Magic Realism

Enhancing reality in your writing

I came across a problem in my work in progress a while back. One of my characters suffers the terrible loss of a baby. I wanted to show how that loss haunts her for the rest of the novel. But how could I do that except to say how much she missed him or how she imagined him at other stages in his life, projecting his development forward and experiencing loss all over again? A reviewer once criticised me for too much ‘hand wringing’ so I was keen to avoid lots of agonised introspection. Then it dawned on me: magic realism.

Magic realism is a genre of literature that depicts the real world as having an undercurrent of magic or fantasy. In a work of magic realism, the world is still rooted in the real world, but fantastical elements are considered normal. Like fairy tales and ghost stories, magic realism novels and short stories blur the line between fantasy and reality.

Here is an example from the very beginning of Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize winning novel, Beloved, which uses the techniques of magic realism to tell the story of Sethe and her family as they are haunted by a daughter that Sethe killed on her flight out of slavery.

"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old-as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door-sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, the months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once-the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time."

Morrison depicts the dead child as wreaking supernatural havoc on the house and its inhabitants, employing magic realism techniques to suggest how the child haunts her family.

In my own novel, it seemed to me that a more powerful option for showing the grief my character feels for her baby’s loss was to introduce him as a character in his own right. So at various points in the story, he appears alongside her, as a giggling baby, a determined toddler, a preoccupied little boy. Alice, the mother, is never startled by his appearance but accepts him naturally, and through her consciousness we see, hopefully in a more powerful way, how she is dealing with her loss.

I’m only nearing the end of the first draft of my new book, so have no idea how this device will be received, but I am hoping Magic Realism will prove to be a game changer.