Gabriel García Márquez’s birth anniversary: A beginner’s guide to magic realism

What is magic (or magical) realism, and what made it so powerful when used by Marquez? Why is it often used in literature coming from the Global South? What is some of the criticism it has inspired in the more than 50 years after the pathbreaking One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) was first published?

What is magic realism?

Put very simply, magic realism is when fantastical, supernatural elements are blended in an otherwise straightforward and factual story. ‘Realism’ was a technique developed as a reaction to art presenting a glorified version of life. Realists decided they would show life as it was, not idealised and beautified. Magic realism, by adding ‘magic’, makes this warts-and-all life soar above the ordinary, giving it power and vigour instead of glamour.

Magic realism, thus, is different from fantasy, where the world is entirely imagined by the author. It creates for itself a space between the real and the fantastical.

The term ‘magical realism’ was first coined by Franz Roh, the German historian and art critic, in his 1925 book Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (Post-expressionism: Magical Realism: Problems of the newest European painting). Roh had been talking about visual arts, and the term has somewhat mutated in meaning from the way he used it to the sense it is used today in literature.

Magic realism and Marquez

Several books can be, and have been, written about the wealth of imagery, styles, and messages in Marquez’s use of magic realism. Marquez was not the first to use this style even in Latin America, authors like the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges and the Cuban Alejo Carpentier came before him. What Marquez did was to take both the style and the purpose (in as much as literature can have any one purpose) of magic realism to previously unattained heights.

In terms of style, his books are bursting with the riotous and the rambunctious, yet his iron-control of the narrative is never once in doubt. Flowers fall from the sky, blood runs across streets to fall at the feet of a murdered man’s mother, ghosts come and go, children are born with pig’s tails, in the most matter-of-fact way.

In terms of purpose, magic realism is often seen as being one way of giving voice to the marginalised (more on this later), and Marquez’s flair and brio bring to stark relief the injustices and oppression his books are referring to.

Magic realism and Colombia

The popular Netflix TV series Narcos begins with the lines: “Magical realism is defined as what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe. There is a reason why magical realism was born in Colombia”.

While this line has been criticised (more on this, too, later), Marquez always acknowledged the influence of his motherland on his writings.

One of the influences was the folk tales, superstitions, ghost stories popular in Colombia. Marquez had often talked about how his grandmother’s stories affected him. The Guardian quotes him as saying “She told things that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness … What was most important was the expression she had on her face… In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.”

The other was the nature of reality around him — absurd, seemingly impossible, but happening all the same. And this brings us to why magic realism has been popular in the Global South. When the world around is strange, oppressive, vulnerable to bigger currents buffeting it (like Latin America was to the pulls of Cold War), only magic can seemingly explain things. When the powerful control what is “real”, what separates facts from fantasy? Thus, voices that have been censored or discredited come back as ghosts’ voices; the “history” as defined by the victor is disrupted by the “tales” that the vanquished remember. In using his literature for this, Marquez has had few equals.

Criticism of magic realism

While Marquez put Latin American literature on the world map like never before, later authors have argued that the popularity of his books led to the exoticisation of Latin America, and instead of being a mystical land with magical happenings, it is a place with problems real and political needing real solutions.

As far back as the mid-1990s, Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez started a literary movement called ‘McOndo’ — taking the name of Marquez’s fictional town of Macondo and fusing it with McDonald’s. McOndo sought to swivel the literary lens away from magical tropical villages to the cold hard reality of cities in Latin America, dogged by crime, drugs and poverty.

Others have argued that magic realism, a technique used by the marginalised, has been appropriated by the privileged, and used to exoticise and obfuscate the problems their class helped create. For example, some argue that the world of drugs that Narcos depicts flourished not because “impossible things happen in Colombia”, but because the US allowed it, to serve its own purposes.