Magical Realism in art and literature
Will Colledge
Coined as a term in 1925 by the German Art critic Franz Roh, Magischer Realismus was a new take on the existing anti ‐ expressionist movement of Neue Sachlichkeit , or New Objectivity, and developed throughout the early and mid ‐ 20 th century as not only a topic in Art, fronted by artists like Frida Kahlo and Hans Reudi Giger, but in Literature too, with key writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Haruki Murakami. However, the artistic side of the genre was born in post ‐ war Central Europe, which allowed for far more liberal and expressionistic explorations and experimentations in the arts. The literary aspect of Magical Realism came about from the culture and everyday life in Southern America, especially in Columbia, often cited as the spiritual birthplace of the literary genre. It is easy to confuse Magical Realism with the Fantasy genre, a more widely known and understood genre, which owes its mainstream popularity to books such as J.K Rowling’s hugely successful Harry Potter series, as they encompass the fantastical elements of Magical Realism, but lack aspects that make it genuine Magical Realism. The genre can be separated into three categories of tropes; fantastical elements, arguably the simplest aspect, set within a realistic setting or tone; authorial reticence, a withholding of information by the narrator and a progression of the story in a logical order with relative indifference towards the events; a plenitude of often disorientating details aided by a layering of elements within the story. While the majority of these traits apply to literature, in order to ascertain whether the two genres are inherently the same, it is key to our understanding of them to see if they apply to Magical Realism in art as well. Fantastical elements are the most recognizable trait of the Magical Realist genre, as it composes the ‘Magical’ within Magical Realism. Often the phantasmagorical phenomen a that occur in the stories of the Magical Realist writers connect the traditional, the folkloric and mythological, with the modern or the contemporary setting of the novel or story, often calling back to the oral tradition of storytelling that was so prevalent prior to the development of the printing press. The Nigerian author Ben Okri’s book The Famished Road (1991) follows the story of Azaro, a spirit child or abiku, living in a nameless Nigerian town. The story combines the spirit world and the real world seamlessly, allowing for fantastical and magical events in a realistic setting, and also comes from the tradition of African Religious Realism. African Religious Realism comes from a vast combination of ethnic beliefs that have a wholly oral tradition rather than a written one, and this allows for certain supernatural and folkloric events that transform it into Magical Rea lism. Additionally, one of Haruki Murakami’s recent works, 2005’s Kafka on the Shore , consists of two interconnected yet apparently completely separate storylines; one of a boy called Kafka Tamura, a boy fleeing from an oedipal relationship at home and subsequently being tied up as a suspect in a murder investigation; the other of a boy called Satoru Nakata, employed to find lost cats due to his supernatural ability to speak to the cats themselves. The two stories intertwine and complement one another while remaining separate, and once again taking inspiration from religious tradition, in this case the Japanese Shinto religion.
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