Also check out the Magis Center blog, which this week posted a previous, related commentary by Bill Schmitt: “We Seek Authenticity, But Be Careful Defining What’s Real.” The Magis Center is directed by Father Robert Spitzer, SJ.
Breathe in the magical realism that is all around us. Are you sniffing the literary genre we identify with 20th century Latin American authors? Or the latest iterations of the style now morphing in multiple media? Or the phenomenon we witness in non-fiction, indeed in the way we think? Yes!
This perspective on life will gain attention in all three cultural currents this year and beyond. We would be wise to remember what we thought we knew about it so we’re prepared to catch its drift .
Lots of students have been taught that magical realism referred to a somewhat esoteric style which emerged around the 1930s, mainly in art and literature and notably (but not exclusively) in Latin American novels. Brittanica.com says it is “characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastical or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.”
The encyclopedia adds that this hybrid approach has cultural resonance. Scholars see its roots in “post-colonial writing” because it strives to “make sense of at least two separate realities—the reality of the conquerors as well as that of the conquered.”
Mysteries that Span Decades
Various writers worldwide have injected imaginative features—telepathic characters, even a moon that speaks—into otherwise realistic storytelling. Their goal: to emphasize and illuminate aspects of truth whose complex authenticity defies a merely prosaic presentation.
One esteemed exemplar, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, featured an otherworldly element in his 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, as an article by Master Class points out: A Colombian family’s patriarch dreams about a city of mirrors, and that city takes shape physically, and mysteriously, across generations.
Here come our first connections to the present day. The Netflix streaming service has released a video preview of a 16-episode serialization of One Hundred Years of Solitude, coming soon to a screen near you.
Magical realism is not new to small or large screens. Observers have said TV series such as Stranger Things and Westworld utilized the style. They have spotted it in films like Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Midnight in Paris (2011), as well as Disney’s Encanto (2021).
A headline in The New York Times calls the new movie Omen a “trippy” drama which “explores Congolese society through magical realism.” It “operates on another—frenzied, magical, gender-bending—wavelength,” the Times reviewer said on April 11.
Several months ago, the newspaper reviewed a noteworthy movie produced by Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki, now 82. The Boy and the Heron uses magical realism to tap into experiences from Miyazaki’s own life.
This animated film has been thriving in theaters and on platforms, but the Times reviewer advises audiences to watch it as an “exercise in contemplation” because it’s so enigmatic. “Magical fires rage, souls of the preborn and the dead mingle, and the fate of the universe is determined in ways unclear.”
It appears the enigmas of these latter films, and of other entertainment served up nowadays, aim to take us where no magical realist has gone before. We can choose to come away from the intense images and ideas either as disoriented wanderers or as mystery-lovers on pilgrimage.
We should assess our trippy 21st century culture expecting this kind of realism to grow. Note that an essay in Writer’s Digest in 2016 advised authors to embrace the style broadly: “It’s as much a worldview as a category.”
Perhaps the worldview of magic, which is distinct from science fiction, surrealism, fable, and fantasy, has found a new home for its enigmas—in non-fiction and our daily search for truth.
When the American public must distinguish between authentic and “fake” news, information and disinformation, reasoning and conspiracy theories, our thinking seems vulnerable to incursions from the unreal.
After all, the Oxford Dictionary in 2016 declared its word of the year to be “post-truth.”
Verisimilitude? Not Very
Katherine Maher, the suddenly controversial CEO of National Public Radio who previously headed Wikipedia, assured a 2022 TED Talk audience that “truth exists.” But, if you take into account a world of different beliefs, she said, our “collective decision-making” needs the “tremendously forgiving” notion of “minimum viable truth.”
This means “getting it right enough, enough of the time, to be useful enough to enough people,” according to Maher. Using patience and humility, fact-gatherers should work incrementally to state what we know now and then keep sorting through the “many different truths” in people’s minds; our “messy humanity” will accept more truth as time goes by.
Because Wikipedia is based on “collaboration” by a volunteer editor “community,” Maher suggested, the online encyclopedia is now one of the few places where “disagreements actually make you more agreeable.” Sadly, agreeability has proven more elusive at NPR.
Meanwhile, early this year, artificial intelligence became disagreeable with its own version of magical realism. Google’s Gemini image-generator concocted a world peopled by a female pope and Black founding fathers. Users rejected this as inclusivity promoting exclusivism, a tweak of reality creating the unreal.
How do people think about reality today? Obviously, each individual will be different. Politicians of either party might act like fabulists in their resumes and speeches. Other influential figures in the public square will be more rigorous and common-sensical.
Of course, it’s natural for us to Photoshop our slices of reality to make ourselves look better. But we also insert our unseen world, perhaps recalling a moment of spiritual epiphany, a personal passion that motivates us, or an observation about people that blends our knowledge and kindness.
Even thoroughly secular people, grounded in empiricism, will try to impress audiences with the values and experiences of their interior selves. Our modern culture favors role models in whom we see deeper dimensions of empathy, belief, and principle.
Judeo-Christian tradition and other religions have been telling stories with these dimensions for millennia. Catholic hagiography, finding inspiration in the stories of canonized saints, integrates mundane biography with the recognition that some people, through sacrifice and the sacred, can live life to the fullest.
The Church, which has developed a healthy skepticism toward miraculous claims, still asserts that an expansive view of reality offers a sense of purpose and joy. Persons cultivate this perspective not instantaneously as solo actors, but gradually in relationships with each other and their God.
Skeptics will use the term “magical realism” to dismiss these statements of faith. But religion shouldn’t be dismissed as magic. It continues to provide communities of benevolence where big-picture questioning is encouraged, even in these times of atomization.
So, we see magical realism taking opposite directions these days—as a blessing upon those who seek more meaningful truth, or as an insult from those who want “truth” without the baggage of higher perspectives.
Those in the latter segment will either limit different worldviews to portion-controlled bites or demand immediate definitions to ensure cultural progress.
Neither of these choices respects the noble roots of the magical realists. They birthed the genre to expose reality on multiple levels without imposing it. They felt a duty to preserve and honor their ancestral cultures’ essence in the midst of oppression and oversimplification.
Their imaginative, non-conformist “truth bombs,” vividly amending regime-sanctioned, minimalist doctrines, have helped countless readers see far more than the “minimum viable truth.”
These days, our battle for fuller truth confronts a new, yet familiar, cultural opponent—the “oppressor vs. oppressed” paradigm. It is more a handy tool of interpretation than a conquering force in our lives. But it allows a new “non-fiction” in America’s post-modern public square.
The new stories (morphed into narratives) emerge not from the grass roots, but from strategic communications. Too many leaders—and those amplifying them—will mix just enough reality and ideology to generate engagement through polarization. That’s precisely what “OG” magical realists resisted.
The Case of the Missing Opportunity
Let’s work toward a final judgment about our reality-challenged culture. Our first witness is NewsNation journalist Chris Cuomo.
America’s current political landscape is “not about truth,” he commented during his April 19 program. “It’s about preference, advantage, and animus…. All that matters is the other side being worse, not you being better.”
In performative politics between Democrats and Republicans, one’s opponents are “not just wrong, they’re bad.”
But that’s not a dead end, says Cuomo. In all areas of life outside politics—“where you work, your partnering, your parenting, your parents, your kids, your friends, your passions”—the norms do center on “truth in every manifestation,” he says, These include tough love, accountability, right and wrong, charity, loyalty, long-term thinking, and “trying to correct and interconnect and think team.”
Cuomo calls upon freethinkers to rage against the “binary” political traps in the media. “Start looking at politics through the lens of the rest of your life. Don’t accept that it’s a different reality and different rules.”
There is great wisdom here, pointing toward magical-realism themes which celebrate family and faith, community and cultural authenticity, to refresh the political battleground .
But he fails to acknowledge that our grass-roots advantage has been whittled down. The aspects of life which he rightly salutes are in the process of being politicized themselves. More and more, it seems politics is the only (zero-sum) game in town, played with fear, confusion, and hostility.
We can blame various causes—the two-party structure extending into state and local governments, big-money lobbying and activism, our lopsided class structure, the education establishment, global economics, our lack of strong relationships, and a power-and-greed culture whose intellectuals have replaced God with the “oppressed vs. oppressor” ethic.
There still may be hope. Drawing upon Americans’ spirituality, love for country, freedom, and fairness, and the same cultural strengths that made early magical realists declare the whole truth, we may have a chance to heal our secular politics over time.
However, we can’t assume that masses of people will offer us systemic assistance. Others’ promises to incrementally build a broader common ground of beliefs and experiences are unlikely to bear fruit. Not if Wikipedia, NPR, social media, artificial intelligence, and world leaders are any indicators of collaboration.
The job of refreshing our link-up with reality—its practical and moral mandates, its meaning and hope—is ultimately up to individuals. We can’t use magic tricks, but imaginations attuned to the fantastical and elevated aspects of life will help us to paint a panorama together.
Therefore, in this inquiry to locate magical realism within the 21st century, we call a second, surprise witness. Unfortunately, he is deceased, but surely our sensibilities can incorporate his memory and message.
The imaginative comic Robin Williams famously mused, “Reality: What a concept!” He may be the very personification of benign magical realism—hardly a clone of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, but a genuine representative of a culture trying to make sense of itself.
His worldview perceived life’s abundant connections, and he expressed them spontaneously, with fervor, in his improv routines and screen roles. He was a maximalist, embracing hefty doses of truth and insight, acclaim and pain. A rare disease ate away at his body and mind, and he took his own life in 2014.
We can draft him as a secular “saint” whose deeper dimensions still offer the encouragement we need. Like Williams, our society teeters between brilliance and suicide. We crave the fullness of truth, but we’re afraid of it.
He made audiences feel happier, and smarter. He exposed us to lots of reality and absurdity, but we also had fun in the otherworldly playground of his brain.
As our assessment of worldviews in the 21st century concludes, what’s our takeaway from the man who said na-nu na-nu?
In this trippy century, magical realism can play a role in making both non-fiction and fiction richer—so long as it keeps them separate, and so long as we keep control of our inner dreamers.
We must grow in respect for both the prosaic and the profound in our personal stories. Once we balance them properly, we can share them in relationships, helping everyone see and honor truth on a grander scale.
If we surrender reality to artificiality, either tyrannical or trivial, we’re in the conundrum described by Robin Williams as Aladdin’s Genie in the bottle: “Phenomenal cosmic powers … in an itty-bitty living space.”
Images from ClipSafari.com, a collection Creative Commons designs.
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