Magical Realism

“Magical realism” (or “magic realism”) has given extensive service to the attempt to provide an overarching characterization of Latin American writing, or to identify a mode of Latin American writing that draws a line between what is touted as paradigmatically Latin American and poor imitations of privileged models. This implies how Latin American writing might influence international writing in ways previously thought to be impossible for a literary tradition considered unquestionably and even irremediably secondary. The result has been, perhaps, the sometimes contradictory application of the term and its alacritous utilization to justify lionizing certain Latin American authors (Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez) and to provide a note of exoticization to First World writing. As a qualifier, “magical realism” has been used to explain any plot configuration of human behavior that seems an exception or contradiction or refutation of West European bourgeois rationalism as the dominant mode for explaining how the world and social relations function. The specific use of the word magical implies that such ruptures in the codes of the supposed usual represent a powerful access to phenomena that have hitherto either been ignored or repressed because they do not fit within prevailing explanatory models of the universe. Key here is Borges’s repeated aggressive assertion that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature, thereby relativizing its scientific rigor and liberating vast realms of counterproposals. Central to the debate over magical realism (called other things by other writers, such as Alejo Carpentier’s “marvelous real”) is the extent to which it is one vehicle for representing the conflicted relationship between Latin America and hegemonic Western values (e.g., only through acts of real and symbolic violence is Latin America seen as sociohistorically Western). Or, alternatively, magical realism is seen as a way of inflecting the material and imaginary ways in which Latin America—and, individually, the various Latin American republics— makes a sociohistoric difference. This sort of position is often seen as “exoticising” Latin America for international consumption. Concomitantly, magical realism may be the basis for a particular poetic use of the Spanish language for demonstrating with vivid complexity how Spanish in the Americas cannot be controlled by the paradigms of the Spanish Royal Academy that reduce it to merely questions of dialect variation. The substratum of indigenous languages vies with the superstratum of immigrant languages to provide unique linguistic configurations consonant with unique sociohistoric ones. Finally, the use of “magical realism” to describe a certain manner of non–Latin American writing raises the question of whether such matters are transferable between cultures on deep structural levels, or whether they constitute questionable expropriations. Yet there is no question that the term has been routinely incorporated into Anglo-American literary studies, as witnessed by Maggie Ann Bowles’s Magic Realism (Routledge, 2004) or by the entry on the subject in the Chris Baldick’s Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (4th ed., Oxford University Press, 2015).