Exploring the Two Types of Magic in Magical Realism

It might be time for critics to acknowledge that magical Realism is a subgenre of fantasy

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In his wonderful essay about fairy stories, J. R. R. Tolkien claims that the land of fairies, where all fairy-stories are set in “contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.”

In Gabriel García Márquez's brand of Magical Realism, we can find this quality of enchantment almost everywhere we look. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel with a large cast of characters, and yet it is enough to think of the hero of the first part of the story—the dreamy José Arcadio Buendía—to see the enchantment of the world. Nature and science (the laws of nature) are to him... not an open book per se, but a book nonetheless, and one that he would love nothing more than to read fluently. It seems that every few months Buendía comes up with a new experiment to conduct, each one sparked by a discovery previously unknown to him. This is, of course, Márquez's way of showing us how remote his village of Macondo is from the rest of the world. Not only do magnets fascinate him, but even ice(!)—all phenomena that exist in our world and that we take for granted.

Even setting aside the real magic that appears in the novel, it can't be denied that One Hundred Years of Solitude often feels like reading a highly sophisticated and beautifully written fairy tale.

At the same time, there is another form of magic in One Hundred Years of Solitude, one that we might call—borrowing a term from the fantasy genre—"soft magic." A soft magic system (as opposed to a hard one) is not really a system at all. The magic found in such stories does not follow rigid rules that the reader gets to know over the course of the story. Soft magic, like what we see in the works of Hayao Miyazaki, is much less knowable and more about moods, themes, and the overall atmosphere of the story. That is the type of magic we find in Márquez's novel as well.

Just to give one example: When José Arcadio Buendía sets out with his wife to establish the village of Macondo, he does so because of true magic—the existence of ghosts, specifically the ghost of the man he killed. And when Buendía himself finally dies, the heavens shower Macondo with flowers. As you can see, there is both enchantment and true magic here.

James Wood, who writes for The New Yorker, is perhaps my favorite literary critic, despite his repeated declarations of disdain for the Fantasy genre. Wood doesn’t like fantasy, but he has no problem writing about works of Magical Realism with his excellent insight and talent. However, I believe the distinction he and others make between the genres is unnecessary. The way I see it, Magical Realism is a sub-genre of fantasy, or it should be viewed as such. If Tolkien created an entirely new world in Middle-Earth, and C. S. Lewis wrote about transitions between our world and another, then Magical Realism can be seen as a fantasy story with a soft magic system that exists within the boundaries of our world.

Some of the time, the magic in Magical Realism novels comes from other "accepted" worlds, like the Christian (or Muslim or Jewish) heaven and hell—places filled with angels and demons that exist outside of our world but are familiar from religion and mythology, and therefore believable.

To understand why Magical Realism is seen as distinct from Fantasy, we need to look at the historical evolution of the fantasy genre. Towards the end of the 1960s, when the fantasy genre was officially created, this was actually a marketing decision made by a publishing house, Ballantine Books. After its founders witnessed the phenomenal success of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, they invited the author Lin Carter to guest-edit a new series that would unify literary works from at least two different streams: works sometimes designated as "Fairy Tales" or "Romance"—a vaguely defined 19th- and early 20th-century literary genre considered high literature at the time—along with the pulp literature of the Sword and Sorcery variety. Thus, the works of Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, and William Morris (to name a few) were grouped alongside the heroic and lascivious tales of Conan the Barbarian. Carter called this the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Launched in 1969, the series lasted until 1974, and in those five years, a new literary genre was born.

In the introduction that Carter attached to all the books in the series, he repeatedly defined the boundaries of the genre in a strict yet convincing manner. He claimed that fantasy stories should be set outside our planet, "in settings completely made up by the author." Only a story set in an imaginary world "in which magic really works" qualifies as fantasy. This definition allowed other fantastical stories—those suffused with magic but set entirely in our world—to be called by other, more highbrow names. The term that won out was an oxymoronic one: Magical Realism. Yet, as I’ve mentioned, it is enough to read the quintessential magical realist novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, to find magical elements in every corner of Macondo—the fictional Colombian town where most of the story takes place.

The fact that magical realism stories take place in a fictional version of our world—a version where magic exists—allows readers, and especially critics, to have their cake and eat it too. Even if the writers' imagination soars, their feet remain firmly planted in familiar ground. In essence, the critics suggest that even if everything is magical and strange, these works still speak about us.

Of course, I have some issues with this perception, primarily because it is partial and condescending. Tolkien's Hobbits are a mirror image of us—sometimes more so than the much stranger characters we meet in a Márquez or a Rushdie novel (Rushdie being another important magical realist author). But the main problem with this division is that it ultimately harms literature. Fantasy is the ability to imagine what is not there, a space for the story to surprise you with unreality. In this sense, even the most realistic works are somewhat fantastic—don’t we find coincidences in Tolstoy that reason cannot accept? Coincidences that are a clear result of the author’s invisible hand? Of course we do. All the time.

Just as Tolkien's Middle-earth reflects human nature, and Márquez's Macondo captures the magical in the everyday, all stories—fantastical or realistic—ultimately reflect our experience of the world, where the line between magic and reality is always shifting.

I feel like Márquez admitted as much when he wrote in his autobiography about his love for the great collection of stories known as A Thousand and One Nights.

I even dared to think that the marvels recounted by Scheherazade really happened in the daily life of her time, and stopped happening because of the incredulity and realistic cowardice of subsequent generations. By the same token, it seemed impossible that anyone from our time would ever believe again that you could fly over cities and mountains on a carpet, or that a slave from Cartagena de Indias would live for two hundred years in a bottle as a punishment, unless the author of the story could make his readers believe it.

- Living To Tell The Tale, 2004