“Ambivalence” doesn’t even come close to capturing my schizoid views about magic (or magical) realism.

The term has been around since the early part of the twentieth century, and for most of its life has been associated especially with the work of certain Latin American authors. Here’s part of the definition from A Glossary of Literary Terms (6th edition, 1993), which I found here:

The term magic realism, originally applied in the 1920s to a school of painters, is used to describe the prose fiction of Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, as well as the work of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez in Colombia, Gunter Grass in Germany, and John Fowles in England.  These writers interweave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements…  These novels violate, in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic — and sometimes highly effective — experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish, in renderings that blur traditional distinctions between what is serious or trivial, horrible or ludicrous, tragic or comic.

Nicely placed editorial “sometimes” there, huh? But in the hands of, well, a true magician, magic realism just slays me: beneath the gray, mundane surfaces of everyday life writhe fantastically colored creatures of plot, setting, and character — a reality behind the reality — and I find it difficult not to be hypnotized when I discover good examples of it. (I linked to one such story in yesterday’s whiskey river-inspired Friday post.)

(Note, by the way, that “magic realism” isn’t synonymous with “fantasy.” Fantasy takes place in unreal worlds, unrecognizable worlds, while the action in works of magic realism is grounded on good old terra firma. Soil is soil. There’s only one sun in the sky, and only one moon. Country roads are paved with asphalt or gravel, not with yellow bricks.)

But wow, is the technique subject to abuse, or what? A lazy author can find it all too tempting to reach for the supernatural to explain something otherwise inexplicable; if anyone challenges a sudden rainfall of fiery goldfish in the used-car lot (or whatever), the writer can just stare, goggle-eyed, at the the ignorant questioner before replying, “It’s magic realism, you jerk!”

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