In one of his poems the American poet Robert Frost speaks of coming to a fork in the road and choosing one of the diverging ways. But he wonders about the ‘road not taken’, which will always hold its allure for him. Magical realism, following Frost's ‘road not taken’, opens onto different ways, alternate paths to perceiving the world and the interrelation between empirical reality and the fantastic.

Most critics have viewed magical realism as a mode of literary and artistic expression whose view and mapping of the world depart from those of mainstream Western thought and literature, evolving from the logocentric tradition. Magical realism is often equated with the fantastic, which ushers in the unexpected intrusion of the otherworldly in the midst of the workaday world, resulting in what Roger Caillois calls ‘a strange and almost unbearable irruption in the real world’. Magical realism frequently if not usually takes the form of a narrative of resistance against dominant or master narratives touting so-called universal truths that reject all other narratives.

Magical Realism and the Fantastic Narrative

Some commentators of the fantastic narrative see it as turning on the eventual resolution of the otherworldly through rational explanation. This particular definition of the fantastic parts company with magical realism, for the latter is not rationally explained. On the contrary, magical realism departs from reasoned argument (logos) by putting into play magical phenomena not reducible to reasoned explanation, and introduces antipodal theories of existence that are coequal: the empirical world of reason and logic and the supernatural world of unreason. The supernatural sunders the arbitrary coherence of the empirical world ordered by logocentric thought, by revealing it to be, not a universally valid representation of external reality, but no more than one of several possible representations. With regard to the fantastic Caillois sees ‘the regularity [of] the world order so painfully established and proved by the methodical investigation of experimental science, [ceding] to the assault of irreconcilable, nocturnal, demonic forces’ (p. 23). But magical realism differs from the fantastic by simultaneously presenting the ‘magical’ and the ‘real’ realms as coexisting, not the displacement of one by the other.

Magical realism, in challenging traditional discourse, has often been considered a marginal or outsider discourse. The late French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard views it differently: ‘there is no such thing as a margin.