FACT SHEET
English 307 * Shaping the Story
Spring 2014* Kenan
The Magic Realist Short Story
A working definition of Magic Realism (also called Magical Realism) might be:
Supernatural or fantastical narratives written using the techniques of social realism.
What is Social Realism?: Naturalism vs. Social Realism
Social realism, officially coming into bloom along with the Industrial Revolution
(Dickens, Trollope, Twain, Elliot), was deeply informed by the over-abundant
experiments of the self-styled “naturalists” at the turn of the 20th century (Emile Zola,
Theodore Dreiser). Naturalists strove to make a photograph of the world with
tremendous exactitude. Naturalists championed detachment (objectiveness), a stress on
the scientific method, and rudimentary ideas about the meaning of Darwinism.
Naturalists were attracted to the extremes of society: hard labor, crime, war, poverty and
disease. Some critics see this focus as a reaction to the High Romanticism of the earlier
periods, and have called naturalism “Stark Realism.” (“I am little concerned with beauty
or perfection. I don't care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle,
intensity. I am at ease in my generation. -- Emile Zola) Another key and important
element of naturalism is an insistence upon determinism – a denial of the importance of
free will, i.e., We are all cogs in a machine.
In the end naturalism proved too trying, too exacting, and too nakedly experimental to
charm most readers, yet the impact of these writers on the social realists was profound.
The social realists of the early 20th century would return to the realism of the 19th
century, but with less romanticism, touched by the sense of detachment and the stress
on science from the naturalists; an emphasis on psychology, history, the physical details.
An easy way to think of 20th century social realism is as “naturalism-lite.”
(Modernism also grew out of this reaction to naturalism.)
The Importance of the 20th Century History of Magic Realism
The techniques of social realism, when brought to bear upon the irrational, the
supernatural, and/or the unexplained, create a number of aesthetic tensions. Franz
Kafka (1883-1924) – though not the first magical realist – led the way in creating this
artistic collision. Consider “The Metamorphosis”: In this long short story a man wakes
up and finds that he is a beetle. Kafka at no time directly remarks on the absurd
fantastical element of this magical transformation. Instead he proceeds in his narrative
with detachment, modern psychology, science, precise detail, and all the other
recognized aspects of strong, social realist prose fiction – as if he were writing about a
green grocer going about his daily life. The very lack of acknowledgement of the
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fantastical heightens the awareness of the fantastical; he tension between magic and
science creates a new aesthetic space – a specific literary form.
Initially magic realism became important in the 20th century largely in places of political
strife and extreme social unease and injustice. The above-mentioned forced tension
became a tool for pointing out the extremes and the absurdities. The first recognized
Latin American magical realist novel, set in Haiti, is Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier's
The Kingdom of the World (1949). He would be followed by writers from Mexico,
Argentina, Chile, and other nations. The phenomenon took hold globally by the 1960,
and some of the world’s great literature (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, David
Grossman's See: Under Love and The Book of Intimate Grammar and Ben Okri's The
Famished Road) use this technique in ground-breaking ways. Undoubtedly the world’s
most famous practitioner of the modern form would be Colombia’s Gabriel Garcia
Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1969)
Magic Realism as Form:
Aside from the aesthetic tension between science and the fantastic, a key element of
Magic Realism is the use of the ancient fairy tale form in conjunction with social
realism. Fairy tales are one of the oldest forms of story-telling, and the more
accomplished Magical Realist writers incorporate those elements.
Fairy tales are a didactic form, and were always seen as utilitarian. It is a controversial
view, nonetheless a borne-out observation, that the text for most of the world's great
religions are almost all written in the form of the fairy tale: The Bible, Greek mythology,
Gilgamesh, The Bhagavad Gita, the Norse Sagas.
Bruno Bettelheim, in his landmark critical/psychological book, The Uses of
Enchantment, points to three critical elements:
(1) The power of the Unconscious and the recognition of the dark nature;
(2) The protagonist's isolation and isolation in general;
(3) The existential dilemma.
As a child psychologist, Bettelheim focuses largely on the famous and influential tales of
The Brothers Grimm (and the true French source of many of their tales, Charles
Perrault), and Hans Christian Andersen, but the observation can apply to any formal
fairy tale.
If you think of these three elements you will see that they can apply to Joseph from
“Exodus,” as well as Princess Elsa from Frozen (based on The Snow Queen by
Andersen); they apply to the story of Moses and to Gilgamesh and to the older lady in
Allan Gurganus’ "It Had Wings"; to Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Magic Realist stories are almost always plot-event stories, but even more important:
they are quest stories, and they are stories of the physical world (what Aristotle deemed
“outer” stories as opposed to “inner” stories --- “The Poetics”). The modern elements of
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character and psychology and philosophy serve to enhance and augment the outer world
of the story, to give the story deeper meaning and resonance.
Chekhov meets the Brothers Grimm.
In sum:
Magic realism:
(1) Treats the unreal as the real, never addressing the unreal aspect of the
narrative.
(2) Uses the shape of fairy tales to tell a story – a main character in quest of a
specific goal.
(3) Is almost always first an external story with strong elements of the internal.
(4) Is concerned with the dark nature of things, the Unconscious (we might see
it, but the characters in the narrative rarely, if ever, do), and with isolation.