Magical Realism

You may not be familiar with the term “magical realism,” but if you read much modern literature, you will read some. Basically it is an episode or detail in literature in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even ‘normal’ setting.

It’s a way of ennobling the most mundane objects in life or of involving our imagination in a story. For example, Gabriel Marquez (South American writer) told a story of a mother giving birth on the kitchen table, alone, and hemorrhaging. The blood spills onto the floor and runs across the room and out into the street, down the street and into her mother’s house a block away, which was when her mother knew she had died. There is a point at which you know it’s not true, but the extending of the logical events to the magical or fanciful, within the context of an otherwise realistic story, makes it magical realism.

A fairly new novel The Tiger’s Wife features a boy who was raised in a very superstitious community in the Baltics. A woman there protects a tiger, which has escaped a bombed zoo, so that the local hunters won’t kill him. Needless to say, the community is terribly frightened of the tiger, and because the woman grows fat (she discovers she is pregnant after her husband dies) the community believes that the devil tiger has taken her as his wife. Even though the little boy seems to realize that it is the superstition of the community, not the reality of the situation, which causes changes and health in the woman, he seems caught up in the mystical relationship of the woman/tiger, drawing in the reader, also.

Here is an explanation, translated from Spanish, which has a broader look at magical realism.

http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/resourcebank/definitions/ Links to an external site.

Spanish, especially South American, writers have used magical realism for quite a while. Americans started to pick it up in the latter part of the 20^th century.

See if you find any circumstances or details in “Fleur” that fall into this category; if so, mention them in the paragraph you write on Fleur.