SOURCE: “‘Magic Realism,’ Or, The Split-Fingered Fastball of W. P. Kinsella,” in Aethlon, Vol. IX, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 1-10.

In the following essay, Hamblin discusses magic realism in the baseball stories of W. P. Kinsella.

As Robert Francis's well-known poem, “Pitcher,” persuades us, the actions and intentions of a baseball pitcher and a writer are remarkably analogous, since both employ indirection, subtlety, deception, and suspense to achieve their desired effects. That being the case, it seems appropriate to develop the subject of this paper, the intertwining of fact and fantasy in W. P. Kinsella's baseball fiction, through the use of a pitching metaphor. As I hope to demonstrate, Kinsella as author is a master of a variety of deliveries, or “pitches.”

Undoubtedly the characteristic of Kinsella's stories that initially impresses a reader is his celebration of the power of creative invention, or (to use the current critical term...