Magical Realism: Style and Substance

Stephen M. Hart

From a term used in 1925 by a German art critic, Franz Roh, to indicate the demise of Expressionism, magical realism grew to become an important feature of the Boom literature of the 1960s in Latin America (particularly in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude of 1967) until it became, by the 1990s, in the words of Homi Bhabha ‘the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world’. Unpacking that history is a complex one and beyond the scope of this introductory essay, but a few lines may be drawn in the sand. In Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen Malerie (Post-Expressionism, Magical Realism), Franz Roh referred to how Post-Expressionism/magical realism embodies the ‘calm admiration of the magic of being, of the discovery that things already have their own faces’ (p. 20) and, thereby, represents ‘in an intuitive way, the fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world’ (p. 24). In this way, as Roh further suggested, Post-Expressionism ‘offers us the miracle of existence in its imperturbable duration: the unending miracle of eternally mobile and vibrating molecules. Out of that flux, that constant appearance and disappearance of material, permanent objects somehow appear: in short, the marvel by which a variable commotion crystallizes into a clear set of constants’ (Roh, p. 22).

Some of the tension between surface and innerness which is at the core of Roh's essay finds its way into the prologue Alejo Carpentier wrote for his novel, The Kingdom of this World (1949), in which he described his experience of the marvellous real in Haiti in 1943: ‘I was in a land where thousands of men, anxious for freedom, believed in Mackandal's lycanthropic powers to the extent that their collective faith produced a miracle on the day of his execution.’ The miracle of the marvellous real, as he clarifies in his essay, ‘arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favoured by the unexpected richness of reality’ (p. 86). Indeed, Carpentier's use of terms such as ‘alteration’, ‘revelation’ and ‘richness of reality’ may be compared to Roh's sense of the ‘radiation of magic’ (Roh, p. 20), the ‘new space’ (Roh, p. 25), ‘the interior figure’ (p. 24), the ‘vortex of depth’ (p. 27) which is ‘throbbing’ (Roh, p. 20) within phenomenal reality.