MAGICAL REALISM OR FANTASTIC REALISM BY GABRIEL

GARCIA MARQUEZ

Magical realism, or magic realism, is an approach to literature that weaves

fantasy and myth into everyday life. What’s real? What’s imaginary? In the
world of magical realism, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and the
magical becomes commonplace.

Also known as “marvelous realism,” or “fantastic realism,” magical

realism is not a style or a genre so much as a way of questioning the
nature of reality. In books, stories, poetry, plays, and film, factual narrative,
and far-flung fantasies combine to reveal insights about society and human
nature. The term "magic realism" is also associated with realistic and
figurative artworks — paintings, drawings, and sculpture — that suggest
hidden meanings. Lifelike images, such as the Frida Kahlo portrait shown
above, take on an air of mystery and enchantment.

Strangeness Infused Into Stories

There’s nothing new about infusing strangeness into stories about

otherwise ordinary people. Scholars have identified elements of magical
realism in Bronte’s passionate, haunted Heath cliff (Wuthering Heights,
1848) and Franz Kafka’s unfortunate Gregor, who turns into a giant insect
(The Metamorphosis, 1915). However, the expression “magical realism”
grew out of specific artistic and literary movements that emerged during the
mid-twentieth century.

Art From a Variety of Traditions

In 1925, critic Franz Roh (1890–1965) coined the term Magischer

Realismus (Magic Realism) to describe the work of German artists who
depicted routine subjects with eerie detachment. By the 1940s and 1950s,
critics and scholars were applying the label to art from a variety of
traditions. The enormous floral paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986),
the psychological self-portraits of Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), and the
brooding urban scenes by Edward Hopper (1882–1967) all fall within the
realm of magic realism.
A Separate Movement in Literature

In literature, magical realism evolved as a separate movement, apart from

the quietly mysterious magic realism of visual artists. Cuban writer Alejo
Carpentier (1904-1980) introduced the concept of “lo real maravilloso" ("the
marvelous real") when he published his 1949 essay, “On the Marvelous
Real in Spanish America.” Carpentier believed that Latin America, with its
dramatic history and geography, took on an aura of the fantastic in the eyes
of the world. In 1955, literary critic Angel Flores (1900-1992) adopted the
term magical realism (as opposed to magic realism) to describe the writings
of Latin American authors who transformed “the common and the everyday
into the awesome and the unreal."

Latin American Magical Realism

According to Flores, magical realism began with a 1935 story by Argentine

writer Jorge Luís Borges (1899-1986). Other critics have credited different
writers for launching the movement. However, Borges certainly helped lay
the groundwork for Latin American magical realism, which was seen as
unique and distinct from the work of European writers like Kafka. Other
Hispanic authors from this tradition include Isabel Allende, Miguel Ángel
Asturias, Laura Esquivel, Elena Garro, Rómulo Gallegos, Gabriel García
Márquez, and Juan Rulfo.

Extraordinary Circumstances Were Expected

"Surrealism runs through the streets," Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014)

said in an interview with The Atlantic. García Márquez shunned the term
“magical realism” because he believed that extraordinary circumstances
were an expected part of South American life in his native Columbia. To
sample his magical-but-real writing, begin with the short “A Very Old Man
with Enormous Wings" and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World.”

An International Trend

Today, magical realism is viewed as an international trend, finding

expression in many countries and cultures. Book reviewers, booksellers,
literary agents, publicists, and authors themselves have embraced the label
as a way to describe works that infuse realistic scenes with fantasy and
legend. Elements of magical realism can be found in writings by Kate
Atkinson, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman, Günter Grass, Mark
Helprin, Alice Hoffman, Abe Kobo, Haruki Murakami, Toni Morrison,
Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, and countless other authors around the
world.

6 Key Characteristics of Magical Realism

It’s easy to confuse magical realism with similar forms of imaginative

writing. However, fairy tales are not magical realism. Neither are horror
stories, ghost stories, science fiction, dystopian fiction, paranormal fiction,
absurdist literature, and sword and sorcery fantasy. To fall within the
tradition of magical realism, the writing must have most, if not all, of these
six characteristics:

1. Situations and Events That Defy Logic: In Laura Esquivel’s

lighthearted novel, Like Water for Chocolate, a woman forbidden to marry
pours magic into food. In Beloved, American author Toni Morrison spins a
darker tale: An escaped slave moves into a house haunted by the ghost of
an infant who died long ago. These stories are very different, yet both are
set in a world where truly anything can happen.

2. Myths and Legends: Much of the strangeness in magic realism derives

from folklore, religious parables, allegories, and superstitions. An abiku — a
West African spirit child — narrates The Famished Road by Ben Okri.
Often legends from divergent places and times are juxtaposed to create
startling anachronisms and dense, complex stories. In A Man Was Going
Down The Road, Georgian author Otar Chiladze merges an ancient Greek
myth with the devastating events and tumultuous history of his Eurasian
homeland near the Black Sea.

3. Historic Context and Societal Concerns: Real world political events

and social movements entwine with fantasy to explore issues such as
racism, sexism, intolerance, and other human failings. Midnight’s
Children by Salman Rushdie is the saga of a man born at the moment of
India’s independence. Rushdie’s character is telepathically linked with a
thousand magical children born at the same hour and his life mirrors key
events of his country.
4. Distorted Time and Sequence: In magical realism, characters may
move backward, leap forward, or zigzag between the past and the future.
Notice how Gabriel García Márquez treats time in his 1967 novel, Cien
Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude). Sudden shifts in
narrative and the omnipresence of ghosts and premonitions leave the
reader with the sense that events cycle through an endless loop.

5. Real World Settings: Magic realism is not about space explorers or

wizards; Star Wars and Harry Potter are not examples of the approach.
Writing for The Telegraph, Salman Rushdie noted that “the magic in magic
realism has deep roots in the real.” Despite the extraordinary events in their
lives, the characters are ordinary people who live in recognizable places.

6. Matter-of-Fact Tone: The most characteristic feature of magical realism

is the dispassionate narrative voice. Bizarre events are described in an
offhand manner. Characters do not question the surreal situations they find
themselves in. For example, in the short book, Our Lives Became
Unmanageable, a narrator plays down the drama of her husband's
vanishing: “…the Gifford who stood before me, palms outstretched, was no
more than a ripple in the atmosphere, a mirage in a gray suit and striped
silk tie, and when I reached again, the suit evaporated, leaving only the
purple sheen of his lungs and the pink, pulsing thing I'd mistaken for a rose.
It was, of course, only his heart.”

Doesn’t Always Fit Into a Tidy Box

Literature, like visual art, doesn’t always fit into a tidy box. When Nobel
Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro published The Buried Giant, book reviewers
scrambled to identify the genre. The story appears to be a fantasy because
it unfolds in a world of dragons and ogres. However, the narration is
dispassionate and the fairy tale elements are understated: “But such
monsters were not cause for astonishment … there was so much else to
worry about.”

Is The Buried Giant pure fantasy, or has Ishiguro entered the realm of
magical realism? Perhaps books like this belong in genres all their own.
“There’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in
reality” — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1927-2014

Sometimes, life is stranger than fiction, but that doesn't make it any
less real. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote about the kind of life that
challenges our ideas of reality, yet it finds resonance with people the world
over. Five Pakistani writers and poets reflect on what Marquez, the great
Spanish language writer of our times who died on April 17 aged 87, meant
for us and them.

‘You can reject him, but you cannot ignore him’ — Mirza Athar Baig

Gabo is no more. Realism wins but his magic is eternal. No literary

term has perhaps been so widely talked about and used, often carelessly,
as magical realism, the narrative trope Marquez’s fiction has come to be
branded with.Unlike its thematic predecessors in the stockpile of the
modern poetics of fiction, like surrealism, absurdism, anti-realism and so
on, magical realism is immediately paradoxical, evoking a giddy feeling of
the incredibly credible. Marquez’s dizzying narrative strain, which emerges
in One Hundred Years of Solitude, runs through In Evil Hour, unleashing
monstrous patriarchs, and continues as Love in the Time of Cholera and
blooms but never decays in Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

Like an impossible swing in an undulating bolero, or a sudden

unbelievable halt in the staccato movements of a tango, the writings of
Marquez dance through the paradox of human existence. Everything arises
from the solitude of a remote Colombian village but, like all great art, his
fiction discovers the universal in the particular. His stark portrayal of the
outrageous acts of barbarity, perpetuated by sleazy power maniacs, his
unflinching humanism, and his deeply sensual eroticism, embedded in the
throbbing rhythms and vibrant colours of his soil, transcend through the
breathtaking craft of his storytelling.

How the art and craft of a literary genius like Gabriel Garcia Marquez
comes to influence the creative solitude of generations of other writers is a
difficult question to answer. Perhaps, while sharing the ecstasy of the
enraptured readers, the writer-self is thrown into an existential and creative
crisis by its encounter with the staggering originality of a master. Literary
assumptions and creative habitus fall into jeopardy.

You cannot imitate the genius. Yes, you can reject him, but you
cannot ignore him. His most celebrated work, One Hundred Years of
Solitude, was such a violent intrusion into the complacent life-world of
many fiction writers across the continents that it ultimately became an
unforgettable personal event for each, with an uncanny feeling that “you
are not the same writer anymore.”

Mirza Athar Baig’s latest novel is *Hasan Ki Soorat-i-Haal: Khali ... Jaghein
... Pur ... Karo. He teaches philosophy at Government College University,
Lahore*

‘He is telling our stories’ — Zahida Hina

ON the map of 20th century writings the world over, Latin American
writers are the most prominent. And among them, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
is the biggest name, the writer who has recently left from our midst. If you
look at his picture, it looks like that of an owner of one of Karachi’s Iranian
cafés, smiling in the shadow of his thick moustache. And when you read his
stories and novels, it feels like he is telling our stories. You wonder how he
could be from Colombia and then you realise that it is fitting that he is from
a place where dictators ruled for decades, where they had their opponents
skinned and their speech silenced.

The eldest son of his parents, Marquez was left with his maternal
grandparents who enriched him with the wealth of their creative stories. It
was the magic of those tales heard in his childhood that spoke through
Marquez in such a way that he came to be known as a magician of words.
A magician, who, when he relaxes the reins, causes the rule of dictators to
span decades, and hearts of lovers separated for 50 years to sing the
same old songs when they finally meet.

Marquez started his life as a journalist and it was during this time that
his love affair with literature started. This love made him a writer who came
to be recognised in every corner of the world. His readers were labourers
and students, and the leaders of the world. He couldn’t get an American
visa but Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were proud to be among his
readers.

Chile’s great poet, Pablo Neruda, called One Hundred Years of

Solitudeone of Spanish language’s “greatest revelations”. This great
Spanish novel has been partially translated into Urdu. Many writers among
us consider writing on political concerns unworthy. But even in Marquez’s
love stories, politics cannot be removed from the narrative. He took pride in
starting his life as a journalist and said in an interview that “My books
couldn’t have been written if I wasn’t a journalist because all the material
was taken from reality.” He has left us and so has the hope that we will be
able to read other spectacular writings such as The General in His
Labyrinth and The Fragrance of Guava.

Zahida Hina is a writer and columnist.

‘We still wait to be discovered with our mundane realities rendered in

Marquezesque magical realism’ — Afzal Ahmed Syed

IT was Marquez who brought me and my wife together. Until 1982,

we were just formal acquaintances. Then I bought One Hundred Years of
Solitude from Thomas & Thomas, Saddar, Karachi. We shared it. It was
immensely fascinating from the very first sentence, which mentions Colonel
Aureliano Buendia facing the firing squad. The stories were magical, the
characters enchanting, and the world they lived in mesmerising. We were
transported and stranded in Macondo and lost ourselves there to live with
the characters in their agonies and ecstasies. Marquez captured our minds
and the wait and search for his other books began. Soon we found them.
We now had a lot to talk about: Donoso, the innocent thief who stole billiard
balls, the dentist who couldn’t kill the mayor, Balthazar with his bird cage,
the colonel to whom no one wrote, the artificial roses of Mina and the
torments of the 14-year-old innocent Erendira who accidentally put her
grandmother’s house on fire and was made to pay dearly through her only
asset: her body. When we read Love in the Time of Cholera, the
predicament of Fermina and Florentino seemed familiar. Every tale told by
Marquez was read by us eagerly and all had the quality of sticking to the
mind and transforming us into people who could understand the
complexities of the world more profoundly and more sympathetically.
 I came to know Marquez more intimately while translating Chronicle
of a Death Foretold into Urdu. My four-month-long uninterrupted immersion
in this novel revealed to me the depths and subtleties of Marquez’s
craftsmanship. The foretold honour killing of Santiago Nasar pointed out
the presence of some commonalities between the Latin American culture
and ours. The magic of peoples’ lives in Latin America has been captured
by the great fiction master of that land whereas we still wait to be
discovered with our mundane realities rendered in Marquezesque magical
realism.

If Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia had not entered our lives so

vigorously, we would have known only one world: the Kafkaesque world.

Afzal Ahmed Syed is a poet and translator. His latest work is the Urdu
translation of Mir Taqi Mir’s Persian divaan.

‘There is no better place to go than where [the writing] takes us’ —

Uzma Aslam Khan

PERHAPS there is no greater ending in the history of the novel than

the one in Love in the Time of Cholera. It isn’t original to pick this book, but
sometimes genius is what it is. The only option is to join others in saying it,
particularly when confronted with final pages like these.

As I look back on my relationship with the work, which I read some 20

years ago, I see that it was perhaps a turning point in what I wanted from a
story. Back then, I still wanted likeable characters, and Florentino Ariza, the
protagonist of Love in the Time of Cholera, is mopy and vain. The irksome
part for me, the 23-year-old reader, was not the number of women he has
sex with while promising his ‘true’ love that he’ll wait for her, but that he
believes in this ‘truth,’ and more, that we, the readers, have to bear witness
to it! Yet the writing is so lush and seductive, much like the river along
which the story unravels, that we begin to feel swayed. It is a beautiful
hypnosis. It tugs, and tugs again, and there is no better place to go than
where it takes us, and to stop judging the characters, because, as in all
breath-stopping fiction, it is not their likeability that matters. Something
deeper is tapped. Something — ah, Florentino was right — true.
Uzma Aslam Khan is a novelist. Her latest novel, Thinner than Skin, won
the French Prize for Best Fiction at the Karachi Literature Festival 2014.