Magic realism

With regard to literature, magic realism, or magical realism, is an aesthetic style or narrative mode in which magical elements are blended into a realistic atmosphere in order to access a deeper understanding of reality. These magical elements are explained like normal occurrences that are presented in a straightforward and unembellished manner which allows the 'real' and the 'fantastic' to be accepted in the same stream of thought. It has been widely considered a literary and visual art genre; creative fields that exhibit less significant signs of magic realism include film and music.

As used today the term is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous: Matthew Strecher has defined magic realism as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something 'too strange to believe'." However, it may be that this unbelievability stems from the Western reader's disassociation with mythology, a root of MR more easily understood by non-Western cultures. The term was initially created by German art critic Franz Roh to describe painting which demonstrates an altered, yet representational, sharpened reality, but was soon thereafter used by the Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri to describe a literary current on the rise in Latin America. Today, there are many writers whose work is categorized "magical realist", to such an extent that critics and readers alike are confused as to what the term really means and how wide its borders are.

Etymology

While the term magical realism wasn't introduced until 1955, the term magic realism was first used in 1925 by the German art critic Franz Roh to refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity), an alternative championed by fellow German, museum director Gustav Hartlaub. Roh considered magic realism to be related to, but distinctive from, surrealism due to magic realism's focus on the material object and the actual existence of things in the world, as opposed to the more cerebral and psychological reality explored by the surrealists. It was later used to describe the uncanny realism by American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists during the 1940s and 1950s. However, in contrast with its use in literature, magical realist art does not often include overtly fantastic or magical content, but rather looks at the mundane, the every day, through a hyper-realistic and often mysterious lens; the extent to which magical elements enter in visual art depend on the subcategory, discussed in detail below.

Development within Visual Art

The painterly style can be said to have begun evolving as early as the 1900s, but the year in which magischer realismus and neue sachlichkeit were officially recognized as major trends was 1925. This was the year that Franz Roh published his book on the subject, Nach Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (translated as After Expressionism: Magical Realism: Problems of the Newest European Painting) and Gustav Hartlaub curated the seminal exhibition on the theme, entitled simply Neue Sachlichkeit (translated as New Objectivity), at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Mannheim, Germany. In her article on the subject, Irene Guenther refers most frequently to the New Objectivity, rather than magical realism; perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that the former was initially the more practical based, referential (to real practicing artists) term, while the latter was used more in a theoretical, critic's rhetoric light. However, with time, the term magic realism was fully embraced by the practicing community, in Germany but in Italy too, under the guidance of Massimo Bontempelli (organizer of journal 900).

New Objectivity saw an utter rejection of the preceding impressionist and expressionist movements, and Hartlaub curated his exhibition under that guideline: only those "'who have remained true or have returned to a positive, palpable reality' in order to reveal the truth of the times" would be included. The style can then be roughly divided into two subcategories - conservative, (neo-)Classicist painting and generally left-wing, politically motivated Verists. The following quote by Hartlaub distinguishes the two, though mostly with reference to Germany; however, one might apply the logic to all relevant European countries. "In the new art, he saw"

a right, a left wing. One, conservative towards Classicism, taking roots in timelessness, wanting to sanctify again the healthy, physically plastic in pure drawing after nature...after so much eccentricity and chaos [a reference to the repercussions of WWI]... The other, the left, glaringly contemporary, far less artistically faithful, rather born of the negation of art, seeking to expose the chaos, the true face of our time, with an addiction to primitive fact-finding and nervous baring of the self... There is nothing left but to affirm it [the new art], especially since it seems strong enough to raise new artistic willpower.

Both sides were seen all over Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, ranging from the Netherlands to Austria, France to Russia, with Germany and Italy as centers of growth. Indeed, Italian Giorgio de Chirico, producing works in the late 1910s under the style arte metafisica (translated as Metaphysical art), is seen as a precursor and as having an "influence...greater than any other painter on the artists of New Objectivity".

Further afield, American painters were later (in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly) coined magical realists; a link between these artists and the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s was explicitly made in the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibition, tellingly titled "American Realists and Magic Realists". French magical realist Pierre Roy, who worked and showed successfully in the US, is cited in Guenther's article as having "helped spread Franz Roh's formulations" to the United States.

Development within Literature

The theoretical implications of Roh's magic realism had a great influence on European and Latin American literature, for instance, on Italian Massimo Bontempelli. Cited by Maggie Bowers as being the first magic realist creative writer, Bontempelli sought to present "mysterious and fantastic quality of reality". He argued that the function of literature as a means to create a collective consciousness by "opening new mythical and magical perspectives on reality", and used his writings as a means to inspire an Italian nation governed by Fascism. Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri was closely associated with Roh's form of magic realism and knew Bontempelli in Paris. Bowers argues that rather than following Carpentier's developing versions of "the (Latin) American marvellous real", Pietri's writings emphasize "the mystery of human living amongst the reality of life" and that he considered magic realism to "be a continuation of the ' vanguardia ' [or Avant-garde] modernist experimental writings of Latin America." While all of these writers tended to use the term (or some variation of it) for critical purposes and that term implied more or less the same thing, there are small differences amongst them that one will notice upon further research into the topic; for example, the term new objectivity was not embraced by the literary sphere, as magic realism instead does not carry the same explicit reference to visual objects. On that note, neue sachlichkeit is much more historically confined to the 1920s, while magical realism's usage extends to present day.

While literary magic realism is commonly understood to have originated from Latin America, the political and creative ambiances in European and Latin American were linked in the early 20th century; this connectivity and relation made for artistic sharing, which culminated in the confused and ambiguous origins of a rapidly growing magical realism. Latin American writers would often travel back and forth between their home country and European cultural hubs, such as Paris or Berlin. Alejo Carpentier and Arturo Uslar-Pietri, for example, were strongly influenced by European artistic movements, such as Surrealism, during their stays in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, one major event is considered irrefutably as the link between painterly and literary magic realisms: the translation and publication of Roh's book into Spanish by Spain's Revista de Occidente in 1927, headed by major literary figure José Ortega y Gasset. "Within a year, Magic Realism was being applied to the prose of European authors in the literary circles of Buenos Aires".

It is advisable also to take into account the influx of European, especially German, Austrian (leaders in the evolution of painterly magic realism), and Czech, immigrants who arrived in Latin American countries like Mexico, Cuba, Brazil and Venezuela, during the 1930s and 1940s. This mass migration - approximately one-fifth of the 500,000 who fled "the horrors of the Third Reich" - contained some literary luminaries who would stay on to become émigrés after WWII was over; Irene Guenther poses that these new Europeans might "have played a role in disseminating the term". These events contribute to the notion that Latin American and European trends in writing and art are indeed connected, and further supports the claim that magical realism does not belong singularly to Latino writers, but is rather a shared, universal mode.

Criticism

Determining who coined the term magical realism (as opposed to magic realism) is a controversial topic among literary critics. Bowers argues that it first emerged in the 1955 essay "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction" by critic Angel Flores. She notes that while Flores names Jorge Luis Borges as the first magical realist (some critics would consider him to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist), he fails to acknowledge either Carpentier or Pietri for bringing Roh's magic realism to Latin America. However, both Luis Leal and Irene Guenther, (referencing Pietri and Jean Weisgerber texts, respectively), attest to the fact that Pietri was one of the first, if not the first, to borrow the term and apply it to Latin American literature. Leal and Guenther both quote Pietri, who described "...man as a mystery surrounded by realistic facts. A poetic prediction or a poetic denial of reality. What for lack of another name could be called a magical realism."

The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier originated the term lo real maravilloso (roughly "marvelous reality") in the prologue to his novel The Kingdom of this World (1949) and is widely acknowledged as the originator of Latin American magical realism (as both a novelist and a critic). Carpentier's conception was of a kind of heightened reality in which elements of the miraculous could appear while seeming natural and unforced. Disassociating himself and his writings from Roh's painterly magic realism, Carpentier aimed to show how, by virtue of Latin America's varied history, geography, demography and politics, improbable and marvelous things are made possible. Critic Luis Leal further supports the claim that Carpentier was an originating pillar of the style by implicitly referring to the latter's critical works, writing that "the existence of the marvelous real is what started magical realist literature, which some critics claim is the truly American literature."

Literature

Themes and qualities

The Mexican critic Luis Leal has said, "Without thinking of the concept of magical realism, each writer gives expression to a reality he observes in the people. To me, magical realism is an attitude on the part of the characters in the novel toward the world," or toward nature. He adds, "If you can explain it, then it's not magical realism."

By the 1960s this phrase was being taken up not only by critics but by ordinary readers for whom it summarized a quality they had been noticing in recent fiction. In the broadest terms, the phenomenon that seemed to be spreading through a sector of Spanish American writing was the co- occurrence of realism with fantastic, mythic, and magical. A secondary trait was the characteristic attitude of narrators toward the subject matter: they frequently appeared to accept events contrary to the usual operating laws of the universe as natural, even unremarkable. Though the tellers of astonishing tales, they themselves expressed little or no surprise.

Although the term was first applied to literature of Latin America, it has become popular among English language writers as well. As recently as 2008, magical realism in literature has been defined as "a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the 'reliable' tone of objective realistic report. Designating a tendency of the modern novel to reach beyond the confines of realism and draw upon the energies of fable, folk tale, and myth while maintaining a strong contemporary social relevance. The fantastic attributes given to characters in such novels—levitation, flight, telepathy, telekinesis—are among the means that magic realism adopts in order to encompass the often phantasmagoric political realities of the 20th century."

In Leal's view, magical realism has a tropical (or llano [plains] or desert) context, but he says that the fiction of Julio Cortázar contains only "the fantastic", not magical realism. He distinguished as follows: "In fantastic literature—in Borges, for example—the writer creates new worlds, perhaps new planets. By contrast, writers like García Márquez, who use magical realism, don't create new worlds, but suggest the magical in our world." But for him, even Cortázar's short story "Casa Tomada", about a brother and sister whose house is taken over by someone or something mysterious, is an example of the fantastic, not magical realism.

According to Naomi Lindstrom's Twentieth-Century Spanish American Literature, magic realism is "a narrative technique that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality. It is characterized by an equal acceptance of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Magic realism fuses (1) lyrical and, at times, fantastic writing with (2) an examination of the character of human existence and (3) an implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite."

Emory University's "Introduction to Postcolonial Studies" defines the "characteristics of magical realism" as follows:

Hybridity—Magical realists incorporate many techniques that have been linked to post-colonialism, with hybridity being a primary feature. Specifically, magical realism is illustrated in the inharmonious arenas of such opposites as urban and rural, and Western and indigenous. The plots of magical realist works involve issues of borders, mixing, and change. Authors establish these plots to reveal a crucial purpose of magical realism: a more deep and true reality than conventional realist techniques would illustrate.

Irony Regarding Author’s Perspective—The writer must have ironic distance from the magical world view for the realism not to be compromised. Simultaneously, the writer must strongly respect the magic, or else the magic dissolves into simple folk belief or complete fantasy, split from the real instead of synchronized with it. The term "magic" relates to the fact that the point of view that the text depicts explicitly is not adopted according to the implied world view of the author. As Gonzales Echevarria expresses, the act of distancing oneself from the beliefs held by a certain social group makes it impossible to be thought of as a representative of that society.

Authorial Reticence—Authorial reticence refers to the lack of clear opinions about the accuracy of events and the credibility of the world views expressed by the characters in the text. This technique promotes acceptance in magical realism. In magical realism, the simple act of explaining the supernatural would eradicate its position of equality regarding a person’s conventional view of reality. Because it would then be less valid, the supernatural world would be discarded as false testimony.

The Supernatural and Natural—In magical realism, the supernatural is not displayed as questionable. While the reader realizes that the rational and irrational are opposite and conflicting polarities, they are not disconcerted because the supernatural is integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and characters in the fictional world.

Collective memory and the sensation of communal experience.

Major topics in criticism

• Difficulties with vague definition

It is worth noting that Arturo Uslar-Pietri, in presenting his term for this literary tendency, always kept its definition open by means of a language more lyrical and evocative than strictly critical, as in this 1948 statement: "What came to dominate the story and to leave a lasting impression was the view of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic data. A poetic divination or denial of reality. Something that for lack of a better word could be called magical realism." When academic critics attempted to define magical realism with scholarly exactitude, they discovered that it was more powerful than precise. Critics, frustrated by their inability to pin down the term's meaning, have urged its complete abandonment. Yet in Arturo Uslar-Pietri's vague, ample usage, magical realism was wildly successful in summarizing for many readers their perception of much Latin American fiction; this fact suggests that the term has its uses, so long as it is not expected to function with the precision expected of technical, scholarly terminology."

• Exclusivity to Latin America and Latin Americans

Criticism that Latin America is the birthplace and cornerstone of all things magic realist is quite common. Angel Flores does not deny that magical realism is an international commodity but articulates that it has a Hispanic birthplace, writing that "magical realism is a continuation of the romantic realist tradition of Spanish language literature and its European counterparts". And Flores is not alone on this front; indeed, there seems to be somewhat of a battle between those who see magical realism as a Latin American invention and those who see it as the global product of a postmodern world. Irene Guenther concludes, "conjecture aside, it is in Latin America that [magical realism] was primarily seized by literary criticism and was, through translation and literary appropriation, transformed". Nevertheless, magic realism has taken on an internationalization: dozens of non-Hispanic writers are categorized as such, and many believe that it truly is an international commodity.

• Magic realism as postmodernism

Wendy B. Faris examines in her article "Scheherezade's Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction" how postmodernist examples of magical realism are frequently more accessible than their modernist predecessors: "magic realist fictions do seem more youthful and popular than their modernist predecessors, in that they often (though not always) cater with unidirectional story lines to our basic desire to hear what happens next. Thus they may be more clearly designed for the entertainment of readers".

Comparison with related genres

When attempting to define what something is, it is often helpful to define what something is not. Much discussion is cited from Maggie Ann Bowers' book Magic(al) Realism, wherein she attempts to delimit the terms magic and magical realism by examining the relationships with other genres such as realism, surrealism, fantastic literature and science fiction.

• Comparison with realism

Bowers defines realism as an attempt to create a depiction of actual life; a novel does not simply rely on what it presents but how it presents it. In this way, a realist narrative acts as framework by which the reader constructs a world using the raw materials of life. Understanding both realism and magical realism within the realm of a narrative mode, she argues, is key to understanding both terms. Magical realism "relies upon the presentation of real, imagined or magical elements as if they were real. [It furthermore] relies upon realism but only so that it can stretch what is acceptable as real to its limits."

• Comparison with surrealism

Surrealism is often confused with magical realism, as they both explore illogical or non-realist aspects of humanity and existence. There is a strong historical connection between Franz Roh's concept of magic realism and surrealism, as well as the resulting influence on Carpentier's marvelous reality; however, important differences remain. Surrealism "is most distanced from magical realism [in that] the aspects that it explores are associated not with material reality but with the imagination and the mind, and in particular it attempts to express the 'inner life' and psychology of humans through art." It seeks to express the sub-conscious, unconscious, the repressed and inexpressible. Magical realism, on the other hand, rarely presents the extraordinary in the form of a dream or a psychological experience. "To do so," Bowers writes, "takes the magic of recognizable material reality and places it into the little understood world of the imagination. The ordinariness of magical realism's magic relies on its accepted and unquestioned position in tangible and material reality."

• Comparison with fantasy literature

Prominent English-language fantasy writers have stated that "magic realism" is only another name for fantasy fiction. Gene Wolfe said, "magic realism is fantasy written by people who speak Spanish,", and Terry Pratchett said magic realism "is like a polite way of saying you write fantasy". However, Amaryll Beatrice Chanady distinguishes magical realist literature from fantasy literature ("the fantastic") based on differences between three shared dimensions: the use of antimony (the simultaneous presence of two conflicting codes), the inclusion of events that cannot be integrated into a logical framework, and the use of authorial reticence (a deliberate withholding of information and explanations). In fantasy, the presence of the supernatural code is perceived as problematic, something to which special attention is drawn, whereas in magical realism the presence of the supernatural is accepted. While in fantasy, authorial reticence creates a disturbing effect on the reader, it works to integrate the supernatural into the natural framework in magical realism. This integration is made possible in magical realism as the author presents the supernatural as being equally valid to the natural. There is no hierarchy expressed between the two codes. The author does not provide explanations for the presence of the supernatural, because by having to explain it, the validity of the supernatural is undermined.

Fantastic literature, such as Kafka's short story "Metamorphosis", may be defined as a piece of narrative in which there is a constant faltering between belief and non-belief in the supernatural or extraordinary event. Bowers cites critic Tzvetan Todorov, who identifies the key characteristic of the fantastic as the reader's hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations for the fictional events in the text. Unlike fantastic texts, magical realist texts present magical aspects as accepted everyday realities. The ghost of Melquíades in Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or the baby ghost in Toni Morrison's Beloved who visit or haunt the inhabitants of their previous residence are both presented by the narrator as ordinary occurrences; the reader, therefore, accepts the marvelous as normal and common.

• Comparison with science fiction

While science fiction and magical realism both bend the notion of what is real, toy with human imagination, and are forms of (often fantastical) fiction, they differ greatly. Bower's cites Aldous Huxley's Brave New World as a novel which exemplifies the science fiction novel's requirement of a "rational, physical explanation for any unusual occurrences." Huxley portrays a world in which the population is highly controlled with mood enhancing drugs, which are controlled by the government; in this world, there is no link between copulation and reproduction. Humans are produced in giant test tubes, where their fates are determined by chemical alterations during "gestation." Bowers argues that "the science fiction narrative's distinct difference from magical realism is that it is set in a world different from any known reality and its realism resides in the fact that we can recognize it as a possibility for our future. Unlike magical realism, it does not have a realistic setting that is recognizable in relation to any past or present reality."

Major authors and works

Two of the major critical and commercial successes of magical realism are The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende; and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, both bestsellers . One Hundred Years of Solitude is widely considered the master work of the genre and perhaps the novel that has most shaped world literature over the past 25 years. Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel Laureate and author of One Hundred Years confessed: "my most important problem was destroying the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic".

Please see Category:Magic realism novels for a detailed list of authors and works considered magic realist in style.

Visual art

Magic realism which excludes the overtly fantastic

When art critic Franz Roh introduced the term magic realism with reference to visual art in 1925, he was designating a style of visual art which brings extreme realism to the depiction of mundane subject matter, revealing an "interior" mystery, rather than imposing external, overtly magical features onto this mundane reality. In Roh's own words, as quoted on a public resource page provided by professor Albert Ríos at the website of Arizona State University:

"We are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world, that celebrates the mundane. This new world of objects is still alien to the current idea of Realism. It employs various techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquility of simple and ingenuous things.... it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world."

In painting, magical realism (in this sense) is a term often used interchangeably with post-expressionism, as Ríos also shows, for the very title of Roh's 1925 essay was "Magical Realism:Post-Expressionism". Indeed, as Dr. Lois Parkinson Zamora of the University of Houston writes, "Roh, in his 1925 essay, described a group of painters whom we now categorize generally as Post-Expressionists." [14] Roh used this term to describe painting which signaled a return to realism after expressionism's extravagances which sought to redesign objects to reveal the spirits of those objects. Magical realism, according to Roh, instead faithfully portrays the exterior of an object, and in doing so the spirit, or magic, of the object reveals itself.

Other important aspects of magical realist painting, according to Roh, include:

• A return to mundane subjects as opposed to fantastical ones.
• A juxtaposition of forward movement with a sense of distance, as opposed to Expressionism's tendency to foreshorten the subject.
• A use of miniature details even in expansive paintings, such as large landscapes.

The pictorial ideals of Roh's original magic realism continued to attract new generations of artists through the latter years of the 20th century and beyond. In a 1991 New York Times review, critic Vivien Raynor remarked that "John Stuart Ingle proves that Magic Realism lives" in his "virtuoso" still life watercolors. Ingle's approach, as described in his own words, reflects very much the early inspiration of the magic realism movement as described by Roh; that is, the aim is not to add magical elements to a realistic painting, but to pursue a radically faithful rendering of reality; the "magic" effect on the viewer comes from the intensity of that effort: "I don't want to make arbitrary changes in what I see to paint the picture, I want to paint what is given. The whole idea is to take something that's given and explore that reality as intensely as I can."

Later development: magic realism which incorporates the fantastic

The Fleet's In! by Paul Cadmus

While Ingle represents a "magic realism" that harks back to Roh's ideas, the term "magic realism" in recent visual art has tended to refer to work which incorporates overtly fantastic elements, somewhat in the manner of Latin American literary magic realism.

Occupying a somewhat intermediate place in this line of development, the work of several British and American painters whose most important work dates from the 1930s through to the 1950s, including Bettina Shaw-Lawrence, Paul Cadmus, Ivan Albright, Philip Evergood, George Tooker, even Andrew Wyeth, is often designated as "magic realist". Some of this work departs sharply from Roh's definition, in that it (according to artcyclopedia.com) "is anchored in everyday reality, but has overtones of fantasy or wonder." In the work of Cadmus, for example, the surreal atmosphere is sometimes achieved via stylized distortions or exaggerations which are not, strictly speaking, realistic.

More recent "magic realism" has gone beyond mere "overtones" of the fantastic or surreal to depict a more frankly magical reality, with an increasingly tenuous anchoring in "everyday reality". Artists associated with this kind of magic realism include Marcela Donoso and Gregory Gillespie.

Artists such as Peter Doig and Will Teather have become associated with the term in the early 21st century.

See also

With reference to literature

• Category:Magic realism novels
• Latin American Boom
• Hysterical realism

With reference to visual art

• Fantastic realism
• Neosurrealism
• Romantic conceptualism
• New Objectivity
• Metaphysical art

With reference to both

• Surrealism
• Metarealism
• Postmodernism

External links

• Ten Dreams Galleries - A comprehensive discussion of the historical development of Magic Realism in painting
• The Magic Realism Time Capsule
• Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 8th edition. Heinle., 2004 (now superseded) Page 195, 261 ISBN 978-1413002188
• MagicRealism at TV Tropes