Magical Realism and the Magnification of Elements in Flash Fiction

Aaron Tillman | September 2023

Aaron Tillman

Magical realism does not fit easily into any singular category. It is often described as a mode of literary expression, which suggests that it “can characterize works belonging to several genres, periods or national literatures,” 1 and its very name is paradoxical. Works of magical realism possess a “co-presence” of the natural and supernatural that is treated as normal by the narrator. These works are often grounded in realistic settings, focus on characters who struggle with realistic concerns, yet allow various extensions of reality to coexist with more conventional circumstances. Similar to magical realism, flash fiction resists any universal categorization and has been subject to classification debates. One such debate has to do with what, exactly, this very short form should be called. In the title of this essay, I call it flash fiction, but very short stories have gone by a number of different names, including nano, short-short, sudden, micro, minificción, prose poem, blaster, sketch, American haibun, and “You call this a story?” among others. Stuart Dybek sees the value in the uncertainty, saying, “I hope the debate as to what to call these short prose pieces continues, and that we’ll never reach consensus, or feel we’ve figured it out and categorized them at last. Their elusive quality is part of what makes them attractive.” He goes on to note how “the short prose piece so frequently inhabits a No-Man’s Land between prose and poetry, narrative and lyric, story and fable, joke and meditation, fragment and whole, that one of its identifying characteristics has been its protean shapes.” 2 

Once again, the questions of definition and constitution align with those asked of magical realism. For flash fiction, questions arise about what distinguishes the form from poetry or the traditional short story. For magical realism, a common question is how we distinguish it from fantasy or science fiction. Although there are ways to answer these questions—for flash fiction we might point to a narrative arc and word count, 3 and for magical realism, we often mention the hybrid planes of the magical and the real, compared to stories set on a more singular, fantastical plane— the distinctions still get murky, especially when working with such generalized differences. Rawdon Wilson suggests that “whenever ways of writing appear similar and are difficult to keep separate, then it makes sense to examine them on the level of common fictional elements. How such fundamental and recurring concepts as voice, plot, character, time or space function, what assumptions they entail and what definitions they make possible, should tell one how the uncertain boundaries are to be drawn.” 4 It is my contention that magical realist flash fiction encourages analysis and magnifies some of the fundamental elements of fiction. Significantly, the supernaturally natural circumstances— especially within the flash fiction form which often does not provide the space to easily or tidily resolve those circumstances—takes all readers, particularly students, out of the habit of thinking about stories as being primarily about plot (or the what happens) and compelling them to consider the meatier and, I would argue, more important questions of how and why. These questions usher readers toward the elements. In this essay, I demonstrate how questions of howand why reveal important aspects of voice, setting, space, character, theme, and time. 

For magical realism, the dominant element is often the narrative voice. The interesting and perhaps ironic discovery made when analyzing a magical realist story through the lenses of how and why is that the narrator almost never asks these questions, how and why. The supernatural occurrences are conveyed as entirely natural, as if they have “always already” been there. According to Wilson, magical realist stories “are expressed in a narrative voice that is noteworthy for its calmness, for its attention to facts and its personal lack of division or bifurcation.”5 What is irrelevant in the world of the magical realist story becomes monumentally relevant in the reflective and analytical space of the reader. So much of the story boils down to the way the story is told. How and why magical occurrences are treated as objectively real. Coincidentally, claims about the importance of narrative voice have been made about flash fiction too. The most poetic that I have found comes from Joyce Carol Oates, who suggests that in the short-short story, “Voice is everything, the melting of the ice on the stove, consuming itself as we watch.” 6 

Another way to think about voice is to consider narrative authority and the various ways that believability is established. One method may indeed be the “calmness” that Wilson describes, but it is often rooted in human details. In an interview with The Paris Review, Gabriel García Márquez speaks of the “journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.” 7 Of course, unique and exact details are not only essential for magical realism, but stories in general. As Tim O’Brien suggests in his essay “The Magic Show,” “Stories are rooted in particulars—this village, this time, this character.”8 With believability and particular details in mind, let’s look at a work of magical realist flash fiction. 

I’ll start with one of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories, “The Book of Sand.” On the surface, this story is about a man who buys a book with an infinite number of pages. So, the essence of the plot: a man buys a book. But as with all stories, magical or not, there is much more to it. This particular story opens with the narrator cutting off his own description of the book that we come to learn is called “the Book of Sand,” saying “No—this … is decidedly not the best way to begin my tale. To say that the story is true is by now a convention of every fantastic tale; mine, nevertheless, is true.” 9 As we can see from the outset, truth and the very methods of storytelling are raised. It feels true not because truth is brought up, but that the process of bringing it up is ridiculed, and the storyteller—our central character—comes across as humble and human, building trust through his relatability and limitations. In a sense, he begins to build narrative authority by undermining his own authority. This is also how we get to know him and believe in him as a character. 

In Borges’s story, we see how the narrative voice—and the narrator himself—are connected to and developed through details of setting and space, and how this voice and these details are essential components in establishing the objective, magical reality of the story. As the narrator informs us at the very beginning, he lives “alone, in a fifth-floor apartment on Calle Belgrano.” 10 Before any other details are established, we know the space he inhabits and the street on which he lives—a real street in a real city. But setting and space take on another dimension in this story too, notably in the boundless “Book of Sand.” As we learn, the book comes from Bombay; the pages are “worn,” the text “cramped,” and the numbers don’t seem to run in chronological order. 11 It is soon clear that the narrator cannot find the page that he had originally opened, nor can he find the beginning or the end of the book. Wilson argues that magical realism “focuses the problem of fictional space.… by suggesting a model of how different geometries … can superimpose themselves upon one another.”12 We see such superimposition at play in Borges’ story. As the narrator looks through the “Book of Sand,” the reader not only considers the space of the book but space more broadly. Since the book is boundless, we are reminded of the boundlessness of universal space and the boundless ideas that books can inspire: the magical reality of ordinary infinity. Only here, in Borges’s story, infinity can be held in one’s hand, and we are told it has “unusual heft.” 13 The obsessive attention he pays to this object with access to an infinite number of pages is comparable to the obsessiveness that many in the twenty-first century devote to their phones and other devices that can access endless pages of information, and often have a psychological “heft” that can keep eyes weighted to screens. In the story, the narrator finally determines that he must put the book away, choosing “at last to hide it behind some imperfect volumes of the Thousand and One Nights.” 14 Here we have a reference to a tangible, familiar book—one that contains stories within stories and has a boundless quality of its own—all on the common space of the bookshelf. 

In any story, but especially a work of flash fiction, setting can reveal significant details about character. In “The Book of Sand,” we pull such details not simply from the small, fairly barren apartment in which our protagonist lives, but also from the description of the book itself. It’s “worn” pages, “cramped” text, and puzzling constitution all seem to match the aging loneliness of our narrator who has “few friends left, and those [he has] stopped seeing.”15 We are also told that the narrator “hardly” leaves his home, which aligns with his decision not to display the book, but “hide it behind some imperfect volumes of the Thousand and One Nights.”16 Through the spatial details that ground this magical realist story, the components of character come rising to the surface. What emerges is the image of a lonely, obsessive, anxious, and aging insomniac who is finally compelled to bring the book to the basement of the National Library were he “hide[s]” it once again, this time on “one of the library’s damp shelves.” And though we’re told that he “feel[s] a little better” afterward, he can no longer “walk down the street the library’s on,” 17 isolating and confining him even further. 

Since we’re discussing confined spaces, it seems appropriate to consider the confined physical space of the flash fiction form. It is this space that makes literary components stand out and calls readers back for closer examination. As Robert Shapard reminds us, “if you find [a very short story] particularly troubling, or to your liking, one of the pleasures of very short fiction is that it takes only a moment to reread and reflect.” 18 Grace Paley suggests that “a short story is closer to the poem than to the novel … and when it’s very very short—one, two, two and a half pages—should be read like a poem. That is slowly.” 19 Coupled together, the flash fiction form and the magical realist mode encourage such slow, close reading and reflection; the elements that make up the story start to creep out of their confined spaces where they were initially camouflaged by the casual narrative voice. 

Just as narrative authority can be linked to setting and space, it can also be connected to time. We see this in Judy Budnitz’s story, “Flight,” in which a woman named Kanisa contemplates jumping from the roof of her building. The story opens with the narrator telling us of “a time when the women jumped off buildings regularly.” 20 Despite the title, what’s magical here is not the flight—although there are magical extensions, as I will note—but the age or period of time when such “flights” were commonplace. We see time working in a few different ways, 

with overlapping temporal geometries. There is the passage of time, from a previous age—when women “wore hoopskirts … carried parasols.… [and] fell gently,” the men more gentlemanly, as “they did not look up and snigger when a lady fell” 21—to the time of Kanisa’s mother who “splattered nearly next to the curb. It was street-cleaning day: lucky coincidence.” 22 Time is stretched in a different way, when we read about Kanisa’s “aunt, who was in such a hurry that she leapt before she was ready, and had to finish her coffee and pull up her pantyhose midflight,” 23 displaying a magical duration of time within this extraordinary age. We see a similar extension of time played out in another one of Borges’s stories, “A Secret Miracle,” in which a playwright in Nazi Germany is placed before a firing squad, where his wish for the opportunity to complete his play is granted, and he is given a year of suspended time to complete and edit the play he is working on, including choosing an epithet, all in the boundless space of his mind before time resumes as normal and he is shot to death by a Nazi firing squad. 24 A Borgesian miracle, indeed. 

Over the course of the two odd pages of Budnitz’s “Flight,” we experience distinct time periods and sequences, are grounded in the perspective of a singular character, and we view flight, time, and death as both magical and brutally real—like a suspended Nazi bullet. But the overarching questions remain the same: how? and why? How does she normalize such abnormal circumstances and why does she take this approach? As I have tried to show, with a story such as “Flight,” and most works of magical realism, we are drawn to the narrative voice when answering the question of how this magical reality is normalized, but the why encourages us to probe even further and enables the themes to rise closer to the surface. Why create a story with such circumstances? Why do these “flights” receive such casual narrative treatment? Why isn’t there panic or alarm in the voice of the narrator? In our twenty-first century, hyperbolic age, when a minor criticism is so often characterized as an evisceration, and a second incident of something might be called an epidemic, the matter-of-fact nature of the narrative stands out (again, ironically, for the way it tries so hard not to stand out), and we are compelled to consider the question of why. 

Since “Flight” is about women jumping off buildings, it makes sense to think about women’s rights, roles, and voices, and the significance of the voice who tells this story. The casual narration helps to normalize a period of time “when women jumped off buildings regularly.” 25 Although the sweeping and extraordinarily grim circumstances are presented as natural and real, and they represent a certain numbing to the plight of women in flight, the central character and her more realistic and relatable concerns stand out, allowing for an impact that is starkly personal and emotional. For example, as Kanisa gazes out of her seventeenth floor apartment window, understanding that it is not high enough for her to take flight, “her baby screams and screams for a fallen toy.” 26 We learn that the father of her child has left. “He was a trucker, accustomed to moving in horizontals, not verticals.” 27 Here, we are reminded of the horizontal nature of the status quo, and the vertical structure of hierarchies, as well as the glass ceilings that have tried to stop women from ascending. This is reinforced as the narrative continues with Kanisa’s thoughts comparing the distant past, when “the villains were easy to pick out,” to her contemporary time when “they are much harder to spot” 28: like a glass barrier, we might imagine. The story closes with Kanisa taking the elevator to the roof of her building, prepared for a final act of self-determination. In the last sentence of the story, the narrative shifts from third to second person—a narrative turn toward the reader—and we’re told of the “sense of betrayal, as you arch earthward like a shooting star and look down to see no one there waiting to catch you.” 29 Just as the voice helps to normalize the extraordinary circumstances of the story, it also takes us through time, grounds us in the perspective of a struggling character, and causes us to question our potential complicity in her plight. 

In the central stories discussed here, Borges and Budnitz both feature lonely characters in familiar settings who coexist naturally with supernatural objects and in fantastical periods of time. There are overlapping geometries at work, and it is the narrative voice that enables an integration of “the supernatural into the code of the natural, which must redefine its borders. 30 Jon Thiem argues that “one of the main advantages of magical realism as a literary mode lies in its extraordinary flexibility, in its capacity to delineate, explore, and transgress boundaries. 31 Stuart Dybek suggests that when writing flash fiction, there “is a sense of slipping between the seams.” 32 When reading a story using a mode suited to “transgress boundaries” in a form ripe for “slipping between the seams,” readers are compelled to look closely and to reflect, to identify the particular boundaries and seams that are being transgressed and penetrated, and to gaze through the magnifying lenses of how and why to find the fundamental elements of the story, the components that make up “the melting of the ice on the stove, consuming itself as we watch.” 33 

Aaron Tillman lives in Boston and teaches writing at UMass Amherst. His short story collection Consolation Miracles was published by Gateway Literary Press in 2022; his book of critical nonfiction, Magical American Jew, was published by Lexington Books in 2018, and his short story collection Every Single Bone in My Brain was published by Braddock Avenue Books in 2017. His fiction and essays have appeared in a variety of journals, and he can be found online at aarontillmanfiction.com

Notes 

1.     Amaryll Beatrice Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved Versus Unresolved Antinomy (New York: Garland, 1985), 2. 

2.     Stuart Dybek, “Afterwards: Toward a New Form,” Sudden Fiction: Amer­ican Short-Short Stories, ed. Robert Shapard and James Thomas (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986), 241. 

3.     In the “Introduction” to the an­thology Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, James Thomas points to Hemingway’s “A Very Short Story,” which is “about 750 words,” and suggests that when choosing works for this collection, he looked for stories about this long because it “seemed about tops for convention­al, readable typography,” 11-12. 

4.     Rawdon Wilson, “The Metamor­phoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Par­kinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995), 215. 

5.     Ibid., 221. 

6.     Joyce Carol Oates, “Afterwards: Toward a New Form,” Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, ed. Rob­ert Shapard and James Thomas (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986), 247. 

7.     Gabriel García Márquez, “Gabriel García Márquez: The Art of Fiction, 69,” interview by Peter H. Stone, The Paris Review, No. 82 (Winter 1981). 

8.     Tim O’Brien, “The Magic Show,” Writers on Writing, ed. Robert Pack and Jay Parini, (Hanover, NH: Mid­dlebury College P, 1991), 178. 

9.     Jorge Luis Borges, “The Book of Sand,” Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), 480. 

10.   Ibid.

11.   Ibid., 481. 

12.   Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space,” 210. 

13.   Borges, “The Book of Sand,” 481. 

14.   Ibid., 483. 

15.   Ibid.

16.   Ibid.

17.   Ibid.

18.   Robert Shapard, “The Remarkable Reinvention of Very Short Fiction,” World Literature Today 86, no. 5, (September/October 2012), 49. 

19.   Grace Paley, “Afterwards: Skippers, Snappers, and Blasters,” Sudden Fic­tion: American Short-Short Stories, ed. Robert Shapard and James Thomas (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986), 253. 

20.   Judy Budnitz, “Flight,” Flying Leap: Stories (New York: Picador, 1998), 111. 

21.   Ibid.

22.   Ibid., 112. 

23.   Ibid.

24.   Jorge Luis Borges, “The Secret Miracle,” Jorge Luis Borges: Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), 157-162. 

25.   Budnitz, “Flight,” 111. 

26.   Ibid., 112. 

27.   Ibid., 113. 

28.   Ibid.

29.   Ibid.

30.   Chanady, Magical Realism and the Fantastic, 30. 

31.   Jon Thiem, “The Textualization of the Reader in Magical Realist Fiction.” Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Par­kinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke UP, 1995), 244. 

32.   Dybek, “Afterwards: Toward a New Form,” 242. 

33.   Oates, “Afterwards: Toward a New Form,” 247.