Marjorie Boulton (1924- ); or, Why I don't get along with magic realism

"We enjoy suspense; but for real suspense there must be causality. If a man in a thriller is tied to a chair with a bombfuse lighted on the table and a cobra on the floor, we know certain possibilities: he may free himself, his captor or someone else may free him; otherwise, the snake may bite him, or not; the bomb may explode, or not, and so on; our interest is in which possible alternative may occur. But if he is imprisoned in a room with cheese walls, from which turtles and sticks of rhubarb pop out at intervals, he hears music in a twelve-tone scale coming out of soap teacups, he is tied up with spun sugar which he cannot break, the room is lit by burning icicles standing in candlesticks carved out of liver... real suspense is no longer possible; there are no probabilities. If we have no notion of what may happen next, we cannot have an interesting choice."

Marjorie Boulton, The Anatomy of the Novel (1975). Ms. Boulton, bless her little cotton socks, is also an important writer in Esperanto.