"Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction" by Angel Flores

Flores begins his essay by stating that Latin American literature has been underestimated and unappreciated due to the fact that critics have historically tried, and failed, to put this literature into categories in which it does not fit: realism, romanticism, naturalism, existentialism. Flores suggests that the "roots of this ambivalence are psychological" and begin with European attitudes towards much Spanish literature and visual art, and also "can be ascribed to the unstable economic and social milieu of the writers of Spain and Latin America which forces them to improvisation" (110). When read with such categorical expectations, Latin American literature may seem rife with "ineptitude, uncertainty, imitativeness, sentimental histrionics" and tedium (111).

Flores says that artists after the First World War rejected photographic realism and instead turned towards symbolism and magical realism, among them Kafka, Proust, and de Chirico. He singles out Kafka for praise, noting the "difficult art of mingling his drab reality with the phantasmal world of his nightmares" and the novelty in the "amalgamation of realism and fantasy" that can be found in Latin America in the earliest records of the Colonial Period (112).

He then lists a number of Latin American writers influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, but concludes that "all these productions, which depend so utterly on atmosphere, mood, and sentiment... differ from the cold and cerebral and often erudite storytelling" Flores values, and claims that 1935 marks the year Latin American literature came into its own with the publication of Jorge Luis Borges' Historia Universal de la Infamia, an author who was influenced by Chesteron, H.G. Wells, Arthur Machen, Marcel Schwob, Ellery Queen, and most of all Kafka; the shift results in other authors doing cross-genre work, like Adolfo Bioy Casares' La Invencion de Morel (112-3).

Despite the diversity in the works, Flores finds many commonalities. "Meticulous craftsmen all, one finds in them the same preoccupation with style and also the same transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal" (114) and points to the uncertainty and fluidity of time while still remaining grounded in reality. "The practitioners of magical realism cling to reality as if to prevent "literature" from getting in their way, as if to prevent their myth from flying off, as in fairy tales, to supernatural realms" (116). He also finds within magical realist works a "confusion in clarity" and a style that "seeks precision and leanness" that places them against mawkishness of other Latin American writers, and also notes that "their concern for the well-knit plot probably stems from their familiarity with detective stories" (116).

Flores' essay again wishes to reclaim, or perhaps redeem, Latin American literature in the eyes of critics. Flores' discussion of genre crossovers, including both science fiction and the detective story, suggests another point where magical realism is a transgressive type (genre? mode?) of literature. While these claims are easily supported, it further confuses the definitional quandary of parsing works into categories of fantasy, magical realism, science fiction, or even slipstream. It's interesting to note Flores highlights style as being of particular importance, yet also extremely difficult to quantify. How ought we judge whether a particular work has sufficient style to be considered a magical realist work? And if it fails this litmus test, to which category does it then fall?