ABSTRACT
Latino/a authors of narrative fiction have total freedom when it comes to choosing how to tell their stories. This appears in the shape of style (idiosyncratic use of syntax, for instance), medium (all verbal or the combination of visual-verbal, for instance), and storytelling mode (realism or magical realism, naturalism or fantasy, regionalism or science fiction, for instance). While the options are many and the combinations limitless, Latino/a authors (like many others) gravitate toward two main storytelling modes: realism or magical realism. Most fiction (Latino/a-penned or otherwise) today follows in the realist tradition
popularized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Realism (along with its derivations such as naturalism) is a specific delimited form of writing fiction whereby scholars (and some authors) consider the text to be like a mirror in the road, capturing and then reflecting whatever passes by. The common understanding is that realism is a kind of fiction that most directly (and faithfully) presents a reflection of reality. Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959) or Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda (1973) would be considered realist. Magical realism is a form of narrative fiction writing whereby the narrative makes
no distinction nor discriminates between events that defy the laws of nature (in physics or genetics, for example) and those that conform to the laws of nature. Scholars mostly follow the mirror-in-road mimetic principle as stated above, but do so by talking about how the captured and reflected reality itself is at once magical and real. Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale (1975) and Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1994) would be considered magical realist. Upon closer inspection, we see that realism and magical realism are simply available
features and devices for Latino/a authors to use when deciding how best to tell their story. As such, the magical realist fictions are entirely reconstructions of the building blocks of reality. That is, realism and magical realism (or other so-identified, nonrealist modes such as the fantastic) are a reflection of reality in as much as they use as their prime matter objects and entities we can recognize and understand – even in their most magical and zany incarnations. They both reflect reality to the extent that by necessity their building blocks are building blocks taken from reality and processed by the author’s capacity to think in terms of causal relations, counterfactual hypotheses, and probabilistic outcomes, among others. In this sense, there is no difference between a realist novel by Villarreal or Mohr and a magical realist novel by Arias or Ana Castillo.
