Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about whether fantasy is about magical realism:

Do you see magical realism as related to fantasy? Do you enjoy reading it? Why or why not?

I think this question means to ask about “magical realism” as in the off-brand, non-Latin American stuff that gets used to spice up literary and contemporary fiction sometimes. As far as the “original”(?) stuff goes, I don’t know a lot about the Latin American literary tradition of magical realism, and though I’ve read (and largely enjoyed) my Gabriel García Márquez, I haven’t read a lot of magical realism that actually stems from that tradition. As such, discussing that aspect would feel pretty out of my lane as a white Welsh person living in the UK and not well-versed in the tradition, even with two literature degrees.

It’s my understanding that magical realism as a tradition is considered to be separate from fantasy, anyway; what I’ve read about it and what I quickly revised about it before writing this post makes me think that that explanation is using a very specific definition of fantasy that I don’t necessarily endorse… but at the same time, “fantasy” can still be a pretty white space with a lot of baggage and assumptions, so I can understand drawing lines around magical realism to make it clear it’s something else. Plus, there’s definitely a different feel to the OG magical realism to most fantasy: magical and surreal occurrences just happen in magical realism, and the point isn’t to get to what and why, as it might be in fantasy.

There is a fair bit of magical realism that isn’t Latin American, of course, and for me that usually seems to be at the very least fantasy-adjacent. Maybe a matter of degree, sometimes; whether it’s a light touch of magic, or something that’s dug into and which the narrative tries to understand… stuff like Before the Coffee Gets Cold could arguably be called magical realism. I think that same lack of interest in understanding why the magic is happening or what the magic is doing, etc, is often the marker of something that’s more “magical realism” than “fantasy”.

And sometimes it seems like a matter of deciding what awards you want to be eligible for: the Booker prize or the Hugos, or whatever: if you want one, you’ll call it magical realism and literary fiction, and if you want the other, you’ll probably call it fantasy.

(Of course publishers are also involved there.)

I’ve enjoyed some magical realism, both the actual Latin American magical realism and the Starbucks version that’s borrowed the term, but that’s not a surprising statement to anyone who knows the range of genres I read. That said, I’m not a huge fan of postmodernism, so some of the more postmodernist writers don’t work for me.