’Magic realism has been-convincingly shown to be far more widespread; indeed, in recent

decades it has been gaining in international popularity. Yet despite its immense success, it
remains among the most challengingly diverse and ill-defined of the literary modes or genres.
Abstract, intuitive notions about the nature of magic realism abound, the most common of
which is that it blends the magical and the real, introducing fantastic elements in a real-world
setting. This is also true of many other types of literature. To begin any study on magical
realism it is necessary to start with the classic review of the first articles on this theme. In
1925, in his book NachExpressionismus (Magischer Realismus), the art critic Franz Roh
coined the term "magical realism" to refer to the objectivity of German postimpressionism.1
He used the term as an aesthetic category, a way of representing the mystery inherent in
things: En el post expresionismo se nos ofrece el milagro de la existencia en su imperturbada
duración: el inagotable milagro de que las vibraciones de las moléculas—eterna movilidad
— ,de que el constante aparecer y desaparecer de lo existente, segregue, sin embargo, objetos
permanentes; en suma, la maravilla de que el tumulto de lo variable cristalice en
determinadas constantes, (qtd. in Revista de occidente 48 (1927): 285). Another critic who
has attempted to articulate the exact relationship between the magic and the real is Amaryll
Chanady, who argued that any antinomy between these worlds is resolved, because "in magic
realism, the supernatural is not presented as problematic," but is instead "integrated within
the norms of perception of the narrator and characters in the fictitious world" (1985, 23).
Because they supposedly do not question the supernatural, she concludes that the magic does
"not disconcert the reader" (24). In other words, the magic is not disturbing to the characters
or narrator because it is depicted as a normal part of their everyday reality. Chanady adds that
this natural presentation engenders in readers an equally natural response; they are not
disconcerted by the supernatural because it is accepted as real within the fictional world.
Many current theories of magic realism still focus on the compatibility of the two fictional
worlds present in a text of this mode or genre .

Sylvia Molloy has observed that the representations of Latin America now deemed desirable
in the Global North seem to involve the transculturation of the very foreign (the “magical”)
with the modern West, in a way that makes the southern continent readable as part of a
homogenous, global Other—to be consumed on-demand yet kept at a safe distance

Amaryll Chanady, who argued that "in magic realism, the supernatural is not presented as
problematic," but is instead "integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and
characters in the fictitious world" (1985, 23). Because they supposedly do not question the
supernatural, she concludes that the magic does "not disconcert the reader" (24). In other
words, the magic is not disturbing to the characters or narrator because it is depicted as a
normal part of their everyday reality. Chanady adds that this natural presentation engenders in
readers an equally natural response; they are not disconcerted by the supernatural because it
is accepted as real within the fictional world.
Because the line between magical realism and fantasy, realism, "the marvelous," and
surrealism is so fuzzy, many critics like Angel Flores at Queens college, have argued over
whether or not certain writers can be considered magical realists. For example, even though
Alejo Carpentier was the first to bring the term "magical realism" into Latin American
literature, critics like Howard M. Fraser at the University of North Carolina have argued over
whether or not his work can be classified as magical realism instead of simply fantastical.
Many of these debates center around whether a given work should be recognized as literature
as opposed to entertainment. Unlike fantasy and commercial fiction, magical realism is
considered literary fiction instead of genre fiction, making it more reputable in the academic
landscape, and more likely to win awards.

Harriet Blodgett (1994, 49)…… Magic realism has afforded our novelist the necessary scope
to accomplish just those objectives. Paradoxically, it is the spinning of a magic-realist web
that allows "reality [to be] untangle[d]" (Leal 1995, 121) and "creates a more complete
picture of the world"

Magical Realism brings exciting new perspectives to the study of Latin American literature.”
;Robbin Fiddian , Bulletin of Hispanic Studies .

William Mac-duff said that : Magic Realism is a genre of Latino and Latin American fiction
and theater, found notably in the works of writers such as Gabriel García Marquéz.

It isn’t just throwing a little magic into a realistic world; it is better related to animism, the
belief that everything has a spirit—including plants, but sometimes including rocks and other
things usually considered inorganic. A magic realist element from a play I once read: plants
that bleed when cut; the point of the blood was to suggest the “life” within the stems, but also
the blood accumulated in the soil from years of habitants.

This is primarily a literary device and its proponents no more believe in actual magic in the
real world than I do. Magic realism is important because it is a way of portraying the material
world as something richer than mere matter.
-"Magical realism gives us a world view that does not depend on natural or physical laws,
and is not based on objective reality" (attributed to Gonzàlez Echevarría, 9).

-Notably, the "presence of the supernatural is often attributed to the primitive or ‘magical'
Indian mentality (which accepts the supernatural as part of everyday reality), which coexists
with an enlightened European rational view of life" (this from Floyd Merrell in 1975!,
Chanady, 19).

-In 1955, literary critic Angel Flores coined the term “magical realism” (as opposed to
“magic realism”) in English in an essay, stating that it combines elements of magic
realism and marvelous realism.

- Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, ‘Introduction’, in Zamora and Faris
(eds.), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Duke University Press, 1995)
‘ … Magical realism is a mode suited to exploring – and transgressing – boundaries, whether
the boundaries are ontological, political, geographical, or generic. Magical realism often
facilitates the fusion, or coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be
irreconcilable in other modes of fiction. The propensity of magical realist texts to admit a
plurality of worlds means that they often situate themselves on liminal territory between or
among those worlds – in phenomenal and spiritual regions where transformation,
metamorphosis, dissolution are common, where magic is a branch of naturalism, or
pragmatism. So magical realism may be considered an extension of realism in its concern
with the nature of reality and its representation, at the same time that it resists the basic
assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism and literary realism. Mind and body, spirit
and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and female: these are
boundaries to be erased, transgressed, blurred, brought together, or otherwise fundamentally
refashioned in magical realist texts.

- Irene Guenther, ‘Magic Realism, New Objectivity, and the Arts during the Weimar
Republic’, in Zamora Faris
‘It is the discovery of a totally new world. One paints pots and rubbish piles, and then
suddenly sees these things quite differently, as if one had never before seen a pot. One paints
a landscape, trees, houses, vehicles, and one sees the world anew. One discovers like a child
an adventure-filled land. One looks at technological objects with different eyes when one
paints them or sees them in new paintings’ (Grethe Jürgens, quoted by Guenther, 36). 
-Luis Leal, ‘Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature’, in Zamora and Faris 
’So we see that magical realism cannot be identified either with fantastic literature or with
psychological literature, or with the surrealist or hermetic literature that Ortega describes.
Unlike superrealism, magical realism does not use dream motifs; neither does it distort reality
or create imagined worlds, as writers of fantastic literature or science fiction do; nor does it
emphasise psychological analysis of characters, since it doesn’t try to find reasons for their
actions or their inability to express themselves’ (121).
‘Magical realism is, more than anything else, an attitude towards reality that can be expressed
in popular or cultured forms, in elaborate or rustic styles, in closed or open structures … the
magical realist … doesn’t create imaginary worlds in which we can hide from everyday
reality. In magical realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover
what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts’ (121).

-Eugene Arva, The Traumatic Imagination: Histories of Violence in Magical Realist

Fiction (New York, Cambria Press, 2011).
Magical realist writing is not an escape from horrific historical “facts” or … a distortion
meant to make them more palatable cognitively or emotionally, but rather … one of the most
effective means of recreating, transmitting, and ultimately coping with painful traumatic
memories. An author’s traumatic imagination transforms individual and collective traumatic
memories into narrative memories and integrates them into an artistic chronotope. This work
examines novels from Caribbean, North American, and European literatures of the second
half of the twentieth century, both Anglophone and in translation, with focus on the
chronotopes of slavery, colonialism, the Holocaust, and war. Historical traumata have found
their reconstruction in literary works written by either traumatized or vicariously traumatized
authors, such as Jean Rhys, Alejo Carpentier, Maryse Condé, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel
García Márquez, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Skibell, Günter Grass, and Tim O’Brien. The
traumatic imagination accounts for the relative prevalence of magical realist writing in
postmodernist fiction. As a singular phenomenon of postmodern aporia, magical realist texts
write the silence imposed by trauma, and convert it into history.

Eugene Arva and Hubert Roland, ‘Writing Trauma: Magical Realism and the Traumatic
Imagination’, Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, October 2014, 
‘Magical realist writing foregrounds and at the same time transgresses the traditional borders
between reality and imagination by rearranging apparently antithetical ontological levels
within the literary text: the logical and perceptually verifiable everyday reality, on the one
hand, and the sensorially ungraspable and unexplainable phenomena of the supernatural, on
the other. Considering these premises, we foreground the psychological and socio-political
relevance of magical realism, and proffer the general thesis that magical realist writing has
become one of the most effective, albeit controversial, artistic media to represent extreme
events. The writing mode has indeed demonstrated its potential to adapt and to affect literary
productions belonging to various cultural spaces and representing histories of violence, such
as slavery, colonialism, wars, the Holocaust, genocide, and dictatorships.’ (9) 
‘Trauma does not always result from sudden, violent events; it may be also often caused by
an extended period of exposure to tense, stressful, or even life-threatening circumstances,
such as living in an oppressive police-state or a dictatorship, being the victim of domestic
abuse, etc. ’ (13)
‘As a narrative strategy that has proved to be a viable medium for representing historical
traumata, magical realism remains a fixture in contemporary writing not only because of an
ongoing sociopolitical climate of violence (war, terrorism, police brutality, etc.), but also
because of its compelling aesthetic qualities. By juxtaposing or even merging apparently
antithetical realities and by exacerbating the crisis of representation, this controversial poetics
has developed a highly subversive potential. Magical realism undermines the ontological
integrity of a realist text by including irrational elements, breaks the logic of subordination,
and ultimately creates a new reality framework, which seems to favor fresh critical
approaches to historical and contemporary events by relying primarily on the creative and
healing power of imagination

-William Spindler, ‘Magic Realism: A Typology’ (1993) Forum for Modern Language

Studies
‘ … It can be argued … that Magic Realism, properly defined, is a term that describes works
of art and fiction sharing certain identifiable thematic, formal and structural characteristics,
and that these characteristics justify it being considered an aesthetic and literary category in
its own right, independent of others such as the Fantastic and Surrealism, with which it is
often confused. This article attempts to put forward a framework that will incorporate the
different manifestations of Magic Realism into one single model, and in this way, help to
clarify the present confusion by distinguishing between different types of Magic Realism,
while maintaining the links and points of contact between them’ (75).

-Anne Hegerfeldt, ‘Contentious Contributions: Magic Realism goes British

‘ … Magic realism employs a wide variety of strategies which can each be seen to contribute
a central project, namely to ask about the possibilities of, as well as the limitations to, the
human endeavor to know the world. Paradoxically, the mode reaches the same conclusion on
both counts – its answer is: fiction. Magic realism clearly shows fictions to be capable of
providing knowledge about the world, potentially allowing insights which other, rational-
scientific paradigms cannot offer. At the same time, it emphasizes that all knowledge is
constructed and provisional, which means that in the end, human insight remains limited to
fiction’ (78).
-Eugene L. Arva, ‘Writing the Vanishing Real: Hyperreality and Magical Realism’
(2008) Journal of Narrative Theory :
‘Magical realism constitutes an attitude toward and a way of approaching reality—a reality
that is rarely what it seems and is seldom perceived in the same way by subjects in different
places or in different times’ (68)
‘The deceptive simplicity of magical realist images, their coherence, vividness, and emotional
charge, enables readers to see and to feel—without necessarily understanding—the
indescribable horrors of the past’ (75)
‘Any attempt to understand the modus operandi of the traumatic imagination in magical
realist writing needs to start with an analytical survey of the neighboring literary genres—
fantasy, the fantastic, the marvelous, and the uncanny, all of which inform the most essential
traits of magical realism and of the postmodern context in which magical realism first
appeared and has developed since the mid-1930s. The thematic core of the magical realist
writing mode at any of its stages concerns representation: the writing of the real. Magical
realist authors turn to illusion and magic as a matter of survival in a civilization priding itself
on scientific accomplishments, positivist thinking, and the metaphysical banishment of death.
Yet it is curious that fantastic re-presentation (imaginative reconstitution) works where
realistic representation (descriptive mimesis) has apparently failed. What does postmodernist
fiction in general, and magical realist writing in particular, re-present: reality, its non-
referential substitutes, or mere simulacra? By virtue of its subversive character, magical
realism foregrounds, somewhat paradoxically, the falsehood of its fantastic imagery exactly
in order to expose the falsehood—and the traumatic absence—of the reality that it endeavors
to re-present’ (61).

-Bruce Holland Rogers, ‘What Is Magical Realism, Really‘ (2002) 

(Magical Realism) ‘is, first of all, a branch of serious fiction, which is to say, it is not
escapist. Let me be clear: I like escapist fiction, and some of what I write is escapism. I’m
with C.S. Lewis when he observes that the only person who opposes escape is, by definition,
a jailer. Entertainment, release, fun…these are all good reasons to read and to write. But
serious fiction’s task is not escape, but engagement. Serious fiction helps us to name our
world and see our place in it. It conveys or explores truth.
Any genre of fiction can get at truths, of course. Some science fiction and fantasy do so, and
are serious fiction. Some SF and fantasy are escapist. But magical realism is always serious,
never escapist, because it is trying to convey the reality of one or several worldviews that
actually exist, or have existed. Magical realism is a kind of realism, but one different from the
realism that most of our culture now experiences.
Science fiction and fantasy are always speculative. They are always positing that some aspect
of objective reality were different. What if vampires were real? What if we could travel faster
than light? Magical realism is not speculative and does not conduct thought experiments.
Instead, it tells its stories from the perspective of people who live in our world and experience
a different reality from the one we call objective. If there is a ghost in a story of magical
realism, the ghost is not a fantasy element but a manifestation of the reality of people who
believe in and have “real” experiences of ghosts. Magical realist fiction depicts the real world
of people whose reality is different from ours. It’s not a thought experiment. It’s not
speculation. Magical realism endeavors to show us the world through other eyes. When it
works, as I think it does very well in, say, Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, some
readers will inhabit this other reality so thoroughly that the “unreal” elements of the story,
such as witches, will seem frighteningly real long after the book is finished. A fantasy about
southwestern Indian witches allows you to put down the book with perhaps a little shiver but
reassurance that what you just read is made up. Magical realism leaves you with the
understanding that this world of witches is one that people really live in and the feeling that
maybe this view is correct.
It’s possible to read magical realism as fantasy, just as it’s possible to dismiss people who
believe in witches as primitives or fools. But the literature at its best invites the reader to
compassionately experience the world as many of our fellow human beings see it.’