Magical Realism: From Franz Roh to the Latin American Boom

A woman ascends into the sky one afternoon while folding laundry, and nobody in the household treats it as an event worth interrupting dinner over. That moment, from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , is probably the single most quoted example of magical realism in the English-speaking literary world, and it's a useful test case for what the term actually requires. The magic isn't explained. It isn't marveled at. It simply happens, inside a narrative voice that otherwise reports village gossip, civil wars, and family feuds with total documentary calm. That flatness, that refusal to treat the impossible as impossible, is the real mechanism of magical realism, and it's a mechanism with a surprisingly specific critical history, one that starts not in literature at all, but in German painting criticism of the 1920s. Table of Contents Defining the Term Properly Magical realism describes a mode of fiction in which supernatural or fantastical events are …