Magical Realism in Latin American Literature: Isabel Allende
Magical Realism in Latin American Literature
Magical Realism was born with the tales of Horacio Quiroga in the early twentieth century, but it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that several Latin American Boom writers used it as a hallmark of their novels. Gabriel García Márquez, with One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Alejo Carpentier, with The Lost Steps, are its greatest exponents.
Introducing the Fantastic into the Everyday
It is a narrative mechanism used to introduce unusual or fantastic events into a realistic narrative. These novels try to be very graphic and realistic. They do not escape tragedy, pain, or the scatological, but occasionally introduce an unusual fact that surprises the reader. What is truly surprising is not the act itself, but that the characters, the vast majority simple and mundane, take it as part of their daily lives and do not bother in questioning it.
The Magic of Latin American Authors
The magic of the environments, the extravagance of its characters, and the fervent imagination with which the author reveals the hidden side of everyday life, and especially the ambiguity that presents situations that move between the real and the fantastic, are part of the particular style of Latin American authors.
All of this is the magic part, while realism is in the way of telling the narrative, as if the main thread was realistic and most importantly, while the magic represents no more than a few minor details without regularity. Magical realism invites the reader to underestimate the real, to appreciate the miraculous, and to neglect the historical.
Magical Realism in Isabel Allende’s Work
Magical realism in Isabel Allende is a direct influence of other writers, mainly García Márquez. In her texts, the magical traits tend to accumulate around certain characters and at a certain time, unlike other texts such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, where they are present in the entire community from beginning to end.
‘The House of the Spirits’: A Family Affair
Fantastic realism in The House of the Spirits seems to be something genetic in the family, although only in the females. We have characters that are marked by unusual characteristics, and their relatives live it as natural, such as Rosa’s “strange beauty,” or Clara, who lives in a private space accompanied by spirits.
Of Nivea, the mother of the sisters, it is even said that she considered Rosa’s green hair and Clara’s telekinesis on the same level as the lameness of Luis: a more distinctive feature. As for Barrabas, he is attributed “mythological” traits.
Here, magical realism pervades the activity of Rosa and Clara, the home of the Del Valle family, and the big house on the corner, but after Clara’s death, the unusual is more relaxed, and so do we notice the narrator.
Hyperbole and Harmony in ‘The House of the Spirits’
In this extraordinary text, there is a hyperbole of everyday reality, and any kind of superstition ceases to be, because the premonitions are true, objects move, and the dead come to care for the living and say goodbye. The barriers between the real and the special become so porous that unlikely features slowly seep into dramatic situations, and it does not surprise us.
At one point, Clara warns that “there must be a relationship between events,” and in this statement, we find the key to understanding the novel: the suffering, deaths, losses… are assumed as part of a great cosmic harmony, a plan that assumes existence as a whole. It is therefore not surprising that the book opens and closes with the same words, giving the impression of a cycle completed because all it tells starts from and flows back to the same place.