The New York Review of Science Fiction

Published monthly by Dragon Press, P. O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570. $4.00 per copy.

Issue #101, January 1997

FEATURES

Sandra J. Lindow: Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea: Rescuing the Damaged Child: 1

Jeff VanderMeer: The Curious Rooms of Angela Carter: 1

Justine Larbalestier: Ending the Battle of the Sexes? Hermaphroditism in Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon and "Motherhood, Etc." by L. Timmel Duchamp: 14

James Bradley: A Slippery, Ripperty Thing: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey's Tristan Smith: 17



REVIEWS

Joan Aiken's The Cockatrice Boys, reviewed by Gwyneth Jones: 19

Jeff VanderMeer's Dradin, In Love: A Tale of Elsewhen & Otherwhere, reviewed by David Griffin: 20

Starlight I, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, reviewed by Michael M. Levy: 21

George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, reviewed by Lisa Padol: 23



PLUS

Bryan Cholfin on slushpile trendlets (p. 7), Lucy Clifford on writing a book (p. 12), and a magically real editorial (p. 24).

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Whose Magic Realism?

To my mind one of the most abused terms in the current critical vocabulary is magic realism. It is often used as a vague substitute for the fantastic, or fantasy, or even science fantasy, intended to upclass a second-rate genre production, or to backdate respectability, as in "Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote fantasy, he was a magic realist just like modern fantasy writers." I heard this sentence uttered a few years ago at a convention panel--and fortunately, at least some of the audience exploded into loud disagreement. As a result I began to suspect the term deeply whenever I saw or heard it applied to anything not written by the modern school of South American writers.

I recently came across an informative article in the small press magazine, Magic Realism, that begins to clarify the term from which that journal takes its name--Magic Realisms: Definitions by Brian Evenson (Magic Realism, Vol. V, #1, Winter 1995/96). It is so pertinent to the contemporary discussion of fantasy that I wish to give a quick précis of it here.

Magic realism first appeared as a term for the visual arts, introduced in the 1920s by Franz Roh, a German art critic. It identified a kind of art that claimed to be a return to realism, but which nonetheless tried to approach objects in new ways, as if seeing them for the first time. It was an attempt to uncover a magic found in ordinary objects but hidden by too long a familiarity with those objects.

Roh's book was translated into Spanish and the term he had introduced came to be applied to certain European literature--and by 1948, it had come to be a term applied to Latin American literature "providing an alternative to surrealism and to the main European literary traditions." The term was introduced into English in 1955 in an influential article by the scholar Angel Flores ("Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction," in Hispania 38.2 (1955): 187-192.) Evenson selects certain characterizing phrases from Flores:

Magic realist works have a "preoccupation with style" and provide "the transformation of the common and everyday into the awesome and unreal" (190). It is "predominantly an art of surprises" (190), the stories timeless rather than timely. For Flores, the magic realists "do not cater to popular taste" but address the sophisticated; their "style seeks precision and leanness"; "their plots are logically conceived" and "well-knit." (191)

This, it seems to me, does not characterize or describe much genre fantasy. And thirty years later (in Magic Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antimony (1985) by Amaryll Beatrice Chanady), magic realism is still quite distinct. Evenson quotes, for instance: "in magic realism, however, the supernatural moves down into the villages and becomes woven into the fabric of daily life. Rather than trying to explain unusual circumstances away with logic or reason, the narrator offers them to the reader as part of life, as opaque events, irreducible to reason." Again, not much like fantasy (and it appears to be Chanaday's purpose to separate magic realism from the fantastic). But more so than in Flores's piece.

In the 1990s, the clarity has fallen apart into many pieces. In William Spindler's recent article "Magic Realism: A Typology" (Forum for Modern Language Studies 39.1 [1993]: 75-85), the author takes pains to sort the existing definitions of magic realism into categories and to come up with three main types of magic realism. To me, this is much like the movement of the term "cyberpunk" from a relatively precise term referring to a small number of writers and works to a marketing hook widely applied. Magic realism sells, you see. Or if it doesn't, at least it makes the effort seem nobler, to have been part of the few, the special.

In 1963, in the classic show Beyond the Fringe, there was a parody of World War II, in which an idealistic young British man goes into a recruiting office. "Please sir, I want to join the few," he says.

"I'm sorry, there are far too many," is the reply.

This is funny because "the few" is the majority and that's absurd. My feeling at present is that Flores is still rather close to the mark and that there are a few works every year in English that merit the term as he more or less applied it--"preoccupied with style," "not catering to popular taste," are the phrases the contemporary marketers let fall by the wayside. Let not the critics follow them.

--David G. Hartwell & the editors