What does magical realism mean?

Magical realism is a creative method that expresses the reality of life through the illusions generated by "magic". Magic is a tool, a way, and the reality of life is the goal. Reality is hidden with magical things, showing the reader a world where the cycle is repeated, the subjective time and the objective time are mixed, and the space of subjective and objective things loses the boundary.

Magical realism is a literary genre that flourished in Latin America around the fifties of this century. It is not a product of a literary group, but a common tendency in literary creation, mainly manifested in the field of **, limited to Latin America.

Magical realist writers pretended to be the "soul of the Indians", fusing the traditional notions of the Indians with the "magical reality" (Carpenter) of Latin America, while at the same time they were influenced by European modernist literature, especially surrealist literature.

The writers of this genre insist on putting reality into the illusory environment and atmosphere, giving objective and detailed descriptions, so that the reality is clothed with a layer of bizarre magic, not only insisting on the principle of reflecting the real life of society in their works, but also using the techniques of European and American modernism in the creative method, inserting many magical and grotesque illusions, so that the whole picture presents a style that seems to be true and not true, seems to be false and not false, virtual and real, and difficult to distinguish between true and false. This method of merging reality and illusion has been called "magical realism" by Latin American critics.

Han Han's first magical realist work "Glory Day".

As a literary style unique to Latin America, magical realism has distinctive and unique characteristics that distinguish it. To summarize the characteristics of magical realism there are three

A magical reflection of the realities of Latin American society.

Magical realism is a kind of Latin American reality full of this bizarre and illusory trance, which is what Carpentier called a "magical reality". In this reality, there is no distinction between life and death, between man and ghost, illusion and reality are mixed, and myth and reality coexist.

The principle of magical realism is to "turn reality into fantasy without losing the chain and closing its reality".

For example, "Pedro Palamo" reflects the cruel stripping and oppression of the people by the feudal lord of the big estate. Pedro is a ghost in **, but in real life in Latin America he is a real person. Countless greedy, cruel, and vicious feudal manor owners like him are the main reasons for the poverty and backwardness of the vast rural areas of Mexico and the miserable life of the peasants.

The successful use of the "magical" expression technique.

The most fundamental difference between magical realism and traditional realism lies in the "magical" nature of the expression, which is another significant feature of magical realism.