The Multiple Invention of Magical Realism

The following essay traces the global, independent, and simultaneous invention of magical realism in the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on five novels that mark the first example of this style in their respective traditions—Mário de Andrade's Macunaíma (1928), Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World (1949), Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1959), and Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita (1966)—this paper suggests that two factors are responsible for the multiple invention of this form: 1) similar levels of combined and uneven development in the countries in which these writers were working, and 2) the parallel emergence of field anthropology and ethnography in all of these places, a practice which would inspire these authors to produce the detached, ambivalent narrator that is so essential to this form.