What is Magic Realism

This is the first day of the Magic Realism Blog Hop. Twenty bloggers are taking part, so when you have finished reading this blog post pop along to the other blogs (see the links below).  

On the 29th July this blog will be one year old. I started the blog as a way of ensuring I finish my magic realism challenge - to read a book a week for a year. And the reason I started the challenge was because I was told I wrote magic realism, but I didn't know what that meant. By reading 52 books, I hoped to have an answer. I deliberately read as widely as possible, both in terms of geographical origin and genre. So what have I discovered?

The first thing I discovered is that there is no easy definition and that there are a number of interpretations of what magic realism is. 

There seem to be three main strands of magic realism. The first is what one might call Latin American magic realism, exemplified by the works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In this form of magic realism, "magical" events are treated as normal occurrences in an otherwise realist world and are not commented on. This magic realism strand is informed by the coming together of two cultures in a post-colonial world: the western realist/rationalist (and dominant) culture and the "magical" indigenous cultures of South America. Whether the post-colonial context is essential is open to debate, but this mixing of two cultures with different belief structures has become so frequent a theme in magic realism, that arguably it is essential to the definition. Examples of this "two cultures" magic realism are not restricted to South America, but also include native American writers such as Silko and Erdrich, Jewish writers such as Alcala and even Kafka, British South Asian writers like Rushdie and Afro-American writers such as Toni Morrison. Arguably this definition also applies to feminist magic realism, such as that by Angela Carter and Virginia Woolf. 

Then there is the European strand. The roots of the European magic realism are in the surrealist and post-expressionist movements. The first use of the phrase "magic realism" was by art critic Franz Roh in 1925 when writing about the post-expressionist movement: 

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.

For me this definition is still important: everyday things having deeper-than-expected meaning seems to be a key element of magic realism. 

This European strand has an approach that is very different from Latin American magic realism. It is more self aware, so much so that metafiction regularly features in some leading magic realist novels, such as Life of Pi, or If On a Winter's Night A Traveller. To show that my attempt at definition is fraught with problems, some of the best examples of this approach come from outside of Europe, such as works by Borges and Murakami. And there are plenty of common roots for both strands. Franz Kafka is in many ways not a magic realist writer, he is too surrealist, but he is remarkably influential on the development of magic realism. Arguably he is the root of magic realism - it was his story Metamorphosis that inspired Marquez to write as he does. 

There is a third strand, which is what might be termed popular magic realism. This uses magic realism as a story-telling technique. The magic can be a way of showing the psychology of characters, such as in the Tooth Fairy, or of exploring alienation, such as in The Story Sisters. It can be used to show religious and non-rationalist beliefs that exist even in western society, for example in Fludd. Or it can simply be used to add a touch of magic.

Magic realism in all these strands questions the nature of "reality". In some ways it is unfortunate that it is called magic realism. In the context of our world, which is dominated by rationalism and science, the term "magic" often implies unreality. However magic realism allows the writer to draw a world where there are alternatives to rationalism. It might be better described as "alternative realism". 

Please follow the links below to take you to posts on magic realism from lots of other bloggers. And please come back here tomorrow and Wednesday, when there will be two more posts as part of the blog hop. And there's a giveaway too - a collection of magic realist e-books and a Kafka bookmark. See the Rafflecopter below. Remember leaving a comment on this post gets you an entry.