Magical realism
Magical realism, magic realism, or marvellous realism is a style or genre of fiction and art that presents a realistic view of the world while incorporating magical elements, often blurring the lines between speculation and reality. Magical realism is the most commonly used of the three terms, and refers to literature, in particular, with magical or supernatural phenomena presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting, and is commonly found in novels and dramatic performances. In his article "Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature", Luis Leal explains the difference between magic literature and magical realism, stating that, "Magical realism is not magic literature either. Its aim, unlike that of magic, is to express emotions, not to evoke them." Despite including certain magic elements, it is generally considered to be a different genre from fantasy because magical realism uses a substantial amount of realistic detail and employs magical elements to make a point about reality, while fantasy stories are often separated from reality. The two are also distinguished in that magical realism is closer to literary fiction than to fantasy, which is instead a type of genre fiction. Magical realism is often seen as an amalgamation of real and magical elements that produces a more inclusive writing form than either literary realism or fantasy.
Description
The term magic realism is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous, and Matthew Strecher defines it as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe." The term and its wide definition can often become confused, as many writers are categorized as magical realists. The term was influenced by a German and Italian painting style of the 1920s which were given the same name. In The Art of Fiction, British novelist and critic David Lodge defines magic realism: "when marvellous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative—is an effect especially associated with contemporary Latin American fiction but it is also encountered in novels from other continents, such as those of Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. All these writers have lived through great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism", citing Kundera's 1979 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as an exemplar." Michiko Kakutani writes that "The transactions between the extraordinary and the mundane that occur in so much Latin American fiction are not merely a literary technique, but also a mirror of a reality in which the fantastic is frequently part of everyday life." Magical realism often mixes history and fantasy, as in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in which the children born at midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment of India's independence, are telepathically linked.Irene Guenther tackles the German roots of the term, which first began alongside the alternative label "Neue Sachlichkeit", or "New Objectivity", and explicates how an earlier magic realist art is related to a later magic realist literature. Meanwhile, and despite Guenther's observations on the term's germanic origin, magical realism is often associated with Latin-American literature, including founders of the genre, particularly the authors Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Elena Garro, Carrión Grimes, Mireya Robles, Rómulo Gallegos, Alejo Carpentier and Arturo Uslar Pietri. In English literature, its chief exponents include Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Alice Hoffman, Louis De Bernieres, Nick Joaquin, and Nicola Barker. In Russian literature, key proponents include Mikhail Bulgakov, Soviet dissident Andrei Sinyavsky and the playwright Nina Sadur. In Bengali literature, prominent writers of magic realism include Nabarun Bhattacharya, Akhteruzzaman Elias, Shahidul Zahir, Jibanananda Das and Syed Waliullah. In Kannada literature, the writers Shivaram Karanth and Devanur Mahadeva have infused magical realism in their most prominent works. In Japanese literature, one of the most important authors of this genre is Haruki Murakami. In Chinese literature the best-known writer of the style is Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature for his "hallucinatory realism". In Polish literature, magic realism is represented by Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature.
Etymology and literary origins
Precursors
19th-century Romantic writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Nikolai Gogol, especially in their fairy tales and short stories, have been credited with originating a trend within Romanticism that contained "a European magical realism where the realms of fantasy are continuously encroaching and populating the realms of the real". In the words of Anatoly Lunacharsky:Unlike other romantics, Hoffmann was a satirist. He saw the reality surrounding him with unusual keenness, and in this sense he was one of the first and sharpest realists. The smallest details of everyday life, funny features in the people around him with extraordinary honesty were noticed by him. In this sense, his works are a whole mountain of delightfully sketched caricatures of reality. But he was not limited to them. Often he created nightmares similar to Gogol's Portrait. Gogol is a student of Hoffmann and is extremely dependent on Hoffmann in many works, for example in Portrait and The Nose. In them, just like Hoffmann, he frightens with a nightmare and contrasts it to a positive beginning... Hoffmann's dream was free, graceful, attractive, cheerful to infinity. Reading his fairy tales, you understand that Hoffmann is, in essence, a kind, clear person, because he could tell a child such things as The Nutcracker or The Royal Bride – these pearls of human fantasy.
Philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev and poet Andrei Bely used the term "mystical realism" in the foreword to 1907's Philosophical, Social and Literary Experiences , in reference to a genre of literature that merges realism with mystical revelation, particularly noting its emphasis on the writer's own spiritual understanding, rather than established dogma. The pair note the later works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, particularly Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov's storyline in The Brothers Karamazov, as an example of this style, arguing that Ivan's relationship with Smerdyakov and the devil go "beyond reality and instead exists within a more abstract and metaphysical realm". They also note similar divine features between Stavrogin and Shatov in Demons, the protagonist and Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment and the protagonist and Nastasya Filippovna and Rogozhin in The Idiot Other authors discussed include Gogol, Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy. Academic Ceylan Özdemir noted this concept of "mystical realism" not as synonymous with magical realism, but as a style that precluded the more religious side of magical realism.
In her essay "Russian Magical Realism and Pelevin as Its Exponent", Alexandra Berlina observed that seven years prior to Franz Roh's coining of the term magischer Realismus, Viktor Shklovsky's essay "Art as a Device; Theory of Prose" discussed a topic "strikingly reminiscent". The essay largely discussed Tolstoy and his story Kholstomer and use of "the estrangement of familiar objects", due to its narrator being a horse.
In Serge Charchoune's 1932 article "Magical Realism", he notes his own work's use of symbolism, emotional depth and blurring the distinction between reality and magic follow Edmond Jaloux's definition of the magic realism genre. In his response to this article, critic Gleb Struve noted the works of himself, Gaito Gazdanov, Irina Odoyevtseva and Nina Berberova as "quintessentially portraying magical realism". Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita was called "one of the great works of magical realism" by The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists, noting it as a continuation of the style of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and a sign of a separate lineage of magical realism to the Latin American school.
Etymology
The term first appeared as the German magischer Realismus. In 1925, German art critic Franz Roh used magischer Realismus to refer to a painterly style known as Neue Sachlichkeit, an alternative to expressionism that was championed by German museum director Gustav Hartlaub. Roh identified magic realism's accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity, and portrayal of the 'magical' nature of the rational world; it reflected the uncanniness of people and our modern technological environment. He also believed that magic realism was related to, but distinct from, surrealism, due to magic realism's focus on material object and the actual existence of things in the world, as opposed to surrealism's more abstract, psychological, and subconscious reality.German magic-realist paintings influenced the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli, who has been called the first to apply magic realism to writing, aiming to capture the fantastic, mysterious nature of reality. In 1926, he founded the magic realist magazine 900.Novecento, and his writings influenced Belgian magic realist writers Johan Daisne and Hubert Lampo.
Roh's magic realism also influenced writers in Hispanic America, where it was translated in 1927 as realismo mágico. Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who had known Bontempelli, wrote influential magic-realist short stories in the 1920s and 30s that focused on the mystery and reality of how we live. Luis Leal attests that Uslar Pietri seemed to have been the first to use the term realismo mágico in literature, in 1948. There is evidence that Mexican writer Elena Garro used the same term to describe the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann, but dismissed her own work as a part of the genre. French-Russian Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who rejected Roh's magic realism as tiresome pretension, developed his related concept lo real maravilloso in 1949. Maggie Ann Bowers writes that marvelous-realist literature and art expresses "the seemingly opposed perspectives of a pragmatic, practical and tangible approach to reality and an acceptance of magic and superstition" within an environment of differing cultures.
Magic realism was later used to describe the uncanny realism by such American painters as Ivan Albright, Peter Blume, Paul Cadmus, Gray Foy, George Tooker, Brian Connelly and Viennese-born Henry Koerner, among other artists during the 1940s and 1950s. However, in contrast with its use in literature, magic realist art does not often include overtly fantastic or magical content, but rather, it looks at the mundane through a hyper-realistic and often mysterious lens.
The term magical realism, as opposed to magic realism, first emerged in the 1955 essay "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction" by critic Angel Flores in reference to writing that combines aspects of magic realism and marvelous realism. While Flores named Jorge Luis Borges as the first magical realist, he failed to acknowledge either Carpentier or Uslar Pietri for bringing Roh's magic realism to Latin America. Borges is often seen as a predecessor of magical realists, with only Flores considering him a true magical realist. After Flores's essay, there was a resurgence of interest in marvelous realism, which, after the Cuban revolution of 1959, led to the term magical realism being applied to a new type of literature known for matter-of-fact portrayal of magical events.