The sense of magical realism is a natural product of literature. Letting aside literature, in reviewing the circumstances of nature of the world, it can be observed that there are a lot of elements that are expressing magical things which are also real. For instance, a sudden change in the weather at a same place from autumn to spring describes a phenomenon, a thunderstone or a sudden earth quick that demolished many long lasting things. A former grows a seed and it gives birth to a plant which becomes a tall tree or it brings many beautiful flowers onto its boughs. The appearance of Sun and Moon in a planned intervals all these happenings have a logic behind it.
Apart from the above, everyone has noticed that children complaint that they
On which grounds ‘Dr. Faustus’ in Marlow’s play ‘The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus’, was mending his life in urge for becoming a master of all things? How did the ghost of old Hamlet play its role in the play ‘Hamlet’ by Shakespeare? What role did the embroidery handkerchief perform in the play Othello by Shakespeare? How the female protagonists, ‘Sethe’, of Toni Morrison’s novel, ‘Beloved’ come into life after death? What were Tituba and Abigail doing in the whole paly ‘The Crucible’ by Arthur Miller? The answers of all these questions will bring many logical, illogical, rational, irrational, real, unreal and spiritual thinking into mind. Although all that is not magical realism but have a sense so the term magical realism is not a new statement, it is an old and a perfect genre of writing
By 1980s it had become a well-established ‘label’ for some forms of fiction. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Luis Borges (1899-1988), the Argentinian who in 1935 published his Historian universal de la infamies, regarded by many as the first work of magical realism. The Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez is also regarded as a notable exponent of this kind of fiction, especially his novel ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ (1967). The Cuban Alejo Carpenter is another writer described as a magic realist.’ ‘Experiments in magical realism affects and techniques’ are to be found in the fiction of Italo Calvino John Fowler, Gunter Grass, Emma Tennant, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie and Ben
In the South American storytelling tradition it is said that humans are possessed of a hearing that goes beyond the ordinary. This special form is the soul’s way of paying attention and learning. The story makers or cantadoras of old spun tales of mystery and symbolism in order to wake the sleeping soul. They wished to cause it to prick up its ears and listen to the wisdom contained within the telling. These ancient methods evolved naturally into the writings of contemporary Latin American authors. The blending of fantasy with reality to evoke a mood or emphasize elements of importance became known as magical realism, and was employed to great effect by Latin authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Rudolfo Anaya, in his work, Bless Me Ultima.
Latin American author Elena Garro wrote works such as "Recuerdos del porvenir," "Andamos huyendo Lola," "Testimonios sobre Mariana," and "The Day We Were Dogs." The short story "The Day We Were Dogs" (1964) uses events that are questionable to the reader even though the characters do not question. Because these events are questioned by the reader, it is not a Magical Realist story. This story might have been miss identified because it was written by a Latin author.
In the book Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, magical realism plays a large roll in the book. Magical Realism blends realistic elements with magical elements to create ‘magical realism.’ As a matter of fact, magical realism is used for a graphical explanation to access a better comprehension of reality; therefore, the readers can understand the connection from primeval or magical. In other words, fictional realism emphasis the elements of everyday life. Laura Esquivel effectively uses a fictional style to voice magical elements such as, Tita’s breast milk, the quail with rose pedals in the soup and the death of Pedro and Tita.
Louise Erdrich’s stories combine wildly dynamic characters with metaphoric language and elements of the supernatural to create tales that challenge the demarcations of cultural reality. In her stories “Plunge of the Brave,” “Scales,” and “Fleur,” Erdrich utilizes magical realism to help mystic elements seem more relatable to readers. The short stories, while otherwise straight-forward, are infused with touches of colorful language and mystic descriptions that, many critics claim, classifies Erdrich as a magical realist author. She uses magical realism in her stories to encourage readers to reconsider perceived ideas and question the determined realities of ethnic or cultural groups. By adding a few elements of the supernatural, Erdrich is actually inviting readers to expand their knowledge of different cultures and perceptions of the world.
The controversy surrounding Magical Realism makes the classification of what is and what is not Magical Realism very difficult. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a famous Latin American author, has written many pieces of what is generally conceived to be Magical Realism. Marqez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" fulfills every characteristic of Magical Realism..
Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2004. 24 Sept. 2012. Web. 15 Mar. 2014. 21
Leal, Luis. "Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature." Magical Realism. Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995: 119-123.
Magical realism was first coined by Franz Roh when he was writing about paintings. Artaro Ulsar Pietri was the first to use the term when talking about literature. Magical realism is also related to other academic fields such as philosophy, psychology, mathmatics, physics, and theology. Im magical realism, "the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts" (Leal 121). Viktor E. Frankl uses this concept in his book Man's Search For Meaning.
Magical Realism evolved only in the last century. Franz Roh was the first to use the term to describe paintings and the new style that had come about after the expressionistic era (7, p.15), however it was Alejo Carpentier who used it to describe Latin America's fanatastical writing styles (3, p.373). He felt that magical realism expounded upon reality and "was able to elude realism's insufficiency, in its inablility to describe an ex-centric experience"(3, p.373). Latin America, though perhaps the first to name the new writing phenomena, was not the only country to use it. In the course of this paper I will compare and contrast several different novels from female authors who evoked magical realism into their writing styles. These authors come from Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean, showing the wide range of history and environments. Feeling that the Caribbean alone may prove to narrow a topic for a style that has taken the world by storm, I felt it only fitting that other countries should be included the theme of women in the paper. Also, I selected Africa and parts of Latin America to compare to Caribbean writings because these two continents play a pivotal role in shaping what the Caribbean has become today.
Flores, Angel. "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction." Magical Realism. Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995: 109-116.
“I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them I don’t tell truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!” (Williams, 2009, p. 738).
In order to see how Magical Realism is found in this treatment, one must first consider at least one of the identifying marks of Magical Realism. Among the characteristics that identify Magical Realism is the feeling of transcendence that the reader has while reading a Magical Realist text (Simpkins 150). During transcendence, a reader senses something that is beyond the real world. At the same time, however, the reader still feels as if he or she were rooted in the world (Sandner 52). After the reader undergoes transcendence, then he or she should have a different outlook on life.
Magical realism is a term that describes contempory fiction. Magical realism blends magical or fantastical elements with reality this means that they put something that’s real, and is meant to be fake to be used as reality. It tells its story from the perspective of people who live in our world and experience a different reality from the one we call objective. Magical realism is used in a lot of stories, but it takes a role in one of the stories we read in class which was “The Handsomest Drowned Man”.
Magical realism is clearly present throughout Gabriel-Garcia Marquez's novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Magical realism is the juxtaposition of realism with fantastic, mythic, and magical elements. A secondary trait was the characteristic attitude of narrators toward the subject matter: they frequently appeared to accept events contrary to the usual operating laws of the universe as natural, even unremarkable. Though the tellers of astonishing tales, they themselves expressed little or no surprise.
'The formal technique of "magic realism,"' Linda Hutcheon writes, '(with its characteristic mixing of the fantastic and the realist) has been singled out by many critics as one of the points of conjunction of post-modernism and post-colonialism' (131). Her tracing the origins of magic realism as a literary style to Latin America and Third World countries is accompanied by a definition of a post-modern text as signifying a change from 'modernism's ahistorical burden of the past': it is a text that 'self-consciously reconstruct[s] its relationship to what came before' (131). The post-modern is linked by magic realism to 'post-colonial literatures [which] are also negotiating....the same tyrannical weight of colonial history in conjunction with the past' (131).