Hi, my name is Mercedes and I’m the Latin American Literature and Cinema professor at Fundación Ortega y Gasset. Today I’m going to talk about a thrilling topic that we see in our class: Magical Realism. Magical Realism is a literary movement that was born in Latin America by the midst of the 20th century.
You can see that in the name of this movement there are two familiar words “realism” and “magical”. Well, we are going to study the characteristics of this movement. Why “realism”?
Because the environment of these narrations and texts always happens in a real habitat that we readers can place in a map or in a fictional environment but with characteristics that we recognized as real. For example, a typical Latin American town. All that regards to “realism”.
Now, why “magical”? Because we are in a real, credible environment but at one point a “magical” or fantastic element appears. Let’s imagine that we are at the Spanish class in Buenos Aires and suddenly a dog that talks and flies appears.
This is a realistic environment with a magical element. One particular characteristic of this movement is that the characters won’t be surprised by this supernatural fact and will continue as if nothing had happened. This is one of the things that differentiates “magical realism” from, for example, “fantastic literature”.
It is important to highlight that this movement was born in a time when the technological and scientific innovation was arriving from Europe and the US to Latin America. So, the goal of the authors of this movement is to rescue the autochthonous of the Latin American societies, to rescue our system of beliefs and religions while facing that threat. For this reason, they are going to place most of their stories in Latin American contexts.
We can find stories placed in the Amazon area, in Latin American towns that may exist or not, but if they don’t, they have the characteristics that are real for those towns. In order to rescue these systems of beliefs, values and religions that are threatened writers need the help of the reader. They need what we call an “active reader”.
They don’t want their books to be read just to spend time or because you are bored. They want to generate questions in the readers questions such as: What is reality? How much was lost of the typical Latin America in the light of the advances that come from Europe or the US?
What is magic? etc. In order to get an active reader, a reader that is seriously committed, they use some literary mechanisms, for example: the use of timelessness in the writing, the chronological line of time is broken, we don’t have a straight time line but we find three types of time We use “flashbacks” that is to say the memories the “flashforwards” to anticipate actions and last but not least we use the “static time” time stops and the stream of consciousness of one of the characters is favored.
Another important element is the use of dreams and the dreamlike state. These writers were influenced by the European Surrealism. They are going to incorporate dreams and the importance of the subconscious, all these elements will appear a lot in these texts.
At the same time, to rescue the typical Latin America, writers will use a lot of sensory images, lots of colors, smells and many visual images that will be useful to create and characterize the Latin American context. There are many writers and referents of this movement but one of the most important ones and that we study in our Latin American Cinema and Literature is Julio Cortázar and one of his short stories called “The night face-up”. So, I invite you to read this short story taking into account all of what we talked about and to reflect what typical elements of magical realism we can find in this story.
Goodbye and see you next time.
