This section uses three related but distinct motifs – genealogy, myth, and archive – in order to address the foundational moment of magical realism. In ‘Swords and Silver Rings: Magical Objects in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez’, Lois Parkinson Zamora traces the complex genealogy of magic through a set of key figures. She identifies a line of continuity running from Franz Roh's sense of the ‘oppositional energy’ inherent in the painted objects of magical-realist painting, through Borges's portrayal of objects via an iconography she labels ‘magical idealism’, up to the ‘baroque objects’ which populate García Márquez's fiction and, in which, as he suggests, ‘magic wells up’. As Zamora concludes: ‘Borges and García Márquez are (…) equally concerned with the relations of the visible world to invisible meanings, but García Márquez gives priority to the former, from which he infers the latter, whereas Borges proceeds in the opposite direction, starting with the invisible, from which he infers the world’ (p. 44). Donald L. Shaw traces another type of genealogy within the discourse of magical realism; now it is myth which acts as a recurring leitmotiv in the work of a set of key figures. In an important study published more than twenty years ago, La transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Narrative Transculturation in Latin America, 1982), Ángel Rama had argued that the innovation of the Boom novel derived from its incorporation of the Amerindian archive of myths into a new framework whereby the myths were no longer viewed as exotic and foreign (namely, as if from a Eurocentric perspective), but rather were seen, as it were, from the inside. Donald L. Shaw, in his essay, ‘The Presence of Myth in Borges, Carpentier, Asturias, Rulfo and García Márquez’, builds on some of Rama's insights but he shows how the myths used by the writers mentioned in fact derived from a number of different sources, not just the Amerindian archive.