The previous chapter explored perspectives of causation; the communities of people in each text had different ways of explaining the world around them, which the narrator presented as valid. Where these clashed with the reader's perspectives, this produced the atmosphere we have come to label ‘magical realist’ in literature.

Latin American scholars and writers at the first appearance of the genre in Latin American literature, towards the middle of the last century, construed a theory of magical realism in territorial terms, claiming that it was the specific circumstances of Latin America that produced magical realism. In an expanded version of the prologue to his novel El reino de este mundo, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier (1995, 88) wrote the following:

Carpentier's formulation of magical realism, as a genre of literature emerging essentially from the largely untapped and baroque magnificence of his continent's geography, history, diversity and mythology, has been taken by many scholars as seminal in its field.