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Comment by diversionfactor | Hacker News Reader

The origins of Magical Realism are (appropriately) obscure:

"German magic-realist paintings influenced the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli, who has been called the first to apply magic realism to writing, aiming to capture the fantastic, mysterious nature of reality." - Bowers, Maggie Ann (2004). Magic(al) Realism. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-26854-7.

Rather than any one person or culture being its source, it may perhaps be better attributed to an aspect of human storytelling since time immemorial.

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They are referring to the genesis of the Latin American literary movement commonly referred to as Magical Realism not the general idea of essentially realist stories with magical and fantastic elements which is ancient. Sure we can call most any religious text or mythology Magical Realism but only on the level of plot, literature is more than plot and the way the authors of the movement deal with things like theme and subtext place them firmly into literary fiction, these distinctions are important.

Edit: Thinking on this more, mythology and religion can't really be called Magical Realism from what I have read of the movement, in mythology and religion we know how the trick was done we have a god or some creature who did it even if we can not understand how they did it; in Magical Realism we don't get to know how the trick is done, it is just magic and left unexplained. Even fairy tales and folklore don't work as Magical Realism because they are so tied up in the religion and mythology of the culture that produced them, they can seem magical and unexplained when removed from that culture but that is different. I would not call myself well read in the movement yet so I could be completely wrong here.

I hear Magical Realism and I immediately think of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez! The creators of Lost definitely read that book… the wrecks of ancient ships deep in the jungle, the ghosts of ancestors haunting the present, the way their community narrative evolves out of the mists of story and time. Amazing stuff.

Also, the village of Macondo where the story is set is something quite like the Garden of Eden out of the Book of Genesis, which might qualify as the oldest work of magical realism in existence.

https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Biblical-Allusions-In-Gabriel...

That's my instinct as well. The local university had a GGM month that was more like 2 years during the pandemic.

Rushdie also comes to mind. And I can't help but connect a number of similarities between The Satanic Verses and the TV series Lost.

I think there's something in the names of the families and characters that, at least to my younger mind, helped blend some of the magic into a dream-like state of never ending wandering.

Love this take

I feel like AI has forced us to face this

No one person or entity is the sole author, creator or owner of anything

Everything is a mix of previous things

And we are constantly re-creating previous concepts in different ways

> Everything is a mix of previous things

"There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages."

― Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review

So beautiful, thank you

The comment is meta in some sense as your observation should have been expressed by someone else before because that's what your observation implies.

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