Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Essay Example

As a literary and artistic genre, magic realism is apparently plagued by its insistent use of supplementation as a literary strategy for the improvement of the realist text. The boundaries framing realism so constrained many artists and burdened them with the nagging difficulty of how to compromise between realism and their own creative desires and inclinations that the movement towards magic realism was instigated. Supposedly, this genre expresses both the seen and the unseen realities, the historical memories which make and shape a people and the myths and superstitions which dominate their worldview.

Magic realists contend that realism never allowed them the leeway to express reality’s multiple dimensions, further asserting that, as a linguistic and literary medium, it constrained their creativity. Magic realism supposedly overcomes realism’s boundaries and limitations and seems to displace its predecessor’s shortcomings through the conveyance of textual apparitions, ephemeral and ambiguous themes and images which cast a confusing and somewhat dark shadow over everyday life and its most mundane tasks.

The magic realist text is, itself, somewhat akin to a fantastical apparition which, even as readers recognize the magical imagination which informs it, detect its underlying realism.