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All articles treated are collected in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community by (eds) Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris

Introduction: Daiquiri Birds and Flaubertian Parrot(ie)s

by eds

The first two thirds of the book’s prologue introduce magic realism to the unacquainted reader, while the third describes each article in the collection. First of all, Zamora and Faris respond to an excerpt of Flaubert’s Parrot by English author Julian Barnes, wherein Barnes begrudges the now-established clichés of magic realism: “oxymorons march in locked step – too predictably” (1) and patterns are obvious.
From Barnes’ argument spring the following ideas:

Though Latin America is fundamental, MR is an “international commodity” (2)

Though MR explodes in the 20th century, signs of it exist as early back as the Decameron

Zamora and Faris elaborate:

Magical elements aim to scrutinize accepted norms in politics, social behaviour, etc.

“Magical” assumes a Western non-familiarity, while the work’s cultural origin does not consider it strange creating a cultural gap in reading.

The book’s aim:

To make MR viable as a significant contemporary international mode and to accentuate cultural/political contrasts within.

To demystify MR’s focus on marginality.

What the book's authors have in common toward MR:

An exploration and fusion of boundaries and worlds, impossible to do in other modes of fiction

An extension of realism – explores the nature of reality and its representation – but also a departure – from patterns in traditional realism genres. “Magic” is normalized.

Some, to distinguish magical precursors from current literary manifestations

Zamora and Faris emphasize that MR devices “enhance the expressive potential of their chosen genre”, namely, that MR is a style and not a genre.

The Baroque and the Marvelous Real (1975)

by Alejo Carpentier

Carpentier defines the baroque and lists the abundance of places where one might encounter the style – literature, art, architecture, music and France, Mexico, India and Italy. For his purposes, the baroque is defined by a lack of emptiness, a departure from structure or rules, and an “extraordinary” plenitude of disorienting detail (citing Mondrian as its polar opposite). From this angle, we can say that Carpentier views the baroque as a layering of elements, which translates rather easily into a postcolonial or transcultural atmosphere. “America, a continent of symbiosis, mutations...mestizaje, engenders the baroque”, made explicit by elaborate Aztec temples and associative Nahuatl poetry. These mixing ethnicities grow together with the American baroque; the space in between is where the “marvellous real” can be seen. Marvellous: not meaning beautiful, pleasant, but extraordinary, strange, excellent.

Addressing potential confusion, whereas Surrealism deliberately aims to be strange – “a manufactured mystery” (104) – the marvelous real occurs naturally, clearly commonplace in Latin America, proven by the colonizers initial awe of the place and people. In order to communicate this spectacular gulf is a new, detailed language (both visual and literary) – the baroque – now encompassed in the then contemporary Latin American “boom” novel, which aims at “translating the scope of America” (107). The difficulty lay in expressing the “strange events” of real life, which Latin American 20th century literature accomplished.

Straying from the book’s emphasis on internationality of magic realism, Carpentier’s text clearly puts Latin America at the center of magical realism; though magic can happen elsewhere, it is an exceptionally Latino impulse to accept and normalize it.

Magical Realism in Spanish America

by Luis Leal

The text cites and challenges Angel Flores throughout, with whom Leal disagrees that Borges is the movement’s originator, and the 40s is the epitome of the style. Examining MR’s origins, Franz Roh used the term first with consideration to art, while Pietri is quoted here as being the first to use it for Lat. Am. literature. In concordance with what I’ve read so far, Leal agrees that MR has a magic that is naturally occurring, though hidden, in the real world: not something to which attention is particularly drawn, like in Surrealism, or that [the text’s world] exists entirely outside reality and therefore must be explained, like in fantasy literature. MR does not explain mysterious events nor escape reality; it simply confronts and untangles reality, with an aim of discovering life’s mystery.

Leal sees both Kafka and Borges as doing what MR characteristically does not support: creating imaginary beings or worlds, and/or emphasizing them. Kafka’s otherness in The Metamorphosis does exactly that: the magic is not normalized. Leal clearly insinuates that in MR, magic exists already in reality, irrespective of the author’s hand in it; Borges’ work doesn’t follow that idea.

The existence of the marvellous real is cited as “what started magical realist literature” (122). What is the theme that unites all MR writers, according to Leal? “To seize the mystery that breathes behind things” (123). Finally, as Carpentier expresses in “On the Marvellous Real in America”, a writer must heighten his senses to the point of “estado limite” in order to realize all levels of reality, most importantly that mystery.

Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers

by Theo L. D'haen

The major point is that magic realism can be read as a sect of postmodernism. A list of the latter’s traits is provided and noted for their connection to magic realism:

“Self-reflexiveness, metafiction, eclecticism, redundancy, multiplicity, discontinuity, intertextuality, parody, the dissolution of character and narrative instance, the erasure of boundaries, and the destabilization of the reader”; “permutation” (192, 201): past versus present, real versus unreal, etc. Birth around the 1930s, international renown, Latin American origins with global expansion.

Mostly focusing on Latin America, D’haen poses that magic realism breaks from the inarguable discourse of “privileged centers of literature”. MR is a mode primarily about and for “ex-centrics”, the geographically, socially and economically marginalized. Therefore, MR’s ‘alternative world’ corrects the reality of established viewpoints (realism, naturalism, modernism), a kind of revolution over socially dominant forces. Magic realist texts, under this logic, are subversive texts. Alternatively, the socially dominant may implement MR to disassociate themselves from their “power discourse” (195). D’haen titles this magic realist change in perspective, “decentering”. To argue her point, D’haen analyzes recent English language novels with privileged centers, focalizing and then displacing these centers using magic realist and postmodernist ‘tools’. Refer to text for various examples.

Latin America was the perfect locale and starting place for such literary subversions to a dominant power, from colonizers to dictators. D’haen proposes the U.S.’s reluctance at calling their fiction MR is a sign of being one of the world’s most “privileged centers” (201). A side note: D’haen refers to Borges as a magic realist on page 200, to continue the ongoing debate.

The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction

by Jon Thiem

Textualization is a motif central to magical realist, and further, postmodernist literature; however it is not common or easily rendered. It can be defined twofold:

1. Most literally, a fictitious reader enters into the story while reading it, making us, the reader, self-conscious of our readerly status (the main focus of Thiem’s argument)

2. The textual world intrudes into the extratextual or reader’s world

Metafiction, with its multiple realities and specific reference to the reader’s world, is paramount here. It explores the impact fiction has on reality, reality on fiction and the reader’s role in between. Good sense disallows it but ‘magic’ is the flexible topos that allows it.
So why all this emphasis on the reader?

1. Writers identify with readers, but ultimately are disdainful of them: self-loathing?

2. 20th century writers and readers share postmodern belatedness: the feeling of coming after the peak (of literature) and after the text is already written.

Fictitious ludic readers usually are victims and meet with tragic ends. This takes place once the fictitious reader advances closer to the author’s position, and thereby authority, deeper into the text (author-->text-->reader). The postmodern writer condemns escapist literature, that which the ludic reader reads (fantasy, crime, ghost stories), and judges those who read it to be incompetent active-readers.
However postmodernist literature is related to escapist, concerning readership. There are two modes in postmodern literature: one, commercially successful pop fiction, and the other, philosophy, better suited to intellectuals; a singular reading of the first mode will render a distorted or reductive understanding of the text. The fictitious reader is the hostage used to express the writer’s anxiety on this rather large issue.

Magic Realism in the Weimar Republic

by Irene Guenther

Germany was an epicenter for the birth of magical realism. How it affected the literary counterpart is less certain, as discourse on its art meaning is ambivalent and muddled. Further, Western audiences didn’t pay attention to MR or NewObj art at all until the 1960s.

Following WWI and the decay of Expressionism, a new art style emerged all over Europe that German critics Franz Roh and Gustav Hartlaub respectively named Magic Realism and New Objectivity (or post-Expressionism). Imperfectly aligned with the literary meaning, MR in art is a rediscovery and fastidious capturing of objects and of the mundane, so much so that the mundane acquires a “magic of Being”, a magical rationalism (Roh 1925); it is familiar and sober, a knee-jerk response to the grotesque, abstract responses to WWI. A valuable list of the style’s traits is provided.

However, the style is diverse, from conservative, sentimentalist right (landscapes and still lifes) to the quasi-surrealist pictures of Giorgio de Chirico (which sit closer to literary magical realism) to left political painting. This makes the style difficult to simplify. Irrespective of stylistic choices and whether or not they had political aims, there are commonalities:

1. The view closes in on objects

2. Themes from the modern environment and daily life

3. Extreme, polished detail which led to revealing a deeper magical layer

Neue Sachlichkeit responds to WWI devastation, and MR is official in 1931. The first New Objectivity exhibit, curated by Gustav Hartlaub mid-1920s, was paramount to development. Nazi Germany flushed out all of this, save the more idealistic, conservative artists; the creative community was hurt very badly, art to a lesser degree. Ortega y Gasset translated Roh’s 1925 text into Spanish in 1927. Within a year of its release, Buenos Aires literary circles were applying “magical realism” to texts vigorously. The mass European migration escaping Nazism brought intellectuals to Latin America, possibly Euro magical realism over with them.

The transition to literature can be seen as early as 1909, in Austrian Alfred Kubin’s illustrated novel. Here the two MR worlds might merge, as it explores the “other side of the visible world”, notably, through both positive and negative elements; uncanniness, or the shifting between reality and dream. Guenther does not explicitly state anything about art’s shift into literature, but does play at connect-the-dots (writer to writer). She also deduces that among the varied art MR’s, there are definitely commonalities with literature’s MR: most notably, the subversive feel that lurks behind external reality. Further, we can draw a major comparison between MR art and literature with their revolutionary status, the keen and dissatisfied eye through which the artist sees the world.

This precis is particularly long because I decided to read an article pertaining to magic realism in art. We don't have anything on it yet, but we should, so I feel all the details are necessary.