Magic Realism Meets the Contemporary Gothic: Isabel Allende and Angela Carter

Abstract

In comparison with ancient folklore, magic realism is a more recent form of fantastic fiction still relatively unfamiliar to many contemporary readers in Britain and Europe. Its very name associates the term with oxymoron (how can something simultaneously be “real” and “magical” at the end of the twentieth century?) and, in that regard, provides a perfect framework for many of the concerns of postmodern writers of the fantastic, while also being integrally concerned with the impact of post-colonialism upon narrative theory. The etymology of the term is repeatedly emphasized by all critics of the field. To reiterate this in brief, its origins lie in art history, first being coined in 1925 by Franz Roh, actually as a counter-response to what Roh saw as the “exaggerated preference for fantastic, extraterrestrial, remote objects” typical of the Expressionist movement.² In literature it can be seen to take the opposite trajectory, rooting itself in the real, but allying magical realism with the extraordinary within the real, evoking a type of double-edged frisson not dissimilar to the concerns of the post-colonial, in that both actively resist turning what one might define as “the Other” (the fantastic/foreign/ native) into “the Same” (realism/empiricism/empire).³

… the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality … from a privileged revelation of reality … or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality …¹