“Reality is more than the thing itself. I look always for the super-reality. Reality lies in how you see things. A green parrot is also a green salad and a green parrot. He who makes it only a parrot diminishes reality. A painter who copies a tree blinds himself to the real tree. I see things otherwise. A palm tree can become a horse.” – Pablo Picasso.
Ghost could be the element being used in Pedro Paramo that made the book inspired the creation of the magic realism genre. The short novel written by Juan Rulfo, originally published in 1985, tackles the death of Comala through the narration of the ghosts of the former inhabitant of the town.
Juan Preciado, the protagonist of the story traveled to Comala, Colima as being beseeched by his dying mother in the beginning. He intends to seek the answer in this place of the revenge that his mother wanted him to do to the man responsible for his biological existence, Pedro Paramo. She left Pedro Paramo.
Pedro Paramo had stolen all the supposed lands and the inheritance of Juan Preciado. As the story progresses he eventually learned about Comala’s history through the ghosts of the town.
Although it tackles real pains and sufferings of humans in such circumstances, it was delivered in a surreal situation using entities that were not acknowledged to be real in some aspects – putting it in a magical context or the genre that is called magical realism.
Magical realism is regarded as an artistic genre usually being used in films and literature, where creators are using unusual elements such as mystical entities or even scenarios far from reality while it was told in a realistic setting.
Using such element is to convey the message that is more effectively executed by using entities that has some literary relevance, the message, and its characteristics. These are being considered for poetic license and aesthetic value of the text.
Although the term was initially coined by German art critic Franz Roh in his painting to point out an altered reality and in writing it was the Cuban Alejo Carpentier who formally claimed he used magical realism in his work, still Rulfo’s work had a major influence on the creation of the genre through his novel Pedro Paramo. In it he executed the story in a painting like narration, using first-person and third-person points of view.
Upon scrutinizing the text, Rulfo’s work is nevertheless a fiction especially using such elements but the realism and accuracy of the historic Mexican Revolution discussed as subtext is cannot be ignored. The novel is also regarded as the breakthrough of the “realists” trend of the novel during its contemporary, which was popular and at its peak during that period.
Dissecting the term, it can be explained as a combination of reality and fiction or a fantastical realm. Indeed this is how Pedro Paramo was executed, meeting both the essences of the genre.
Through the execution of the story, it is implying that the genre of magical realism is witnessing. Witnessing and aesthetically retelling the things it witnessed of the realities even how ugly those things are.
It is trying to be honest in relaying to the audience or readers the spinoff that embodies the real matter. The spinoff is the presentation of the genre. In this tale, it is the cultural struggle and human oppression during the Mexican Revolution – the death of Mexican people.
Magical realism will take the audience in the magical spinoff then it will bring back in reality. Just like Pedro Paramo’s statement in the novel “this death really hurt me, my shoulder still sore.”