“Can a magician kill a man by magic?” Lord Wellington asked Strange. Strange frowned. He seemed to dislike the question. “I suppose a magician might,” he admitted, “but a gentleman never could.” Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
A couple of years ago I was at a Skype conference where the keynote speaker made a charade about “magic realism—which we all know is just fantasy written by a Latin American author!” The others laughed and applauded, but I did not. No, I did not laugh. It was more than that.
At the time, I was exploring the healing power of fiction. My editor friend who lives in New York recommended me a few books. So the best idea was to visit the British Library the next day. I did the same. It all began when I first met Sam, my fellow Bibliotherapist, and we found ourselves in reading rooms mostly on Fridays at British Library. We started giving each other books about career worries, the ups, and downs of relationships, fabulism, magical realism, etc.
It was a cool spring morning I was sitting on one of the wicker chairs in my garden reading a book Sam recommended. The lines I read caught my attention:
“Consider Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell a terrific novel about two types of magic: one a rational science bound by rules and algorithms, the other the wild, unpredictable power of Faerie. But even the latter follows rules. There are humans, and there are fairies; there is our world and there is theirs; some items, places, persons, and rituals are magical, and some are not. Now consider One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s chock-full of magic, no question. Flying carpets, ghosts, insomnia plagues, telekinesis, prophecies, premonitions, alchemy, unexplainable deaths and inescapable smells, blood that flows upwards, landlocked galleons, a woman whose presence drives men mad, a bag of bones that clack constantly together to name, just a few examples. But all this magic is random, chaotic, surreal, of no lasting consequence to any but those who experience it; and all these supernatural events are told in the same casual, matter-of-fact tone used to describe lunches and money problems.”
It might be easy to read the above paragraph and think “So the magic in magic realism is just a bunch of random, arbitrary weird stuff happening, with no consistency and no examination of the ramifications?” And, well, you wouldn’t entirely be wrong. But if you went on to conclude that this is just bad fantasy—honestly, you couldn’t make a worse mistake.
Italian writer and critic Massimo Bontempelli, who draws attention to the fact that literature has the power to create a new atmosphere by combining the real world and the imaginary world, is considered to be the first person to apply magical realism in literature. Bontempelli thinks that myths and legends should take place in the narrative process through imagination in order to reveal a deeper layer of reality.
According to Angel Flores, magical realism is an amalgamation of reality and fantasy. According to him, the first magical realist work written in the modern period is The Universal History of Vileness by Jorge Luis Borges. Flores, who thinks that magical realism is an authentic expression of Latin America, is of the opinion that the unreal is naturalized in magical realism.
New Wave Fabulism may be really what you write, read or watch if it’s similar to Magical Realism but is not Latin American. It is Literary fiction about the role of the imagination in our lives.
All the literature genres are distinguished by the writer’s imagination as well as achieved the aesthetic brilliance of execution. “Literature is classified according to a variety of systems including vocabulary, culture, tradition, and history".
Literature makes it easier for an individual to know the culture and the life of past generations, as well as allows us to know their preference over time. Literature has the power to reflect the experiences and goes along with the history from the aspect that they are both considered as the gateway to the previous generations. Literature and history are inextricably linked.
“The Truth must dazzle gradually or every man is blind” is a line from a poem by Emily Dickinson, which somehow explains the work of magical realism discussed by the current study. Magical realism is a combination of magic and realism to beautify the truth. Based on the literary works during the last century, the reader can conclude that magical realism is an item of fiction in contemporary literary works; magical realism is a part of literature that is mostly concerned with history.
Magical realism is a sort of fiction and a style of literature that makes a realistic picture of the contemporary world with the addition of magical elements. Magical realism is the magic that refers to life's mystery.
Magical realist works do not attempt to imitate the surrounding truth as the realists' works, but they attempt to capture the mystery behind objects since one of magical realism's purposes is to increase awareness of mystery. Moreover, magical realism is not fantastic literature because it focuses on the actual relationship between humans and their environment rather than on the development of imaginary entities or universes.
Many people mistakenly describe what they like to write, read or watch as Magical Realism, but in fact, that term is specific to Latin American narratives and includes their unique worldview. So, instead, to be more accurate, people use the term New Wave Fabulism if it isn’t Latin American or doesn’t dramatize that particular worldview and stick to the traditions of that genre. New Wave Fabulism also has its own guidelines, of course, but they are more malleable and more fitting to a larger geographical context. The defining idea: the New Wave Fabulist narrative is always about the role of the imagination.
In my opinion, there’s something special about magical realism. Its stories hover between grounded and extraordinary sensations yet steadily manage to leave profound marks on the reader. With everything that’s happening around the world today—horrible, wonderful, and surreal—this is a genre that feels very relevant.
Here are a few magic realist authors and their books that I would recommend to you.
Wishing you all find your own magical realism in the new year!
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The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
