Magical Realism

Magical Realism

Magical realism does not mix two worlds: it has only one, in which the extraordinary is treated with the same ordinariness as everything else.

1. Reading contract

The reader demands: strong social and material anchoring, an unexplained marvellous, a narrator who is not astonished, and a meaning that stays open.

2. The rule of non-astonishment

The narrator and the characters are not astonished by the extraordinary event. They deal with its practical consequences.

Test: if a character asks how this is possible, the text has tipped into the fantastic and no longer belongs to the genre.

3. Anchoring

• The marvellous only works on a dense realist base: prices, work, families, administration, illnesses, seasons.
• The more extraordinary the event, the more ordinary the sentence carrying it must be.
• The marvellous is often tied to a social reality: bereavement, exile, erased memory, political violence. That link is what gives the genre its meaning.

4. Writing the marvellous

• One sentence, without emphasis, inserted into an enumeration of ordinary facts.
• No explanation, no rules, no system. The coherence is emotional, not mechanical.
• Practical consequences are treated seriously: who cleans, who pays, what the neighbours say.
• The marvellous may cease for no reason, as it came.

5. Voice

• A storyteller's voice, often close to orality, with controlled repetitions and digressions.
• Long spans of time, generations, motifs repeating across eras.
• The narrator may know things they did not witness, provided they never justify that knowledge.
• Free indirect speech is the central tool; see core/narrator.

6. Cliches to turn or prohibit

• Exoticism used as the justification for the marvellous.
• A marvellous that is purely decorative, with no social consequence.
• The character who goes mad to explain the supernatural.
• The metaphor explained by the text itself.
• Copying motifs already used by the founding authors of the genre.

7. Exit checks

• No character asks for an explanation.
• Every marvellous event has a practical consequence that is dealt with.
• The realist base occupies the majority of the text.
• No systematic rule is stated.
• The meaning stays open, not stated by the narrator.

8. Auto-critique

The eleven constitution axes, plus four genre axes: non-astonishment held, density of the realist base, ordinariness of the phrasing, openness of meaning.

Threshold: no axis below 3, average at least 4 on non-astonishment held.

9. Interfaces

• Upstream: narrator, immersion-director.
• Neighbours: genres/fantasy, poetry/prose-poetry.