Along the Paths of Magical Realism

The term magical realism first appeared in the 1920s. It is a special direction in artistic art, which first received such a definition in 1925 thanks to the German critic Franz Koch. Later this concept began to be applied to the literary movement as well. Massimo Bontempelli characterized one of his novels as magical realism.

Thus, magical realism is a literary movement characterized by the breaking of standard realist forms through the interweaving of fantastic events into the narrative. Angel Flores was the first to think of calling Latin America’s rich literary style magical realism. In the late sixties the term spread to the work of writers from other continents. In a deeper sense, magical realism began to occupy an increasingly strong position in the minds of South American artists and writers, prompting critics to identify the most powerful avant-garde movement with the term. Magical realism succeeded in extinguishing cross-cultural differences by combining elements of everyday life and global problems; it managed to harmoniously combine seemingly polar characteristics: at times exaggerations of reality alien to realism are mixed with typical and commonplace categories of thought and behavior.

Any reader familiar with the work of the writers of this movement will confirm that magical realism is capable of surprising anyone, without ignoring the culture, tradition, and memory inherited from the ancestors. Magical realism has succeeded in accomplishing what the reader has not been able to observe for two whole millennia, namely, crushing the walls of the familiar, even traditional, form of organization of novels and narratives. Thus, the monotonous and painfully sterile path trampled by postmodernism managed to turn to an unprecedented plane.

Many writers belong to this movement: Miguel Angel Asturias, Aljejo Carpentier, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, Lisa Aubin de Teran, Louis de Bernier, Günther Grass, Laura Esquivel. Among others, Carpentier calls “real singularity” the attempt to find magical properties in the midst of realism: “everything is extraordinary only when there is an unexpected reversal of reality. This is how he spoke of magical realism in his work The King of This World.

Among such properties that creators have tried to find in everyday life are the following: clairvoyance, levitation, a very long life in a biblical manner, miracles, fictionalized, even hyperbolized, diseases; but as Carpentier states in the work already mentioned, all this requires real faith.

All these features are responsible for the magical part of the work, while realism occupies the more significant, so to speak, main part of the narrative. In a sense, one could say that realism is given the first role in the work, with the magical parts acting only as an adjunct, and less important than the main part. Thus, magical realism invites the reader to step away from everyday reality for the sake of plunging into the maelstrom of the miraculous and not following meticulous rules.

The Reasons for Magical Realism

In this part of our story we will try to find the reasons for the emergence of such a movement as magical realism.

• The Crisis of Religion. One way or another, but in the era of the most important scientific and technical discoveries mankind had to face the fact that the ancient beliefs of the ancestors could no longer fully satisfy the need to know the world around us. Man began to search for new horizons, to discover new latitudes and planes of the scientific field, which gradually filled the gaps in knowledge about the creation of the world.
• The Western reader was bored with the techniques of introspection and the internal psychological struggle of book characters, so subconsciously the reading masses were already prepared to perceive a radically new literary form. The postmodernism of the early 20th century finally exhausted the minds of readers who mentally longed for familiar stories, only told in a new way, which magical realism was finally able to provide them with. A rare reader could oppose the tendency to describe social realities through hypnotizing metaphorical language.
• The source that fed the body of postmodernism dried up completely, for it no longer had the resources to invent new structures of expression, or at least to reform them, and the forms of presentation clearly lacked something magical and truly alive: thus the threshold was reached after which postmodernism was nothing more than a collection of obsolete metaphors and nonconformist ideas. Instead, magical realism succeeded in smoothing the edges between real life and the result of literary creation with a simple technique that consisted in sharpening the reader’s anticipation of something wonderful, of some unexpected event, while using sometimes primitive but painfully captivating language.
• Magical realism is a kind of emotional flow, a current of experimental reason, the origins of which go deep into the human subconscious, thus taking on a certain ideological role, which previously belonged entirely to the faithful side of the subconscious.
• The paradox of the equation of all the masses and the eerie loneliness in a world that is becoming more crowded by the day was bound to have its reflection in literature. Postmodernism was the “cold” current that provoked the mass equation, while magical realism puts into ordinary things all the ideas and experiences of the postmodern period, without giving a clear explanation and solution to these problems.
• Magical realism shifts the literary stratum toward more ancient forms, gives complete freedom of choice and provides a wide front for the imagination, thus giving the impression that even the author is surprised at the direction in which his narrative unfolds.
• Magical realism emerged shortly after a period when many avant-gardists were actively experimenting with various forms of narrative, thereby finding themselves in an advantageous position, a new literary movement could smelt a monolithic form from those methods considered most suitable for the novel.
• Magical Realism emerged in parallel with the Beatnik movement, but the two cultures took different paths in their development.
• Reality had become too burdensome to bear, and already the reader demanded something different from reality; the World War had produced so many deaths that the only way to resist it was mockery; this factor caused the need to read about the hyperbolic exploits of the most ordinary people, or conversely, to read about hyperbolized heroes in the conditions of ordinary life. The reader needed something invisible to fill the environment, for everyone craves miracles.
• Everything is cyclical, so people recreate history to remember their heroes. Ancient nations and empires created entire epics during their periods of greatest glory and prosperity, and now it is the turn of every other nation to create epic stories, in which magical realism has been a good helper.

External influences

If we now try to outline in more detail the general face of magical realism and determine on which texts it is based, it will be necessary to mention the outside currents that have influenced it: they are Barroco, the Rascal Novel, the Gothic, tragedy, fables, myths, legends, indigenous superstitions, social realism, and of course postmodernism.

The Influence of Realism

From realism, magical realism has adopted the transparency of language and the pseudo-objectivism of 20th-century convictions. If realism refers to the identification of the literary work and the world around it, then yes – magical realism is indeed real; in every “magically real” novel there are ordinary things, familiar feelings and experiences, real dates and events, but the main epithet of everything familiar becomes metaphor with the effect of profound hyperbole.

Magical realism in its ideas can hardly be called more democratic than any other literary movement. But magical realism is possible: it creates such imaginary worlds from which it becomes extremely difficult for a person to re-adapt to the reality around him.

Barroco’s influence

Magical realism has followed a dual developmental path, and now we can observe two main directions: the Latin American and the Asian. Writers of other nationalities also belong to this literary style, but, examining the problem in more detail, we can conclude that the short stories of South American writers bear the imprint of one current, while the works written in English are influenced somewhat differently, but both sources of inspiration have common roots: Barroco. Thus, the works of Salman Rushdie have distinct characteristics of Spanish Gongorism: metaphors, poetic language, the antithesis of ideas and concepts, hyperbole, mythical plots; while the narration of Gabriel García Márquez is more similar to Spanish Concepcetism: naivety, humor, morality, knowledge, metaphors.

The main distinguishing feature of Barroco was a constant change of perception of reality and unreality. Representatives of this literary style constantly sought to emphasize the disgusting, exaggerated, extravagant, funny, shocking and touching details, while mixing them together in the most hypnotic way for the reader.

The influence of the Rascal novels

But Barroco is not the only source of inspiration for magical realism, certainly one of its directions was borrowed from the Rascal novels. The knave is a kind of trickster, a cunning and insolent pest. The rascal is constantly changing places of his activity, embroiled in risky and deceptive adventures; he is capable of deceiving everyone to fulfill his own goals. The clearest example is Lasarillo of Tormesa (a knave tale written back in the 16th century). In many ways, the protagonists of magical realism fight for their own lives on the principle of rogue novels. Adam Asis (Salman Rushdie’s Children of Midnight) is just such a character. The rascal is characterized by the ambivalence of his character: he exhibits the traits of a hero and an anti-hero. His behavior follows a cyclical pattern: today he is a vagabond, tomorrow he serves two masters, while realizing his aspirations through all kinds of traps and deceptions and never retreating from his cynical view of the world; the narrative is always in the first person with a tangible touch of satire.

The Influence of Postmodernism

Within postmodernism, every conceivable boundary of the literary genre has been broken to give place to a general grotesque comedy: fiction offers us heterogeneous characters, they seem to be subjected to the analysis of other characters by means of the author’s words. The reader is literally invited to appreciate the writer’s narrative abilities, to act as a witness to the monologue, or rather the author’s confession to the reader.

When this technique of writing was new – for example, in the era of Cervantes – the reader was astonished, but later he needed something more, something capable of embracing the unexplored corners of their spirituality, something appealing to moral foundations, because it was already known that man is capable of living without faith, but there is always a group of people who constantly need certain moral pillars that help them live and exist in their social environment.

When postmodernism went out of fashion, magical realism took its place, and writers rediscovered worlds full of fantastic creatures, relegated to mythology of incest and violence, as well as strange things and unseen weapons, all became instruments of mockery of reality. We can see all this in the works of Günther Grass’s The Tin Drum, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Angela Carter’s Nights in the Circus, etc.

The influence of Gothic novels

Gothicism in magical realism is reflected in its tragicism: a kind of attempt to mock death and fate. The elements of tragedy have a very powerful representation within magical realism because in their structure they are very similar to ancient tragedies. Among the homogeneous elements are the following:

• The crime follows one after another, predominantly provoked by a thirst for revenge;
• There is a chorus that comments on what is happening in the work;
• The writer resorts to irony to emphasize the significance of death;
• The ending is almost always disastrous.

Major Themes

One of the frequently mentioned themes in magical realism is that of unprecedented diseases that appear for no reason and just as easily disappear. The Moor in “The Moor’s Farewell Sigh” Salman Rushdie ages twice as fast as the others, and the inhabitants of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude suffer from forgetfulness.

The theme of loneliness is intertwined with themes of vindictiveness and depravity. These ideas were borrowed from Barroco, but have been modified somewhat with irony, sometimes even wicked satire.
These themes inextricably carry with them other subtexts, such as revenge, the uncertainty of motherhood, and others, but the narrative themes themselves do not make the style. It takes immense writing talent in conjunction with reader intuition to create an aura of magical realism, one of the most mysterious and hypnotic literary styles. At first glance, it’s a fairly simple formula with few variables, but is it that simple to solve the equation!