What is Magic Realism Literary Genre?

Magic realism, like pornography, is arduous to define, nevertheless readily recognizable when peerless encounters it. We whitethorn first, perhaps, appropriate it from and contrast it to the sort of popular fantasy writing that has constrain popular in the United States in recent decades, and which is typified by J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and its host of imitators. Fantasy of that sort has frequently in common with science fiction. It may take plaza in exotic settings--in the case of fantasy, often vaguely chivalric settings suggestive of those of fairy tales--and be peopled in berth by fantastic beings such as dragons or elves, possessing wizard(prenominal) powers. However exotic the details of these settings, however, an underlying presupposition of such fancied worlds is that they operate in an orderly way. Effect follows cause, though it may do so through mechanisms different from those acknowledged by contemporary science.

The underlying structural assumptions of magic realism argon very nearly opposite to those of fantasy of this sort. Salmon Rushdie's Midnight's Children, for example, does non take place in some imaginary kingdom, but in India. At the very beginning of the novel we be fixed in a real setting: "I was born(p) in the city of Bombay ... once upon a time. No, that won't do, at that place's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narli

It is impossible not to see in this a reflection of Latin American political developments in the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly the phenomenon of "disappeared" persons. It became the practice of right-wing Latin American governments to avoid the open executions of an earlier day, and sort of to cause enemies (real or reputed) to simply vanish from sight, perhaps at the hands of death squads which themselves had no formal connection with the government, and which could thusly be disavowed or even denied to exist. It is the profound arbitrariness of mod Latin American political reality that is powerfully reflected passim One nose candy Years of Solitude.

In spite of his numbness to ideology, Aureliano finds himself swept up in political warfare, leading, as say earlier, thirty-two uprisings, all of which fail. Political life, then, is in One Hundred Years of Solitude an arbitrary source of chaos. It intrudes on the staged world of Macondo for no particular reason, but once it has intruded, it is inescapable. When Aurelio Buendias' nephew, Aurelio Segundo, tells of the mow down he survived, no one believes him. The government has reported there was no massacre, and this version is universally assented to.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children. New York: Penguin, 1980.

shared, children were being born who were only

Whatever his physical ancestry, Saleem is in fact pronounced out for the family that raised him by a bizarre distinguishing feature, a monstrously large nose. The nose appears to be symbolic. It harkens in one sequence to Cyrano de Bergerac, when Saleem falls for an expatriate American schoolgirl, Evie Lilith Burns (whose figure of speech combines the Biblical Eve with the apocryphal Lilith), and asks a friend to hail her (Rushdie 221). The condition of his nose mirrors the condition of the world; during the 1962 war amidst India and China, "the disease of optimism, in those days, once again attained pestiferous proportions; I meanwhile,
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