"Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism" by Franz Roh

Most critics agree that the term "magic realism" was coined in this 1925 essay by Roh, who was in fact writing about a new kind of painting he saw emerging in Europe at the time that signaled an end to the Expressionist style. Even though Roh's comments are directed toward visual art, many of his statements are useful to consider in light of the literary phenomenon that became to be known as magical realism as well.

Magic realist art placed focus on the object itself, its tactile nature, the special nature its very being as opposed to being used as a means to other ends. "This calm admiration of the magic of being," Roh writes, "Of the discovery that things already have their own faces, means that the ground in which the most diverse ideas in the world can take root has been reconquered--albeit in new ways" and that former artistic styles don't "acknowledge that radiation of magic, that spirituality, that lugubrious quality throbbing in the best works of the new mode, along with their coldness and apparent sobriety" (20).

Roh concludes his essay with the metaphor of a person stepping into a church where "the ensemble of an altar painting unfolded its essential meaning at a hundred paces, and then, as the distance diminished, revealed little by little the new world of the very small in successive planes of details, details that were symbolic of all true spiritual knowledge of the world because they always remained subordinate to the entire structure" and how "the latest painting wants to offer us the image of something totally finished and complete, minutely formed, opposing it to our our eternally fragmented and ragged lives as an archetype of integral structuring, down to the smallest details" (30).

Roh's comments about the mixing or juxtaposing of the fantastic alongside the real can easily be applied to the literary works that are generally classified as magical realism. In a more theoretical vein, Roh's comments can also be applied to worldviews, with the fantastic equating to pre-Colonial beliefs and practices of people of the Americas whereas the "coldness and apparent sobriety" equates to the Western scientific worldview that was then subordinated to the cultural belief systems of the colonial powers. Roh refers to this kind of art as a kind of reclamation project, and this can very easily be extended to the literature of magic realism as well, especially in light of the arguments that magical realist works inherently question the received tradition of what constitutes reality and the possible.

More problematic is attempting to reconcile the idea of the minutiae contributing to the overall effect of the entire structure. While this works when referring to a physical piece of art, and perhaps when referring to the book as an object (i.e. fragmented stories, voices, etc. still add up to the entire structure of the physical object of the book) it's much more difficult to place literary works (and probably paintings as well) as working towards an "entire structure." Indeed, considering the overlap between the non-linear nature of many magical realist narratives, they seem to reflect and promote "our eternally fragmented and ragged lives." One possible resolution to this problem: seeing these texts only (or perhaps primarily) as fragments that make no sense suggests a deficiency in our reading or limitation of our comprehension; in other words, if we take a broader view of the chaos of our lives, larger patterns and structures may become visible.