Our Magical Mystery Tour—Now Departing from Reality
Breathe in the magical realism that is all around us. Are you sniffing the literary genre we identify with 20th century Latin American authors? Or the latest iterations of the style now morphing in multiple media? Or the phenomenon we witness in non-fiction, indeed in the way we think about truth? Yes!
This genre, or perspective, will gain attention in all three cultural currents this year and beyond. We would be wise to review what we thought we knew about it so we’re prepared to catch its drift .
Also check out the Magis Center blog, which this week posted a previous, related commentary by Bill Schmitt: “We Seek Authenticity, But Be Careful Defining What’s Real.” The Magis Center is directed by Father Robert Spitzer, SJ.
Lots of students have been taught that magical realism referred to a somewhat esoteric style which emerged around the 1930s, mainly in art and literature and notably (but not exclusively) in Latin American novels. Brittanica.com says it is “characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastical or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction.”
Brittanica adds that this literary hybrid approach has cultural resonance. Scholars see its roots in “post-colonial writing” because it strives to “make sense of at least two separate realities—the reality of the conquerors as well as that of the conquered.”
There’s So Much to Say About Truth
Various writers worldwide have injected imaginative features—telepathic characters, even a moon that speaks—into otherwise realistic storytelling. Their goal: to emphasize and illuminate aspects of truth whose complexity defies a merely prosaic presentation.
One esteemed exemplar, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, featured an otherworldly element in his 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, as an article by Master Class points out: A Colombian family’s patriarch dreams about a city of mirrors, and that city takes shape physically, and mysteriously, across generations.
Here come our first connections to the present day.
The Netflix streaming service has released a video preview of a 16-episode serialization of One Hundred Years of Solitude, coming soon as the novel’s first screen adaptation.
Magical realism is not new to small or large screens. Observers have said TV series such as Stranger Things and Westworld utilized the style. News programs and podcasts have built huge audiences by covering “true crime” stories—the more mysterious, the better.
Outlandish events have occurred in films like Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Midnight in Paris (2011), as well as Disney’s Encanto (2021).
A headline in The New York Times calls the new movie Omen a “trippy” drama which “explores Congolese society through magical realism.” It “operates on another—frenzied, magical, gender-bending—wavelength,” the Times reviewer said on April 11.
Several months ago, the newspaper reviewed a noteworthy movie produced by Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki. The Boy and the Heron uses magical realism to tap into experiences from Miyazaki’s own life.
This animated film has been thriving in theaters and on platforms, but the Times reviewer advises audiences to watch it as an “exercise in contemplation” because it’s so enigmatic. “Magical fires rage, souls of the preborn and the dead mingle, and the fate of the universe is determined in ways unclear.”
It appears the enigmas of these latter films, and of other entertainment served up nowadays, aim to take us where no magical realist has gone before. We can choose to come away from the intense and strange content either as disoriented spectators or as newly awakened mystery-lovers.
We should assess our trippy 21st century culture expecting this species of realism to grow. Note that an essay in Writer’s Digest in 2016 advised authors to embrace the style broadly: “It’s as much a worldview as a category.”
Perhaps the worldview of magic, which is distinct from science fiction, surrealism, fable, and fantasy, is moving into a new home for its enigmas—in non-fiction and our daily search for wisdom.
When the American public must distinguish between authentic and “fake” news, information and disinformation, reasoning and conspiracy theories, our thinking seems vulnerable to incursions from the unreal.
After all, the Oxford Dictionary in 2016 declared its word of the year to be “post-truth.”
Verisimilitude? Not Very
Katherine Maher, the suddenly controversial CEO of National Public Radio who previously headed Wikipedia, assured a 2022 TED Talk audience that “truth exists.” But, if you take into account a world of different beliefs, she said, society’s “collective decision-making” needs the “tremendously forgiving” notion of “minimum viable truth.”
This means “getting it right enough, enough of the time, to be useful enough to enough people,” according to Maher. Fact-gatherers should work incrementally to state what we know now and then keep sorting through the “many different truths” in people’s minds; our “messy humanity” will absorb more truth as time goes by.
Maher praised the collaboration and agreeability among Wikipedia writers and editors, although several studies and critics have alleged a liberal-left bias in its political articles, according to media watchdog AllSides. Sadly, agreeability has proven more elusive at Maher’s new organization, NPR.
Meanwhile, early this year, artificial intelligence became disagreeable with its own version of magical realism. Google’s Gemini image-generator concocted a world peopled by a female pope and Black founding fathers. Users rejected this as inclusive beliefs promoting departures from reality.
How do people think about what’s real today? Obviously, each individual will be different. Politicians of either party might act like fabulists in their resumes and speeches. Other influential figures in the public square will be more rigorous and common-sensical.
But even thoroughly secular people, grounded in empiricism, will insert their interior selves and unseen worlds into their self-descriptions. They might mention a moment of spiritual epiphany, a personal passion that motivates them, or matters of empathy or principle which influence rules for living. Our culture still favors role models who display deeper dimensions.
Judeo-Christian tradition and other religions have been telling stories with these dimensions for millennia. Catholic hagiography, finding inspiration in the stories of canonized saints, integrates mundane biography with the recognition that some people, through sacrifice and the sacred, can live life to the fullest.
The Church, which has developed a healthy skepticism toward miraculous claims, consistently asserts that an expansive view of reality offers a sense of purpose and wonderment. Persons cultivate this perspective not instantaneously as solo actors, but gradually in relationships with each other, the world, and their God.
Skeptics will use the term “magical realism” to dismiss these statements of faith. But religion shouldn’t be ridiculed as a magic trick. It continues to propagate communities of benevolence worldwide where life’s biggest ideas are embraced and vigorously interrogated.
German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) diagnosed the skepticism during his times as “disenchantment”—that is, “the retreat of magic and myth from social life through processes of secularization and rationalization.”
However, as Maggie Phillips writes in this month’s Evangelization and Culture Online, we’re now observing an “anti-rational backlash” in which many folks crave again the mysterious turns of events in all those “true crime” shows and podcasts, not to mention the magical realism in fiction.
She points out the irony: “A world that has rejected the supernatural is discovering that humanity will insist on reinventing it.” Today’s “substitute enchantments are something at once far stranger and less fantastical than any religion.” (italics added)
So, we see magical realism taking opposite directions these days—as a blessing upon those who seek more mysterious (and meaningful) truth, or as an insult from those who want their truth without the baggage of higher perspectives.
Those in the latter segment will either limit different worldviews to portion-controlled bites or default to immediate definitions to ensure cultural progress.
Neither of these management tactics respects the noble roots of the magical realists. They birthed the genre to expose reality on multiple levels without imposing it. They felt a duty to preserve and honor their ancestral cultures’ essence in the midst of oppression and oversimplification.
Their imaginative, non-conformist “truth bombs” were not spaced-out. They vividly amended regime-sanctioned, minimalist habits of thought. They dreamily helped countless readers see far more than the “minimum viable truth.”
These days, our battle for fuller truth confronts a new, yet familiar, cultural opponent—the “oppressor vs. oppressed” paradigm. It is more a handy tool of interpretation than a conquering force in our lives. But it allows a new, coarser “non-fiction” in America’s post-modern public square.
The new stories (more like narratives) emerge not from the grass roots, but from strategic communications. Too many leaders—and those amplifying them—will mix just enough reality and ideology to generate engagement through polarization. That’s precisely what the deans of magical realism resisted.
The Case of the Missing Opportunity
Let’s work toward a final judgment about our divided, reality-challenged culture. Our first witness is NewsNation journalist Chris Cuomo.
America’s current political landscape is “not about truth,” he commented during his April 19 program. “It’s about preference, advantage, and animus…. All that matters is the other side being worse, not you being better.”
In performative politics between Democrats and Republicans, one’s opponents are “not just wrong, they’re bad.”
That’s not a dead end, says Cuomo. In all areas of life outside politics—“where you work, your partnering, your parenting, your parents, your kids, your friends, your passions”—the norms do center on “truth in every manifestation,” he says, These include tough love, accountability, right and wrong, charity, loyalty, long-term thinking, and “trying to correct and interconnect and think team.”
Cuomo calls upon freethinkers to rage against the “binary” political traps in the media. “Start looking at politics through the lens of the rest of your life. Don’t accept that it’s a different reality and different rules.”
There is great wisdom here, pointing toward magical-realism themes which celebrate family and faith, community and cultural authenticity, to refresh the political battleground .
But he fails to acknowledge that our grass-roots advantage has been whittled down and robbed of wonder. The aspects of life which he rightly salutes are in the process of being politicized themselves. More and more, it seems politics is the only game in town, played with fear, banality, confusion, and hostility.
We can blame various causes—the two-party ethos extending into our local mind frames and subsidiarity, big-money lobbying and activism, our disempowering class structure, the education establishment, global economics, and our lack of strong relationships.
Also, consider our power-and-greed culture. Intellectuals try to replace God, whom Maggie Phillips describes as “the source and fulfillment of our desire for enchantment,” with the oppressed vs. oppressor ethic, which disenchants everyone.
There still may be hope. Drawing upon Americans’ spirituality, love for country, freedom, and fairness, and the same cultural strengths that made early magical realists declare the whole truth, we may have a chance to heal our political culture over time.
However, we can’t assume that masses of people will offer us systemic assistance. Others’ promises to incrementally build a broader common ground of beliefs and experiences are unlikely to bear fruit. Not if Wikipedia, NPR, social media, artificial intelligence, and world leaders are any indicators of collaboration.
The job of bolstering our link-up with reality—its practical and moral mandates, its meaning and hope—is ultimately up to individuals. We can’t use magic tricks, but imaginations attuned to the fantastical and elevated aspects of life will help us to paint a panorama together.
Therefore, in this inquiry to locate magical realism within the 21st century, we call a second, surprise witness. Unfortunately, he is deceased, but surely our sensibilities can incorporate his memory and message.
The wildly imaginative comic Robin Williams famously mused, “Reality: What a concept!” He may be the very personification of benign magical realism—hardly a clone of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, but a genuine representative of a culture trying to make sense of itself.
His worldview perceived life’s abundant connections, and he expressed them spontaneously, with fervor, in his improv routines and screen roles. He was a maximalist, consuming hefty doses of truth and insight, acclaim and pain. A rare disease ate away at his body and mind, and he took his own life in 2014.
We can draft him as a secular “saint” whose deeper dimensions still offer the encouraging verve we need. Like Williams, our society teeters between brilliance and suicide. We crave the fullness of truth, but we’re afraid of it.
He made audiences feel happier, and smarter. He exposed us to lots of reality, absurdity, and (not explicitly religious) spirit. We had fun in the otherworldly playground of his brain.
As our assessment of worldviews in the 21st century concludes, what’s our takeaway from the man who said na-nu na-nu?
In this trippy century, magical realism can play a role in making both non-fiction and fiction richer—so long as it keeps them separate, and so long as we keep control of our inner dreamers.
We must grow in respect for both the prosaic and the profound in our personal stories. Once we balance them properly, linking things through wonder, not weirdness, we can share and shape our stories via relationships, helping everyone see and honor truth on a grander scale.
If we surrender our mysteries to artificiality, either tactical or trivial, we’re in the conundrum described by Robin Williams playing Aladdin’s Genie in the bottle: “Phenomenal cosmic powers … in an itty-bitty living space.”
Images from ClipSafari.com, a collection of Creative Commons designs.
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