Magical Realism in art and literature
stranger. The narrator says ‘I looked at him a while, then said “ Good Evening !” and took my jacket off the fireguard not wanting to stand in front of him half dressed’ , displaying a sense of apathy and nonchalance towards a situation that is completely out of the ordinary. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ 1967 book Cien Años de Soledad treats supernatural events in a similar way. The priestly character Father Nicanor, when he has failed in his attempts to beg for money to build a cathedral, begins to float after drinking hot chocolate. While the event does garner himmore money, it is treated by the narrator in a very calm way, shown by the old beggar ’ s complete nonplussed reaction to it. This reticence allows for the sense of mystery that Magical Realism is famed for. Comparatively, it is difficult to see authorial reticence within Magical Realist art due to the absence of an author and by the same token the absence of a story. As it is a visual medium, any withheld information is simply non ‐ existent rather than delayed. 20 th -century artworks of this genre tended to focus on the visual experience of art, so lacked any attempts at an order of events akin to a story. Indeed, often they lack even the slightest sense of logic at all. Colleen Browning (1918 ‐ 2003), an Anglo ‐
American painter, experimented with the ideas of illogicality and disorder, seen most clearly in her Rio Bamba Restaurant Mural (1950) . The scene depicts multiple distorted figures beneath a deep red sky. The painting is devoid of logic, with two large hands protruding from the ground, floating umbrellas and an anthropomorphic cactus inhabiting the seemingly random landscape. While Magical Realist books tend to be full of mundane details to cement the order of the story, the works of Magical Realist art are often devoid of a story or a logical sense of order, which makes it harder to consider them the same genre.
The trope of a large amount of details that add a disorientating effect to the piece of work is however, something that can apply to both sides of the argument better than authorial reticence. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel Crónica de una Muerte Anunciada (1981), the narrator returns to the scene of a crime after 20 years to create a complete chronicle of the events. The story jumps around fromcharacter to character as he interviews each, but there is no easy flow. At any given moment, the murder victim, Santiago Nasar, can be alive, yet in the next he can be lying outside his front door with his entrails hanging out. The disorientating yet logical narrative movements in the book are created by the mass of details that form a complete picture in the head of the reader yet seem completely out of place in their own right. Márquez uses a similar technique in Cien Años de Soledad , where he combines a linear and circular narrative structure, so as to lay out the events of the story, but then return the reader to key moments, leading to a passage of time that disorientates and confuses the reader until the final moments, aided by the aforementioned authorial reticence.
A disorientating amount of details is an element that lends itself to art naturally, if the effect is desired by the artist. While some prefer simplicity and rigidity, others prefer a maelstrom of colours and details to highlight the intended themes of the piece, simultaneously confusing and overwhelming the viewer.
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