Just A Whisper Of Magic: Using Magical Realism in Contemporary Romance
AUTHOR: Joyce Ellen Armond

Paranormal romances remain a hot ticket, but some editors and readers seem to be full up of vampires, brooding or otherwise. The sub-genre is waiting for its next big thing, and it might come from the style and elements of Magical Realism.

The term Magical Realism, while applying first to art, had its literary roots in early 20th century Latin American fiction most often characterized by the writings of Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez. Remember from high school literature classes: "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings?" That's classic literary Magical Realism.

Pinning down a concise definition of Magical Realism isn't easy. At the Post-Colonial Studies page of the Emory University website, Lindsay Moore says "Magical realism is characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality." A definition that is more a prose poem from Angel Flores isn't much more concrete either:

In magical realism we find the transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal. It is predominantly an art of surprises. Time exists in a kind of timeless fluidity and the unreal happens as part of reality. Once the reader accepts the fait accompli, the rest follows with logical precision (Angel Flores, Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, p. 113-116).

At Writing-World.com, Bruce Holland Rogers laments that the two words together, "magical realism," have a debased meaning no longer tied to its classical roots, but used to mean "contemporary fantasy written to a high literary standard---fantasy that readers who 'don't read escapist literature' will happily read. It's a marketing label and an attempt to carve out a part of the prestige readership for speculative works."

Luckily, we're writing romance novels -- commercial, not literary, fiction -- and can guiltlessly add elements of Magical Realism without being troubled by academic traditions and definitions. In fact, film-makers have been doing this since for a while, resulting in some much-loved love stories.

The basic elements of the sub-genre are pretty obvious, even in the convoluted academic definitions above. You've got something real. You've got something magic. And using the fictive techniques, you "seize the paradox of the union of opposites." (Linsday Moore.)

The most counter-intuitive aspect of Magical Realism is that the author need not - in fact should not - explain the mechanics of paranormal, supernatural or magical events in the story. None of Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez's characters seek to explain why The Very Old Man has Enormous Wings. They just accept it as a fact, and deal with the consequences. In the film LA Story, Steve Martin's character does not stop to rationally investigate why a freeway sign is helping him win his true love's heart. In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray doesn't spend the movie in the science library trying to figure out the mechanics of his time travel loop. When the characters allow the unexplained to remain unexplained, the reader (or movie-goer) does, too. So by employing the techniques of Magical Realism, you can have something paranormal happen to your characters in the course of their love without spending hours, days, months or years meticulously building the rules and mechanics of your fantasy world.

But as a trade-off to the reader, the author must present a sensory-rich, contemporary setting that anchors the story. Groundhog Day and LA Story exist in undeniably contemporary realities: Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania and Los Angeles, California. Elements of undeniable reality keep the reader believing: the so-familiar click of an analog clock flipping over to 6:00 am in Groundhog Day, and the heroine's ludicrous tuba in LA Story.

Furthermore, continuing with this theme of paradox in Magical Realism, just as the supernatural is considered normal, the normal is considered astonishing and magical. Says Bruce Holland Rogers, "At the same time, the whole world is enchanted, mysterious. Automobiles, desert streams, and ice are all as astonishing as angels."

LA Story -- which is such a great example of applying literary techniques to commercial products -- gives us a moment when the lovers, on their first date, are transformed into children and the streets of Los Angeles into a mysterious, magical garden. That's the visual equivalent of what Magical Realism fiction hopes to capture. If the real world is understood to be wondrous, magical and astonishing by itself, would a matching-making freeway sign that wants to be a set of bagpipes really be that hard to understand and accept?

Another transferable element of the magical realism movement is its fluid relationship with time. Time tends to run in cycles, or backwards. Bill Murray repeats Groundhog Day over and over and over, until he gets it right. George Bailey travels back through his life until he sees that old Savings and Loan as magical, not mundane. In literary works of magical realism, the characters rarely get a happy ending. Luckily, as these examples show, the elements lend themselves to love won, and not just love lost.

Of all the elements of Magical Realism, the one that might find a surprising home in romance fiction is the theme of revolution. Coming as it did from the politically unstable countries of Latin America, many works of literary Magical Realism are about overthrowing social conventions, political structures, tyrants and torturers. But in LA Story, the social conventions of Los Angeles culture, personified in the repetition of "sunny, seventy-two," are overthrown. The bad relationships of the characters -- so typical of the jaded, risk-less, contemporary heart -- are the tyrants, and, thanks to the freeway sign, are overthrown in favor of true passion. The story speaks a truth to everyone's heart, something that makes us lean forward with tears in our eyes when the freeway sign begins to play "Amazing Grace."

Confronting a social problem in this subtle way might be the element that takes a good romance novel out of the genre, into hardcover and onto the New York Times best-seller list.