8/11/2023 0 Comments Magical words fantasyHowever, you do feel ill at ease in Jorge Luis Borge’s short stories. As Lucy Armitt says in her book, Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction, there are no “competing readings of the text… revolving around two choices, the psychological or the supernatural.” No one doubts that Remedios the Beauty ascended bodily to heaven and that a man’s blood flowed out the front door, down the block, turned left and went into his mother’s house. However, this definition doesn’t work for the poster child of magic realism, 100 Years of Solitude. Whereas fantasy “imposes absolute closure” and “implies complicity on the part of the readers,” the literary fantastic seeks reader hesitancy.” The story begins in the “real world” and when something unreal happens and the reader is never sure if the cause is supernatural or natural, such as a psychotic break or a drug induced hallucination.Īccording to this definition, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is an example of the literary fantastic: did the governess see a ghost or hallucinate it? Did the ghost kill the boy, or did she scare him to death? The movie Pan’s Labyrinth is likewise an example: is she alive or dead at the end? Did imagination save her or kill her? Tsvetan Todorov, a literary theorist famous for his treatment of the fantastic, said that magic realism disrupts the reader’s sense of reality whereas fantasy creates another completely enclosed reality. I think the best way to consider the difference between fantasy and reality is to consider its impact on the reader. So I have to respectfully disagree with the king. The amygdala is a crude but lightning fast instrument. The flicker we all get in the peripheral vision, and secrets our parents tried to keep but which we all felt, is where ghosts come from. However, anyone who has heard a woman screaming in the forest and followed the sound into the mouth of a mountain lion will find the origins of fantasy very real. Gabriel García Márquez, the king of magic realism and author of the Nobel Prize winning 100 Years of Solitude, said, “Fantasy has nothing to do with the reality of the world we live in it is purely fantastic invention, an inspiration, and certainly a diversion ill-advised in the arts.” Native American writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko write about things that most Caucasian Americans would call unreal, but which are very real to her. Roman mythology was at one time considered real now the word myth is synonymous with lie. Orthodox Christians consider God and the Bible real. In magic realism, by contrast, the characters react to the magical as though it is ordinary.Ĭomplicating both these definitions is the fact that the concept of reality is culturally defined. I’ve heard people say that the big difference is that in fantasy, the characters are amazed, stunned, and shocked by the magical events, as when the glass suddenly disappears at the zoo in Harry Potter, and everyone screams. Of course, magical things happen in both fantasy and magic realism, so that doesn’t help us. The most common definition of fantasy is “literature in which magical things occur” or, as the Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms defines it, “literature which creates its own coherently organized worlds and myths.” But if you’re reading about women ascending bodily to heaven, you’re probably reading magic realism.Ĭonfused? You’re not alone. If you’re reading about dragons, chances are, you’re reading fantasy.
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