Fantasy vs. magical realism

People argue over the definitions, but magical realism is generally real world with real world problems as the central story. Magic is something that is taken for granted. It's not discovered or explained. It doesn't have a system. It's just the world.

A middle grade example of magical realism might be a story about a child dealing with bulling at school. Her teacher, who she goes to for advice, is a troll. This gets no more explanation than if her teacher was a human. Her dealing with the bullies isn't magical.

A middle grade example of fantasy would be if the teacher was a troll and that was a big deal because trolls had just been discovered. The main character discovers she's never fitted in because she's half-troll and has inherited the Ring of Awesome. She must learn to use the ring or the fate of the entire world is at stake.

Portals and magical worlds generally makes me think fantasy. But it'd depend on how it was handled. If the kids regularly took a shortcut through a magical world to get to school, and that's taken as being as normal as a shortcut through the park, you might have a magical realism on your hands. But nine times out of ten, when someone asks if they've written magical realism, they haven't.

There is no rigid formal definition. The joking definition is "fantasy novels that are written in Spanish."

More seriously, I disagree that a story about a boy who discovers he can levitate would be magical realism. If the story is about the fact that he can levitate, and wow, isn't it cool that he can levitate because, you know, most people can't levitate, then it's a fantasy.

If the boy just starts levitating and there is never any explanation and no one finds it particularly remarkable, even though most people don't levitate, and his levitation is not actually a major plot point, then maybe it's magical realism.

Generally, magical realism means the magical is mundane. People just accept that magical things happen, but it doesn't alter their worldview.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is usually the poster child for magical realism (hence the "fantasy in Spanish" jokes). Jorge Luis Borges is a biggie. I would argue that a lot of Haruki Murakami's books fall into that category also.

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is another example. The characters all have "superpowers," but they don't really affect the course of events. Rushdie has pointed out that Westerners tend to read it as a fantasy, while Indians read it as a historical novel.

A more recent, mainstream example: possibly World Made By Hand. For the most part, it's a straightforward post-apocalyptic novel with no zombies or aliens or anything of that sort. But there are hints dropped throughout the book that there are supernatural forces at work, and the characters kind of notice it, but don't really make much of it.

That last is more debatable though; I haven't read the later books but I understand that the supernatural elements become much more overt and shape the plot.

To add an example to the very comprehensive posts others have already made, my MG stories are Magical Realism. My characters seem to live in the normal world, but then, for example, they encounter an Extremely Girnormous Octopus who can talk and is a Shakespearean actor and no one questions this, or wonders why. No rather they have to deal with the fact that he is drunk and doesn't want to return to set. So you see the issue isn't that here's a magical seeming creature and WTF, the issue is he's a diva actor to work with.

A portal story, like the one you describe is fantasy. The magic is seen as extraordinary, unusual. As Alice puts it: "Curiouser and curiouser."

Not sure if this helps or just repeats the above, but I like giving my two cents as its a genre I am rather fond of .

Pipi Longstocking would count as another example of magical realism it seems.

A lot of classic MGs fall into that category. Even Peter Pan, though a portal book, could be considered magical realist with, for example, its use of a dog as a nanny, and the non-issue Mrs. Darling has with having captured Peter's shadow (her concern is more that there's been a strange boy in the house).

Ooh do let me know if she enjoyed it! And thanks so much! I really appreciate the support .

Sweet! That's awesome to hear. And I so know what you mean. MG readers have the best reading technique. It's so all consuming and just wonderful.

Her teacher, who she goes to for advice, is a troll.

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Is this a physics teacher?

Great thread, thanks! I've been wondering this myself.

So ... I've been interested in low fantasy versus high.

Wikipedia defines low fantasy as “a sub-genre involving non-rational happenings that are without causality or rationality because they occur in the rational world (= the real world or a rational fictional world) where such things are not supposed to occur" (the underlining is mine).

That definition is close to the one from magical realism, bar the "where such things are not supposed to occur" part.

This part confuses as the question is whether the “not supposed to occur” is from the reader’s perspective, who will always think that non-rational events are not supposed to occur in the real world or a “rational fictional world” (if they break the reading spell, i.e. suspension of disbelief, and consider it), or from the character’s perspective, who may or may not accept that non-rational occurrences (such as magic) are part of their world.

If the definition of low fantasy refers to the reader’s perspective, then, it seems, magic realism is a sub-genre of low fantasy (in which the characters accept their world as is). If on the other hand the definition of low fantasy refers to the character’s perspective on this definition, then, magic realism and low fantasy are disjoint genres, i.e. a book can’t be both. In low fantasy, the characters will accept non-rational occurrences (say magic) as is, while in low fantasy they won’t.

Any calls on which interpretation is intended in this definition? I could look up the wikipedia sources, but wonder if anyone already has/knows. My preference would go to the first interpretation, i.e. the reader’s perspective. It seems to make more sense to have magic realism be a sub part of low fantasy.

Like magical realism, there's no authoritative checklist. (Like, I kind of disagree with Toothpaste that children's books are magical realism. I mean they kind of meet the "technical" definition, but I'd say everything from Dr. Seuss to Peter Pan could technically fall into the category of magical realism if you include children's literature, which generally makes no distinction between the real world and the fantasy world.)

As for Low Fantasy, that Wikipedia article looks like the product of a hair-splitting graduate student. Harry Potter is maybe high fantasy, but maybe low fantasy? C'mon.

I think of everything from Stephen King to Robert E. Howard as "low fantasy." Magic exists but you don't actually see it very often. But the distinction with magical realism would be that when magic does show up, it's not some random and/or arbitrary authorial insertion, it's actually a thing in the world; this is how the world works.

No authoritative check list is a problem.

The main problem for me is not that there are several definitions available for the same concept (annoying as that is), but that definitions tend to have (large) holes in them, so that even if you pick one, you're still on shaky ground. And indeed, when you do pick one, and fine tune it perhaps to make more sense, others will understand something different under that flag. It might be better to start from scratch, with brand new names and crisper definitions. Ok we're talking fantasy, in which almost anything goes, not science, but still.

I went through a nice merry-go-round trying to classify a novel I wrote, pigeon holed by beta readers as "epic", myself as "low fantasy" and ultimately, chasing genres, I pegged it as "SF" though no reader would put it in that category. I found the process fascinating, so I got a bit hooked on trying to pin things down.

Ton Lew Lepsnaci said:

No authoritative check list is a problem.

The main problem for me is not that there are several definitions available for the same concept (annoying as that is), but that definitions tend to have (large) holes in them, so that even if you pick one, you're still on shaky ground. And indeed, when you do pick one, and fine tune it perhaps to make more sense, others will understand something different under that flag. It might be better to start from scratch, with brand new names and crisper definitions. Ok we're talking fantasy, in which almost anything goes, not science, but still.

I went through a nice merry-go-round trying to classify a novel I wrote, pigeon holed by beta readers as "epic", myself as "low fantasy" and ultimately, chasing genres, I pegged it as "SF" though no reader would put it in that category. I found the process fascinating, so I got a bit hooked on trying to pin things down.

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It will be labeled whatever readers call it.

My story is a "YA hard SF novel." I call it "hard SF" because I don't introduce any obviously-counterfactual concepts or things we know to be impossible (like FTL travel). However, there are places where I kind of hand-wave a bit of the technology and planetology; I'm sure purists would argue with the "hardness" of my SF. And I didn't originally intend it to be YA, but most of my readers have said it's about teenagers, therefore it is definitely YA.

Toothpaste calls her books "magical realism"; I wouldn't.

Genre categories are really just marketing labels. Nowadays Jane Austen is often classified as "romance" or worse, "chick lit," which would probably have horrified Austen and her many contemporary male readers.

I do agree though that Magical Realism does tend to have a much more profound element to its defintion, one that isn't always found in children's books and does have a specific place in Latin American literature. However with that being said, I don't think I'm wrong to categorise my books as such. They are neither high nor low fantasy, and it took me a long time to find a category in which I felt I actually belonged (believe it or not, my books are also social commentary, despite "just" being children's books). Here is a blog post I wrote going through what are considered the basic points for Magical Realism: http://ididntchoosethis.blogspot.ca/2007/12/magical-realism.html As you'll see, I acknowledge it isn't perfectly spot on with my work, but it is the darn closest I come to a category.

I didn't arbitrarily give my children's books that heading. I did my research. And while you may disagree that putting whimsical children's books into this category is correct, I think, if you look at the definitions out there, that many such books fall into that category nicely. And it is quite possible that the authors of adult Magical Realism (who were the ones who invented the genre of course, as opposed to the authors of the children's books I cite), were inspired by that kind of perspective on the world found within the classic children's stories, which included the ability for kids to just accept the absurd as a normal part of life. And also in the fact that often in these older children's novels children have an insight and clarity of what is going on that often the parents don't. It is quite possible the authors of Magical Realist works were in part trying to emulate those kinds of lessons in their grown up books. So while the books may not have begun as Magical Realism, they could have nonetheless wound up in that category after the fact. I suppose you could use the "serious literature" point in the checklist as the most important point which supersedes any other possible commonalities. But I don't. And quite frankly, I think a lot of children's literature says volumes about the world we live in and can be just as profound as the more poetic literary adult works that originated the genre.

Well, I certainly can't come and take away your Magical Realism license. And I'm not dismissing children's books (or yours in particular) because they are "not serious literature." I just don't think whimsical children's stories are quite in the same category as magical realism as it's usually discussed. But as I said, it's a label with very fuzzy definitions and no "official" criteria (and certainly no one capable of arbitrating what does and doesn't qualify).

There may be children's books that I could be convinced are magical realism - but I do have a hard time putting Peter Pan in the same category as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Okay, I'll be honest. I haven't read the former, so I am unable to agree or disagree whether they belong together. Have you read both? Can you explain why you wouldn't put them in the same category? (sincere question) Because to me the novel of Peter Pan is one of the more profound beautiful stories out there (it might be one of my favourite novels of any genre/category/age range), with a sad sad ending commenting on the nature of childhood and adulthood that makes me cry every time. Then again, I do cry rather easily . . . . And I can't see why it wouldn't fit in the Magical Realist category, including the more social commentary elements, heck even the city vs nature element is present. Along with authorial reticence and irony regarding the author's perspective.

The Venn diagram for these two literary concepts has a big overlap, made more so by the fact that the boundary of the "magic realism" field is so fuzzy. But I can't think of any work "for kids" that I would put in the "magic realism" category. That term was more or less invented for the slightly surreal, slightly poetic, intoxicatingly haunting work of Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Marquez, most notably One Hundred Years of Solitude. Numerous other South American writers have been pigeonholed into that "genre", some for good reasons, others not so much. I'd add some African writers, too (in particular Nigerian Amos Tutuola), and possibly some Asian writers. Also some "beat era" writers like Kenneth Patchen. But, frankly, I've grown to detest the "magic realism" label, and think it's pretty meaningless. You could put earlier writers such as Kafka, Céline, Malaparte in that Venn field. Maybe even some of William Faulkner.

caw

Ton Lew Lepsnaci said:

So ... I've been interested in low fantasy versus high.

Wikipedia defines low fantasy as “a sub-genre involving non-rational happenings that are without causality or rationality because they occur in the rational world (= the real world or a rational fictional world) where such things are not supposed to occur" (the underlining is mine).

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I've only really seen low fantasy used when someone's trying to highlight stuff which isn't high fantasy. What they're usually trying to say is the book is fantastical, but the magic and fantasy creatures are low key. They may not appear at all or they may only appear infrequently. As opposed to going on an epic adventure where magic and elves are around every corner.

But really, unless you're planning to get into academic discussions about genres, you don't need to worry about that. Such books are usually queried and marketed as fantasy. You don't have to list a sub-genre. If in doubt, it's best to be general than choose a category that doesn't fit.

Amadan said:

There may be children's books that I could be convinced are magical realism - but I do have a hard time putting Peter Pan in the same category as One Hundred Years of Solitude.

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I wouldn't count Peter Pan either. Catching the shadow certainly has a magical realist vibe, but that's one small part of the story. Most of it is magical adventures in Neverland, where they discover fairies are real and so forth.

(except the conceit of Neverland is that we all know it exists. It isn't like Wonderland which is a surprise, no the author talks about the Neverland like we all already know what it is. And that when the kids arrive at Neverland it's exactly as they knew it would be - they aren't surprised, they have been expecting it. Like I said, it is both a portal book and . . . well I guess only to me . . . Magical Realist. In any event, clearly I'm in the minority with this one, so it might not be a good idea to use my definition I guess. I still advise people to read Peter Pan, it's quite something special, and incredibly well written.)

I've put Peter Pan on my list

I understand why Toothpaste classifies these books as magical realism. I think she is right in doing so, based on the definition of magical realism discussed in this thread (which pops up on many sites). When I read the description given in sites such as "what is magical realism, really", I understand why others may disagree. But this site takes quite a bit of space to pin down the original notion. On the other hand, the crisp definition given here, seems a fair summary of the core idea, even though it lets in a host of other works in the sub genre.

The definition used in this thread could fly under the flag "broad(ened) magical realism". The adjective doesn't really matter, as long as we're clear on what we mean. But, with some justification, "magical realism" could be described as has been done in this thread (i.e. not using an extra adjective). After all, the description offered here captures the core of what it would mean, in literature, for "magic to occur as realistic". I.e. magical/supernatural elements are blended seamlessly with the reality of that world. Magical events are unexplained and treated as mundane occurrences. As long as we're clear on the definition, I see no issue.

As a writer, I'm interested in sub genres, because they give me a deeper insight in the choices of other authors or the nature of their work.