Magic realism in literature is a writing technique incorporating magical or supernatural elements or events into a realistic world without questioning the improbability of the events. Mostly, the subjects of the novels or folk tales were the people consisting of colonized people, and besides rural area where ignorance is higher than the town. If there is ignorance, people can believe supernatural elements or spiritual elements easily in that region. While the West believes in positivism, realism or so on, the people in rural areas, or East or undeveloped regions tend to believe sorcery, supernatural events.
Magic realists such as the father of the magic realism, Gabriel Marquez, who introduced this style into world with his notable novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, used oral narrative tradition. In this movement, Realism and supernatural elements are intertwined each other and reader accepts the supernatural events as an ordinary events. The main source of Magic realism is Latin America’s people like Maya, Inca who were colonized, and the second source is the Surrealism movement flourished in 1920s in Europe. There are historic events in the background, and while they were depicting the historic event, they used supernatural elements in the works. Immortality, raising someone from the dead, or sorcery were not interesting events for the readers although they were not imposible to be real in these kinds of novels or folk tales.
Latin America, the colony of Spain, were the main subjects of Latin American authors as there were many tragic events and suffering in the colonialist process. So, it can be said by this aspect, the history of Latin America was blatantly obvious in the works of this movement. At that era, colonized people could not express or raise their voice how they exposed to racism, or how humiliated they were, but there was no listener to understand them although they wrote. By this context, it can be said that Magic realists and postcolonialist writers were the voice of exploited people.
There is a similarity between post-colonial and magic realism in three aspects. Both post-colonial and magic realism writers expressed the suffer and traumas of the exploited people in the colonial process in their works. Secondly, both postcolonialist and magic realist writers ignored science or reason; in other words, magic realists ignored whether the event was true or not while they were writing the novel or folk tales; therewithal, for the enlightened writers, scientific methods were valid in the process of legitimizing the information while magic realists ignored science and logic. Magic realists were anomalous, as they did not obey the rules in literature. Thirdly, both of two movements’ writers used realistic and fantastic elements in their works at the same time.
As to relationship with magic realism and British post-colonial literature, India was the colony of Britain and Salman Rushdie, an origin Indian British writer gave prominent works including post-colonial and magic realism subjects and he depicted a history of India’s suffered people after India gained its independence. With its both realistic and fantastic narrative style, The Midnight’s Children, a masterpiece of Salman Rushdie, is rich with its ancient myths, fun and tragic historical elements.
Melike Çelik
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