On the Origin of "the Magical" of Magical Realism in Literature: Fairy Tales as Means of Social Adaptation

The literary reflection of magical realism is usually examined by appeal to certain aspects of the texts that are considered to be magical realist, and to how these aspects are revealed in those texts. The attempts to define the characteristics of the "magical" as the most fundamental feature of the subject-matter genre do not seem to go beyond an observation that relates this "magical" to its counterpart in fairy tales rather than to the mythical/legendary/fantastic. This observation does not seem to have been subjected to the question of why the "magical" of magical realism belongs to the world of fairy tales. In this paper, I will try to answer the above-mentioned question by presenting an analysis of the characters' similar levels of perception of the textual reality in fairy tales and in magical realist texts. I will argue that this particular resemblance between the characters that are employed in these two genres seems to point to a specific structure that enables texts to have functionality of some sort. In order to support this claim, I will discuss Zipes' explanatory framework for textual functionality in case of fairy tales, and the socio-political conditions under which the genre magical realism rose. These explanations will lead us to consider the works of magical realism as enabling a textual function for social adaptation. As a result of this brief analysis, I aim to demonstrate that the textual functionality, which sprang from the Latin America of the 20(th) century, stands as an explanans for why the "magical" of magical realism is that of the "ordinary-magical" of fairy tales.