SOURCE: “Magical Realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien Anos de Soledad,” in INTI, Nos. 16 & 17, Fall 1982 & Spring 1983, pp. 37-52.

In the following essay, Hart examines Gabriel García Márquez's novel Cien años de soledad in an attempt to simplify and reinterpret the idea of magic realism.

Ce qu'il y a d'admirable dans le fantastique, c'est qu'il n'y a plus de fantastique: il n'y a que le réel.

—André Breton¹

It was in an article by Ángel Flores published in 1955 that the term magical realism—originally used by a German critic to characterise a type of Expressionist art—was first employed as a yard-stick to measure, compare and evaluate modern Latin American fiction. In this article, Flores pointed out that one of the distinguishing features of magical realism is its ability to transform ‘the common and the everyday into the awesome and the unreal’.² Flores' article also...