Magic realism is a narrative technique that acquires an important presence in contemporary world literature. The paper compares between Jorge Luis Boges’ fictions and Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and Days. Jorge Luis This paper is a comparative study of magic realism in Jorge Luis Borges’s Fictions and Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights And days. It aims at shedding light on the term Magic Realism as a narrative technique in which magic events are woven into reality in such a way as to render the boundaries between the two either blurred or non-existent. The two writers come from different culture, yet they use the same technique— magic realism.
Jorge Luis Borges is regarded as one of the major Latin American writers in world fiction and a founder member of Magic Realism as a genre. Naguib Mahfouz is, also, one of the great Egyptian novelists who represent the principle of magic realism in their novels. Both of them variously violate standard novelistic expectation by the fusion of everyday experience with the fantastic, the mythical and the nightmarish. Both writers write fiction to represent not the real world, but a fanciful recreation of the cultural inventions of man whether in history or in literature. They depict the absurdity of life and the meaninglessness of man’s existence, searching for the meaning of a universe beyond concrete reality and, in the process, set their reader on a journey into a hallucinatory world of magic realism.
Although both writers use the same narrative technique, each employs it differently. This is due to the wide diversity of the constituent features of magic realism—mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic with the fantastic, skilful time shifts, miscellaneous use of dreams, myth and fairytales, expressionistic and even surrealistic deception, the element of surprise and even shock, the horrific and the inexplicable.
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