Latin American Gothic

I recently had the opportunity to read some interesting Latin American short stories; The Gospel According to Mark, If You Touch my Heart, and A Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Children's Story. These stories all had traditionally Gothic elements such as oppression, decay, misunderstanding of characters, but what was culturally unique was the introduction of "magical realism."

Magical realism is the style of writing that allows familiar things to feel strange and strange things to feel familiar. In The Gospel According to Mark, the Gutres family after listening to Espinosa read the book of Mark, believe that it is their responsibility to conduct a reenactment of the sacrifice of Jesus, with Espinosa playing the part of Jesus. As followers of Jesus that believe it okay to make this sacrifice thinking that the bible says that they would be forgiven. This bizarre behavior is strange but it is happening in the story which has pulled you in to its disbelief.

In If You Touch My Heart, a girl is held captive in a dark dank cellar of an abandon mill for decades. She is so neglected that she start to decay and becomes a part of the actual earth, with lichen, bushes and silkworms growing on her body. Although she is being abused she has no knowledge of this neglect. Even though we hear about abduction all the time the description of the events are not vividly drawn as in magical realism.

Magical realism makes us examine ourselves in A Old Man with Enormous Wings, a story about a fallen angel. The angel is not what we would expect an angel to look like; old, bald, toothless and missing feathers. The people of the community only wanted to use the angel for personal gain. The Priest wanted the angel to prove that he indeed was an angel, which in the Priest eyes the angel had failed to do. It is ironically called a child's story because it is filled with lessons; don't judge a book by its cover, respect everyone, and to remember that we are all imperfect and that we should always show humility.

Magical realism gives the ability to see things that generally go on notices as special, and realize that the thing that we regard as special may not be as special as we believe. This is what is culturally unique about the Latin American Gothic Stories.