Magical Realism and the Sociology of Possibility

We as North Americans do not believe in magic. We are, however, entertained by it. Anything magical is operatively impossible by definition, and the impossible is many things—scary, in that it can seem powerful because we don’t know how something is done; child-like, in that it has the patently made-up elements of a fairy story or a fable or a nigh

Magical Realism is, more than anything else, an attitude toward reality…. In Magical Realism the writer confronts reality and tries to untangle it, to discover what is mysterious in things, in life, in human acts. The principle thing is not the creation of imaginary beings or worlds but the discovery of the mysterious relationship between man and h

Language is a blueprint for culture. We put ourselves into our words, from grocery lists to theorems. Needs are certainly encoded into language, but beyond those needs we see that imagination itself is just as much encoded into language, and different cultures have different languages. How is this possible? It suggests that imagination is dynamic,

One word does not capture the thing. One language does not hold all things. More words and different words mean more and different perspectives, which is an immediate widening of our world.

A verb moment is an act of community, a partnership with the world, with the universe.

Pablo Picasso said in 1950:

Reality is more than the thing itself. I look always for the super-reality. Reality lies in how you see things. A green parrot is also a green salad and a green parrot. He who makes it only a parrot diminishes reality. A painter who copies a tree blinds himself to the real tree. I see things otherwise. A palm tree can bec

Magical Realism, rather than being multicultural, is something closer to otherculturalism, culture of the other, with culture taking the place of magic. Culture is different; magic is different. At a distance, they are marvelous. Up close, things get messy: what, exactly, are we eating tonight?