The difference between magical realism and urban, alternative-history or retro-futuristic fantasy sub-genres is the importance they place upon the supernatural elements of the narrative. Traditional fantasy functions as a magical world alternative to our own mundane world. This is even true when this other world shares its appearance with our own as is the case with the urban, alternative-history or retro-futuristic (steam-punk) sub-genres of fantasy. By contrast, magical realism represents our own world suffused with the supernatural. For the latter genres, the supernatural is of principal importance and the narrative is devoted to speculating on how the inclusion or intrusion of the supernatural would affect our mundane world. For magical realism the supernatural is naturalized back into the world as an assumption of it, equally mundane to the elements recognizable as part of our own world. Magical realism makes the magical mundane and enables us to see the natural as numinous.
A great focus of the fantasy genre is the exploration of and negotiation between the natural and unnatural realms of the world, presupposing some form of division or barrier between the two. In epic and high fantasy this takes the form of a struggle between powers of good and evil in order to restore political, if not cosmic, balance in the world. Alternative-historical and retro-futuristic fantasy is concerned with the consequences of supernatural intrusions upon our historical past, while urban fantasy focuses upon the inclusion of the fantastic within our contemporary urban cityscape. In all such forms of fantasy, the supernatural is of primary importance and independently influential to the narrative; not only are magic systems and mythological creatures elaborated upon in greater detail but the narrative itself is driven by such examination. Magical realism reverses this relationship, making the mundane more important that the magical and utilizing the unreal more like a metaphor for political and cultural forces than an independent force to be comprehended. In traditional fantasy sub-genres, the presence of magic is problematic, whereas within the magical realism sub-genre it is perceived as perfectly acceptable. For magic to be accepted in the former it must be explained, whereas for the latter its very acceptance by the characters makes it intelligible for the reader.
Whereas much of the fun of fantasy is speculation upon systems of magic or fantastical species, magical realism appears as the absence of such introspective imagination. In the majority of the fantasy genre, the unreal is essential to understanding the place and plot of the story. This requires elaborate explanations to bridge the world-building estrangement of the reader between their world and the literary world. But it also entails that the characters themselves must understand, control, or utilize the unreal (magic typically) in order to drive the plot. But in the magical realist sub-genre the unreal is peripheral, not essential, to understanding the world and changing it. In fact, magical realism entails an intentional refusal to understand the magical or fantastical elements of its world, simply accepting them as they present themselves. In magical realism the narrative and characters are indifferent to the fantastic when confronted by it, continuing on as if nothing extraordinary has occurred. Magical events are mundane affairs, deriving their metaphorical relationship to the lives of the characters and their struggles. In contrast, the magic of traditional fantasy tends to be extraordinary affairs that are themselves a challenge confronting the characters. Information and explanation for supernatural beings and happenings are intentionally ignored in magical realism. This withdrawal of wonder away from the supernatural is necessary to the policitized nature of magical realism for it focus the narrative on more mundane and immediate political or cultural struggles. But more importantly it eschews explanation in order to represent a world with inherent legitimacy, ideally liberated from our ideological limitations.
Magical realism is not mere chaotic fancy
however. Although its fantastical
elements may lack systematic explanation and justification, it is not
necessarily arbitrary or inconsistent.
The tears of children could consistently turn to butterflies or whenever
someone dies all the sources of heat and light extinguish without the story
sliding into a more traditional fantasy narrative. What is
essential is that such regular occurrences are not justified by reference to a
pseudo-scientific system of magical laws and forces but are simply accepted
without inquiry much as one could mention crying or death itself without great
detail. This is because mourning and
mortality are universal aspects of the human condition we can appreciate without
having to deconstruct them beyond their phenomenal experience. When magical realism portrays such
experiences as fantastical it does so to highlight something inherent in that
very real experience. Other forms of
fantasy impose magic upon the mundane
rather than drawing it out of it to thereby speculate upon how that experience changes the underlying reality. The
fantastic in magical realism is not explained as if it were a reality itself,
but rather serves to explain some other,
more immediate and fundamental reality, usually cultural or political in
nature.
First-world fantasy genres such as science fiction, urban fantasy, alternative history or retro-futurism derive their realism from being set within our world or some alternative to it with any explanatory narrative that makes it intelligible as our own world. This is so even when this is impossible relative to our worldview; for example, urban fantasy is impossibly our world since it includes magical forces we do not predict to be possible within the world we inhabit. What is crucial is not how recognizable the world is to our own, but how possible that world is to us, even if its possibility is grounded by the logic of its own world-building. By contrast, since magical realism forsakes such elaborate explanatory justifications its realism is derived entirely from it being recognizable as our own world to some extent. The magic of fantasy literature makes new worlds, even when those worlds are considered fantastical alternative versions of our own world. In contrast, the magic of magical realism is in this world.
The sub-genre of magical realism and other fantasy sub-genres each contain a contradiction and source of tension between the reader, their world and the world within the text, all of which revolves around an encounter with reality. Fantasy is realistic because of the way it explains its world according to rules we would recognize even when the world itself is impossibly distinct from our own. Fantasy strives to logically explain a world that violates the rules we understand. In contrast, magical realism ignores explanation and depends upon the indifference of its characters towards the supernatural in order to establish its realism. Magical realism seeks to represent the world sincerely through fantasies we may consider to lack all credibility. Put another way, in fantasy the world is explained to us in terms that we would understand even though the world may violate our understanding while in magical realism we are presented with the way our own world is understood by someone fantastically different from us.
Magic in fantasy genres other than magical realism is systematic if not pseudo-scientific. It has established rules and regularities regarding who can perform it, when they can do so, what its predicted effects will be, etc. All of which presupposes a distinction made between mundane regularities of the world we would recognize and the fantastical ones we would not. Even if the magic was a science in method and was predicated upon predictability as much as scientific materialism itself presupposes, it still requires elaboration to be comprehended because its predictions are in conflict with those of our own sciences. For example, if sorcerers can fly or summon fire, the nature of such magic must be reconciled with our own understanding of gravity and thermodynamics. If not, the reader will likely be left unsatisfied and the critic will classify the work as mere fancy rather than consider it serious fantasy.
It is wrong to draw a strict dichotomy between magical realism and the rest of fantasy as though the former was divorced from reality and the other one not. It is far better to situate their difference along a spectrum of realism. At one end of the spectrum is the more “experiential” fantasy of magical realism: reality enters into the narrative through the matter-of-fact disposition characters have towards the unreal who merely accept it as another mundane facet of their experience. At the other end is the “existential” fantasy of most other sub-genres: reality is provided through the elaborate explanations of its unreal elements which provide a parallel to the rule-governed nature of reality we are familiar with. For magical realism, magic serves as a metaphorical reproduction of some element in our reality such that the fantastic is an effect of our world. In traditional fantasy, the unreal possesses a reality inherent in itself and exists in its own system of causes and effects unique to its own world.
Fantasies could exist well within these two polarities but some of them could be particularly alienating depending on how far the unreal deviates from our own familiar world. Precisely because magical realism represses explanations of the fantastic, it depends upon some familiarity between the reader and the world of the story. Magical realism uncovers the magic within a world, our world, by extending features of it into fantastical metaphors while other forms of fantasy seek the unreal outside of our world in other worlds bound by their own logic and laws. A story that combined these techniques would struggle with the immediate experience of a world radically different from our own existence. Such a story would be a fascinating, if not frustrating struggle, to not only imagine a world other than our own, but to experience it as if one were embedded within that world.
The fact that the fantastic is taken for granted in magical realism provides the realism of the sub-genre. The inclusion of magic makes the world impossible for us, but the immediacy of its presentation makes it possible for us to imagine ourselves within that world regardless. Because the narrative does not recognize the fantastic as strange, we are not estranged from the world. But this requires that the world be intelligible to us without explanation, even if such a world is not believable. This presupposes some familiarity with the fantastical elements of the story and for this reason magical realism typically derives such elements from familiar, albeit marginalized, mythologies and folklore. If a character’s grandfather is a literal angel from heaven in a magical realist story, one can understand more or less what this may entail, even if such a person does not believe in angels. But if a fantasy story features an original race of shape-shifting metallic entities from the moon, the originality of such creatures independent of any grounding myth or folk story would be alienating and beg narrative explanation for the reader.
Magical realism is more dependent upon established mythologies than traditional fantasy is to ground its credibility. But precisely because it represents the magic of mythology and fantasy of folk stories with immediacy, it lends credibility to such marginalized world views. In contrast, traditional fantasy, despite its tendency to focus its creativity within the confines of European medieval culture, is fundamentally unfettered by a dependence upon pre-established narratives of the fantastic. The best the other fantasy sub-genres offer is re-interpretations of the unreal or innovative representations of the magical; vampires can be re-imagined as sentient trees that feed upon those who threaten their forests or one can create a new race of intelligent necromantic octopi who raise corpses to serve as their surrogate bodies on land. The limitations are not pre-established by fidelity to history or mythology but arise spontaneously as each element of the world is imagined.
Literary realism is not simply a function of what is presented within the narrative of the story but how that narrative itself is told to us, especially when it is told through the characters within the world of the story. Realism is not limited to the depiction of “real” objects we recognize as part of our own lives, but encompasses the way that literary characters recognize and interact with the objects of their own world in a realistic manner. What unifies magical realism and other genres of fantasy is how they depict magic realistically. The narrative and the characters of the story take the world they inhabit seriously; they are capable of interacting with the magic in the world and consider it important to their struggles, even if it is only in a derivative and metaphorical sense as is the case with magical realism. Magical realism is realistic because it presents the fantastic as mere mundane facts of experience the characters encounter. Other forms of fantasy are realistic because they investigate the existence of magic in the world as a systematic force with rules and regularities. Magical realism allows us to appreciate a different way of seeing our world, while fantasy allows us to appreciate a different world entirely.
First-world fantasy genres such as science fiction, urban fantasy, alternative history or retro-futurism derive their realism from being set within our world or some alternative to it with any explanatory narrative that makes it intelligible as our own world. This is so even when this is impossible relative to our worldview; for example, urban fantasy is impossibly our world since it includes magical forces we do not predict to be possible within the world we inhabit. What is crucial is not how recognizable the world is to our own, but how possible that world is to us, even if its possibility is grounded by the logic of its own world-building. By contrast, since magical realism forsakes such elaborate explanatory justifications its realism is derived entirely from it being recognizable as our own world to some extent. The magic of fantasy literature makes new worlds, even when those worlds are considered fantastical alternative versions of our own world. In contrast, the magic of magical realism is in this world.
The sub-genre of magical realism and other fantasy sub-genres each contain a contradiction and source of tension between the reader, their world and the world within the text, all of which revolves around an encounter with reality. Fantasy is realistic because of the way it explains its world according to rules we would recognize even when the world itself is impossibly distinct from our own. Fantasy strives to logically explain a world that violates the rules we understand. In contrast, magical realism ignores explanation and depends upon the indifference of its characters towards the supernatural in order to establish its realism. Magical realism seeks to represent the world sincerely through fantasies we may consider to lack all credibility. Put another way, in fantasy the world is explained to us in terms that we would understand even though the world may violate our understanding while in magical realism we are presented with the way our own world is understood by someone fantastically different from us.
Magic in fantasy genres other than magical realism is systematic if not pseudo-scientific. It has established rules and regularities regarding who can perform it, when they can do so, what its predicted effects will be, etc. All of which presupposes a distinction made between mundane regularities of the world we would recognize and the fantastical ones we would not. Even if the magic was a science in method and was predicated upon predictability as much as scientific materialism itself presupposes, it still requires elaboration to be comprehended because its predictions are in conflict with those of our own sciences. For example, if sorcerers can fly or summon fire, the nature of such magic must be reconciled with our own understanding of gravity and thermodynamics. If not, the reader will likely be left unsatisfied and the critic will classify the work as mere fancy rather than consider it serious fantasy.
It is wrong to draw a strict dichotomy between magical realism and the rest of fantasy as though the former was divorced from reality and the other one not. It is far better to situate their difference along a spectrum of realism. At one end of the spectrum is the more “experiential” fantasy of magical realism: reality enters into the narrative through the matter-of-fact disposition characters have towards the unreal who merely accept it as another mundane facet of their experience. At the other end is the “existential” fantasy of most other sub-genres: reality is provided through the elaborate explanations of its unreal elements which provide a parallel to the rule-governed nature of reality we are familiar with. For magical realism, magic serves as a metaphorical reproduction of some element in our reality such that the fantastic is an effect of our world. In traditional fantasy, the unreal possesses a reality inherent in itself and exists in its own system of causes and effects unique to its own world.
Fantasies could exist well within these two polarities but some of them could be particularly alienating depending on how far the unreal deviates from our own familiar world. Precisely because magical realism represses explanations of the fantastic, it depends upon some familiarity between the reader and the world of the story. Magical realism uncovers the magic within a world, our world, by extending features of it into fantastical metaphors while other forms of fantasy seek the unreal outside of our world in other worlds bound by their own logic and laws. A story that combined these techniques would struggle with the immediate experience of a world radically different from our own existence. Such a story would be a fascinating, if not frustrating struggle, to not only imagine a world other than our own, but to experience it as if one were embedded within that world.
The fact that the fantastic is taken for granted in magical realism provides the realism of the sub-genre. The inclusion of magic makes the world impossible for us, but the immediacy of its presentation makes it possible for us to imagine ourselves within that world regardless. Because the narrative does not recognize the fantastic as strange, we are not estranged from the world. But this requires that the world be intelligible to us without explanation, even if such a world is not believable. This presupposes some familiarity with the fantastical elements of the story and for this reason magical realism typically derives such elements from familiar, albeit marginalized, mythologies and folklore. If a character’s grandfather is a literal angel from heaven in a magical realist story, one can understand more or less what this may entail, even if such a person does not believe in angels. But if a fantasy story features an original race of shape-shifting metallic entities from the moon, the originality of such creatures independent of any grounding myth or folk story would be alienating and beg narrative explanation for the reader.
Magical realism is more dependent upon established mythologies than traditional fantasy is to ground its credibility. But precisely because it represents the magic of mythology and fantasy of folk stories with immediacy, it lends credibility to such marginalized world views. In contrast, traditional fantasy, despite its tendency to focus its creativity within the confines of European medieval culture, is fundamentally unfettered by a dependence upon pre-established narratives of the fantastic. The best the other fantasy sub-genres offer is re-interpretations of the unreal or innovative representations of the magical; vampires can be re-imagined as sentient trees that feed upon those who threaten their forests or one can create a new race of intelligent necromantic octopi who raise corpses to serve as their surrogate bodies on land. The limitations are not pre-established by fidelity to history or mythology but arise spontaneously as each element of the world is imagined.
Literary realism is not simply a function of what is presented within the narrative of the story but how that narrative itself is told to us, especially when it is told through the characters within the world of the story. Realism is not limited to the depiction of “real” objects we recognize as part of our own lives, but encompasses the way that literary characters recognize and interact with the objects of their own world in a realistic manner. What unifies magical realism and other genres of fantasy is how they depict magic realistically. The narrative and the characters of the story take the world they inhabit seriously; they are capable of interacting with the magic in the world and consider it important to their struggles, even if it is only in a derivative and metaphorical sense as is the case with magical realism. Magical realism is realistic because it presents the fantastic as mere mundane facts of experience the characters encounter. Other forms of fantasy are realistic because they investigate the existence of magic in the world as a systematic force with rules and regularities. Magical realism allows us to appreciate a different way of seeing our world, while fantasy allows us to appreciate a different world entirely.
