Margin: 

Exploring Modern Magical 

Realism

c o l u m n

SUBJECT 2 INTERPRETATION

Note: This column offers insights into other literary forms that often resemble or share attributes with magical realism. The goal of this column is to highlight shifting notions and biases about cutting edge literature.

Q What is supernatural writing?

Here are a few points to ponder culled from the Internet:

Alain Silver, author, More Things Than Are Dreamt Of: "In primitive societies, the unknown was a fertile ground for a process of mythic transformation. As the aspects of material reality which could not be scientifically understood were explained through folk tale and fable, the basis for all of supernatural literature was laid down. "

Tsvetan Todorov, author/theorist/intellectual: "The fantastic, we have seen, lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. At the story's end, the reader makes a decision even if the character does not; he opts for one solution or the other, and thereby emerges from the fantastic. If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvellous. ... The fantastic therefore leads a life full of dangers, and may evaporate at any moment. It seems to be located on the frontier of two genres, the marvellous and the uncanny, rather than to be an autonomous genre. One of the great periods of supernatural literature, that of the Gothic novel, seems to confirm this observation. Indeed, we generally distinguish, within the literary Gothic, two tendencies: that of the supernatural explained (the "uncanny"), as it appears in the novels of Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliffe; and that of the supernatural accepted (the "marvellous"), which is characteristic of the works of Horace Walpole, M. G. Lewis, and Maturin."

Elbert Hubbard, author: "The supernatural is the natural not yet understood."

Dictionary.com:   su - per - nat - u - ral    adj.

1. Of or relating to existence outside the natural world.
2. Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces.
3. Of or relating to a deity.
4. Of or relating to the immediate exercise of divine power; miraculous.
5. Of or relating to the miraculous.

B U T . . . I S   I T   M A G I C A L   R E A L I S M ?

Feel free to respond to this question in an e-mail to MARGIN's editor. Responses will be considered for publication in MARGIN with permission from the author.

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