Magic Realism

June 5, 2006 5:55 PM

Magic realism, "in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting." A few galleries to peruse, but these are my favs.
posted by JPowers (31 comments total)

Burn them!
posted by SweetJesus at 5:58 PM on June 5, 2006

Related.
posted by tellurian at 6:05 PM on June 5, 2006

>>"in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting."

<insert joke about bush administration here>
posted by modernerd at 6:11 PM on June 5, 2006

Like Ally McBeal?
posted by Artw at 6:14 PM on June 5, 2006

Crapgic Realism.

Rob Gonsalves paintings were posted to the front page within the last week.
posted by fire&wings at 6:16 PM on June 5, 2006

I really hate these kinds of coinages. No matter how good the literature or art that inspires them, they always serve to diminish and downplay the individual merits of the works by clustering them together for commercial or critical expediency.
posted by bukharin at 6:17 PM on June 5, 2006

It would be more magical if they disappeared. Seriously, put down the prismacolors.
posted by furtive at 6:19 PM on June 5, 2006

I don't follow this thread at all. I'm gonna go get a beer.
posted by rolypolyman at 6:22 PM on June 5, 2006

I really hate these kinds of coinages.

The music thing in particular. Unless the author of that entry can come up with multiple examples of music created by people who actually intended their music to be "magic realism" it's just another meaningless term.
posted by Foosnark at 6:26 PM on June 5, 2006

they always serve to diminish and downplay the individual merits of the works by clustering them together for commercial or critical expediency.

Eh? All study of anything is a study of patterns. What about 'magical realism' turns you off that doesn't in terms like 'modernism' or 'gothicism'?
posted by Firas at 6:27 PM on June 5, 2006

Regarding music, I agree--not every artistic movement needs to be pan-media (I mean, there isn't such a thing as an 'impressionist novel' right?)
posted by Firas at 6:29 PM on June 5, 2006

Some people seem to think so...
posted by danb at 6:41 PM on June 5, 2006

All study of anything is a study of patterns. What about 'magical realism' turns you off that doesn't in terms like 'modernism' or 'gothicism'?

"Gothic" is a term used to describe the prevailing aesthetic, in art and architecture, that dominated an entire culture for centuries. Of course it needs a word! Modernism is a more questionable term and I would use it carefully. Naming the patterns is important for a critical understanding of the context in which art was made and the principles by which it was made, but most of the time genres are tacked on to individual pieces of art out of intellectual laziness or to give academics some rotten semantic scrap to fight over for a few decades.

What would you call Nabokov? Post-modern magical realistic anti-novel satire? Or why not just describe what it is? What is Melville? What is Proust? Features of "modernism" can be found in King Lear or Don Quixote. It's better to evaluate a work and try to understand its context by doing so without a careless clumping together like "magical realism," an ugly term anyway because it implies the validity of the very boundary between subjective and objective which the authors of those works are trying to overcome.
posted by bukharin at 6:44 PM on June 5, 2006

If by "magical elements" you mean "aunt-fucking", then yes, the term is totally appropriate.

But I guess a book named Rediscovering Aunt-Fucking in the Americas wouldn't sell.
posted by Powerful Religious Baby at 6:45 PM on June 5, 2006

These pictures remind me of the covers of books I read when I was a kid or something.
posted by delmoi at 6:55 PM on June 5, 2006

These pictures remind me of the covers of books I read when I was a kid or something.

Or the third-rate kitsch in plastic frames they sell in those bins at Wal-mart.
posted by bukharin at 6:58 PM on June 5, 2006

Oh, I take that back. Some of them are pretty cool.
posted by bukharin at 7:02 PM on June 5, 2006

Definitely, delmoi.
posted by Powerful Religious Baby at 7:20 PM on June 5, 2006

Hmmm...make that definitely.
posted by Powerful Religious Baby at 7:21 PM on June 5, 2006

Huh. I'd never heard the term "magical realism" applied to visual art before, but what do you know, it does. Not these artists though. They're between children's illustration and surrealism if you had to pick genres. You have to scroll down a bit on this wikipedia entry to read about it, or look at galleries of a few of the artists: Alexander Kanoldt and Christian Schad, among others. A bit of googling also turned up this paper (pdf) about the interplay between the painting movement called "magical realism" and the literary one. I don't have time to read it right now, but maybe someone else will find it interesting. It looked interesting, anyway.
posted by furiousthought at 7:30 PM on June 5, 2006

I was listening to a local (KUOW, Seattle) public radio program on sleep disorders, when someone called in to say he saw angels and demons walking around in real life all the time --until his narcolepsy was finally able to be controlled by medication.
posted by jamjam at 7:48 PM on June 5, 2006

I really liked this one, the rest, meh.

One thing I've noticed (from snarfing JPOP on Lime, er the radio) is that many/most artists have made one representative work -- grab that, and you've got a pretty good handle on their oevre...
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 8:18 PM on June 5, 2006

Magic realism is a literary movement, too, including Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which despite claiming to be a chronicle actually has no path of time whatsoever and repeats the murder several times. It's a good read if you have any spare time.
posted by Citizen Premier at 10:14 PM on June 5, 2006

Is TMBG's "Dr. Worm" an example of magic realism? I mean, he's not a real doctor, but he is a real worm -- that's got to be something, right?
posted by aaronetc at 10:35 PM on June 5, 2006

No one's mentioned One Hundred Years of Solitude yet and this is a Magic Realism thread?!
posted by nonmerci at 11:37 PM on June 5, 2006

nonmerci, its absence makes the thread magically real.
posted by bukharin at 12:04 AM on June 6, 2006

For Impressionist writing, try Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Gustave Flaubert, Stephen Crane, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, etc. Visual artistic aesthetics can translate into writing one way or another, though I'm not sure this FPP captures magic realism in art very well. I'm a bit sceptical of "magic realist music", too.

For some good magic-realist books try Jeff Noon, China Miéville, , J.T. Leroy, Scott Bradfield (, J.L. Borges, Kafka, Burroughs...)

Borges & M.R.
Lots of M.R. links
M.R.: A problem?
posted by Drexen at 4:08 AM on June 6, 2006

Wait, how is Mieville a magical realist? He's a fantasist, no? As is Borges mostly. Realism is the overarching term used to describe the predominant literature of today. It relies on conventions of description and motivation to make a facsimile of reality. Fantasy and science fiction are both, despite the subject matter, firmly within this realist tradition. Magical realism is too, but it is different than either fantasy or science fiction because it presumes a world essentially like our own into which magical elements intrude without causing the disruptions of ontology that we might otherwise expect from them. Mieville is a fantasist and world-builder where some elements of this world are present, but where the basis of reality is understood to be completely different than our own. Borges (or Kafka for that matter) was a fantasist of a different sort, in which the fantasy was stressed through it's authorial acceptance, but where it created major ontological problems within the work. A story like Tlon, Uqbar...is precisely about the disruption of epistemology in the face of radical (and fantastic) doubt; similarly The Metamorphosis is about the breakdown of social norms in light of a fantastic change. In other words, the fantastic is never integrated into reality, or to the extent that it is, it's profoundly disruptive.

Mostly I agree with bukharin, though.
posted by OmieWise at 6:19 AM on June 6, 2006

To summarize, in fantasy weird shit happens and it's crazy. In magical realism, weird shit happens and it's not crazy.
posted by Khalad at 12:11 PM on June 6, 2006

Eugh, Drexen, don't drag them into this. "Impressionist" writers, please! Flaubert is closer to Nabokov than Conrad.
posted by bukharin at 12:59 PM on June 6, 2006

Again, the clumping together, in this case under the misnomer "Impressionist," clouds rather than clarifies the writing in question... the precision of detail in Flaubert's prose, the minutae of setting and his extraordinary sensitivity in rendering the flow of thought, hardly reminds us of Monet's flowers. Their nearness is in space and time, but not style or principle.

One of the few references online I could find to a so-called Impressionist manner of writing is, oddly enough, from the Encyclopedia of Ukraine: "Impressionism in literature is a manner of writing whereby the author does not try to represent reality objectively but to capture the impressions derived from it. The writer frequently centers his attention on the mental life of a character by simply registering his impressions or sensations instead of interpreting experience."

This correctly describes Flaubert's prose, but Flaubert's influence on modern prose-writing is so pervasive that many writers may not even think of the debt. (Here's a fine NYT article on the subject.)
posted by bukharin at 2:04 PM on June 6, 2006