What Is Magical Realism?

Where the term comes from

The phrase began in art criticism, not literature. In 1925 the German critic Franz Roh used Magischer Realismus in the title of his book Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus to describe post-Expressionist painting that rendered ordinary subjects with an uncanny, dreamlike precision. In 1927 the Spanish journal Revista de Occidente, directed by José Ortega y Gasset, published Roh’s book in Spanish, which carried the phrase realismo mágico into the Spanish-speaking world.

In Italy, Massimo Bontempelli, who founded the magazine 900 in 1926, is often described as the first to apply the idea to writing. The Venezuelan writer Arturo Uslar Pietri is credited with first using realismo mágico for Latin American literature in 1948. Roh’s original sense, which Tate links to the 1920s ’return to order’ in painters such as Giorgio de Chirico and Alexander Kanoldt, described a way of painting reality, not stories about magic.

Carpentier and the marvellous real

In the prologue to his 1949 novel The Kingdom of This World, the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier proposed a related term, lo real maravilloso, the marvellous real. After a trip to Haiti in 1943, he argued that Latin America’s history and landscape were themselves marvellous, so the extraordinary did not need to be invented. The prologue recounts that trip and some of the research behind the novel.

Carpentier set this against European surrealism, which he criticised as producing the marvellous through formula and artifice. Critics still debate how far his marvellous real and magical realism are the same thing. In 1955 the critic Angel Flores popularised the English term in his essay ’Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction’, naming Jorge Luis Borges as the first magical realist.

Key features

• The marvellous treated as ordinary — Supernatural events are reported in the same calm, factual voice as everyday ones, and characters rarely question them.
• A recognisable world — Stories are set in a realistic place and time, not an invented secondary world; the magic is found inside familiar reality.
• Authorial reticence — The narrator withholds explanations, so the reader is not told whether the strange event is real, imagined or symbolic.
• Hybrid realities — Many works join opposites, such as rural and urban or Western and indigenous ways of understanding the world.
• Implicit social criticism — Critics often read the form as a way of telling history from the margins, questioning official versions of events.

The Latin American Boom

Magical realism became internationally famous through the Latin American Boom, a period in the 1960s and 1970s when novels by a group of Latin American writers were widely read in Europe and beyond. The writers most associated with the Boom are Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez, though not all of them wrote magical realism.

García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), the multigenerational story of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo, is widely regarded as the canonical magical realist novel and made the style famous worldwide. Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), set in a village of the dead, and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982) are also central to the tradition.

A global mode

From the 1980s the label spread well beyond Latin America. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) ties its narrator’s magical powers to Indian independence; Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) brings a dead child back to haunt the aftermath of slavery; Ben Okri’s Booker-winning The Famished Road (1991) is narrated by an abiku, a spirit child. Earlier, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940 and published in 1966–1967, had already shown the mode at work outside the Americas.

Writers from other traditions have used related labels. The Angolan writer Pepetela proposed ’animist realism’ for African literature, and the Swedish Academy described Mo Yan’s work as ’hallucinatory realism’ when he won the Nobel Prize in 2012. Haruki Murakami and Angela Carter are also frequently discussed in relation to the mode, and Olga Tokarczuk, awarded the Nobel Prize for 2018, appears in many discussions of it.

Key works

• The Kingdom of This World — Alejo Carpentier, 1949. Its prologue introduced lo real maravilloso, the marvellous real, and set Latin American reality against European surrealism.
• Pedro Páramo — Juan Rulfo, 1955. A short, fragmentary novel set in a town of ghosts, often cited as a forerunner of the Boom.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez, 1967. Widely regarded as the canonical magical realist novel and the book that made the mode famous worldwide.
• The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966–1967. Written between 1928 and 1940 and published decades later, it brings the Devil to Soviet Moscow and is often counted among the great works of magical realism.
• Midnight’s Children — Salman Rushdie, 1981. Links the telepathic gifts of children born at India’s independence to the history of the nation.
• The House of the Spirits — Isabel Allende, 1982. A family saga with clairvoyance and spirits, set against the political history of a Latin American country.
• Beloved — Toni Morrison, 1987. Uses a haunting to confront the trauma of slavery in nineteenth-century Ohio.
• Like Water for Chocolate — Laura Esquivel, 1989. Lets a cook’s emotions pass physically into the food she makes, blending romance, recipes and the marvellous.
• The Famished Road — Ben Okri, 1991. Booker Prize winner narrated by Azaro, a spirit child, and often linked to both magical and ’animist’ realism.

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