Realismo Mágico
I put this together in a hurry, and apologize for spelling mistakes,
other types. This is a rough collection of ideas, and does not
have an introduction, a conclusion, or even a continuity (yet.)
Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala) was one of the first Latino writers
to make use of the writing style we call
Magical Realism. Uslar Pietri applied the term to Latin
American writing; the term came from German art criticism.
Magical Realism- The co-ocurrence of realism with the fantastic,
the mythic, and the magical. Critics have trouble attaching
a scholarly definition to the term Magical Realism, and some
have expressed disgust with the term, and want to abandon it.
The term Magical Realism, a term difficult to specify, is used to
draw attention to "the fusion of realism with myth and fantasy
that distinguishes a sector of Latin American literature."
Uslar Pietri refers to a human of mystery surrounded by realistic data.
Writers of Magical Realism accept events contrary to usual operating laws
of the universe, and they express no surprise when these things
happen.
Superposition of the fantastic on realism example:
James Bond rides a motorcycle over a cliff while in pursuit
of a plane that had just gone over, a plane with the engine runnnig
but no pilot because Bond had thrown him out. The planes goes into
a dive, and Bond follows, angling his body to fall
faster than the plane and he steers himself toward it, opens the
door, and pulls the plane out of a crash, and flys away.
To allow James to catch the plane we must grant him a temporal
distortion (to give him enough time to catch the plane) and
forget for the moment that the propellar on the plane which is
still running will give the plane an additional acceleration to
make it fall faster than Bond.
The 1994 publication of Asturias' Men of Maize showed a
change of the literary treatment of Indian issues.
Asturias draws on Popul-Vuh, which is the sacred book
of Maya civilization. The novel encourages people to respect
the rich cultural inheritance of the Central American Indians.
With the acceptance of the style, Magical Realism, authors were
no longer compelled to chose to write either in the real-world,
or an imaginary world.
The best analogy I can make for this is to say we have a realism
movie, "Casa Blanca" and we have an imaginary movie, "Donald
Duck in Mathemagic Land" and one day someone develops a Magical
Realism movie, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" which combines real
and cartoon footage together.
The other makes reference to a "polemical distinction" between the
real and imaginary (I need to look the word polemic in the
dictionary :)
Conflict of Style: Older revolutionaries felt a realist style was
important to evoke change, and Oscar Collazos criticized Julio
Cortázar for neglecting social concerns in favor of
experimenting with a new writing style.
Asturia's El señor Presidente creates an
atmosphere of nightmarish fear and uncertainty, for the reader
does not see much of the dictator, but has only the wild
rumors to work with, which create the fear the dictator needs
to instill in the people. The book makes use of spatial and
temporal distortions of uneasy dreams, sort of like the
paralysis you may fear in a dream when you are trying to run
from a killer and you just can move hardly at all.
Example of hidden unknown in cinema: For the movie "Jaws" you did
not see the shark until you were in the last third of the movie.
For a television example of magical realism, we might consider "Twin Peaks"
by David Lynch, which kept allowing ideas and items from the
netherworld to slip in through the cracks of reality.
In the last episode there spatial distortions (if you
walked through the circle of the twelve trees you ended up
somewhere else) and temporal distortions (every time the guy
walked from one room to the next, twenty five years past.)
Sherilyn Fenn as Audrey at One Eyed Jacks (TV series Twin Peaks)
Encyclopedia Britannica calls Rafael Arévalo Martínez,
a Guatelmalean novelist, an important precursor to modern Spanish-American
fiction, and a "foremost writer" of what has been called magical realism.
Referencia:
"Twentieth-Century Spanish American Literature", Naomi Lindstrom,
University of Texas Press: Austin, Texas (1994)
