Magic Realism

Reading Like Water for Chocolate

my distaste for magic realism grows. I have no problem with supernatural events occurring in literature, I'm far from a strict realist. But this genre, this device, is philosophically misleading. In Like Water for Chocolate, as in Midnight's Children, or many other post-colonial works, the inexplicable nature of life and our place in it is given a false order. A character is surreptitiously born during preparations for a feast (in fact born into the feast itself), and thus lives a life enchanted with food. She cries so much that when the tears dry, the salt leftover is enough to fill a ten pound sack. She variously cries and bleeds into many meals that have profound emotional effects on the readers. I'm hoping she shits or pisses in a pie before it's through.

So what, exactly, is my problem with magical realism? It is too easy, it is too allegorical, it is too clean. It suggests nothing of the anxiety that we feel towards the world's incomprehensibility, and replaces it with the suggestion that all is right and logical, so long as we bend the coincidences of life to their breaking point. Life does not make sense in easy terms. Magical realism is merely an attempt to usurp religion as the ridiculous cipher for this chaos. It suggests order where there is none.

And yet, I revere works of surrealism. Because Kafka and Beckett and Barthelme do not flinch, though their worlds are fantastic. They use the logic of dreams to characterize our anxiety and confusion. They hold up no answers, just questions all the way down to your spine. . .

Anyway. Everyone seems to love this stuff except me.