Magical Realism in Latin America
By Keegan MacDonald
Origins of Magical Realism
Magical realism is a genre that has long intrigued scholars and artists alike with its blurred boundaries between the fantastical and the real. As a genre that blends the everyday with the extraordinary, it has become a significant narrative tool for authors grappling with the complexities of political, social, and cultural struggles. While the term initially gained prominence in Europe, it was in Latin America where magical realism flourished as a vehicle for authors to confront their respective histories. There, the genre became intertwined with the region’s turbulent political landscape, with authors using magical realism to reflect on war, dictatorship, and identity. Through examining the history of this genre as well as the key works from this region, we will explore how writers from Latin America have transformed magical realism from a budding art form into a tapestry of their country’s history and memory.
The term “magical realism” was first coined by German art critic Franz Roh in the 1920s to describe paintings that depicted the ordinary with subtle, often surreal, elements interwoven, creating a sense of mystery within a grounded reality. Roh’s observations marked the beginning of a movement that would transcend visual art and find a home in literature. Writers such as Franz Kafka began exploring these concepts in prose, most notably in The Metamorphosis (1915), where the ordinary is disrupted by the surreal transformation of the protagonist into an insect, yet the world around him remains fundamentally unchanged. This merging of the magical with the real caught the attention of Latin American writers in the 1920s, and Roh’s ideas eventually influenced the flourishing of magical realism in the region. The genre would later become a powerful tool for authors to capture the magic they saw in their own lives as well as reflect on their historical traumas, weaving together the fantastical with the harsh realities of their world.
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly stay in place and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.”
Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis” (1915)
When magical realism was first cultivated in Europe during the early 20th century, its range of topics was still quite diverse. However, with the political and social unrest that plagued many Latin American countries during this period, many authors took up their pens and wielded magical realism as a medium to speak on the issues of their time. Political themes were the beating heart of many of their stories.
Gabriel García Márquez
Among one of the most influential Latin American authors in this genre is Gabriel García Márquez. A native of Colombia, Márquez grew up in a country that struggled with political tumult ever since its independence from Spain, undergoing “more incidents of political unrest, violence and human rights violations than most of Latin America,” according to Maria Eugenia B. Rave (2003), who cites the “Thousand Day War” (1899-1902)1 and the “Violencia” (1946-1966)2. Growing up amidst the turmoil that government corruption sewed in Colombian society, Márquez believed that it was a writer’s job to shed light on the injustices the people of his country faced rather than to tuck it away and present a favorable facade of their society to the world. It was important to him that readers around the world knew that “the sense of wonder and infinite strangeness which emerges from much Latin American writing is a true reflection of the complex realities of Latin American experience, not merely the product of feverish literary imagination” (Minta 1987). While he was inspired to record the reality of the injustice most citizens were oppressed by in their daily lives, the magical element of his writing came from the influence of his grandmother’s fantastical storytelling. Ever since he was a child, his grandmother would spin mystical tales, her stories interlaced with her superstitions and ideas of magic that often related to the oral traditions from the Caribbean coast (Rave 2003), captivating his mind and leading him to write with a similar style later in his career.
One such example of Márquez’s blend of magical elements and reality is Cien Años de Soledad, which is often celebrated as the epitome of magical realism in Latin America. This 1967 novel is centered around the Buendía family who establish the fictional town of Macondo, a remote and magical city in Colombia. The story follows the lives of José Arcadio Buendía and his wife Úrsula Iguarán, the founders of this town, as well as the lives of their growing family. José Arcadio Buendía is an important figure in his community due to his experimentation with alchemy and his mission to uncover the world’s mysteries. However, as his obsession with alchemy and the secrets of the universe grows, his inquisitive mind leads to madness and he becomes increasingly isolated from his family and community. Worried that he’ll wander off in his unwell state, his family resorts to tying him to a tree, creating through him the symbol of solitude that will haunt the Buendía family for generations. This curse of isolation will later plague José Arcadio’s son, Aureliano, who is destined to become a revolutionary leader. Aureliano fights in several civil wars before finally returning home a ghost of himself. Withdrawn and overcome by intense loneliness, he further repeats the family’s fated inclination towards solitude. Márquez used Aureliano’s decline to reproach the politics in Colombia and the constant outbreaks of violence and struggles that the country faced.
“At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, Harper & Row, 1970
Márquez’s critique of the power struggles and violence in Colombia was one of the key features that cemented magical realism as a genre where writers could comment on major political issues within Latin America. This is further demonstrated in his introduction of the foreign banana company that establishes a business in Macondo, meant to serve as an emblem of “the direct interference of U.S. capitalist interests in Latin America” (Lainck & Moura, 2020). Though at first the banana company brings economic prosperity to Macondo, it ultimately disrupts the way of life of the townspeople, eventually leading to violence and the event called the banana massacre. This is an allusion to the real-life massacre in Colombia where workers on strike were slaughtered and their deaths covered up by the government and foreign companies. Through this historical parallel, we see Márquez’s admonishment of the destructive powers of capitalism in Latin America. Disillusioned by capitalism and its repercussions–an “imbalance of power and wealth that resulted in widespread poverty” (Rave 2003)–Márquez believed that socialism was the wiser path for Latin America to take. However, as he observed throughout his life, Colombia was unable to actualize a reality in which the government changed for the good of the country and its people. To illustrate this sorrow, Márquez leaves readers with a message at the end of Cien Años de Soledad in the form of the Buendía family’s prophecy. Aurelio reads the prophecy after it has come true and, through reading the history of his lineage, realizes that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It dawns on him in that moment that each generation is doomed to repeat the failures of those who came before them, no matter how much they try to break free from it. In this way, Márquez leaves readers with the idea that humanity is itself tangled in endless cycles of repetition that it needs to free itself from.
Alejo Carpentier
Like Márquez, for many Latin Americans magic was not only fantasized about in stories, but was also alive in the very fabric of their reality. This sentiment was captured in Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s own theory of magical realism, in which he described Latin American reality as being naturally imbued with the fantastic. Their own reality was not so rational and scientific as the Western Europeans would argue, but rather retained the mystical element in their everyday lives made possible only by their refusal to deny a faith that “has not yet been tarnished by the kind of (European/Western) rationalism that would make the alteration of reality by a miracle seem impossible; this faith can will miracles into the fabric of existence…”(Rave 2003). This kind of admonition towards defining Latin American reality by European thought is further expressed in his rejection of allowing the intricacies of magical realism to be swallowed up by and dissolved into the category of surrealism. He emphasizes that unlike surrealism, magical realism doesn’t artificially introduce magical elements where it is absent, but instead records the “marvelous” that is already woven into Latin American reality. As Rave describes, “[f]or Carpentier Latin America is a cultural realm where mythologies are still alive; in order to do the region justice, any “realistic” depiction of it must necessarily seem rather wondrous for European eyes and take the fantastic into account as something natural and commonplace” (2003).
This belief that the fantastic could be seen in the world all around him only grew during his time in Haiti. His stay there inspired his novel El Reino de Este Mundo (The Kingdom of This World), a story following an enslaved laborer on a sugar plantation during the time of the Haitian Revolution. The story is suffused with magical elements deeply rooted in Haitian culture, such as the main character’s interaction with spirits through Vodou rituals and his transformation into animals that allow him to experience life through their perspective. Through weaving spiritual rituals, shape-shifting, and other such themes central to the Vodou religion into the experience of his main character, Carpentier illustrates the ways in which the “marvelous” is still active and present in the everyday lives of Latin Americans, though recounting it might seem fantastical to most European cultures.
Magical Realism and History
As we explore the history of Latin America, we uncover the pivotal events that shaped these authors, inspiring their subject matter and compelling them to share their stories. In Latin America, where the specter of political upheaval is always looming, magical realism became a powerful tool for writers to capture the chaos that enveloped their countries and shaped their upbringing. Having entered the 20th century amid one of the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts in its history, Colombia’s Thousand Days’ War (1899-1902) set the tone for the epoch, as the country would suffer political upheaval and conflict throughout the following decades. This constant strife was mirrored across South America, culminating in countless narratives from authors in countries ravaged by dictatorships, civil wars, and political unrest.
These authors expertly reflect this historical turbulence in their literature through the blending of grim political realities with the fantastic. Gabriel García Márquez exemplifies this in his One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which he captures the cyclical nature of history. This is particularly evident in his depiction of Macondo, a town forever trapped in repeating patterns of war, power, and decay—an echo of Colombia’s own political struggles. The surreal rain of yellow flowers mourning José Arcadio Buendía’s death and the town’s eventual erasure in a whirlwind further mirror the inescapable violence that plagued Latin America, calling back to the countless people who lost their lives in wars or were disappeared by the government. Similarly, Chilean-American author Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits intertweaves the personal and the political, with spirits and premonitions existing alongside the brutal rise of a dictatorship, mirroring Chile’s descent into military rule under Pinochet. In these works, magical realism does not function as mere embellishment but as a means of grappling with trauma: the supernatural becomes indistinguishable from the tragedies of war and oppression. By weaving the real and the surreal together, these authors create a literary space where they can actualize the alienness they feel towards the wars and corruption in their homelands, allowing readers to engage with political strife on a personal and emotional level.
About the Author
Keegan MacDonald is a recent graduate of the MS in Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies with a concentration in Japanese. Her studies in Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish have shaped her interests in translation, linguistics, and the societal impact of literature.