Magical Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad

Abstract

It was in an article by Angel Flores published in 1955 that the term magical realism originally used by a German critic to characterise a type of Expressionist art was first employed as a yard-stick to measure, compare and evaluate modern Latin American fiction. In this article, Flores pointed out that one of the distinguishing features of magical realism is its ability to transform 'the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal'.2 Flores' article also stressed the connections between magical realism and examples of European art such as Kafka's novels and Chirico's paintings. Flores' article, however, soon came under attack from various sources. In an article published in 1967, Luis Leal attempted to show that Flores' various statements about magical realism were ill-founded. The main aim of Leal's article is to see magical-realist artists the examples he gives are Arturo Uslar Pietri, Miguel Angel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Lino Novas Calvo, Juan Rulfo, Felix Pita Rodriguez, and Nicolas Guillen as part of a movement which is exclusively Spanish American in orientation and flavour. He thereby cuts the movement of magical realism and the various artists that represent it from any European antecedents, one of which is surrealism. At one stage in his article, Leal makes the following statement about the difference that separates magical realism from surrealism and realism:

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