The first of the modern magical realists was the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier. The French surrealists would put a sewing machine on a dissecting table; the absurd objects together would cause an event or a juxtaposition to seem surreal. Carpentier, living with the surrealists in France, realized that in Latin America, you don’t have to put them together. In Latin America you will find a white mule on a piano.
I am of the first generation of Latin American writers to grow up reading Latin American authors: Borges, Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes. What we have in common, among greatly varying styles, is the inclusion of the invisible world, not ghosts and spirits, but emotions and passions. When I write about spirits, they stand for things. I lost my daughter in 1991, but she is with me every day, not in the shady corners of my house but inside me. This is a way of understanding common among Latin American writers, even those not considered magical realists. When I read “Pedro Paramo,” by [Mexican writer] Juan Rulfo, and he describes a man walking through a village with the dead, I know he is not talking about ghosts, he is talking about memory, the presence of the past.
Does magical realism exist outside Latin America? Of course; writers like Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison incorporate magical elements. Strangely, the term has lost its vogue within Latin America. It is not “in” anymore; people reject it everywhere. The exaggeration of magical realism may be over, the use of the term may be fading, but it is in essence only a phrase to describe a world of light and shade, something akin to a painting. This is unlikely to disappear from Latin American literature. This landscape does not disappear. I was recently in Guatemala, where a great many do not speak Spanish. You can go into a cybercafe and check your e-mail, then walk outside and see Indians living in the 17th century.
Reality is more magical than real. I live in California, for God’s sake.
