How Magical Realism Derailed Fantasy
Among fantasy genre aficionados, a joke persists that magical realism is what they call fantasy when it’s written by a South American author.
It usually evokes a laugh when at a fantasy convention, but there are many in the literary world who would raise eyebrows at the joke. Fantasy is escapism, they might say, while magical realism still forces its reader to remain in the real world.
Part of this distinction, the argument goes, is that magical realism stops short of world building, instead preferring to dish out abstract and unusual magical elements into its narrative rather than present an entire new world to its readers.
But magical realism does have world building, contrary to what many literary commentators have said. Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel includes sophisticated world building, as does the work of Gabriel García Márquez. But the key difference between fantasy and magical realism is the way they address metanarrative.
In 1817, English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term suspension of disbelief when speaking about the fantastical elements of his poems. Such elements required a greater emotional investment from the reader, he said. The greater the emotional investment from the reader, the more willing was the reader to overlook unbelievable elements in fiction.
The issue is not a new one. Aristotle raises it in Poetics, pointing out how the audience ignores the unreality of fiction in order to experience catharsis. The phenomena has also cropped up in modern video game studies, when Clint Hocking, then-creative director of Ubisoft, created the term ludonarrative dissonance to describe the conflict between a game’s narrative and the physical experience of playing a game.
The split between the two genres is in their approach to the suspension of disbelief. In fantasy, the approach many authors take is to immerse the reader into the world as quickly and frictionlessly as possible.
But in magical realism, suspending disbelief is often not the goal. The aim instead is often to deliberately bring to attention the act of reading itself.
For example, in Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 short story The Nose, the precursor of the magical realism genre, the author often addresses the strangeness of the story he is writing, bringing up specific parts of the text that don’t make sense.
In the story, Major Kovalyov wakes up missing his nose, and becomes quickly embarrassed upon realising he will be unable to attend a party that evening. Upon venturing out, he finds his nose dressed as a state councilor.
When Kovalyov confronts his nose, calls it his own, and asserts that it must re-attach itself to his face, the nose replies: “You are mistaken, my dear sir. I exist in my own right.”
Kovalyov later takes his story to a local newspaper, hoping to take out an ad the next morning offering a reward for its apprehension. His barber, the narrative reveals, found the nose in a loaf of bread on the same morning it went missing.
At the end of the story, the author reviews the narrative, remarking how odd it is that the nose should have become detached and appeared in a loaf of bread.
“But the strangest, most incomprehensible thing of all, is how authors can choose such subjects,” writes Gogol in the closing lines of the story.
The two genres of magical realism and fantasy are at odds. The former takes its inspiration from postmodernism, whereas fantasy falls largely outside of those influences.
In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, for example, the author begins his narrative speaking directly to the reader about the problem of writing about the bombing of Dresden, which is the subject matter of the book.
Drawing the reader's attention to the fact that they are reading an artificial world is a goal contrary to those of the fantasy author, who exerts most work keeping their readers immersed in the elaborate world they have created.
One school of inquiry is concerned with the immersion of the reader beyond all else, whereas the other is concerned with deconstructing the way texts are disseminated, consumed and thought about.
Whose goal is the most valid? It is not for us to judge, but to think on how the two schools of thought can be reconciled.
Magical realism
The debate harkens back to the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction. In a nutshell, the argument is around what should be considered “literature” and what is simply entertainment.
Because it is not concerned with the deconstruction of texts (i.e. challenging metanarrative structures), fantasy and science fiction are not considered “literature” within the major literary award circles.
The reason most commonly given for the difference in perception is the treatment of supernatural or magical elements.
Magical realism prides itself on making little fuss over the magical elements it introduces. In The Nose, few characters outside of the protagonist find it remarkable that a man’s nose has detached from his face and disguised itself.
But the opposite is true in many examples. In A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, a short story by Márquez, townsfolk gather from all over after a young boy discovers an “angel” down by the seaside.
In the Márquez story, the magical element of the story is as pivotal as it would be in a Harry Potter novel. But it is hard to find a magical realist novel which has a coherent magic system akin to say, Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere novels or David Farland's The Runelords series.
In fantasy, the magical elements take up a lot of room in the story. In magical realism, they aren’t necessarily its focus. The magical elements are often macguffins (things around which the plot evolves) propelling the story but not taking it over.
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings could have the magical elements removed completely and the story would remain intact, but in fantasy there would be little left. In the academy, they are considered literary fiction, and hence more likely to win an award.
Tied in with their status as more serious fiction is the genre’s relation to politics. The genre emerged at first from the "Neue Sachlichkeit” (new objectivity) German art movement, which inspired anti-utopian literature that rejected art as escapism throughout the 1920s and 30s.
Nazisim suppressed and killed-off the movement in Germany, at least until the “Latin American Boom” propelled a group of Latin-American authors to erupt in popularity across the world.
Márquez, a Colombian, and Argentinian novelist Julio Cortázar were among the first published in Europe from their respective countries. They and others became famous largely through their social activity inspired by the 1959 Cuban Revolution, utilising magical realism to critique the countries and societies they were born into.
The genre therefore was born with a political edge which never touched genre fiction. The politicisation of the genre is one of the reasons it graces award ceremonies more commonly than its awkward cousin, fantasy.
Western-derived examples include Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, and Exit West by Mohsin Hamid.
But rewarding political messaging can often be dangerous for an emerging literary genre, particularly when the genre becomes a vehicle not of social parody but also of political critique.
The danger was realised upon the publication of British author Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), after the book’s portrayal of Islam led to then Supreme Leader of Iran calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989.
Despite receiving nominations for many awards prior to the fatwa, many in the western literary world were unwilling to lend vocal support to the author by condeming the call for murder. Some went further than that.
Children’s author Roald Dahl said at the time that "[Rushdie] knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise”, while former spy and novelist John le Carre wrote “It seems to me he has nothing more to prove except his own insensitivity."
"I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles,” added writer and academic Germaine Greer.
Islamists tracked down William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, and shot him three times in the back. A cleaning lady would find Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of Rushdie’s novel, stabbed to death on a college campus, while in 1993 a mob would set fire to a building and see 37 people burned alive while trying to get to their target Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator.
Rushdie is still the subject of the fatwa, with him and his family spending much of their life in hiding or police protection.
The genre never fully recovered. Like others before it, Magical Realism had become politicised, and the culture war which erupted over Rushdie’s novel saw to it that the genre would not become the preeminent leader of literary fiction.
Taking the crown later in the 21st century was historical fiction, which supplanted the genre in academic and accoladed literature.
Fantasy
Fantasy has trod a very different path to magical realism. Although their ingredients often look the same, the two are chalk and cheese on the literary spectrum.
It feels a waste of paper and pixels to point out that Tolkein is the father of the genre, but he is as impossible to escape in fantasy as Frank Herbert in science fiction.
When the Nobel Prize Committee denied Tolkein the award in 1961, they wrote that Lord of the Rings had “not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality”.
It is telling, then, that one of the only prominent fantasy authors to win a Nobel Prize in literature is Gabriel García Márquez for his novel Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).
Another is Kazuro Ishiguro, who stepped into the genre with his novel The Buried Giant (2015).
Fantasy can be approached in two directions. From authors already stopped in a political tradition which has identified itself with the concerns of literary fiction, another is venturing into the genre as a bonus prize once the literary mainstream has been conquered.
Genre fiction writers call this genre-tourism, in which a high-profile novelist becomes a “tourist” sightseeing and tasting a literary realm in which they are not considered local.
One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Buried Giant are both examples of books which shy away from world building. They are able to hint at worlds that exist behind the curtain, but both resist the temptation to flesh out the world their characters inhabit.
Ignoring genre conventions can be frustrating for fantasy-genre readers, if an author used to playing can-and-mouse with their audience overly teases a reader who is used to having the world fleshed out and developed
The issue is that the political aim with literary fiction is to deconstruct narratives, whereas the aesthetic goal in sci-fi-fantasy is to construct them. These two goals oppose and contradict, and it is difficult to see a resolution.
Rather than unifying genre and literary fiction, as many hopeful critics thought magical realism might in the early 80s, the movement actually further embedded the literary divide.
The result of the journey of magical realism has been that the literary academy does not recognise world building as a legitimate intellectual literary pursuit in its own right.
I will not say they are wrong to do so. A fully-fleshed out world will often fall flat if bereft of interesting characters, whereas an unexciting setting can often be brought to life by the fresh interplay of interesting characters reacting against one another.
But how can this be reconciled? How can one simultaneously construct and deconstruct a narrative at the same time?
Historical fiction often involves a great deal of world building, and is the winner of many awards such as the Man Booker Prize with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Such novels often involve the same type of world building involved with constructing a fantasy novel, the difference is one can be said to have happened and one can’t.
The correct course of action is not to force writers or readers in any particular direction, but to make our own attempts at marrying the genres. One promising piece of work which has received a nod from literary high ups is The Terror, a 2007 novel by American author Dan Simmons.
In The Terror, the supernatural elements of the novel are implied to be a result of lead posioning. In other words, for sci-fi-fantasy to be accepted as literary fiction, it seems the supernatural elements must be implicit rather than explicit.
One source of inspiration is the satirists. The list includes Orwell, Huxley, Atwood and other dystopian authors who have become hallmarks of academic fiction. These authors indubitably employ world building, but they do so in a way which gives the reader only glimpses of the world surrounding their characters. Genre-fiction writers could learn from this.
If a book could apply the unreliable narration from The Terror and the precision of language found in the satirists to a historical setting, while at the same time drawing on the world building perfected by genre-fiction authors using magical realist tropes, then perhaps the genres could see eye-to-eye again. A kind of fantastical realism might emerge, if a group of authors had the skill, time and dedication to produce such works.
But first, where literary fiction must give ground is the idea that fiction should have a utilitarian purpose. Oscar Wilde said there are no bad or good people, only people who are charming and tedious. I think much the same for novels.
We don’t recommend a visit to the Sistine Chapel because it has much to teach us about societal progress, nor do we enjoy music because it informs us how to behave. Why should our books be any different?