Magical Realism vs Fantasy

[buyjupiter]

I don't know if this is the spot for it, but here goes.

I typically write stories that take place in the real world (or very close to it). But with magical events that very rarely get explained, and there aren't a lot of "rules" governing magic use. I realized when I was trying to figure out where to submit stuff to/how to categorize for online publishing, that I don't know if what I'm writing would be classified as mainstream fantasy.

I tend to aim for literary when I'm writing, which might be the difference?

I could say that they're low-level magic fantasy stories, but that kind of implies gritty storytelling (which I do sometimes, just not often)? I would categorize Game of Thrones as low fantasy as well as Joe Abercrombie, for reference.

Thoughts? Good sources for definitions?

 

[Inglorion]

To me, it seems like magical realism is sort of like everyday life with some fantastical elements in it. So no great quests about which the fate of the land turns. For example, in the short story "The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, an angel-like being simply lands in a fishing village, and intrudes into the villagers' otherwise mundane lives, without any great consequences.

 

[AnneL]

I wonder about this same issue a lot myself. It seems like magical realism is set in our world, but it's different from urban fantasy, and I haven't been able to qualify the difference beyond that one is "literary" and the other is not. I think one of the things is that in magical realism the magic is unexplained and does not rely on the standard fantasy tropes. But this is one of the great fuzzy areas of genre labeling.In Carlos Fuentes's *Terra Nostra* there is reincarnation (apparently), time travel (medieval flagellants appearing in the streets of Paris in the year 1999), miraculous virgin births, events that seem downright hallucinogenic, and just plain utter weirdness, but no one would call it a fantasy. It certainly counts as epic with a great world-altering quest. You could probably call it science fiction, too. The current book *The Golem and the Jinni* is getting tagged as fantasy a lot, but I would call it magical realism at least as much (I was disappointed in the book, but that's a different conversation). Matt Bell's "In The House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods" (Matt Bell • In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods) is another one that I think could legitimately be labeled either way; it's very fantastic, but it's also built upon language and emotion rather than plot. (Read this book, BTW, it's amazing.)

In submitting, I would target by how the publication presents itself. For more literary journals, if it is not obviously urban fantasy and if character is more important than plot, I would call it magical realism when submitting. Or say it belongs to "the magical realism subgenre of fantasy." Or just say, "Here's my story," and let it speak for itself.

Not sure that helped at all.

 

[Feo Takahari]

Gardner Dozois has argued that magical realism, slipstream, fabulism, and New Weird are all the same genre under different names. I'd debate that to some degree--for instance, New Weird is noticeably influenced by horror--but it does seem like all those terms came from people thinking "Sure, my story may be very, very similar to fantasy, but that doesn't mean I can't call it something more marketable than fantasy!"

As for the specific subgenre of magical realism, its "gimmick," for lack of a better word, tends to be that it doesn't separate the magic from the realism. Like, if a fantasy author writes about magic, either he'll go standard fantasy and write about it as something fantastical, or he'll go pseudo-sci-fi and write all about the mechanics behind it. A magical realism author writes about magic in exactly the same way he writes about everything else in the story, never trying to draw attention to it and never portraying it as any more unusual than anything else in the setting. (In a lot of ways, the genre can be related to how we write about technology. If we don't find it unusual that we're typing up messages here that can be seen by people thousands of miles away, why should our characters find it unusual if stepping into a closet allows them to quickly travel those thousands of miles?)

 

[buyjupiter]

A magical realism author writes about magic in exactly the same way he writes about everything else in the story, never trying to draw attention to it and never portraying it as any more unusual than anything else in the setting.

Yep. That's me alright.

I have attempted to draw attention away from the magic use by creating hyper-realistic scenes in some of my stories, and used the magical elements so rarely that the reader almost forgets they're reading fantasy. Mainly because I felt that the fantastical stuff was so weird that I needed to have a good counterbalance to it. But the characters never acknowledges that the stuff they're experiencing is strange, it just is.

So, I guess now the question is: what's the market value of magical realism stories?