Magic Realism: Representations in One Hundred Years of Solitude and Shame

Magic Realism is a literary genre which comprises magical or supernatural elements with the narrative representing the events as something mundane and realistic without inviting the question of improbability and allowing the readers to question reality itself. Ambiguous in its articulation and innovative in its style, magic realism has been employed by several writers across different regions and is considered to be one of the most experimental and popular literary genres. This study explores two texts namely Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Salman Rushdie’s Shame and aims to analyze the use of magical realism in these texts. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, magic realism is explored through events within the magical sphere of Macondo. Magic realist elements are explored through the lens of modernization and imperialism with an exploration of the gypsies and the presence of the banana company in the story. In Shame the issue of politics and identity is dealt with regards to the use of magic realism. Events circulating around characters such as Sufiya Zinobia, Raza Hyder, Iskandar Harappa etc. help in emphasizing the issues explored. It further attempts to build a connection between the two texts through a close examination of certain resemblances between the texts and also how it differs from one another in terms of the authors’ experimentation of magical realism.