Elements of the magical and the mundane are interwoven seamlessly, making it impossible to determine where reality ends

and the extraordinary begins. The story is set in an otherwise ordinary world, with familiar historical and/or cultural realities. Story events are not always explained by universal laws or familiar logic. The ordinary aspects of the story are what produce the greatest magic. Objects and settings within the story may take on lives of their own in a way that is ordinary to the characters in the story. Constructs of time do not follow typical Western conventions. For instance, stories may be told in spiraling shapes rather than in straight lines. The story, as it unfolds, gives the reader a sense of being inside a puzzle or maze. Contradictions, inconsistencies and ambiguities color the point of view, making you question what you understand about the world at large, as well as what happens inside the story. A metamorphosis takes place in the story. It's treated not as a miracle, but as an everyday event. The story bears the influences of oral tradition: fables, myths, tall tales, urban legends, a charmed storytelling narrator (who may or may not be reliable). The magical elements in the story may enhance a subversive message or personalized point of view. Often the point of view is revealed through voices, ideas, and places which exist outside the mainstream or majority perspective. Magic occurs without using devices typical to the fantasy genre unless the devices (i.e. ghosts, angels) are employed in a context that makes them ordinary. Ghosts or angels may exist in a magical realist story, for instance, but not in a way that is surprising or unusual to the characters in the book.
MAIN FEATURES

(1) The text contains an "irreducible element" of magic, something we cannot explain according to the laws of the universe as we know them. In the terms of the text, magical things "really" do happen. The irreducible element says to us, in almost existential fashion, "I EKsist" -"I stick out." We might even see here the remnants of existential anguish at an un-co-optable world, but tempered by the more playful mood of surrealism. Irreducible magic often means disruption of the ordinary logic of cause and effect. In the light of reversals of logic and irreducible elements of magic, the real as we know it may be made to seem amazing or even ridiculous. This is often because the reactions of ordinary people to these magical events reveal behaviors that we recognize and that disturb us. (2) Descriptions detail a strong presence of the phenomenal world -this is the realism in magical realism, distinguishing it from much fantasy and allegory, and it appears in several ways. Realistic descriptions create a fictional world that resembles the one we live in, in many instances by extensive use of detail. On the one hand, the attention to the sensory detail in this

transformation represents a continuation, a renewal of the realistic tradition. But on the other hand, since in magical realist fiction, in addition to magical events, the best magical realist fiction entices us with entrancing -- magic -- details, the magical nature of those details is a clear departure from realism. The detail is freed, in a sense, from a traditionally mimetic role to a greater extent than it has been before. In many cases, in magical realist fictions, we witness an idiosyncratic recreation of historical events, but events grounded firmly in historical realitiesoften alternate versions of officially sanctioned accounts. The combination implies that eternal mythic truths and historical events are both essential components of our collective memory. As we have suggested, the material world is present in all its detailed and concrete variety as it is in realism -- but with several differences, one of them being that objects may take on lives of their own and become magical in that way. The part of Surrealism that could be written down, its textual poetics, exploited to the fullest the magic of metaphor, foregrounding the enchanting quality of all poetry as it defies reason and logic. In taking this poetics of defamiliarization to its extreme, magical realism, as is often recognized, is a major legacy of Surrealism. However, in contrast to the magical images constructed by Surrealism out of ordinary objects, which aim to appear virtually unmotivated and thus programmatically resist interpretation, magical realist images, while projecting a similar initial aura of surprising craziness, tend to reveal their motivations -- psychological, social, emotional, political -- after some scrutiny. (3) The reader may hesitate (at one point or another) between two contradictory understandings of events -- and hence experiences some unsettling doubts. Much of magical realism is thus encompassed by Tzvetan Todorov's well-known formulation of the fantastic as existing during a story when a reader hesitates between the uncanny, where an event is explainable according to the laws of the natural universe as we know it, and the marvelous, which requires some alteration in those laws. But this is a difficult matter because many variations exist; this hesitation disturbs the irreducible element, which is not always so easily perceived as such. And some readers in some cultures will hesitate less than others. The reader's primary doubt in most cases is between understanding an event as a character's hallucination or as a miracle. (4) We experience the closeness or near-merging of two realms, two worlds. We might say that in many of these texts "perhaps you are aware that seeing takes place only if you smuggle yourself in between worlds, the world of ordinary people and that of the witches." The magical realist vision exists at the intersection of two worlds, at an imaginary point inside a double-sided mirror that reflects in both directions. If fiction is exhausted in this world, then perhaps these texts create another contiguous one into which it spills over, so that it continues life beyond the grave, so to speak. The various cultures are not separate but unified in dream and fantasy through history, populated by ghosts and specters who refuse to die, and who live their afterlives through endless time in ways that reshape the present." Another related boundary to be blurred is the one between fact and fiction. (5) These fiction questions received ideas about time, space, and identity. As Fredric Jameson sets out the project of realism, one thing it achieves is "the emergence of a new space and a new temporality." Its spatial homogeneity abolishes the older forms of sacred space; likewise the newly measuring clock and measurable routine replace "older forms of ritual, sacred, or cyclical time." Many magical realist fictions carefully delineate sacred enclosures and

then allow these sacred spaces to leak their magical narrative waters over the rest of the text and the world it describes. Magical realism reorients not only our habits of time and space, but our sense of identity as well According to Linda Hutcheon, "In The White Hotel, the realist novel's concept of the subject, both in history and in fiction, is openly contested." That contestation is all the more convincing because it comes from within; the magic contests but it contests from within a realistically rendered historical fiction and a realistically conceived character. As we read magical realist texts, the magic seems to grow almost imperceptibly out of the real, giving us, as Rushdie puts it, a dense "commingling of the improbable and the mundane" (4). A graphic illustration of this phenomenon, really an extension of the strong mimetic quotient of magical realism, and related to its historical dimension, is the way in which events are usually grounded textually in a traditionally realistic, even an explicitly factual manner.