which magical features and storylines appear and are accepted as everyday reality.

Magical realist stories often have a dream-like landscape and call on folk-lore and myth to question the true nature of reality. Time may be manipulated to appear cyclically or in reverse, rather than in the more usual linear way. It is often unclear whether the reader is intended to view the magical or everyday elements as the more 'real'.

Origin

In the 1920s an exhibition of pictures titled Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity or New Matter-of-Factness) was presented in Mannheim, Germany.

Magical realism was coined by Franz Roh in his article Magischer Realismus ("Magic Realism"), describing the works shown at the event.

The term is now more often applied to a literary genre which appeared much later. This "magical realism" came to prominence in the 1960s with the work of South American writers like Miguel Angel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, and was first applied to their work by writer and critic Arturo Uslar-Pietri. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, 1967, is often described as the seminal magical realist story.

In the original Spanish the term was "Lo real maravilloso", which translates as "the marvelous real", gives a good impression of the nature of the style.

Magical realism in literature isn't an isolated and specifically Latin American genre. It has links to Science Fiction and Fantasy and the works of the English romantic poets, amongst many genres.

In addition to the early painting genre, magical realism also finds expression in other art forms, notably film. This has become a popular and almost mainstream form in the late 20th century, with the work of director David Lynch and other widely released and commercially successful films, like Being John Malkovich, Donnie Darko and Edward Scissorhands.