Christopher Warnes
[1] The term magical realism has appeared in print with increasing frequency over the past few decades.It can now be found in a vast number of university course descriptions, dissertations and academic articles, and it has received notable coverage in the popular press.Even the advertising industry has recently begun to take an interest in the term, though it long ago learned how to capitalize on magical realist visual techniques in its quest for ever more novel ways of marketing products.The main force of the attraction seems to be that the term’s distinctive oxymoronic nature suggests a numinous quality to the everyday, and it thus promises somehow to reconcile the modern, rational, disenchanted subject of the West with forgotten but recoverable spiritual realities.
[2] In the domain of literary studies this popularity has not been matched by any certainty over what magical realism actually is, and scholars new to the field are likely to be confronted by a number of contradictory attitudes towards the term.One eminent critic has referred to magical realism as the “literary language of the emergent postcolonial world”, while another has called it “little more than a brand name for exoticism”.It can be “a major, perhaps the major, component of postmodernist fiction”, or it can be “a possible alternative to the narrative logic of contemporary postmodernism”.Magical realism has by turns been praised for founding a new multicultural artistic reality and denigrated as dangerous and shallow.It has even been accused of being underpinned by pernicious — even racist—ideologies.While such discrepancies are partly to be accounted for by ideological differences, as a critical term magical realism has, until recently, lacked widespread definitional and theoretical legitimacy.
[3] Some critics have responded to this state of affairs by suggesting that we ought to do away with the term magical realism altogether.The problem with such a suggestion, even if it were possible to implement, is that it ignores the fact that the tenacity of the term is due in large measure to its explanatory value.There is a growing corpus of literary works that draws upon the conventions of both realism and fantasy or folktale, yet does so in such a way that neither of these two realms is able to assert a greater claim to truth than the other.This capacity to resolve the tension between two discursive systems usually thought of as mutually exclusive must constitute the starting point for any inquiry into magical realism.A brief survey of canonical magical realist texts — Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Laura Esquival’s Like Water for Chocolate, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, for example — will reveal that what these otherwise different texts all have in common is that each treats the supernatural as if it were a perfectly acceptable and understandable aspect of everyday life.As Rushdie says, talking of García Márquez, “impossible things happen constantly and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun”.A basic definition of magical realism, then, sees it as a mode of narration that naturalizes the supernatural that is to say, a mode in which real and fantastic, natural and supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of rigorous equivalence — neither has a greater claim to truth or referentiality.