Magical Realism

When I was in law school, the contracts professor explained the use of weasel words in law.  The idea was a weasel would suck the juice out of an egg leaving the shell. So a weasel word was a word that would suck the meaning out of another word. The notion of Magical Realism was first used in art but soon was applied to several Latin American authors. For example, the book, Like Water For Chocolate is considered to be in the genre of "magical realism".  The problem with that is the word "magical" sucks out the meaning of realism. It gives the idea that the events described are not real but fiction or a creation of the imagination of the writer.

Thus those things described that are not congruent with a European world view are considered magical and not real but the story presents them as if they were real.  Here is the problem with this notion. It denies the reality of the Latin American experience. Much of this literature present an alternative reality that has just as much validity if not more so than the traditional European world view.  Victor Villasenor ran into this problem when the book company that gave him an advance on his book Rain of Gold wanted to publish it as fiction. It was fiction to those who could not accept the reality of the world view presented by Villasenor.  When I first read Rain of Gold, I had to suspend my world view to accept what he wrote. Now that I have read all the works of Villasenor, I have come to realize he wrote about a reality that is of another dimension then the European world view, but real nonetheless. The use of the term "Magical Realism" is a subtle put down of what Villasenor and many other writers have written.