My Love Letter to Magical Realism

 Still from Pan’s Labyrinth

I love magical realism.

I think I read my first magical realism book in middle school. I got “Green Angel” by Alice Hoffman from my sister’s bookshelf and ended up crying because of how much it lingered with me. My heart ached not only for the characters, but the beauty created in their sorrows. I didn’t know what magical realism was, but I couldn’t get the writing out of my head.  

If I were in a magical realism book, it would be obvious that my life was all falling together for me to become a total MR nerd. Without knowing, I was drawn to the genre in so many forms of media. “Pan’s Labyrinth” is one of my favorite movies, partially because I can’t explain it. I don’t understand the world completely, so I keep learning more about the bizarre world director Guillermo del Toro created. I love not completely knowing, because then I continue to want more. Rule #1 of writing: don’t give the reader everything.

After discovering this “weird in-between fantasy and real” was a common theme, I started researching the actual term.

I had two questions:

“What’s magical realism?” 

And

“Where can I get more?”

Art by Tomek Setowski

I read what I believe was my second magical realism book, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton, after I graduated high school, and discovered the term “magical realism” for the first time. I found so much vulnerability in the poetic language, as if I were being shown the deepest secrets of the author’s mind through their words. I felt intimate with the world they found in this genre. I was one of the only people in my course who liked Bless Me Ultima (my third known encounter with MR); the majority of the class argued that it was “too weird” and “didn’t make sense”, while I argued this suspension of reality is what we search for in literature.

My next encounter with magical realism was in graduate my class Theorizing Queer Adolescent Literature when we read “When the Moon Was Ours” by Anna-Marie McLemore, a book about a young girl with roses growing out of her wrists, and (spoilers!) a young trans boy who eventually is transformed into the body he always desired, and all I wanted was for that to be true. I wanted to see this beauty in real life. My heart strings were tugged, and my mind begged for more. At this point, I knew I loved magical realism. I love the suspension of reality, the focus on the beauty of language. Most of all though, I loved the magic.  

At this point, I started researching more books in the genre.

Falling into Gabriel García Márquez showed me an inkling of why I love it. First, before knowing about the background, I was just immediately drawn to the beautiful language.

Although I fell in love first and foremost with the actual language and books of magical realism, there was more that drew me to it. I loved learning of the connection between magical realism and Spain. I am Spanish, but not super connected to my culture; my Spanish grandmother lives across the country, I refused to learn Spanish until tenth grade, and let’s be honest: I don’t “look Spanish” according to people, (or stereotypically Spanish, which is another issue on its own) and my love of magical realism has been questioned because of that. This made me think more about why I love it.

Hearing inklings of my family’s journey moving to America from Spain captivated me, and I saw this genre as a tiny way to be more connected to my culture across the ocean. I felt transported.

I read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by the king of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez. While I was carrying the book around, my mom told me it was her favorite book, and reading it made me feel a little bit closer to her as well. Everything was just falling together. Finally, I started researching the actual genre of magical realism, also known as magic realism, marvelous realism, or fabulism.

According to Encyclopedia Britannica, magical realism is a “chiefly Latin-American narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction”. Although Latin-American, its roots are in Germany, and the term “magic/magical realism” was first used by German photographer, art historian, and art critic Franz Roh in 1925 (Slemon, 9). Although it is most popular in literature, it can be found in any form of art: paintings, movies, et cetera.

As Maggie Ann Bowers beautifully puts it in “Magic(al) Realism”, the genre “magic realism” is “the concept of the ‘mystery [that] does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it” while “magical realism” is “commingling of the improbable and the mundane” (Bowers, 74). I love this mystery that doesn’t need to be explained. I’m okay with it hiding and never truly being discovered.

There is some contestation whether the term “magic realism” should only apply to Latinx authors, but the issue in this requires each author to disclose their identity, which if they want to is great, but I really think that’s another issue in this: a policing of the genre, by all identities. This policing forces some authors to validate their writing and divulge potentially personal information, which for some is perfectly fine, but in general, I think that’s pretty weird to insist upon.

Why is their background your business?

For some authors, they don’t want their identity to be central to the reading of the novel, or simply they don't want it as a public fact in general, and that should be respected. Varying identities in authorship is amazing, and something I would love to see more of, but an author, like myself writing this blog, should not have to immediately preface their work with their identity. But I do.

Nonetheless, I still love the genre, and writing about it.

My journey in this genre has helped me discover more about my family, myself, and the world.

Magical realism for me has become an escape from the world. In times where I felt like life didn’t make sense, everything fell together in this genre, because things didn’t have to follow the logic of our world. When life didn’t make sense, when I stared at the hate in our world, I wanted just a glimpse of beauty. Beauty was found in times of hate and oppression in these books.

Magical realism is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I want to emphasize something: It is for everyone, no matter their background. I think everyone should at least try it, and I think those of any age or identity should at least experience it once. If you love it, read about it, research it, honor the background and roots of it. It is not only beautiful; it is necessary to be accessible to the world. The whole world. For some, it can be an escape, an exploration. A reader can escape this world and explore another one more fantastical, more beautiful, more magical. A world like in When the Moon Was Ours where flowers grow from wrists and a trans boy born in the body he doesn’t align with can have the body he always should have had with a drink of a potion. A world like that.

There’s something so beautiful about that. The possibility.

Magical realism is full of possibility.

For me, reading magical realism is a reparation of some of the darkness in life, by seeing that reparation happen in books. This can be seen in When the Moon Was Ours, when a trans boy can magically transform to have the body he always desired. Magical realism brings light to my world, and I think it can bring light to others. This escape that I found, this suspension of disbelief, became a way of coping, because for a little while during my reading, I could believe that anything was possible.

I was right.

Anything is possible. It doesn’t matter if that anything is in a book, because a book is real to me.

-SS

Sources:

“Magic Realism.” ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, https://www.britannica.com/art/magic-realism.

Slemon, Stephen. Magic realism as post-colonial discourse Archived 2018-04-25 at the Wayback Machine. In: Canadian Literature #116 (Spring 1988),pp. 9-24, p. 9 http://canlit.ca/canlitmedia/canlit.ca/pdfs/articles/canlit116-Magic(Slemon).pdf

“Hansel & Gretel: Fairy Tale to Opera”

Two singers from the San Diego Young Artists 

Opera Program performing a piece 

from the opera of "Hansel & Gretel"

On January 14^th I had the wonderful opportunity to see Dr. Joseph Thomas and Dr. Nicolas Reveles’ lively discussion, “Hansel & Gretel: Fairy Tale to Opera” as part of San Diego Opera’s 65^th year of the “Taste of Opera” series. Thomas and Reveles discussed the roots of Hansel and Gretel, both the Grimm Brothers’ version and the story in the Humperdinck opera. They explored the dark undertones of the story and how it turned into the (somewhat less dark) story it is known as today. Two talented singers from the San Diego Young Artists Opera Program performed a piece from the opera.

As Reveles beautifully puts it, Humperdinck perfectly illustrates children left to their own devices, without the scrutiny of parents, as seen by the two singers bickering with one another as they dance around the stage. This can be seen with Hansel and Gretel joyously skipping around the stage and fighting over who should do the laundry.

Nicolas Reveles playing a piano

piece from the Hansel & Gretel Opera

I don’t know much about operas, but I know a bit about the Grimm Brothers, so I was excited. The original opera was written in the nineteenth century by composer Engelbert Humperdinck, based on the Grimm brothers’ popular fairy tale.

The origins of “Hansel and Gretel” are a bit unclear, but Thomas says estimates lie around 1315, the time of the Great Famine in Europe. During this time there were many historic tales of cannibalism and child abandonment, two ideas present in the story of Hansel and Gretel. This popular tale may have been inspired by Charles Perrault’s fairy tale Hop o’ My Thumb.

Nicolas Reveles and Joseph Thomas

In the time of Grimm’s tales, it was not uncommon for many children to be abandoned due to lack of food, so Hansel and Gretel’s tale, at least the first part of the tale, is not as far-fetched as it may seem to modern audiences.

Although fairy tales are modernly associated with children, according to Reveles, fairy tales were originally written as a historical and theoretical study for adults. Grimm’s tales were a very new concept, as the common idea of literature was the it should come from Greek and Roman tales, an idea popularized by King Louis XIV. This was known as “The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns”. 

Although Grimm’s first edition highlighted a motif of child abandonment, this didn’t sit well with audiences, so the mother was edited as a step-mother, and as Dr. Thomas states, editors argued that “a German mother would never do that [abandon her children]”. I am curious if this started the tradition of stepmothers that we see in many Disney movies and the fairy tales they were inspired by.

Hansel and Gretel has some interesting themes. For one, the natural world, or the woods Hansel and Gretel enter, is a world of mysticality, poetry, and fairy tales, perhaps as an escape from the restrictive world the two live in at their own home. These stories had many educational themes throughout which may not have been as obvious being a modern reader.

This was truly such a fun talk and I learned so much.

-SS