In his essay, "Some Aspects of the Short Story," Julio Cortázar addresses a Cuban audience to trace a cohesive Latin American lineage of literature while also more providing his broader views on the craft of short-story writing. Here, Cortázar characterizes his own writing as "fantastic," as in, engaging with fantastical and magical elements and rejecting the "scientific and philosophical optimism of the eighteenth century," which he continues to define as "a world directed more or less harmoniously by a system of laws, principles, cause-and-effect relations, defined psychologies, and well-mapped geographies" (Hayes)—of which Cortázar, for himself, remained skeptical.
It's clear in the selected stories from Blow-Up and Other Stories how Cortázar manages to separate himself from the prevailing movement of literary realism and carve out an early place for himself in the leagues of Latin American writers who developed a distinct genre of magical realism. Among those writers are Jorge Luis Borges, who came slightly before Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez, arriving on the scene slightly after. The genre and culture carries on in contemporary literature with authors such as Carmen Maria Machado and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
The "magic" of magical realism is in the way it mixes hidden magical qualities into an otherwise familiar world. Cortázar's narrators and protagonists are not battling dragons guarding princesses in high towers, but his characters are reading high fantasy and adventure novels. The magic they confront is a more subtle, private magic, and Cortázar doesn't devote any time to explaining his magic and conforming to "scientific and philosophical optimism"—he doesn't allow his narratives to be hemmed in by the requirements of cause-and-effect explanation and the more logistical elements of the known world. For example, no time in "Bestiary" is wasted explaining why or how this tiger came to be at the Funes estate. It is simply there; everyone accepts it, and with this universal acceptance of the tiger, Cortázar and his reader can focus on the effect of its presence rather than dwell on improbable details of its arrival.
