What is Magical Realism?
Magical Realism is a literary movement associated with a style of writing or technique that incorporates magical or supernatural events into realistic narrative without questioning the improbability of these events. This fusion of fact and fantasy is meant to question the nature of reality. Magical realist writers make the lived experience extraordinary and strange.
The movement originated in the fictional writing of Spanish American writers in the mid-twentieth century and is generally claimed to have begun in the 1940s with the publication of two important novels: Men of Maize by Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias and The Kingdom of This World by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. What is most striking about both of these novels is their ability to infuse their narratives with an atmosphere of indigenous folklore, cultural beliefs, geography, and history of a particular geographic and political landscape. However, at the same time that their settings are historically correct, the events that occur may appear improbable, even unimaginable. Characters change into animals, and slaves are aided by the dead; time reverses and moves backward, and other events occur simultaneously. Thus, magic realist works present the reader with a perception of the world where nothing is taken for granted and where anything can happen.
The fantastical qualities of this style of writing were heavily influenced by the surrealist movement in Europe of the 1920s and literary avant-gardism. Although other Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, and Julio Cortazar used elements of magic and fantasy in their work, it was not until the publication of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in English in 1970 that the movement became an international phenomenon. Subsequently, women writers such as Isabel Allende from Chile and Laura Esquivel from Mexico have become part of this movement’s later developments, contributing a focus on women’s issues and perceptions of reality. Since its inception, Magic Realism has become a technique used widely in all parts of the world. Thus, writers such as Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison have been added to the magic realist canon of writers because of their use of magical elements in real-life historical settings.
Elements of Magical realism in The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World
In the short story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” Gabriel Marquez employs magical realism in the most effective manner. Magical realism as the term itself suggest, magically fuses the fantasy on the one side and reality on the other.
In the story, Marquez lets one dead man come into an island’s everyday life, but the dead man is not decomposed or odorous; instead, it is full of good-look and masculinity regarding which it has been remarked in the story:
“Fascinated by his huge size and his beauty, the women then decided to
make him some pants from a large
piece of sail and a shirt from some
bridal linen so that he could
continue through his death with dignity”
They named the drowned man as Esteban. He turns into an object of desire and an epitome of beauty that the whole island community gets engaged in. Absorbing the essence of the land and the inhabitants there, the drowned man magically changes into a larger than life figure that encroaches on everyone’s life around. From a material figure Esteban’s transformation into an immemorial one is going to intervene in every aspect of the islanders’ life. The islanders who never have come to meet him, who never even know the life beyond the small island, they suddenly name him as Esteban, adore him, plan to design their future keeping him on the mind – all these certainly refer to the radical transformation of society keeping faith in any particular idea. In literary texts, therefore, no other device can better explain such huge collective transformation except magic realism.
