"Magical Realism"

fucking drone. how about you leave Veeky Forums and try and get a personality elsewhere.

I always saw it as a Compelling narrative device, no more no less.

But those are rooted in European perception of the New World. You'll find plenty of similarities in American works--McCarthy, for instance, is chock-full of it.

Good for McCarthy. In Latin America it turned into a genre spanning many countries over a short period of time, which is what OP was asking about, r-tard.

Besides Europeans use European folklore in their works, the experience of Latin Americans means Indigenous shiz mixes with European.

>yeCarthy
retard

Marquez basically explains it as the folk lore stories his grandparents told him.

i like you

I thought Haruki Murakami was magical realism too?

>McCarthy, for instance, is chock-full of it
McCarthy hates magical realism.

>magical realism
>not called pretentious fantasy

How real is your magicalism?

This.
When I took the ACT there was some absurd, obfuscatory passage about an orange suspended on/in a "line" in the sky. The questions were shit, partly because there was no way to write good questions for the passage.
>tfw I got a 35
>tfw it was the english section
>tfw if only I had any other test version

>tfw "magical realism" is glorified skinwalker posting

> all we creatures of that disorderly reality have needed to ask little of the imagination, for the major challenge before us has been the want of conventional resources to make our life credible.
>To interpret our reality through schemas which are alien to us only has the effect of making us even more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.
>people who desire to have their own life while sharing the good things in the world
>Nevertheless, in the face of oppression, pillage and abandonment, our reply is life.

Colombian here. I had never read that speech and I am not particularly fond of his work, I actually strongly dislike it, but it is all in there. We in latam simply have no self identity as a group, we are trapped in the conflict between building a society which deserves that name and the effort to be a part of the modern world. Only that, unlike for instance asian societies which had a well developed culture to face that modern world and are in that same struggle, having been succesful in integrating it within their own culture and values, we had no unified culture when modernity arrived and now we have no ground to make it grow on.

This kind of literature gives you a picture of how people live here, by facing a reality they hate but cant escape and are forced to sugar coat it somehow in order to be able to live in it, no matter how little it 'leaves to imagnation'. I guess that kind of literature grows out of the mixture of living life in that incomprehensible and hostile reality and the instinctual striving for life inside every human being, because sometimes I look at kids growing here and wonder why do they cling to life... I wouldnt if I hadnt travelled around a bit living abroad for some time, and having seen that life can be different and something you can make on your own as you go along.

When you see colombians or latinos and dont get what they do, or are disgusted by how they live, take advice from wittgenstein: "when you feel like hating people, try to understand them instead, and thus be in peace with yourself"

Do you have any other authors or works you like from latin america, then?

not really... anything i have read is stuff they gorged on us at school, which i just forgot and ran away from as soon as i could. however i can mention a strange avant-garde movement called nadaismo, "nothing-ism", and its main figure, the poet gonzalo arango. i dont know if its good or original, it might be a cheap copy of the beatniks, but it called my attention by its name some time back, when i was diving into dadaism and surrealism.

thats not the full speech btw. i tried to look for it in english but couldnt find it.

As a Spaniard, to fully get Magical Realism you should try to live on Spain, or a Latin American country of your choice. Once you get used to the surrealist corruption, like building an airport for persons, you come to understand Magical Realism better.

It's basically a combination of 'special snowflake' meets historical revisionism to make ourselves seem greater, as a people as an individual, than we ever truly were.

I think you're being a tad reductive

what literature have you actually read from latin america?

good one

Magical realism uses elaborate metaphor tied into narrative to reveal deeper truths about subjective reality than old fashioned realism can. Beloved by Toni Morrison is be the best example I know.

More sounds like the Spanish speaking world hasn't embraced the supremacy of logic to the same extent as most of the western world where contradictions and absurdities are not necessarily viewed as impossible or even particularly strange.

If by most of the western world you mean europe then yes you're right

china has a different way of dealing with truth claims and avoids linear narratives too
it's not like you're right just because you say so

Just read it in Spanish.

The famous one, Like Water for Chocolate

I'm talking more about the concept discussed of 'inventing a history' as not being a 'lie' than I am the concept of magical realism which I don't see as being the same thing.

>If by most of the western world you mean europe
yes
>china has a different way of dealing with truth claims and avoids linear narratives too
it's not like you're right just because you say so
didn't say i was right just stating an opinion, and magical realism doesn't seem to be mostly allegorical in nature like what you see in alot of chinese writing