Magic in the Real World

This post is part of the Magic Realism Blog Hop 2015. 

For links to the other blogs taking part, check out the links belowFor three years I have been reading and reviewing magic realism on the Magic Realism Books Blog. And the more I read, the more I am of the opinion that magic realism is not a genre, but a way of looking at and describing the world – the real world. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said: It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. 

Magic realism is a rejection of the modern Western rationalist and scientific world view, which excludes the marvellous and unexplainable. You can see this in terms of cultural differences between the West and other cultures. But I believe that, like me, the majority of people in the West actually have a magic realist outlook on life. Philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that: The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. I totally agree.

When I am writing (especially when I am writing poetry, but also sometimes when I write fiction) I am conscious that I am experiencing and seeing the world differently. It is a form of heightened or extended reality. Michel Ajvaz wrote: The frontier of our world is not far away; it doesn’t run along the horizon or in the depths. It glimmers faintly close by, in the twilight of our nearest surroundings; out of the corner of our eye we can always glimpse another world, without realizing it.

Fantasy crosses the frontier and stays there. Magic Realism presents the world with the frontier in place – glimmering in the twilight. It does not deny reality but is, in Alejo Carpentier’s words,  a privileged revelation of reality, an unaccustomed or singularly favourable illumination of the previously unremarked riches of reality, an amplification of the measures and categories of reality, perceived with peculiar intensity due to the exaltation of the spirit which elevates it to a kind of “limit state”.  Without magic, reality becomes two dimensional. The magic illuminates and throws the “real” into relief. The real can only be seen fully if you see it from different angles and perspectives, if you can hold it up to the light and look into it and see that the magic is inside and an integral part of it.