Magical Realism and Fabulism
Clarifying Their Purpose
Magical Realism is a fantastic name for a genre. Another name for it is Fabulism. The difference is that Magical Realism is written by authors from countries that historically suffered from Imperialism and can be, itself, a form of resistance. It is particularly associated with Latin America where the movement took root and from which it became an international phenomenon.
Outside of that context, it’s known as Fabulism.
If I’m to discuss the genre, I have to do so with a caveat. If you look up an explanation for what the genre is, you will get descriptions of what it’s been. My interpretation describes Fabulism’s purpose.
In my very first prose style essay, Aping the Style of Classic Authors, I talk about the difficulty in combining fantasy stories and literary style. Literary style uses fantasy as metaphor, and the reader always knows its describing a real-world phenomenon. Fantasy fiction depicts a reality that includes magic and fantastic creatures, and the reader knows that these depictions are factual within the context of the story. As Orson Scott Card says in How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, when he described a bus as reptilian, literary readers knew to interpret is a sectional bus with accordion connections that snaked its way through the city. Fantasy readers pictured it as powered by dragons.
Fabulists turn this problem into an asset, and we can picture Fabulism as stories where the metaphorical is casually and indifferently real.
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And now Fabulism:
Until this point, the term that was primarily used was “magic realism”, and the use of “magical realism” emerged in 1955 in an essay by Angel Flores. This writer identified Jorge Luis Borges as the first “true” magical realist, but there was no acknowledgment of who had come before.
Justin van Huyssteen, Magical Realism – A Definition in Art and Literature
For a typical, responsible exploration of Magical Realism, read Huyssteen’s piece in Art in Context. I prefer an irresponsible approach. For example, the writer newly approaching Fabulism may ask: how much fantasy can a Fabulist work contain? In turn, I may irresponsibly respond:
Fabulism is a literary approach to bridging realism and fantasy that is rooted in realism, but in which, the literary use of fantastic metaphor creates a diagetic element. If we describe a serpentine bus, the bus is likely to be both metaphorically and factually reptilian. Because the element is real, the story may linger longer upon it, but the intention of the element remains fundamentally metaphorical. Its impact on world building and story structure is lighter than one sees in fantasy, and as is true of metaphor, these elements are likely not sustained across the entire story nor will they have the usual requirements places upon them, like internal consistency. The story itself is not about these fantastical elements but the real world.
In Magical Realism, these fantastic elements are often used to comment on society: fascism, racism, and colonialism in particular.
Check out all the essays on style and theory as well as our shared readings:
Writing Magically about Reality
Seen this way, you’re not trying to approach the genre from a fantasy perspective and questioning the limit. There is no real limit if you begin from the context of a literary work of fiction that depicts real life but does so in such a way that transforms moments into living metaphors.
A few points now become relevant that we first discussed in Simile and Cormac McCarthy Similes with You. First, a metaphor is an emotional comparison, and we can apply that to our fabules (the spelling of fable in Spanish, French, Czech, etc.) The comparisons made in our stories need not be literal.
Here, I’m using fabule in the sense that we say metaphor or simile, which is completely unjustified, but I’m old and cranky and you can’t stop me. I’ll lie like a throw rug and claim that a fabule is a metaphor that takes itself too seriously. The simile compares two things. The metaphor states one thing is another thing, and the fabule transforms a thing, taking away its familiarity that once softened its inherent emotion.
It’s too bad that fabule doesn’t mean any of that, but make me famous and maybe it will. The concept remains, even if I’m pretending like I have the currency to coin a phrase: the fantastic reveals what familiarity hides.
When we ask what’s the difference between Fabulism and Urban Fantasy, this is the heart of it. Urban Fantasy is fantasy in a realistic setting. Fabulism isn’t. See?
Simple.
—Thaddeus Thomas
Championing Writers
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Would a story that presents a more animistic, preenlightenment worldview than is often found in modern fiction be considered fabulism?
I'm very happy to see Magical Realism come up in this series! I was blown away when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude -- what a performance! I like the idea of a spectrum from simile to metaphor to "fabule", although I wonder if it makes it sound too easy. Garcia Marquez talked about it as an attitude, or *more* than an attitude: you don't just tell the fantasy, you have to *believe* the fantasy. In fantasy you say, "Imagine a world." In magical realism you say, "This *is* the world!" What an audacious thing to do.