Franz Roh (1890-1965) On Magic Realism: 1925 Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) On the marvellous real (lo real maravilloso: 1949) Tzvetan Todorov (1939)

Franz Roh (1890-1965) On Magic Realism: 1925

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) On the marvellous real (lo real maravilloso: 1949)

Tzvetan Todorov (1939) On the Fantastic: 1970

Franz Roh (1890-1965)

On Magic Realism: 1925

Franz Roh On Magic Realism

Magic Realism: Post-Expressionism

Writing in German in 1925 to champion a new direction in painting, Franz Roh originates the term Magic Realism to characterize this new painting's return to Realism after Expressionism's more abstract style.

The original work was entitled Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europaischen Malerei [Magic realism, post-expressionis: Problems of in the most recent European Painting] (Leipzig, Klinkhardt and Biermann, 1925).


With the term, Roh praises Post-Expressionism’s realistic, figural representation, a critical move that contrasts with our contemporary use of the term to signal the contrary tendency, that is, a text’s departure from realism rather than its reengagement of it.

According to Roh, the “convulsive life” and "fiery exaltation" of Expressionism have yielded to the representation of vigorous life in a “civil, metallic, restrained” manner.


He describes the ways in which the Post-Expressionist painting of the 1920s returns to a re newed delight in real objects even as it integrates the formal innovations and spiritual thrust of Expressionism, which had shown “an exaggerated preference for fantastic, extraterrestrial, remote objects?”

His statement in the preface to his book that:

“with the word “‘magic,’ as opposed to “‘mystic,’ I wished to indicate that the mystery does not descend to the represented world, but rather hides and palpitates behind it,” he thought to anticipate the practice of contemporary magical realists.


Roh’'s 1925 essay was translated into Spanish and published by José Ortega y Gasset's influential Revista de Occidente in Madrid in 1927;

It was also published in Spanish in expanded form as a book in the same year.

The actual influence of Roh’s art-historical argument on the literary practice of magical realism is taken up by Irene Guenther in the essay following Roh’s.


The Article The New Objects

The phases of all art can be distinguished quite simply by means of the particular objects that artists perceive, among all the objects in the world, thanks to an act of selection that is already an act of creation.

One might attempt a history of art that would list the favourite themes of each era without omitting those whose absence would be equally meaningful.


Of course, this would only give us the foundations for a system of characteristics;

nevertheless, it would constitute the elementary, indeed the only fruitful, groundwork for wider research.

There is, however, a second path open to research on objects.

That other way, which transcends the thematic statistics I have just mentioned, would strive to determine, for example, whether an era is notoriously fond of painting the heads of old people, chose to paint old people as withered or lymphatic like in Geroge Grosz`s paintings (German, 1893-1959).


None of this research concerns form.

Only later begins the formal operation that reworks preceding layers.

In the same way, in reverse fashion, particular objects can have an obscure and inexplicable influence over particular methods of painting.

We will indicate here, in a cursory way, the point at which the new painting separates itself from Expressionism by means of its objects.


Expressionism shows an exaggerated preference for fantastic, extraterrestrial, remote objects.

Naturally, it also resorts to the everyday and the commonplace for the purpose of distancing it, investing it with a shocking exoticism.

Many religious themes suddenly appeared, which had

been so secular until then: the ultimate religious symbols (which the church rarely modifies) were employed with sudden daring.


1) Edvard Munch (Norwegian, 1863-1944): Madona (1894-1895)

2) Marc Chagall (Russian, 1887-1985): The White Crucifixion (1938)

3) Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1989): The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1946)

4) Marc Chagall (Russian , 1887-1985): The Fall of the Angels (1923-1947)


If a picture portrayed a city, for example, it resembled the destruction produced by volcanic lava and not just a play of forms or the booty of an agitated cubism.

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)

1) Metropolis, 1917 2) Lower Manhattan, 1933


If the theme was erotic, it often degenerated into savage sensuality.

If devilish men were depicted, they had the faces of cannibals.

George Grosz (German, 1893-1959)

1) Suicide, 1919 2) Café, 1919

Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1989)

3) Young Virgin Autosodomized by her own Chastity, 1934

4) George Grosz (German, 1903-1959) The Kiss, 1920


If animals appeared, they were horses of a heavenly blue or red cows that, even in their objective reality, had to carry us beyond what we could experience on earth.

Marc Chagall (Russian 1887-1985)

1) Suicide, 1919 2) I and the Village, 1911


If a painter wanted to sing the exuberance of southern provinces in a landscape, he came up with the topics of an extraterrestrial world where men of our race burned like piles of paper under dry flames of colour.


But above all (as in Chagall's work) animals walked in the sky;

behind the transparent brain of the viewer, also present in the picture, appeared towns and villages.

Marc Chagall

Horse Flying


The Expressionist serials and reviews were called The Last Judgment, Fire, Storm, Dawn.

These titles are enough to reveal the world of objects favoured at that time.

Edvard Much 1) The Scream

Ernest Kircheen 2) Artillerymen

Marc Chagall 3) The Fall of the Angels


But let us glance at the pictures reproduced at the end of Roh’s book.

In the New Painting, Post-Expressionist it seems to us that this fantastic dreamscape has completely vanished and that our real world re-emerges before our eyes, bathed in the clarity of a new day.

We recognize this world, although now—not only because we have emerged from a dream—we look on it with new eyes.

The religious and transcendental themes have largely disappeared in recent painting.


In contrast, we are offered a new style that is thoroughly of this world, that celebrates the mundane.

Instead of the mother of God, the purity of a shepherdess in the fields.

Instead of the remote horrors of hell, the inextinguishable horrors of our own time (Otto Dix (German) Flanders )

It feels as if that roughshod and frenetic transcenden-talism, that devilish detour, that flight from the world have died and now an insatiable love for terrestrial things and a delight in their fragmented and limited nature has reawakened.


But considered carefully, this new world of objects is still alien to the current idea of Realism.

How it employs various techniques inherited from the previous period, techniques that endow all things with a deeper meaning and reveal mysteries that always threaten the secure tranquillity of simple and ingenuous things:

excessively large bodies, lying with the weight of blocks on a skimpy lawn;


objects that don't imitate the least movement but that end surprisingly real, strange mysterious designs that are nevertheless visible down to their smallest details!

It is a movement of decantation that was fortunate enough to find right at the start an almost exhausted artistic revolution that had begun to discover new avenues.


But during the development of Expressionism, painting, which has somehow almost always held on to nature, went as far as it could toward rejecting its representative, imitative meaning;

specific objectivity was suspected of lacking spirituality; in Futurism, the objective world appeared in an abrupt and dislocated form.

The elemental happiness of seeing again, of recognizing things, re-enters painting becomes once again the mirror of palpable exteriority.


That is the reason to speak of a New Realism without in any way alluding to the instinctive attitude that characterized previous Realisms in European art.

The viewers who continue to prefer that attitude do not feel satisfied with this new "frigid, unanimated" Realism.

We must admit that the world created like this in its most tangible reality offers us the fundamental artistic feeling of existence for the first time.

For Impressionism, that the world consisted of objects was an "obvious" fact not worth much attention;


Before (Post-expressionism), people were not at all devoted to the object: they took the exterior world which art moulds and shapes for granted.

This calm admiration of the magic of being, of the discovery that things already have their own faces, means that the ground in which the most diverse ideas in the world can take root has been reconquered—albeit in new ways.


The Proximity of the Object as Spiritual Creation

Painting now seems to feel the reality of the object and of space, not like copies of nature but like another creation.

This recent painting could not, then, fall back into amorphous sensuality, although here and there it does court that danger. It manifests its interior

The new idea of "realistic depiction" as it is rigorously conceived wishes to make such forms concretely evident in nature rather than in the abstract.


To depict realistically is not to portray or copy but rather to build rigorously, to construct objects that exist in the world in their particular primordial shape.

The old Aristotelian idea of imitation had already gained a spiritual quality.

For the new art, it is a question of representing before our eyes, in an intuitive way, the, fact, the interior figure, of the exterior world.


The point is not to discover the spirit beginning with objects but, on the contrary, to discover objects beginning with the spirit; for that reason, one accords consummate value to the process in which spiritual form remains large, pure, and clear.

This second objective world thereby rigorously re-sembles the first, the existing world, but it is a purified world, a referential world.

This is how we must understand what today's historical situation shows us so extraordinarily well: that the invention and re-establishment of the object can reveal to us the idea of creation.


The way in which the restorative process of this new painting operates here is quite clear.

A painter like Georg Schrimpf (1889-1938), who attempts to create the exterior world with the utmost precision, considers it very important not to paint outdoors, not to use a model, to have everything flow from the interior image to the canvas.

That is why he paints his landscapes in his studio, almost always without a model or even a sketch.


Nevertheless, he repeatedly insists that the landscape be definitively, rigorously, a real landscape that could be confused with an existing one.

He wants it to be "real," to impress us as something ordinary and familiar and, nevertheless, to be magic by virtue of that isolation in the room: even the last little blade of grass can refer to the spirit.


The New Space

As we have previously suggested, the partisans of nineteenth-century sensuous Realism reject the new painting's Realism as schematic, intellectual, constructed, inert, frigid.

In fact, what happens is that the feeling of space has changed.

To understand that change, we will compare the latest styles of landscape painting.


The Impressionists represented space from the perspective of air, of vaporous atmosphere: that is, they gasified and shattered colour on the intervening atmosphere.

But in attempting to create a shimmering coloured vapour to fill the whole picture, and in conceiving of the whole world as a chromatic veil, what Impressionism actually achieved was a flattening of space.

Matter visualized in form and colour was caught as in a gaseous substance on the picture plane.


Smaller than Natural (Miniature)

The rigorous dedication to the object functions in very different ways in the most recent art, but it almost always manifests itself in miniature form.

By miniature we mean a fine and exact painting, executed on a very small surface;

a painting whose decisive character typically comes from its minimal exterior dimensions.


Though it is true that the narrowness of the surface compels all representation to search for smallness from within, this is no more than the extrinsic and superficial concept of miniature.

The intrinsic miniature (which can encompass also very large paintings, a typical example of which is Albrecht Altdorfer's Battle of Alexander (1529) is art produced by attempting to locate infinity in small things.


Thus, for example, The Lacemaker (1664) by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is a little painting the size of a plate that nevertheless produces the impression of a poster the size of a house.

Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980)

On Marvellous Reality (lo real maravilloso): 1949

Alejo Carpentier On the Marvellous Real

Alejo Carpentier wrote his text on marvellous reality, for the first time, in the Prologue to his novel, The Kindom of this World, published in 1949.

He has published one novel before, in 1933, Ecue-Yamba-O, which he later rejected as a false presentation of the African people

At the end of the year 1943 I was fortunate to visit the Kingdom of Henri Christophe –the ruins, so poetic of Sans-Souci…

Alejo Carpentier On the Marvelous Real

After to feel the not really false sorcery of the lands of Haiti, after having found magic warnings on the red roads of the Central Plateau, after having heard the drums of the Petro and the Rada, I was obliged to approach the marvellous reality just lived, to the exhausting pretension to make emerge the marvellous which characterised certain European literatures of these last thirty years.

The marvellous, poorly suggested by the deforming work of characters of the public faire do not work.


The marvellous, obtained with prestigitacion, uniting objects which are not at all related, the old and false history of the random encounter of the umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table, …


[The marvellous] Invoked by means of established formulas which make of some paintings a cheap monotony of melting clock, mannequins made by seamstress, vague phallic monuments, the marvellous is reduced to umbrella or a lobster or a sewing machine, or anything else, on an operating table, in the sad interior of a room, in a desert of stones.


To day there exist codes of the fantastic based on the principle of the donkey being devoured by a fig, proposed by the Songs of Maldoror (Isidore Lucien Ducasse: 1868-69) as supreme inversion of reality, adding “children being threatened by hummingbird”, o “horses devouring birds” of Andre Masson.


[…] the marvellous begins to be in an unequivocal manner when it emerges from an expected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality, from an unusual illumination or particularly motivation of the unnoticed riches and categories of reality, perceived with particular intensity by means of an elevation of the spirit which leads it to a sort of “limit state”.

Alejo Carpentier On the Marvelous Real To begin with, the marvellous presupposes a faith.

That is why the marvellous invoked by reason, as the Surrealists for so many years, was never but a literary trick, as boring, by its predominance, as certain literature, which now are in the way out.

This is became particularly evident to me while in Haiti, the fact of being in contact with something in every day life that we could call the marvellous real (real maravilloso).

I was stepping a land where millions of men, anxious for, liberty, believed in the lycanthropic powers of Macandal, to the point that that collective faith would produce a miracle the day of his execution.


But I also thought that the marvellous real was not privative to Haiti, but rather the patrimony of the whole of America, where still now a cosmogonic study has not been established.

The marvellous is to be found daily in the lives of people who inscribed dates in the history of the continent and who left their last names still used today: from the those who searched for the Fountain of Eternal Youth, for the Gold City of Manoa (El Dorado), to those first revolutionaries or certain modern heroes of our Independence wars which have much mythology as is the case of Juana de Azurduy.

But what is the whole history of America if not a chronicle of the marvellous-real?


The Legend of El Dorado Several different legends exercised their spell over the

Spaniards. Rumours current among the Indians of Peru referred to a great city or cities somewhere in the central plains to the east of the Andes which abounded in gold.

The Spaniards themselves believed that a large body of Inca had fled into the interior at the time of the Spanish invasion of Peru, and that they had carried with them much treasure and had founded a great empire.


Another legend, known to the Indians for many years, but which seems to have come to the notice of the Spaniards about 1535, concerned El Dorado, or the "gilded man".

It was said that once or twice a year this legendary king, his body covered with powdered gold, appeared before his people by a lake high up amid the mountains.


Thus gilded and resplendent, he would push off in a raft for the centre of the lake where he would throw into the water offerings of gold and other precious things.

After this he plunged into the lake and bathed in it.

It seems likely that the legend was based on a religious rite actually performed at Lake Guatavita in the highlands of Bogota but which had probably ceased some fifty years before the Spaniards came to hear of the story.


The legend, as it was handed down, became increasingly confused with other legends. It led the Spaniards to seek in the central plains to the east of the Bogota highlands a golden city by the name of Manoa and a golden king by the name of El Dorado.

Other explorers sought for wealthy kingdoms far to the south-west in the lands watered by the upper tributaries of the Amazon.


The man responsible for finally fixing the site of El Dorado's mythical city within the boundaries of present-day Guyana was Antonio de Berrio, the Spanish Governor of Guyana and Trinidad.

After three expeditions in 1584, 1585, and 1590, and after a further expedition in 1593 by his lieutenant, Domingo de Vera, Berrio concluded that the city of Manoa was close to the sources of the Caroni river.

Alejo Carpentier On Marvellous Real

The view that Manoa was situated behind the mountains of Guyana was given further weight by the stories of Juan Martinez, a Spanish survivor of an earlier expedition, who, after living for ten years among the Indians, turned up in Margarita about 1586, claiming that he had been taken to the golden city.

He described it as a region of the Parima and Rupununi.

Tzvetan Todorov (1939-)

On the Fantastic: 1970

Tzvetan Todorov on the Fantastic

Definition of the Fantastic

In our world, the world that we know, without devils or vampires, an event takes place which cannot be explained by the laws of the familiar world.

The person who sees the event has to decide between two possible solutions:

A) either it is a sensory illusion, a product of the imagination and the laws of the world continue to be what they are;


B) or the event has indeed taken place; it is an integral part of reality, but this reality is governed by laws unknown to us.

Thus, the devil is either an illusion, an imaginary being; or he really exists, like any other being: however, with one reserve: we rarely seem him.

The Fantastic is located in the moment of this uncertainty.

In the very moment we decide for one of the solutions, we leave the Fantastic and we enter into neighbour genres such as the uncanny or the marvellous.


The Fantastic is the hesitation felt by a person who knows only the natural laws, when facing an event apparently supernatural.

Thus, the concept of the Fantastic is defined in relation to the concepts of the real and the imaginary.

Vladimir Soloviov stats that “There is an uncanny phenomenon which can be explained in two ways, by the type natural and supernatural causes.

The possibility to hesitate between the two creates the fantastic effect”.


Montague Rhodes James, is the of the opinion that “Perhaps it is necessary to have an exit door for a natural explanation, but I should add: this door should be sufficiently narrow in order use it”.

Olga Reimann states that “The hero feels continually and distinctively the contradiction between the two worlds, that of the real and that of the fantastic which surround him”.

P. G. Castex afirms that “The fantastic … is characterised… by a brutal intrusion of mystery in the bosom of real live”.


Louis Vax comments that “The fantastic narrative … likes to present to us, by inhabiting the world were we are, people like us, places suddenly facing the inexplicable”

Roger Caillois says that “All the fantastic is rupture of the known order, an unacceptable irruption at the heart of unchangeable every day reality”.

These definitions are of three types: a) the natural world

b) the supernatural world


c) the possibility to provide two explanations about a supernatural event, and therefore, the fact that some one has to chose between them.

Who hesitates in the story? The character and the reader.

Thus, the Fantastic implies, then, the integration of the reader in the world of the characters.

The reader’s hesitation is, then, the first condition of the Fantastic.

Thus, the Fantastic implies not only the existence of a uncanny event, but also provokes a hesitation in the reader and the hero.


For the Fantastic to take place, three conditions must be met:

a) First of all, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living characters and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explication of the events evoked.

b) This hesitation can be felt by a character, that is, the role of the reader is deposited to character and at the time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work.

In a naïve reading, the reader identifies itself with a character.


c) The reader adopts a certain attitude with respect of the text: no allegorical or poetic interpretation.

The first condition sends us to the verbal aspect of the text: the vision.

The second sends us to the syntaxtic: formal unities of the text, and to the semantic aspect (theme represented)

The third sends us to a different manners of reading


The Uncanny and the Marvellous

The Fantastic, as we define it, it last only the time of a hesitation: a hesitation that is common to the reader and the character, who have to decide if what they perceived comes or not from reality.

At the end of the story, the reader if not the character, make a decision, opting for one of the two solutions, and in doing so, leaves the Fantastic.


If it is decided that the laws of reality remain intact and they permit to explain the events described, then, we say that the work is not Fantastic, but Uncanny (a different genre).

If, on contrary, it is decided that we admit new laws of nature, which allow to explain the events, then we enter into de Marvellous (a different genre).

The Fantastic it is placed at the limit of these two genres (Uncanny and Marvellous).


The pure Fantastic is represented by the line which separates the uncanny-strange from the marvellous-fantastic.

pure uncanny marvellous pureuncanny fantastic fantastic marvellous


The Fantastic

The events are inexplicable

The Uncanny The Marvellous

Events are explained Events are explained

by natural laws by new laws of nature


The Uncanny-fantastic

Here the events which seem supernatural (i.e. miracles) through the story, at the end they receive a rational explanation.

If these events conducted the character and the reader to believe in the supernatural intervention, it is because they had an unusual character.


The Fantastic-marvellous

These are the stories which present themselves as fantastic, but they accept the supernatural.

The Pure-marvellous

In this case, the supernatural do not provoke any particular reaction in both the character or the reader.

Generally we link the marvellous genre to fairy tales. However, this is only one of the varieties of the marvellous, and the supernatural events do not provoke any surprise: the sleep that last one hundred years, the magic gifts of a character, etc.

Documents

Franz Roh (1890-1965) On Magic Realism: 1925 Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980) On the marvellous real (lo real maravilloso: 1949) Tzvetan Todorov (1939)