MAGIC REALISM
AThe illusion of logic is resolved in myth.@
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Culture refers to the practices, habits, skills,
arts, rituals, etc. by which a people conducts its life. Since it is
non-essential, unlike food, clothing, and shelter, it can be thought of as a
buffer between the individuals it serves and life=s bare or crude necessities, which it attempts to invest with the
weight and dignity, or non-specific significance, the way music
in a film can likewise be felt to heighten the significance of a scene without
actually specifying anything. Culture, in other words, makes it easier
for people to live, both individually and socially, as well as to work and to
divert themselves. However, the realm of non-specific significance, that is, of
a felt, obeyed, believed, understood but generally uncodified (or unwritten)
tradition, invokes qualities of human thought that can be recognized as magical:
they are accepted on faith and for psychological comfort, justified by
myth or an appropriated folk or pseudo-rationality: i.e., a stitch in time saves nine; if the gloves
don=t fit you have to acquit. The arts generally
speaking record, reflect, dramatize, critiqueBthe critique is especially important hereBtransmit and preserve human culture. Initially
culture and the arts were an instrument of religion, but since
the end of the medieval period, culture and art have assumed the character of
commodities offered in arenas of secular (non-religious) exchange, competing
for their pertinence and existence in the marketplace. The
cultural centrality of the marketplace and the general commodification of the arts
intensified markedly following the Industrial Revolution, which
likewise and simultaneously effected the decline and dismantling of traditional
social and cultural arrangements, as well as the rise of commercial culture,
the city, individualism and alienation,
modernism, and such international economic and political maneuvers as
imperialism, colonialism, and most recently globalization.
Communism, Fascism, and nationalism, can be understood as
reactions to the decline of traditional authority and its
communal consolations, and as extreme modes of magic realism.
1. MAGIC
REALISM is a category of 20th century art, primarily
fiction, often associated with
20th
Century Latin American writers, notably Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez.
2. MAGIC
REALISM fuses two opposing representational modes, the fanciful or
fantastic, with the rational and/or the realistic.
3. MAGIC
REALISM, in behalf of the human, the traditional, and the communal or
folk, is inevitably a critique and subversion of REALISM,
which purports to represent the truth or the official view.
To quote the introduction to MAGICAL REALISM by Faris and
Zamora, MAGIC REALISM represents a Ashift in emphasis...from the psychological to social and political
concerns,@ or to those arenas where human and communal
losses have been most aggravated by social and economic change, indifference,
corruption, and abuse. In other words, it revels in examining stereotypes
shaped by economic and power arrangements, rather than analyzing individual
feelings.
4. MAGIC
REALISM is frequently the cultural production of the powerless and
marginalized.
5. MAGIC
REALISM often responds to the centrality of gender and sexual issues
central to human culture with reactionary mockery and vituperation, especially
when it is male-centered or male-authored.
6. MAGIC
REALISM resorts to deliberate artistic innovation, and employs
exaggeration,
hyperbole,
totalization, aphorism, paradox, stereotype, parody, farce, uncertainty, dreams
and hallucinations, the grotesque and discordant. It prefers wisdom to
knowledge, which it distrusts, along with rationality.
7. MAGIC
REALISM is an oxymoron, or a two-word phrase that fuses opposites, such
as >cold fire.=
8. MAGIC
REALISM frequently poses specific human cultural traditions in
opposition, the ideal vs. the actual, the living versus the mechanical, the urban versus the rural, the female
versus the male, the western or advanced versus the eastern and backward, the
Germanic and Scandinavian versus the Slavic or Balkan and Mediterranean, the
North American versus the Latin American.
9. MAGIC
REALISM has existed throughout the history of culture, from Homer=s Odyssey and Euripides= The Bacchae, to the present day, and
is a useful paradigm and tool for examining cultural artifacts, values and
texts throughout history and in the immediate era.
10. MAGIC
REALISM, like metaphor, which also fuses and irrationally asserts the
identity of items that are profoundly different, on the basis of an unexpected
and extremely slim similarity, also offers the added personal benefits of
stimulating the mind with images and preparing it psychologically to deal with
uncertainty and the unknown, especially the absolute brevity of the present,
the instability of the past, and the impenetrable opacity of the future.
11. MAGIC
REALISM is a perspective on cultural production and cultural phenomena,
not a genre or technique, so the question AWhat is magic realism?@ is somewhat improper and misleading: a work of art viewed through the
lens of magic realism justifies application of the term on the
basis of discerned and demonstrable benefits the perspective makes possible.