Magic realism: what it is, characteristics, authors and works

Magical realism is a literary movement that had its origin in Latin America around the 1930s, although it reached its peak between 1960 and 1970, when it coincided with the generation of the boom Latin American. It was the Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri who coined the name of magical realism to the movement, in a book entitled Letters and men of Venezuela, published in 1947.

Years later, after a long controversy regarding the term, Uslar Pietri shared that that name had arisen from his unconscious memory, already that he had ever read a text by the German critic Franz Roh, in which he used magical realism to describe a pictorial style post-expressionist.

The clarification was necessary so that it was understood that there was neither a relationship between the two movements nor a shared objective or concept. It was not, therefore, an attempt to identify one thing with the other. So what does the name literary magical realism refer to?

What is magical realism?

Magical realism is a type of narrative in which the strange and the peculiar are presented as something everyday. Or rather, it is a narrative based on the observation of reality, where singularities, peculiarities and strangeness have a place within normality.

This reality is possible in a context: Latin America, in whose society they communicate, confront and mutually feed symbolic thought and modernizing technical thought, the fruit of a dizzying history marked by cultural juxtaposition, miscegenation and patent heterogeneity.

Uslar Pietri insists on conceptually separating Latin American magical realism from other apparently similar aesthetics. It even departs from those who see an antecedent in works like Arabian Nights or in the genre of chivalric novels. For the Venezuelan writer, magical realism is not a substitution of reality for an alternate world, as in the examples cited. Magical realism describes an existing phenomenon that the author qualifies as extraordinary.

The point of origin

Magical realism arises, according to Uslar Pietri, as a response to a descriptive and imitative literary tradition that dominated in Latin America, like the currents of Latin American romanticism, modernism and the costumbrismo. According to the author, these currents have not yet managed to take charge of the complex universe of Latin American reality. Instead, magical realism questioned "the escapist fantasy" of modernist aesthetics as much as the picturesqueness of manners literature. It is not that magical realism had been an invention, says the author, but rather an acknowledgment, a "portrait of a peculiar situation."

Characteristics of magic realism

From this point of view, some of the main characteristics of magical realism include the following:

• Part of the observation of reality.
• It incorporates the universe of symbolic values ​​of Latin American cultures, which he recognizes as part of that reality without appealing to a vertical gaze.
• He normalizes quirks instead of substituting reality for a fantasy or alternate world.
• The narrator does not offer explanations about the unusual events.
• The characters do not show surprise at unusual phenomena.
• He values ​​sensory perception of reality.
• It breaks the temporal linearity of the story.
• It exposes juxtaposed realities.
• He tends to develop metafiction extensively.

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The real wonderful

In 1949, two years after Arturo Uslar Pietri coined the term magical realism, Alejo Carpentier introduced the notion of the marvelous real to refer to the new literature that was brewing in Latin America. With this he openly departed from any semantic interference with the concept of European magical realism. He also departed from the prejudice according to which this new literature would have been a Latin American interpretation of surrealism.

According to the Cuban writer, the meaning of pictorial magical realism refers to the combination of forms taken from reality in such a way that they do not conform to normality. Surrealism, for its part, is defined as a premeditated creation, based on psychoanalytic literature, whose objective is to build a "feeling" of uniqueness. But not the real wonderful Latin American: "Here the unusual is everyday”Says Carpentier. Thus, Carpentier defines the marvelous as something extraordinary, which does not have to be beautiful or kind. How do you justify this concept in the face of the American literary and cultural linguistic tradition?

The writer points out that Latin America needed time to find a vocabulary that would allow it to express that overflowing reality, that baroque exuberant consecrated in its nature, in its history and in its atavistic and juxtaposed culture, and of which the marvelous real seems to be its continuation:

And amazed at what has been seen, the conquerors find themselves with a problem that we, the writers of America, are going to confront many centuries later. And it is the search for the vocabulary to translate that. I find that there is something beautifully dramatic, almost tragic, in a phrase that Hernán Cortés writes in his Letters of Relationship addressed to Carlos V. (…): “Because I don't know how to put names to these things, I don't express them”; and he says of indigenous culture: "There is no human language that knows how to explain its greatness and peculiarities." Therefore, to understand and interpret this new world, a new vocabulary was needed for man, but also –because without one there is no other–, a new perspective.

The debate between magical realism and the wonderful real

From the contrast between the terms proposed by both authors, as well as their view of the literary tradition, an aspect emerges fundamental of the literary context: the long debate in which it is questioned whether the concept of magical realism is equivalent to the real marvelous.

The researcher Alicia Llarena, in an essay entitled A critical balance: the controversy of magical realism and the American marvelous real (1955-1993), argues that there is a difference (and more), since in magical realism a phenomenological perspective predominates, while in the marvelous real an ontological perspective predominates. The first describes the plural reality; the second, she reflects on him to be inscribed in that plural reality.

Given that both concepts share an interest in the representation of said reality, the author understands the reason why some critics have proposed bringing both terms together in a syncretic expression: "marvelous realism" or "magical realism. marvelous".

The debate is still open.

Main authors and works of magical realism

Among the main representatives and works of magical realism, we can mention the following:

• Miguel Angel Asturias, Guatemala (1899-1974). He was a writer, diplomat, and journalist. He stood out for having drawn attention to indigenous cultures in Latin America. She is considered a forerunner of the boom Latin American. Among his most emblematic works are Corn men Y Mr. president.
• Alejo Carpentier, Cuba (1904-1980). He was a writer, journalist, and musicologist. He introduced the notion of the marvelous reals and the Latin American neo-baroque. His works include: The kingdom of this world; The lost steps Y Baroque concert.
• Arturo Uslar Pietri, Venezuela (1906-2001). He was a Venezuelan writer, journalist, lawyer, philosopher and politician. He coined the term magical realism to the phenomenon of the new Latin American literature of the 20th century. Among her literary works are: The rain Y The red spears.
• Elena Garro, Mexico (1916-1998). Writer, playwright, screenwriter and journalist. Her literary work has been classified by critics as magical realism, although she did not feel comfortable with this label. Among his works stand out The memories of the future Y The week of colors.
• Juan Rulfo, Mexico (1917-1986). He worked as a writer, screenwriter and photographer. Her work is considered a turning point in Mexican literature, marking the end of revolutionary literature. Among his most important narrative works are Pedro Paramo Y The Burning Plain.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia (1927-2014). Known as Gabo, he was also a journalist, screenwriter and editor, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. His novel One hundred years of loneliness It is considered the maximum reference of magical realism. She also wrote fundamental titles like A Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The colonel has no one to write to him Y Love in the time of cholera.