Daydream Nations: Has Magical Realism Lost Its Bite?

At its simplest definition, Magical Realism is marked by an emphasis on the fantastical and its contemporaneous coexistence with so-called reality. I first came across this wild strain of literature about twenty years ago when I read some of the European practitioners of the genre such as Günter Grass and Mikhail Bulgakov. Notably, the past few years have seen a resurgence of Magical Realist writing. Darkly whimsical novels like Swamplandia! and The Night Circus contain spirit guides and magicians, while The Great Night revives Greek gods and goddesses and drops them in San Francisco. The sci-fi romance of 1Q84 features an alternate universe and The Orange Eats Creeps is populated by a roving band of "hobo-vampire junkies." Though such contemporary works and the genre's original incarnations are somewhat similar superficially, I'm seeing some marked differences.

Gabriel García Márquez's epic 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is considered by many to be the primary text of Magical Realism, in its dual tales of the vast history of the fictional Buendía family and of Colombia's struggles to forge a distinct national identity despite decades of conquest and colonization. Throughout the book, García Márquez allowed his imagination free rein, employing complex structures, arcane symbolism, startling imagery, and the unquestioned appearance of ghosts to tell his multiple stories, inadvertently setting a kind of gold standard for much of the magical realist writing that followed. And that history is rich and impressive with a roster of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges from Argentina, Miguel Ángel Asturias from Guatemala (both early influences for García Márquez), Mexico's Carlos Fuentes, Augusto Roa Bastos of Paraguay, Guillermo Cabrera Infante of Cuba, and Peruvian-born Isabelle Allende, to name only a few from Latin America alone. All of them have produced works that now constitute a large portion of the contemporary literary canon.

Compared to these Latin American progenitors, however, the emphasis of much of the current work seems to be on a de-politicized fusion of speculative and fantasy fiction, with a dose of historical revisionism and the occasional talking animal thrown in for good measure. It seems to me that the once-held view of literature as a formidable, potentially subversive political tool is on the wane. In this new context, the ghosts and monsters and double planets of genre fiction are being conjured up in the service of creating a literature that can compete with the firepower of today's effects-laden movies, games, and apps. Rather than expressing political dissent or simply speaking truth to power, many current writers working in this vein seem to be enjoying the imaginative freedoms of Magical Realism rather than finding more direct confrontational applications for its powers. The Tiger's Wife, the critically acclaimed debut by Yugoslav-born, now American Téa Obreht, is a notable exception for the ways in which it deals with the miserable legacies of the Serbo-Croatian conflicts in former Yugoslavia by intertwining folk tales told to the protagonist as a young child with the grim realities of life during wartime. Yet exceptions aside, I think the current crop of Magical Realist fiction could benefit from the infusion of a more politically conscious spirit. Its current form may be fun and imaginative, but what it really needs is a bit more critical backbone—and some bigger, sharper teeth.