On Writing: Magic Realism & Urban Fantasy

 I believe reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude gave me the idea of lucidity that I latched onto as a goal and solution to my despondency. Likewise, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books showed me there was hope in writing far away from the literary center. The first taught me of magical realism. The second showed me magical realism could exist in northern climes. Both showed me that social realism does not capture all of what I see as reality.

Let's get more specific, thanks to Counter Craft and its Fantastic Modes; Or, Is Magical Realism Just Urban Fantasy? 

This week, I’ve been mulling a question that came up in some recent literary discussions: isn’t magical realism just urban fantasy by another name?

This is a question I’ve seen a lot. And there’s a common claim that works in the magical realist/surrealist/fabulist zone are “really just fantasy” for literary snobs. Or as Terry Pratchett once put it, “a polite way of saying you write fantasy.” To the degree this is critiquing artificial barriers to bar certain fantastic fiction from “real literature,” I agree. I read and write SFFH (science fiction, fantasy, and horror) alongside so called “literary fiction.” So I certainly agree many great fantasy-shelved writers have been unfairly overlooked by literary critics.

But if we’re trying to illuminate fiction—to understand how different storytelling styles operate—then the claim that magical realism is simply urban fantasy by another name doesn’t seem right to me. Especially since this claim often comes with its own snobbery. A few years ago, I was discussing this with a SFF writer who insisted magical realism was really fantasy yet in the same breath mocked it as lazy writing by authors who “don’t think through their worldbuilding.” Suddenly magical realism wasn’t just fantasy by another name but bad fantasy by another name. I’ve heard this a lot and, well, disagree. Magical realism operates differently, not in the same way yet worse.

Increasingly, I’m inclined to think less in terms of “genres” than “modes.” Something about genres promotes a partisan mindset where the goal is to “win” by either declaring the superiority of your preferred genre or claiming territory from other genres. This writer is “really” science fiction, that writer has “transcended” genre, etc. It’s more obfuscating than illuminating. If you want to argue surrealist and magical realist work should be shelved with fantasy, or that fantasy should be shelved with literary fiction, that’s fine. I’m not arguing about that here.

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Magical realism’s lineage is different. The predecessors (or early examples if you prefer) include early 20th-century writers like Franz Kafka and the Surrealists. Latin American magical realists such as Borges, Carpentier, and Márquez spoke openly about their influence. (Márquez on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”: “When I read that [opening] line I thought to myself I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago.”) Scholars also tend to say magical realism flourished in Latin America as a rejection of Western realism as well as a fusion of European literature and indigenous mythology. There’s also an influence of earlier experimental Latin American literature. From these influences you can see magical realism’s political dimension as well as its focus on estrangement through unexpected and original magical elements akin to Surrealist art. More on that below. With the boom period, magical realists like Márquez’s became world famous and their influence is obvious in certain strands of postmodernism (e.g. Barthelme and Rushdie) and fabulism (e.g. Russell and Calvino).

So how do these differences manifest on the page? 

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 In urban fantasy, the magical is typically hidden within the mundane. In works like the Vampire Chronicles or the Dresden Files or American Gods, magical and supernatural entities are common yet secret. The magical may influence or even control our reality—hidden councils of fairies or wizards are behind our wars, disasters, and triumphs—but the average human is unaware. The life for most people is our life. Thus the reader enters with our understanding of our reality, then is granted a peek behind the veil. This concept, used in other SFF genres as well, is sometimes called “the masquerade.” Outside of the hidden magical world, the real world operates like ours. NYC is NYC, unless you’re one of the select few that know the fae dwell in Central Park.

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In magical realism, the magical isn’t hidden or separate from the mundane but rather completely intermingled. The magical events that appear in the works of writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, and Karen Russell are features of the world. Any character living in Macondo, say, will witness and may be involved in the magical events. There’s no masquerade. At the same time, the real world itself becomes magical. NYC isn’t just NYC. The subways are pulled by giant rats and billionaire’s park their helicopters in the clouds, or whatever. This happens both at the “worldbuilding” level and at the stylistic level, with authors describing banal events in magical ways and vice versa. A classic example might be found in the opening of Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” where everyday banalities like rain and a beach are described wondrously—“The world had been sad since Tuesday” and “the sands […] glimmered like powdered light”—while the on-the-surface astonishing appearance of an angel is described rather unmagically: “There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had.”

Go for it. Write to the capacity of our imagination, and open the imaginations of others.  Do not think yourself fitted for a straight-jacket of tradition. Tell the story as the story needs to be told. Most importantly: write.

sch 8/27