MAGICAL REALISM
"Reality is not always probable, or
likely."
----Jorge Luis Borges
I attribute no special value to the title “magical
realism.”
---- Fritz Roh
In 1925, Fritz Roh coined the term “Magischer Realismus”
to describe a new impetus in art, which eclipsed
Expressionism, and represented a return to realism, albeit
with a new emphasis. He adds that in this new realism “the
mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides
and palpitates behind it…”
Roh identified many artists as “magical realists.” Though all unique,
Roh provided a unifying definition for this group of artists.
• Magical Realism--We recognize the world, although now--not only
because we have emerged from a dream--we look on it with new
eyes. 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. This [art offers a] calm admiration of the magic of being, of
the discovery that things already have their own faces, [this] means
that the ground in which the most diverse ideas in the world can take
root has been reconquered--albeit in new ways. For the new art it is
a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the
fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world. (Franz Roh, Magic
Realism: Post-Expressionism (1925).Magical Realism. Ed. L. P.
Zamora and W. B. Faris. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. p. 15-32.)
De Chirico
The Disturbing Muses
The Child’s Brain
George Schrimpf
George Grosz
The Hero
Three Human Beings
Otto Dix
The Triumph of Death
From Art to Literature
• Fritz Roh’s 1925 essay made its way
across the Atlantic in translation, and was
appropriated by Latin American writers to
describe a literary form that seemed
peculiarly New World.
Connecting Art and Literature
• Irene Guenther states “This appropriation
of a pictorial term by literary critics has
been facilitated by the pliant meanings of
both ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ and the
ambivalence with which Roh first
presented Magic Realism.”
Lo Real Maravilloso Americano –
Alejo Carpentier
• “The marvelous begins to be
unmistakably marvelous when
it arises from an unexpected
alteration of reality (the
miracle)… The marvelous real
that I defend and that is our
own marvelous real is
encountered in its raw state,
latent and omnipresent, in all
that is Latin American…”
• “dictionaries tell us that the
marvelous …is extraordinary,
excellent, formidable. And that
is joined to the notion that
everything marvelous must be
beautiful,lovely, pleasant, when
the only thing that should be
gleaned from the dictionaries’
definitions is a reference to the
extraordinary…The
extraordinary is …neither
beautiful nor ugly… it is
amazing because it is strange.”
More from Carpentier
• “Everything strange,
everything amazing,
everything that eludes
established norms is
marvelous…”
• “After all, what is the
entire history of
America if not a
chronicle of the
marvelous real?”
•
Angel Flores
• “In magical realism we
find the transformation of
the common and the
everyday into the
awesome and the unreal.
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.”
•
Richard Prehn/ZXORB
Luis Leal
• In magical realism the writer
confronts reality and tries to
untangle it, to discover what is
mysterious in things, in life, in
human acts. The principle
thing is not the creation of
imaginary beings or worlds but
the discovery of the mysterious
relationship between man and
his circumstances. 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.
•
Appia
Amaryll Chanady
• “Magical realism
offers a multifaceted
fiction that
incorporates
metropolis thinking,
rejects some
components of it, and
also incorporates and
shapes the traditions
of indigenous
cultures”
•
Scott Simpkins
• “Garcia Marquez maintains
that realism is a kind of
premeditated literature that
offers too static and exclusive
a vision of reality. However
good or bad they may be, they
are books which finish on the
last page. Disproportion is part
of our reality too. Our reality is
in itself all out of
proportion. In other words,
Garcia Marquez suggests that
the magic text is, paradoxically,
more realistic than the realist
text.”
•
Fredric Jameson
• “Magical realism--is
not a realism to be
transfigured by the
supplement of a
magical perspective,
but a reality which is
already in and of itself
magical or fantastic.”
Kathleen Toelke
Patricia Merivale
• “Rushdie sees 'El
realismo magical, magic
realism, at least as
practiced by [Garcia]
Marquez, [as] a
development out of
Surrealism that
expresses a genuinely
Third World
consciousness. [Magical
realism] is a way of
showing reality more truly
with the marvelous aid of
metaphor.”
Thomas Woodruffe
David Mikics
• “Magical realism turns out to be part of a twentiethcentury preoccupation with how our ways of being in the
world resist capture by the traditional logic of the waking
mind's reason.The magical realists' project to reveal the
intimate interdependence between reality and fantasy is
shared by modernists, but magical realism and
modernism proceed by different means. Magical realism
wills a transformation of the object of representation,
rather than the means of representation. Magical
realism, like the uncanny projects a mesmerizing
uncertainty suggesting that ordinary life may also be the
scene of the extraordinary.”
Struggling for Definition
•
Magic realist novels and stories have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the
recognizably realistic merges with the unexpected and the inexplicable and in which
elements of dreams, fairy story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a
mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence. (Oxford Companion to
English Literature)
•
Magic realism--the result of a unique fusion of the beliefs and superstitions of
different cultural groups that included the Hispanic conqueror, his criollo (creole)
descendants, the native peoples and the African slaves. Magic realism, like myth,
also provides an essentially synthetic or totalizing way of depicting reality. It was
firmly grounded in daily reality and expressed man's astonishment before the
wonders of the real world,[and] convey[s] a vision of the fantastic features of
reality. (Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century)
•
Magic realism--a fantastic situation is realistically treated [discussed only in terms of
German Literature] (Macmillan Guide to Modern Literature, Martin Seymour-Smith,
ed.)
…And Struggling
•
Magic realism--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. (The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms)
Magic realism--[is characterized by] the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and
the fantastic, bizarre and skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine
narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories,
expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the elements of
surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. (A Dictionary of Literary
Terms and Literary Theory)
Magic realism--the capacity to enrich our idea of what is 'real' by incorporating all
dimensions of the imagination, particularly as expressed in magic, myth and religion.
(Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia)
Wendy Faris suggests five primary
characteristics of Magical realist fiction
• The text contains an “irreducible element of magic,
something we cannot explain according to the laws of
the universe as we know them
• Descriptions detail a strong presence of the phenomenal
world.
• The reader may hesitate… between two contradictory
understandings of events – and hence experiences
some unsettling doubt.
• We experience the closeness or near-merging of two
realms, two worlds.
• These fictions questions received ideas about time,
space and identity.
Making Connections
• Magical realist texts tend
to occur at points of
intersection – at margins
– at disputed spaces – in
zones which lack comfort
– in places where the
familiar coincides with the
uncanny; with the
accompanying frisson of
fear that comes with
suddenly being lost.
•
•
Margins exist between human
cultures and technology…
Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization. The two
elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman
architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the
rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the
mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines,
you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes
even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.
---Frederico Garcia Lorca
Frank Rosazy
…Between the mind and the body
• The human head is bigger
than the globe. It conceives
itself as containing more. It
can think and rethink itself
and ourselves from any
desired point outside the
gravitational pull of the
earth. It starts by writing
one thing and later reads
itself as something else. The
human head is monstrous.
• ----Gunter Grass
…Between the past and the future
Reality is a question of
perspective; the further
you get from the past,
the more concrete and
plausible it seems --but
as you approach the
present, it inevitably
seems incredible.
---Salman Rushdie
•
…Between Science and Imagination
On a day like today, my
master William Faulkner
said, "I decline to accept
the end of man." I would
fall unworthy of standing
in this place that was his,
if I were not fully aware
that the colossal tragedy
he refused to recognize
thirty-two years ago is
now, for the first time
since the beginning of
humanity, nothing more
than a simple scientific
possiblity.
…Between finite and infinite time
•
• "I am the one
who never has
unraveled the
labyrinth of
time.“
• ----Jorge Luis Borges
• (Image by the Great
Quail)
In Conclusion
• Magical realism is not
limited to specific political
or cultural identity. It
emerges out of the
anxiety surrounding
cultural interaction,
political unrest,
technological advances,
and the angst of human
uncertainty about the
universe.
•
“I Told You So” – Ed Miracle