Fanz Roh originally coins the term “magical realism” to describe a group of post-expressionist

painters. He used the term in order to emphasize the “magic” of the

ordinary world, the wonder of ordinary objects and how they can
look strange and fantastic to us.

Roh’s term as it applies to painting did not include magic or fantasy

elements.

Many Latin American writers combined Surrealism elements into

their own culture. Surrealism was a movement both in art and
literature based on “The Surrealist Manifesto” published by André
Brenton in 1924. This art movement explored how to unite the
conscious and unconscious realms of experience. In this way,
dreams and fantasy would be a part of everyday, rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.”
They used the theories of Sigmund Freud and this theories of the subconscious.1 Surrealists tried to
produce magical effects through artificial techniques: automatic writing, hypnosis and dreaming;
meanwhile the magical realists portrayed the real world as having marvelous aspects inherent
in it.2

Alejo Carpentier criticized surrealists, his former friends, for juxtaposing objects that would never
naturally be found together. He believed that magic realism is part of the natural heritage of Latin
America because of its geographic, cultural and historic uniqueness. Gabriel García Márquez
supports this view of magical realism as a technique particular to Central and South America, since
this magic is part of the landscape and cannot be relocated: “poets and beggars, musicians and
prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little
of imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives
believable.”

Gabriel García Márquez agrees with Carpentier and suggests that magic realism is a part of the Latin
American idiosyncrasy since it arises out of the Latin American experience, more as a result of
political necessity than as a result of cultural instability.

The term was later on used by Venezuelan intellectual Arturo Uslar Pietri to describe the work of
some Latin American writers. By the 1960s many critics and readers used it since fantastic, mythical
and magical elements had become a common feature in Spanish American fiction by then. He also

1
“Surrealism vs Magical Realism.” Ten Dreams Fine Art Galleries. http://www.tendreams.org/magic4.htm
14 Oct 2009.
2
María Cardalliaguet Gómez-Málaga. “Lo “real maravilloso” y el cine”
http://teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/search/viewer.php?id=initiative_09.01.02_u#a 14 Oct 2009
noted that the “magical realists” described the supernatural and magical
elements naturally, accepting them with little or no surprise.

Naomi Lindstrom defines Magical Realism as a “narrative technique

that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality.” Characterized,
she says “by an equal acceptance of the ordinary and the extraordinary,
magic realism fuses lyrical and, at times, fantastic writing with an
examination of the character of human existence and an implicit
criticism of society, particularly the elite.”

Another explanation of the term presents it as “fiction that does not

distinguish between realistic and non-realistic events, fiction in which
the supernatural, the mythical, or the implausible are assimilated to the
cognitive structure of reality without a perceptive break in the narrator´s
or character´s consciousness. Magical realism is a style associated with
Latin American fiction especially in the 1960s and after.”

Magic realism relies on a fusion of facts and fantasy in the service of a quest of meaning, instead of
just relying on isolated fantastic episodes or elements. Magic realism combines fantasy with raw
physical or social reality in a search for truth governing the surface of everyday life.

Writers look for supernatural phenomena in the natural world and in human actions and they often
turn common places into mysterious happenings. Reality seems to be changed, but the reader still
perceives essential truths as a result of this distortion.

García Marquez´ novels help to define magic realism and illustrate how it works. In Cien años de
soledad, a woman named Remedios the Beauty ascends to heaven grasping the bed sheets she had
been folding in her hands. Such beauty, García Márquez suggests, cannot survive in this imperfect
world of lust and greed. Remedios escapes her endless chain of male admirers by going to heaven,
where her purity best belongs.
So to summarize, Magical Realism has the following characteristics:

1. The real world has magical elements inherent in it.

2. Magical realism is a natural part of the Latin American cultural experience. It appeals to the
Latin American mind because of the combination of influences that accept magical, fantastical
elements as an ordinary part of the natural world.

3. Magical realism describes fantasy or the supernatural without surprise or transition; it is

accepted as an ordinary way of perceiving alongside the rational, ordered world.

4. There is no distinction between realistic and unrealistic experiences; both have equal weight
acceptance.

5. Magical realism seeks to uncover and visually display the truth that governs ordinary life, of
showing reality more truly with the aid of metaphor.

6. Reality is often changed but the result is that the reader perceives essential truths as a result
of this distortion.

7. Traditional elements of the novel are often violated—elements such as form, temporal
sequence, style, and subject matter. Magic realism--[is characterized by] the mingling and
juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic, bizarre and skillful time shifts, convoluted
and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and
fairy stories.

8. Garcia Marquez maintains that realism is a kind of premeditated literature that offers too static
and exclusive a vision of reality. However good or bad they may be, they are books which
finish on the last page. Disproportion is part of our reality too. Our reality is in itself all out of
proportion. In other words, Garcia Marquez suggests that the magic text is,
paradoxically, more realistic than the realist text.

9. Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality that can be expressed
in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles in closed or open structures. In
magical realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is
mysterious in things, in life, in human acts.

Name:________________________
Date:________________________

Period:_______________________

List at least 5 characteristics of magical realism. Then find instances of each of these characteristics in Pedro
Páramo.
Instance in novel:

(page_______)
1._______________________________

Effect/purpose:
Instance in novel:
2._______________________________

(page_______)

Effect/purpose:
3._______________________________ Instance in novel:

(page_______)

Effect/purpose:
4.________________________________
Instance in novel:

(page_______)

Effect/purpose:
5.__________________________________
Instance in novel:

(page_______)

Effect/purpose: