Magical Realism: The “Problem of Definition”

Whilst the theoretical study of magical realist literature is broad and wide-ranging, there is a remarkable lack of consensus among critics on how the mode should be defined, how its techniques should be described, and how it corresponds with both the contexts of its production and its contemporary neighboring genres. This essay maps some of the dominant avenues that have been explored in the field, illuminating where the disagreements lie and highlighting the sheer profusion of critical approaches that have been competing for attention since magical realism first began to receive academic attention with the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, which have inevitably contributed to the confusion about how works of magical realism should be identified and interpreted. Ultimately, it is my contention that the study of magical realism is limited by the critical convention that considers the mode to have begun in Latin America in the 1950s, and often treats García Márquez as its originator: texts emerging from outside of this context are excluded from critical discussion, even where they comply with all formal definitions of the mode. My essay interrogates this convention, which I view as producing an untenable internal contradiction that I identify as a key contributing factor in the so-called “problem of definition” with which the field has long been plagued, and proposes that historical or geographical particulars cannot feature in a working definition of magical realism.