Magic realism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Magic realism (or magical realism) is an artistic genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting.
As used today the term is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous. The term was initially used by German art critic Franz Roh to describe painting which demonstrated an altered reality, but was later used by Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri to describe the work of certain Latin American writers. The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (a friend of Uslar-Pietri) used the term "lo real maravilloso" (roughly "marvelous reality") in the prologue to his novel The Kingdom of this World (1949). Carpentier's conception was of a kind of heightened reality in which elements of the miraculous could appear while seeming natural and unforced. Carpentier's work was a key influence on the writers of the Latin American "boom" that emerged in the 1960s.
An example of magic realism can be seen in Julio Cortázar's "La noche boca arriba," in which an individual experiences two realistic situations simultaneously in the same place but during two different time periods, centuries apart.
History
The term magic realism was first used by the German art critic Franz Roh to refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit. It was later used to describe the unusual realism by American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists during the 1940s and 1950s. It should be noted though that unlike the term's use in literature, in art it is describing paintings that do not include anything fantastic or magical, but are rather extremely realistic and often mundane.
The term was first revived and applied to the realm of fiction as a combination of the fantastic and the realistic in the 1960s by a Venezuelan essayist and critic Arturo Uslar-Pietri, who applied it to a very specific South American genre, influenced by the blend of realism and fantasy in Mário de Andrade's influentiafal 1928 novel Macunaíma. However, the term itself came in vogue only after Nobel prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias used the expression to define the style of his novels. The term gained popularity with the rise of the Latin American Boom, most notably Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez, who confessed, "My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic." More recent Latin American authors in this vein include Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel.
Subsequently, the term has been applied both to earlier writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, or Ernst Junger and to postcolonial and other contemporary writers from Salman Rushdie and Gunter Grass to Angela Carter
See also
- Latin American Boom
- McOndo
- marvellous realism (lo real maravilloso, réalisme merveilleux)
- Fantastic realism
- Hysterical realism
- Neosurrealism
- Postmodern literature
