Comment On Magic Realism As A Subversive Literary Force.: Jana1
Comment On Magic Realism As A Subversive Literary Force.: Jana1
Semester: 6
English Honours
Course: CC14
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
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
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,
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,
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
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
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
Bibliography
Ahmad, Mustanir, Ayaz Afsar, and Sobia Masood. "Elements of Social Protest in Gabriel García
Arellano, Jerónimo. Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America.
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
Foretold’."