¿Cúales realismo mágico?

Some of you may be asking yourselves...Amanda, what the heck is magical realism? Fantasia? Seeing magicians in real clothes? Well, it's neither of those things.


Magical realism is a literary motif used to make either mundane, ordinary things become extraordinary or to take something impossible or imaginary and twist it into something almost believable. hubpages.com has a definition of magical realism that I really like.

"Some absolutely love magical realism books, but other readers (and academics, for that matter) hate the genre created by magical realists, and look down their nose at it. Part of the problem is that the very term "magical realism" has a very nebulous meaning and now is often used for marketing purposes for stories (or movies) that are actually surrealist, expressionist, escapist, or experimental in nature. The original definition of magical realism fiction is fiction where the magical or distinctly uncommon occurs frequently, but is seen and treated by the characters as an everyday occurrence. While there are great examples of magical realist literature from other cultures, the earliest common use of this term came with Latin American literature, and early on it wasn't uncommon to see the term "Latin American magical realism." 

While One Hundred Years of Solitude is often heralded as the best example of this motif, several other works of Latin American fiction are also good examples. Por ejemplo....Chronicle of a Death Foretold by our man García Márquez///La Casa de los Epiritus (or The House of the Spirits) by Isabel Allende/// Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka/// Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie....and the list goes on.

Columbia University's Department of English and Comparative Literature also has a really good article on the concept and birth of magical realism, and its evolution into post-modern magical realism.

"This heightened reality perception (Ringer's Das Abenteuerliche Herz) leads to the principal characteristics of magic realism, already strongly evident in Kafka, Mann and Musil: derealization (a sudden sense of detachment from the reality of the surrounding object world) and defamiliarization (the representation of familiar objects through a language or descriptive technique that causes them to appear new or shocking). In the derealized and defamiliarized world(s) of magic realism, the unusual juxtaposition of objects throws traditional descriptive systems into disarray, and the boundaries of an assumed "real" are stretched until levels of reality obeying different ontological laws coexist metonymically." (Columbia article excerpt) 

 Having a casual and more academic definition of magical realism gives more of an idea of what to expect from a novel within the genre. I think what I most enjoy about this genre is the escape that it provides. When reading these novels, it allows you to imagine what your own life would be like if the fictitious circumstances were reality. Furthermore, it shows creativity on the part of the author to stretch daily life into something plausible


Outside of literature, the concept of magical realism is also available. We've all seen at least one of the following films in which magical realism is abundant:
Pan's Labyrinth
Like Water for Chocolate (Warning: Nudity..and no subtitles)
Run Lola Run
Moulin Rouge
Pleasantville
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou   (or any Wes Anderson film for that matter...)
Barton Fink

If you haven't seen or heard of any of these films, just click on them to see movie trailer and that should help out with a mental picture.

Todo sobre mi amigo Gabo

Before delving into an analysis and survey of an author's work, I think it is important to understand their biography and have a background knowledge of them. For example, we can listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and enjoy how awesome it is, but when we know that he composed it after going completely deaf, doesn't that make the listening experience so much richer?

• Gabriel Garcia Márquez was born in Aracataca, in the province of La Guajira, a small town in northern Colombia in 1928. The town is situated in a tropical region between mountains and the Caribbean Sea. The surface area of Colombia is twice the size of Texas and has a population of about 30,000,000. Like many South American countries, Colombia enjoys a variety of landscapes.

"Its geographic spread includes the sparsely settled eastern plains, the high chill of the Andean chain and Bogotá, the coastal heat of the Caribbean provinces, the desert desolation of the Guajira peninsula jutting to the northeast, the lush "eternal spring" of the western Cordillera Central and the Cauca Valley with its cities Medellín and Cali, and the vast, humid Amazon bush dipping four degrees south beyond the equator. Colombia is the one mainland South American country blessed with both Atlantic and Pacific littorals; it shares borders with Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil; and through Panama(formerly Colombian territory) it has a Central American frontier." (Bell-Villada 15)

With such a beautiful landscape to stimulate imagination, it is easy to see how García
Márquez was able to come up with a place as spectacular as the fictitious Macondo.

• His father was a telegraphist and he was not approved of by his wife's family since he was an outsider. Because of the family's disapproval, the couple moved away but García Márquez's mother returned to her home town to give birth to their first child, Gabriel. She ended up leaving him with her parents in order to return to her husband. He was raised by his maternal grandparents and his grandfather,Nicolás Márquez Iguarán, was a colonel in the civil war during the start of the century. He stayed there until his grandfather died when the boy was only eight years old. García Márquez has been quoted in many interviews throughout his life that "nothing interesting has happened to me since then".

• He originally attended a Jesuit college, University of Cartagena,(above photo) to pursue studies in law but became involved in journalism. During the late 1940's, he wrote for El Universal in Cartagena. In 1954, he was sent to Rome for an assignment and that spurred on travel and living abroad in his life. He began to publish literary work in 1955 with his first book, La hojarasca( the leaf storm). Along with writing fiction, he continued to work as a journalist and to write screenplays.
• In June of 1967, Editorial Sudamerica published Cien Años de Soledad. The initial printing was only 8,000 copies and now has been translated into over 35 languages and has sold 30,000,000 copies worldwide.

In this video, García Márquez talks about the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude  and why he likes the novel. Unfortunately, it's not in English...but I enjoyed it.

García Márquez is often heralded as the premiere Colombian writer and for plenty of good reasons. The Colombian people love him, his work, and what he represents for them. In his home country, he's nicknamed "Gabo" as a term of endearment. When his Nobel Prize was announced in 1982, people were excited to be able to call him their own.

Introduction

Hey!

This post will be the first of many chronicling my research. I'm going to examine the usage and purpose of magical realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Why this book? Because I LOVE it! It's a wonderfully written novel and is an iconic representation of Latin America. Not only is it enjoyable, but serves a specific purpose in chronicling the events of Colombia's history in a way that makes it palatable to a wide readership.

With the following quote in mind, I can only hope for success in my endeavor:

"Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) is easier read than written about. In large measure, this is due to the constant use of techniques which keep the novel supercharged with interest. Everything in this novel is affected, plot, incident, character, style." (Mose 185)

As the blogging continues, please comment and let me know what you think!

-Amanda