What Is Magical Realism?
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- Опубліковано 26 чер 2019
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Critical works mentioned in the video:
Chabon - "Trickster in a Suit of Light" (from Maps & Legends), arguing that literary fiction is a genre just as fantasy, science fiction or horror. James Wood's How Fiction Works argues the opposite point - that literary fiction is somewhat "superior" to these other forms.
Eco - The Role of the Reader
Fowler - Kinds of Literature
McHale - Postmodernist Fiction
Fictional works mentioned in the video. The one with an * before them would be good examples of magical realism, if you've never read any:
*Allende - The House of the Spirits
Brautigan - The Hawkline Monster
Brautigan - In Watermelon Sugar
Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
*Cortazar - "House Taken Over" from Blow-Up & Other Stories
Finney - The Body Snatchers
Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Grossman - The Magicians
*Kafka - The Metamorphosis
King - It
Lovecraft - "At the Mountains of Madness" & The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
*Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Rowling - Harry Potter
*Rushdie - Midnight's Children
Stoker - Dracula
Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
Wallace - Infinite Jest
Wyndham - The Kraken Wakes
Is The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath realist or not? That's debatable; lots of irrational stuff happens, but it's all supposed to be happening in a dream, and one might read the book as a very mimetic/realist treaty on the feeling of inhabiting dreams.
(You see how tricky these things are?)
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I think one thing that is missing is the following: realism, at least in latin america, was a specific literary movement, that came about in opposition to romanticism in late 19th BC. Instead of depicting idealized characters in romanticized situations, it primed to depict life as it was. It was also proposed a critical view of society.
So when the term realist fantasy was coined it wasn't exactly opposing to unrealistic or fiction. The idea was to use magic not to romanticize the events and character, but how magic or a magical event would affect the characters in a real world situation. Also, following the realism tradition, use magic to make a social commentary in current society, depicting situations that we live today.
TL;DR People are confused because the realism in magical realism is not a contra-position to fiction, but to romanticism.
That's a very interesting point, thank you for that!
Even I had a similar take on "the metamorphosis ". The story overall is really kind of a melodramatic family story. The insect element gives it that unnatural edge.
If one replaces the transformation with say a fatal disease it becomes a sad family story in which they r trying to survive when the sole earning member becomes incapable of doing so.
I once read an interview with Garcia Marquez who said that he was influenced by the German novelist Guenter Grass and his novel The Tin Drum which had also been turned into a popular movie. In the novel the narrator is a man who decided to stop growing when he was three years old. His voice can crash glass in large amounts and so on. This was written in the 1950's, when nobody had heard the term Magical Realism.
Yea, The Tin Drum is really great :D One of my favorite novels
People have been hearing the term magical realism since the 1920s.
this was an absolutely beautiful meditation on one of my favorite traditions in all of literature.
thank you for it.
This was an excellent discussion, I learned a lot.
This was of so much help! You explained it in a waaaaaay better than my teacher did! She simply confused us more about Magic Realism vs. Fantasy 😆! I loved that you mentioned the way genre matters in reading & perceiving the literary text! I remember reading a comedy without knowing it & couldn’t really get the humor and irony that made no sense to me and puzzled me cuz simply I didn’t expect that in first place 😆 I once read a gothic novel and was also puzzled reading about a character that’s already dead but still lingers in the house as if alive, I remember how that put me off reading cuz I don’t get the whole gothic concept of haunting and all. This all happened cuz I was less interested in knowing the genre and its tropes and commonly expected stuff! Thank you very much keep these enriching discussions up!
Christmas is when I've got the time to catch up with all the wonderful videos of the Bookchemist! :-)
I remember reading a realismo magico short story for the first time in a university Spanish class and it was so freaking cool, reading it in another language you aren't fluent in made it so fun, like did I read that right, what is going on - you go look up a word or two in the dictionary to double check, and realize yeah thing suddenly went crazy. When I later tried to read some in English it didn't have the same magic for me.
Imo, there are some differences between fantastic literature (for example Borges or Cortázar's short story that you mentioned) and magical realism (García Márquez, Rulfo, etc). "Introduction à la littérature fantastique" by Todorov is a must read for this distinction. It's all about the nuances and the way the "fantastic" element is introduced.
Great video!
Sure but, is Cortazar and Borges fiction really fantastic? Leaving aside the fact that the fantastic in Todorov's original distinction is a historically bound genre that should not exist in the 20th century (most scholars tend to ignore this point, possibly for good reasons), it doesn't seem to me like, say, the supernatural elements in stories like "There Are More Things," "Axolotl," "House Taken Over" etc are really balanced between uncanny and marvelous. They all seem pretty unquestionably marvelous to me! But it's not like I've given this a huge amount of thought, so do tell me what you think!
As Brian McHale has already pointed out, Todorov's definition of fantastic is limited but who says that we must discuss fantastic only in Todorov's terms. When it comes to the stories you've mentioned, I think that "House Taken Over" is still very much in between marvellous and uncanny, while "Axolotl" is surely more towards marvellous. It might sound paradoxical, but often in Cortázar's stories it is not the point to decide for one or the other option. I think that his novel "Rayuela" is much closer to magical realism than his short stories. "There Are More Things" is, as we know, a story written in the memory of H.P. Lovecraft so it is pretty obvious in which direction it goes. While it is not the most representable story for Borges, most of his stories do indeed gravitate towards marvellous, too. These are all good examples that we can still talk about fantastic but that we need new definitions and new understandings of the genre.
Great video and very well explained, clears up a lot of ideas I had about magical realism. I still do believe this is a very obscure genre and maybe that's the beauty of it. And perhaps I need to read more of it to truly understand it's nuances. Thanks a lot for your effort!
Juan Rulfo's "Pedro Páramo" : classic banger of magical realism
the greatest
Absolutely.
No es realismo mágico xd
@@filipipipis que es entonces, mujer?
Un texto inclasificable que hace el efecto de ruptura y sutura dentro del sistema literario latinoamericano, decir que es realismo mágico es aminorar el texto, la constitución de simbologia tradicional del texto se expande y supera los límites de la inverosimilitud fácil del realismo mágico a secas, el lenguaje en Pedro Páramo expande el sistema, lo rompe y lo reconstruye, no es menor como para encasillarlo en un sistema simple como el que se cree que fue consolidado por un escribidor como Márquez y después utilizó una escritora tan mediocre como Isabel Allende
Your videos inspire me to read more, thanks!
The light rain of little yellow flowers that looked so beautiful and continued to fall on the town throughout the night piling up higher and higher until in the morning they were found to have smothered all the cows... I read 100 Years of Solitude almost 50 years ago now and couldn't really say today what it was all about or what the author was trying to say... Certain images from the book, however, have remained with me throughout my life -- and all of these have within them some small but sudden and unexpected momentary shift into a different kind of reality, a "magic" realm that the author seems to have sprinkled sparsely throughout his book -- for reasons, to be honest, I never understood, but instinctively enjoyed
The reason why i, as a south american, consider 100 Years Of Solitude nothing but pure magic realism, is that i relate to everything including the magic. The vastness of the land, combined with underdevelopness and descentraliced societies, made us believe the word used to be like that. There's a reason the book is set to long ago, because that's the way our grandparents and grand grandparents tell us the world was, the magic is punt point accurate. 100 years of solute feels like it's only realism.
Great video, Bookchemist!
There are a couple of things I would like to add. First of all, there is no "outside" definition of genre or to say it better, there is no objective definition of the genre. To say to which genre some book belongs means to read it and to interpret it. That is why it is impossible to say to which genre some book belongs just by counting fantastic elements in it, for example. And you show that in this video very well.
When it comes to literary works discussed, there are some disagreements. I would never talk about Kafka's Metamorphosis as about example of magical realism but again, Kafka's works are so specific that they cannot be regarded as "example" of any genre. However, I read them more as fantastic literature.
Although the fantastic elements are much discussed by the narrator, I would still regard Rushdie's Midnight's Children in a tradition of magical realism. The thing is that that novel (or its narrator) in overall is so self-conscious - it is what sets it apart from Marquez's OHYS.
And I agree with one of the commentators below - there is an important difference between Cortázar's short stories and Marquez's OHYS. Although it is true that in many of Cortázar's short stories fantastic elements are regarded by characters as something normal, acceptable and expectable, there is a reason for that which lies in characters' often troubled relationships and their feeling of guilt. That is why I rather think about his short stories as fantastic literature than as magical realism.
Your view on magical realism as a tendency is interesting and opens new possibilities.
I really enjoy your videos Thank you.
AMAZING! I finally get it. Thanks!
I love you! haha but no really, thank you for these videos, really pleasant to listen to for someone passionate about books but not really anyone around me to share the passion, and anyway in Slovakia we always studied magical realism as a very important genre as one of the greatest books written in our language was marked by this genre, its called Tisícročná včela (Hundred year old bee) by Peter Jaroš, its very similar to Hundred years of solitude, as more generations of one family appear. Anyway, I think Slovak literature is very picky and Russian literature in still more emphasised than others. But again, thank you!! :)
Souns like an excellent book - I've added it to my list!
Thank you so much I wanted to know about it.❤🙂🤩
I read once that magical realism is meant to provoke the reader to ask at some point, “what is real” in regard to the narrative. I would love to hear you speak on speculative fiction. Thank you.
I have had the same experience while reading several novels. It is, I reckon, your brain trying to draw lines between what is believable and what is not. It is a great mental exercise given the time in which we are living.
There's a fine mess you've got us into!
osom as always! greetings from Colombia!
I became obsessed with the film version of No Country For Old Men when it came out. It led me to read quiet a bit about Cormac McCarthy. One thing that intrigued me about the film was there are times I wondered if the naratvie was slipping in and out of magic realism. For example, when Moss leaves the Mexican Hospital with his white hospital gown, he crosses the bridge to the boarder post and gets questioned by the boarder guard. I wondered if this was a surreal way of saying Moss is already dead and this boarder guard is akin to Gabriel at the gates! I read into it and funniuly enough, I did come by a quote by Mc Carthy (unfortunately, I can't cite the source right now) saying that magic realism scares the reader somewhat so perhaps it better to slip it in unannounced. That was the jist of it anyway. He didn't specify that he uses or has used it, but I liked the idea all the same.
That's fascinating - I'd love to take a look at the quotation if you can ever find it again! (Happens to me all the time that I read something very interesting but I'm later unable to ever find it again).
@@TheBookchemist If it helps, the quote was in relation to Blood Meridian. My obsession led me to a series of Yale Lectures by Amy Hungerford on modern literature, you have probably seen them yourself, they are here on you tube. My search began there, so I will retrace my steps, see what I come up with.
@@TheBookchemist Forgive me, I found the quote, but not the interview it came from (a Time magazine interview, I think around 2006 when he featured in one of their award lists), so I may of misunderstood the context of what he was saying. Blood Meridian is often mentioned as being Magical realism, but according to Mc Carthy 'you know, it's hard enough to get people to believe what you're telling them without making it impossible. It has to be vaguely plausible'. Seeing as Blood Meridian is considered magically realistic (if that is a term) that can be read two ways. He uses it in the novel, but hides it in 'plausible' scenarios or he doesn't use it all!!
This is a very interesting take. You must appreciate a work of art that is sprinkling a bunch of puzzling clues here and there, subtle clues, as shapeless as clay, leaving it to the reader to mold them into what they prefer.
Terrific! Any kind of social situation, face-to-face or electronic, seems like magical realism these days (with a strong lean toward horror).
What is reality anyway?
~Too old & too tired
But you are the bomb, BC. Keep on
Hey Bookchemist! I really enjoy your videos, I take a lot out of them. I would like tu encourage you to read Jodge Luis Borges, who to my knowledge, is in part of the fathers of postmodernism. Pynchon, in my opinion, is in part a borgian writer.
I forgot to add that he is heavily metafictional and considering your thesis, it may interest you.
I wonder if you've read Jose Saramago? He's one of my favorites and he wrote Baltazar and Blimunda (which I haven't finished) which is considered a magical realist novel.
Loved this video by the way.
I still haven't read him! And I didn't know the book you mentioned, but I'm very curious about it!
YOU MUST READ 2666, i just finished the masterpiece myself earlier this week and found that your conlusion w/r/t a definitive description of magic realism is very prevalent within the text, if not essential. I’d love to hear what you think, despite the novels daunting length, i found it actually to be a page turner, tho some postmodern element ie blocky long texts may stint the reading experience slightly, nothing as challenging as pynchon but just a worth the merit and time
Currently reading 2666 by Bolano and Pynchon's V. When I finish any of those I'm going for 100 años de soledad (thanks god spanish is my mother tongue) a book i read back in highschool but it was a copy and pages started to fell off (very magical realist if you ask me 😂😂)
very excited to read it as a more mature reader 😁
so glad you're being sponsored man! keep the quiality content up
Bolaño is not a "magical realist". He is a "visceral realist".
@@vins1979 i never said he was tho, bolaño's movement was named infrarealism
Hi! I want to write a paper about fantastic elements in a 20th century novel.. would you have any suggestions as to which novel to choose?
its really amazing
I love your videos. When you describe Lovecraft's stories and Stephen King's It as worlds in which monsters are natural (and humans the aberation) the recent Godzilla movie sprang to mind. In this new cinematic universe the monsters are the norm for Earth. Thinking about the film from what you've said, this new Godzilla is the kid-friendly version of Cthulhu. ;)
Man I have to watch that!
This was a really good video. I'm interested in how you would parse out surrealism from what you consider magical realism. I'm pretty sure it was David Foster Wallace who said, when talking about David Lynch movies, that in order for surrealism to be truly effective there needs to be a foundation of realism. There needs to be something for the surreal or fantastic elements to corrupt in order to have the effect that surrealist art is trying to pull from the audience. This seems similar to what you brought up with something like Harry Potter or supernatural stories, where you need to have some ordinary world or status quo so that some juxtaposition can exist between the magic or the supernatural. I guess what I'm asking is, where do you think the line is between surrealism and the inherent realism in most fiction that you laid out in the video? Where do you think the line is between the surrealism of a Lynch movie and the fantasy elements of a Harry Potter book? If that makes any sense.
Excellent question! In Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, one character thinks of surrealism as perfectly balanced between the marvelous & the vulgar. In that sense, I think there are fundamental distinctions between surrealism and fantasy, as in, the vulgar is almost wholly absent from fantasy. In fact, I see how someone may conceive of fantasy as a rejection of vulgarity! See Lovecraft's "Celaphais," or Harry Potter's fundamental idea of "there's another world beyond the humdrum & injust reality of your uncles' home, Harry, and even the bad guys there might be evil & wicked but they're never really vulgar."
It seems much harder to me then to distinguish between magical realism and surrealism! And I guess the distinction would be, again, that magical realism does not stress vulgarity too much, nor does it necessarily attempt to elicit a strong, even physical reaction? In that sense, Kafka's Metamorphosis would appear more surrealist than magical realist. But you can see how obviously problematic all this is!
Many amazing books in the magical realism genre. What’s everyone’s favourites? Mine would have to be The Famished Road.
I was really surprised when you mentioned Infinite Jest as a Magical Realist novel. Do you know of any scholar who has read the novel as such or it is your read of the book and so an open issue?
Anyway, thank you for giving us some guidelines on how to find out magical realist novels, which I always mistakenly thought as a weird combination of two genres which I love.
One last thing,
Do you think that Calvino's Trilogia degli antenati could be seen as Magical Realism?
About Infinite Jest, no one that I know - but hey, it's not at all a thoroughly researched opinion, and just like I do with Kavalier & Clay in the video, I might simply be reading too much into very minor textual elements.
As for Calvino, if you accept my idea in the video that magical realism, at the end of the day, is often not quite realism at all, then sure, Visconte dimezzato and Cavaliere inesistente would definitely be magical realist novels (they are to me!). Il barone rampante, curiously enough, is an excellent case of how these definitions are never watertight, but certain works are bound to slip through the cracks. It's not really a supernatural text, but it pushes the boundaries of verisimilitude in such a brazen way it might as well be.
you're great
I recommend you to read "Prólogo al Reino de este Mundo" by Alejo Carpentier, it's the best text to understand what is Magical Realism.
Another very short essay to compliment that one is "Realismo mágico" by his contemporary and Latin American writer Arturo Uslar Pietri in the book Godos, insurgentes y visionarios (also present in Nuevo mundo, mundo nuevo). I recently passed the final exam of Hispanic American Literature II at my South American university, and those two were the main texts to refer to regarding Magical Realism.
Uslar Pietri coined the term "Magical Realism" (he actually read it once from the text of a german art critic that was referring to something completely different, and then years later he used it thinking that he had just created it from scratch). According to Uslar Pietri, "Magical Realism" is the same thing that Carpentier calls "lo real maravilloso". To some scholars, that's true, to others, there are significant differences.
According to Carpentier, lo real maravilloso is grounded in the idea that "in América, wonder (lo maravilloso) is part of everyday reality", or rather that "different cultures think of and relate to wonder in different ways". He claimed that the community of people from this continent has (or at least had, at the time of him writing this essay) faith in miracles, which are seen akin to magician tricks in Europe. He said that while here the wonder actually happens in reality itself because of the community's faith, in Europe it is a result of the individual inventiveness of writers and thus it has fantastical and subjective properties. So, when he talks of lo real maravilloso, he refers to "characters and events of unheard of and unusual characteristics, but that, even if they cause surprise or amazement, they are not perceived as magical or supernatural by the community".
Meanwhile, Uslar Pietri says that until Magical Realism, Latin American literature wasn't fully representing the reality of these lands. It "just followed fashions and tendencies from Europe" and the local stuff only moved on a costumbrist and landscapist level. The main character was nature itself, but Uslar Pietri says that this literature ignored the "prodigious human world that surrounded it" and hadn't really looked at its "strange and deep peculiarity". He says that then books started to come up, books like Asturias' Leyendas de Guatemala, Carpentier's Ecue Yamba O, Uslar Pietri's Las lanzas coloradas, and many more until we reach García Márquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude. These books expressed a reality until then "ignored and unbelievable". He says that "these writers wanted to reveal, discover, express to its full height this almost unknown and almost hallucinatory reality that was Latin America, in order to penetrate into the great creative mystery of cultural mestizaje (blend)". "A reality, a society and a particular situation that were radically different from the one that European narrative reflected".
Uslar Pietri emphasises that Magical Realism is not fantasy, because it doesn't seek to "superimpose an overflown fantasy to reality, or to substitute reality with fantasy". "[In Magical Realism] reality is not abandoned, it's not mixed with magical events and personifications, rather the intent is to reflect and express existing phenomenons that may be extraordinary for the genres and categories of traditional literature. What was new was not the imagination but the existing reality until then not precisely expressed. [...] It was a realism no less strict and true to reality than the one used by Flaubert, Zola or Galdós over a very different reality. [...] In a way, it was like discovering again the Hispanic America, not the one the spaniards thought they had formed, nor the one the Native advocates believed they couldn't renounce to, nor the fragmentary Africa that the slaves brought with them, but that other thing that had spontaneously and freely sprouted from their long cohabitation" [...] "The things that García Márquez describes in One Hundred Years of Solitude and that may seem like pure invention aren't but the portrait of a peculiar situation, seen through the eyes of the people that lives it and creates it, almost without alterations. The local world is full of magic in the sense of that which is unusual and strange".
@@teoentrelibros Yes, and thanks for the others references:)
Interesting, as I read this novel after reading Harold Bloom's Genius whereby he made made the similar point, if i can remember. And It is one of the finest novels i have read.
out of curiosity, are there any papers you've written that are available to the public to read? :3
Not yet but I have an essay coming out in Modern Fiction Studies about Chabon's Moonglow. Thanks for the interest!
I love this guy
Alejo Carpantier, you will love him
Watching from India
what about Junot Diaz, did he write in MR?
21: 15 Hes name is not Alejandro, but Alejo.
if, for example, the characters try to understand the fantastic but the book is raw about it is it magicaal realism?
This might be off topic but you must read My Name Is Red by Pamuk, you’ll really love it.
Thanks, I'm sure I will! I have The New Life on my shelf at the moment ;)
Would love to hear your views on New Life especially due to the polarising reviews it has received.
I'm interested in your theory of the "power of language", indeed
I second this!!
3rd
Is 1q84 by murakami magical realism. Its my favorite read this year and when I recommend it to others i wouldn't say its fantasy, more weird fiction.
"Weird fiction" must be the vaguest way in which you can describe a novel to others. Weird-how weird? And in what way?
@@fc1984fc Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction that combines supernatural, horror, magical realist, and fantasy elements. .. Think the old pulp magazines with writers like H.P Lovecraft.
Is it just me or did the floating guy in Infinite Jest come out of nowhere? i'm still trying to wrap my head around the point of that character lol
mmzen yea
Im almost done with IJ, about 200 pages left, and I have to admit that I didn't realize the dude was actually floating lol. I think I read it more like he was "floaty" or he just seemed to float or something. It seems like one of the Lynchian aspects DFW incorpates in IJ.
get that coin 👏🏼🔥🤑
Is it true that magic realism got popular due to Latin American Boom in 1960 ' s and 1970's.....
Or is it the tendency or an attempt to change the reality or at least our perspective towards it....my personal take would be that magic realism weaves a belief that a change or miracle can happen in the fictional world ,people love to see the spectacle of change ;be it in social ,cultural and political domain.........plus magic realism gave a cultural identity to Latin American narratives which took the world of publishing industry by storm and threw a challenge to realistic western narratives .
How it’s going with 2666?
It sits very comfortably on the shelf. It's very clean and polite and I'm very happy with the way it causes no trouble whatsoever around the house.
shoutout murakami
This doesn't exactly fit your subject here, but...:
Have you ever read the first work, A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS, by David Lindsay, or his 2nd novel, THE HAUNTED WOMAN? Lindsay is not finely polished in this first book, but he certainly hit the ground running big time (in my opinion). Colin Wilson thought of ARCTURUS as "one of the great books of the 20th century,", even considering its occasional lapses as refined literature. It is a visionary , breakthrough work, as far as I'm concerned, if not everyone's cup of tea.
I suggest you start with the the last three minutes, and elaborate after.
Fuck yes!!
I hear Roberto Bolano straight-up hated Magical Realism. I find it too escapist for my tastes as all, although I'm largely ignorant about it .. but so is life
Alejo Carpentier: Great Writer!
Great video. But, word of advice from an Italian to another: work on your accent a little, try making it more natural. And also, "this" and "these" are pronounced differently, and every time you say "this" it sounds like you are saying "these" instead.
ikea manuals have some of the most predictable plots tbh
I thought Gabriel Garcia marQuez was complete trash.