Abstract
This paper traces the conceptual origins, theoretical development, and literary practice of magical realism as a global literary mode from its earliest uses in 18th-century German thought to its flourishing across Latin American, European, African, and Indian fiction. Distinguishing magical realism from pure fantasy, the paper examines key theorists from Novalis and Franz Roh to Angel Flores, Luis Leal, and Wendy Faris, alongside canonical texts by Carpentier, García Márquez, Rushdie, Morrison, Okri and others. It argues that magical realism’s fundamental concern is the nature and limits of the knowable, and its enduring power lies in using the fantastical to challenge paradigms of reality.
Keywords: magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Salman Rushdie, Latin American literature, postcolonial fiction, Ben Okri, narrative mode
Introduction
Magical realism is more a literary mode than a distinguishable genre and it aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites such as time and timelessness, life and death, dream and reality and the pre-colonial past and the post-industrial present. It is characterized by two conflicting perspectives. While accepting the rational view of reality, it also considers the supernatural as a part of reality. The setting in a magical realist text is a normal world with authentic human characters. It is not at all fantastic or unreal; it is a mode of narration that discovers the natural in the supernatural and supernatural in the natural. It is a mode in which the real and the fantastic and the natural and the supernatural are more or less equivalently and coherently represented.
The term “magical realism” was first used by Novalis, the German poet and philosopher in 1798 to refer to a “true prophet” or an “isolated being” who cannot be bound by ordinary human limitations. According to Novalis, this prophet should be referred to as a “magical idealist” or a “magical realist”. He talks about the miraculous truth that is the quintessence of contemporary magical realism.
Early Origins and Theoretical Development
Novalis’ concept of “magical realism” could not be developed further. However, in 1925 the term was again used by Franz Roh, another German and an art critic, to refer to paintings that demonstrate an altered reality. With reference to magical realism he writes:
We recognize this world, although now — not only because we have emerged from a dream — we look on it with new eyes … (Zamora and Faris 17-18)
Roh continues, “This calm admiration of the magic of being, of the discovery that things already have their own faces, means that the ground in which the most diverse ideas in the world can take root has been reconquered — albeit in new ways” (20). During the 1940s and the 1950s, the term “magical realism” was used to describe the unusual realism by American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and some other artists.
The major figure in the conceptual genealogy of magical realism in the context of literature is Massimo Bontempelli, the Italian writer and critic. In 1926, he specifically names that art as “magical realism” which proposes to find miracles in the midst of ordinary day to day life. Some works by Kafka, Junger and Musil are later named as magical realist texts, though they were not appreciated as such at the time of their first publication. Bontempelli exerts an influence over both Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Angel Asturias, the two authors credited with the earliest works of Latin American magical realism.
Arturo Uslar-Pietri, the Venezuelan essayist and critic, applies the term “magical realism” to a very specific South American genre which is influenced by the blend of realism and fantasy as one comes across in Mario de Andrade’s influential novel Macunaima. In 1948 Pietri defines magical realism as a poetical negation of reality, as “the depiction of man as an element of mystery surrounded by realistic data or a poetic intuition or denial of reality.”
Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban writer, popularizes the trend by using the term “lo real maravilloso” or marvellous reality in “Preface to The Kingdom of This World” (1949). He writes:
Lo real maravilloso americano — The marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state. (Zamora and Faris 85-86)
The first sustained piece of literary criticism devoted to magical realism appears in 1955 when Angel Flores christens the term “magical realism” to describe a wide range of Latin American authors who share certain aesthetic similarities. Flores writes that in “magical realism we find the transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal” (114). He continues, “It is predominantly an art of surprises. Time exists in a kind of timeless fluidity and the unreal happens as part of reality. Once the reader accepts the fait accompli, the rest follows with logical precision” (116). For Flores magical realism involves the fusion of the real and the fantastic, or as he claims, “an amalgamation of realism and fantasy” (112).
In 1967 Luis Leal attempts to correct Flores’s overly formal definition. For Leal, “the principle thing is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds but the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and his circumstances” (122). Leal further writes, “In magical realism key events have no logical or psychological explanation. The magical realist does not try to copy the surrounding reality or to wound it but to seize the mystery that breathes behind things” (123).
Irlemar Chiampi, the Brazilian critic, is the first to develop a coherent narratological theory of magical realism in 1980. She emphasizes on magical realism’s idea of “naturalizacion de lo irreal” (28) that refers to the denaturalisation of the real or the naturalisation of the marvellous.
In 1985 Amaryll Chanady tries to distinguish magical realism from fantastic literature. She writes, “The magical realist text must display coherently developed codes of the natural and supernatural, the antinomy between these codes must be resolved, and a measure of authorial reticence must be in place to ensure that the co-existence and legitimacy of both codes is not threatened” (3-6).
The most elaborate critical anthology on magical realism appears in 1995 with the publication of Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. In this book Zamora says, “Magic realism’s most basic concern [is] — the nature and limits of the knowable. Magic realist texts ask us to look beyond the limits of the knowable” (498). Faris presents some new observations in magical realism as a literary mode in her book Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative in 2004 where she counts magical realism as “perhaps the most important contemporary trend in international fiction” (1).
Canonical Texts and Authors
When we take the popular magical realist texts into account, Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) is credited as a great work of magical realist fiction of the earlier period. Here the blend of the magical happenings with the day-to-day life is prominently visible. The novella begins with the protagonist’s overnight physical transformation into an insect. Kafka narrates, “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug… His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumstance, flickered helplessly before his eyes.” (1)
Jorge Luis Borges becomes popular for his Ficciones (1944) whose tales of fantasy and dream-worlds are classics of the twentieth-century world literature. Most of Borges’ tales embrace universal themes, such as, the theme of time. In the fictions of Borges, time is shown as a metaphor of life that often recurs in a circular labyrinth. This is a significant aspect of a magical realist work.
In the novel The Kingdom of This World (1949), Carpentier’s projection of a kind of heightened reality is shown through his presentation of the miraculous happenings as natural and unforced. In this novel Carpentier describes Mackandal, the slave who possesses many supernatural abilities. Carpentier writes, “With wings one day, spurs another, galloping or crawling, he had made himself master of the courses of the underground streams, the caverns of the seacoast, and the treetops, and now ruled the whole island” (42).
Gunter Grass, the German magical realist, becomes popular during this period with his remarkable work The Tin Drum (1959). Here Oscar, the protagonist has a scream of such awesome power that it shatters glass and can subdue all who hear it. He has the power to hear the unheard activities of insects, birds and animals.
Asturias attempted something similar by simultaneously creating and retelling history of the descendants of the Maya of Guatemala by blurring the distinction between reality and myth in Men of Maize (1967), the book which won him the Nobel Prize.
Later come Jacques Stephen Alexis, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) marks itself as a brilliant work of magical realism. The book tells the story of the Buendia family in the fictional village of Macondo. It is a vivid story of one hundred years passed by seven generations with memorable characters who share almost the same names. One Hundred Years of Solitude intertwines the ordinary with the extraordinary and treats time in a timeless fluidity that exemplifies the characteristics of magical realism.
Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus combines the mythical with the realistic; characters have supernatural abilities; and time is hazy throughout the novel. Isabel Allende is another powerful magical realist of this time. Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1979), Of Love and Shadows (1985), Eva Luna (1987) and The Stories of Eva Luna (1991) are distinguished magical realist texts. In The House of the Spirits, one of the characters named Clara has supernatural abilities like levitating, communicating with the spirits, reading dreams and predicting future.
Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1992) is a classic of magical realism with a distinctively African twist. The book takes the reader to an unnamed Third World city in the Nigerian landscape, the author’s own native land. Azaro, the main character as well as the narrator of this novel is an “abiku” or spirit child, who moves back and forth between the human and the spirit worlds. He denies the use of the supernatural as it is a part of reality for him. He says in an interview: “This is just the way the world is seen: the dead are not really dead, the ancestors are still part of the living community and there are innumerable gradations of reality, and so on. It’s quite simple and straightforward. I’m treating it naturally. It’s a kind of realism, but a realism with many more dimensions.” (Contemporary Authors 338)
Toni Morrison uses magic, folktales, and the supernatural in her novels The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987). Some extra-sensory knowledge or perception is given to the characters of her novels. Their dreams are described as if they are happenings in real life and the characters accept visitations as real.
Indian Magical Realists and Global Spread
Some Indian writers also figure prominently as magical realists among whom Salman Rushdie is unique. His Midnight’s Children (1995) takes the issue of the colonial version of the history of India. Here, he uses magical realism as a device to bind the Indian culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural interface. Rushdie’s principal use of magical realism in the text involves the treatment of supernatural ability such as, the telepathic power of Saleem, the protagonist and of the other thousand and one children born at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 (the date of India’s independence). Rushdie enables them with this ability to communicate with each other at anytime and allows the supernatural, the mythical and the bizarre to intrude into the natural, the contemporary, and the real without explanation or rationalization. It results in an idiosyncratic, culturally and politically aware form of meta-fiction.
Among the postcolonial magical realists, writers like Jorge Amando, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino, Milan Kundera, Peter Carey and Alice Hoffman etc. are also instrumental in making the trend more popular. Among others, the two names that have gained prominence as magical realist writers in the recent time are J. K. Rowling (seven books in Harry Potter series [1997-2007]) and Stephenie Meyer (four books in Twilight series [2005–2008]). Tea Obreht is one of the latest magical realist writers whose novel The Tiger’s Wife (2011) has become immediate success and a best seller.
Although “magical realist” works vary from one another in their structure and presentation, one universal theme in them is the use of the fantastical to highlight and challenge the setting’s paradigm of reality, rather than using it merely as a plot device. The detailed history of magical realism shows the unique fusion of beliefs and superstitions of the Hispanic conqueror and his Creole descendants and of the native people and the American slaves with the day-to-day lives resulting in a new perception of reality.
Works Cited
Carpentier, Alejo. “On the Marvelous Real in America” 1949. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 75-88. Print.
Carpentier, Alejo. The Kingdom of This World. New York: Ferrar, Straus and Girous, 2006. Print.
Carter, Angela. Nights at the Circus. London: Chatto and Windus, 1984. Print.
Chanady, Amaryll Beatrice. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Anatomy. New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1985. Print.
Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. Print.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Trans. Ian Johnston. New York: Tribeka Books, 2012. Print.
Okri, Ben. Interview by Jean W. Ross. Contemporary Authors. Vol. 138. ed. Olendorf, Donna. Detroit: Gale Research. 1993. 336-341. Print.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham: Duke Up, 1995. Print.