- Lee Nok'si Livingston
- 7 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Magical Realism as Political Philosophy
Lee Nok'si Livingston
May 8, 2025
The term "magical realism" originates in the realm of visual art with Franz Roh’s magischer Realismus, which he used to differentiate the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement from German Expressionism and other related forms of Surrealism[1]. While the literary term develops in different directions than Roh’s magischer Realismus, and other genealogies of the idea can be traced in a multitude of directions, I find this etymological origin critical, not only due to the biases of my art history background. New Objectivity, a movement spearheaded by Western Europe’s political left, which focused on public collaboration and direct materialist engagement, formed as a direct rejection of Expressionism’s romantic idealism and "programmatic deformation of reality[2]". New Objectivity was the spirit of Weimar Germany, while German Expressionism was championed as the official Nazi art by Goebbels and other National Socialists before losing state backing to the volkish ideals of Alfred Rosenberg.
Magical realism continued to be inseparable from political discourse as it moved into the literary sphere, where it is perhaps most well known in the Latin American literary world through the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez. The genre’s explosion of the real can be found in literature around the globe, and similarly has been theorized and defined by a wide array of theorists. David Lodge writes in The Art of Fiction that magical realism is "when marvellous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative…All these writers have lived through great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism[3]". Stephen Slemon theorized magical realism as a form of political discourse, focusing on its situation within postcolonial cultures, especially Latin America and the Caribbean, and its incompatibility with more established genre systems in relation to its existences at the margins of mainstream literary traditions[4]. Magical realism, visual and literary, is often associated with left-wing and post-colonial politics.
I would like to push this association even further by drawing not only this historico-political genealogy of magical realism, with its connections to particular political moments and movements, but also by claiming that the genre itself is a locus for radical creativity. It is not a coincidence that this art form exists in the spaces in which we find it, and that is wielded by those in particular who do. But why? Why is it so radical? Lodge’s explanation, that writers simply turn to magical realism to express personal and historical troubles whose emotional intensities lend themselves to particular poeticisms or abstractions, does not satisfy me. It forgets magical realism’s anti-Expressionist origins and ignores the particular philosophical ground that the genre builds and embodies, reducing it to a visual motif or single fantastical element.
When Matthew Stretcher explored the fiction of Murakami Haruki as magical realism, he described it as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe[5]". This quote embodies a mainstream understanding of the philosophical position of magical realism, where a “real world” is threatened, undercut, infected, or blessed with the “unreal” or “otherworldly”. This logic requires several assumptions already, situating the realism of the setting as representational and essentialist, operating on the type of Humanist individualist metaphysics critiqued by post-humanists such as Karen Barad[6]. It seems to me that the genre of magical realism is uninterested in this kind of stark realism. Or, I should say, I think there is a post-humanist literary theory of magical realism that is not only viable, but addresses many of the questions that have made the genre into such a seeming problem child.
La Mar Jurelle Bruce’s work on radical creativity and madness gives us many tools in theorizing and examining of magical realism. In his book How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, he quotes political theorist Achille Mbembe’s remark that “it is on the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason (passion, fantasy) that late-modern criticism has been able to articulate a certain idea of the political, the community, the subject—or, more fundamentally, of what the good life is all about, how to achieve it, and, in the process, to become a fully moral agent. The exercise of reason is tantamount to the exercise of freedom[7]". The distinction between reason and unreason, real and unreal (and as extension, subject and object as clear categories themselves) form the bases of the operative functions of our societies. And as La Mar Jurelle Bruce points out, within the Western world (and the places it has locked in its colonial grip), the reason that distinguishes the real from unreal is in fact Reason. Not reason, “a generic process of cognition within a given system of logic and the ‘mental powers concerned with forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences", but Reason, “a proper noun denoting a positivist, secularist, Enlightenment-rooted episteme purported to uphold objective ‘truth’ while mapping and mastering the world[8]".
Magical realism, in entangling the real and unreal, also makes space for both reason and Reason without presenting one as more legitimate, tangible, or valuable than the other. There is a clear internal logic to magical realist works, even if it is different from the one we usually operate within in our world. As Stephen Slemon writes in his post-colonial analysis of the genre, “although most works of fiction are generically mixed in mode, the characteristic manoeuvre of magic realist fiction is that its two separate narrative modes never manage to arrange themselves into any kind of hierarchy[9]”. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes, for example, the titular old man’s wings are not something most would expect to see as part of the everyday reality of our world, and the other characters in the story—Pelayo, Elisenda, their children, and the townspeople—feel the same. We are not in a fantasy story, where it is commonplace to see people with wings (and horns, pointed ears, etc.). However, the old man’s wings are never less real than anything else in the story. They hold the same material weight, exist in the same space, and interrelate with the more conventional elements of the story just as much as the rain, the mud, and the crabs. The line between “magical” and “real” is thus blurred, but not entirely collapsed. Rather than a complete separation or absorption between the magic and mundane, the two are allowed to be differentiated but co-constituted. Their simultaneous existence and connection to one another does not flatten them into monoliths, but rather puts them into relation and conversation with each other.
By this mechanism, humans and Others (including humans fantastical and monstrous but also the non-human other, the world itself), are also blurred and created via intra-action. Márquez’s old man with enormous wings is a creature because he is treated like a creature by those around him, but there are moments in the story where he feels more human, more of-the-world, than the townspeople who fear and mock him. In Jorge Luis Borges’ The Circular Ruins, this intra-active reality is literalized through the story itself, in which a man works to build a boy out of dreams through partaking in rituals at a strange ruin, only to realize that he himself has been composed from dream by someone else. The man who thought he was a “real” human, an active subject engaging with a passive object, has this perception exploded by the truth of his own construction. The realism of magical realism is performative and intra-active, rather than representationalist or essentialist, which “forestalls the possibility of interpretive closure through any act of naturalizing the text to an established system of representation[10],” as Slemon puts it. As Karen Barad discusses at length in Meeting the Universe Halfway, this does not mean that there is no reality at all—the “realism” is just as important as the “magical”. Magical realism simply operates on an agential, rather than representationalist, realism.
And this, at last, returns us to magical realism’s artistic origins as a direct counter to Expressionism. Whereas Expressionism serves as a distortion of reality, often along xenophobic, white-supremacist lines, magical realism serves as an agential reality—a site of radical creativity that makes room for that which is too strange to believe. Under the regime of Reason, it is often the othered and marginalized, the human and nonhuman survivors of colonialism, who are considered too strange to believe. Magical realism does not make a new world for the Other. It reveals the Other already in our world by revealing the inter-active construction of the real and unreal, Reasonable and unReasonable, subject and object, self and other—and allows us to imagine new versions of our world, where we work to crack open these categories entirely.
Footnotes
Franz Roh, Nach-Expressionismus (1925)
Emily Braun, “Expressionism as Fascist Aesthetic” (1996)
David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (1992)
Stephen Slemon, “Magical Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse” (1995)
Matthew Stretcher, “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki” (1999)
See Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)
La Mar Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind (2021)
Ibid
Stephen Slemon, “Magical Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse” (1995)
Ibid.
Lee Nok'si Livingston is an undergraduate student at GCAS in Humanities.
