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Hybridity in Magic Realism

Hybridity in Magic Realism

Magic Realism is all about mixing things up: the fantastic with the mundane, the ordinary with the extraordinary, dream life with waking life, reality and unreality.

If you want to be fancy-shmancy about it, you can say that Magic Realism is characterized by hybridity. We're serious about this: Magic Realists often take the most unrelated things and mix them up to see what happens. It's sort of like if a cook tossed chocolate and chicken and sushi and root beer, tossed it all into a pot, and served it up as an exciting new dish. It's probably going to taste a little weird, but it won't be like anything you've had before.

Chew on This

Isabel Allende's work is a hybrid mix of the magical and the mundane. Here are some examples from her novel The House of the Spirits.

Here (Quote #1) is Salman Rushdie mixing it up as he describes India's independence through the perspective of his fictional narrator, Saleem, in Midnight's Children.