Latin author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written many short stories and novels that are considered to be Magical Realism. Some of these works are “The Ghosts of August,” One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” and “Light Is Like Water.” In “Light Is Like Water” (December 1978), the use of various fantastic elements along with the realist elements is what defines this story as Magical Realism.
The exclusive magical element of “Light Is Like Water” is light because Toto and Joel use it as water. The use of light as water comes into use when Marquez says that the light begins to “pour out of the broken light bulb” (158) Light having the same physical characteristic as water is the use of “an ‘irreducible element’ of magic, something we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe as we know them” (Faris 167).
One of the realistic elements is the “beautiful aluminum boat with a golden stripe at the waterline” (158) that Toto and Joel’s parents had promised to get them “complete with sextant and compass” (157-158). Marquez goes on to say that they had gotten the rowboat into the apartment when they had “invited their classmates to help bring the boat up stairs” (158). They used it to navigate “at will among the islands of the house” (158). To achieve this effect, Marquez uses the characteristic of de-familiarization or the “radically emphasizing common elements of reality” (Simpkins 150) to allow the boys to row on top of the light.
Other realist elements in the story are the “complete skin-diving outfits: masks, fins, tanks, and compressed-air rifles” (159) that the brothers had received from their father …
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…old building hidden among the trees. It spelled over the balconies, poured in torrents down the façade, and rushed along the great avenue in a golden flood that lit the city all the way to the Guadarrama. (160)
Works Cited
Faris, Windy B. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Post Modern Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Windy B. Faris. Durham
Saint George and the Dragon as Fantastic Literature
Saint George and the Dragon as Fantastic Literature
Set “in the days when monsters and giants and fairy folk lived,” Margaret Hodges’ tale Saint George and the Dragon brings to the world of children Edmund Spenser’s classic Faerie Queene. Retold in children’s format in 1984, Saint George and the Dragon is based upon Spenser’s English legend of the sixteenth century. Through examination of the characteristics that describe fantastic and magical realist literature, a more concise understanding of magical realism can be obtained.
In Saint George and the Dragon, many “magical” elements exist throughout the text. The setting, in the days when “monsters and giants and fairy folk lived in England,” lays the groundwork for many other mysterious elements (Hodges 7). The Red Cross Knight, the main character of the story, was “bound on a great adventure, sent by the Queen of the Fairies to try his strength against a deadly enemy, a dragon grim and horrible” (Hodges 7).
The Red Cross Knight, with a princess and a dwarf accompanying him, set out to find the dragon. On his way, “there against the evening sky, they saw a mountaintop that touched the highest heavens. It was crowned with a glorious palace sparkling like stars and circled with walls and towers of pearls and precious stones” (Hodges 11). Finally, they saw the dragon. Despite the Red Cross Knight’s attempts to kill the dragon, he was unsuccessful. The “half flying, half running” beast threw him to the ground, clapping its wings in victory (15). “But he had fallen beneath a fair apple tree, its spreading branches covered with red fruit, and from that tree dropped a healing dew that the deadly dragon did not dare to come near” (Hodges 16). When the dra…
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…ealistic characteristics, but they function differently in the magical realist mode than they do in Saint George and the Dragon. Although Saint George and the Dragon is not true fantastic literature, many of the elements are the same. By examining the elements that characterize fantastic literature, the boundaries of what can be considered magical realist literature are narrowed.
Works Cited
Faris, Wendy. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris.Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995. 125-144.
Hodges, Margaret. Saint George and the Dragon. Boston, M.A.: Little Brown and Company, 1984.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary From. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973. 168-174.