The term magical realism was coined by a German art critic in the 1920s and applied to fiction decades later — and the term has always been a partial fit. What it names is a mode in which the miraculous is treated with the same neutral factuality as the mundane. A ghost returns to a house and her presence is neither explained nor questioned. A plague of insomnia erases the names of things. The Devil materializes in Moscow and attends an evening's entertainment. The strangeness is not foregrounded as strangeness. It is reported with the same register as everything else. The effect is not escape from reality but a different way of being in it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is the novel that made the term global. The Buendía family's century in the fictional town of Macondo unfolds with an accumulating density of event — founding, civil war, banana company colonialism, flood, forgetting — in which the miraculous elements (the yellow butterflies that accompany Mauricio Babilonia, the flying carpet, the insomnia plague) function as concentrations of historical and emotional truth rather than departures from it. García Márquez said he found his method when he realized he could use his grandmother's tone — the voice in which she reported supernatural events without inflection — as the voice of the novel. The chapter where insomnia begins erasing the names of things is worth the entire book.

Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo preceded García Márquez by more than a decade and is the stranger and more compressed achievement. Rulfo's Comala is a dead town — literally: Juan Preciado arrives looking for his father and finds only ghosts, and the novel is structured so that the reader only gradually understands that the narrative voices are all from the same side of the boundary between life and death. Rulfo wrote this novel in 1955 and stopped writing fiction. García Márquez reportedly said he had read Pedro Páramo more than anyone has read anything — that he could recite it backwards. This is not incidental praise. Rulfo found a formal language for grief and the persistence of the past that no one has successfully reproduced.

Beloved by Toni Morrison is American Gothic but it is also, unmistakably, magical realism. The ghost who returns is not ambiguous: Beloved arrives in the flesh at 124 Bluestone Road and is understood by everyone who encounters her to be what she is. Morrison's method is to treat this supernatural fact with complete seriousness — not as metaphor but as something that actually happened, in the way that the horrors of slavery actually happened and left presences in the world that cannot be accounted for in strictly realist terms. The novel's great formal achievement is that the supernatural elements do not make the historical horror more bearable. They make it more present.

The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov takes a Soviet Moscow and into it introduces the Devil, who arrives with his retinue and proceeds to reveal the city's hypocrisies. The supernatural intervention works because Soviet reality had its own unreality — the official version of events that everyone was required to affirm and no one believed. Bulgakov's novel, written in secret and hidden in a drawer, understood that the only form adequate to that kind of systemic dishonesty was one that acknowledged the presence of things that official reality denied. The black magic performances at the Variety Theatre are funny because the audience keeps trying to explain them away, which is exactly what everyone in the novel's Moscow is doing about everything else.

The common thread through these novels is not a formal device but an epistemic one: they all treat ordinary reality as insufficient for the things they need to say. History is too violent, grief too persistent, political repression too comprehensive, to be contained in strictly realist narration. The magical elements are not ornamental. They are the form that the content requires. This is why the genre has flourished in places where official history has been violent or dishonest — Latin America under dictatorship, the Soviet Union, post-slavery America. The miraculous is what survives when realism is not enough.