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Name: Indrani Jana

Semester: 6

English Honours

UID No.: 0304180140

Roll No.: 185212

Course: CC14

Comment on Magic Realism as a subversive literary force.

While magic realism is known in the literature of several cultures in several ages, the term was

first applied in 1925 by the German art critic Franz Roh and later in the 1940s by a Cuban

novelist known as Alejo Carpentier. He recognised this theme in abundance in Latin-American

literature. Unlike fantasy stories that are completely separated from reality, a story pertaining to

the magic realism genre remains within the realms of reality while taking additional aid of

magical and supernatural elements and phenomenon. Some of the most renowned authors who

use such a style of fiction in their works are Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, Carlo

Fuentes, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Among these writers, Gabriel Garcia

Marquez was one of the most predominant magic realist writers, especially in South America.

Rewarded with a Nobel Prize for his contribution in literature in 1982, most of Garcia’s works

clearly portrays the idea surrounding magic realism. 

One of the best examples of Garcia’s usage of magic realism in his works is the Chronicle of a

Death Foretold. With the help of the magical-real narration, he presents the nature of honour as a
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cultural phenomenon in the Latin American society as well as the numerous prevalent issues

such as racial discrimination which was a direct aftermath of slavery. Similar to most of Garcia’s

other magical realist works such as  One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, Of Love and Other

Demons in 1994, and The Autumn of the Patriarch in 1975, Chronicle of a Death Foretold too

has its literary roots deeply embedded into reality. The novella depicts a reconstruction of the

actual murder of Cayetano Gentile Chimento, who was reportedly one of his childhood friends,

in Sucre, Colombia, in 1951.

With a magical tone, the narrator explains the two different dreams that Santiago Nasar saw

about trees. Garcia does not assert the existence of truth and instead, presents the version of this

reality as a fact. As a result, he forces the narrator as well as the reader to, as John Dale puts it,

“to choose between contradictory versions of what constitutes the truth [in order to set up] a

dialogue between the past and the present”. Magical elements are presented by the narrator

amidst ordinary ones without registering surprise and causing readers to suspend disbelief.

Santiago saw himself “going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling,

and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered

with bird shit” in his first dream. This soft and gentle rain that Santiago witnesses in his first

dream really falls at the time of his death. As for the second dream, Santiago’s mother revealed

to the narrator that: "The week before, he'd dreamed that he was alone in a tinfoil airplane and

flying through the almond trees without bumping into anything." We see the spirit of magical

realism in these surrealistic descriptions of such ordinary events that do not influence the plot.

Further instances of magic realism in this novella include Placida Linero, Santiago’s mother,

who “had a well-earned reputation as an accurate interpreter of other people’s dreams.”

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The prominence of magic realism as a subversive literary force is seen from the 1970s when it

became an increasingly global phenomenon. The radically hybrid texts of magic realism

operated at the intersection between Western realism and elements of other cultures which often

included myths and neorealist narrative traditions as well. These texts frequently valorize the

indigenous voices that were otherwise silenced by colonialism. Thus, magic realist texts

performed the cultural work of literary decolonization while highlighting problems associated

with cultural interface. In Garcia Marquez’s “Light is like Water,” “household objects, in the

fullness of their poetry, flew with their own wings through the kitchen sky” which further

reinforces the metafictional moments which describe the characteristic real versus magical

duality of the magical realism itself. 

Apart from bringing forth the voices of the colonized, magic realism is also used to empower

female subjects in various texts. Theories of the relationship between the female body and the

land is often shown in texts with magically articulated connections between bodies and places

such as in So Far from God by Ana Castillo and Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.

Moreover, many recent magic realist texts have often been seen to implicitly valorize village

culture that exists in proximity to nature in contrast to urban corruption or alienation. 

The contact zone of two or more cultures that is interpreted by nearly all magical realist novels

often generates elements of magic in the narrative. This genre is considered to embody the in-

betweenness of beings, cultures, and discourses while constantly oscillating between the real and

the magical and thus obliterating the boundary between them. 

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Bibliography

Ahmad, Mustanir, Ayaz Afsar, and Sobia Masood. "Elements of Social Protest in Gabriel García

Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold: A Study in Magical Realism

Arellano, Jerónimo. Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America.

Bucknell University Press, 2015.

Leal, Luis. Magical realism in Spanish American literature (1967). Duke University Press, 1995.

Roh, Franz, and Irene Guenther. Magical realism: Theory, history, community. Duke University

Press, 1995.

Siskind, Mariano. "The genres of world literature: The case of magical realism." The Routledge

Companion to World Literature. Routledge, 2011. 367-377.

Sreeparvathy, R. "Magical Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Chronicle of a Death

Foretold’."