Alberto Álvaro Ríos

The following are not rules or simple rubrics regarding magical realism—no such things exist—but they are mindful, sometimes provocative, occasionally private meditations on what I personally think about the literature and its practices.  Having grown up in a circumstance not dissimilar from much in these texts, a life in between countries and languages and foods and song, a life open to possibility, to the human dimension as much as the scientific, I offer these glimmers not in any over-arching essay form, but in the bits and pieces that, I think, better frame what is not patiently subject to long discourse.

 

             These literary and critical greguerías, comparatives, and insights are intended for writing students specifically, but will, I think, help anyone interested in the subject.  They are in no particular order, and all imagined by me.—AR

Some Meditations and Notes on Magical Realism

 

“Reality is more than the thing itself.  I look always for the super-reality.  Reality lies in how you see things.  A green parrot is also a green salad and a green parrot.  He who makes it only a parrot diminishes reality.  A painter who copies a tree blinds himself to the real tree.  I see things otherwise.  A palm tree can become a horse.”  (Pablo Picasso, A Palm Tree Becomes a Horse, 1950.)

 

“In reality one works with few colors.  What gives the illusion of many is that they have been put in the right place.”  (Pablo Picasso, Pablo Picasso, conversations with Christian Zervos, Cahiers d’Art Magazine, nos. 3-5 (1932).

 

 

 

Magical realism is a much quieter thing on the page than one might suspect, and much louder in the heart than one can predict.

 

***

 

Magical realism does not reside in or belong to the countries in which the writers who have created it work.  Rather, magical realism—whatever it is, and it’s different each time—belongs to the new geographies these writers, and their words, have imagined.  These are countries without names, but whose maps are our maps.  That is to say, we recognize something.  They are places we imagine superimposed on places we live, giving to our lives, through this literature, a dimensionality that—once recognized—is immediately evident.  Though many of the conclusions drawn may be contrary to the laws of nature as we know them, this writing—magical realism—shows us a new science, a literary science, an understanding of those parts of the world and of life which take into account the personal.  Science may not work this way, but on a given day in a given place and to a given person, this thing—whatever it is—happened.  This is, finally, the science of the impossible, which describes every one of us.

 

***

 

If I am standing next to you, I am standing next to you both clothed and naked, depending on the distance being measured.  A distance of half and quarter inches is everything.  This understanding is the province of magical realism.  To make the heart beat very fast can take very little.

 

***

 

Magical realism is not escapist—it’s there, witnessing.  It is a literature fomented in oppression and cultural struggle as much as anything else, the spin-off of saying: this can’t be happening—but it is.  This is magical realism, with its true edge in view.

 

***

Surrealism is about objects, magical realism is about people.  Surrealism often, in fact, turns people into objects, while magical realism assumes some kind of a life in objects.

 

***

 

Surrealism confronts you with impossibility and simply demands that you accept it, while magical realism takes you to the impossible place and then returns you, asking that you participate.

 

***

 

Magical realism is sometimes characterized as stylistic excess.  Some would view that as a negative characterization, and some would celebrate it.  Some would, further, see the inherent politics of this response—that is, excess as compared to what or whose right amount?

 

***

 

Much in the descriptions of magical realism sound like descriptions of poetry.  It is true that they embrace many or even all of the same variables.  But what distinguishes the two is that, in general, poetry goes from the literal to the metaphorical, like an airplane taking off.  Magical realism, just as often, moves instead from the metaphorical to the literal, more like an airplane landing.  Nicanor Parra says in a poem, for example, “I wish to make a noise with my feet/I want my soul to find its proper body.”  That is the airplane taking off.  On the other hand, Juan Rulfo, in the novel Pedro Páramo, says, “This death really hurt me, my shoulder is still sore.”  That is the airplane landing.

 

***

 

When we have just one word for one thing, the moment is one dimensional—flat.  The work of labeling or describing something is apparently done.  But when we have two words for one thing, or two cultural frameworks trying to claim that thing, then we have some dimensionality, in that the two words have a space between them—after all, they are not the same.  They indicate a lack of agreement, and are, therefore, a dialogue, and even a debate.  They are not simple agreement on what a thing is at all.

The two words for a single thing evidence a struggle rather than complacency with what they are trying to define.  That distance from certainty gives the moment—the word, the thing, the idea—dimensionality, a physical space, into which we can wander, sometimes very far.  That dimensionality, that space, for which we have no vocabulary: It’s what words mean to represent but for which they provide, in fact, only a cursory label.  In this way, when we encounter a word, we must understand that we are face to face with the experience that a word only attempts to contain—but we must not assume that the word by itself has done the entire work.  We must be complicit in our understanding of the world.  It is our civilizing job.

 

***

 

One begins to talk about and to understand magical realism just as well by not trying to define it; by looking at what it is not; by looking at what was before it, and what is companion to it, and what it might become. 

 

***

 

In easy conversation, one might hear an innocuous phrase regarding grace, something like, “She walked so lightly, it was as if she flew, como si tenía alas, as if she had wings, you know, had wings, wings.” 

The progression and the paring down to essentials in that exchange is easy, and that first part, the as if, is never as operative as the wings, so that the as if is not what we hear, at least not well.  Or maybe we hear it at first, but not later, when we try in the mind’s ear to hear it or to recall it for someone else.  The phrase as if is such a given, with the event still fresh in the mind, that perhaps we feel we don’t need to repeat it, or in retelling the story we don’t quite have the energy to tell the more unimportant parts. 

Sometimes the transference of an idea is that simple, and with the overlay of several languages, and the understanding capability of, for example, a child, then even the wings are lucky to survive—and in this way become more precious, because they were the one thing understood, the one thing remembered, the one thing saved, not from the moment but from the explanation of the moment, but so clear it strikes us with the truth of a photograph.  Sorted out from the junk of the rest of the sentence in this way, from the rest of the moment, the wings become even more vivid, as we are looking at them now more closely than the rest.  It’s as if they become even more real than the rest of the sentence.  But there’s that as if again.

 

***

 

Surrealism and dada were acts of art finding itself again, of reexamining and reassembling the toolbox; magical realism, however, does not stand around looking at the handsome tools.  It uses these tools to build.

 

***

 

Magical realism might be usefully thought of in political terms, particularly Marxism, and especially in García Márquez’s writing.  The best sentence in a García Márquez work is the line I’m reading.  To generalize, all the sentences are good, and equal in that way.  One thing is not more important than another.  The sentences and paragraphs themselves become a working and worthy community, in service as much to themselves as a greater good.  This is honest work, and well done.  And so on.  Neruda said that everyone should travel first class.  I think they have both meant for that exhortation to apply to their writing as well as their lives.

 

***

 

Magical realism has reached maturity, and gone beyond itself, starting with Love in the Time of Cholera.  It is well beyond the braggadocio of the new coat in One Hundred Years of Solitude; today, we still find the coat, but now it has the elegance of use.  This has always been magical realism’s intention.  It lives not simply by what color and how shiny it is—it requires of itself an answer, an elegant answer, to the question: does this work?  Does this serve the need of the moment?  Is it a fabulous color that is also a useful barrier against the wind?

 

***

 

Magical realism comes from a life lived, not a life imagined.  That is to say, it comes from what happens, not from all the things that could happen.  Its explanations are answers, right or wrong—not suppositions or possibilities.  But understand that it does not leave out imagination, if the imagination was indeed part of the moment.

 

***

 

Magical realism resides in that space between words for the same thing.  It often dispenses with the words, and goes to what they are.  This is at the same time both poetic and pragmatic, and here is the beginning of understanding magical realism.  It is poetic in that the narrative becomes expressive, and not simply defined; it is pragmatic in that the words that might simply define it do not, and so something else must be found—similes, metaphors, objective correlatives, and even whole stories, sometimes.  Both impulses drive the narrative to the same place, if for different reasons: to the events themselves.

For example, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, at one point in his narrative, describes the return of an errant son, José Arcadio II, who, before returning to his mother Ursula’s house, stops for a drink on the other side of town.  While there, however, he is mysteriously murdered.  GGM offers the following subsequent action:

 

A trickle of [his] blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.

“Holy Mother of God!” Ursula shouted.

 

In this scene, the writer could just as easily talked about intuition, or a woman’s intuition, or a mother’s intuition, and left it at that.  But the idea of being related, of the bloodline, is instead fully and physically realized, and the moment is played out.  The two characters are related by blood, and so this is how the mother knows her son is dead.

 

***

 

Magical realism’s crucial act, however, is its divestiture of words, if only metaphorically.  It moves from the words we use for things, from how we demean things, to what those words represent, to what they are.  Magical Realism in this way reports the world as it is at that moment—and this includes dream, desire, misinterpretation, and anything else one feels in the glorious simultaneity of feelings a single moment invariably offers.

 

***

 

I don’t mean to make magical realism an ephemeral thing; indeed, there are many moments of magical realism to which we can point in literature generally, and in others arts, and in life itself.  They taste like good apples, and the bite is sure.

 

***

 

Magical realism is a moment encountered, a moment found—not a moment predicted or planned for.  And yet that encounter is not an encounter with surprise.  Rather, it is an encounter with something normal, but not normal at that moment.  It is not a boo! with exclamation points; it’s more of an “oh, it’s you—I almost didn’t recognize you at first.”

 

***

 

I didn’t feel any compelling need to reread Love in the Time of Cholera, but not because it wasn’t a brilliant book.  It has such immediacy, such presence, that it doesn’t go away....  There are no particular scenes to point at, nothing memorable in that way; and yet, one experiences the book remarkably.  It works in some other manner.  It is what magical realism has become.

 

***

 

Anyone who writes magical realism isn’t.

 

***

 

If you are interested in writing magical realism, you do not go out and find it by inventing it, by creating wild or amazing or ghosty things.  Making things up is entirely too easy, and its cardboard building material is always finally in evidence.

 

***

 

Sometimes, accepting this approach, which is more than simple patience, after all, may be cultural.  I am reminded, for example, of a small example used in every Spanish class about a central cultural difference between English-speakers and Spanish-speakers.  In English, one says I dropped the glass, should such a thing happen.  It is an “I” centered instance, rugged individualism in its smallest moment.  I did it.  In Spanish, one says “se me cayó el vaso,” which means, “the glass, it fell from me”—we were both there, we were both complicit in the act.  This is a different world view, a way of adapting to the world, of living with it instead of changing it.

Which is the better view is not the point, but I do think that our notions of the United States as representing rugged individualism may, in fact, be faulty.  One language, one culture, one science, one medicine: There’s a messy middle, something in between.  I think that’s the language this literature is trying to show us, if it has any didactic purpose.  It’s a rugged pluralism.

Se me cayó el vaso.  This phrase speaks to the life in things.  This glass and I, we are partners to each other in this event.  This animistic sensibility multiplies by thousands the cast of available characters in any given moment.  In this country, cartoons have best recognized this possibility since their inception, and anything we face that does not “make sense” we treat as child-like.  The glass is alive?  This makes the notion of magical realism difficult to take seriously, and we treat it, and its writers, perhaps as amusements.

 

***

 

The Russian formalists, working about the same time as the surrealists, offered up a phrase useful in these discussions: defamiliarization.  I suggest that we have become comfortable with what is regularly around us, confusing that commonness of things with an understanding of them.

 

***

 

Magical realism seeks release from the contemporary bondage of words into the time of things, to which words are subservient.

 

***

 

Tone, so often, is everything.  These are extraordinary stories invariably told in a normal manner.  No exclamation points.  The technique might be compared to understatement, when the matter is large, but is just as often overstatement, when the matter is small.  The outcome is, then, regular, even as nothing “regular” is being told.

 

***

 

In magical realism, time is often everything, but the clock is nothing.  The minute hand is replaced by the breath, the hour hand by a rhythm of yawns.

 

***

 

Magical realism is also the stuff of fairy tales; but in magical realism, the impossibility is more real—it is reframed, rather, as possibility pushed to new boundaries on the edge of understanding.

 

***

 

In magical realism you don’t make any leaps; rather, you are leapt.  You have made the leap before you know it, caught up already by the net of what is new around you.

 

***

 

Rather than going out and finding it, magical realism finds you.  And you must be prepared.  Gabriel García Márquez in an interview published in Paris Review is asked by the interviewer at the end whether or not he was currently writing a new novel.  He responds by saying something to the effect of no, that he was not writing something new.  That instead he was being very quiet, so that, if a new novel passed over him, he would hear it, and know to reach up and take hold of it.

 

***

 

Pluralistic views of science and medicine, especially, may be hard to accept, of course.  But, as just a simple example, there are illnesses in Latin America that do not exist in this country—I am thinking of empache, which is a kind of stomach blockage, mollera caída, which is a bad case of a fallen fontanel in a baby, and which must be cured by someone who is a twin, and mal ojo, which is the bad or evil eye.  In this country, we laugh at these things, of course.  But we laugh by ourselves.

In science, to use a large example, but my favorite, scientists have been able to explain to us the phenomenon of water going down the drain in one direction in the northern hemisphere, and going down the drain in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere.  Scientists explain this curiosity—which is actually a function of what is called the Coriolis effect—in a discussion of gravity, one of the four main forces.

But they explain it only in that way, stopping short of a discussion of what this means to people.  If one of the four major forces affects some people one way, and some people in an opposite way—is it true that there is no effect?  Technically, scientifically, I’m sure the answer has been no.  So what do I know.  Except this: Science may be our best way of understanding the world, but it may not be our best way of living in it.

 

***

 

The rules of the world and the universe exist inasmuch as they exist within the moment; sometimes the moment offers us new rules.  This is something I would call situational physics, and is something of the science of magical realism.

 

***

 

Perhaps surprisingly, your better job is instead to report accurately on the world around you.  But you must include with that report both the things you do and do not understand.  So much of what we write has an explanation, some kind of science inherent in our understanding of it.  Or else it seems too slight for the literary elevation to which we aspire—assuming that it is not a part of the greater plot, what then, after all, is the significance of a smudge on the shine of a shoe?

 

***

 

There is no final definition of magical realism.  It is a felt sense of direction, not an act of manipulation or predetermination.  In this way it may often be reported, but rarely is it predicted or planned for—not successfully.

 

***

 

Magical realism inhabits the world of García Lorca’s duende.  You feel it.  But it has no name.  It does not comfortably inhabit the singularly narrow world of words, though it has by necessity found itself in their care.  This makes it vital, as we struggle with its definition.

 

***

 

Magical realism’s purpose is to go back to what words are, to recognize that the things words represent were named because they were worthy, and in need of representation in the world.  But like representative government, the individual constituents sometimes get lost.  Remembering their stories is always a power, and can always come back to surprise us.

 

***

 

Work and form as frames in literature—a novel, a short story, a sonnet—may be predictable, but detail is always singular.  This is part of the engine of magical realism: The time taken with the singular, even at the risk of offending the form it is working within, is everywhere and everything.

 

***

 

Magical realism is an insinuated, not an inhabited, movement.  There are no card-carrying members of the magical realism movement.  Indeed, Gabriel García Márquez himself says, as quoted in the Gerald Martin biography, that “far from being a ‘magical realist,’ he is just a ‘poor notary’ who copies down what is placed on his desk.”

 

***

 

Magical realism may have its intellectual roots in Surrealism, but it is not an intellectual movement itself—it is, rather, a lived movement, a paradigm based in real life, not imaginary life.

 

***

 

“Magical,” in magical realism, as with its companion word in translation, “marvelous,” implies an appreciation of the real, rather than a distortion or replacement of it.

 

***

 

We will, finally, find magical realism in words as well as life.  And the words, as with the life, are not magical at all.  The phrase “magical realism” simply gives to us this added caveat about our easy and tired use of language: We must instead treat each word as the suitcase it is, and every time open it up as we encounter it—open it up and not simply check it through—to find what there is inside, no matter what the consequence.  We want words to mean the same things to all people, but they simply do not, regardless of the dictionary.

 

***

 

Magical realist literatures hold in their single embrace all truths simultaneously—scientific, public, private, lie, dream, and the unknown—in order to create one reality comprised of many, a symphonic reality.  The best in the literature combines objective and subjective realities together, not deciding between the two, creating a world of synthesis—offered as a world that includes dream, but a world that includes possibility and bad memory, too, along with the dailiness we all find familiar.

 

***

 

One might reasonably argue that magical realism is the real world we live in, stepped out of a book and into the street.  This is our day and our experience together, albeit reported on a personal, individual level.  Accounting for the personal, of course, is always a dangerous proposition.  If magical realism teaches us something, then, it is to stay open to the possibilities of the world, and not fall into the trap of counting on anything to behave itself today.

 

Alberto Álvaro Ríos

 

Department of English, Box 870302, Arizona State University, Tempe AZ 85287-0302

aarios@asu.edu · 480-965-3800—office · 480-965-3168—department

©2015, Alberto Ríos.  Not for re-use without permission/attribution.

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©2015 Alberto Ríos.  Not for re-use without permission/attribution.