#Magical realism full
My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house. I remember particularly the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies. That’s exactly the technique my grandmother used. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of thing. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you. For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. That’s a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. Is this something you have picked up from journalism? You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality. There also seems to be a journalistic quality to that technique or tone.
Reread the paragraph in chapter 1 that begins, “Holding a child by each hand …” and the two paragraphs in chapter 3 that begin, “Visitación did not recognize him … ” Then read an excerpt from the interview conducted by Peter Stone, “Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. Gabriel Garcia Marquez noted in his interview with The Paris Review, “The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination." García Márquez actually claimed that everything he wrote had some basis in reality. Compare the reactions of José Arcadio Buendía and his two sons, Aureliano and José Arcadio,upon touching the ice.Why might the people of Macondo think ice is magical? What other things might be perceived as magical in different times and places?.The Magic of Iceįind the section about ice at the end of chapter 1, beginning with the paragraph that starts, "Holding a child by each hand." Read aloud to the end of the chapter. In this lesson, you will explore the specific techniques García Márquez uses to achieve this porosity-to blur lines that might seem hard and fast before we open the novel. One of the hallmarks of García Márquez's magical realism is the porous boundary between the magical and the real. At one point García Márquez confessed, "My most important problem was destroying the line of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic.” Although this strategy appears in the literature of many cultures in many ages, the term is a relatively recent designation and is used to characterize a number of contemporary writers of Latin American literature such as Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, and Juan Rulfo. This is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or magical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.
It is generally recognized that rather than explaining reality using natural or physical laws, the magical realist creates a new reality. What does this term mean? Commentators disagree, and the divide seems to be both geographical and linguistic: English-speaking critics emphasize the magic in One Hundred Years of Solitude, while Spanish speakers stress the reality of the events in the novel. The term “ magical realism” is broadly descriptive and recently has been applied to the works of such diverse authors as Salmon Rushdie, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich however, critics usually recognize Gabriel García Márquez as first among equals in writing in this fictional genre.