Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY is a series devoted to the best of theatre/performance scholarship currently available, accessible and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more traditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study, but utilized as important underpinning or as a historiographical or analytical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other types of less traditional performance texts are also germane to the series if placed in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no geographical focus for this series, works of excellence of a diverse and international nature, including comparative studies, are sought. The editor of the series is Don B. Wilmeth (Emeritus, Brown University), Ph.D., University of Illinois, who brings to the series over a dozen years as editor of a book series on American theatre and drama, in addition to his own extensive experience as an editor of books and journals. He is the author of several award-winning books and has received numerous career achievement awards, including one for sustained excellence in editing from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Also in the series: Undressed for Success by Brenda Foley Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-garde by Günter Berghaus Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Sally Charnow Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain by Mark Pizzato Moscow Theatres for Young People by Manon van de Water Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre by Odai Johnson Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and Its Performers by Arthur Frank Wertheim Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women’s Writing by Wendy Arons Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific by Daphne P. Lei Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns by Leigh Woods Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance edited by William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 by Susan Harris Smith Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: The Performing Subject by Alan Sikes Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 90s by Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish-American Drama and Jewish-American Experience by Julius Novick

American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance by John Bell On the Uses of the Fantastic in Modern Theatre: Cocteau, Oedipus, and the Monster by Irene Eynat-Confino Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show by Michael M. Chemers, foreword by Jim Ferris Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present edited by Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck; foreword by Eugene Burger

Performing Magic on the Western Stage From the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Edited by

Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck Foreword by Eugene Burger

PERFORMING MAGIC ON THE WESTERN STAGE

Copyright © Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck, 2008. Foreword Copyright © Eugene Burger 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60788–0 ISBN-10: 0–230–60788–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Performing magic on the western stage : from the eighteenth century to the present / edited by Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck; with a foreword by Eugene Burger. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history) ISBN 0–230–60788–8 (alk. paper) 1. Magic—History. I. Coppa, Francesca. II. Haas, Lawrence J. M. III. Peck, James. BF1595.P47 2008 793.809—dc22

2008021070

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents List of Illustrations

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Foreword by Eugene Burger

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Acknowledgments Introduction Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck 1.

Life Magic and Staged Magic: A Hidden Intertwining Lawrence Hass

2. The Family Romance of Modern Magic: Contesting Robert-Houdin’s Cultural Legacy in Contemporary France Graham M. Jones

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3. Magicians and the Magic of Hollywood Cinema during the 1920s Matthew Solomon

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4. The Body Immaterial: Magicians’ Assistants and the Performance of Labor Francesca Coppa

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5. Conjuring Capital: Magic and Finance from Eighteenth-Century London to the New Las Vegas James Peck

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6. The Sacred and the Sleight of Hand in American Indian Gaming Mary Lawlor

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7.

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Outdoing Ching Ling Foo Christopher Stahl

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Contents

8. Intersecting Illusions: Performing Magic, Disability, and Gender Karen Dearborn

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9. Through a Glass Darkly: Magic and Religion in Western Thought and Practice Susan L. Schwartz

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10. Illusions about Illusions Robert E. Neale

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Index

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Illustrations 3.1

Betty Compson, the Popular Screen Star, Demonstrating Her Favorite Stunts in Card Manipulation, from The Magical Bulletin, April 1922

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3.2 Eisenheim (Edward Norton) and the Orange Tree, in The Illusionist, 2006

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3.3 5.1 5.2

Robert-Houdin and the Fantastic Orange Tree, from L’Illusionniste, June 1904

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Isaac Fawkes Performs the Egg Bag Trick. Courtesy of the Huntington Library. Detail

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Robert Walpole Visits Bartholomew Fair. Harlequin Performs for the Crowd and a Large Billboard Advertises the Magic of Isaac Fawkes. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of London

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Foreword Eugene Burger

Eugene Burger is one of the most revered magicians in the world. A celebrated performer, Burger is also a prolific author of books on the art and theory of magic performance. He is a leading figure in the recent movement to approach magic as a meaningful, expressive art form.

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hroughout most of its history, beginning around the sixth century BCE when the Magi came to Greece from Persia, the idea of “magic” has had a checkered reputation. On the one hand, the idea resonates positively with us: we are drawn to the idea of magic. It is an idea filled with possibilities that suggests the fulfillment of our deepest dreams. We find the idea of magic fascinating and alluring. Perhaps it appeals to us at a primal level. Perhaps the human heart cries out for magic. On the other hand, magic has also always been seen as something suspect. Magic has never fully been trusted and never been felt to be fully trustworthy. There are negative connotations to the idea of magic. Many people see magic as ungodly, demonic, from the Underworld. Magic frequently suggests danger, something we need to fear. In the words of Antonin Artaud: “But no matter how loudly we clamor for magic in our life, we are really afraid of pursuing an existence entirely under its influence and sign” (9). It was one of the accomplishments of the twentieth century that the negative perception of magic has changed. With the exception of a few fundamentalist Christians, Jews, and Muslims, the notion of magic has been virtually redeemed. This has happened in large measure because of the efforts of advertisers and marketers. I would say that a good deal of the credit for the redemption of magic surely must go to the Disney company. (If the funds are available, what parent could be so cruel not to take their children to visit Disney’s Magic Kingdom?) Disney and other advertisers including Mercedes Benz, Buick, and AT&T—the list is long and growing—have

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used the idea and even the word “magic” to sell their products and enhance their services. Is there much difference, after all, between consulting the forestdwelling old witch in the Middle Ages to obtain a love potion and going to Bloomingdales’s cosmetic department today for much the same purpose? At the beginning of the twenty-first century, in advertising, the word magic has become an exciting and positive adjective that opens our minds to new possibilities for our lives. To say that something is “magical” is to say something highly positive about it. The old negative connotations seem to be drifting from our consciousness. As our view of the value of magic changed, there were changes in the way we viewed theatrical or performance magic as well. The price for the rehabilitation of the idea of magic has been high: as the twentieth century progressed, performance magic became, more and more, something “merely for the children.” Exactly why this happened is too long a story to attempt to tell here. Nonetheless, I would observe that while magic began the century not simply as an entertainment for the family but also sometimes as an adult entertainment without the presence of children, by mid-century most performance magicians seemed to be primarily aiming their work at children and families with children. In the process, in the larger world of cultural perceptions, performance magic became more and more dismissed as trivial and unimportant for the adult world. Even so, as the twentieth century was drawing to a close, something rather surprising happened: academics began taking performance magic seriously. They began writing about it. (Many of these books and articles are referenced in the pages that follow.) Not only books that taught magic tricks, but also books that intelligently discussed the history of magic began to appear in popular bookstores. (Oddly enough, they are placed not with the performance and theater books, but with books about games and puzzles). The last decade of the twentieth century also marked the beginning and flowering of Lawrence Hass’s “Theory and Art of Magic” program at Muhlenberg College. Magicians and academics from all over the world were invited to discuss performance magic from a variety of standpoints. It is from this groundbreaking academic program, in fact, that this present book has grown and developed. Frankly, I must confess that I am personally surprised (and a bit distressed) that this process of rehabilitation and recognition took so long and came so late. For me, performance magic has always been a deep and profound art that raises fascinating questions, and some of these are questions that we ignore at our own peril. Consider this one: why are we all so

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easily deceived? Why is deception so common? Why are we deceived by politicians, the so-called religious, and even those who reside in the inner circles of those we love and who love us? Would our lives benefit if we could reduce the amount of deception in which we are involved on a daily basis? And how shall we deal with self-deception? Indeed, is self-deception always a “bad” thing? I submit these are important questions. Looked at from another perspective, performance magic is worthy of our attention if only because it appears to be the only art form that is always and forever concerned with transcendence. I find this fascinating. This is not to say that other art forms do not also deal with transcendence. They surely do. Sometimes. Theatrical or performance magic, on the other hand, always deals with reaching beyond the ordinary and everyday; it always deals with transcending the human condition. In everyday life, I cannot fly, fire will consume me, spikes will penetrate my heart, and I will die. In the world of the magic show, on the contrary, people can fly, they do survive burning fire and deadly spikes. In everyday life, the empty hat remains just that: empty. It does not suddenly fill with life—with the small white rabbit that brings “ohs” and “ahs” not only from the children but also from many adults. As a professional magician I find it genuinely exciting that performance magic is becoming the subject for academic scrutiny, analysis, and interpretation. The essays that follow take us down many paths. They look at performance magic in different ways. And so they open doors for us behind which we will find many new and different questions—and many new surprises. I suspect, for example, that many magicians will be surprised at some of the interpretations that follow because they have never quite looked at their art in the ways suggested. At the same time, I think that many academics will be surprised by the way these scholars openly celebrate magic—their willingness to treat magic as a profound art form worthy of our deepest attention. Part of the fun and excitement of performance magic, of course, is that it brings us surprises. It reminds us that life is filled with surprises. And surprise sometimes brings wonder; and wonder can bring transformations in the ways we see our world and ourselves. But how could it be otherwise? Ultimately, performance magic reminds us that the Universe is a capital “M,” Mystery. And Mystery, I think, is both irreducible and eternal. As the well-known theologian and anthropologist Lawrence E. Sullivan puts it: “The horizon of the unknown moves outward with the horizon of knowledge” (viii).

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WORKS CITED Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Sullivan, Lawrence E. Foreword for I. P. Couliano’s Out of This World: Other Worldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein. Boston: Shambhala Press, 1991.

Acknowledgments

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he editors would like to thank: the Mellon Foundation for giving us our first grant to pursue performance studies; our colleagues at Muhlenberg College, particularly the Faculty Humanities Seminar, the Faculty Scholarship and Development Committee, and the Faculty Center for Teaching, for their support of us both individually and collectively; Provost Marjorie Hass, Dean Curtis Dretch, Humanities professor Tom Cartelli, and Presidents Peyton R. Helm, James Steffy, and Arthur Taylor for their support of performance studies and the “Theory and Art of Magic” program at Muhlenberg; Richard Schechner, for suggesting that we do a book like this in the first place; Chris Kovats-Bernat, Peter Bredlau, and Beth Schachter for thinking through so much of this material with us; Laurie Beth Clarke and Michael Peterson for hosting the American Society for Theatre Research (2004) seminar on Las Vegas Performance; Eugene Burger, Marc DeSouza, Max Maven, Jeff McBride, Larry Reichlin, and Teller for indispensable guidance and support as Advisors to the “Theory and Art of Magic” program; all the participants, friends, and patrons of the magic program; the many participants of the Muhlenberg College Conference, “Performing Magic: Theory and Practice”; and lastly, all the magicians of the world, without whom this book would have no magic at all.

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Introduction Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck

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he book you are holding is not only an innovative interdisciplinary study of performance magic, but also an experiment in collaborative teaching and learning. This experiment took place at Muhlenberg College, the small liberal arts college that is the institutional home of the editors as well as many other contributors to this volume. In its encouragement of interdisciplinary scholarship and creative pedagogies, Muhlenberg has given us the space not only to produce new knowledge but also to consider how and in what ways knowledge is produced. This book, for all its wide-ranging perspectives, historical breadth, and cultural diversity, was produced locally, by an interdisciplinary, crossdepartmental, college-wide collaborative effort. By the end, this project had drawn together scholars from many institutions and magicians from all over the world; to tell the story of this book is therefore to describe a series of intellectual encounters and transformations as unexpected as those in any magic trick. One part of the story begins, as so many exciting intellectual adventures do, with a Mellon grant. In 2000, an interdisciplinary group of faculty at Muhlenberg, including coeditors Francesca Coppa and James Peck, applied to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for pilot funds through the college’s Faculty Center for Teaching. Their goal was: to investigate the emergent field of performance studies from a cross-disciplinary perspective; to find ways to incorporate performance studies methodologies into our own research and teaching; to seek out and converse with other people at Muhlenberg interested in exploring performance studies ideas within the context of their field.

Performance studies is an interdisciplinary field, situated at the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences, that uses methodologies

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of contemporary critical theory to analyze performances and establish the meanings and values they transmit. Formally established some twenty years ago, performance studies expanded the study of performance beyond the study of drama, taking as its subject not only theater, but also dance, music, ritual, performance art, film, radio, television, and new media, as well as the many and various signifying practices of everyday life. The members of the Mellon pilot group, which included faculty from anthropology, dance, English, psychology, and theater, worked together closely for a year, comparing the place of performance in their various disciplines and developing a shared methodology in the hopes of fostering better scholarly communication and encouraging more collaborative teaching. At the end of that year, the Mellon group was invited to chair Muhlenberg’s Faculty Seminar in the Humanities. Despite its name, the seminar is open to faculty across the college, and the “Humanities Seminar in Performance Studies” ultimately drew participants from across the liberal arts: from American and women’s studies to religion and communication. For the next two years, the seminar met regularly to read and discuss critical texts. The seminar also invited many notable performance studies scholars to campus, and guests at the seminar included such major thinkers as Richard Schechner, Phillip Zarilli, Jill Dolan, Sally Banes, Jon McKenzie, Thomas DeFrantz, Michelle Kisliuk, and Mark Wing Davey. By the end of 2004, the “Humanities Seminar in Performance Studies” had built up some serious intellectual muscle, and performance studies methodologies were making themselves felt in the participants’ scholarly work and in classrooms across Muhlenberg College. But there was a feeling within the seminar that all of this collective, interdisciplinary training should somehow manifest itself in a collective, interdisciplinary project. It was Richard Schechner who first suggested we do a book. Impressed with the variety of fields represented around the seminar table, as well as the group’s cohesiveness and commitment to collaborative thinking, Schechner observed that we were ideally trained to think through a complicated mode of performance. We had come from many fields, and could thus bring a great variety of specialized training to bear, yet we now spoke a common language. Years of study had produced an intellectual cadre with a methodology in search of a subject. Later, after our subject had become clear to us, we in the seminar often joked: “oh, if only there were an under-theorized mode of performance with a rich and complex history that would benefit from interdisciplinary analysis!”

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Across campus from the Humanities Seminar, a vinyl banner spanned the area known as Parent’s Plaza and fluttered noisily in the wind. “The Theory and Art of Magic!” it proclaimed. “Tickets available at the box office!” *

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That banner was flying because elsewhere at Muhlenberg, coeditor Lawrence Hass had been having a different kind of intellectual experience. A philosopher specializing in phenomenology and aesthetics, Hass saw a magic special on television one night in the early 1990s and realized that magicians were creating a distinctive and literally astonishing form of aesthetic experience—one to which philosophers and theorists had paid little attention. As a result, Hass began what was, in effect, a “post-doctorate” in magic performance. He plunged into the vast (but largely secret) literature of magic and magic history; he immersed himself in the contemporary subculture of contemporary magic; and he began developing his own repertoire for performance. Naturally enough, Hass was especially interested in issues relating to the philosophy of magic and of magic performance. His deep interest in this area was inspired by the writings by Eugene Burger—one of the leading magic performers, philosophers, and teachers in the world today—who would soon become Larry’s good friend and mentor. It was in this bubbling cauldron of passionate exploration that, in 1997, Hass made a detailed proposal to Muhlenberg College for a semester-long academic symposium on magic. To be titled “Theory and Art of Magic,” Hass’s plan was to bring the world’s great magicians, theorists, and teachers of magic to campus to perform magic of high artistry and to give lectures and talks about the nature of magic as a human experience and as an art form. Hass’s intention was twofold. First, he intended to show academic audiences, against common assumptions and prejudices, that magic was a profound performing art with connections to and implications for many different disciplines, for example, philosophy, psychology, literature, sociology, religion, history, and theater arts. Indeed, he wanted to share with the College community what he had himself discovered: that magic was an ancient and universal art form that merited scholarly attention and study. At the same time, Hass was hoping to create a new venue for magicians—a venue in which educated audiences might inspire a new level and type of discourse about the magical arts. It is an understatement to say that Hass’s proposal was “unusual” or “unconventional.” In fact, although he didn’t know it at the time, Hass’s proposed program was entirely without precedent.

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Nonetheless, Muhlenberg College embraced the opportunity. Seeing the “Theory and Art of Magic” program as a natural complement to its nationally ranked Theatre and Dance department, then President Arthur Taylor and then dean Curtis Dretsch enthusiastically approved the magic proposal and committed substantial resources for Hass to produce his program. After two years of preparation, labor, coordination among many different departments and units at the College—and arranging the visits of renowned performers and theorists of magic such as Eugene Burger, Darwin Ortiz, Hiawatha, and Robert E. Neale—the first season of the “Theory and Art of Magic” program was launched in the fall semester of 1999. The program was a remarkable success. On campus, all the shows and lectures were sold out, faculty members in different departments taught courses on magic or units about magic in their existing courses, and Hass began teaching “The Art of Magic”—a full-credit studio arts course to train highly interested students to perform magic in a theatrically sound way. Further, the public shows and lectures created a most wonderful and unusual community: audiences consisted not only of students, but also of faculty and staff members, administrators, people from the Allentown community, and magicians from all over the East Coast. The high level of interest in the magic program was also mirrored by national media attention. That first season, the “Theory and Art of Magic” program garnered major feature coverage in USAToday and The Philadelphia Inquirer, with similar coverage in subsequent seasons featured in such outlets as The New York Times, The Discovery Channel, the Associated Press, The Chronicle of Higher Education, CanadaWest News Service, The Christian Science Monitor, South Korean television, and many others. As a result of its successful first season, the “Theory and Art of Magic” quickly became a regular part of campus life at Muhlenberg College. With continued strong support by the College, along with substantial donations made by devoted patrons, magic organizations, and businesses, Hass has produced full-fledged seasons of the magic program in 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 featuring performances and lectures of such illustrious world-class magicians as David Blaine, Eugene Burger, John Carney, William Kalush, René Lavand, Losander, Max Maven, Jeff McBride, Robert E. Neale, Luna Shemada, Margaret Steele, Jim Steinmeyer, Jamy Ian Swiss, Juan Tamariz, Teller, and Topas (among many others). At the time of this writing, the “Theory and Art of Magic” continues to go and grow. Indeed, at every step in this history, the impact and significance of the magic program continued (and continues) to be felt: the “Theory and Art of Magic” program is the first-ever ongoing academic program devoted to magic.

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As part of the magic program’s academic mission, in 2006, Hass partnered with coeditors Peck and Coppa to host a conference on magic as one of the events in that season of the program. The conference was titled “Performing Magic: Theory and Practice.” This very fruitful partnership was not new: in 2002, Coppa and Peck had seen that the “Theory and Art of Magic” programming was dovetailing with the scholarly work of the “Humanities Seminar in Performance Studies.” By 2003–2004, the projects had joined forces, with Coppa, Hass, and Peck organizing a campus research and writing group that focused on performance studies and magic. Their goal was to develop essays for an anthology on the subject of performance magic. By 2005, those essays began to come in and this collection, Performing Magic on the Western Stage, started taking shape. However, the magic conference in the fall semester of 2006 was a watershed moment for this project. For one thing, several essays were presented at that conference that exemplified the “new wave” of academic scholarship on magic that has been transpiring in the last ten years or so, not only at Muhlenberg College but also at other institutions of higher learning around the world. Some of those essays are included here. The magic conference in 2006 was also significant because it underscored the fact that this exploding scholarship on magic is coming from people with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, for example, theater arts, cultural studies, film studies, anthropology, philosophy, religion studies, and performance studies. And it is being written by people who are employing quite diverse methodological approaches, for example, phenomenology, materialist cultural critique, social scientific field studies, and literary analysis. To be sure, instead of a unified vision or voice emerging, the magic conference demonstrated to the editors that no one discipline, paradigm, or method could be sufficient to honor an artistic and cultural phenomenon that is as complex as magic. Adding in the fact that many compelling presentations at the conference were made by magic enthusiasts and professional magicians, and that many active participants in the conference had little or no formal academic training, we began to realize that the community of scholars, thinkers, students, and magicians interested in magic is even more interdisciplinary than we had realized. As the magic conference went on, we editors serving as hosts and facilitators began to thematize this new interdisciplinarity the group was embodying. We held interactive discussions in which we asked the very question about who “we” as a group were. We asked questions that explored not only the things we were enjoying about the conference but also the ways in which the diversity of voices and perspectives challenged us and generated

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discomfort. We observed that “being out of the comfort zone” was the norm for everyone in the room: academics uncomfortable with other academic approaches, magicians uncomfortable with academics, academics uncomfortable with performers and professional artists. The editors came to realize that, quite by surprise, the conference had become a paradigm of what might be called a “post-modern” learning community—one in which our unity was constituted by the very diversities among us and in which learning happened through the self-displacing, sometimes uncomfortable encounter with radically other perspectives, conceptual frameworks, and methodological programs. *

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In the end, then, we editors have constructed this anthology to reflect the profound, diverse interdisciplinarity that we discovered at the magic conference and that we believe needs to be in play if one is to gain a robust, non-reductive understanding of the complex phenomenon of magic. Drawing on what we learned from the conference, we hope that every reader—academic or magician, with all the diversity among and between— will find essays she or he “connects with” and enjoys. But we also presume she or he will find essays that feel alien and uncomfortable. You will know this is happening if you find yourself muttering things such as “I don’t get this” or “this is ridiculous (or ignorant, or absurd)!” Of course, the reader is free to proceed at such points however she or he wants, for example, to move on to some other essay or to abandon the book altogether. However, we editors respectfully offer another possibility for your consideration: that these moments of puzzlement, discomfort, or criticism are part of the ride as we try to explore the inexhaustible richness of magic. No one academic discipline, artistic path, intellectual paradigm, or method of thinking can say everything there is to say. Instead, the editors hope that the plurality of perspectives in this book might be viewed as opportunities for thinking about magic in radically new ways, encountering new concepts, and seeing which new ways and concepts are productive to your own work and thinking. By no means does this argument suggest that the reader should agree with everything that is said. (How boring would that be!) But it is to invite the reader to hold off a while before passing judgment. Indeed, as with all things magical, there is almost certainly more going on with every essay than meets the eye. As editors, we hope this book prompts continued research into the theory, history, and impact of magic from a diverse array of perspectives.

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Such investigation is already underway in the Academy and beyond. The current wave of writing and thinking about magic began in the mid-1990s and has accelerated steadily since. Magicians themselves began this effort to cast magic as a site for serious intellectual inquiry. Two of our contributors, Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, figure among the vanguard of such artist–thinkers. Among the subculture of magicians, dexterous technique is, for obvious reasons, widely admired. Burger and Neale have prodded their peers to devote themselves with comparable passion to the metaphoric resonances of their acts. They have illuminated for magicians and nonmagicians alike structures of meaning embedded in well-known illusions. In books such as their coauthored Magic and Meaning (1995), they ask fundamental questions about the significance of magic: “What is magic? . . . Why did it appear? . . . Is conjuring performance simply ‘entertainment’ (and what does that mean?) or does this ancient and venerable art involve some larger symbolic or metaphorical meanings for conjurors and audiences alike?” (Burger xi) Also writing from within the magical community, illusion inventor and historian Jim Steinmeyer has recently revitalized magic history through a series of books, the most famous of which is Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (2003). Steinmeyer extended magicians’ long-standing interest in biography and in the genealogy of widely performed tricks to contextualize those tricks within broader historical and cultural developments. Why did a particular audience enjoy a particular magical feat? What symbolic functions did it serve for a given community in a given time and place? Steinmeyer delivered the keynote address at our first magic conference, an invitation we issued because we saw that his work built a bridge between the magicians and the scholars of magic in attendance. In recent years, the formal academy has also recognized magic as a fecund research area. A few scholarly works loosely gathered under the banner of cultural studies attest to the fact that magic provides entree into a diverse array of human concerns. The titles of important works such as Simon During’s Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (2002), Karen Beckman’s Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (2003), Fred Nadis’s Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America (2005), and Michael Mangan’s Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (2007) suggest some of the many viable approaches to the subject. Our book extends this nascent critical literature. Magic is a vast, under-researched area, and our one additional text could not possibly explore all of its possibilities. We have therefore made no effort to create a comprehensive or even representative anthology. Rather, this

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book is the creation of people gathered at an institution that is unusually willing to invest resources in the performance and study of a low-status cultural form. It is to some degree the result of productive happenstance, and the product of a group of people eager to think together. That said, we do hope our anthology contributes to the future direction of magic scholarship. In part, we aim to demonstrate the interdisciplinary potential of magic. Intersecting as it does with so many established intellectual and performative domains, magic invites—fairly demands—an interdisciplinary approach. The scholars represented in this book are formally trained in disciplines ranging from literature to film studies to dance to performance studies to philosophy to religion to anthropology. Consequently, the essays are diverse in topic and approach. They range from subjects that speak from the heart of entertainment magic, such as Graham M. Jones’s chapter about the influence of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (the so-called father of modern magic), to chapters that demonstrate the influence of magic on other more respected cultural forms, such as Matthew Solomon’s intermedial analysis of magic and film in the 1920s, to chapters that adopt performance studies’ broad definition of performance to investigate magic making as an influential cultural practice, such as Mary Lawlor’s analysis of magical imagery and behavior in Native American casinos. Throughout, we invite the reader to consider each author’s disciplinary background. How does she construe the notion of the magical? What interpretive strategies does he bring to the material? What questions, assumptions, and intellectual paradigms animate her or his analysis of magical acts? And in a movement reminiscent of magical mirrors, we invite the reader to articulate what assumptions and paradigms inform her or his own interests and reactions. In addition, despite the fact that these essays were commissioned and assembled in a non-systematic way, they do coalesce around a number of shared themes. For the purposes of the book, we offered contributors a working definition of magic: “magic is the artful performance of impossible effects.”1 This rubric is intentionally broad, and it permitted the contributors to examine material that diverges widely in historical period, geography, and culture. Nevertheless, the final essays articulate many common ideas about the nature and function of magic. These motifs undoubtedly arise in part from the authors’ ongoing interactions. However, they also point to the sorts of experiences that magic creates and addresses as a widespread and perhaps universal cultural form. We hope, in part, that by noting some of the themes that link these essays, other scholars may discover unexpected intersections with their own research and turn to the bountiful archives of magic history and performance as a new and potentially revelatory site.

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A number of contributors situate magic amid and against the supposed “disenchantment of modernity” most famously theorized by Max Weber. Much twentieth-century thought, following Weber, presumes that as the West adopted a rationalized, empirical approach to reality, it renounced the realm of the magical. And so in theory, if not in practice, the twentieth century is marked by a notion of radical separation between magic and science, reason, and knowledge. However, several essays in this collection show that this binary cannot be uncritically maintained. Indeed, the chapters by Hass, Jones, Stahl, Lawlor, Schwartz, and Neale—each in their own way—shine a light on this opposition and either refute, qualify, or paradoxically confirm the tension between the magical and the modern. Whatever else might be said, by the end of this book it will be no longer possible to maintain this habituated binary in a naïve way. Coming from another direction, several authors are inspired by the contemporary concern in Humanities studies to articulate often hidden notions about and attitudes toward “otherness.” They have seen that the subculture of magic and magic performances are important places where, paradoxically enough, otherness is performed in some ways and effaced in others. The chapters by Coppa, Jones, Stahl, Dearborn, Lawlor, and Schwartz show how magic represents the feared and/or desired other. Considering such lived categories as gender, ethnicity, disability, and religion, these essays demonstrate that magic offers symbolic means to manage encounters with and experiences of difference. Lamentably, magic often figures otherness only to discipline or banish it. Other times, however, magic unfolds the perspective of the other. Magical actions of putative “others” critique or transgress accepted social norms and suggest access to experiences and potentials that exceed the constraints of the expected and normative. Another recurrent theme is the transformative, seemingly magical power of the modern marketplace. The chapters by Hass, Jones, Coppa, Peck, Stahl, and Lawlor uncover deep, persistent connections between magic in the modern world and capitalism. For one thing, the authors show in various ways, the staged theme of magical transformation maps rather directly on to the promises of class mobility, the “American Dream,” and the dramatic, even magical expansion of wealth. Indeed, it is no accident—several authors suggest and Peck explicitly demonstrates—that performance magic becomes such big business in modern Las Vegas. But more subtly, some of these essays show how performance magic both models and mystifies the symbolic operations of commercial exchange. Another group of essays scrutinizes the subculture of magicians, in particular its penchant for secret-keeping. And what a complex penchant it is!

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For on one hand, many magicians rather plausibly insist upon the idea that the secrets of magic are indispensable to its success. And yet, the wholesale, public exposure of magical secrets by prominent magicians is as old as the hills. As the late, great magician Jay Marshall was fond of saying: “If you want to keep something a secret [in magic], publish it” (quoted in Steinmeyer xx). The essays by Jones, Coppa, Solomon, and Stahl all weigh in on the vexed relationship between magicians and their secrets. Does a Gnostic approach to magical knowledge serve the art or hinder it? Who gets admitted to the community of magicians, and at what price? How do the boundaries that guard access to the magician’s secrets replay or recast other social barriers? A final cluster of essays takes up the widespread theme of magic and spirituality. Of course in the Western world, a wedge has been driven between magic and religion—one that starts with Plato, continues with the Church Fathers, especially Tertullian and Augustine, and persists well into modern life and religious practices. And yet, a good deal of scholarship in the late twentieth century by theologians, religion theorists, and anthropologists shows how difficult this separation is to maintain. Many of these thinkers and theologians have argued that when we appreciate the factual centrality of ritual to spiritual life and of magical practices and belief to ritual, then there is no longer a need to drive magic outside of religion as its forbidden or demonic “other.” This is of course a very large and controversial topic that would require many collections to explore. But the chapters by Stahl, Lawlor, Schwartz, and Neale in this volume make interesting headway on it by charting explicit affinities between the performance practices of magicians and the ritual practices of religious specialists. Drawing upon some of the new scholarship, these writers show that the boundary between entertainment magic and ritual magic is highly unstable and even doubtful. We have tried to suggest then several large constellations of thought through which these diverse essays can be arranged. No doubt other such constellations are possible. Additionally, one category of concerns runs through the book as a whole, surfacing to some degree in every essay. In brief, the chapters individually and collectively demonstrate that magic offers especially acute insight into processes by which humans imagine alternatives to seemingly settled realities. How do people craft symbols that help them imagine the apparently unimaginable? How do the aesthetic and/or ritual enactments of magic proffer the psychic means to flourish in seemingly intransigent situations? To what extent does magic render personal, social, or material obstacles conceptually fluid and potentially

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negotiable? These essays demonstrate that magic stages the pleasures of envisioning life otherwise. That said, the essays also suggest that as experiences of pleasures and powers, performance magic involves the regulation of access to this privilege. Who has the authority to disrupt the known? Who has the desire to break personal or social boundaries, to relax the laws of physics? Who, stepping into the magician’s persona, has the opportunity to propose a new reality? Who doesn’t? Who or what does the magician act upon, and with what implications? We also observe that, as a Möbius strip, these questions fold back on academics as well. Indeed, who are we as thinkers to propose the disruptions and arguments that occur in these pages? Who are we to propose new models and realities within which to conceive the magical arts? Admittedly, few of us write from an embodied experience of making magic—at least in the narrow sense of the term. Only two contributors and the author of the foreword are practicing magicians. Nevertheless, we hope these essays invite both scholars and magicians to think more complexly about the symbolic practices of performance magic. For scholars, the essays collected here underscore the profound poverty that results from banishing magic to the outside of philosophy, science, religion, theory, art, and intellectual life itself. For magicians, we hope the essays suggest arenas of thought that might enrich magical practice. Robert E. Neale has argued that, properly understood, magic is a mirror that promises to reveal at least as much about our lives and cultural practices as it conceals (3–5). At its best, magic cracks open the commonplace to give a shape to human fantasy. This does not render magic trivial; quite the reverse. To see into the fantasy life of a community is to see into its most fundamental longings. What do the people of a particular time and place perceive as impossible? How do they hope to transcend such impossibilities? How do they symbolize their hope by embodying it in artful performances? To what extent and for whose benefit does ideology rush in to parse the meaning and establish the limits of such dreaming? The essays in this book gather one rich array of examples, but merely begin the process of unfolding magic history, theory, and practice. We do believe they demonstrate that it is intellectually worthwhile to take magic seriously. Magic is an ancient, influential, oft-times beautiful, and usually contested cultural practice. To study magic is to study the human imagination in frenzied dialogue with its own limits. This is a serious topic indeed. The essays collected here show that magic offers insight into that most fundamental of endeavors—crafting another reality, conceiving a new world.

12 Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck

NOTE 1. Our definition is adapted from one created by Robert E. Neale in his book with David Parr The Magic Mirror. Neale defines magic as “the performance exercise of imaginative mastery that grants symbolic power over life and death by means of ritual control over change in the artful play of impossible effects” (55).

WORKS CITED Beckman, Karen. Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Burger, Eugene and Robert E. Neale. Magic and Meaning. Seattle: Hermetic Press, 1995. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Mangan, Michael. Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007. Nadis, Fred. Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America. Piscataway, N J: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Neale, Robert E. with David Parr. The Magic Mirror. Seattle: Hermetic Press, 2002. Steinmeyer, Jim. Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003.

1. Life Magic and Staged Magic: A Hidden Intertwining Lawrence Hass

Lawrence Hass is Professor of Philosophy at Muhlenberg College and founding director of the College’s internationally recognized, award-winning program, The Theory and Art of Magic. Hass is a highly respected performing magician who teaches and writes about magic from a philosophical point of view. Hass also specializes and is widely published in phenomenology, aesthetics, and post-modern philosophy.

In this chapter, Hass attempts to articulate the profound, yet unacknowledged relationship humans have with magic. He argues that magic-making, far from trivial, juvenile, or superficial, is a fundamental aspect of our pre-conscious practices and sensibilities. Certain magical acts, rituals, and beliefs are constitutive of life as we know it; they are life magic. How do magical artists stage life magic we already perform and want to perform? How do they reflect back our own magicmaking practices and desires? Magic need not be an empty show of skill that provokes disbelief, or a display of false power that encourages belief. Magic can be a collaborative work of imagination . . . that generates make-believe. —Robert E. Neale, The Magic Mirror

A

ppropriately enough for the topic of magic, I begin this philosophical essay with a paradox. On one hand, it would seem that there are few things less deserving of such study than magic. After all, in traditional philosophy, magic is cast out as “the other,” as that thing outside that demarcates and legitimizes proper philosophy. This strategic operation is clearly seen in Plato’s writings: time and again, he insists that

14 Lawrence Hass Socrates’ dialectical practice is not sorcery but philosophy proper. Plato makes clear that magic is the primary threat to a philosophical life; it is bad enough to be a confused and confusing artist, but still worse to be a “victim of magic” (Republic, 89–90). Constituting philosophy through an opposition to magic is by no means unique to Plato. The same foundational binary can be found in the Pali Canon of Buddhism, Aristotle’s Organon, the writings of Enlightenment Europeans, the texts of nineteenth-century revolutionaries (Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche), and Heidegger’s Being and Time. Although one would be hard pressed to find many shared qualities amid this motley of thinkers, there is at least one: the insistence that their philosophical projects are strictly, vigorously distinct from magic, and of course superior to it. This intellectual structure, the hierarchical binary between philosophy and magic—a binary that gets reiterated between “religion and magic” and “science and magic”—is supplemented by what we might call a cultural sensibility. By and large, in America at least, magic is viewed as the least of all arts—or not even an art. In the pantheon of pursuits, magic would seem to rank somewhere between mime and balloon folding. The very mention of magic brings to mind cute tricks, birthday parties for little kids, and Uncle Bob with his cards. Truly, it would seem that magic is beyond the pale of academic attention and serious consideration. Yet there must be more to the story. How can something so paltry and insignificant as magic simultaneously be so threatening and dangerous? As we know from other examples of this paradoxical projection—of something treated as both laughable and dangerous (e.g., the familiar stereotypes about women or gay men)—there must something deeper going on. As with these other projections, the “something deeper” with magic provokes thought. For the other side of the resistance to magic is the apparent fact that we seem profoundly drawn to it. As a longtime performer, I can attest to the fact that most people find excellent performance magic ecstatic: transporting, pleasurable, and sublime. These are among the best aesthetic values (celebrated by such thinkers as Kant), and they lie at the heart of magic, particularly when performed by truly great magical artists. And in the last fifty years, we have been treated to likes of Dai Vernon, René Lavand, Richiardi Jr., Richard Ross, Tommy Wonder, Jeff McBride, Max Maven, Juan Tamariz, Fred Kaps, and Eugene Burger, to name a few. These men are not a crowd of hacks, like Uncle Bob. The world of modern magic has produced a range of genuine masters. Why does common sensibility devalue magic as a performing art by association with the least of its practitioners? This is analogous to disparaging

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all of music by the way a child honks on a sax. How has the disjunction between the anxious denigration of magic and its actual experiential enjoyment come to prevail? Why is it that we seem so intrigued by magic performance? These are not minor questions. Rather, they are provocative and substantial ones about a hidden intertwining between art, magic, and life. I also observe that, until recently, these lived relations almost wholly eluded the divisions, categories, and methods of traditional academic analysis. These questions can only be asked (much less answered) in a genuinely interdisciplinary space where, for example, performing arts, phenomenology, and psychology can come together. Thus, in this essay, I will attempt a first foray into this intertwining by elucidating why humans seem so enmeshed with magic despite some of their conceptual and intellectual commitments. First of all, it is important to stress that humans are so enmeshed: magicians have been around since the beginning of recorded history. Although most experts no longer believe that the images on the ancient tomb of Egyptian governor Baqt depict a performance of the Cups and Balls (instead, it seems that a game is being played);1 the Westcar Papyrus (ca. 1500 BCE) contains extensive accounts of ancient magicians going back to the times of Cheops (4000 BCE).2 The Torah tells us that Moses’ performances were at first ignored because he was working wonders that had already been performed by Pharaoh’s court magicians. It is because of these and much other textual evidence that magician and historian Ricky Jay suggests that, after music, magic is the second oldest art form (Grauer 108–112). Performance magic is more than merely ancient. It is also astonishingly universal. It seems that every known culture has had a place for magic: conjuring in ancient religious practices, shamanic rituals of healing, street fakirs in Calcutta, poetic artists in China and Japan, ancient and contemporary oracles, great stages and television screens across six continents, mammoth showrooms in Las Vegas, Uncle Bob and his card tricks, and street corner entertainers the whole world over. Once we start noticing it (and then studying it), we find magic all around—a pulse that runs throughout human cultures, near and far, past and present. Consider, for example, the tremendous extent to which images of magic surround us. I have an ever-growing catalog of advertisements that use magic as their hook. Crate and Barrel, Virgin Atlantic, Hermés Paris, AT&T, and Hilton hotels, to name a few, have used images of magic in ad campaigns. Starbucks suggests that “there is a hidden magic” in their coffee. Disney has made billions by extolling its magic every which way. It seems that, at a deep psychological level, the word magic conjures up something powerful and compelling in people.

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It would be illuminating and productive to critically examine the notions and assumptions, the uses and abuses of magic that operate in this cultural mélange. I suspect we would find that many of these images trade on and contribute to our paradoxical notions about magic: is it ridiculous or dangerous, juvenile or powerful, beneath contempt or deeply desired? But in this essay, I want to move beyond commonplace images of magic in our lives to our commonplace performances of it. As a first step toward understanding our hidden interest in magic, I suggest that everyone, every day, is performing acts of magic. I mean this quite literally. We are all magicians in an important sense, but our performances have gone unnoticed or marginalized for so long that they have become invisible. They unfold in that strange, wonderful flow of life that psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls “the unthought known”—those regions of experience and activities that we know perfectly well but that typically resist our concepts and intellectual categories (3–4). However, one of the virtues of phenomenology as a philosophical method is that it focuses on life phenomena and experiential structures that are typically overlooked. We can use this method to fruitfully study these “unthought but known” magic performances. How, specifically, do they work? What do they mean for the people who perform them? What meanings do they make for others? What needs and desires do they speak to? If we then add performance studies sensibilities to the mix (as most other essays in this collection do), we can elucidate the cultural meanings that they bear and the ideological sediments that they might perpetuate or unsettle. When this combined approach is brought to magic, as in this collection, we have something like a field day.

LIFE MAGIC My claim that people are magicians in their daily lives is inspired by the writings of the magician Robert E. Neale, who is also a professor of psychiatry and religion. In The Magic Mirror (2002) Robert refers to our everyday magical performances as life magic, and he offers an example of the parent holding a crying child, chanting: “It’s alright. That’s OK. It’s going to be alright” (10). These words are far more powerful than “Abracadabra!” Somehow, magically, this incantation soothes parent and child alike, and before long, they are all back to sleep. Building upon Robert Neale’s idea, I want to suggest that humans perform many of these life magics—spells and rituals, illusions and incantations—and that they play an indispensable part in a happy, healthy, and flourishing life.

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Nietzsche was the first philosopher to ask the then-scandalous question about whether some falsehoods might have higher life value than truths.3 Over a century later, there is no question: the answer is yes. In Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind (1989), psychologist Shelley E. Taylor argues that “normal human thought and perception is marked not by accuracy but by positive self-enhancing illusions about the self, the world, and the future” (7). To support her conclusion, Taylor draws on a wide range of empirical studies to identify a number of different life magics that we use. Taylor argues that there is a set of positive illusions about our self as a sort of hero in our lives. For example, humans think and say, “I did it”—that is, we tend to tell our personal histories in ways that selectively filter out failings and bring our contributions to the fore. Closely related, Taylor argues, is the power of positive thinking: “I can do it!” Well, maybe we can and maybe we can’t, but it is evident from empirical studies that if we really believe we can, it makes it far more likely that we will succeed. Taylor also writes about the health-giving illusions of control over our environment and the illusory notion that tomorrow will be pretty much like today. The reality is that tomorrow need not be like today—as, for example, the shock of 9/11 reminded us—but it is painful and debilitating to centralize the truth that our lives are precarious, unpredictable, and in many ways beyond our control. Although Taylor doesn’t make the explicit connection, she demonstrates that we are all engaged in everyday magic-making. There are many more examples of this life magic. Consider the baseball player’s ritual at the plate before receiving the pitch: he adjusts his gloves, taps his cleats, touches the outside of the plate with the tip of the bat, and takes two-and-a-half practice swings. This is a magical performance that casts a spell for calmness. Or consider the well-established transformative power of human contact—touching and cuddling—which Neale develops at some length in The Magic Mirror (10–11). Consider the array of secret rituals people perform in times of stress: pacing, deep breathing, praying. Consider too the magical behavior that people engage in while gambling, for example, blowing on the dice, making wishes, trusting intuitions. Consider the way a child’s beloved stuffed animal takes on a life and character of its own, often for the whole family—what Robert Neale calls the teddy bear illusion (“Illusions of the I”). Or consider the magic-making in our everyday perceptions: depth illusions, angle illusions, mirror phenomena, background indeterminacy, aspect dawning (“Is it a rabbit or a duck?”). As one quick example, I invite readers to set down the book for a moment and hold their hands out at arm’s length, in fists—except the index fingers should be pointing in toward each other about two inches apart. Now the

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readers should slowly move their hands closer to their eyes but keep the visual focus on the wall beyond. There it is: an extra little finger floating between the two fingers! This is an old illusion from children’s books of magic, but it usefully reminds us that reality is not exactly what we see. It reminds us that in the heart of our visual field, as an unthought known, is an overlooked yet constitutive zone of illusion. Everyday perception is itself a life magic performance. A final example I want to discuss is the magic of the movies. Every time we enjoy a film, we are performing a life magic. We experience the images on the screen in motion and depth. We feel the dizzying excitement of a battle scene or a chase. We are overcome with creepy terror at a scary scene. We are deeply affected by pleasure, sadness, or romance. Imagine someone next to us tapping our arm and saying: “You know it is only still pictures up there. Don’t believe it. It isn’t real.” After this happens twice, we might start screaming, “Stop it! Enjoy the movie!” Or more precisely, “You are ruining my magic-making!” Film watching is a performance of magic—something that can be discerned if we watch the audience rather than the screen: we will see bodies swaying in time, wrenched with emotion, in a self-induced mesmeric state. This example of movie magic underscores some things that are important generally about magic performance. For one thing, when we are plunged into a movie, we don’t truly believe the film is real—at least, I don’t. Instead—drawing on the epigraph by Robert Neale that I used to open this essay—I am making believe it is real. I am making believe in a deep and powerful way. If my bothersome companion really pressed me on it, I would say, “Of course, it is only still pictures up there,” or “Yes, maybe I can’t do it,” or “Yes, terrible, unpredictable, and uncontrollable things do happen,” or “Yes, my son’s teddy bear is just a lump of stuffing.” But the pressure to acknowledge it is trying to kill my life magic. It ruins my magical making-believe and the life-enhancing, health-producing, pleasurable experiences they promote. These everyday life magics are not mere delusions. They are not superstitions, as empiricists have typically called them. They are not mere deceptions that we would be better off without. On the contrary, try to imagine living without them. It would be a barren, joyless, abstract life indeed, because these utterly common, “unthought but known” magical acts yield wellbeing, pleasure, and success. They provide hope and calmness, they improve performance; many of them give love and make love in the world. In short, these examples of life magic are inextricable features of living experience and an indispensable part of living well.

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No wonder, then, that most humans, everywhere and at all times, have felt drawn to magic, consciously or not. No wonder that the magician is an ancient and universal archetype—the first card in the tarot deck. No wonder people seek out magical artists even though they use deception to create impossibilities. This is all because experiences of magic are a profound part of our daily lives and sensibilities. Twisting Aristotle’s famous phrase, I would assert that humans are at least as much the magical animal as the rational one.

STAGED MAGIC The earlier recognitions, I think, reflect back on the opening paradox. Given the depth and importance of our magical lives, why is magic so vigorously resisted? Why do people fail to recognize our life magics for what they are? (It is perfectly consistent but ironic that we seem to trick ourselves about our own tricks.) Why have these phenomenological facts and their implications eluded academic culture in general? In the face of these pervasive human phenomena, how has the strict system of hierarchical disciplinary binaries been able to sustain themselves—philosophy versus magic, religion versus magic, science versus magic? This important question cuts to the core of the psychology of self-deception and the politics of discipline formation. For example, as master magician (and former theology student) Eugene Burger has said, “It isn’t too far off the mark . . . to define magic as somebody else’s religion” (63; italics in original). A great deal could and should be said about the illegitimacies of these traditional binaries with regard to magic, and I suspect we would see—as Derrida has started to show with philosophy, particularly in his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1981)—that there is no shortage of magic-making in disciplines and practices that are allegedly free from it. For my purposes in this essay, it is clear enough that if these disciplinary oppositions to magic need to be reexamined, and if our everyday health and well-being depends on quotidian acts of magic, then it is time for us to think anew, and more rigorously, about the nature of magic itself and its meaning in our lives. A first thing this new study can reveal is an explanation for why most humans are fascinated (sometimes secretly so) by the theatrical art of magic, what Robert Neale refers to as stage magic. (I prefer to call it staged magic in order to stress that its character is performed rather than necessarily being “onstage.”) Taking up Neale’s ideas again, part of why we are drawn to magical artists is because they intentionally, artfully, perform magnified

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versions of the common life magic we already perform. Magicians also create experiences of the life magic we would like to perform. Again, good, compelling magical artists recreate the wonders we already perform and create experiences of those wonders we wish we could perform—wishes sometimes kept secret from ourselves (the unthought known). In this idea we encounter the hidden intertwining between ourselves and the magician. We find a reason for the fact that magic is universal and cross-cultural, perhaps the second oldest art form. We begin to understand the conflicted desire that marks our relation with it. Try as we might to reject magic through conscious or intellectual effort—through incantations about truth, rationality, or being grown up—our magical lives cannot be undone. We are magic makers at the core; it is constitutive of our perceptions, life experiences, and well-being. So we yearn for magic. We yearn for magical relief from suffering, confusion, or ignorance. We yearn for magical transformation of the mundane. We desire magical control over the forces beyond our control. We dream of magic; our dreams are magic. In all this, we are approaching the basic themes of staged magic. There are many such themes and styles, rich and resonant with our lives. Contrary to impoverished clichés of, say, rabbits and hats or ladies sawn in half, there is no single theme, no single magic, that is staged. Instead, there are, as Neale has also shown, “many magics.” Appreciating the multiple facets of staged magic requires that we eschew universal definition and instead plunge into the particulars. In other words, it requires that we elucidate what Wittgenstein might have called “magic-games”—our various “magicplays” that are connected by no universal property, but rather by a “family resemblance.”4 As a first modality, there is the theme and practice of magic as astonishing wonder, what the ancient Greeks called thauma. This is a style of magic-making I have explored at length elsewhere, in the essay “Ways of Wonder” (2001); it is the pursuit of magical moments that stupefy our senses and freeze our cognition. Mouth hanging open, chills up the back of the neck, eyes wide open, we exclaim, “No way! No way!” Indeed, one of the magics that some artists seek to stage is the experience of astonishment (thauma). Astonishing wonder is a disorienting experience, one that slips reality off its hinges, one that blows away our habitual notions and expectations about reality. Yet as I have argued, wide-eyed wonder is deeply pleasurable and health promoting. It is a high, delightful form of play to be surprised, to have a vacation from habituated concepts and structures of life. It is good for us to be reminded that we aren’t gods, that there are always mysteries outside the organizing boxes we use to make

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sense of the world and our lives. Humans want to wonder and seek out artists who can deliver it. This is one of the reasons that bad magic is so disappointing. Having said just this much allows me to unravel a couple of widespread, but false, assumptions about magic. When we recognize the magic game of astonishing wonder, we can understand why—contrary to common belief— young children do not enjoy magic. The world is already magical to them. We need to have a sufficiently stable sense of causality and constancy for the wonder-working magician to blow it all up, and this sense doesn’t typically start to develop in children until the age of six and beyond. No, wonder magic is for adults, the ones who forget to wonder and who get locked into habits of life and models of mind. Thus, given its complex dual dynamic— delightful and shattering—it is easy to understand why, if unthematized, wonder magic would become both secretly desired and feared. A second assumption is the notion that the experience of wonder is the same as being puzzled. This is one common way scientific thinkers (such as Aristotle) have sought to tame the beast: by making thauma a propaedeutic to rational knowledge.5 However, scholars and magicians alike have shown that the experiences are remarkably different. Being puzzled involves knowing that there is a solution and being inspired to apply effort to solve it. (We might think of the frame of mind that goes with solving a crossword puzzle or a tricky math problem.) But wonder—genuine astonishment—is the experience of the absence of a solution (“No way!”). It typically deflates the desire to explain in order to preserve the exhilaration of it (“I don’t even want to know how that was done!”). In my experience, theatrically impoverished magicians leave their audience feeling challenged and puzzled, but the best performers create extraordinary delight in the mystery. Max Maven, Jeff McBride, Tommy Wonder, Eugene Burger, Juan Tamariz, and René Lavand are all contemporary magicians who achieve this result with stunning regularity. “No way!” “Awesome!” Chills on your neck, gasps, and shudders—these are the residue of wonder magic. As a magical artist, I live for this kind of response, and I aim for it in many of the pieces I perform. As a human magic maker, I seek out such experiences myself because they are a source of ecstatic pleasure and interest in the world all around me. However, wonder work is only one practice or style of staged magic, and this was impressed on me several years ago when I met Teller. I introduced myself, and we started talking about magic and philosophy. I mentioned that I was keenly interested in magic as creating wonder. With a grin, he said, “Well, that’s one approach.” His response turned me upside down.

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I realized that another style and theme of magic exists, the one Penn & Teller specialize in: magic as reversal and disruption—what I call trickster magic. The trickster, like the magician, is an ancient, universal archetype, yet the trickster is subtly distinct from the magician. Tricksters are border crossers, transgressors by their very nature. They are playful types, with an overflowing abundance of good humor. They like to shake us up and break down our usual patterns and expectations. While the Magician is tarot card “1,” the Trickster is best represented by the Hanging Man, card “12.” Indeed, Tricksters invert things and turn us inside out and upside down. They are a breath of fresh air. And they are always out to confound priests, whoever and wherever they may be. In philosophy, Nietzsche is a trickster figure, as are Socrates and Derrida. In music, it is John Cage, with his four-and-a-half minutes of silence. In the stories of some Native American people, the trickster goes by the name of Coyote.6 Among magical artists, Penn & Teller are the best examples of the form. Penn & Teller started out as the bad boys of magic. They have been called exemplars of postmodern magic. In “Illusions about Illusions” (chapter 10), Robert Neale prefers to call them “the good news guys” because of their evangelical celebration of mystery play. Whatever we decide to call them, they continually present us with trickster magic. They break all the traditional rules of magic. They expose methods. They do the Cups and Balls with clear plastic cups. They confess to their trickery from the get-go and turn their deep skepticism about religion, mind readers, and psychic phenomena into entertaining, convention-bending routines. For example, in one of their signature pieces, Teller holds his breath in a water tank while Penn attempts to find an audience member’s signed playing card. After many mishaps—with cards flying all over the stage and Penn screaming at the participant—the water tank is turned around to show that Teller is holding the signed card, but he has drowned. The tank is wheeled off, dramatically ending the first act. Obviously, this is not how magic is supposed to work; it is not even how variety theater is supposed to work (with one of the stars dying at intermission). It is an explicit reversal of those traditions, a reversal with some surprise, yes, but much more discomfort and even death. To see trickster magic further and its distinctness from wonder work, I want to explore at some length Penn & Teller’s piece Honor Code (debuted 2001). Before the show, as the audience members file in to take their seats, they are invited on stage to vigorously examine two fairly large boxes and tops, a heavy wooden one and a sheer, solid Plexiglas one. There is nothing

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unusual to see. They are solid and utterly simple; obviously, there is no trickery. Already, the conventions have been reversed: the fourth wall is shattered; the audience is on stage with full freedom to examine the props. Later in the show, Penn refers the audience back to the boxes, which have remained in full view, and announces that Teller will be sealed inside the Plexiglas box, which will be sealed inside the wooden box, and that each member of the audience has an important decision to make. If they keep their eyes open, they will witness exactly how Teller magically escapes from these boxes. Or they can close their eyes during the procedure and remain astonished. So, Penn asks, what will it be? Keep your eyes open and be disenchanted, or keep them closed for an unforgettable mystery? What do we, as audience members at the magic show, want—enchantment or disenchantment? This is a delicious example of trickster magic: it reverses the agency of magic. Suddenly the audience members become responsible for their own epistemic state. Instead of the magician claiming mastery and receiving applause for his powers of illusion, this piece reminds the audience of their profound complicity in magic-making. After all, Penn & Teller, the magicians, are not doing anything secret on stage; the secret is completely available to anyone who chooses to know. What an interesting position for us to be in at a magic show! It makes me think about and decide whether I want the delightful, memorable experience of enchantment or the more deflating experience of knowing. Penn & Teller have had a long, successful career of creating trickster magic, and they show no sign of slowing down. Nonetheless, there are still other divergent magic games. One notable example is magic as the art of the con, or confidence magic. This theme and style has been a dominant force in twentieth-century magic, particularly in its flourishing subculture. It is a style of magic that is explicitly about cheating and gambling, with the magician operating not as wonder worker or trickster, but as sleight-ofhand artist. Part of the reason for the popularity of this style of magic is the mesmerizing influence of Dai Vernon (born David Frederick Wingfield Verner), considered by many to be the greatest magician of the twentieth century (Ben; Vernon). Vernon grew up in Ottawa, Canada, studying the techniques of card sharps before going on to a distinguished career as high-society entertainer in New York, and then becoming a master teacher at the Magic Castle in Hollywood for two generations of magicians. A disciple of sleightof-hand with playing cards—indeed, he considered gambler S. W. Erdnase’s The Expert at the Card Table his “Bible”—Vernon revolutionized what could

24 Lawrence Hass be done with them. He created countless new techniques and powerful tricks that quickly became standards. His memorable presentations were filled with the lexicon and lore of confidence men and poker cheats. Suddenly sleight-of-hand was not merely something done in secret. It was something openly discussed as part of the play. It is no exaggeration to say that Vernon’s influence on twentieth-century sleight-of-hand magic and card magic is staggering. Because Vernon himself was not a writer and was little concerned to receive credit for the countless things he created (which were often appropriated by others), the full extent of his legacy is yet to be revealed. Still, what we already know is enough for two lifetimes of accolades. However, the presence of a great artist is only a part of the story. Another reason the magical art of the con has flourished in the last century is that gambling, cheating, and swindling seems to resonate with something deep in the American experience. Herman Melville published The ConfidenceMan in 1857. This extraordinary novel is about the complex, fragile epistemology at work in the art and act of confidence. Who really has this shaky thing called “confidence”? How is it developed and sustained? What tricks and illusions are used to build and then trade on our confidence? To extend this, what tricks and illusions have been used (on indigenous populations and others) to build the American Dream? Further, what magical confidences are at work in the paper money standard and the stock market? And, of course, we know that “a sucker is born every minute,” and “if you build it, they will come.” It is no accident that Las Vegas sprouted on American soil and has flourished through a multitude of cons, both dimly perceived and confidently ignored. Given the interaction in American culture among illusion, confidence, and wealth, it is no surprise that we are drawn to the staged magic of the con: gambling exposés, demonstrations of secret cheating techniques, the psychology of the shell game, and the switchbacks of three-card monte. In the hands of contemporary magicians such as Ricky Jay, Darwin Ortiz, and Steve Forte, this world is endlessly entertaining. This is the world we glimpse in films such as The Sting, House of Games, and The Hustler. In so glimpsing, we build confidence—confidence in our own ability not to be fooled, whatever that is worth. Another distinctive theme and style of staged magic is the escape. This form is best exemplified by Harry Houdini (Kalush and Sloman; Silverman). Young Ehrich Weiss, one of seven children of a struggling rabbi, was locked away in Appleton, Wisconsin, but escaped, to rise to a level of worldwide celebrity never previously achieved. It is generally acknowledged that Houdini was our first superstar. Superstars are usually the ephemera

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of popular culture—here today, gone tomorrow—but not Houdini. One hundred years later, we still celebrate and commemorate this amazing man in Broadway musicals, in a parade of books, and on postage stamps. We cannot seem to be done with this iconic figure. What is this all about? Houdini started out as the Modern Monarch of Mystery and then became the King of Cards. He played in dime museums and medicine shows. He was a jack-of-all-magical-trades. He would try anything for a buck, and in November 1895, he allowed an audience member to place a pair of borrowed handcuffs on him before performing his Substitution Trunk escape (known as Metamorphosis). After that, there was no looking back. “Bring on the handcuffs!” his advertisements cried. Bring on the chains, the shackles, the straitjackets, and jail cells! Bring it all on—the most fiendish constraints that can be devised—and he will escape. The subtext is not subtle: an immigrant, dispossessed, working the streets and edges of poverty, has nothing but his wits and physical strength. Time and again, he sets himself free and triumphs. This is the power and promise of escape magic. In recent times, we find a strange ambiguity that compromises the widespread appeal of physical escape, at least with intelligent audiences. It often seems to be more sideshow than magic. Or if it is presented as magic, it is predictable: “They always get out of the straitjacket, don’t they?” (Well . . . yes.) If it is really dangerous, it is just creepy, like something in a sideshow, but after seeing all these straitjackets, water torture cells, handcuffs, and episodes of fake danger all over TV, it feels inauthentic. Perhaps the problem has to do with the absence of breathtaking successors to Houdini who could expand the form (although David Blaine is giving it a go; as is New York escapologist Thomas Solomon). It is equally true that to those Americans who are reasonably well off and well fed, who are distant from the struggles of immigrant roots, the physical forms of escape feel less compelling. For those fortunate Americans, this form of staged magic resonates less with lived hopes and fears. Nonetheless, I want to stress some of the structures that yield this affluence: the long working hours in repetitive jobs, the lack of creativity that such jobs enforce, the overreliance on computers and e-mail, the lengthy commutes, and the fracturing of families through overwork and divorce. In short, there is still extraordinary resonance to escape magic when it is directed at a psychological level, such as the level explored in some of the current work by Criss Angel, David Blaine, and Jeff McBride. No discussion of magic games would be complete without discussing the staged magic of the mind—that is, prediction, clairvoyance, mind reading,

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psychokinesis (metal bending), speaking to the dead, seeing through and beyond. This magical theme also has a long history in the American experience. It goes back at least to the popular spiritualist movement of the 1840s. Any sufficient history of American show business, starting with early variety theater, then later vaudeville, chautauqua, the large theater circuits, radio, TV, and so forth, must pay special attention to the weird interrelationships between the mind magic and the entertainment business. For example, we have the Davenport Brothers touring the theater circuits with their Spirit Cabinet, Dunninger reading minds on the radio, and John Edward talking to the dead on his weekly prime-time TV program. Are these things show business or reality? In no other area of magic do we see such profound ambiguity, such blurring between theater and truth. Part of this is the long history of many mind magicians making claims about the reality of what they are doing. However claims alone would not be sufficient; audiences must also have a special vulnerability to the staged magic of the mind. The vexed dynamics around mind magics—ambiguity, blurring, tension—is rooted in the fact that such magics feel most authentic to people. Psychologically and phenomenologically, they touch a place where people lose their ability to make believe and seek to really believe. One result of this credulity has been a countermovement of debunking by other magicians. Starting with Kellar (who, after serving as their advance man for four years, exposed the Davenport Brothers’s Spirit Cabinet on stage for the rest of his career), continuing with David P. Abbott (who published a definitive exposé of séance in 1907), and Houdini’s late campaign against spiritualism, this tradition of magician debunkers flourishes today in the hands of James Randi, Jamy Ian Swiss, and Penn & Teller. Nonetheless, these efforts have not reduced the appeal of mind magic, nor have they stemmed the tide of claimants. If anything, this style of magic continues to grow. Why? What is its appeal? Part of the answer has to do with the strange ontological status of thinking itself. Our minds, our thoughts, our intuitive perceptions are already so uncanny, so apparently nonmaterial, that it is natural for us to wonder what if about them: “What if I could get a glimpse of the future and win the lottery?” “What if I could see what is happening in the other room and draw a picture of it?” “What if I could turn on the TV without having to get up?” In this sense, the staged magic of the mind explores a domain of human life (i.e., thought, thinking) that remains badly understood. Even in our age of cognitive studies, as we learn how the brain works and processes its energies, thinking remains elusive. It seems astonishing that a chunk of tissue could have evolved to do it. Perhaps in some future era it will no longer seem so

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alien, but for now, our minds, our subtle perceptions and intuitions, remain a final frontier. The novelty of mind, however, is not sufficient to explain the profound grip and confusion of mind magics. For that, we also need desire, and the desire that plays out here is one of the deepest: the desire for intimate contact with others. In a fundamental sense, each of us is alone: we live in our own skin, we see from our own perspective, we think our own thoughts. Although we can touch, hold, love, and caress others, that proximity is never quite enough. That proximity is not sufficient to know the other’s thoughts, perceptions, and secrets. It is not sufficient to guarantee that they will never leave us; in fact, death (at least) guarantees that they will. No wonder we are so interested in staged magics of the mind! A performer appears to read my deepest, most secret thoughts. Another performer appears able to tell me what will happen to me before it does. Still yet another performer allows me a chance to speak with my deceased sister. By putting all these elements together, we can uncover the syllogism at work in audiences of mind magic—a syllogism that is clearly fallacious: Premise 1: These profoundly desired things are impossible, yet they happened. Premise 2: Thinking is distinct from matter and mysterious. Conclusion: These phenomena must be real—musn’t they? So, it seems, this is how mind make-believe slides into “I believe.” I hasten to add that this vulnerability isn’t the result of stupidity or a lack of education. I can’t count the number of highly intelligent people and PhDs who over the years have professed belief to me. On the contrary, it is about the depths of desire for magic of the mind. Desire brings us to a final theme or practice of staged magic: the magical world of rebirth. To be sure, performers frequently create the experience of healing what is injured, restoring what is broken, repairing what is torn apart, resurrecting what is dead. I have no doubt that this is one of our deepest desires and dreams. Who doesn’t truly, ultimately, wish for health and long life? We want to be well. We want to be whole. We do not want to die. When our lives are in rubble or someone we love has perished, it seems utterly impossible to go on. The magical artist reminds us, time and again, that rebirth is possible. This theme of rebirth is one of the most important ones in the family of magic games. The earliest accounts of magicians feature some version of what Rogan Taylor has called the “death and resurrection show”: the destruction

28 Lawrence Hass of an animal or child that is soon followed by its miraculous rebirth. These are among the earliest accounts, and also the most widespread. As Taylor shows, such magical performances are found across diverse cultures and performers, from the court magicians of kings, to shamans in Siberia, to street performers in India. In much twentieth-century European–American magic, the theme of rebirth has been curiously flattened; the subtext has somehow gotten lost. We see things such as the Cut and Restored Rope, the Broken and Restored Cigarette, the Torn and Restored Playing Card, the Torn and Restored Dollar Bill, the Broken and Restored Pencil. When living things have been involved—for example, the Cut and Restored Woman, or Sawing a Lady in Two—many Western performers show little sensitivity to the visceral, psychological structures at play (“Let’s cut ‘er in half and move on to the next one!”). But when performed well and fully (say, by David Blaine with a pigeon on his second television special in 1998), and even when performed weakly, death and renewal are among the most resonant themes for magicians to stage.

CONCLUSION Many magics are staged, each with its own resonance in our culture. The few I have discussed here are astonishing wonder, trickster reversals, the art of the con, escape, magics of the mind, and the theater of rebirth. I have also sought to establish the substance in the work of staging them. The magical artist, far from performing superficial or trivial tricks, reflects our own deepest abilities and desires as magic makers. Magic is not outside of our lives and practices for knowing the world, but there amidst them, shaping them from within. If there is a danger relating to magic, it has to do with insisting on a false binary that divides magic from the things that really matter, because as we have seen, life magic-making and staged magic-making tap into deep-seated psychological needs. They are the site of pleasurable, sometimes subterranean play with the impossible limits that confront us. Indeed, mystery artist Max Maven has argued that it is certainly possible to conceive of a culture without magic or mystery in it; the problem is that such a society would be insane (15). The challenge, then, is for us to carry out what has been resisted by deep, ingrained habits of pedantry and pedagogy: a concentrated effort—in philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, performance studies, and religion—to study the nature and extent of our magical lives. This essay may sketch out a framework for such study, but it is only

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a beginning. For example, I am keenly aware that my analysis has scarcely touched on the cultural sources, influences, and implications of our magical performances. Considerable attention must be paid to the ways that magic performance (as with all embodied or aesthetic performance) perpetuates or confounds cultural meanings and values. Although they go beyond the thesis and limits of this essay, these two areas of focus are extremely important and will be explored in several other essays in this collection; no understanding of magic could be complete without this kind of analysis. I do hope, however, as the new interdisciplinary field of magic studies proceeds, that scholars remain alive to the phenomenological and psychological structures that I seek to uncover in this essay, because without them—without the experiential dynamics they illuminate—our life magic might once again lose its magic and become mere data.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This essay has benefited enormously from comments and suggestions offered by the performance studies–magic research group at Muhlenberg College. Special thanks to Mary Lawlor and Karen Hellekson for their many suggestions that have improved the expression of my ideas. I am indebted to Lewis Hyde for referring me to Melville’s novel, The Confidence-Man, and for provoking my thoughts on this subject. I am thankful to Ruth Setton for conversations about the desires of mind magic, which helped me articulate these ideas. Above all, I am deeply appreciative and indebted to the work of my friend Robert E. Neale. Bob’s many writings and wonderful creations have inspired me in many ways.

NOTES 1. For a recent review of the evidence and expert opinion, see McKeague, “The Mystery of Beni Hassan,” 52–55. 2. See Clarke, The Annals of Conjuring, Chapter 1. 3. See, e.g., Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: “For all the value that the true, the truthful, the selfless may deserve, it would still be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life might have to be ascribed to deception. . . . Maybe!” (§2, p. 10). 4. Wittgenstein’s rejection of universalizing definition in favor of a sensitive articulation of the differentiated yet overlapping complexities of family resemblance is found throughout part 1 of his landmark work, Philosophical Investigations.

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5. For example, Aristotle famously says in Metaphysics: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize” (982b 10–30, Ross translation). Oddly enough, given his early vituperance, Plato too is moved to such sentiment in the later Theatetus: “The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher” (155d, Cornford translation). 6. For a wonderful celebration of the trickster archetype and several of its manifestations in American culture, see Hyde, Trickster Makes the World.

WORKS CITED Abbott, David P. “Behind the Scenes with the Mediums.” In House of Mystery: The Magic Science of David P. Abbott. Vol. 1. Ed. Teller and Todd Karr. Los Angeles: Miracle Factory, 2005. 23–264. Aristotle. Metaphysics. Trans. W. D. Ross. In The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941. 689–926. Ben, David. Dai Vernon: A Biography, Artist—Magician—Muse, 1894–1941. Toronto: Squash, 2006. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Burger, Eugene. “Stories of the Origin of Magic.” Burger and Neale, 57–82. Burger, Eugene, and Robert E. Neale. Magic and Meaning. Seattle: Hermetic Press, 1995. Clarke, Sidney W. The Annals of Conjuring. Ed. Edwin A. Dawes and Todd Karr. Seattle: Miracle Factory, 2001. Derrida, Jacques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Disseminations. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 61–171. Erdnase, S. W. The Expert at the Card Table. Originally published 1902. Mineola: Dover, 1995. Grauer, Neil A. “The Wizard of Odd.” Smithsonian June 2004: 108–12. Hass, Lawrence. “Ways of Wonder: Philosophy and the Art of Magic.” The Linking Ring January 2001: 53–59. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY P, 1996. Hyde, Lewis. Trickster Makes the World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: North Point Press, 1999. Kalush, William, and Larry Sloman. The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero. New York: Atria Books, 2006. Maven, Max. “Ennui Are the World.” Magic November 1991: 15. McKeague, Jim. “The Mystery of Beni Hassan.” Magic March 1997: 52–55. Melville, Herman. The Confidence Man: His Masquerade. New York: Penguin, 1991. Neale, Robert E. “Illusions about Illusions.” The Linking Ring May 2001: 47–56. ———. “Illusions of the I.” Unpublished essay. ———. “Many Magics.” Burger and Neale, 173–189.

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Neale, Robert E., with David Parr. The Magic Mirror. Seattle: Hermetic Press, 2002. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. Plato. Republic. Trans. G. M. A. Grube. Rev. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992. ———. Plato’s Theaetetus. Trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. Silverman, Kenneth. Houdini!!!: The Career of Ehrich Weiss. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Taylor, Rogan. The Death and Resurrection Show: From Shaman to Superstar. London: Anthony Blond, 1985. Taylor, Shelly E. Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1989. Vernon, Dai. He Fooled Houdini: Dai Vernon, A Magical Life. Ed. Bruce Cervon and Keith Burns. Tahoma, CA: L&L Publishing, 1992. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1953.

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2. The Family Romance of Modern Magic: Contesting Robert-Houdin’s Cultural Legacy in Contemporary France Graham M. Jones

Graham M. Jones is a Haarlow-Cotsen postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, where he is also a lecturer in the Council of the Humanities. Trained as an anthropologist, between 2003 and 2006, Jones conducted research on the culture of the magic world in contemporary France. In this chapter, Jones investigates the legacy of the great French magician and putative “ father of modern magic,” JeanEugène Robert-Houdin. Jones blends ethnography and literary analysis to account for the lasting influence of Robert-Houdin’s memoir, A Conjuror’s Confessions. Robert-Houdin continues to appeal, Jones demonstrates, because of his success in articulating persistent anxieties about the aesthetic status of magic and the social status of magicians. Why does this text continue to shape the world of entertainment magic in France and beyond? Better that you honor your profession than your profession honor you. —Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin

“I

hold Robert-Houdin personally responsible for all the crap that passes for magic today!” Raphael proclaimed, looking me straight in the eye as he unleashed ultimate blasphemy. Imagine a jazz soloist blaming Louis Armstrong for the decline of improvised music or an anthropologist laying responsibility for decadence in ethnographic methods at Malinowski’s tent-flaps. I had before me what appeared to be just such an apostasy. Magicians around the world have long revered RobertHoudin as the “Father of Modern Magic,” a spiritual paternity reaffirmed

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twenty years after his death by the adoring young American magician Eric Weiss’s choice of the Italianized stage-name “Houdini.” Among magicians in his native France, Robert-Houdin generally still inspires something verging on religious awe. With his oversized earth-toned sweater, thick beard, and sandy hair pulled back into a long ponytail, Raphael could have easily been an iconoclastic student reflexively scoffing at a symbol of establishment culture. Yet few magicians today are closer to the establishment than he is. At a mere twenty three, he was a founding director of an acclaimed performing arts ensemble whose avant-garde productions incorporating magic, juggling, and mime had garnered generous backing from France’s stodgy Ministry of Culture. As part of my anthropological research on the social world of contemporary French magic, we were having lunch together in order to discuss the promising steps he was taking toward realizing a dream dear to several generations of French magicians: creating a state-sponsored national magic conservatory. With an intellectual’s fluent erudition (he expressed some misgivings about my reading of Lévi-Strauss), Raphael had quickly emerged as one of the savviest culture brokers in the French magic world. So why attack magic’s greatest cultural hero—and a native son at that? “I know what I’m saying is a bit incendiary,” he admitted. “It’s just that magic today is not an art, it’s just not artistic. And it’s not artistic because RobertHoudin’s vision of magic wasn’t artistic.” Raphael was holding a distorting mirror up to the past as I, and practically every magician everywhere, saw it—leaving key features generally intact but inverting, rearranging, them. The result was an almost unrecognizable vision of magic history with Robert-Houdin cast as arch malefactor rather than messiah. According to French magicians’ catechism, Robert-Houdin gave magic its “deed of distinction” (lettres de noblesse), transforming a crass fairground amusement into a refined art form, elevating it “from the street to the stage,” and making France “the birthplace of modern magic” (le berceau de la magie moderne). Phrases such as these frequently recur in conversations about Robert-Houdin, constituting a tacit party line that I, for one, had been happy enough to toe. Even Raphael agreed that Robert-Houdin reinvented magic in a form more palatable to nineteenth-century bourgeois taste, purifying it of associations with the popular, the carnivalesque, the occult, and the criminal; he simply considered the resulting performative product commercially “safe” but culturally vacuous entertainment—not art. Raphael’s assessment, while debatable, raises a substantial question: how have articulations of class and culture shaped the expressive idiom of modern Western magic, and why

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does Robert-Houdin’s image of the magician as an elegant upper-class gentleman in sober evening attire still retain so much resonance today? In this essay, by focusing on the textual performance of class identity (as well as gender and race) in his autobiographical writing, I explore how RobertHoudin achieved cultural respectability as a magician—an achievement that has made him both an object of patriarchal adoration and patricidal repudiation. Robert-Houdin was born in 1805 and died in 1871, having performed professionally for little more than eight years. Happily, the period of my fieldwork coincided with the 2005 bicentenary of his birth and throughout France magicians were celebrating his cultural progenitorship. Streets were renamed in his honor; the presence of his elderly great grandson André Keime Robert-Houdin at one such ceremony I attended in the industrial city of St-Etienne made the occasion particularly moving. The magic museum in Robert-Houdin’s native Blois hosted a series of lectures and a magic contest inviting participants to imagine a twenty-first-century performance by Robert-Houdin. The Parisian Musée de la Magie undertook extensive renovations in preparation for an unprecedented exhibit of Robert-Houdin artifacts featuring some superbly restored automata. The metropole also played host to an unprecedented European convention of magic collectors, with a particular focus on magic before Robert-Houdin. “How could we fully appreciate the Master and the advances he brought to the Art of Magic,” the convocational statement questioned rhetorically, “if we didn’t have information about the repertoires of the magicians who preceded and who followed him?” Most of the over one hundred participants, many from as far away as Australia and the United States, made a daylong pilgrimage to Robert-Houdin’s gravesite and former residence, The Priory. On November 26, 2005, the Fédération Française des Artistes Prestidigitateurs, the French national magic association, organized a state-sanctioned “National Magic Day,” encouraging its fifteen hundred members to give charitable performances throughout the country to “help raise awareness of the Art of Magic” (sensibiliser le public à l’art de la magie), as one of the event’s organizers told me. In preparation, they printed thousands of jaunty “J’ j la magie!” stickers and the informative pamphlet “Who was Robert-Houdin?” Lamenting the too-frequent confusion between the nineteenth-century French conjuror and his twentieth-century American namesake, the pamphleteers minced no words: Robert-Houdin developed a new conception of magic performance and for that . . . every magician owes him a debt of gratitude. He remains a worldwide

36 Graham M. Jones point of reference, perhaps the point of reference . . . Robert-Houdin laid the foundations of today’s magic through his creativity, his modernity, his conception of performance and staging, and with his pioneering tricks and routines.

Such statements, characteristic of these commemorations, simultaneously reaffirm the universality of magic as an international tradition, while insinuating a nationalistic claim about France’s unique historical role in its development. Indeed, Robert-Houdin’s contribution to global magic culture is, in France, a source of national pride—one that has gained rather than lost significance as other countries (not least of which the United States) have asserted leadership within the field. History may prove 2005’s most enduring tribute to Robert-Houdin a literary event: the much-anticipated publication of the final installment of a multivolume biography by Christian Fechner, a French movie mogul, himself a magician of tremendous distinction. Fechner contends that “Robert-Houdin elaborated the golden rules of magic, untouched by time, and recognized by every great artist ever since” (2005a, 14). This conception of magic, Fechner states, can be summed up in two words, naturalism and modernity, and expresses itself in “elegance of presentation, purism, and the absence of any obviously specialized props” (16). Over the years, Fechner has demonstrated his fidelity to Robert-Houdin’s magical vision through collection, scholarship, and performative emulation. In 1979, his application of what he considers Robert-Houdin’s “timeless” principles earned him two of magic’s most prestigious awards: the World Championship in Stage Illusion and the World Championship in Invention (both conferred at the triennial congress of the International Federation of Magic Societies, or FISM). In the following account, I rely heavily on Fechner’s painstaking biographical research—a monument to one man’s unflagging passion and another’s undying allure. I admit that when I began researching magic in France, I naively considered all this apparently hagiolatrous attention to Robert-Houdin a “folkloric” distraction from contemporary processes of cultural production. One must not underestimate, however, the overwhelming importance of history as a source of cultural legitimacy in France (Rogers). Just as they seemed fixated on the accomplishments of a magician long dead, I sometimes felt that participants in my study would have found a historian’s attentions infinitely preferable to an ethnographer’s. When they, like clockwork, asked about the place of Robert-Houdin in my research, I explained with growing frustration that although I was hoping to address the unique history of magic in France (after all, the birthplace of modern magic), I was

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primarily interested in the practice, experience, and vision of contemporary conjurors. With time, however, I came to appreciate that the figure of Robert-Houdin serves present-day magicians as a conceptual polestar for situating magic in a broader cultural landscape, as a model for their own continued self-fashioning, and as a basis for their projects of community building. In this essay, I explore the historical genesis of Robert-Houdin’s unifying magical legacy, as well as some of the enduring cultural tensions it belies. Most French magicians agree that Robert-Houdin’s career marked a major cultural watershed, a generative moment in which magic assumed its present-day form. Still, most would also agree that in the twenty-first century, few people in France consider magic an art and magicians artists, regardless of what Robert-Houdin may have accomplished. Did, as Raphael seemed to suggest, Robert-Houdin’s success establish a stifling precedent that has hindered the emergence of an artistic avant-garde in magic? Or has neglect of the timeless principles Robert-Houdin enumerated and enacted led, as Christian Fechner implies, to the genre’s gradual decline into cultural irrelevance? And why all this fuss about “art” in the first place? To answer these questions, I turn to the autobiographical text in which RobertHoudin staked out his intertwining (and inseparable) claims to originality and respectability—the rhetorical bedrock on which he built his reputation. Ultimately, I will argue that, regardless of his artistic accomplishments, as a writer Robert-Houdin sensitized future magicians to connections between the cultural legitimacy of magic and their social status as performers. As we shall see, by articulating this nexus of status and value, Robert-Houdin assured his longevity as an iconic cultural progenitor.

THE UR-TEXT OF MODERN MAGIC It is difficult to distinguish Robert-Houdin’s impact as a performer on the history of magic from the indelible mark he left as a writer on the historiography of magic. His technical and dramaturgical influences incontestably suffuse the magic of subsequent generations. Contemporaneous imitators ran rampant, while legitimate successors—including, most famously, Georges Méliès—continued to perform his repertoire until the closing of his Paris theater in 1920. Today we still can admire the beauty and ingenuity of the props and automata Robert-Houdin left behind, and his literary output includes a seductively titled exposé of cardsharpers’ techniques, How to Win at Every Game (1861), and a book many consider

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the first comprehensive primer on the art of conjuring, How to Become a Wizard (1868). But it is Robert-Houdin’s extraordinary 1858 autobiography, Confidences d’un prestidigitateur—literally, A Conjuror’s Confessions— that remains the definitive objectification and crowning achievement of a career.1 Given the cultural prominence of these memoirs and the numerous literary adaptations, historical biographies and, more recently, films they have inspired, it is safe to say that this ingenious text is largely responsible for mediating Robert-Houdin’s imposing legacy. While I will mention in passing some of Robert-Houdin’s technical and performative contributions to the art of magic, I am more concerned with exploring what he has meant to magicians, particularly in France, as a literary image and what they, through their various readings and renderings, have made him mean. I contend that Robert-Houdin’s emergence as an enduring, but not always unifying, symbol among magicians is directly connected to his autobiography’s underlying cultural logic: “logic” because the memoirs comprise an argument about the author’s role in elevating the status of magic; “cultural” because this argument draws heavily on values, representations, and motifs still resonant today. Ultimately, while RobertHoudin was certainly a groundbreaking performer, I think he has continued to appeal to French magicians as a foundational figure primarily because of his success as a writer in articulating persistent anxieties about the cultural status of magic and the social status of magicians. Written after his retirement from the professional stage in 1854, the Confessions are a meditation on the meaning of a career, animated by Robert-Houdin’s desire to establish the magician as a respectable figure and magic as a respectable profession in distinctively modern terms. Recent readings have been especially attuned to Robert-Houdin’s literary assimilation of the magician to the romantic model of the creative artist. For example, Fechner argues that Robert-Houdin’s “major obsession, the goal of his entire life was to give a brilliant and respectable image to his art, and to raise the status of the conjuror to that of the great painters, sculptors, or musicians of his time” (2002, v2, 189). Contemporary readings that emphasize the category of art as the ultimate measure of cultural distinction reflect the particular anxieties of present-day French magicians, but may obscure Robert-Houdin’s at least equal preoccupation with establishing his bona fides as an inventor and man of science. Participation in scientific activity was central to nineteenth-century French notions of bourgeois masculinity. During this period, “science, as both a discursive field and a realm of social practice, was capable of making bourgeois manhood appear a solid, homogenous unity set in opposition to the more frivolous occupations of

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women and noblemen” (Harrison 64). To harness the legitimizing prestige of science, Robert-Houdin, both in print and on stage, drew attention to his technological savvy as an inventor and craftsman, his prescient applications of electricity, and his dedication to pure research, especially in the field of optics. By combining these tropes of art and science, Robert-Houdin narratively refashioned magic from a relatively anonymous folk tradition mired in out-of-date techniques into a modern profession propelled forward by striving individual talent. In so doing, he induced magicians to think in new ways about progress as central to the vitality of their art. The influence of Robert-Houdin’s literary efforts is manifest in the testimonials of readers such as Bernard Bilis, a jovial middle-aged card ace, beloved of French television audiences for his regular appearances on the popular Saturday-night program Le plus grand cabaret du monde: It was one of my brother’s high school friends who showed me my first magic tricks and gave me a copy of Robert-Houdin’s memoirs when I was around 10. I was transported into one of those extraordinary worlds—a mixture of real life, adventure, fiction—where you follow the hero’s transformation through the pursuit of his passion. The book made me dream like a Jules Verne or a Dumas, all the while introducing me to the world of magic into which I was taking my first tentative steps; the book gave me the will to continue down that path; it showed me the inherent nobility of our art; it taught me that one needs perseverance, hard work, and passion . . . Beyond his creative genius . . . he knew how to produce an image of himself and of his art. If he knew how to get the most out of his art, even more, he knew how to defend and enrich it, to make it better known, and to elevate it in every way, bringing it even more prestige.

Even if subsequent experience and rereading may inform Bilis’s account of his first encounter with the Confessions, he nevertheless calls our attention to features of Robert-Houdin’s narrative that make it a seemingly inexhaustible source of inspiration for magicians. In the following pages, I will consider some of these features, exploring the rhetoric this sophisticated text deploys in order to cement the author’s legacy as a seminal figure in magic and the first magician to achieve cultural legitimacy on bourgeois terms. In a reading inspired by my conversations with contemporary French magicians, I will focus, in particular, on RobertHoudin’s complementary textual strategies of mythologizing the figure of the magician; historicizing magic; rendering his own performances as revolutionary; and, finally, sociologizing spectatorship. In the concluding sections, I address some issues raised by the reception of this text in France and beyond.

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MYTHOLOGIZING THE MAGICIAN From its title alone, Robert-Houdin’s Confessions extend the titillating promise of secrets disclosed, while portending canny deceptions, the conjuror’s stock-in-trade. The author proves a magician to the last, liberally weaving picturesque fictions into what appears a predominantly factual narrative. The preface alerts the reader to the use of literary artifice, describing the memoirs as a “continuation of the performances of yesteryear in a new form” with “the reader as an audience, the volume as a stage” (Robert-Houdin, 1995, 22). The parallelism between the theatrical performance of magic and the writerly performance of biography is a key feature of the text and of Robert-Houdin’s literary self-fashioning more broadly. One of the “tricks” this allows him to perform is reconciling the Romantic myth of creative individualism with bourgeois codes of social respectability and modesty (Gerson). The resulting portrait is of a paradoxical (and not altogether believable) figure who dutifully strives to domesticate a talent inappropriate for someone with his class pretensions, just as providence conspires to reveal it. The Confessions begins with Robert-Houdin’s childhood in Blois, a midsized city to the south of Paris. Born scion to a family of clockmakers, the young hero expresses an early penchant for mechanical crafts. However, his father, a well-meaning provincial patriarch enamored of the social mobility that a white-collared career would afford his son, sends the boy to a boarding school rather than taking him on as an apprentice. A principal conceit of the early part of the narrative is the boy’s filial struggle to conform to his father’s (and, metonymically, bourgeois society’s) expectations despite a troubling obsession with mechanical marvels. After graduating from high school, he gets a job clerking for a notary where his duties include tending a cage of canaries. He quickly modernizes the antiquated aviary, adding automated amenities and clockwork doohickeys to entertain the birds, whose physical imprisonment seems to parallel his own spiritual captivity. This symbolism is not lost on the wise notary, who finally persuades RobertHoudin’s father to let the boy pursue an apprenticeship in clockmaking. Eager to supplement his hands-on training with background reading, Robert-Houdin visits a local book dealer who absentmindedly mistakes a volume on scientific and magical recreations for a work on clockmaking. “How often have I given thanks for this providential mistake, without which I would have doubtless remained a provincial clockmaker,” the magician muses (Robert-Houdin, 1995, 58). When he unwraps his purchase at home, Robert-Houdin finds in his hands the keys to an untold world of

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wonder. The reader can almost hear clarions of Annunciation. Still, it is difficult to believe that a young man with Robert-Houdin’s interests would not have deliberately partaken of the abundant magic literature of his day (see Stafford). Whatever the case, in magic Robert-Houdin discovers a perfect fit between his love of things mechanical and his thirst for the marvelous. By the time his journeyman’s tour of France leads him to a master clockmaker’s shop in Tours, he is a proficient entertainer in polite company, “never missing an occasion to show off [his] little society talents” (67). But fate is at work within the narrative to propel his ascent to stardom. The most contentious episode of the Confessions begins when, after dining with his master’s family, the young journeyman succumbs to a nasty case of food poisoning. Bedridden for days, he fears himself near death and, in the hope of seeing his own parents one last time, sneaks from the master’s house in a febrile haze. He takes a buggy, but when the jostling proves too much for his convalescent stomach, flings himself into a ditch. After languishing in delirium for several days, he eventually comes to in the opulent carriage of an aristocratic magician errant Count Edmond de Grisy, stage name: Torrini. For mysterious reasons, Torrini shows paternal solicitude to the RobertHoudin and nurses him back to health. Later, Torrini reluctantly explains his unusually strong interest in the sick boy: after fleeing the French Revolution to Italy, the young nobleman went on to become a distinguished doctor. A performance by the renowned magician Pinetti sparked his interest in conjuring. His success as an amateur led to a bitter rivalry with the jealous Pinetti, locking the two men in a struggle to destroy each other. When Pinetti finally retreated to Russia, Torrini found himself enthralled by “the intoxication of the crowd’s applause” (132) and an opulent lifestyle of proto-celebrity. But with the passage of time, his star began to fade. Eager to reinvigorate an outmoded act, he concocted a “William Tell” routine, in which his son was to catch a bullet fired by a spectator. The new trick promised to jumpstart a flagging career until Torrini’s carelessness resulted in the boy’s gruesome death on stage. In Robert-Houdin, the emotionally wrecked Torrini sees not only the resemblance of his own son, but also the prospect of redemption. Prudently, Robert-Houdin does not mention his own enthusiasm for magic, but his eyes ultimately give him away. When Torrini stops to perform at a country fair (his ingenious carriage transforms into a small theater), the magician notices that the boy is impervious to misdirection, the magician’s technique of guiding the spectator’s gaze away from sleights of hand. Robert-Houdin apprentices himself to Torrini, learning the principles

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of showmanship from a seasoned professional. Later when the carriage capsizes and Torrini is badly injured, Robert-Houdin volunteers to perform his master’s act in a donated theater in order to raise money. The show is an astounding success. The young conjuror’s baptismal performance on the professional stage comes as a gesture of dutiful—even filial—self-sacrifice. Magic historians have disagreed about the veracity of the Torrini episode. For many years, it was read so uncritically that a number of authors, deferring to Robert-Houdin’s authority, discussed Torrini as an important figure in the history of magic. Then in 1943, Jean Chavigny, a historian from Blois, published a biography drawing on testimony from Robert-Houdin’s descendants to argue that Torrini was a fictional character contrived to add intrigue to the narrative. Still many magic collectors persisted in their belief in Torrini, Fechner first among them. Finally, in 2002, even he relented: “I long . . . hoped to find proof that would finally confirm the brilliant career of this mythical artist . . . [but] I am now inclined to believe that this narrative was formed to correspond to the work’s various requirements” (2002, v1, 48). According to Fechner’s revised reading, Torrini’s primary role is to provide Robert-Houdin—who very well may have cut his teeth as a showman traveling with an unsavory lot of mountebanks such as those he depicts in intimate detail in chapter seventeen of the original French edition—with a respectable teacher harmonious with “the moral and social criteria of the time.” Viewing Torrini as a literary device allows for a better understanding of the ways in which the narrative functions to elevate the cultural status of magic and social status of the magician. In Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist, art theorists Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz point out that “surrogate or spiritual parentage” is a common feature of artists’ biographies, a strategy for giving a social account of exceptional talent (35). Indeed, Robert-Houdin explicitly attributes inspiration for his own artistic innovations and aesthetic refinements to Torrini. But while Torrini has many winning, romantic qualities, he is far from a moral exemplar. He is, rather, a tragic figure driven by hubris to his own ruin. His moral flaws— complacency, prodigality, and vanity—make him an aristocratic foil to the characteristically bourgeois Robert-Houdin, himself industrious, prudent, and frugal. At the same time, the affiliation with Torrini allows the petit bourgeois social climber to acquire the transferred cultural capital of an aristocratic patron. By fashioning his own artistic patron and precursor, and denying virtually all other influences, Robert-Houdin furthermore vastly reinforces his claims of originality, placing himself in a radically exclusive lineage.

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In short, this hundred-page picaresque adventure emblematizes the autobiography-as-magic-show motif, and complements the narrative’s underlying cultural logic. The intervention of fate is key in these early chapters, not only because it thrusts a magic book into the young hero’s hands and an extraordinary teacher into his path, but also because it allows the narrator to deny any volition in disobeying his father’s wishes or in pursuing a career many in polite society would have regarded with suspicion and probably contempt. For in Restoration France, Robert-Houdin makes clear, magic was anything but respectable.

HISTORICIZING MODERN MAGIC Kris and Kurz argue that establishing “independence or dependence upon a school or tradition,” either as a sui generis autodidact or as successor in a creative dynasty, is central to the construction of the artist as cultural hero (20). Throughout his life, Robert-Houdin was a keen observer of his fellow magicians, and carefully positions himself in respect to other currents in the field. Reminiscences of magicians and their performances pepper the Confessions, establishing a historical baseline—a veritable prehistory of modern magic—so that readers can better appreciate the revolution Robert-Houdin’s purports to effect. Ultimately, evocations of competitors contrastively accentuate Robert-Houdin’s own virtues: he is modern, progressive, refined, and elite where they are traditional, backward, vulgar, and popular. Magicians—ranging from open-air buskers and provincial carnival entertainers to cosmopolitan celebrities such as Comte, Bosco, Philippe, and Anderson—populate the Confessions. While depicting many of them with tender bemusement and, at times, even grudging admiration, RobertHoudin is quick to condemn most other performers as “mystifiers” and “charlatans” guilty of abusing public credulity. Such criticism may seem at first paradoxical, if not hypocritical: how could one professional deceiver reproach another for fooling the public? But Robert-Houdin’s criticism is not directed at the deceptive artifice intrinsic to magicians’ tricks, but rather at other, non-magical, means that magicians use to mask their lack of skill and originality—false advertising, off-color jokes, malicious pranks, gaudy costume and décor. James Cook rightly remarks that “Robert-Houdin’s primary adversary was the conjuror afflicted with bad taste” (193), but RobertHoudin opposes himself to mystification on implicitly moral grounds as well, establishing, as I argue further on, a continuity between the consumer

44 Graham M. Jones marketplace, bourgeois sociability, and modern magic in terms of the core value of sincerity. The first sort of conjuror Robert-Houdin encounters in the course of the narrative is an itinerant mountebank named Dr. Carlosbach performing in the marketplace of Blois. Clearly marked as an ethnic outsider with “dark skin” and “kinky hair” (Robert-Houdin, 1995, 36), Carlosbach has all the romantic allure of a fairytale gypsy. After attracting a crowd with humorous banter, Carlosbach performs a classic Cups and Balls routine (38–39) then goes on to peddle a false tract of conjuring secrets. While the figure of Carlosbach may be a literary construction, he typifies the open-air conjurors who plied European fairgrounds and marketplaces for centuries. Like the morally suspect conjuror in Hieronymus Bosch’s late-fifteenth-century painting, such figures seem to have occupied a murky station somewhere between troubadours and rogues (for his part, Carlosbach uses an elaborate ruse to skip out on his bill at a local inn). A carnival magician named Castelli later strikes Robert-Houdin as “charlatanism incarnate” (88). Advertising on giant posters that he will “eat a man alive,” Castelli packs his theater with rubes. As Robert-Houdin watches from the audience, Castelli begins the show performing some crude conjuring feats, then asks for volunteers willing to be eaten on stage. Selecting a corpulent boy, Castelli uses a giant saltshaker to cover him with a fine white powder. He then takes the volunteer’s hand and bites it with such force that the boy runs squealing from the stage. Unable to get another volunteer for his “dinner,” Castelli admits the impossibility of fulfilling his promise. This comic scene unfolds in an atmosphere of great hilarity. “One must remember,” Robert-Houdin writes, “that magic, at the time, was not the object of serious performance . . . People attended magic shows with the purpose of laughing at the expense of the conjuror’s victims, even if that meant exposing themselves to attack” (88). Such face-threatening spectacles of public ridicule would certainly fail to please a bourgeois audience preoccupied with maintaining an image of decorum and respectability (Stallybrass and White). In the partisan framework of the Confessions, Castelli’s humiliation of volunteers for the sake of entertainment coupled with his unscrupulous advertising mark his style as retrograde and uncouth. Some of Confessions’ harshest criticism goes to the Italian magician Bosco, one of the era’s most famous magicians (236–246). Robert-Houdin decries Bosco’s outmoded repertoire (“never in the year of our lord 1838, would I have dreamed someone would dare perform the Cups and Balls in a theatre”), his garish outfits (“he looked like Scapino [the buffoonish servant] from Commedia dell’arte”), and his necromantic décor (“the human

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skull certainly completed the resemblance to a funeral ceremony”). He finds Bosco’s extensive use of stooges—to “lend” the performer prearranged objects and lead the crowd in cheering—inexcusably crude and insulting to the audience’s intelligence. Most damningly, he presents Bosco’s specialty of gory tricks with live birds (e.g., de- and re-capitations) as simply barbaric. Robert-Houdin intimates that Bosco’s greatest mystification was to convince audiences that he used skill to simulate the bird mutilations when he in fact slaughtered numerous animals in the course of every sanguinary performance. In the Confessions, magicians such as Carlosbach, Castelli, and Bosco serve as foils to Robert-Houdin’s artistic aspirations, substantiating his claim that magic in mid-nineteenth-century France was overwhelmingly crass, tasteless, and inexpert. These dismissive depictions also serve to reinforce the author’s class position according to a pattern of distinction Peter Stallybrass and Allon White identify as characteristic of bourgeois taste in modern Europe: “The bourgeois subject continuously defined and redefined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as ‘low’—as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating” (191). Paradoxically, Stallybrass and White continue, “disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains, apparently expelled as ‘Other’, return as the object of nostalgia, longing and fascination”—feelings Robert-Houdin’s portraits of other performers are clearly designed to arouse. Given the importance cultural historians have attributed to sincerity and trustworthiness as constitutive values of middle class religious, economic, and social life in the context of European modernity (Keane; Shapin), it is not surprising that Robert-Houdin makes an especial effort to differentiate his brand of modern magic from the mystification his predecessors and rivals in the Confessions incarnate. His claims to trustworthiness are reinforced by his accounts of helping the Paris police department combat cardsharping and working with the French army to fight purported charlatanism in colonial Algeria (as described further on). Presented against this brilliantly constructed backdrop of hacks and charlatans, his own approach to magic—one “permitting of . . . no mystification” (Robert-Houdin, 1995, 303)—seems not just salutary, but altogether revolutionary.

REVOLUTIONIZING MAGIC Robert-Houdin’s was an age of uncertainty and opportunity, self-invention and social climbing. Clever young provincials like Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s

46 Graham M. Jones The Red and the Black (1831) or Eugène Rastingac in Balzac’s Old Goriot (1834) could aspire to penetrate the elite spheres of Parisian high society. It is with such ambitions that Robert-Houdin arrived in Paris in 1830, marrying into a wealthy industrialist family. It would take him nearly fifteen years of patient preparation before opening the eponymous magic theater where he would undertake, in his words, “a complete reform of prestidigitation” (Robert-Houdin, 1995, 304). These reforms would bring magic into line with the ascendant “moral ideology” of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, characterized by “good taste, good manners, distinction, modesty, respectability, and ‘self control’ ” (Perrot 20). Gone would be the eccentric costumes and exotic decors. Gone, the stale contrivances: accomplices; double bottomed boxes; props in varnished tin obviously made expressly for the use of magicians; long tablecloths that prevented audiences from seeing under the operator’s tables. Gone, the off-color allusions and tasteless wordplay. Adhering to a strict formula of presenting “new routines, free of all charlatanism, with no resources other than the agility of [his] hands and the power of [his] illusions” (Robert-Houdin, 1995, 304), Robert-Houdin would repackage magic as enlightened entertainment for worldly bourgeois audiences. In his show, the Soirées Fantastiques, Robert-Houdin presented himself as a gentleman sophisticate sharing curiosities with social equals. He dressed like the patrons themselves, in an elegant comme il faut black suit (see Perrot) and outfitted his theater in a lavish Louis XV style that rivaled the most opulent salons of the day.2 On stage, he chatted affably with spectators, making polite conversation that flowed seamlessly into tricks showcasing his talent, taste, wit, and especially his skill as an inventor—an intellectual rather than manual aptitude his middle class audience would have esteemed. For example, in his Fantastic Orange Tree routine, RobertHoudin revealed a borrowed handkerchief inside an orange that visibly grew from a blossom on a mechanical tree. Holding the corners of the handkerchief, two mechanical butterflies lifted it into the air. In another trick, the Pastrycook of the Palais-Royal, he exhibited a small model bakery in which a mechanical pastry-cook appeared to bake piping hot miniature pastries specified by spectators. Just as he sought to align himself with the modern cult of science, Robert-Houdin also exploited public uncertainties about new scientific advances. For instance, at a moment when doctors were debating the safety of using ether as an anesthetic, Robert-Houdin claimed to have found a “miraculous new property” of the substance. In a routine called the Ethereal Suspension, he pretended to dose his young son with ether and then, to show that the boy had become “as light as a

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balloon,” levitated him several feet above the ground. Although (or perhaps because) accusations of child abuse quickly appeared in newspapers, audiences flocked to see the new “discovery.” Robert-Houdin’s literary depiction of the creative process behind these magic effects is crucial to his claims of artistic authenticity; thus he “endows his personal invention of magic tricks with all the value and seriousness of creative and artistic originality” (During 127). Today, his working habits seem redolent of manic depression: in one chapter, he writes that he sequesters himself for months to concentrate exclusively on building automata; in another, mysterious neurasthenia debilitates him for five “listless” years (Robert-Houdin, 1995, 227). Readers witness this devil-ridden perfectionist agonize over every detail of his show, paralyzed at times by fear of failure, yet goaded by his singular commitment to innovation. By detailing his working habits, Robert-Houdin not only provides evidence of the skillfulness and intelligence his vocation demands, but also substantiates the pretense of profound originality. Consider for instance the account he provides of the genesis of the Second Sight, a clairvoyance routine in which his blindfolded son would identify objects freely presented to the conjuror by members of the audience: My two children were at play in the salon, amusing themselves with a game borne of their childish imaginations. The youngest had blindfolded his brother’s eyes, and gave him objects to inspect. If the blindfolded subject could correctly guess the object, the two would change places. This game—so simple, so naive—nevertheless inspired in me one of the most complicated ideas I have ever had. Hounded by this idea, I scrambled to my study. I was in one of those moods where intelligence follows imagination with docility—even alacrity. I held my head in my two hands and, in a state of overstimulation, laid out the first principles of Second Sight. (328)

Reading this passage, an uninformed reader would naturally assume Robert-Houdin invented the Second Sight. He didn’t. Pinetti’s blindfolded wife was identifying objects on European stages by 1784; other magicians were performing the same effect in the England and the United States in the 1830s and 1840s (Christopher 142). While Robert-Houdin seems to have improved upon the effect considerably, he suppresses the scarcely deniable influence of other magicians’ thought-transmission routines, figuring his act of innovation as a spontaneous paroxysm of unmediated creativity. In The Anxiety of Influence (1973), literary critic Harold Bloom famously argues that poets, in order to reconcile indebtedness to precursors with

48 Graham M. Jones aspirations to originality, misrepresent their artistic influences and obfuscate their creative process. According to this familiar pattern, Robert-Houdin’s characteristic representation of the origins of Second Sight foregrounds discontinuity and inspiration at the expense of continuity and influence. The systematic elision of influence in the Confessions helped Robert-Houdin constitute himself as the Promethean figure in the collective imaginary of modern magic—and to sever kindred relations with culturally unsavory predecessors and peers. As we shall soon see, he ultimately succeeded in establishing himself as a towering influence that future generations of magicians would, in typical Bloomian fashion, struggle to both emulate and overcome.

SOCIOLOGIZING SPECTATORSHIP The Confessions not only seeks to enunciate the artistic conventions of modern magic, but also to prescribe the normative forms of spectatorship appropriate to it. Robert-Houdin’s ideal spectator is a model of bourgeois refinement and restraint, comportmentally, and discernment and curiosity, cognitively. Just as he sketches a taxonomy of the different sorts of magicians performing in the early to mid-nineteenth century, Robert-Houdin also paints a social tableau of stereotypical spectators. His sociologized account of spectatorship reinforces the idea that appreciating magic is a cultural skill, one not available to just anyone, and that requires a very specific forms of reflexive stance-taking. Just as the magician must be accountable to delight but not delude in Saler’s (702) memorable phrase, audiences must be willing to be deceived but not overly credulous. Symptomatic of the inappropriate responses Robert-Houdin depicts is an inadequate appreciation of the basis of magical marvels in virtuosic skill. Robert-Houdin illustrates the difference between competent and incompetent spectatorship by depicting contrastive reactions to his Writing and Drawing Automaton, a small android nobleman that gives written responses to questions from the public or draws sketches at a spectator’s behest. The first people to see the finished automaton are the superintendents of his Belleville apartment building Monsieur Auguste, a mason, and his wife. In Robert-Houdin’s depiction, the ill-mannered Monsieur Auguste gluttonously stuffs himself with bread and sardines throughout the inaugural performance. The magician bids Madame Auguste to pose a question to the automaton. “What is the emblem of loyalty?” she asks (Robert-Houdin, 1995, 263). By way of response, the automaton draws a greyhound. Gulping

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down a large mouthful of food and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, the mason complains, “you should have had it draw a poodle instead of a greyhound. Everyone knows that there’s nothing like a poodle for loyalty.” Choking back laughter, Robert-Houdin pretends to seriously entertain the idea. Monsieur Auguste then inspects the inner-workings of the automaton with a ponderous air, pronouncing, “I understand this more or less . . . You know, I’m the one who oils the jack at the construction site, and even took it apart a couple times . . . If I were you, I would have made this mechanism a lot simpler. That way, people who don’t know about this kind of thing could understand it too” (265–266). Reflecting on this exchange, the author muses, “Isn’t it curious that an automaton that would be the toast of all of Paris . . . only received at its creation a workman’s stupid critique” (267). Robert-Houdin’s jeering tone makes it clear that the mason who feigns understanding of a mechanism manifestly beyond his grasp has not mastered the elite codes of experiencing—and expressing—the wonderment appropriate to modern magic. When he later exhibits the same automaton at the 1844 National Exposition, it attracts the attention of King Louis-Philippe himself. As Robert-Houdin describes it, the king’s reaction differs in every way from Monsieur Auguste’s: he “proved of an excellent humor, and seemed to delight in everything I presented. He asked me many questions, and never missed an opportunity to demonstrate his excellent discernment” (297). Robert-Houdin depicts the king as clever and ironic, and the two engage in witty repartee. After the little Writer completes a selected stanza of verse, the king says in a confidential whisper, “but Monsieur Robert-Houdin, to make a poet of your automaton, did not you yourself instruct it?” “Yes, Sire, according to my humble means.” “Thus my compliments are due the teacher rather than the pupil.” At this, RobertHoudin bows “to thank the King as much for his compliment as for the delicate manner in which he bestowed it” (299). The terms of the narrator’s approbation are suggestive: clearly the king effortlessly deploys the appropriate conventions of spectatorship, which in turn correspond to refined ideals of politeness.3 In a later scene, the king’s delighted reactions to a command performance at the royal court evince the same balance of lighthearted curiosity and skeptical discernment. The juxtaposed reactions of Monsieur Auguste and the French monarch map onto a more general pattern that Robert-Houdin describes: paradoxically, he argues, “it is harder to trick an ignorant person than a learned one” because “an ignorant man sees magic tricks as a challenge to his intelligence and, for him, magic shows become a combat that he wants to win at any cost”

50 Graham M. Jones (178–180). By contrast, “an intelligent man . . . knows that these amusing deceptions cannot harm his reputation for intelligence, which is why he abandons himself with confidence to the illusionist’s inducements” (180–181). Modern conjurors, while often dabbling in occult iconography, generally do not intend audiences to perceive in their performances the action of supernatural forces or agents. Far from it—they want individual credit for their technical prowess (see Metzner). In a modern context, misconstruing tricks as evidence of anything other than the conjuror’s manual dexterity or mechanical ingenuity becomes a mark of unreason or even insanity. In one passage, Robert-Houdin describes a visit from a hysterical woman who, convinced that the illusionist has supernatural powers, beseeches him to render an unfaithful lover impotent (RobertHoudin, 1995, 333–337). His first inclination is to laugh at her delusion, but when she lunges at him with a knife, he agrees to perform an improvised voodoo ritual, sticking a pin in a burning candle while pronouncing the offending party’s name. As in the episode with Monsieur Auguste, the hysterical woman’s misunderstanding about magic becomes a source of comic relief. Historian Michael Saler argues that, in the modern era, the condition of enchantment “became associated with the cognitive outlooks of groups traditionally cast as inferior within the discourse of Western elites: ‘primitives,’ children, women, and the lower classes” (696). Modern magic, in this regard, emerged as a site for the enactment of attributes valorized in Western modernity—disenchantment, rationality, and skepticism—and the interpellation of spectators as typically modern subjects (Schmidt). The power of magic to differentiate between modern and un-modern modes of thought, implicit in the aforementioned encounters, becomes clearest in what is undoubtedly the most legendary and, in this case, veridical of Robert-Houdin’s exploits, recounted in chapters twenty-one and twentytwo of the Confessions. The year was 1856. Algeria had been a French colony for over twentyfive years, but remained a tinderbox of indigenous resistance. Colonial administrators were particularly concerned that charismatic Muslim clerics they identified as “marabouts” were using conjuring tricks and physical stunts—deflecting bullets, walking on coals, swallowing glass—to provide evidence of supernatural power and thereby draw followers into millenarian uprisings. At the behest the French military, Robert-Houdin traversed Algeria, bringing with him sophisticated theatrical props and a lifetime’s experience as a showman, performing modern magic for Arab elites and

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challenging local marabouts to public competitions of miracle working. “It was hoped, with reason,” Robert-Houdin wrote, “that my performances would lead the Arabs to understand that the marabouts’ trickery is naught but simple child’s play and could not, given its crudeness, be the work of real heavenly emissaries. Naturally, this entailed demonstrating our superiority in everything and showing that, as far as sorcerers are concerned, there is no match for the French” (502). These performances, which a French general later called the single most important campaign in the pacification of indigenous Algeria (Fechner, 2002, v2, 53), gilded RobertHoudin’s reputation in the public imagination, confirming him as a great patriot and national hero. We now know that the Sufi orders that Robert-Houdin discusses do not use illusionary techniques to manufacture counterfeit miracles, but rather to mimetically represent, according to well-established performance conventions, the historical miracles of popular saints (Andezian). Imputing cynical motives to indigenous Algerian conjurors and naïve fanaticism to their audiences, the Confessions figures non-modern, nonEuropeans as incapable of distinguishing between real and simulated magic. This assessment clearly fits into a broader pattern of Eurocentric, orientalist representations pitting “French science, morality, masculinity, and intellectual rigor against supposedly representative traits of Easterners: fanaticism, cruelty, idleness, vice, irrationality, deviance, and degeneracy” (Porterfield 7). Unfavorably comparing the supposed credulity of indigenous audiences toward conjuring performances and their own attitude of incredulity toward magic as a form of disenchanted entertainment enabled Europeans to use magic as a marker of cultural difference in colonial encounters. In this sense, narratives like Robert-Houdin’s may have played an important, if heretofore unacknowledged, role in conceptualizing differences between “primitive” and “modern” peoples as a function of putative cognitive ability.4 We have already seen that Robert-Houdin delineates modern magic in terms of new contract of trust between the magician and the audience. The Confessions furthermore plots relationships of correspondence between modes of apprehending magic and spectators’ social stations, with the male monarch typifying an appropriate attitude of playful detachment and members of the working class, women, and African colonial subjects embodying unsatisfactory perspectives. The paternalistic views Robert-Houdin evinces toward these inadequate spectators, while not atypical for someone of his time and place, must themselves be counted among the narrative strategies that constitute and reinforce his authorial—and artistic—status.

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ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE Magic historians generally agree on the importance of Robert-Houdin’s literary achievements in cementing his enduring legacy. The Confessions was so popular in France that the Ministry of Education for some time awarded the book to students as a prize for outstanding academic achievement. Surveying gushing contemporary reviews of the English language translation, James Cook affirms that “what these opinions documented most of all was Robert-Houdin’s virtuosity as a maker of powerful new literary images” (194). Similarly, referring to the “long shadow” RobertHoudin cast over subsequent generations, Jim Steinmeyer calls him “the model magician . . . because, more than anything else, magicians had been captivated by his astounding memoirs, an inspiring piece of literature that painted the portrait of a magician as an artist. It might be the most influential book in the world of magic” (141). Perhaps no episode has reaffirmed the impact of the Confessions better than the publication of Harry Houdini’s Unmasking of Robert-Houdin in 1908. A product of its author’s own morbid insecurities, this book, described by biographer Kenneth Silverman as both “parricidal” and “regicidal” (133–134), ultimately did more to tarnish Houdini’s reputation than to refute Robert-Houdin’s claims to originality and distinction—especially in France. When Houdini attacked Robert-Houdin, French magicians rallied to defend their spiritual progenitor with indignant unanimity (see Jones, 2007, 95–100). Today, a vocal majority of French magicians still upholds RobertHoudin’s paternal image as a source of vocational legitimacy. But as we saw at the outset of this essay, not everyone is happy about Robert-Houdin’s continuing influence. While Raphael offers an especially vocal example, I encountered a number of magicians who lament what they see as the slavish emulation of the Founding Father’s imago, which in turn renders magic sclerotic and unable to keep pace with changing public expectations. French magic historian Fanch Guillemin is one of the few to air such views in print. In a recent article, he admits Robert-Houdin’s ambivalent importance as the very image of the magician in coat and tails. He made this outfit emblematic of the profession, so much that some modern magicians, converts to the religion, couldn’t “defrock” themselves without fearing sacrilege. It’s no different than an earlier generation of magicians who thought it necessary to wear astrological robes and pointed hats as guarantees of their magical powers.

The more I encountered such complaints about Robert-Houdin’s unhealthy influence, the more I began to realize that his iconic status has made him

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the focus of what Freud calls a “family romance”—an Oedipal whirlpool of admiration and resentment perhaps befitting the profoundly androcentric culture of magic. Indeed, Robert-Houdin’s own recourse to fictive paternity in the Confessions formulated the succession of generations as problematic for the self-image of future magicians. My interlocutors’ gripes with Robert-Houdin took a variety of forms. Hervé, a factory worker’s son and self-described sixties radical, expressed disgust with the nineteenth-century magician’s bourgeois sensibilities and lack of social conscience: “When the revolution broke out in 1848 did he care? No! He left for England so he could keep making money!” Hervé called Robert-Houdin a “spoiled brat” (fils de papa) who succeeded not because of any unique talent, but because of his bourgeois boarding-school education and, more importantly, the social connections he calculatingly made to people with money and influence, such as his father-in-law. So repulsed was he with the figure of Robert-Houdin that Hervé even forgave Houdini the Unmasking: “sure Houdini was a egocentric jerk, but in his case, it’s excusable. He grew up dirt poor, never got an education—he was a self-made man. He had an excuse for being insecure.” Raphael echoed the view that Robert-Houdin was more concerned with making money than art. “Look,” he told me, I don’t want to revile the guy. He just wasn’t an artist tortured by his vision. He wasn’t an artist who needed to express things about the world . . . Magic was his life insofar as it was his passion, but it wasn’t his vehicle for commenting upon the human condition. It was a commercial enterprise. He was interesting, but he was a businessman, not an artist.

Raphael’s assessment mobilizes the antinomy of commerce and culture, and reposes on the Romantic/Modernist ideal of the artist as a hieratic figure whose strength of individual vision challenges prevailing cultural, social, and even metaphysical certainties. In contrast with this ideal, Raphael presented Robert-Houdin as espousing a safe and sanitized form of entertainment neatly packaged to satisfy bourgeois expectations. In developing this argument, he pointed to Robert-Houdin’s now-famous dictum that “the conjuror is an actor who plays the role of a real magician.” If the conjuror is playing the familiar and pre-scripted role of a “real magician,” Raphael argued, then conjuring performance can aspire to little more than enacting that role as convincingly as possible through the demonstration of technical prowess. It cannot become an artistic medium for expressing new or disturbing ideas.

54 Graham M. Jones My friend Abdul Alafrez is, like Raphael, one of the few magicians to receive consistent funding from the French Ministry of Culture. Also like Raphael, Abdul (who laughed hysterically when I told him I was conducting my research in France “because it’s the birthplace of modern magic”) considers Robert-Houdin’s transformation of magic into a respectable bourgeois entertainment inimical to the genre’s artistic and expressive potential. In an interview for an issue of the journal Critique (in which I was also a participant), he explained: If Robert-Houdin is so important it’s . . . first, and foremost, because he conquered a new audience, resituating magic culturally. Gone were allusions to the Devil or the occult, the cape with stars and the pointy hats, the black robes and cabbalistic formulae. He invented an art of the salon, performed by someone dressed like his clients, using quasi-scientific rhetoric. It’s by attracting the bourgeoisie that Robert-Houdin gave magic its “deed of distinction.” But pointy hats aren’t gone forever—personally I remain quite attached to them. (545)

Likening himself to a Pre-Raphaelite in painting, Abdul self- consciously draws on the supposedly naïve forms of magic Robert-Houdin purported to displace, costuming himself in ornate robes and masks, adorning his own performances with esoteric iconography intended to disturb as much as enchant. Indeed, his critical successes (he performed for years at the Comédie Française) suggest that the path to high culture legitimacy may not lead back to Robert-Houdin as many magicians assume it does.

CONCLUSION Robert-Houdin’s continuing centrality in the collective imaginary of French magicians hinges not only on the staying power of the Confessions as a literary broadcast of its author’s reputation, but also on the usefulness of that reputation to subsequent generations of magicians. Sociologist Howard Becker explains that “art worlds, in a variety of interwoven activities, routinely make and unmake reputations—of works, artists, schools, genres, and media . . . They use reputations, once made, to organize other activities” (352). In his memoirs, Robert-Houdin connects his individual reputation to the status of magic as a medium whose foundation in science, similarity to fine arts, and amenability to urbane, bourgeois sensibilities he consistently emphasizes. Promoting public recognition of

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Robert-Houdin’s legacy has been, in turn, a means for magicians to further legitimize the medium through a process that one sociologist of art describes as the “transfer of the title and merit of past artists and creators onto their contemporary heirs” (Menger 570). Meanwhile, other magicians, also despairing of magic’s lack of cultural legitimacy, have found him a tempting scapegoat. Certainly, magicians in France are not the only ones subject to the cultural anxieties about the status of magic that Robert-Houdin so effectively channels. In a trenchant essay entitled “Why Magic Sucks,” the American conjuror Jamy Ian Swiss characterizes “the low status of magic on the food chain of the performing arts” as an ageless problem for magicians (3). Neville Maskelyne and David Devant, he recalls, complained in 1911 of the difficulty magicians face in gaining recognition as “something more than jugglers . . . or mechanical tricksters.” Nearly a century later, Swiss echoes their complaint in terms strikingly similar to Raphael’s: “Magic has failed to achieve artistic standing because it has failed to transcend its technique” (4). While magicians in the English-speaking world may worry about cultural stigma, in France these anxieties take a local and, I argue, particularly acute form because of a notoriously hierarchical system of the arts. Pierre Bourdieu’s magisterial book Distinction presents an account of the ways cultural practices involving aesthetic choices serve as markers of social boundaries in French society. The clarity of the system of taste Bourdieu describes is testament to the historical diffusion of the aristocratic model of culture through all strata of French society (Elias). His account of the power of taste to rank people socially, motivated of his own sense of exclusion from distinguishing cultural practices, has made Distinction a landmark case study in the sociology of culture. Likewise, Robert-Houdin’s strategic textual engagement with the same cultural matrix produced a global classic in the world of magic. The success of both texts in challenging regnant cultural hierarchies attests to the particular intensity of the ranking of cultural practices endemic to modern France. Moreover, because of the singular role of the French state in supporting cultural production, cultural ranking can have especially serious consequences for French performing artists. Compared to the relatively minimal involvement of the British and American governments in financing cultural production, the French state, acting through the Ministry of Culture, is the country’s paramount cultural patron and, hence, arbiter of taste (see Born; Coulangeon; Looseley). State postures simultaneously reflect and affect the role of magic

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(and most other expressive forms) in French cultural life. This, in turn, has a direct impact on the lives and livelihoods of practicing magicians, in terms of the prestige they enjoy and the creative and professional opportunities open to them. In this sense, the cultural and discursive strategies these performers use to verbally assimilate magic to the realm of high culture are not merely symbolic gestures, but can have important consequences (see Jones, 2007, chapters three and four). For instance, in the early 1990s, culture brokers in the magic world were able to use Robert-Houdin’s legacy to associate magic with France’s national cultural patrimony—a strategy that convinced the French Ministry of Culture to invest many millions of dollars in an ill-starred National Center for the Arts of Magic and Illusion. At the same time, for magicians such as Raphael who hope state funding will one day liberate magic from the tyranny of the marketplace and usher in a new magical avant-garde, questioning the received wisdom about Robert-Houdin’s artistic achievements provides a means of accounting for magic’s present position and articulating artistic priorities amenable to high culture aesthetic norms. Rather than approaching Robert-Houdin’s iconic status as a natural consequence of his historical influence, I have attempted to understand the broad consensus about his historical influence as emergent in the reception of his literary oeuvre. In an arena of expressive culture that hinges on the charisma of the individual performer, magicians long have cultivated strategies of magnifying and mediatizing their public personae. Insofar as the Confessions has provided a template for future projects of self-fashioning, culture-making, and community-building, Robert-Houdin’s literary performance has proven an extremely successful extension of his personhood. The book’s success, I contend, is in no small measure due to Robert-Houdin’s strategic engagement with cultural assumptions that retain much of their currency today. As a performer and author, Robert-Houdin brought new cultural legitimacy to magic as a respectable bourgeois entertainment, shoring up the class, gender, and racial identity of the “modern” magician at the same time as performers in contiguous genres were working to render these categories unstable (Brooks). The legitimacy he gained individually as an entertainer nevertheless proved limited in terms of the absolute cultural distinction it has conferred on the practice of magic. The gulf in prestige between the fine arts and magic has been a lingering source of concern for magicians in France and, not surprisingly, they have turned to modern magic’s Founding Father for explanation. In both celebrating and repudiating his legacy, they reiterate his seminal formulation of the

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problem of magic’s legitimacy, and reactivate the sense of cultural anxiety he bequeathed to his vocation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I conducted eighteen months of ethnographic and archival field-work in Paris between 2003 and 2006, mostly while a visiting student at the École Normale Supérieure. This research would have been impossible without generous support from a Fulbright fellowship, a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and a grant from the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in France. A Ford Foundation Dissertation Diversity Fellowship and a Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship at New York University enabled me to write up my findings. For their constructive input on various drafts of this essay, I would like to thank Bambi Schieffelin, Fred Myers, Susan Carol Rogers, Val Wang, Michael Balderi, and the editors of this volume—Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and Jim Peck.

NOTES 1. In 1859, a year after its publication in French, Robert-Houdin’s memoir appeared in British and American editions, translated by Lascelles Wraxall. Since then, English language editions have employed a range of subtly shifting titles, for example, Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author, and Conjurer (1859a) or Life of Robert-Houdin: The King of the Conjurers (1859b). To reflect the original, I refer to this work as the Confessions throughout the present chapter. All citations refer to the authoritative 1995 French edition of the text, and translations are my own. 2. These seemingly familiar surroundings would have made it difficult for anyone to suspect that nearly every element of Robert-Houdin’s stage was in fact gimmicked, with electrical wires and mechanical pulleys allowing assistants to operate automata from off-stage and traps precisely designed for surprise appearances, disappearances, and substitutions (Fechner 2005b). 3. Although Robert-Houdin received a silver medal for his inventions at the Exposition, one of the judges also paid him a back-handed compliment: “It is too bad, M. Robert-Houdin, that you have not applied to serious works the mental effort that you have expended in such whimsical objects” (RobertHoudin, 1995, 497–498). The author recalls this accusation of frivolity in connection with his culturally (and morally) redeeming decision to pursue the pure scientific research after retirement. 4. In a future publication I will discuss this case in greater detail as part of a larger study of ethnographic representations of non-Western traditions of illusionary performance.

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WORKS CITED Alafrez, Abdul. “Éloge des chapeaux pointus.” Interview with Yves Hersant. Critique 673–674 (2003): 538–548. Andezian, Sossie. Expériences du divin dans l’Algérie contemporaine: Adeptes des saints dans la région de Tlemcen. Paris: CNRS, 2001. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Bilis, Bernard. “Il restera dans l’histoire de notre art, le maître incontesté.” Revue de la Prestidigitation September–October 2004: 4. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973. Born, Georgina. Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Chavigny, Jean. Le roman d’un artiste: Robert-Houdin, rénovateur de la magie blanche. Blois: Published by the author, 1943. Christopher, Milbourne. The Illustrated History of Magic. New York: Caroll & Graf, 2006. Cook, James W. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. Coulangeon, Philippe. “French Jazz Musicians: From Subculture to Subsidy and Social Insurance.” In Karlijn Ernst, Marlite Halbertsma, Susanne Janssen, and Teunis Ijdens, eds. Taking Stock: Trends and Strategies in the Arts and Cultural Industries. Rotterdam: Barjesteh & Co, 1999. 173–181. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994. Fechner, Christian. Robert-Houdin: An Artist’s Life. Paris: ECF, 2002. ———. “La pensée magique de Robert-Houdin.” Revue de la prestidigitation September–October 2005a: 14–16. ———. “Les armes secrètes des soirées fantastiques.” Revue de la prestidigitation September–October 2005b: 17–22. Freud, Sigmund. “Family Romances.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1959. 237–241. Gerson, Stephane. “In Praise of Modest Men: Self-Display and Self-Effacement in Nineteenth-Century France.” French History 20.2 (2006): 182–203. Guilleman, Fanch. “L’inconturnable Robert-Houdin.” Revue de la prestidigitation 528, 2002: 22–23.

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Harrison, Carol E. The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France: Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation: New York: Oxford UP, 1999. Houdini, Harry. The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1908. Jones, Graham M. Trades of the Trick: Conjuring Culture in Modern France. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, New York University, 2007. Keane, Webb. “Sincerity, ‘Modernity,’ and the Protestants.” Cultural Anthropology 17.1 (2002): 65–92. Kris, Ernst and Otto Kurz. Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Looseley, David. The Politics of Fun: Cultural Policy and Debate in Contemporary France. Washington, DC: Berg, 1995. Menger, Pierre-Michel. “Artistic Labor Markets.” Annual Review of Sociology 25 (1999): 541–574. Metzner, Paul. Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Perrot, Philippe. Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. Porterfield, Todd. The Allure of Empire: Art in the Service of French Imperialism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Robert-Houdin, Jean-Eugène. Confidences d’un prestidigitateur [1858]. Paris: Stock, 1995. ———. Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author, and Conjurer. Philadelphia: G. G. Evan, 1859a. ———. Life of Robert-Houdin: The King of the Conjurers. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1859b. ———. Les tricheries des Grecs dévoilées; L’art des gagner à tous les jeux. Paris: Librairie nouvelle, 1861. ———. Les secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie: comment on deviant sorcier. Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1868. Rogers, Susan Carol. “Anthropology in France.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 481–504. Saler, Michael. “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review.” The American Historical Review 111.3 (2006): 692–716. Schmidt, Leigh Eric. “From Demon Possession to Magic Show: Ventriloquism, Religion, and the Enlightenment.” Church History 67.2 (1998): 274–304. Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994. Silverman, Kenneth. HOUDINI!!! The Career of Erich Weiss. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment, Entertainment, and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

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Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. London: Methuen, 1986. Steinmeyer, Jim. Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Swiss, Jamy Ian. Shattering Illusions. Seattle: Hermetic Press, 2002.

3. Magicians and the Magic of Hollywood Cinema during the 1920s Matthew Solomon

Matthew Solomon is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A film historian, Solomon has published extensively on the relationship between magic and silent film. A common narrative of American entertainment history suggests that early in the twentieth century film supplanted vaudeville as the dominant form of popular culture, and thus contributed to the decline of magic. Solomon challenges this received wisdom. He demonstrates that magic and film were deeply interwoven into the 1920s, looking to a number of films about magicians made during this period. In this detailed historical account, Solomon uncovers numerous interactions between magicians and filmmakers during this period of technological transformation in film history (i.e., the coming of sound). The chapter investigates the following question: How have the practices of theatrical magic helped to shape understanding of the “magic” of movies during the silent period and beyond?

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istorically, magicians were most prevalent as film characters during the first decade of film history (1895–1905), a period in which a number of practicing theatrical magicians, including Georges Méliès, Gaston Velle, Walter Booth, J. Stuart Blackton, Albert E. Smith, and others, were active in international film production. This was the heyday of the trick film, a popular film genre made up of short films depicting magical occurrences created in large part through early cinematic special effects (Solomon 595–615). Many trick films were made by professional magicians and many more—though not all—trick films center on a magician whose onscreen “performance” provides the framework for the film’s presentation of cinematic tricks. Media historian Erik Barnouw

62 Matthew Solomon claims that “the history of magic and the history of cinema intersected” for only a “brief period” around the turn of the twentieth century (9), but in fact one finds a more complex and sustained historical relationship between magic and cinema if films about magic and magicians’ subsequent interest in film are considered. During the 1920s, the histories of magic and cinema intersected once again, as several professional magicians launched film careers and magician characters were prominently featured in a number of Hollywood films. Magicians have proven to be compelling characters up to the present day because their work with illusions foregrounds the visual deceptions so central for the operations of the cinematic medium itself. Magic has been an especially conspicuous cinematic subject during periods of major technological transformation in film history. The trick film thrived around the turn of the twentieth century, just after the “emergence of cinema” (as Charles Musser aptly terms it), when the technologies and techniques of cinema—and indeed the nature of the medium itself—were very much in flux. Magic then reappeared as a prominent subject for films during the next major transformation in what Musser terms the “history of screen practice” (16), the transition from so-called silent films to synchronized recorded sound films during the late 1920s. A cycle of films about stage magic and theatrical magicians was made in Hollywood around the coming of sound and includes feature films such as You Never Know Women (1926), The Show (1927), West of Zanzibar (1928), The Last Performance (1929), and Illusion (1929). As the U.S. film industry and its audiences grappled with cinema’s protracted and uneven transition to synchronized sound, magic films provided a timely context in which to thematize the new illusionistic possibilities of sound cinema. The addition of synchronized speech and recorded sound powerfully heightened the illusion of presence inherent in moving pictures. In 1929, the director of The Last Performance, Paul Fejos (who was not himself a professional magician but would later study the practices of “black magic” among indigenous people in South America as part of a subsequent career as an anthropologist), praised the “audible film” for eliminating the inevitable “spectre of unreality . . . of a silent picture.” According to Fejos, “talking pictures” were “an amazing medium of illusion” that had “captured the approval of the multitudes” (4). Other commentators likened the uncanny effect of synchronized sound film to a kind of magic. Fitzhugh Green called upon analogies with magic, comparing the experience of a sound film to a levitation or a spectral manifestation, both of which were tricks in the stage

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magician’s repertoire (as well as in the films You Never Know Women and West of Zanzibar, respectively): The phenomenon was like watching a man flying without wings. It was uncanny . . . His was a short speech; when it was done and he stood there, people found themselves clapping, unconsciously. As if he heard them, he bowed. He seemed to be present, and yet he did not seem to be present. No wonder a scientist the next day called it: “the nearest thing to a resurrection.” (Quoted in Crafton 79)

In his account of the transition to sound, Donald Crafton argues that, at least initially, the U.S. film industry attempted to exploit this newly amplified illusion of presence through what he terms a “virtual Broadway” approach. Thus, many short subjects in particular involved explicitly borrowing material and performers from live theater: “Filmmakers capitalized on cinema’s capability to suggest a virtual presence, an imagined beingthere, in order to bring performer and auditor together in the space of the filmed performance. Broadway, the ‘Street of Streets,’ was coming soon to the local theater” (63). Crafton argues that the virtual Broadway approach was largely eclipsed by a more fluid and hybrid conception of sound film that united conventions of existing film genres with specific elements and structures from operetta, musical theater, and the stage revue (315). Like talking films that attempted to bring Broadway theater to movie theaters everywhere, magic films of the period—even those that were never (so far as we know) released in synchronized sound versions—attempt to bridge the gap between big-time live performance and the local movie house. But, unlike contemporaneous films that tried to simulate “virtual presence” by largely preserving the integrity of a live performance, magic films of the late 1920s instead rely on the principles of continuity editing to integrate privileged moments of magical spectacle into classical Hollywood narratives. While the 1920s was a period of significant economic and technological upheaval for the U.S. film industry, it was also an immensely unstable decade for the larger realm of mass entertainment, particularly for vaudeville and the many performance specialties that were partially subsumed by the variety theater, including magic. For many historians of magic, the decade of the 1920s marks the end of magic’s “Golden Age” during which theatrical magic ceded much of its popularity to the movies even as noted magicians such as Howard Thurston, Harry Blackstone, Houdini, and others continued to be successful. The so-called death of magic had been heralded since at least the end of the nineteenth century, but the loss of stage magic’s central place in the realm of mass entertainment during the 1920s was caused not by direct competition

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from the movies (nor even by diminished public interest in magic), but rather by the way that vaudeville—of which magic and illusion were constituent elements—was largely co-opted by film exhibition. During the 1920s, most vaudeville theaters adopted the “vaudeville and pictures” format (which had previously been restricted to small-time vaudeville), using several vaudeville acts serving as a live prelude for the featured attraction: a Hollywood film. In 1928, the “decline of vaudeville” declared by contemporaneous commentators such as Alexander Bakshy (98, 100), was incontrovertibly confirmed by the absorption of the major vaudeville circuits into a newly formed movie studio, RKO Radio Pictures. With this merger, the vaudeville theaters that remained from the Keith-Albee-Orpheum conglomerate would be wired for sound and used for the primary purpose of exhibiting synchronized sound films. In 1929, magician Adam Hull Shirk linked the dwindling status of magic to the marginalization of vaudeville theater, claiming “Today, talking pictures have squeezed vaudeville into a small space. It is against the ropes and being hammered brutally” (395). Shirk insisted that only by reasserting the “bigness” of magic through acts like that of the Great Leon, “big in conception and execution,” could magicians “succeed in maintaining it [magic] as an honored profession, an art, and a delightful form of entertainment for the great public” (395–396). The decline of vaudeville during the 1920s no doubt threatened the livelihoods of many professional magicians, but the movies, of course, did not simply supplant magic even as motion pictures replaced vaudeville as America’s principal form of mass entertainment. Some magicians adapted by performing their tricks as part of the theatrical preludes that preceded film screenings in many movie houses. Others, like the Great Leon, mounted large-scale acts that toured theaters in major cities. Several of these “big-time” magicians incorporated films and/or film-related illusions into their acts. “Small-time” magicians such as Eugene Laurant and others performed in rural towns on the lyceum and chautauqua circuits and in local theaters and town halls. Others took up different theatrical specialties or reverted to nonprofessional status in order to pursue more remunerative careers outside of the theater. A few magicians became involved in different branches of film production and exhibition. Thus, for magicians of the 1920s, the movies represented not just an imminent threat, but a suggestive field of potentially lucrative possibilities for expansion and diversification.

TRICK FILMS VS. MAGIC FILMS The international popularity of the trick film crested during the first decade of the twentieth century, before international film producers

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began concentrating on story films around 1907–1908. The large-scale disappearance of trick films coincides with what film historian Tom Gunning describes as the movement from the “cinema of attractions” (early modes of filmmaking based primarily on visual spectacle) to the “cinema of narrative integration” (a subsequent mode of filmmaking in which moments of visual spectacle have well-defined places in a narrative) (6–7). With the proliferation of story films, techniques of trick cinematography formerly used to create striking magical effects were largely absorbed into the ordinary technical repertoire of cinema through the larger film-historical process Gunning terms “narrativization” (41–42). The producers of many trick films had initially adhered to what Crafton describes in his book about early filmmaker Emile Cohl as a “cult of secrecy.” That is, they tried to keep film audiences from knowing how trick cinematography and animation were accomplished “to make the technique and the effects seem unique and valuable—as magic—rather than the simple mechanical operation which in fact it was” (137). But around 1908, many filmmakers—with the notable exception of Méliès, who remained outspokenly committed to magic’s code of secrecy (2–4)—started openly revealing the tricks involved in filmmaking, revelations that suggest the extent to which the practice of filmmaking had begun to depart from stage magic. With the industrialization of film production—first at Pathé-Frères in Paris during the 1900s and later at the movie studios in Hollywood during the 1910s—the direct influence of magic on cinema waned as filmmaking became a set of professions that were largely distinct from those of the theater. Unlike Méliès, those magicians who were absorbed by the incipient film industries (such as Velle) had largely shed their associations with professional magic to become professional film producers, film directors, or film actors—though some nevertheless retained a strong personal interest in conjuring. Trick films were made well into the 1910s, but in later feature films about magic (which are far less numerous), magicians appear not so much as a pretext for a series of cinematic special effects than as characters whose onscreen performances are only one part of a story. Magicians in these later Hollywood films are part of complex narratives in which theatrical magic serves as an unusual setting for stories about the deceptiveness of appearances. Though scenes of magic are among the most visually interesting parts of these films, such scenes are typically bracketed by a larger plot of backstage romance. For example, You Never Know Women and Illusion both explicitly foreground magic as a linguistic metaphor for heterosexual love, contrasting the deceits of insincere suitors with the genuine affection of

66 Matthew Solomon appropriate partners. In You Never Know Women, this metaphor is made explicit through a book of poems entitled “Love Magic,” which magician Ivan Norodin (Clive Brook) reads before deciding to fake his own death. In Illusion, a sound film, the metaphor is clearly established at the beginning of the film through the song “When the Real Thing Comes Your Way.” These magic films of the 1920s eschew the “frontality” Noël Burch describes as characteristic of early cinema (16, 164–165), entirely dispensing with an analogy between film frame and theatrical stage. Instead of placing the viewer at a distance from the action that approximates the distance between the audience and the stage in a small theater, as in so many of Méliès’s trick films (Sadoul 154–168), magic films of the 1920s—like all Hollywood films—integrate the viewer into the imaginary space of the film’s diegesis. Hollywood’s mode of storytelling, as many commentators have noted in different ways, is premised on offering the viewer a privileged vantage on the film’s events through a fluid, ever-changing point of view. The “magic” of continuity editing allows the film to stitch together a long series of individual shots taken in different locations and from an array of camera positions into a seamless, often seemingly omniscient, narrative. As film historian Richard Maltby explains, Our usual relation to the characters is that of a participant observer, often literally looking over their shoulders, included within the pictorial space projected on the screen but not part of it, involved with the action but not impeding it, missing nothing. Hollywood’s representation of space is usually organized to secure our attention to what is going on in that space. In return, it offers us the chance to see and overhear the action from a succession of ideal viewpoints. (312)

As in other backstage subgenres, these magic films take us behind the scenes, showing us what transpires backstage, and in the wings of the theater, to show us the rest of the story and interpolate us into the lives of the characters. We see only the most spectacular or narratively significant aspects of what transpires onstage and sometimes view onstage events from the wings or the stage itself, as participant–observers. The spectator’s point of view in magic films is only selectively aligned with the point of view of the theatrical spectator-within-the-film. But, by allowing us to look over the shoulder of the magician or an assistant, by showing us the view from the wings, magic films sometimes have the ancillary effect of exposing the secret methods of theatrical illusion. During the 1920s, such exposures incited protests from magicians’ groups, illustrating how norms of an adjacent profession could conflict with the narrative illusionism so crucial for the producers of Hollywood cinema.

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Since the time of the trick film, there has not been a sufficient critical mass of films about magic and magicians to suggest the formation of a distinct genre, though the production of several such films in relatively quick succession during certain time periods indicates that there have been subsequent cycles of magic films. These cycles, however, have never been identified or discussed as such. Rick Altman suggests that historical film cycles (some of which would become full-blown genres) began within the Hollywood studio system when individual studios attempted to replicate past successes by producing variations on a theme: “New cycles are usually produced by associating a new type of material or approach with already existing genres” (60). Unlike the cycles Altman discusses, the late-1920s cycle of magic films was neither yoked to any particular generic model nor concentrated at any one studio. Films in the cycle have a variety of generic affinities, often combining elements from more than one genre (like other films made during the transition to sound) ranging from mystery to the musical, and were produced by several different studios. Thus, films in the cycle are linked not so much by a pattern of direct imitation or by a strategy of variation than by a shared topical interest in the figure of the magician, who is placed within different story contexts and depicted in different ways in each film. This late-1920s cycle of magic films must also be understood in relation to the presence of the magician in the media landscape, a presence that was defined in part by the well-known persona of Houdini, who died in 1926 just as the cycle was beginning to take shape. One of the first films in the cycle You Never Know Women was released a few months before Houdini’s death and focuses on a magician who performs escapes as well as more traditional forms of stage illusions. The film shows the magician Norodin levitating his assistant Vera Norova (Florence Vidor), who circles above the heads of the audience as a human butterfly in a beautiful set-piece that begins the film, but later we also see Norodin attempting to escape from a submerged wooden box after he has been handcuffed and secured inside, stage illusions and outdoor stunts that reference Houdini’s well-publicized underwater escapes.

MAGICIANS IN FILM, FILM IN MAGIC ACTS Houdini’s films sparked interest in the movies among a number of magicians who hoped to cross over from stage to screen or were interested in making films as a part of, or adjunct to, the performance of stage illusions.

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After several earlier abortive attempts to become a movie actor, Houdini starred in the fifteen-episode serial The Master Mystery (1918–1919) and shortly thereafter in the sensational melodrama The Grim Game (1919). Magicians’ interest in the movies was spurred by special promotion of The Grim Game for the magic community. Full-color four-page advertising inserts were published in the magic magazine M-U-M to accompany the release of The Grim Game ([August 1919] 17–20; [September 1919] 29–32). A special screening of the film was arranged for the Society of American Magicians (SAM), which gave The Grim Game its official endorsement and pledged that its members would help to promote the film around the country (K[earney] 162). Later in the year, magicians Harry Kellar and Harry G. Cooke appeared in a sort of trick film, Boys Will Be Boys (1919), directed by Francis Ford (who also appears in the film). This short film, in which the two elderly magicians make people disappear and appear (aided by the magic of editing) before the eyes of a skeptical friend from the “show-me state” Missouri (played by Ford), seems to have been screened primarily at gatherings of magicians’ organizations in the following year (McGrath “Big Magical Event” 280; “Los Angeles Society” 9). At the 1919 SAM screening of The Grim Game, Thurston gave a speech in which he pronounced the film “one of the most wonderful things I have ever seen” and called it Houdini’s “greatest work” (quoted in K[earney] 162). By the following year, Thurston had joined Houdini in aggressively pursuing opportunities in the film industry and both were busy making movies, with Thurston starring in the feature Twisted Souls (1920), a murder mystery involving spiritualism, and Houdini following up The Grim Game with a second feature for Famous Players-Lasky entitled Terror Island (1920), an action–adventure set in the South Seas. Both seem to have had plans of abandoning the stage for movie careers. Before relocating to Hollywood to fulfill a contract with Famous Players-Lasky, Houdini wrote: “I am drifting away from vaudeville, and with the exception of my European dates have no plans re[garding] a return” (quoted in Silverman 243). Once he had filled these European dates and returned to the United States, Houdini stopped performing in theaters for more than a year-and-a-half while attempting to launch his own independent film production company (262). Around the same time, Thurston was contemplating retiring from the theater, having offered to name either Blackstone or Laurant as his successor in exchange for a portion of their future box-office proceeds (Olson 262–263; Thurston)— the same kind of arrangement he had earlier made with Kellar in order to be named Kellar’s successor in 1908. Like Houdini, Thurston formed his own eponymous film production company and tried to become a movie star and

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film producer. In 1920, just after Twisted Souls, his first film, was finished, a press release announced: “It is the intention of Mr. Thurston to make a series of pictures dealing with matters in the world of magic” (“Howard Thurston Completes Expose” 988). In 1920, Houdini reported that in addition to Thurston and himself, the magicians Horace Goldin, The Great Raymond, and David Devant had all recently been in films. In an optimistic magic magazine editorial, Houdini wrote, “the indications are that the lure of the clicking camera will steal away a goodly number of magicians” (“Editorial Notes” [July 1920] 20). Within a few years, however, Houdini and Thurston had both returned to the theater full-time, having largely set aside their ambitions for movie careers. Neither was able to achieve much filmmaking success outside of the studio system. After Famous Players-Lasky broke ties with Houdini following Terror Island, he made two features for the Houdini Pictures Corporation, both of which were hampered by poor production values and limited distribution. Thurston never made another feature film after Twisted Souls, which may not have even been released theatrically. Josef von Sternberg, who worked with Thurston as a film editor before directing, notes in his autobiography that the “celebrated magician erroneously thought he could use his tricks to make a successful movie . . . [he] taught me nothing of importance except how to divide an apple into four equal parts without cutting through its skin” (197). Instead of making films for exhibition in movie theaters, Houdini, Thurston, Goldin, and other magicians worked to further incorporate film into their stage acts. Houdini, who had long used nonfiction films to show theatrical audiences his outdoor stunts and escapes, often also screened excerpts from his fiction films as part of his act during the 1920s (Solomon “Houdini’s Actuality Films” 45–61). In 1923, Thurston added the Film of Life illusion to his show. In the illusion, Thurston appeared to interact with an assistant seen in a projected film and then appeared to step from the stage directly into the film, where he performed a few tricks before seemingly walking off of the screen and back onto the stage (Olson 147–148). In 1924, Goldin began performing a sound version of this illusion in which both he and another performer went from stage to film and back several times while interacting and conversing with one another across the stage/screen divide. During the late 1910s and early 1920s, Goldin performed two other illusions that prefigured talking pictures: Radio Film Telepathy and the Girl with the Celluloid Mind. In both mentalist illusions, a female assistant lip-synched behind the screen as a film was projected; the filmed image seemed to respond to what was happening in the

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audience and answered questions posed by the audience (Goldin 252–259; Waltz 161–162). With film illusions like these, magicians of the 1920s demonstrated their apparent mastery of cinematic technology, producing talking films years before they became the standard Hollywood product, and seeming to accomplish what no Hollywood feature film could ever do: transform the movies into an interactive medium.

MOVIE STARS AS MAGICIANS During the early 1920s, magicians’ organizations tried to borrow the renown of Hollywood movies by promoting the fact that a number of Hollywood stars were amateur magicians or former professional magicians. While Los Angeles never rivaled New York or Chicago as a center for magic activity, it supported a monthly magic periodical The Magical Bulletin, several magic shops, and at least one maker of magical apparatus, the Thayer Manufacturing Company. Thayer has been credited with several of the carnival illusions that appear in the “Palace of Illusions” scene in The Show, directed by former magician’s assistant Tod Browning (McIlhany 65–66; Solomon “Staging Deception” 49–67). Regular items in magic magazines reported on the activities of those in the “movie colony” who had an interest in magic; this diverse group included actors Warner Baxter, Hobart Bosworth, Betty Compson, Carter deHaven, Harold Lloyd, Matt Martin, Charles Ray, Wallace Reid, and Larry Semon, as well as director Scott Sidney and cameraman George Baxter, among others. Several movie actors joined the Los Angeles Society of Magicians and/or attended its meetings. Efforts to draw magicians into magic societies and to draw magicians to the movies were spearheaded by Adam Hull Shirk, a devoted amateur magician and West Coast director of publicity for the Famous Players-Lasky movie studio, which was helmed by producer Jesse L. Lasky, formerly the manager of magician Alexander Herrmann, whose picture hung on the wall of Lasky’s private office (Houdini “Editorial Notes” [August 1920] 18). Photographs of actors as magicians, such as the picture of Betty Compson fanning a deck of cards that appeared on the cover of the April 1922 issue of The Magical Bulletin (figure 3.1), reinforced an ostensible connection between magic and the movies. Additionally, Shirk and Patrick Kearney (another amateur magician in the Lasky publicity department) advertised Famous Players-Lasky films such as Hay Foot, Straw Foot (1919) and Something to Think About (1920), which included scenes of conjuring and illusion, through well-placed items in magic magazines (Kearney 14; Sphinx [December 1920] 342).

Figure 3.1 Betty Compson, the Popular Screen Star, Demonstrating Her Favorite Stunts in Card Manipulation, from The Magical Bulletin, April 1922.

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For magicians, promoting movie stars as aficionados of conjuring was an attempt to boost the popularity of magic at a time when it was perceived to be in crisis. For movie actors, an interest in amateur magic fit with the studios’ efforts to shape star publicity during the 1920s. Richard deCordova argues, “there were two principal aspects of the representation of the star’s private identity . . . : an emphasis on the normalcy and morality of their domestic relations and a celebration of their pursuit of pleasure away from work,” though these “two aspects were, in important respects, quite contradictory” (138). Star publicity around amateur magic was one means of resolving these often contradictory aspects of the star’s off-screen persona, showing movie stars having fun outside of work engaging in a pastime whose pleasures were ostensibly entirely wholesome. Consider the following 1921 account of Wallace Reid, film actor and amateur conjurer: Wally Reid, dashing Paramount star, and perhaps the best known of all screen actors, is an enthusiastic conjuror, and is doing the Diminishing Card trick and the Multiplying Billiard Balls at various benefits and “personal appearances” around town. Just the other day Mr. Thayer took out a bunch of apparatus, including the Die Box and other standard tricks, to Wally Reid’s beautiful Hollywood home. Dorothy Davenport, Wally’s charming wife, makes a good assistant. Wally is clever, quick to catch on, and always has a good line of patter. (“Magic and the Movies” 149)

If reports such as these are to be believed, domestic scenes involving amateur magic were a regular occurrence at the Davenport–Reid home. Just a few months later, according to another account, “Wallie [sic] Reid, movie star, entertained a bunch of newspaper men in the den of his home . . . He performed numerous tricks and all his guests voted him a clever conjuror” (Gravatt and McFaddan 394). The extent to which such reports glossed over the stars’ other off-screen activities is suggested by the fact that less than a year after Reid performed this amateur magic show for a room full of newspaper reporters, he died in a sanatorium as a result of complications stemming from a morphine addiction, one of the star scandals that fueled criticism of the decadence of Hollywood during the Jazz Age. The depiction of magicians in several magic films of the 1920s is anything but wholesome. In The Show, the sideshow illusionist Cock Robin (John Gilbert) is a con man and a womanizer who is nearly decapitated by a rival during a performance of a magic sketch version of Salomé. In West of Zanzibar, the magician Phroso (Lon Chaney) is crippled in a fight that occurs after one of his stage performances and abandoned by his unfaithful wife; he flees to Africa, where he uses his magical apparatus to intimidate

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the natives and plots to rob and murder his rival. In The Last Performance, the magician Erik the Great (Conrad Veidt) tampers with the mechanism of the Sword Box illusion in order to kill one of his assistants, who has become a rival for the affections of the woman he loves, onstage during a performance. In magic films of the 1920s, scenes of violence (many of which revolve around the performance of an illusion) typically pit the magician against another man involved in a love triangle with a woman, but in the most popular stage illusion of the decade, the decidedly unwholesome Sawing a Woman in Half (first introduced to the public in 1921 by P. T. Selbit and performed in later variations by the Great Leon, Goldin, and many others), the magician’s violence is directed toward a woman, whose body he appears to sever in two before magically restoring it.

SCREEN EXPOSURES A commitment to stopping exposures of magic in all forms galvanized magicians during the 1920s, resulting in the formation of several new organizations and committees charged with protesting and, if possible, blocking exposures (“Exposure Fight” 189, 191; “Society of American Magicians to Fight Exposures” 179, 183). Protests centered not only on the print media—the New York World and Popular Mechanics, among other newspapers and magazines, were targeted for publishing exposures of magic—but also on motion pictures. Films exposing magic had been made since the 1910s and included “a series of reels showing a performer working various tricks and then exposing them” (Christianer 42). After the introduction of Sawing a Woman in Half, a short film that exposed how it was done was made (Siegel 170–183). The film was reportedly entitled Magic and Mystery Exposed, A Complete Screen Exposé of the Baffling Mystery Tura and was roundly opposed by magicians. Goldin brought suit against the makers of the film, Clarion Photoplays (Fuigle 6; “Illusionist in Film Action” X2). As president of the SAM, Houdini appealed directly to theater owners, urging them not to book the film (Houdini “Editorial Notes” [April 1922] 110; “Magicians Fight Film Exposes of Illusions”). Houdini wrote, “In time, we hope to convince all moving picture owners and managers throughout the United States, of the injustice to magicians by screen exposures,” urging magicians’ organizations around the country to “lend a hand to the good work” (Houdini “Editorial Notes” [June 1922] 112). These efforts were successful in many ways, as was Goldin’s suit, which suppressed exhibition of Magic and Mystery Exposed and resulted

74 Matthew Solomon in damages from Clarion and the film’s distributor, the Alexander Film Corporation (Siegel 182–183). Though these and other protests helped to block distribution of films made solely to expose magic illusions, exposures that revealed magic tricks as part of fictional stories continued to appear in films. Indeed, magicians also had to contend with fiction film scenes that disclosed the methods of magic. In a letter to Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), the organization responsible for supervising the U.S. film industry’s self-censorship efforts, I. I. Altman of the SAM complained that the film Noisy Neighbors (1929), “in which many of the stock tricks of a professional magician are needlessly and deliberately exposed,” was injurious to magicians, some of whom might have had to appear on the same bill as the film in theaters combining vaudeville and motion pictures: It is manifestly unfair to the large group of professional and semi-professional magical entertainers throughout the country that the effectiveness of their acts, which they have built up after years of effort, should be destroyed by a motion picture expose for the sake of a cheap laugh. Once the “Modus Operandi” of the magicians’ tricks are disclosed to an audience the magician’s ability to entertain ceases. (88)

The censorship activities of the MPPDA, which resulted in the creation of the Production Code in 1930, were designed to prevent any and all potential objections to the movies and were hardly confined to issues of morality. As Ruth Vasey emphasizes, “Industry policy influenced not only the depiction of sex and violence but also Hollywood’s representation of religions, politics (domestic and foreign), corporate capitalism, ethnic minorities, the conduct of lawyers, doctors, and other professionals, and a host of other issues, large and small” (6). While magicians’ objections constituted a comparatively small issue for the film industry, pressure from professional organizations was not insignificant given what Vasey describes as “the industry’s accommodating attitude toward . . . isolated lobby groups” (6). As Vasey contends, citing the examples of billiards players and circus operators, “it was quite possible for quite peripheral groups to receive attention if they were sufficiently well organized” (197). Objections from other professional groups usually centered on depictions of professional conduct, but magicians framed their objections to Hollywood film content entirely around the issue of exposures. Exposures of magic tricks may have had more than passing interest for spectators, as suggested by a review of The Last Performance in the New York

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Times. In the review, Times critic Mordaunt Hall mentions “the occasional glimpses of the way in which the magician, Erik the Great, deceives the eyes of his audiences” as one of the primary ways that “this picture holds one’s attention” (25). Although the murderous Erik rigs a piece of magic apparatus in The Last Performance, magicians did not protest the film’s negative portrayal of a member of their profession. Instead, they objected to the film’s exposure of the Sword Box, the Doll’s House illusion, and a trick platform used to effect a mid-air vanish (I. I. Altman “Universal Pictures” 281). Seeking to forestall the objections of magicians, Universal had screened the film for potential problems before its release, but had concluded, “This exposure of the magic art is hardly likely to cause any protest from the magicians union since the tricks are old ones and involve no great skill” (Fisher). I. I. Altman , however, claimed in a letter to the vice president of Universal: “The revelation to the audience that it is the platform that does the trick is a damaging exposure inasmuch as this principle is being used professionally by Thurston, Blackstone and other professional illusionists” (Unpublished letter to Cochran). Universal agreed to eliminate the exposure of the illusion (I. I. Altman “Universal Pictures” 281), but, because the film seems to have been released in some three different versions (silent, sound-on-film, and sound-on-disc), it is difficult to determine how many subsequent copies of the release print—if any—were altered to conform to the wishes of a vocal minority of magicians. Though not all magic films of the 1920s contain exposures of stage illusions, in those that do—such as The Last Performance and The Show— the inclusion of these scenes has the effect of reinforcing the verisimilitude of the film inasmuch as they suggest that the marvels we see on the screen have been created at the level of the mise-en-scène and not through cinematic special effects. Where the ersatz magic acts seen in trick films show bodies being severed, expanded, contracted, and multiplied (among other apparent traumas), magic films emphasize the elaborate choreography and contraptions that must be employed to make actual bodies appear to disappear or seem to be severed. Although cinematic bodies created through special effects might be infinitely malleable, films such as The Last Performance, The Show, and (presumably) Magic and Mystery Exposed show how the body of the performer must be staged, contorted, and manipulated in space to achieve visual deceptions of a different kind. It is precisely the shots in magic films that magicians objected to most vigorously that make it clear that what we see in these films is not entirely the representational magic of the screen, but rather performed magic created through the movements of real bodies in real spaces.

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CONCLUSION: ILLUSIONS AND THE ILLUSIONIST In his famous extended interview with François Truffaut conducted during the early 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock claimed, “it’s impossible to put an illusionist on the screen, because the public knows instinctively, through the tricks they have seen in films, how the director went about it. They will say, ‘Oh well, he stopped the reel and then took her out of the box!’ ” (Truffaut 307). Though Hitchcock would later claim that theatrical magic could not be effectively transposed to film, he had briefly considered directing a biopic about Houdini during World War II (Selznick) and had previously included a magician in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and a magic act in Young and Innocent (1937). By portraying magic in these films, Hitchcock was engendering precisely the kind of skepticism that he subsequently identified as so inimical to the seamless pleasure of the film audience, encouraging viewers to see through the deceptions of film trickery and cinematic storytelling. These deceptions are created largely through cutting, Hitchcock claims, pointing out that the tricks used to simulate magic in films (i.e., “stopping the reel”) highlight and thus expose the substitutions and elisions created through editing. In her astute analysis of The Lady Vanishes, Karen Beckman suggests that Hitchcock’s interest in magic during this period should be read as highly strategic. Through the figures of the magician, Signor Doppo (Philip Leaver), and the vanishing woman, Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), Beckman argues that Hitchcock is able to mount a sophisticated critique both of wartime politics and cinematic illusionism: Hitchcock employs a variety of fragmenting camera techniques to draw our attention to the hidden incisions of the editorial cuts. In doing so, he challenges the period’s norms of film editing and of the finished product—the idea of film as a whole . . . [B]y drawing our attention to those cuts Hitchcock forces knowledge on the spectator, knowledge of the illusion of cinematic wholeness . . . In forcing this awareness on the spectator, Hitchcock’s political critique moves beyond his most obvious target of British isolationism, both cultural and political, and begins to expose . . . the machinations of an ideology like National Socialism . . . But in doing this Hitchcock simultaneously exposes the potential violence of the cinema itself. (136–137)

The presence of a magician as an important supporting character in The Lady Vanishes and the placement of a piece of magic apparatus in its

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mise-en-scène complement these self-conscious sequences of montage editing, combining to expose cinema as a medium of ideological and visual deception. Throughout film history, magic has resurfaced as a cinematic subject during times of technological transformation. The latest cycle of Hollywood magic films, which includes The Illusionist (2006), The Prestige (2006), and Death Defying Acts (2007), has come in the wake of recent advances in computer-generated imagery (CGI) that render digital facsimiles virtually indistinguishable from real settings and objects. Recent films about magicians foreground illusion both at the level of the story and at the level of the techniques that make onscreen magic tricks possible, making viewers hyper-aware of cinema’s propensity for deception and, in particular, inspiring skepticism toward the uncanny verisimilitude of CGI. One touchstone for this skepticism was the Orange-Tree Trick depicted in The Illusionist, directed by Neil Burger. During a theater performance by the illusionist Eisenheim (Edward Norton), a dwarf orange tree is made to seemingly grow from seed, blossom, and produce fruit in a few seconds in a pot placed on the stage (figure 3.2) as an audience looks on in amazement. After Eisenheim tosses several oranges from the tree to spectators, two butterflies flutter over the tree holding a handkerchief

Figure 3.2 Eisenheim (Edward Norton) and the Orange Tree, in The Illusionist, 2006.

78 Matthew Solomon previously borrowed from a member of the audience. This is, of course, a version of the Fantastic Orange Tree made famous by Robert-Houdin and it—like many of the other magic tricks seen in the film—was based (at least in part, as we shall discover) on the techniques of nineteenth-century conjuring and illusion. Many reviews of The Illusionist singled out this sequence for criticism, objecting to the way it seems to substitute transparent cinematic trickery for a mystifying theatrical illusions, a substitution that, as one reviewer put it, “undermines Eisenheim’s credibility as a master illusionist” (Key 6). This particular trick was a flashpoint for criticism and was greeted by considerable skepticism and speculation, as indicated by the different explanations posited in various reviews of the film. One reviewer attributed the trick (somewhat inexplicably) to editing, the oldest and most basic of film tricks: “stunts like growing an orange tree from a seed and having a handkerchief floated off by butterflies comes off as rudimentary film editing to us” (Mathews 49). Another reviewer suspected something a bit more subtle, though nearly as transparent, claiming that when “the great Eisenheim grows an entire orange tree in his hands from the mere speck of a pit . . . it looks like time-lapse photography, which explains why our eyes are less than astounded” (Groen R12). Most reviewers, however, surmised that the Orange-Tree Trick was merely a clever CGI effect: Eisenheim, . . . memorably, plants an orange seed and brings forth a fully grown tree in moments. (Burger is not so old-fashioned as to eschew special effects.) (Bartlett 9) [I]ts tricks, while authentic to the period, are clearly created on a computer (listing magician Ricky Jay as one of the films consultants is perhaps the films craftiest sleight of hand). (Naglazas 9) Eisenheim . . . grows an orange tree from a seed before the very eyes of his astonished audience. This famous turn-of-the-century trick was actually done with finely tuned machinery, but in the film it’s plain ol’ CG. (Nelson A5)

As the latter reviewer indicates, the original Orange-Tree Trick—several versions of which seem to predate Robert-Houdin—was primarily a mechanical illusion (Houdini Unmasking 51–82; Robert-Houdin 119– 120). Performed by Robert-Houdin as part of the programs of his legendary Soirées Fantastiques during the 1840s, the Fantastic Orange Tree (L’Oranger Fantastique) (figure 3.3) was a magnificent trick automaton in the form

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Figure 3.3 Robert-Houdin and the Fantastic Orange Tree, from L’Illusionniste, June 1904.

of a mechanical miniature citrus tree operated by concealed pneumatic pressure: Robert-Houdin made his mechanical orange tree look as much like the real thing as possible. It represented a fully foliated, dwarf tree, and sat on a table. Some of its “branches,” in reality hollow metal tubes, held concealed within their ends folded-up paper or silk “flowers” and, just behind the flowers, deflated “oranges.” Air secretly pumped into the tubes forced the flowers to gradually emerge and open up, or “blossom.” More air pushed the oranges out, causing the flowers to flutter down, and then swelled the oranges in a simulation of growth. (Metzner 196)

The Illusionist seamlessly combines the centuries-old mechanical illusion of the trick automaton with the most recent CGI effects. In the film, the orange tree’s marvelous growth is depicted in two distinct shots (intercut with shots of the audience’s reactions). The first of these two shots involves a 180-degree camera movement that rotates around the tree, beginning with a close-up of a stem rising from the pot with the magician’s

80 Matthew Solomon hand poised over it and the audience in the background and continuing as branches and leaves rapidly sprout and form along the length of the expanding stem, with the camera pulling away to a long shot of the stage with Eisenheim standing beside the still-growing tree on a table. This camera movement shows us the trick, the magician, and the audience all inhabiting a single unified space, reinforcing the veracity of the illusion and helping to collapse the difference between what Eisenheim’s audience in the film sees and what we, the audience for The Illusionist, see onscreen. Though widely understood as a product of the digital conjuring of CGI, the growth of the orange tree (in this shot of the film at least) in fact seems to have employed a mechanical prop along the lines of Robert-Houdin’s trick automaton: “In the case of the orange tree, an intricate set of gears pushed out leaves folded within stems, which then bloom. This mechanical process constituted the major part of the illusion” (Thomson 56), although this shot also appears to have been retouched digitally, like other illusions in the film. According to cinematographer Dick Pope, while filming this sequence of The Illusionist, We had to deal with how to physically move around Edward Norton without destroying his performance . . . and deal with the really complicated mechanics and timing of the tree growing. It’s the type of move that could be a serious candidate for a heavily rotoscoped CGI effect, but it was mainly achieved in camera, which makes it more believable. The credibility of The Illusionist hangs on the very authenticity and believability of its illusions. (Quoted in Thomson 56)

By contrast, one subsequent shot of the marvelous orange tree as it bears fruit and two later shots of two butterflies fluttering above the tree with the handkerchief suspended between them are primarily CGI effects (as Burger explains in the DVD director’s commentary). These four respective shots of the Orange-Tree Trick—one created primarily with a pro-filmic mechanical trick and the other three created primarily in postproduction with the addition of CGI—all take on the quality of a direct address to the spectator. Cinematic special effects, as many have noted (after Gunning), represent a return to the spectacle-based mode of the “cinema of attractions.” Michele Pierson, who considers reception as a key factor in understanding how special effects function in contemporary cinema, writes, “effects sequences featuring CGI commonly exhibit a mode of spectatorial address that—with its tableau-style framing, longer takes, and strategic intercutting between shots of the computer-generated object

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and reaction shots of characters—solicits an attentive and even contemplative viewing of the computer-generated image” (125). Moments of magic (whether created through theatrical means or CGI) tend to disrupt one’s immersion in the story of the film and invite skepticism and curiosity, as the reviews of The Illusionist quoted above confirm. Pope has claimed, with The Illusionist, “I always wanted the audience to be thinking, ‘How does Eisenheim do it? rather than, ‘How do the filmmakers do it?’ ” (quoted in Thomson 56). Yet, by combining theatrical illusions and conjuring tricks—much was made in the film’s publicity of the fact that Norton was tutored in sleight-of-hand by magician (and film actor) Ricky Jay in order to prepare for the role of Eisenheim—The Illusionist effectively makes one question both the methods of the stage illusionist and the techniques of the filmmakers. The illusions in The Illusionist, which deceptively blur the distinction between digital manipulation and prestidigitation, are simultaneously reflective, mirroring the techniques of theatrical illusion, and reflexive, foregrounding the cinematic medium’s own capacity for creating visual illusions. Film’s relationship to magic is one of the themes of the film, which is set around the turn of the century, when film was a brand-new medium and was often used by magicians as part of magic shows. In a key scene later in the film, after Eisenheim’s performances have been shut down by the Viennese authorities and he has turned to conjuring the dead through pseudo-spiritualist stage illusions, a demonstration for Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti) suggests that Eisenheim may be making specters appear by placing a film projector just offstage. This scene is one of the only “exposures” in the film and it constitutes not only an exposé of a specific trick of late-nineteenth-century theatrical magic—David Devant used projected motion pictures to accomplish a similar trick at the Egyptian Hall around 1900 (Mayer 107)—but also of manifold cinematic deceptions, past and present. The Illusionist, like the 1920s films that at times it resembles, cannot avoid reminding us of the different forms of illusion that make the magic of Hollywood cinema possible.

NOTE An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar in November 2007. I am grateful for Oliver Gaycken’s invitation to present my work in this seminar and I am especially appreciative of Karen Beckman’s generous and insightful response, which was extremely useful in reframing this essay, as well as for Gwendolyn Waltz’s helpful comments. Thank you to Jeffrey Man for his help with the illustrations. I would also like to thank the editors of this book for their useful feedback on this earlier version.

82 Matthew Solomon

WORKS CITED Altman, I. I. Letter to Will Hays, April 11, 1929. Sphinx May 1929: 88. ———. “Universal Pictures Corporation Expose Fundamental Secret of Many Illusions in ‘The Last Performance’ but Upon Protest of S.A.M., Scene Eliminated from Picture.” Sphinx October 1929: 281. ———. Unpublished letter to R. H. Cochrane [1929], The Last Performance file, MPAA/Production Code Administration Files, Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1999. Bakshy, Alexander. “Vaudeville Must Be Saved.” Nation July 24, 1929: 98, 100. Barnouw, Erik. The Magician and the Cinema. New York: Oxford UP, 1981. Bartlett, Chris. “Magical History Tour.” Sunday Mail March 4, 2007: 9. Beckman, Karen. Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Burch, Noël. Life to those Shadows. Trans. and ed. Ben Brewster. Berkeley: U California P, 1990. Christianer, L. F. “Magic and the Movies.” Magical Bulletin May 1919: 42. Crafton, Donald. Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. ———. The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926–1931. Berkeley: U California P, 1997. deCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1990. “Exposure Fight.” M-U-M January 1924: 189, 191. Fejos, Paul. “Illusion on the Screen.” National Board of Review Magazine June 1929: 3–4. Fisher, James B. M. Unpublished memorandum, September 9, 1929, The Last Performance file, MPAA/Production Code Administration files, Margaret Herrick Library. Fuigle, J. S. “Some More Notes for Publication.” Sphinx March 1922: 6–7. Goldin, Horace. It’s Fun to Be Fooled. London: Stanley Paul, 1937. Gravatt and McFaddan. “News Notes from Los Angeles.” Sphinx January 1922: 394. Groen, Rick. “Disillusioned? You Bet.” Globe and Mail August 18, 2006: R12. Gunning, Tom. D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana, IL: U Illinois P, 1991. Hall, Mordaunt. “The Screen.” New York Times November 4, 1929: 25. Houdini. “Editorial Notes.” M-U-M July 1920: 20. ———. “Editorial Notes.” M-U-M August 1920: 18. ———. “Editorial Notes.” M-U-M April 1922: 110. ———. “Editorial Notes.” M-U-M June 1922: 112. Houdini, Harry. The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin. New York: Publishers Printing Company, 1908.

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“Howard Thurston Completes Expose of Fake Spiritualism.” Moving Picture World August 21, 1920: 988. “Illusionist in Film Action.” New York Times August 12, 1923: X2. K[earney], P[atrick]. “S. A. M. Endorses Houdini’s Picture ‘The Grim Game’ at Private Showing Pronounces It Glowing Success, and Promises Aid in Exploiting It.” Sphinx September 1919: 162. Kearney, Patrick. “Magicians Will Enjoy the Charles Ray Pictures Showing Trials of Young Conjurer; ‘Hay Foot, Straw Foot’ Paramount Release of Interest to Profession.” Sphinx March 1920: 14. Key, Philip. “Film: Sheer Magic.” Liverpool Daily Post March 2, 2007: 6. “Magic and the Movies.” Sphinx June 1921: 149. “Magicians Fight Film Exposes of Illusions: Theater Managers Urged in Letter Signed by Houdini for Society to Block Disclosures.” Billboard April 22, 1922: 14. Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Cinema. 2d ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Mathews, Jack. “Tricks but No Treats.” New York Daily News August 18, 2006: 49. Mayer, David. “Learning to See in the Dark.” Nineteenth Century Theatre 25.2 (Winter 1997): 92–114. McGrath, T. W. “Big Magical Event in Los Angeles, Cal.” Sphinx January 1920: 280. ———. “Los Angeles Society of Magicians.” Magical Bulletin January 1920: 9. McIlhany, Bill. “Side Show: The Magical Cinema of Tod Browning.” Magic August 1996: 65–68. Méliès, Georges. “Les Coulisses du Cinématographie: Doit-on le dire?” PhonoCinéma-Revue April 1908: 2–4. Metzner, Paul. Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution. Berkeley: U California P, 1998. Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Naglazas, Mark. “Double Dose of Magic.” Perth West Australian March 6, 2007: 9. Nelson, Steffie. “Magic Pics Pull Conjuring Tricks.” Daily Variety January 9, 2007: A5. Olson, Robert E. The World’s Greatest Magician: A Tribute to Howard Thurston. Calgary: Micky Hades, 1981. Pierson, Michele. Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Robert-Houdin. Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, King of the Conjurers. Translated by Lascelles Wraxall. 1859; repr., New York: Dover Publications, 1964. Sadoul, Georges. Les Pionniers du cinéma (de Méliès à Pathé), 1897–1909. Vol. 2, Histoire générale du cinéma. Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1947. Selznick, David O. Unpublished memorandum to [Alfred] Hitchcock, July 21, 1944, Folder 251, Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, CA. Shirk, Adam Hull. “Here, There and Everywhere.” Sphinx December 1929: 395–396.

84 Matthew Solomon Siegel, Fred. “The Vaudeville Conjuring Act.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, New York University, 1993. Silverman, Kenneth. Houdini!!! The Career of Ehrich Weiss. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. “Society of American Magicians to Fight Exposures.” M-U-M October–November 1923: 179, 183. Solomon, Matthew. “Houdini’s Actuality Films: Mediated Magic on the Variety Stage.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 33.2 (Winter 2006): 45–61. ———. “Staging Deception: Theatrical Illusionism in Browning’s Films of the 1920s.” In The Films of Tod Browning, 49–67. Edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006. ———. “Up-to-Date Magic: Theatrical Conjuring and the Trick Film.” Theatre Journal 58:4 (December 2006): 595–615. Thomson, Patricia. “Conjuring the Past.” American Cinematographer September 2006: 50–59. Thurston, Howard. Unpublished letter to Eugene Laurant, October 26, 1920, Box 135, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, Special Collections, University of Iowa Library, Iowa City, IA. Truffaut, François, with Helen G. Scott. Hitchcock. Rev. ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. Vasey, Ruth. The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Von Sternberg, Josef. Fun in a Chinese Laundry. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1965. Waltz, Gwendolyn. “Confounding! Sense Deception and ‘Film to Life’ Effects.” In I cinqui sensi del cinema / The Five Senses of Cinema, 161–172. Edited by Alice Autelitano, Veronica Innocenti, and Valentina Re. Udine, It.: Forum, 2006.

4. The Body Immaterial: Magicians’ Assistants and the Performance of Labor Francesca Coppa

Francesca Coppa is Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College where she teaches courses in dramatic literature, sexuality theory, and performance studies. She has published in many areas, including the effects of copyright law on contemporary subcultures. Coppa here considers the role of the female assistant, who so often does the actual onstage work of magic. She examines the Sawing Illusion (1920) as an exemplar of tensions surrounding women’s postwar suffrage and work. Her materialist feminist analysis connects the modern stage illusion to the industrial world within which it developed, where male capital and reputation are built on hidden female labor. How do magic illusions resemble the modern corporation, in which profits accrue to the owners of intellectual properties rather than those who actually make, do, or manufacture what’s sold? What alternatives could magicians consider?

T

he clichéd image of the magician in top hat and tails, clutching a wand in one hand and a rabbit in the other, is, like most traditional iconography, a product of the late Victorian era. In her book Vanishing Women (2003), Karen Beckman describes how magicians adopted this defiantly Western garb partly in reaction to the Indian Mutiny (1857), thereby asserting the superiority of the British gentleman over the Eastern “other.” Although some magicians continued to perform in Oriental drag (e.g., British magician P. T. Selbit, later the inventor of Sawing Through a Woman, who performed in skin-darkening makeup, gold earrings, and a black fright wig as the “Egyptian” magician Joad Heteb until 1910, or the American magician William Ellsworth Robinson, who performed as Chung Ling Soo until his death in 1918), the professional stage magician increasingly presented himself as a well-dressed European. Beckman suggests that this preference for evening

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clothes rather than turbans and robes reveals a “fear of the orientalizing and feminizing effects of magic on the British male body” (42). Consequently, British magicians began to choose costumes that firmly aligned them with the upper reaches of the global power structure. If, as Jean Eugène RobertHoudin said, a magician is “an actor playing the part of a magician” (39), the Victorian actor increasingly played the role as a Western capitalist rather than as an Eastern mystic. On the one hand, this choice of costuming can be seen as merely the latest twist in the magician’s ongoing symbolic relationship to capital (see chapter five in this volume). On the other hand, the nineteenth century is the site of an unprecedented industrial shift, and in particular, a radical reimagining of the role of labor. Marx projected that society would split into two classes: property owners and propertyless workers. Whether society did or did not make such a split, it certainly occurred in magic. The strengthening of magic’s association with the figure of the Western capitalist happened simultaneously with the widespread addition of assistants to the magic act. After all, what’s a capitalist without a labor force? And in stage magic, as in industry, it’s often the assistant who actually does the work of the trick. Initially, magicians’ assistants were either Indian men or Englishwomen, although over the years, the female “box jumper” has become the industry standard. The presence of a woman or an Indian man on stage as part of the act sharply distinguished the Western male magician from his female and oriental counterparts. It also demonstrated his superiority over them by putting him at the top of a performance hierarchy. The clichéd magician– assistant relationship features a named magician (“The Amazing Xander!”) and his smiling female assistant (“and Jane!”). Although few major magical acts continue to bill themselves in this hackneyed way, and magical partnerships (Penn and Teller, Siegfried and Roy, Jonathan and Charlotte Pendragon) have become more common, many magical acts still feature a male name on the marquee and any number of uncredited or undercredited female assistants on stage. In this way, much of contemporary magic is still firmly rooted in Victorian stage practices, or what Simon During calls “the mid-nineteenth century illusion business” (107). This essay is divided into three parts. In the first section, “The Body and the Secret,” I will examine the way in which traditional stage magic divides its performers into (male) capital and (female) labor, and exaggerates that distinction so that male magicians are defined by their role as possessors of restricted magical knowledge, whereas female assistants are doubly framed as not-magicians in that they are clearly framed as hired help and not as part of the rarefied social circle of magicians, where knowledge

Magicians’ Assistants 87 is shared and transmitted; and in that they are depicted within the magic act as hypnotized, asleep, unconscious, or mentally vacant—that is, literally not in possession of the requisite mental equipment for the magician’s job of keeping secrets. Moreover, I will argue that magical power actually derives from the body, and just as the presence of an Indian or female other helps the Western magician define what he is not in terms of gender and race, having a female assistant actively performing as “the body” within the traditional magic act prevents the male magician from being seen as a body, allowing him to conceal his true source of magical power. Finally, I will argue that nineteenth- and twentieth-century stage magic, although apparently demonstrating various Grand Guignol-style tortures (including various stabbings, sawings, straightjacketings, dismemberings, and crushings) is actually not a display of old-style spectacular punishment, but rather stages the type of physical discipline that produces the docile bodies necessary for modern industrial capitalism. In short, I will demonstrate that all the bodies on stage in the illusion business are docile bodies in Foucault’s terms, which is to say, highly trained and controlled bodies, starting with the magician’s own, although the magician generally prefers to frame himself as the dominating ringleader of this particular circus rather than as its most highly trained physical performer. In the second part, “The Woman Inside: On Being Sawed in Half,” I will more deeply examine some of these ideas, specifically in the context of the Sawing illusion (1920). The Sawing makes for a fascinating case study, not least because of its history as a highly contested piece of intellectual property, which reinforces the notion that profits should accrue to owners and not to those who actually make, do, or manufacture what’s sold. The Sawing illusion was fought over and profitably franchised by men, while the actual onstage apparatus is operated by not just one, but, in many versions of the trick, two women: one lying passively in the box, apparently hypnotized, and one who (like so many laboring women) is never visible to the audience. In this section, I argue that the Sawing represents the apotheosis of the use of female assistants in stage magic. In making this argument, I am consciously following Karen Beckman’s cultural history of the Vanishing Lady (1886), the first illusion to feature a female assistant. Beckman argues that the Vanishing Lady should be read as an expression of mid-nineteenth-century anxieties about Britain’s surplus female population. Having a woman vanish into thin air was one fairly nonviolent solution to the problem; others included emigration, the workhouse, and marriage— that more familiar Victorian vanishing. Beckman notes that the existence of surplus women with time on their hands was a precondition for the

88 Francesca Coppa political activism that led to universal suffrage. Significantly, suffrage was achieved in a limited way for British women in 1918 and fully in 1928, and in 1920 for American women. In “Above and Beneath the Saw” (1998), Jim Steinmeyer argues that the success of the Sawing was at least partly a matter of timing: “The very act of victimizing a lady in 1921 was to victimize the newly enfranchised lady” (86). This is no doubt true: think of how the displayed (and fetishized) head, hands, and feet of a woman in a typical Horace Goldin-style sawing echoes the newly exposed arms and legs of the emancipated flapper. Beyond even this, though, I argue that the Sawing was particularly hostile to the category of working women. In Britain, P. T. Selbit offered to saw the famous suffragettes Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst in half. The suffragettes had earned respect largely as a result of their work in support of the war effort, and Selbit’s “jest” came in the form of a mocking job offer: £20 a week to be “a permanent sawing block” (85). In the third part, “ ‘We Know You’ve Been Hurt Before’: Penn and Teller,” I will examine how these postmodern magicians engage and alter this subtextual narrative. In particular, I will look at the ways in which Penn and Teller, who perform in corporate gray suits, stage a postindustrial capitalism wherein a big, blustery man (Penn) dominates and tortures a meeker, smaller one (Teller). But Penn and Teller depict themselves both as magicians and as laboring bodies. Although they are best known for telling magical secrets, they actually make secrets irrelevant, defining magic as collaborative work and making that collaborative work visible.

THE BODY AND THE SECRET Although the female assistant is the most obvious laboring body in the narrative of performance magic, magic takes place across and through a series of bodies—not just the class- and gender-inflected bodies of assistants, confederates, and audience members, but also, first and foremost, the magician’s own body. The actor who plays the part of a magician is actually the magician’s first assistant, a body with “saw cuts and rope burns on his hands” (Teller xvi). That actor’s hands are trained instruments; his muscles misdirect by appearing to bear weight when there is none; his physical flexibility and strength (which can verge on the gymnastic) underlie the command of gesture necessary for that magical essential: perfect timing. Yet magicians rarely credit the body as a source of magical power. Instead, they fetishize magical knowledge, their possession of secrets. Eugene Burger claims this power draws boys to magic: “The idea is, here’s this powerless

Magicians’ Assistants 89 kid, eleven or twelve years old. What gives him power? Well, having a secret. We should talk about the phenomenology of the secret. What does the secret do to a person? Knowing a secret is power” (51). The secret Eugene Burger describes sounds epistemological: the knowledge of tricks, of how an illusion works. Indeed, the world of stage magic is one of restricted knowledge and tightly controlled intellectual properties. But this is not how magic really works. Secrets are not actually the source of the magician’s power. Lots of people know magical secrets, including illusion inventors, engineers, builders, and their factory workers; roadies, stagehands, and magicians’ assistants; writers, illustrators, and readers of magic books; and the family members of all of these. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), “Knowledge . . . is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field of power” (4). Ignorance often structures interpersonal exchanges, and knowledge may be a liability or a source of vulnerability.1 Certainly, possessing a secret or having a hidden methodology hardly seems powerful in the context of an actual performance, wherein a magician faces the scrutinizing eyes of an audience. The spectators are fully aware that the magician has a secret; the magician, in fact, must inform them of his possession of secrets, either subtly or directly. In this way, the magician’s secret is an “open secret,” in D. A. Miller’s terms—that is, a category of information whose revelation or concealment is more a matter of structuring power relationships between groups than about genuinely disseminating or restricting knowledge. Just as the secret of one’s sexual orientation is constructed for the purpose of being repressed by its possessor, and thereby to oppress him or her, the secret of the magical trick exists to structure the complex relationship between the magician, his assistants, and the audience, wherein the magician openly knows the secret, the assistants know but pretend not to, and the audience doesn’t know it, although they may perhaps wish to.2 Although magicians claim that secrets give power, in fact, the overt or covert announcement of a secret invites the audience’s attention, although that attention is essential to the performance. As Miller frames the paradox: For I have had to intimate my secret, if only not to tell it; and conversely, in theatrically continuing to keep my secret, I have already rather given it away . . . I can’t quite tell my secret, because then it would be known that there was nothing really special to hide, and no one really special to hide it. But I can’t quite keep it either, because then it would not be believed that there was something to hide and someone to hide it. (194–195; italics in original)

Magicians must intimate the existence of secrets to draw the audience’s attention; otherwise, the audience might conceivably miss the trick

90 Francesca Coppa entirely. Miller is arguing that all secrets involve some level of performance (“showing-doing” rather than merely “doing,” to adopt Richard Schechner’s vocabulary [22]), so arguably magicians are not just keeping secrets, but showing-keeping them. This heightened level of attention differentiates magic from, say, a pickpocket’s real-life sleight-of-hand with your wallet. Harry Houdini used just this metaphor in his Strand article, “The Thrills in the Life of a Magician” (1987): “Just suppose a pickpocket knew I was watching him sharply. It isn’t very probable that he would try to pick my pocket while I had my eye on him. Yet that is just the condition under which a magician has to work” (149). The pickpocket, unlike the magician, invites no scrutiny; his secret is a genuine secret, whereas magic is performed before people straining to detect how it’s done, to spot the tiniest slip-up. In this context, the magician is a figure of extreme vulnerability, a criminal trying to protect his secrets from an audience of detectives. Thrilling this may be, but having a secret while being subjected to the gaze of others is not entirely an empowering position.3 Therefore, a magician must command and direct the audience’s gaze. Houdini describes how he controls his audience both physically and mentally. In particular, he reverses the direction of the gaze by reminding the audience that “Our tricks . . . would often fail if we had not studied you as closely as we have studied the techniques of our business” (149). Houdini describes the magician’s power in almost gleeful detail: One of the greatest factors in our success, for example, is our ability to make you look in any direction we want. When I shout, “Look! The box is empty!” or “See! I have nothing up my sleeves!” I do it just to make you keep your eyes glued on the box or my sleeves. Then, while your attention is riveted on these things, I make the moves necessary for the completion of the trick. If you watched me and not the box or my sleeves, you might catch me red-handed. But for the necessary few seconds you forget to do it; because, at my command, your eyes involuntarily turn. (149)

Houdini is speaking as a magician when he describes “our success” and “our abilities,” but he was always more successful as an escape artist than as a magician. This isn’t a minor distinction; Jim Steinmeyer, among many others, claims Houdini was actually “a terrible magician” (Hiding 5). Moreover, Houdini’s self-presentation was anything but magical; as an escapologist, Houdini specifically presented himself as a well-trained body rather than as a keeper of secrets.4 Arguably, Houdini’s performance as a laboring body may explain his later role as an exposer of charlatans and their secrets. He

Magicians’ Assistants 91 had framed his act as honest work, as opposed to fraud or fakery. Houdini’s most famous performances were thus almost antimagical in that the last thing he wanted his audience to suspect was that there was a secret to his escapes. Instead, regardless of the escape’s difficulty, Houdini made sure to emerge sweating and panting, the very picture of physical effort. In this presentation of himself as vulnerable body, Houdini is almost an antimagician—or, put another way, the secrets to Houdini’s escapes were genuine (as opposed to open) secrets, making Houdini the magician as invisible as a pickpocket, and Houdini the performer the most famous magician’s assistant in the world. Unlike the traditional female assistant, however, Houdini owns his labor: he is given credit for his work, and he directly reaps the financial benefit. As an escapologist, Houdini presents an unusual case; most magicians work to conceal physical labor, both their own and that of their assistants. Unlike the panting, sweating Houdini, the essence of magic is the effacement—or perhaps more accurately, the displacement—of labor. If the illusion is successful, the spectator should not even realize who on stage did the trick, let alone when or how it happened. The exhibition is one of perfect control over self, others, and audience. I would therefore argue that the power of magic resides not in secrets but in discipline, and that the potential smugness of the magician is not “I know something you don’t,” but “Made you look!” In fact, the magician’s claim of “Made you!” can be directed at all of the bodies in the act, including the audience’s, the assistant’s, and the magician’s own. All are disciplined, trained, controlled, subordinate, and subordinated, performing their correct role in the spectacle. Ironically, although much performance magic appears to be staging torture and punishment— sawing women in half, throwing knives, straightjacketing people—it’s more genuinely a demonstration of Foucauldian discipline. The rise of performance magic in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe correlates with the rise of what Foucault calls “the project of docility,” or “the body as the object and target of power” (180). Many illusions can be seen to be demonstrating the docile body—that is, the body that “may be subjected, used, transformed, and improved” (180). First and foremost, the magician is displaying and demonstrating his own thoroughly trained body—the hands that are quicker than the eye, the limbs that are so well practiced that they can function almost independently. Then, in illusion, there is the assistant’s apparently indestructible body, which can be levitated, vanished, stabbed, or sawed through. Foucault argues that the docile body is essentially the body as machine, and the same period that gave rise to large-scale illusion-making was also the

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period of magicians’ displaying automata, not to mention the modern factory assembly line.

THE WOMAN INSIDE: ON BEING SAWED IN HALF Foucault argues that in the eighteenth century, “the human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it” (182), which is not a bad description of the famous magical illusion broadly known as the Sawing. The basic trick, invented by P. T. Selbit in 1920, was called Sawing through a Woman and was more about bodily penetration than about separation. This first version involved putting a woman fully inside a box and stretching her to her full length by the means of a series of labeled ropes tied to her hands, feet, and head. These ropes extended through small holes in the box and were either held taut by members of the audience or tied tightly to external poles. The box was then divided and subdivided by long, narrow sheets of glass until it seemed to be divided into eight small compartments, none of which was apparently large enough to conceal the lady within. Finally, the entire box was sawed through. Afterward, blades and glass sheets were removed, and the woman was revealed, unharmed. According to Peter Warlock, who witnessed Selbit performing the Sawing early in 1921 (and was invited to hold the ropes), this trick was performed after, and in the context of, an illusion called Magic Bricks. Selbit came out with four wooden cubes, three painted to look like lead and a fourth painted gold. During the course of this illusion, the gold brick passed downward through the others, and Selbit’s patter framed the trick according to two principles: that matter could pass through matter, and that precious metals can defeat base metals. According to Warlock, Selbit also emphasized the theme of “matter through matter” during the Sawing, although ostensibly there were no claims of glass and metal being more precious than the base flesh of the female body inside. In 1921, the American magician Horace Goldin debuted the version of the trick still familiar today: Sawing a Woman in Half. Unlike Selbit’s, Goldin’s Sawing apparatus allowed the woman’s head and feet to protrude, and showed the woman being separated into two parts after the box was sawed. Goldin initially debuted the trick at the McAlpin Hotel and put a fellow dressed as a hotel bellboy into the box, but he never made that mistake again; all future versions of the trick featured a woman. Sawing

Magicians’ Assistants 93 a Woman in Half was an immediate success and continued to be popular through the 1920s and after, setting off a series of bitter lawsuits between Selbit and Goldin. Because the trick, like most magical properties, was franchised and the patented apparatus licensed to magicians eager to saw women in half themselves, it mattered a great deal who owned this particular piece of intellectual property. Goldin patented his apparatus in 1923 (diagrams and descriptions are publicly available online at the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office, thereby giving an additional lie to the notion of “the secret”) and spent much of the rest of his career defending it in court. By showing the woman’s head and feet (later versions of the trick included cutting open the woman’s stocking to show her wiggling toes), Goldin’s version was even more focused on the female body—or at least parts of it, as the presence of a number of foot and other fetishists on email lists dedicated to the Sawing will attest—than Selbit’s. Later versions of the trick—for example, Robert Harbin’s Zig Zag, which separates a woman into thirds, or the Double Sawing, in which two women are sawed and their body parts switched—were even more overt about separating the woman into discrete, and potentially interchangeable, parts. This is Woman as mechanism— Adam’s rib, but one better. The true illusion of the Sawing is, of course, female passivity: all versions of the trick rely on the spectator’s continuing afterimage of a woman stretched out, tied down, and immobile. But in fact, the woman inside the box is always actively laboring. In Selbit’s version, she must cut herself free and squirm to conceal herself in the foot of the box, contorting her body around the various blades and sheets of glass. In Goldin’s version, there are two women, one seen and one never seen. The Zig Zag box requires a woman who is very nearly a contortionist, but who never loses her smile. All these tricks depend on the assistant’s speed, dexterity, and flexibility: if there is a secret to these illusions, it’s female skill and labor. As the author of the Wikipedia article on the Zig Zag Girl so bluntly puts it: “The trick hinges on two things: 1) People will not suspect the woman is actually responsible for the trick, and 2) The box is larger than it appears.” As that author elaborates: “[T]his illusion relies heavily on the skill of the woman inside, while the magician outside is just a demonstrator. The role reversal helps the illusion. Because most people assume the woman is just a helpless tool for the magician, few will suspect that she is actually in charge of this trick.” Or, as Valarie Cordell Bennett notes in her article, “Working With a Magician’s Assistant” (2000): [T]he Assistant is usually the one who really makes the illusion works [sic] while the Magician directs the action—a lot like a musician being lead [sic]

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Francesca Coppa by the director. The music comes from the musician’s instrument and talent, but the director brings it all together and frequently gets the big hand for the number. I always yell “Brava” for the female Assistant when she emerges from the zigzag or sword basket. The audience salutes the Magician—I know who really did the Magic!

Contemporary magician Margaret Steele concurs: “Although, in fact, the assistant must be extremely skilled for the illusion to succeed, the magician gets all the credit. The assistant must keep smiling while being skewered, dismembered, stretched, and squished, and no matter what her age, she is generally called ‘the girl’ ” (60). Steele, like Cordell Bennett, compares magicians to musicians, but less favorably, noting that whereas symphony musicians work “side by side, playing the same instruments and the same music,” regardless of gender, the magician–assistant relationship continues to be “a power display, often of a strong (male) magician over a weak (female) assistant.” The display of power is such that the weak (female) assistant cannot even be imagined as laboring. The narrative of weakness and passivity is essential to the trick. If the woman’s talent and effort is part of the secret, part of the magician’s misdirection is the implication that anyone can do it. Selbit encouraged this misconception by advertising for women to volunteer, offering five pounds for each victim, yet claiming that nobody ever took him up on the offer. Goldin’s scam was even more ingenious; in his autobiography It’s Fun to be Fooled (1937), he describes what he calls “the swindle”: I soon found I had bigger houses when I was using a local girl for the “operation.” Her picture caused comment in the local paper, and men and women wanted to read all about this brave girl. These details would appear—where she worked, how old she was, and so forth. But in the entertainment world it is impossible to leave things to chance, so I had to “fix” my local girl. She was always the same one, and she traveled from town to town, challenging me regularly. She would go ahead of me, get good “digs” and find some job of work. Very often her landlady would pose as her mother. Everything was thought of. Incidentally, that girl is now married to one of my assistants, and we often have a laugh about those “swindling” days. (161–162)

The girl—“always the same one”—would be reluctantly pulled out of the audience and put by Goldin into a “hypnotic trance” that left her seemingly unconscious. So not only was her work of longer duration and more complicated than even the most sophisticated audience member might guess,

Magicians’ Assistants 95 she also had to perform total passivity. Her role was to be an amateur when she was nothing of the sort. In fact, she was a ringer—a pro. In all these versions of the Sawing, the trick is as dependent on the physical skill of the “girl” as on the presentational skill of the magician, who is arguably there to display his own, highly disciplined persona and to perform his class mastery. But this is true of many illusions featuring female assistants. The real Vanishing Lady was Mademoiselle Patrice, herself a skillful conjurer and sleight-of-hand magician who played as a solo act before such luminaries as the Prince of Wales. Billed as the Queen of Magic, or La Belle Magicienne, she was photographed demonstrating tricks for the Penny Pictorial Magazine and later contributed a series of articles entitled “Magical Problems Explained by Madam Patrice” to the Magician Monthly. In his biography of Charles Bertram, Edwin A. Dawes quotes a handbill from the 1890s that touted Mademoiselle Patrice’s skills in verse: That entertainment pure and light, Puts every thought of care to flight, For every pleasure to increase Comes forth the clever Miss patrice, Most famed magician of her sex, The very keenest to perplex. For tricks she does in cleverest style, With witty speech and winning smile, In every way the most refined Good fun and knowledge well combined. (80)

Mademoiselle Patrice was lucky enough to have Charles Bertram, and later her husband, Charles Lang Neil, as supporters, and she had a long magical career as a headliner. Other women in magic have been less lucky. Jan Glenrose, the first woman to be sawed by P. T. Selbit, and Irene Vanderbilt, Goldin’s assistant, are mere historical footnotes. Selbit’s later Girl-based illusions—Destroying a Girl, Growing a Girl, Crushing a Girl, Stretching a Girl—were all highly dependent on the skill of the “girls” who operated them. Oswald Rae, a protégé of Selbit’s, testified that during his first performance of Selbit’s Crushing a Girl, he had merely stood by the side of the stage, presenting a trick performed by Selbit’s top female assistant without knowing how it worked. But it was men, these inventor–scientists, who owned the properties. Jim Steinmeyer, himself a modern magical inventor, frames the history of magic as running parallel with the history of certain late-nineteenth-century sciences. To make magic, he argues, was to be an innovator in optics, in

96 Francesca Coppa mechanical engineering, in psychology. P. T. Selbit, with his lectures on “matter passing through matter,” certainly talked a scientific jargon. Goldin and others framed the magician as a doctor and the Sawing as a kind of surgery. But if the magician was stuck in the nineteenth century, the woman who was to be sawed in half was very much a creature of the 1920s, and not just for the new abandon with which she showed her limbs in public. Jim Steinmeyer argues that the Sawing was “the perfect product for the decade that would later be said to ‘roar,’ ” and he puts its brutality into the context of the Grand Guignol and the end of World War I. But Selbit’s attempt to hire his victims for five pounds reminds us that sawed women were working women, literally and symbolically. The image of a Victorian inventor–scientist holding a saw and hovering over a box from which limbs protrude evokes nothing so much as that classic of horror Frankenstein. In “Dialectic of Fear” (1983) Franco Moretti reads Frankenstein as a metaphor for the worker and capital: Like the proletariat, the monster is denied a name and an individuality. He is the Frankenstein monster; he belongs wholly to his creator (just as one can speak of a “Ford worker”). Like the proletariat, he is a collective and artificial creature. He is not found in nature, but built . . . Reunited and brought back to life in the monster are the limbs of those—the “poor”—whom the breakdown of feudal relations has forced into brigandage, poverty and death. Only modern science . . . can offer them a future. It sews them together again, moulds them according to its will and finally gives them life. (85)

The Sawing can be seen as a female version of this class struggle: the nameless woman is put into the box, broken down into parts, and restored to wholeness by the patent-holding (and profiting) inventor–scientist. The working woman is erased: the woman who emerges from the box is the restored and smiling female, awoken from her hypnotic trance. In this light, the magic show demonstrates the discipline of and control over the female worker, her domination by science, and subjugation to a capitalist hierarchy. But, as Moretti notes, neither the scientist nor his audience is reassured by this restoration: “he is immediately afraid of it and wants to kill it, because he realizes he has given life to a creature stronger than himself and of which he cannot henceforth be free” (85). In magic, this seems to be indicated not only by the increasing hostility to women indicated by tricks such as Destroying a Girl, Crushing a Girl, Stretching a Girl, and the Indestructible Girl—this last ostensibly featuring a battlefield nurse with the Red Cross who had, against all odds, survived World War I (Lewis and Warlock 143); with its overt acknowledgment of the woman’s

Magicians’ Assistants 97 profession, Selbit’s Indestructible Girl might be the only trick that’s honest about its anxiety about women and work—but also the increasing savagery of the Sawing itself over the twentieth century. By 1949, the Grand Guignol was well out of fashion, and yet Richiardi Jr. performed a Sawing that featured a blonde assistant being split in half by a buzz saw. According to Milbourne and Maurine Christopher, “blood spurted out and drenched the stage. Fascinated spectators filed down the aisle and across the stage to view ‘as ghastly a mess of entrails as can be found in any butcher shop’ ” (422). According to Robert E. Neale, the name “Richiardi” is now synonymous with bloodier, more graphic versions of the Sawing (90–93), and it’s perhaps no accident that Richiardi toured with this version of the act in the immediate postwar era and through the 1970s, despite the eventual organized protest of women. The Sawing was a popular trick not just in the postsuffragette 1920s but also during the second-wave feminist movement. In his essay on “Matinee Magic” (1995) Robert E. Neale tries to recuperate the Sawing as something restorative and potentially even “holy,” but I do not think he succeeds. The Richiardi Sawing, with its focus on blood and entrails, evokes not Frankenstein but another Victorian monster: Jack the Ripper, who preyed on a different kind of working girl. Neale wants to argue that the Sawing is akin to a religious ritual with “a religious theme—death and rebirth” but doesn’t address that these rituals themselves require critique to the extent to which they institutionalize and normalize the dominant–submissive relationship between power (male patriarchs) and the powerless (boys, women, animals). Moreover, Neale tries to ally the sawing magician with suffering shamanistic or Christlike figures: “Want to be a magician?” he asks. “Learn how to die, be reborn, and do divination . . . I like to see Sawing a Woman In Two as a contemporary version of the first conjuring trick and the persistent spiritual trick of ultimate meaning” (98). But it’s not the male magician who dies and is reborn, but the woman who is ritually killed, fetishized into parts, and then reconstituted. Neale is more on target when he claims that in the Sawing, “we celebrate our control over destruction,” although that of course raises two questions: Who’s we? And what control? Neale ultimately wants to argue that, in the Sawing, “we” confront horror and transcend it, or as he says, “performances of the trick conclude with a restoration. The threat has been eliminated” (90). However, this reading treats the Sawing as if it were an act of nature, or God, which seems to overlook the fact that it’s a deliberate situation engineered by the magician himself. The threat hasn’t been eliminated. The Sawing magician is himself

98 Francesca Coppa the threat, not a bystander but a predator, or a monster; the magician in his evening suit and cape resembles no one so much as Dracula, who is not only a sexual threat but also an accumulative capitalist. “Stoker’s Dracula,” Moretti explains, “is a rational entrepreneur who invests his gold to expand his dominion: to conquer the City of London” (84). Moreover, Moretti reminds us that Marx himself uses a vampire metaphor: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (91). Like the figure of the magician, Dracula wishes to seem as if he had no body; his body is his vulnerability. Instead, Dracula presents himself as incorporeal. He can appear and disappear at will, escape in a puff of smoke, and transform himself into animals; he casts no shadow. But this capitalist figure of course has a body: the female body he feasts on, the body in the box. Like Dracula’s victims, Lucy and Mina, the female assistant is all body. She emerges from her coffin, reborn and smiling vacantly. She has no memory, let alone a secret.

“WE KNOW YOU’VE BEEN HURT BEFORE”: PENN AND TELLER Las Vegas, which makes money by selling the fantasy of money without labor, is the magic capital of the world. Currently, Vegas is home to David Copperfield, the Amazing Jonathan, Mac King, Rick Thomas, Gerry McCambridge, Jeff McBride, and many other magicians. “Master Magician” Lance Burton is probably the most successful of these performers, and although Burton bills himself as the official heir of the Royal Dynasty of Magic (a line that starts with Harry Kellar and includes Howard Thurston, Dante, and Lee Grabel), to step into Burton’s custom-made, Victorian-style theater at the Monte Carlo is to step backward in time in more ways than one. Yes, Burton performs many of the classic illusions of stage magic—the Sawing, the Egg Bag, and various kinds of vanishings, as well as doves, cards, rings, and levitations. However, his show’s attitude and politics are equally retro, exuding an eyebrow-wagging, elbow-to-theribs sexism that one would have thought went out of fashion seventy years ago. Burton, who appears in traditional evening clothes, is a solo act, a oneman magical extravaganza—aside from the eighteen members of his production staff (including two male assistants), a team of illusion designers, and seven female dancers (interestingly, nobody in the show is credited as a “female assistant”). Burton’s dancers are treated largely as showgirls, and six of them make their first appearance stepping out of Burton’s suitcase,

Magicians’ Assistants 99 prompting him to comment, “I never go anywhere without a six-pack,” and to ask the audience, with a leering grin, “What do you think of my girls?” There’s never any doubt about who’s in charge here. “Lance Burton: Master Magician,” stars Lance Burton, is produced and directed by Lance Burton, and is playing in the Lance Burton Theatre. But down the road at the Rio, you can catch Penn and Teller, magic’s most famous partnership. The pair is not only vocal about the value of their particular partnership, but are also passionate advocates of partnership in general. “We wanted to be co-dependent,” Penn Jillette says in an interview with Jamy Ian Swiss in Genii magazine. “We wanted to be unable to function separately. Our whole idea is that individualism doesn’t preclude partnership. Which is something that the Eighties and Nineties said exactly the opposite. No teams. No marriages, nothing.” This sentiment is echoed by Teller, who explains that when he was growing up, “there was Dick Van Dyke AND Mary Tyler Moore. There was George and Gracie. There was Lucy and Desi. There was Abbott and Costello. Now, if you name a comedian, the person is one person. If you name a magician, the person is one person.” Teller goes on to define what partners need to function over time as a unit: “a willingness to give the other person enough space, mutual respect, and a division of labor” (502). But although Penn and Teller’s thirty-year partnership certainly illustrates mutual respect, their stage act explores a broad range of interpersonal dynamics, not all of them respectful. This is, after all, the team who refer to themselves as “the larger, louder half ” and “the smaller, quieter half,” and they not only perform magical camaraderie, but also knowingly explore themes of magical cruelty. Dressed identically in gray three-piece suits, Penn and Teller look like nothing so much as two Wall Street middle managers; they’ve updated the traditional magician’s garb to that of the more contemporary Western capitalist. Penn and Teller, wearing these symbolic outfits, work to make power visible and meaningful as they do close-up magic, stage large-scale illusions, and execute various escapes. In one such illusion from early in their careers, Teller is hung upside down in a straightjacket over a bed of spikes. He is held aloft by a rope attached to a chair in which the louder, heavier Penn is seated, and we are told that Penn will sit there for precisely the amount of time it takes him to read Ernest L. Thayer’s poem, “Casey at the Bat.” Teller’s life is therefore dependent on Penn’s anchoring weight, and the image of a little guy struggling to escape a straitjacket while entirely reliant on an overbearing, poetry-reading loudmouth seems ripe for a class-based analysis, especially considering the way that Houdini’s escapes inspired hope for social mobility

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in turn-of-the-century America. However, any simple class-based analysis is complicated by the fact that Thayer’s baseball poem became famous not as a literary work but as a vaudeville performance piece, and so Penn and Teller are evoking (and connecting) different parts of a historical entertainment experience. The escape act is thus laced with nostalgia, as American as apple pie and baseball. But unlike Lance Burton’s museum of magical tricks, Penn and Teller take a critical position vis-à-vis the magical past. Crucially, “Casey at the Bat” is a poem about losing, not winning, as the poem’s famous closing line makes clear: “But there is no joy in Mudville— mighty Casey has struck out.” More specifically, the poem illustrates the pitfalls of American overconfidence. The great ballplayer comes up to bat with “haughty grandeur,” “defiance,” “a sneer,” and doesn’t swing at either of the first two pitches. The poem sets us up for Casey’s triumph with the third pitch—and then doesn’t deliver it. Casey strikes out. A spectator who was lucky enough to know both Thayer’s poem and Penn and Teller’s style might well believe that Teller is doomed to fall on the spikes. Such a thing is not out of the realm of possibility; Penn and Teller’s Underwater Torture Cell concludes precisely this way, with Teller eventually going still in the tank and drowning before our eyes when Penn ostensibly flubs his part of the trick. “The intriguing thing is,” Rory Johnston notes in a 2001 review, “he doesn’t struggle, he simply accepts his fate, keeps his promise, closes his eyes and fades away. The gag is never explained. Nobody attempts to bust open the water cell in a ‘panic.’ ” This version of the act not only emphasizes the inherent cruelty of the trick, but the cruelty of the spectator. It also makes us question our sense of magic’s poetic justice. If Harry Houdini was a symbol of his moment, “the New World’s new man: the little guy, the challenger . . . [who was] doing things the hard way” (Howland 52–58), Penn and Teller can be seen as emissaries of their time—the corporate, Reaganite 1980s. As executed by Penn and Teller, the Underwater Torture Cell is almost a pun on trickle-down economics. To paraphrase Stevie Smith, Teller’s not waving; he’s drowning. Penn and Teller cannot be relied on to stage magical transcendence. Rather, they denaturalize the heroic narrative that assumes that David takes down Goliath and that the little guy always triumphs. Selbit’s Girl illusions feature the crushing, smashing, and sawing of female assistants, but in Penn and Teller’s act, violence is usually aimed at Teller.5 Teller is not only drowned and threatened with impaling, but shot at, sucked by leeches, and run over by a truck. Teller’s body—the male magical body—is put at risk. Like the female assistants whose status as “the body” is emphasized by their performance of sleep, trance, or vacuity, Teller’s silence

Magicians’ Assistants 101 emphasizes both his physicality and his social vulnerability: he literally can’t scream or speak out. But Teller’s silence is unlike the performance given by traditional female assistants in that we always understand Teller to be an intelligent and aware human being. He’s a person, not a prop. Win or lose, Teller is always present in the magical narrative, even when he’s the victim, although Penn quibbles with the word victim: “Teller sees it a different way, and so do I. He’s often the hero” (Swiss 502). When women do appear in Penn and Teller’s act, they’re not presented as assistants but as full performative partners introduced by name (first and last). It is Penn, who sees himself more as a juggler than as a magician, who generally performs with a female partner. In an act variously billed as Fire for Two or Burnin’ Luv, Penn and a female partner (Carol Perkins in the filmed version) sit on a divan and artistically swallow and share fire in an erotic display of mutual passion, at the conclusion of which the woman lights a cigarette directly from Penn’s mouth. Mel Gussow describes this as “a mock-sexual challenge match of prandial pyromania.” Penn also chooses women from the audience to participate in his knife-throwing act—which is to say, the women are asked to throw knives at him, as opposed to the other way around. Moreover, until 2005, Penn and Teller had never done the Sawing, choosing instead to cut and restore a live snake, a trick that, although evoking various rope-cutting and restoration illusions, also gestures toward and subverts magic’s traditional celebration of phallic power, much like the female knife throwers do. In fact, Penn and Teller have always been dismissive of the Sawing. They have used it as a kind of shorthand for everything bad about magic. In their 2005 television special Off the Deep End, Penn and Teller finally did a Sawing—underwater. Staging the illusion underwater has the effect of shifting the focus of the trick from cutting to drowning—a risk shared by the two magicians, so that the risk is not entirely, or even mostly, assumed by the girl. This substantially changes the dynamic of the trick; as Penn notes in an interview with Matt Webb Mitovich, “In a very odd kind of way, moving the whole thing underwater allowed us to do much more traditional tricks, like sawing a woman in half, with a new visual look and enough new problems to make it seem really fresh.” These “new problems” include not only the one most obvious to the audience—the lack of air— but also the ways in which water makes physical movement difficult and strange. If magic is dependent on laboring bodies, putting a trick underwater makes additional demands on the body and changes the ways in which those bodies work. “The way you move underwater is so different from the way you move on land,” Teller explains, and Penn adds, “The simplest

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thing [turned into] days and days of frustration in a pool. Nothing behaved the way you needed it to behave.” Moreover, in this scenario, the spectator is reminded that all participants in a magic trick are bodies first and foremost, and that bodies are subject to gravity, physics, and pressure. This is not a new subject for Penn and Teller; the script during one of their tricks, Balloon of Blood (in which a latex balloon filled with “blood” is miraculously pierced and in other ways threatened), emphasizes the vulnerability of the human body, not its indestructibility. Rather than stage a hierarchy, Penn and Teller present magic as a single, unified subculture that includes magicians, assistants—and the audience. Sarah Thornton defines a subculture as a group of people united by common interests, practices, or problems (1), and although magicians themselves have always been a close-knit and secretive subculture, they have often constituted their identity by defining themselves not only against their female assistants (Teller: “[M]agic has somehow gotten stuck in the ten-year-old boy mentality, where they have secret clubs and leave out the girls” [Swiss 493]), but also against their own audience. As Penn says, “I always come back to the Seinfeld line that I’ve quoted a million times: Every magic act is, ‘Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone, you’re a jerk. Now it’s back, you’re an idiot, show’s over.’ ” Teller echoes the point more analytically: I think people are accustomed to thinking of a magician as someone who is going to condescend in his attitude toward them. Who is going to be a terrible sexist. Who is going to pretend to be very smart because he can do arbitrary things that have no emotional or dramatic content. I think magicians tend to be people who have nothing to say. (Swiss 493)

Rather than creating distance between themselves and their audience, whom Teller categorizes as “the people who are financing your well being” (Swiss 493), Penn and Teller invite the audience to feel like they are part of the magical subculture. In this, they—like Valarie Cordell Bennett and Margaret Steele—argue that magic should be more like music and claim rock and rollers such as Bruce Springsteen, Lou Reed, John Cale, and the Ramones as significant influences. “Think of the term ‘sucker gag,’ ” Teller says. “Can you imagine a musician using the term ‘sucker gag’ about an audience?” Similarly, Penn, having once been asked by a fellow magician, “Whose side are you on, anyway?” responds with a furious tirade that demonstrates magic’s inferiority to music: [P]icture Billy Joel saying to Elton John, “Whose side are you on, anyway?” Picture Keith Richards saying to Slash, “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

Magicians’ Assistants 103 Picture . . . I mean, it gets even crazier. Picture Pete Townsend saying to Johnny Rotten, “Whose side are you on, anyway?” Because no matter how snotty . . . picture Tony Bennett saying to Frank Sinatra, “Whose side are you on anyway?” No matter how full of hate, no matter how alienated, no matter how . . . I mean, picture James Dean saying to Bob DeNiro, “Whose side are you on, anyway?” There’s not another profession in entertainment that you can think of where the most despicable person would say that to anyone else. How could there be another side? (Swiss 504)

To envision a magic show in musical terms is to have a vision of performers and audience connecting and sharing in the moment of performance, something very different from Teller’s negative vision of magicians “run[ning] around saying, ‘It’s fun to know, but more fun to be fooled,’ and snickering up their sleeves” (Swiss 493). Penn and Teller strive to undo this kind of hostile distancing. As Teller explains: I think that there tends, still, to be an image of a magician as somebody who’s on the other team, who’s not working for you . . . The audience may already be in a hostile frame of mind. We deal with this by saying, “Well, we hate magic, too!” and then go out and proceed to do magic. But we’ve taken the moment at first to say, “We know you’ve been hurt before.” And audiences seem to appreciate that kindness. And it’s also why we do several of the things that are apparently themed on explaining how a piece of magic is done. (Swiss 493)

By acknowledging the real and genuine hurt created when magic misuses its power—a misuse that Teller describes in gendered terms as “theatrical rape” (Swiss 492)—Penn and Teller have paved the way for a new relationship between magician, assistants, and audience. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the creation of a more equitable magical relationship entails killing the cult of secrecy, at least overtly. Instead, Penn and Teller have created an act in which secrets are divulged and labor is made visible. By sharing their magical secrets with their audience—or performing the sharing of secrets, just as traditional magic acts have performed the keeping of secrets—Penn and Teller create an environment in which the audience feels that, to use the words of critic Rory Johnston, “We’re together—P&T and 700 audience members—on the same team. We’re cool. We’re hip. We’re all in the know” (41). However, a moment after describing that feeling of inclusion, Johnston takes it back by saying, “Of course, the audience isn’t in the know at all,” because Penn and Teller don’t actually give away all that much in the way of great magical secrets. In fact, as Penn acknowledges in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, “We never gave away anything that wasn’t ours. We’d invent the trick and then give it away” (Richmond).

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But to say this is to miss the forest for the trees. What Penn and Teller do expose in their act is the amount of work that goes into making and performing illusions, thereby drawing continuities between the magician as illusionist (who works to conceal his labor) and the magician as escape artist (who works to display and embellish it). From this point of view, Penn and Teller are doing double the work; they have to invent the trick just to give it away. And so they are exposing much more about magic than they realize: they are encouraging their audience to understand the degree to which magic is not only about secrets, but about collaborative planning and practice. Ultimately, there may be no magical secret greater than that.

NOTES 1. Sedgwick cites as an example the case of Ronald Reagan knowing only English; consequently, the bilingual François Mitterrand had to negotiate in his nonnative language (4). 2. In fact, there are tricks predicated on a volunteer audience member’s reluctance to admit their knowledge of the secret they’ve just learned in front of the rest of the audience, thereby ruining the show for others. Similarly, audience participants in, e.g., mentalist tricks are generally willing to play along and will follow the cues given to them by the magician. 3. Cf. Mulvey. Arguably, magicians are particularly feminized by the intensity of the visual attention they attract. 4. This was, something of a double bind for Houdini, because embodied physical acts that depend on practice—like juggling—were always seen as less than conjuring and its secrets. In fact, one of the ways that the emerging class of European nineteenth-century entrepreneurial illusionists distinguished themselves from Indian fakirs was by describing their magic in terms of art as opposed to skill, with the latter category debased by its mere physicality. This may be one of the reasons why Houdini was so eager to insist that he was a magician as well as an escape artist. 5. There’s one notable exception to violence against Teller: at a Houdini tribute, Penn and Teller approach an apparently random passerby, ask him if he thinks Houdini’s escapes were hard—then handcuff him, put him in a box, set the box on fire, and throw it into the harbor (Swiss 503).

WORKS CITED Beckman, Karen. Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.

Magicians’ Assistants 105 Bennett, Valarie Cordell. “Working with a Magician’s Assistant” and “An Evening about Magician’s Assistants.” Society of American Magicians, Assembly 206. Austin, TX, 2000. May 16, 2007, http://members.tripod.com/~ValarieB/ magasst.html. Burger, Eugene. “The Theory and Art of Magic.” The Linking Ring October 2000: 47–52. Christopher, Milbourne and Maurine Christopher. The Illustrated History of Magic. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1973. Dawes, Edwin A. Charles Bertram, the Court Conjurer. Washington, DC: Kaufman, 1997. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Goldin, Horace. It’s Fun to be Fooled. London: Stanley Paul, 1937. Gussow, Mel. “Penn and Teller Offer Several Variations on a Magic Theme.” New York Times April 4, 1991: C15. Houdini, Harry. “The Thrills in the Life of a Magician.” In The Wizard Exposed: Magic Tricks, Interviews, and Experiences. Ed. David Meyer. Glenwood, Illinois: Magic Books, 1987. 149–152. Howland, Bette. “The Escape Artist.” Commentary 121.5 (May 2006): 52–58. Johnston, Rory. “The Best Show I Ever Saw: Penn and Teller at the Rio.” Magic July 2001: 40–43. Lewis, Eric C. and Peter Warlock. P. T. Selbit: Magical Innovator. Pasadena, CA: Magical Publications, 1989. Miller, D. A. “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets.” The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1988. Mitovich, Matt Webb. “Magic’s Penn & Teller Make a Splash.” TV Guide. August 1, 2006. http://www.tvguide.com/News/Insider/default.htm?cmsRed ir=true&rmDate=11112005&cmsGuid=%7B590341F4–3DA4–4AC9-B16CFDC6277A03DB%7D. Moretti, Franco. “Dialectic of Fear.” In Signs Taken for Wonders. London: Verso, 1983. 83–108.Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. Neale, Robert E. “Matinee Magic.” In Magic and Meaning. Ed. Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale. Seattle: Hermetic Press, 1995. 83–100. Penn and Teller. Off the Deep End. Dir. Star Price. Perf. Penn Jillette and Teller. A&E Home Video, 2005. Richmond, Ray. Interview with Penn and Teller. Hollywood Reporter March 30, 2004. Online. Lexis-Nexis Academic. June 10, 2007. Robert-Houdin. “The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic.” In The Essential RobertHoudin. Ed. Todd Karr. Los Angeles: The Miracle Factor, 2006. 20–21. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. Steele, Margaret. “Women in Magic—Claiming Power.” The Linking Ring November 2002: 58–61. Steinmeyer, Jim. “Above and Beneath the Saw.” In Art and Artifice, and Other Essays on Illusion, Concerning the Inventors, Traditions, Evolution and Rediscovery of Stage Magic. Burbank, CA: Hahne, 1998. 77–106. ———. Hiding the Elephant. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003. Swiss, Jamy Ian. “Penn and Teller Exposed: An Exclusive Interview with Jamy Ian Swiss.” Genii 8.7 (May 1995): 491–507. Teller. Foreword to Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant. xiv–xvi. Thornton, Sarah. “General Introduction.” In The Subcultures Reader. Ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton. London: Routledge, 1997. 1–7. Zig Zag Girl. May 16, 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zig_Zag_Girl.

5. Conjuring Capital: Magic and Finance from Eighteenth-Century London to the New Las Vegas James Peck

James Peck is Associate Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance at Muhlenberg College. He publishes in the area of eighteenth-century English theater and culture. Peck notes that money is a prominent motif of many popular magic acts; magicians commonly use sleight of hand to transform legal tender—seemingly creating, destroying, and multiplying wealth. This chapter contextualizes influential performers of money magic within the history of finance. Peck’s materialist theater history begins with the early eighteenth- century entertainment conjurer Isaac Fawkes and culminates in the Las Vegas headliners Siegfried and Roy. Throughout, Peck analyzes stage illusions in economic contexts. How is the history of the coin trick connected to the history of the coin? How do magic acts involving money indicate attitudes, fantasies, and anxieties about the mystifying powers of capital?

S

iegfried and Roy figure among the foremost symbols of the New Las Vegas. The duo played Steve Wynn’s Mirage Hotel from 1990 until a white tiger, Montecore, attacked Roy onstage in 2003 with devastating consequences. Though their performing career seems to be over, their influence in Vegas continues to be felt. Their show Siegfried and Roy: Masters of the Impossible, alongside several offshoot enterprises, helped transform the role of entertainment in the Las Vegas tourist market during the 1990s. In this decade, Las Vegas hotels changed from casinos garnering most of their profits from gambling into multifaceted tourist destinations that coupled gaming with fantastical themed hotels, lavish performances, fine food, and high-end shopping. “One after another,”

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writes Marc Cooper, “the old Rat Pack-era hotels were dynamited and in their place rose staggering Leviathans of modern, market-based entertainment” (12). The Mirage was the inaugural edifice of the New Las Vegas, and it was the prototype of a shift that is still ongoing. A page entitled “Siegfried and Roy’s Las Vegas,” from Siegfried and Roy’s website, lays claim to their trendsetting role in this history: Through the years, they have seen many changes in the city’s entertainment scene, some of which they were personally responsible for. The illusionists opened the door to family entertainment, setting a standard in stage extravaganzas that cannot be duplicated anywhere in the world. “We’re proud to have been a part of this metamorphosis,” Siegfried states . . . “We’re also proud that we’ve been credited for raising the bar of Las Vegas entertainment,” Roy adds, “taking our industry to a new level by premiering spectacular mega-productions to match the city’s new mega-resorts.”

Las Vegas historian Hal Rothman confirms Siegfried and Roy’s prominence in this realignment of market forces and aesthetic values: “When [Siegfried and Roy] signed on with the Mirage, they became intrinsically identified with the Las Vegas of entertainment. Siegfried and Roy anchored the new Strip” (42). Although for good reason the rhetoric of the new organizes most writing about Las Vegas through the 1990s, and Siegfried and Roy for good reason assert that they brought something unprecedented to the Vegas entertainment scene, in fact, Siegfried and Roy were doing something old. Their magical personae drew from models that date back at least three hundred years, to the beginning of the eighteenth century; their act invoked longstanding symbolic links between performance magic and the rhetoric of financial capitalism. To establish this context, I want to sketch a critical performance genealogy of the magician as financial wizard. Joseph Roach, in Cities of the Dead (1996), develops a genealogical approach to performance analysis. Roach suggests that performance is, among other things, a form of embodied memory, a corporeal repository of psychic and social structures that persist across time and space. Critical genealogies make visible the meanings, desires, and, most importantly, values that historically enduring performance practices constitute, transmit, and sustain. Roach writes, “Performance genealogies draw upon the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves, including patterned movements made and remembered by bodies, residual movements retained implicitly in images or words (or in the silences between them), and imaginary movements dreamed in minds” (26). His suggestion that performances recall “imaginary

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movements dreamed in minds” is an especially useful entry to theatrical magic, an art form that takes seriously the imaginary as a potentially efficacious realm of human experience. I will relate a number of influential magic acts to pertinent economic contexts. Many magic performances from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries invoked local, national, and global finance in ways relevant to their historical moment. My research suggests that magic involving financial wizardry often surfaced and attained popularity in times of economic instability—that it mediated booms and busts arising from the inherent instability of capital markets. In this respect, I follow Roach’s more recent work, It (2007). Drawing upon the historiography of Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Roach suggests that old performances resurface in updated forms to address desires arising from new, though plausibly related, historical conditions. As Serres and Latour write, “Time doesn’t flow; it percolates” (quoted in Roach 13). I will begin with an early-eighteenth-century conjurer, Isaac Fawkes, who was, I believe, the first magician to construct a performance persona intimately linking magic with what we have come to call financial wizardry. I’ll then briefly consider two nineteenth-century magicians, Goethe’s literary creation Faust and the vaudeville headliner T. Nelson Downs, the King of Koins. I’ll then return to Siegfried and Roy and analyze their act within this genealogical lineage, with particular attention to a DVD of their IMAX show, The Magic Box. As for Siegfried and Roy, I hope to introduce some surprising antecedents of their act and illuminate their particular use of the persona of magician as financial wizard. They use it in ways eminently suited to the economic transformations of both the New Las Vegas and related transnational global flows of their decade. More broadly, their magic reveals something of the cultural imaginary of credit culture. In their different ways, these performances instantiated fantasies or anxieties characteristic of capitalist life. They reveal illusions—theatrical, psychic, and social—that created and have helped to sustain the capitalist West for more than three hundred years. For the purposes of this book, we have adapted the definition of magic as “the artful performance of impossible effects.” Ultimately, perhaps credit—itself an illusory form of value and a pleasurable collective fantasy—is one such artful performance of the impossible.

MAGIC AND FINANCE Isaac Fawkes was the premier entertainment conjurer of the early eighteenth century, a fairground illusionist who, through showmanship and

110 James Peck shrewd self-promotion, claimed a spot performing for wealthier patrons of the legitimated indoor stages. Fawkes’s act referred to a mercurial, rapidly changing English economy and mediated the spectators’ responses to it. Through costume and prop choices, advertising copy, and probably patter, his theatrical illusions affirmed the increasingly commercial, mercantile character of English society. England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries adopted an array of financial practices that created new, mobile forms of property. In 1682, William Petty, one of England’s foremost economic thinkers, asked, “What remedy is there if we have too little money?” Casting about for a solution to the government’s perpetual fiscal shortfalls, he proposed, “We must create a bank which, well computed, doth almost double the Effect of our coined Money. And we have in England Materials for a Bank which shall furnish Stock enough to drive the Trade of the whole Commercial World” (quoted in Binswanger 31). In the 1690s, William III and Parliament, following hard on the Glorious Revolution of 1688, introduced numerous innovations into the English economy. During this decade, England did in fact create its first national bank, the Bank of England; instituted its first stock exchange; and exponentially increased its national debt through public bond offerings. State-sponsored lotteries became a prominent and popular form of taxation (Neal). These and other mobile financial instruments buoyed the state’s finances and, somewhat unexpectedly, moved wealth between different strata of society, hastening the breakdown of fixed positions of status and opening possibilities for rapid class mobility. These events so changed English society that the definitive history of them by P. G. M. Dickson is justifiably titled The Financial Revolution in England (1967). Grouped in the parlance of the day as “Credit,” these forms of capital multiplied England’s money supply, largely underwrote its growth into a world power over the course of the century, and paid for many of its mercantile and military successes. Credit also reconfigured England’s middle and upper classes. The division between the landed (the estate-owning aristocracy) and the monied (the mercantile classes) became the central fault line of the English sociopolitical imagination. In a period of intense and often divisive party politics, Tories (typically representing the landed interest) and Whigs (typically allied with the monied interest) vied for social, economic, and political dominance. Nearly as frequently, and ultimately more influentially, these groups sought mutually beneficial collaborations through agricultural improvements, financial and trading endeavors, and that long-standing conveyance of property, marriage.

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Throughout this period of social change, Credit remained controversial. Commentators from across the political spectrum recognized that Credit catalyzed England’s burgeoning economy, but they articulated anxiety about the world of flux and illusion it seemed to be creating. Some, typically Tories, decried the dissolution of status categories. Virtually everyone, even the Whiggish apologists of Credit, worried that the wealth it created was entirely imaginary—that the financial revolution tied England’s prosperity to an unstable collective fantasy. To its detractors, Credit created a society that, in the words of J. G. A. Pocock, seemed “to be gambling on its own wish-fulfillments” (113). Events proved this anxiety justified. In 1719 and 1720, a trading frenzy exponentially increased the price of stock in one of the largest of the government-licensed joint stock companies, the South Sea Company. When the market turned from bull to bear, England endured its first stock market crash, the South Sea Bubble. Stock values plummeted, fortunes evaporated, and the government teetered on the brink of financial collapse. England was forced to confront the dizzying realization that the illusions of value that enabled the transactions of financial capitalism were precisely that—illusions. Theater and allied cultural forms mediated these developments. JeanChristophe Agnew’s Worlds Apart (1986) provides a helpful historiographic backdrop to the relationship between commerce and theatrical performance generally. Agnew connects the symbolic practices of early modern English theater to emergent forms of commodity exchange. Agnew interprets theater as a cultural practice that accustomed audiences to the mental operations required and the social mobility engendered by early capitalism: “The professional theater of the English Renaissance became in effect a ‘physiognomic metaphor’ for the mobile and polymorphous features of the market” (11). Just as actors could substitute for people, so could coins (and later banknotes) substitute for goods, and so could people become, socially speaking, different people. Theater celebrated the potentially terrifying metamorphic qualities of these forms of exchange. How can one object become another? How can a person in one social category become a person in another? Theater, in effect, invited audiences to accept the metamorphosis of goods and persons as a fundamental, even enjoyable, aspect of human existence. Magic was an especially precise condensation of the affinity between commerce and theater. It should not be surprising that magic attained such paradigmatic status. Karl Marx influentially described commodification as a magical process. The rhetoric of magic abounds in the first volume of Capital, for example. The critiques of the commodity form (chapter one) and its exemplary instance the money form (chapter three) cluster magical

112 James Peck terms to articulate the mystifications that accompany the circulation of value in capitalist exchange: commodities are “transcendent . . . mystical . . . fantastic” (Marx 71–72), the products of “magic and necromancy” (76); money is “magic” (92), a form of “alchemy” (132). Agnew demonstrates that Marx’s rhetoric has an historical basis in the early modern period, which conferred mysterious, quasi-divine powers of transformation on the market: “Magic provided a convenient metaphor for the abstract powers of a nascent commercial capitalism” (72). What Agnew calls the “mutually illuminating relation . . . between the practical liquidity of the commodity form and the imaginative liquidity of the theatrical form” (12) applies with particular acuity to magic; mysterious, inexplicable metamorphosis is often the explicit content and foremost pleasure of conjuring.

ISAAC FAWKES Isaac Fawkes was the preeminent magician of the first half of the eighteenth century. He played venues that ranged from the popular Bartholomew Fair to the fashionable Long Room adjoining the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket (the Opera House) to command performances for the royal family. Both Fawkes’s carefully crafted public persona and his act alluded to fantasies and anxieties that grew out of the financial revolution. Fawkes constructed himself as an aspirant to the gentry, his move from the fairgrounds to the legitimate stages of town being one indicator of social mobility. Simon During, in an interpretive history of magic, notes that Fawkes broke with long-standing conjuring tradition and explicitly disavowed any connection to demonic forces or confidence games (81). Rather, Fawkes positioned himself as an entrepreneurial entertainer, a participant in an increasingly commercial theatrical industry. A savvy marketer, he advertised prodigiously in newspapers such as the Daily Post, Mist’s Journal, Pasquin, London Journal, Weekly Journal, Daily Courant, and Grub Street Journal (During 83). He publicly trumpeted his financial success. In 1723, he published his earnings of seven hundred pounds from the Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs alongside a challenge to his competitors to match his box office clout with a comparable bank deposit (Jay 57). By the time of his death in 1731, wealth had become an indelible aspect of his carefully crafted public persona. An impressed observer marveled at Fawkes, one of our modern Conjurers, who, after having anointed himself with the Sense of the People, became so great a Conjurer, that he amassed several Thousand Pounds to himself . . . and that this money should not die with him,

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he has conjured up a son who can do the same thing; so that one may say his Conjuration is hereditary. (Quoted in Jay 61)

This testament presents magic as a path to gentry status, a means to earn and pass on a fortune, social respectability, and even the family business to a lineal male heir. Innovations in the act itself also link Fawkes’s illusions to the swirling fictions of finance. In his choice of dress, Fawkes eschewed the typical supernatural conjurer’s costume. Rather, he wore the elegant wig and fitted jacket of a member of the gentry (figure 5.1). The extant visual representations of Fawkes, all of which show him in the middle of his act, confirm the consistency of this costume. Performing “dexterity of hand” illusions before (typically) an audience of mixed status, Fawkes looked like one of his wealthier patrons. The costume perhaps invited an association between his feats of conjuring and people established on (or at least climbing) the social ladder. His innovative reworking of the Egg Bag trick especially spoke to the mystical, wealth-generating powers of modern finance. The Egg Bag trick was, according to magic historian Sidney W. Clark, “the great trick of the first half of the eighteenth century” (122). This widely performed illusion involved an empty bag from which the magician pulled a seemingly endless supply of eggs and, eventually, the hen that presumably laid them. Although the trick is technically difficult, its secrets were not well guarded; instructions could be found in several published trick books and the rigged props could be purchased at one of several magical apparatus shops in London. Henry Dean, in his popular 1722 book, The Whole Art of Legerdemain, describes the mechanics: This is the manner of performing it thus: Take the egg bag and put both your hands in it and turn it inside out, and say, “Gentlemen, you see here is nothing in my bag,” and in turning it again you must slip out some of the eggs out of the purses, as many as you think fit; and then turn your bag again and show the company it is empty, and in turning it again, you command more eggs to come out; and when all is come out but one, you must take that egg or hand it to the company and then drop your egg bag and take up your hen bag, and so shake out your hen, or pigeon, or any other fowl. This is a noble fancy, if well handled. (123)

The sleight-of-hand here is challenging, so to some degree, Fawkes’s outstanding success with the illusion can probably be credited to his skill. More fundamentally, however, Fawkes attained fame performing this trick because he altered it in ways that referred to England’s financial

Figure 5.1 Isaac Fawkes performs the Egg Bag Trick. Courtesy of The Huntington Library. Detail.

moment. His advertisement reads: He lays his little Bag upon the Table, and shows you that it is empty; first, He commands a great many Eggs out of it, then several Showers of real Gold and Silver; then you perceive the Bag begin to Swell, and several sorts of curious Indian Birds run out of it alive, as Cockatoos, Paraketes, Virginia Nightingales, and others, which no Person in Europe shows but himself, the Birds alone giving an entire Satisfaction to those that are curious, besides the Performance. (Quoted in Jay 57)

We cannot know Fawkes’s patter, but adding coins and a variety of exotic birds to the bag’s magical products shifted the trick’s implicit meaning. In its standard form, the Egg Bag trick evokes agriculture; the eggs and the hen are metonyms of farming life, and the magician by implication an exceptional farmer. Fawkes’s version of the illusion retains agricultural associations but adds metonyms from the economic arenas of finance and trade. A proliferating supply of coin pouring from an empty bag figured the new forms of mobile property associated with Credit—a pile of negotiable currency created from nothing. Simon During has noted the resonance between Fawkes’s act and the financial revolution: Fawkes’s “willingness to figure money as barely a form of matter at all,” he writes, may have signaled that “the status of money itself [was] changing” (84). During does not recognize that the gaggle of birds imported from distant realms further extends the illusion to encompass foreign trade; cockatoos came from Australia, parakeets from South America,

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and Virginia nightingales from North America. These living props added to the magician’s bounty of metonyms of England’s mercantile empire— squawking, exotic commodities alighting on English shores, as if by magic. Fawkes’s reliance on metonymy is perhaps itself implicated in the psychic structures of capitalism; Baudrillard, among others, has argued that the trope of metonymy, in reducing wholes to parts and making poetic meaning through contiguity rather than similarity, echoes processes of fetishism and exchange that are characteristic of commodity capitalism (86). Conjuring coins from an empty bag was the theatrical highlight of Fawkes’s act. Figure 5.1, for example, illustrates him in the middle of this trick, thus emphasizing its prominence in his repertoire. A description written shortly after his death suggests that it was a recurrent motif, a structural thread holding the other illusions together: He could presently assemble a multitude of People together, to admire the Phantoms he raised before them, viz. Trees to bear Fruit in an instant, Fowls of all sorts, change Cards into Birds, give us Prospects of fine Places out of nothing, . . . and moreover, to show that Money was but a Trifle to him, with a Conjuring Bag that he had, would every now and then shower down a Peck or two of Gold and Silver upon his Table. (Quoted in Jay 61)

This dramatic structure subsumes all of Fawkes’s illusions—all of his metamorphic transformations—into his definitional ability to create money from air. Trees bear fruit, things turn into other things, and distant realms materialize, the act implied, because mobile money makes it so. Isaac Fawkes, looking very much like a member of the gentry, performed its hopes for finance capital—the magician as exceptional banker. Another description of Fawkes’s act confirms that audience members saw in his illusions hopeful metaphors of the new financial order. An amusing bit of doggerel from a broadside casts two peasant farmers as admirers of Fawkes’s “wonderful and rare” show. They extol his act and imagine what they would do with his magical powers. His performance prompts them to fantasies of class mobility: R ICHARD : Had I but with him an equal Skill, An empty Bushel with Bread-Corn to fill: Or could I with Hocus Pocus make Wheat to fill mine, another’s to forsake. Not Parson Spin-Text, nor our Mannor’s Lord, Should better live then me at Bed or Board:

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I Granaries on Granaries would heap, And braver Teams than either of them keep. R ALPH : And, oh! Could I but know from whence he’s taught That art of Multiplying which h’has got: Could I, like him with arbitrary Call, Cause Showers of Coin in Bag or Hat to fall, No longer would I as a Farmer dwell, But give to Plough and Cart a last Farewel; From Villages to Cities to repair, And with the fine folks put on a courtly Air. (Quoted in Jay 56)

These dreams of plenty speak from the perspective of the rural peasantry about their longing to join the ruling class. The farmers sketch the two poles of early-eighteenth-century economic power, the landed and the monied. Richard imagines himself a member of the landed interest; he would use Fawkes’s skill to conjure a competitive, capitalized estate and store his bountiful produce in multiple overflowing granaries. Ralph projects his destiny with the monied interest; he fancies departing the country for a life of genteel urban sophistication underwritten by a never-ending supply of money conjured from the air—Credit. The poem figures two of Fawkes’s illusions as magical incarnations of the two forms of wealth underwriting the consolidating oligarchy. Fawkes was the preeminent magician of his era, but he was not the only one to use theatrical magic as a metaphor for financial wizardry. Another emergent theatrical form, the pantomime afterpiece, also deployed this trope. Pantomime combined characters from the commedia dell’arte with elaborate mimed sequences, songs, dances, and lavish spectacle. It prominently featured magic. One commentator called the influential Harlequin, John Rich, the “Conjurer General of the Universe” (O’Brien 107). A review of Rich’s The Necromancer emphasizes the importance of illusions to audience enjoyment: “the Entertainment was wonderful satisfactory to the Audience, as exceeding all the Legerdemain that has hitherto been performed on the Stage” (Sadlack 442). Many pantomime illusions involved metamorphosis: “A typical set piece of English harlequinade was the scene where Harlequin receives the bat from a devil, wizard, or sorcerer, and thereby gains his power to transform himself and his surroundings as needed” (O’Brien 109). A few extant sources explicitly connect the pantomime’s burgeoning popularity to the financial revolution. John O’Brien argues,

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“Contemporaries recognized that the expansion of the entertainment culture in the 1720s that Harlequin widely symbolized seemed to have its precedent in the public fascination with stock-trading in the 1710s” (103). At least one harlequinade explicitly connected these seemingly disparate events. John Rich’s The Magician; or Harlequin, South-Sea Director, debuted in 1721, just one year after the market crash bankrupted scores of investors and threatened confidence in the government. Sadly, little documentation of this production survives. A review from 1723, however, suggests that the piece satirized the inner dealings of the South Sea Company: I look upon Harlequin, A Director, to be a Master-Piece of its Kind; it does not only ridicule the awkward Vanity of those imaginary great men, who from Pigmies, were of a sudden, swelled up to Giants; but it also lets us into the most secret and iniquitous Part of the Management. We all know what Pains were taken to stifle inquiries and names &c. and, I think, we learn as much of that matter by this Dance, as by any Thing made public to us. (Quoted in Sadlack 420)

Unfortunately, no surviving evidence indicates how Harlequin, SouthSea director, wielded his magical powers. The review’s mention of the “secret and iniquitous Part of the Management” suggests that The Magician paralleled theatrical legerdemain with driving up the price of stock and concealing illicit backroom deals. Where Fawkes celebrated finance capitalism, The Magician seems to have deployed magic in a markedly ambivalent way, appealing to the audience’s sense that the directors had engaged in a nefarious deal with the devil. The Magician was an impressive success, playing fifty-three performances over the next five years. A visual fragment from a fan print depicting the 1721 Bartholomew Fair links Fawkes, Harlequin, and the South Sea Bubble. It groups the two magicians with the prime minister, Robert Walpole (figure 5.2). Harlequin’s patchwork costume introduces his presence; a caption from a reprint of the fan image identifies and doubles the politician and Fawkes: “The figure on the right is supposed to be that of Sir Robert Walpole, then Prime Minister. Fawkes, the famous conjurer, forms a conspicuous feature, and is the only portrait of him known to exist” (quoted in Jay 58). Walpole was the chief architect of government economic policy in the immediate aftermath of the South Sea Bubble. He was the target of opposition attacks, and he maneuvered behind the scenes to save the company

118 James Peck and his ministry while preserving the fortunes of his friends and political allies. Walpole, a master of fiscal policy and influence peddling, was the fulsome chief of the “great men” mocked by The Magician and similar satires. Early-eighteenth-century prints often incorporated half-spoken jabs at public figures through pictorial composition (Paulson). This composition associates Walpole with the two preeminent magicians of his day, all three of them conjurers of illusory value, and all three of them artful performers of impossible effects. Magic, then, flourished in the 1720s with the barely averted cataclysm of the South Sea Bubble at the forefront of public memory. Fawkes became England’s foremost conjurer and a modest celebrity over the course of this decade.1 His theatrical illusions thrived because they joyously endorsed the monetary illusions underwriting England’s commercial growth; at other times, magic seems to have figured finance as a dangerous realm rendering England’s prosperity subject to manipulation by unscrupulous, self-serving masters of illusion. During the decade, magic assuaged the fears, projected the frustrations, and embodied the dreams of a populace struggling back from the brink of financial ruin.

GOETHE’S FAUST AND T. NELSON DOWNS I believe these patterns of representation have a longer historical trajectory, that they extend into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The symbolic, mutually constituting relationship between magic and finance articulated by English illusionists in the 1720s signifies a cultural logic still extant, both in the realm of magic performance and across multiple discourses of capitalist modernity. I’ll pass briefly through two nineteenth-century sites that might be discussed more extensively than I can do here, then return to Siegfried and Roy. The isomorphism of conjuring and capital structures a major section of one of the great works of nineteenth-century dramatic literature, Goethe’s Faust (2001). The second part of Faust explicitly analogizes magic and government finance. The genealogical link to the financial chaos of the 1710s and 1720s here is explicit: Faust’s part 2 persona is modeled on a Scot, John Law, who in 1715 persuaded the regent of France to issue paper banknotes, and whose ill management of that enterprise bankrupted scores of investors in a financial panic that helped trigger the South Sea Bubble (Binswanger). Goethe’s Faust part 2 finds the title character similarly employed by a financially strapped emperor. With his government bankrupt and his kingdom

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Figure 5.2 Robert Walpole Visits Bartholomew Fair. Harlequin Performs for the crowd and a Large Billboard Advertises the Magic of Isaac Fawkes. Courtesy of The Museum of the City of London.

imploding in a frenzy of crime and corruption, the emperor agrees to use Faust’s magic to address his fiscal woes. Faust and Mephistopheles stage an elaborate carnival masquerade to, in the words of Marc Shell, “[divert] the Emperor’s attention to what will seem, like goods and specie, to satisfy his desire: the deceptive but credited productions of magical art” (672). Faust plays Plutus, the god of wealth, who enters from the rafters on a chariot pulled by dragons. He, with the help of his charioteer, performs a series of magic tricks, chief among them conjuring a coffer that overflows with a proliferating supply of gold coins. The next day, this theatrical performance is revealed as an elaborate charade to dupe the emperor into signing a writ

120 James Peck that does in fact replenish the nation’s empty treasury. Diverted by the magical spectacle of Faust and Mephistopheles, the emperor affixes his signature to negotiable currency—that is, paper money: To All it may Concern upon Our Earth: This paper is a thousand guilders worth. There lies, sure warrant of it and full measure, Beneath Our earth a wealth of buried treasure. As for this wealth, the means are now in train To raise it and redeem the scrip again. (Goethe 172)

The populace accepts the emperor’s claim that unmined treasure backs his national banknotes, and their collective belief magically solves the nation’s monetary problems. With the money supply exponentially increased, the emperor pays his debts, restores order, and launches an imperial program of war, conquest, and industrial development. Goethe figures paper money as a form of theatrical magic with impossibly imperial material effects, an illusion that conjures a shared delusion of such fantastic scope that it can literally move the world. As the treasurer hopefully exclaims, “There shall not be the faintest breath of trouble: I cherish a magician for my double” (174). Goethe in fact distrusted paper money, and in act 4, a drastic inflation leads to a collapse of the currency that sends the empire into a spire of anarchy and civil war. Scholars have long recognized that Faust figures paper money as an unstable magical phantasm (Binswanger). “That is the meaning of Faust’s relationship with the devil,” writes Marshall Berman; “human powers can be developed only through what Marx called ‘the powers of the underworld,’ dark and fearful energies that may erupt with a horrible force beyond all human control. Goethe’s Faust is the first, and still the best, tragedy of development” (40). Over the course of the nineteenth century, this metaphor entered literary, philosophical, and even popular discourse, chiefly through the writings of Karl Marx. Marx, his political economy in fact deeply indebted to part 2 of Goethe’s Faust, repeatedly figures commodification as a metamorphic, alchemical process, and identifies money as the magical prototype of all other commodities (Neary 99). Nineteenth-century entertainment magic conversely incorporated the mystifying operations of the money form into the stage show, albeit in a celebratory rather than critical fashion. The exemplary nineteenthand early-twentieth-century performer of magic and finance is T. Nelson Downs. Downs, one of the most accomplished sleight-of-hand artists of all time, made a tidy fortune and attained international fame performing an

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act dominated by coin manipulation. An American born to a rural farming family, Downs was a shrewd marketer as well as a Horatio Alger figure who parlayed his magic act into substantial real estate holdings (Downs ix). In a typical performance, for ten–fifteen minutes, Downs conjured an unceasing supply of silver coins from his fingertips. Downs’s signature illusion was the Miser’s Dream, a trick still widely performed. For this trick, he borrowed a silk top hat from an audience member and filled it with silver half-dollars pulled from the ears, jackets, and handbags of the audience. “When asked the secret of the Miser’s Dream,” writes Mark Elling Rosheim, “[Downs] responded: ‘It’s simple. You’ve got to get the money out of their whiskers’ ” (Rosheim xvii). Known as the King of Koins, the King of Dollars, or the Silver King, Downs toured the United States and Europe through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Downs’s act evoked a domestic political controversy about the status of money. Downs joined the American vaudeville circuit in 1883 performing a largely derivative routine with modest success. In 1895, he invented the Miser’s Dream, and this trick propelled him to immediate stardom. By 1900, he had moved from variety fill-in to headliner, toured the United States and Europe, and performed (like Fawkes) for the Prince of Wales. The years 1895–1900, not coincidentally, saw a national debate on American monetary policy. The most contentious issue and principal fault line of the 1896 presidential election was a proposal by Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan to convert U.S. currency from a gold standard to a silver standard. This linchpin of the party platform, known as the silver plank, aimed to multiply the money supply in an effort to combat the 1890s depression. Downs’s performance effectively staged the Democrat’s monetary program, with the silver coins dropping from his fingertips acting as magical figures of the recoinage envisioned by Bryan and his allies. The symbolism did not escape contemporaries: one reviewer asserted, “Mr. Downs hails from America and is known as the ‘Silver King,’ a title which his ability justifies. Mr. Downs is undoubtedly a firm adherent of the silver plank” (quoted in Downs 28). The transmutation of silver coins into gold coins, and vice versa, was in fact another of Downs’s coin manipulations (124). European reviewers proposed Downs as the solution to their nations’ own economic woes. A French reviewer wrote: T. Nelson Downs, the “King of Dollars,” was the other evening the guest of Monsieur Dupuy, Minister of Agriculture (having obtained the permission of the Directors of the Folies Marigny). He made the company which surrounded

122 James Peck him greatly admire his extraordinary tricks, making unlimited piles of dollars materialize under his dexterous fingers. He was so successful that some of the Ministers of Government present invited him to teach them his modus operandi to enable them to adopt same in re-establishing the equilibrium of the budget. But, lacking Downs’ great dexterity, they have not yet succeeded. Mr. Downs scored a tremendous success, equaled only by that gained by him nightly at the Folies Marigny. (Quoted in Downs 31)

A German newspaper echoed these sentiments: We strongly advise those Governments who suffer from lack of capital to pay particular attention to this gentleman, as he has the stuff necessary to make a good Minister of Finance and the humour and rhetoric to turn an unruly Opposition in Parliament found to his way of thinking. (Quoted in Downs 22)

These reviews are, of course, ironic jabs at inept governments, not interpretations of Downs’s performance. Nevertheless, they suggest that the Miser’s Dream resonated with audiences because it converted the economic instability of their macroeconomic lives into pleasurable, psychically manageable entertainment.

SIEGFRIED AND ROY I turn now to a descendant of these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century magicians, the former Las Vegas headliners Siegfried and Roy. Their personae and act retain theatrical and narrative elements of the magician as financial wizard, deploying it in ways suited to the New Las Vegas. Las Vegas is a propitious site to continue this genealogy. Certainly, few locales embrace commodification with the unabashed glee of Vegas, and gambling, the city’s long-time raison d’être, performatively enacts the hopes and perils of liquid capital. Hal Rothman correlates the growth of Vegas into a tourist powerhouse and entertainment mecca across the 1990s with the economic growth of the United States during the Clinton era, and specifically with the expansion of personal credit lines, “The combination of widespread credit, the new availability of cash, and the great stock run-up of the 1990s extended the market for gaming and leisure . . . With credit, people could truly attain the be-all and end-all of post 1960s culture: they could have whatever they wanted now and pay for it later, if at all. Cash flow was no longer a barrier to a weekend in Las Vegas” (26).

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Vegas succeeded in attracting a more respectable demographic: “Its attractions could be shaped to the tastes of the mainstream audience,” writes Hal Rothman. “Las Vegas promised a luxury experience at a middle-class price; now it could offer that price to the entire middle class” (24). In addition to benefiting from a flourishing national economy, the New Las Vegas is itself the product of financial wizardry. Historians date the New Las Vegas to the late 1980s and the construction of Steve Wynn’s Mirage Hotel, Siegfried and Roy’s longtime theatrical home. The Mirage was the first of the massive themed hotels, casinos, and entertainment complexes that came to dominate the Strip. Wynn led the corporate takeover of Vegas, a shift fueled by carefully coordinated cross-marketing and innovative forms of debt financing. Vegas retooled its image across the 1990s to offer more family-friendly entertainments attractive to baby boomers flush with disposable income. Although recent Vegas ad campaigns have rehabilitated its reputation as a site of sanctioned transgression (“What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!”), in 2000, Russell Belk accurately wrote, “Vegas is looking much less like a den of iniquity and much more like a fantastic theme park with attached fantasy shopping malls and fantasy hotels” (114). Wynn also authored the business plan that underwrote the new mega-resorts. A man of many gifts, he is above all a daring financier whose extensive credit line and creative debt management fund his development ventures. The Mirage cost $630 million, $500 million more than any previous Vegas property (Rothman xvii). Piquantly, the Mirage was capitalized by Michael Milken, the junk bond king imprisoned for securities violations in 1991, who used innovative and sometimes illegal financial instruments to raise unprecedented sums through the bullish Wall Street expansion of the 1980s. Through Milken’s firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, Wynn “borrowed $535.1 million to finance the Mirage in what observers of the financial markets called ‘a work of art’ ” (25). Although Siegfried and Roy are a complex cultural phenomenon that generates multiple meanings and reworks numerous strands from magic history, the persona of the magician as financial wizard is an essential element of their carefully constructed public image. In particular, it is a foundational aspect of Siegfried’s persona. Siegfried is the magician of the duo; until his injury, Roy was the animal tamer and the frequent object of Siegfried’s magic. As Siegfried says in their 1999 IMAX film, The Magic Box, “I am the magician, Roy is the magic.” Promulgating a mythic version of his life through media such as their website, Siegfried and Roy: Masters of the Impossible, and their video, The Magic Box, Siegfried places himself in the genealogy of the magician as financial wizard.

124 James Peck The biography section of their website and information provided in The Magic Box tell similar stories of Siegfried and Roy’s path to stardom. Each begins with a solitary boyhood in war-ravaged Germany and represents each man’s discovery of his vocation. Siegfried finds refuge in magic, Roy in his love of animals. Both sites then construct their lives and partnership as a rags-to-riches story, the principal trajectory being their rise from broken homes in an impoverished, defeated country to international fame and fabulous wealth. For Siegfried, successful magical encounters with capital comprise the key turning points of his story. This is clearest in The Magic Box. Virtually all of his episodes involve some interaction around money or professional status. For example, his story begins with a young boy longing to purchase a magic book his parents cannot afford. A five-mark note sweeps down from the stars into his hand, with a mystical ping in the soundtrack announcing its arrival. “Could it be a higher power rewards our true desires?” he asks. In the next episode, he amazes his depressive, war-damaged father with his first magic trick—a coin trick. It is Vanishing Coins From a Goblet, a routine from T. Nelson Downs classic text Modern Coin Magic.2 Young Siegfried’s next episode finds him journeying to Munich in search of more sophisticated magic apparatus. On entering the large magic shop, Siegfried’s voice-over intones, “Everything I dreamed of seemed to be there.” The Web version of this story links magic, credit, and class mobility: Meanwhile, Siegfried discovered a special shop called “The King of Magic” in Munich, 30 miles up the road from Rosenheim. Through the shop’s window he eyed an ornate magic box. The proprietor, an old Hungarian gypsy, told Siegfried that the box was for professional magicians only. With no money, the box was out of Siegfried’s grasp. Siegfried opened it anyway.

While seeking the fulfillment of his dreams in a shop, Siegfried acts as if he has a credit line. He opens an item that he lacks the financial resources to purchase—an item intended for magicians of a status that he has not yet risen to. The narrator celebrates Siegfried’s bold act as “a metaphor for Siegfried & Roy’s lives,” thus effectively linking magical knowledge to the ability to claim credit, to use property one cannot afford, and to assume business-class professional identities for which one has insufficient training and experience. Both the website and the video go on to present Siegfried and Roy within a classic narrative of European immigration to America, entrepreneurship, and economic triumph. Ensuing episodes include securing their first regular job as a magical team on an ocean liner; getting fired when Roy’s cheetah

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escapes into the audience, only to be immediately hired by another cruise line owner; and receiving the invitation to move to Las Vegas, this last garnished with the sound of coins clinking from a slot machine. Throughout, magic catalyzes their steps up the economic ladder, both the website and the video culminating in a tour of their opulent homes, the Jungle Palace (with an exterior reminiscent of the Taj Mahal) and Little Bavaria, a “home for the White Lions of Timbavati.” In both locales, Siegfried and Roy are presented as living happily and harmoniously with exotic animal companions who move freely about the house, both homes filled with antiques gathered from around the world. Siegfrieds and Roy’s (especially Siegfried’s) self-representation in these biographical anecdotes is clearly a version of the magician as financial wizard. However, their act itself does not obviously invoke this persona. In what ways might this image shade the meaning of Siegfried and Roy’s stage act? The architectural context of the New Las Vegas provides one powerful interpretive key. The Strip of the New Las Vegas resembled nothing so much as a massive World’s Fair of the sort discussed at length by Christopher Stahl in chapter seven of this volume. Led by The Mirage, the casinos and themed hotels gathered the wonders of the world into four densely packed miles of tourist real-estate. The New Las Vegas brought a sanitized, commodified simulacrum of global tourism to the United States. Many of the hotels offered the frisson of exotic destinations without the challenges of linguistic, monetary, or cultural difference that world travel typically entails. The Paris offered air-conditioned elevator rides up a scale model of the Eiffel Tower, the Luxor gambling in an Egyptian pyramid, the New York, New York an up-close view of the Statue of Liberty without the hassle of the ferry, the Venetian an indoor gondola ride in crystal-clear water, the Aladdin shopping in an “open-air” Moroccan market inside the hotel, the refurbished Caesar’s Palace a brush with Roman Imperial decadence with nary a decaying ruin in view. The 1990s saw the United States in its incipient moment as the world’s sole military and principal economic superpower. With the Cold War over and the economy booming, in its fantastical way the New Las Vegas staged the ability of U.S. capital to co-opt the global and cultural treasures of the world and offer them (albeit in vitiated versions) to the broad American middle class at an affordable price. The New Las Vegas writ large this capitalist practice already successfully operative elsewhere in America, as, for example, at Disney’s Epcot Center. The local context of the Las Vegas Strip and the global context of U.S. economic dominance resonate with central elements of Siegfried and Roy: Masters of the Impossible. The Mirage show utilizes a theatrical vocabulary that links it to the context of a purportedly benign globalization. Many of

126 James Peck Siegfried and Roy’s illusions combine images of animal taming with magical feats of metamorphosis and teleportation. Roy’s stage persona crystallizes around the benevolent mastery of dangerous beasts from foreign climes. Though the act includes one horse (the only domestic animal in the act), exotic beasts predominate: an elephant, a hawk, lions, and numerous tigers, including the famous white tigers to which the duo has especially devoted themselves. In some moments, the act emphasizes Siegfried and Roy’s harmony with the animals, offering the two of them sitting casually amidst a pride of white lions, or Roy and a tiger materializing together in a previously empty cage. In other moments, the act emphasizes the humans’ species dominance. Roy canters a white stallion, rides an elephant, and, in the show’s culminating sequence, straddles a yoked, striped white tiger on a large rotating disco ball that Siegfried levitates. These human–animal interactions cite a performance genealogy dating from another eighteenth-century popular entertainment form that still enjoys currency: the display of exotic animals. In The Circus and Victorian Society (2005), Brenda Assael persuasively argues that in Western contexts, the display of animals from colonized regions functions as a celebration of an expanding colonial order “in which the exotic animal, once subdued, [becomes] a metonym for progress” (69). Given the intense patterns of global co-optation that characterized the Las Vegas Strip generally through the 1990s, the lions, tigers, and elephant in Siegfried and Roy’s show must be read in this context. A gondola ride in the Venetian or a trip up the half size Eiffel Tower poking through the Paris offered tourists a synthetic, tightly controlled experience of the distant world, and advertised the power of the United States to gather, reproduce, and control the foreign within its borders. Roy Horn straddling a white tiger atop a rotating globe sent heavenward from the mists like a planet into orbit by Siegfried Fishbacher offered spectators an even flashier condensation of EuroAmerican global dominance—Roy riding his tiger, literally on top of the world. Much of Siegfried’s other magic also resonates within this context. Metamorphosis and teleportation predominate. Siegfried turns people into animals and vice versa, elements into animals and vice versa, and people into other people; he and Roy move rapidly around the stage, disappearing from one locale to reappear instantaneously on the other. Onstage, Siegfried and Roy employ, pacify, and cavort with the dangerous living inhabitants of formerly colonized territories. They cause this animal labor force to appear, to disappear, to change guises, and to migrate at the wave of a magician’s hand. Occasionally, Siegfried and Roy present themselves in relationships of affection and equality with the animals; other times, they establish their incontrovertible dominance over them. Russell Belk writes, “It is no coincidence

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that Las Vegas offers the largest concentration of magic acts in the world. Like the casinos, they offer alluring allusions [sic] that make something out of nothing and transform one thing into another. These are our contemporary sources of contact with the miraculous and the numinous” (106). Across the 1990s, the “miracle” to which Siegfried and Roy: Masters of the Impossible insistently referred was not so much the miracle of nature (the explicit rhetoric they use to describe their act) as it was the miracle of a globalizing capitalism. Performing on a stage in a building devoted to liquid capital on a street devoted to the American appropriation and commodification of world cultures, two European men staged their benevolent dominance of a blanched, pacified labor force from the global south that seemed—until one terrible day—entirely compliant. Combining symbolic rhetorics from the performance traditions of magic and animal taming, Siegfried and Roy: Masters of the Impossible embodied a U.S. cultural and economic imperialism that many Americans could happily applaud. Magic flourished in the creative destruction wrought by financial capitalism in Las Vegas in the 1990s. Many magicians followed Siegfried and Roy’s lead, and by 2000, Las Vegas had become the acknowledged center of entertainment magic in the United States, if not the world. “It seemed natural,” writes Hal Rothman, “a synergy between the city and the art of illusion” (43). The genealogy I have offered here suggests that, at least in the case of Siegfried and Roy, this synergy seemed natural precisely because it was not. Rather, Siegfried and Roy became the vanguard entertainers of the New Las Vegas by citing long-standing narratives and metaphors drawn from the three-hundred-year-old magical image repertoire of capitalist culture. On the one hand, compared with the grand illusions of Siegfried and Roy, Isaac Fawkes pulling parakeets and nightingales from a bag seems almost quaint; on the other hand, Fawkes invented a magical scenario that celebrates capitalist transformations of identity through magical mastery of the global flow of goods and living creatures. Three hundred years later, this performative rhetoric still facilitates performances of awesome magnitude, if discomfiting ethics. Siegfried and Roy’s act was so old it seemed original, so established in history that, in spite of its glitzy artifice, it seemed somehow authentic.

CONCLUSION The analysis I have offered here is limited in its application. Although my analysis is chronologically (and some may aver interpretively) ambitious, I am not offering a unified field theory of magic. In discussing the uses

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of performance genealogies, Joseph Roach quotes Jonathan Arac (drawing on Foucault drawing on Nietzsche): genealogies should “excavate the past that is necessary to account for how we got here and the past that is useful for conceiving alternatives to our present condition” (25). I have argued that some magic performances of the 1720s evoked and responded to events and discourses of the financial revolution, and that the patterns of meaning and value they established surface in ensuing cultural products. I have tried to demonstrate that the pleasures of these performances were historically conditioned pleasures—symbolic practices offering pleasurable psychic experiences that, although they have persisted for nearly three hundred years, were and are emphatically contingent. It is possible and energizing, but perhaps difficult, to imagine a world with no use for these illusions. Early-eighteenth-century audiences embraced magic because it spoke to their widespread sense that, for both better and worse, Credit rendered their lives illusory and impermanent. People flocked to Goethe’s Faust in the duchy of Weimar, T. Nelson Downs at the Palace, and Siegfried and Roy at the Mirage at least in part because so much of the capitalist West still lives within the material base and cultural imaginary of that historical moment. The audiences marveling at Fawkes’s dexterity of hand, quailing at Faust’s paper money necromancy, cheering the silver coins falling from Downs’s fingertips, or exclaiming when Siegfried turned Roy into a white tiger were, through the psychic identifications and displacements of theatrical spectatorship, enjoying and/or disciplining the chaotic, inexplicable, and emphatically metamorphic social processes of finance capitalism, imaginatively confronting the perpetual cataclysms of a world in which, as Marx and Engels write, “all that is solid melts into air” (1).

NOTES 1. Some evidence suggests that Fawkes began his career earlier. Although his name does not surface in the documentary record until 1721, it appears frequently thereafter, suggesting that he achieved fame in these years. 2. Interestingly, in another video The Magic and the Mystery, Siegfried tells the same story of entertaining his father, but he does a different Downs manipulation, the Continuous Front and Back Hand Palm, the basis of Downs’s Miser’s Dream.

WORKS CITED Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550–1750. London: Cambridge UP, 1986.

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Assael, Brenda. The Circus and Victorian Society. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Belk, Russell. “May the Farce Be With You: On Las Vegas and Consumer Infantalization.” Consumption, Markets, and Culture 4.2 (2000): 101–124. Berman, Marshall. All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin, 1982. Binswanger, Hans Christoph. Money and Magic: A Critique of the Modern Economy in the Light of Goethe’s “Faust.” Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Clarke, Sidney W. The Annals of Conjuring. Seattle: Miracle Factory, 2001. Cooper, Marc. The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas. New York: Nation Books, 2004. Dean, Henry. The Whole Art of Legerdemain, or Hocus Pocus in Perfect. London, 1722. Dickson, P. G. M. The Financial Revolution in England. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Downs, T. Nelson. Classic Coin Tricks: An Unabridged Reprint of Modern Coin Manipulation. Ed. Mark Elling Rosheim. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von. Faust. Trans. Walter Arndt. Ed. Cyrus Hamlin. New York: Norton, 2001. Jay, Ricky. Jay’s Journal of Anomalies. New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2003. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London, 1848. May 28, 2007, http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html. Neal, Larry. The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Markets in the Age of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Neary, Michael. “Marx and the Magic of Money: Towards an Alchemy of Capital.” Historical Materialism 2.1 (1998): 99–117. O’Brien, John. Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004. Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times. Vol. 1. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1971. Pocock, J. G. A. Virtue, Commerce, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. ———. It. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007. Rosheim, Mark Elling. Introduction to T. Nelson Downs, Classic Coin Tricks: An Unabridged Reprint of Modern Coin Manipulation. Ed. Mark Rosheim. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999: ix-xxii. Rothman, Hal. Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sadlack, Antoni. Harlequin Comes to England: The Early Evidence of the Commedia Dell’arte in England and the Formulation of English Harlequinades and Pantomimes. PhD dissertation, Tufts University, 1999.

130 James Peck Shell, Marc. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies From the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Siegfried and Roy. The Magic and the Mystery. 1994. Perf. Siegfried Fischbacher, Roy Horn. Voxcorp, 2003. ———. The Magic Box. 1999. Perf. Siegfried Fischbacher, Roy Horn. Voxcorp, 2003. ———. Masters of the Impossible. May 28, 2007, http://www.siegfriedandroy.com/.

6. The Sacred and the Sleight of Hand in American Indian Gaming Mary Lawlor

Mary Lawlor is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Muhlenberg College. Her most recent book is Public Native America: Tribal Self-Representation in Museums, Powwows, and Casinos (Rutgers University Press, 2006). Combining Native American and cultural studies, Lawlor examines magical imagery in Native American casinos in the United States. She notes that Native casinos often include design elements that associate gambling with inherited Native religious ideas and with stories about creation involving magical actions. The chapter outlines debates about tribal casinos in terms of conflicting ideas about gambling, magic, and colonial history. How are casinos stages for playing out contemporary Native self-representations? To what extent and in what ways is gaming in Native American casinos “magical”?

T

he logo for the Dakota Magic Casino Hotel in Hankinson, North Dakota, features an enormous buffalo pawing the ground, ready to charge. On the distant horizon, two jagged peaks rise above the valley floor. The advertisement replays a conventional image of an old Plains environment where the buffalo roamed free, before the American west was carved into cities, strip malls, reservations. In block, frontier-style print, the words “Dakota Magic” frame the landscape. “Casino Hotel” cuts the borders of the image in sleek, angled script, lending the sign a bit of the speedy glamor of modernity. Dakota Magic is the property of the Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe. Situated on the state line between North and South Dakota, the casino draws gamblers, golfers, and honeymooners from throughout the northern Plains. Profits go toward improving the infrastructure of the tribe’s reservation and administrative complex located in Agency Village, South Dakota, until recently a deeply impoverished Native American town.

132 Mary Lawlor The choices Sisseton leaders made in designing Dakota Magic’s logo reflect trends in Native American casinos across the United States, where references to an older indigenous world collide with the methods and styles of corporate modernism. As the name of this particular tribal casino suggests, the pastiche of the traditional and the modern is supplemented by references to magical thinking aimed at stimulating gamblers’ dreams of self-transformation. The conflicting design strategies speak to differing kinds of cultural knowledge and different attitudes toward gambling that overlap with and often appear to contradict each other in tribal casinos. Each of them, in its way, invites certain modes of thinking that might be termed “magical.” The appearance of an ever greater number of Native American gambling casinos in the United States during the past fifteen years has provoked a good deal of debate in local and national public discourse. Tribal leaders and their supporters speak with pride of business successes and of the relief casino profits have brought to American Indian nations that have been mired in poverty for generations. At the same time, however, Native gaming ventures have elicited a great deal of indignation from off reservation neighbors, community councils, and state houses. In some cases, animosity toward tribal casinos simply reflects the moral stigma attached to gambling in the West generally, but in others, the hostility gains an extra edge from the perceived injustice of tribes enjoying the legal privilege of operating casinos in the first place. At first glance, these debates might appear to be no more than interesting local quarrels over the codification of business rights and privileges. On closer inspection of the issues at stake, however, it becomes apparent that the tensions manifest important epistemic differences concerning the meanings of gambling. These differences are aggravated by the colonial dynamic—the history of conquest and the continuing experience of colonization—that haunts the background and confuses the foreground of what otherwise might seem familiar, postmodern public scenes. In this essay, rather than focusing on issues related to magic on the stage, I will look at magic more broadly to encompass the magical performances of everyday life, particularly performances implied by strategies of casino design and enacted by gamblers in their private rituals to affect the operations of chance. My argument also assumes what Silvia Federici describes as the tendency of magical concepts and practices to “not admit of any separation between matter and spirit, and [to see] the cosmos as a living organism . . . where every element [is] in sympathetic relation with the rest” (13–14). How do casinos and their patrons engage in artful performances that seek to produce impossible effects? My more general and

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more traditional understanding of magic allows me to answer this question by framing a wide range of concepts and practices deployed in American Indian casinos for the purpose of achieving transformative effects. Taking up the strands of magic evident in the tribal, corporate, and popular epistemes referenced in tribal casino design and decoration, I attempt to show how the sacred, the rational, and the magical interact and produce contradictory motifs that are best understood as effects of a continuing colonial history. I also suggest ways in which this contradictory colonial history may shape and flavor the performances of casino gamblers, many of whom enact elaborate acts of magic intended to influence the operations of chance and improve their odds of winning. While gambling practices in precolonial North America and in the ancient West shared religious contexts and sacred resonances, the cultural meanings of gambling in Europe and its colonies shifted dramatically in the course of early modernity. These shifts placed gambling under the sign of the irrational and the wasteful, such that from a newly emergent Protestant perspective, practices construed as such were considered by church and state officials as wishful and sinful forms of magical thinking that shirked and attempted to best Divine will. In European America, a great deal of ambivalence has characterized attitudes about gambling since the first settlements, as condemnation based on the perceived immorality has alternated with more permissive climates into the present time. For Native American populations, however, gaming has never ceased to be regarded as a means of engaging with the sacred. Several kinds of gambling, I argue, occur simultaneously in American Indian casinos. Besides the slot machines, the roulette wheels, the black jack and poker tables that sustain the casinos’ central functions as sites of popular, recreational gambling, references to older Indian gaming practices often feature in tribal casino designs and interior decoration. These references point to the religious context that gaming can have for tribal people, in the present as it did in the past. In addition to these secular and sacred gaming practices, I argue that the Western financial systems deployed by Indian casinos, modeled as they are on rational accounting methods and self-blessed by a Protestant ethic of gain, often seem to operate as well by risk taking and wagering, methods commonly described as “gambling” by critics of capitalism and by corporate personnel themselves (Comaroff and Comaroff 295). Yet another form of gambling that functions in tribal casinos is the occult, magical thinking that players bring to the games. Each of these kinds of gambling—the traditional modes referred to in the design motifs, the actual gaming-floor practices of players, and the corporate risk-taking—expresses

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a distinct style of thinking about gambling, and each performs a particular form of magic, even as they interact with and influence each other. To the extent that corporate methods depend on the categories and procedures of rationalism and dominate the Indian casino industry, they keep these institutions fastened to financial and political circuits of the dominant society. At the same time, corporate operations, in their sometimes arbitrary logic, can be said to deploy certain kinds of magic, which drive transformations that are incomprehensible from the perspective of ordinary reason. To the extent that the sacred informs gambling generally in Native America, imbuing the concept and the performance with a religious aura, it implies a connection between gaming practices fostered in tribal casinos and ultimate, cosmological meanings that are distinct from views of gambling that tend to prevail in European America. Native theologies, however, are often evoked for what could legitimately be described as rational corporate ends; and they often engage what from Western perspectives (which Native subjects sometimes share) might seem magical thought. To the extent that players descending on Indian casinos from off the reservations bring to the gaming table forms of nonrational, magical thought that are encouraged by the exotic “Indian” decoration strategies in tribal casinos, they too can be said to contradict the dominant, rational frameworks of the social forces epitomized by the corporate model. The magical thinking of a non-Native player as she rolls the dice or chooses a number might include divinatory or propitiatory gestures that derive from gaming traditions of the ancient West that are as distinctly sacred as Native gaming traditions. In this sense, we can see the player’s actions as a kind of performance on at least two levels. First, by conducting her movements, gestures, facial and vocal expressions—indeed even her thoughts—in ways that rehearse practices she has seen or engaged in before, consciously and unconsciously, she exhibits what Erving Goffman and Michel de Certeau have termed “the performance of everyday life.” Second, the interior designs of the casinos, as I describe later, clearly encourage patrons to perform certain styles of being scripted, so to speak, in the social interactions gambling sponsors. The more pressing and effective the layout of space and the décor strategies, the more possible it is that players will suspend their disbelief, so to speak, and engage as performers in the magical world of gaming and in the “traditional” world referenced by the design environment. For readers who are unfamiliar with this particular development, I begin the discussion by narrating the history of the Indian casino phenomenon. Next, I chart some of the inherited ideas about gambling that inform much Native American thinking on the issue at present. After laying out this

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history, I turn to the historical dynamic that looms in the background of the casino phenomenon and of the varous responses it has elicited, and that is the continuing legacy of colonialism. Colonialism leaves its mark on both Native and non-Native attitudes about Indian casinos and invests the current debates with a palpable historical valence. While the colonial dynamic has meant the imposition of European and European American structures on the land and people of North America, these forceful expressions of power have not produced a seamless cultural hegemony; nor have they erased Native tribal identities, in the individual or collective sense. In reiterating this point, I echo many tribal and scholarly voices that have continuously asserted that Native cultural difference is an integral force in the casino movement. Thus even though Western capital and cultural circuits flow through and help shape casino corporate structures, they do not by any means account for all the cultural work that Native casinos perform. I argue, then, that while imitations of U.S. corporate methods in tribal casinos attest to the influences of the dominant society on so many levels, the meanings that attach to gambling in endogenous Native knowledge systems still pertain. Thus casino executives and staff, as well as players, can be said to perform as participants in gaming practices that are framed by design strategies referencing the sacred; and that engage magic to deal with chance and risk on a number of different levels. My effort in mapping the intersection of these different understandings and practices of gambling and of the historical backgrounds that hover over contemporary debates about Indian casinos is to make sense of the complex relations between casino tribes and the larger publics they face, critics and scholars as well as players. Casinos have indeed become some of the most important sites in Native America for the elaboration of contemporary tribal identities in terms of endogenous as well as postmodern styles of being. What might initially look like kaleidescopes of ideas and aesthetic styles in American Indian casinos, configuring and reconfiguring endless ironies, can thus be mapped and made sense of in terms of an intersection of conflicting cultural ideas about gambling and colonial history, as well as a stage for the playing out of contemporary Native self-representations in the public sphere.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INDIAN CASINO PHENOMENON Any of a number of events and conditions in recent Native history might be identified as the stimulus for the Indian casino phenomenon, but the

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momentum behind the voluminous increase since the middle of the 1990s was largely set in motion when the Seminoles of Florida and the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians in California opened bingo operations in 1979 and 1980, respectively. The Seminole and Cabazon cases fueled congressional action that resulted in the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), which established that federally recognized tribes have the right to negotiate with state governments for the construction and operation of casinos in states where the kind of gambling they wish to conduct is not prohibited. The law stipulates that state governments will negotiate in good faith with tribes to establish compacts for operating casinos. A compact often sets aside a percentage of the casino’s earnings for the state in lieu of state taxes, since the tribes are not required to pay taxes on income earned within the boundaries of reservation lands.1 The financial organization and management of Native American casinos is outlined in the text of the IGRA. Revenues are to be used for tribal infrastructure, welfare of tribal members, and tribal government initiatives, especially the promotion of tribal economic development (IGRA Section 11 B 2 b i–v). This means, among other things, that profits from casino gaming must be reinvested in ventures that will likely increase the tribe’s economic base. Of course, risk is a component of the casino business, even when it is as regulated as the IGRA mandates, but if the tribes are gambling on and with their own gambling profits, they are doing so within widely accepted social parameters that hold such transactions are, for the most part, rational and ethical (Section 11 b 2 C and D).2 Tribes have looked to gaming in progressively greater numbers as a way out of the entrenched poverty that has characterized reservation life in some cases since the seventeenth century (Eadington, Indian Gaming and the Law; Eisler; Mason). In 1988, when the IGRA came into existence, nine Indian casinos were operating in the United States (Davis and Otterstrom 58). At the end of fiscal year 2003, the National Indian Gaming Commission reported three hundred and seventy-seven casinos, forty-three of which were earning $100 million or more. Total revenue for 2003 was $16,730,148 billion. In that year, contributions to federal and state governments from Indian gaming approximated $7.6 billion. In addition, $100 million went to local governments (National Indian Gaming Association 2004 9). In 2005 and 2006, Indian casinos brought in totals of $22.5 and $25.1 billion, respectively (NativeBiz). This new wealth, however, represents only part of the picture of contemporary Native American life. While some tribal gambling enterprises have been remarkably successful, others have brought only modest economic

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benefits to their reservations. In 1993, ten tribes took in over 50 percent of Native gaming revenues; in 2004, twenty casinos earned 55.5 percent of the total Indian gaming income (National Indian Gaming Association; Davis and Otterstrom 61). As of 2005, only one-third of the federally recognized tribes in the United States even owned gaming operations. Native American poverty continues to exceed poverty rates for all other ethnic groups in the United States, with 46 percent unemployment across North America (National Congress of American Indians). In South Dakota, where the Sisseton owners of Dakota Magic Casino Hotel live, Indian per capita income averages $4,800 per year. Unemployment is at 80 percent, while the state non-Indian unemployment rate is only 3.4 percent (Melmer). Native poverty has produced all the predictable social ills: alcoholism, family violence, depression, and a high rate of diabetes. It might surprise readers to consider that, given the possibility of economic development that has come with the “new buffalo” and of charity on the part of successful casino tribes to the many poorer ones, things are better now in most places in Indian country than they have been in the history of European contact.

INDIGENOUS REPRESENTATIONS OF GAMBLING Tribal public self-representations that appear in casino designs and in the many websites, brochures, and other media commonly point to the inherited styles of being and knowing that constitute key features of Native individual as well as collective identity. A few examples will illustrate my point. At Foxwoods Resort Casino, owned and operated by the Mashantucket Pequots of Ledyard, Connecticut, and probably the most well-known American Indian casino in the United States, an enlarged photograph of an ancestor hangs prominently over one of the main lobbies. She is Elizabeth George Plouffe, considered by many in the tribe to be the single most important conduit of Pequot culture into contemporary time. Stately and sagacious, wearing a plaid wool shirt, beads and braids, she gazes upward, away from the camera, toward something outside the picture frame. It is as if her calm but intense gaze were fixed on something inspirational beyond the scope of the photographer’s view, beyond the historical moment when the picture was taken, and certainly beyond the immediate scene of Foxwoods, which nevertheless appears in this arrangement to have her blessing. Visitors to the casino pass beneath this over-enlarged photograph on their way to the slot machines, roulette wheels, and card tables. Bright,

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flashing lights call attention to the roped-off gaming areas where a labyrinth of corridors leads. Only adults are allowed in this zone, but there is much to engage the attention of children in the surrounding courts—fast food, movie theaters, souvenir and toy shops. Players are reminded, however, that in spite of the Vegas-for-family décor, they are in American Indian territory. Details of the casino’s decoration suggest that the institution intends to associate itself with distinctly Pequot concepts and daily life practices. The basket and wampum designs embedded in carpet and wallpaper borders derive from older Mashantucket patterns. Brochures highlight the fact that “[t]he casino at Mashantucket is located on lands occupied continuously for thousands of years by the ancestors of today’s Mashantucket Pequot tribal members.” In the midst of the clamor and rush of the gambling crowd stands a room identified as “Mashantucket Pequot Museum,” where a narrative of tribal history with artifacts and photographs calls attention to the cultural revitalization and restoration projects in which many of the casino’s profits are invested. To take another example, Sky City Casino at Acoma Pueblo, which opened in 2000, was designed to evoke the environment of old Acoma, “the longest continuously inhabited urban site in North America,” which sits atop the tribe’s ancient redoubt, Sky City Mesa. Gamblers line the rows of slot machines, staring intently into the screens, looking for all the world like workers in an assembly plant. But the decoration of the room recalls the local, reservation setting, with the geometric patterns in the casino carpets resembling venerable Acoma pottery styles, and the vigas in the ceilings suggesting old pueblo architecture. In sections of the building, the floors and walls are decorated with reddish-brown tiles featuring animal designs, arrows, and thunderbirds drawn in the manner of petroglyphs. All of this is modestly done and seems to gently invite visitors to think of the casino, if not exactly as an extension of the old village, then at least as a design inspired by and related to it. The Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut is designed to evoke the local natural environment and to thematically frame the gaming activities in terms of inherited Mohegan styles and concepts. The Casino of the Earth features separate areas coinciding with the four directions, described as “sacred to the First Nations of the Americas,” and dedicated to the seasons of the year. The entrance to the Casino of the Sky is framed by a wood, glass, and metal interpretation of the Tree of Life, the revered mediator of past and future, earth and sky, humans and the Great Spirit. Passing through this symbol, gamblers are invited to imagine themselves entering a sacred space, a locale in which material reality is thin and possibilities abound for magical

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intervention in the affairs of everyday life. Paintings, murals, and sculptures depict images and events in creation narratives of the Mohegan and Delaware people. Players move through gaming corridors decorated with stuffed wolves, imitation pine trees, and waterfalls, all of which are aimed to “bring you back to nature.” Nature and the sacred are bound up in each other in the Mohegan world, so that framing gambling in a natural context frames it as a ritual, even magical practice, insofar as it evokes connections between the material and the sacred in this environment. Among the practices identified with the traditional cultures referencd in these designs is gaming, not blackjack or roulette or twenty-one, but a host of ancient games of chance still performed and bet on by tribes across North America. The Yakama Nation, located in Washington State, enacts perhaps the most literal connection between casino and traditional, sacred gaming by hosting an annual Stick Game Tournament at the tribe’s Legends Casino. Advertisements describe the tournament as a transhistorical event, with a sepia toned photograph of Yakama adults gathered around the outdoor playing space, thoroughly engaged in the conduct of the game. The clothing and hairstyles date the image to the early 1950s, but the game is clearly much older, and the advertisement itself is directed to an audience of 2004 (Indian Country Today 76). What distinguishes these older games from those played in casinos on and off the reservations is the spirit in which they are conducted; for classical Indian gambling is by and large a religious matter with overtones of sacred magic. Many different tribal creation narratives, for instance, describe gambling sequences, the outcomes of which will determine relations between death and life, darkness and light, or destructive and constructive natural processes. The gaming of sacred powers thus provides a model for human wagering, and these magical powers can have effect on the outcomes of human games if they are properly propitiated. Chance had a place in the origins of creation, and it continues to bear the traces of special instrumentality, as a form of the sacred that might be addressed and managed through certain processes. The stick game played in the Legends Casino advertisement is one of a large category of ritualistic games found among tribes throught North America. The guessing and betting involved puts players in contact with extraordinary forces that influence events and help reshape the material world. Gamblers enter into exchanges with these sacred dynamics that promise some kind of transformative effect, for good or ill. To engage with chance is to engage with magical powers whose aid might be propitiated for various causes, including success in the game itself; or who might be called

140 Mary Lawlor on to give information about events to come, which then are read in the fall of the dice, bones, or other markers (Culin). The games thus give human subjects the opportunity to perform the ritual magic needed to develop familiarity with the spirit world, to become more practiced at deciphering its meanings, and simultaneously at recognizing the limitations of human powers in such endeavors. In the Northeast, the Haudenausaunee, the confederacy of tribes known more commonly as the Iroquois, wager on similar games, including the peach stone game, and a variety of dice games. As Paul Pasquaretta explains in his study of Indian gaming history and its functions in contemporary Native American literature, the sacred bowl game, or Gus-ka-eh, reproduces a game played by the twin grandsons of the Woman Who Fell From the Sky, an important figure in Haudenosaunee creation narratives. The twins are constitutionally impelled by opposing moral drives, and the conflict between them culminates in the ritual, magical performance of the bowl game, which Good Mind wins, even though his brother continues to exert destructive influence (Pasquaretta 121–122; Tooker 35–47). The Navajo mocassin game, which had its origins in a contest between the deities known as First People, is still played in ceremonial contexts, with songs referencing the original game to help the players compete (Gabriel 218). In the narrative that structures the Navajo Nightway Ceremony, sacred beings bet on the outcome of dice and hoop games; even the powerful creator figure First Woman takes part. The gambling described in the Nightway story is enacted during the ceremony, not as an extracurricular past time, but as part of the ritual, magical procedure (Faris 219–220). Coyote, one of the First People in the Navajo cycle and a culture hero even in his lesser avatars as fool, lecher, and thief, gambles often but generally loses, not because he gambles but because of the extravagant and obsequious way in which he gambles (Reichard 424). Creation narratives of several California tribes include episodes in which heroic “First People” and culture heroes compete with each other and with various demonic figures in gambling sequences, the results of which determine the material and cultural composition of the human world (Gendar 66–67). The origins of many contemporary California games that include betting are understood to originate with supra-human creation figures. In the Sun Dance of the Utes, like the Sun Dance of the Shoshones, a place is made for gambling on the dance grounds, and participants in the ceremony are welcome to play. Although poker and monte, which sponsor individual competition, loss, and gain are common, the more honored forms of gambling on these occasions are varieties of the hand and stick game, in which players wager on the outcome

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of contests between two teams to guess correctly—and to keep from guessing correctly—in which hand or hands certain marked and unmarked bones are held. For the Utes, the hand and stick game can take place during the ceremonial part of the Sun Dance, while in the Shoshone version, gambling is usually deferred to a time after the dancing has ended (Jorgensen 180, 223–224). The results of the game are controlled to some degree by the hosts, who try to ensure that both sides come out more or less even in the end and that the visitors do not lose their shirts (299–300). In this sense, the gaming rehearses the values of collaboration and collective well-being that the Sun Dance itself is intended to foster. These are only a few of the myriad forms of Native American gambling that occur in ritual contexts in the present, as they did in the past. Clearly, they are not now and have not been at other times simply recreational diversions. Gaming is sacred in its origins, and outcomes are still considered to be determined by sacred beings. Gambling enables ritual contact—magic making—with powerful spirits who can help bring about favorable outcomes for players whose interests and desires coincide with their own. In addition, to be adept at gambling in any of the forms just described requires focus, patience, foresight, and other abilities not necessarily called for in the course of ordinary life. Ritual cultivation of the strengths needed to gamble successfully, for example, fasting and sexual abstinence, expose the gambler to dimensions of the sacred, of extra-human orders of being that can influence the elements in play, magic forces that have gambled too and accomplished or lost what they hoped to achieve in doing so.3 The meanings attached to these gambling practices are implicitly referenced in the casino design strategies I describe earlier and suggest associations—not direct continuities—between older, ritualistic gaming and what goes on in tribal casinos. These references do not openly explain the contents of ideas about gaming that make them sacred or offer outsiders opportunities to engage in gaming in the ritualist way. Nevertheless, we can see that the reference to ritual gaming invests casino gaming practices with magical meanings that define them as potentially more than simply recreational activities.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF NATIVE CASINO DECORATION How does magic enter this picture? From certain Western points of view, the effects of such ritual gaming transactions might be termed “magic,”

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and indeed R. Stewart Culin, one of the foremost late-nineteenth-century ethnographers of Native America, wrote in 1902 that indigenous gaming practices function as “religious ceremonies, as rites pleasing to the gods to secure their favor, or as processes of sympathetic magic, to drive away sickness, avert other evil, or produce rain and the fetilization and reproduction of plants and animals, or other beneficial results” (809). Indeed, what is said to occur as a result of these performances is precisely such a “break through” into ordinary reality. As Silvia Federici’s definition of magic suggests, the boundaries between spirit and material world open. But there is a troublesome dimension to the matter too. The obverse of the more balancing and constructive gamblers and gambling methods is the Evil Gambler, a figure that appears in many tribal creation narratives. Generally speaking, this figure’s evil is expressed not only in his (and the figure is usually a male) destructive desires but in his methods, which are manipulative, deceitful, and involve tricking technologies. They are often identified as evil magicians and simultaneously evil gamblers. Leslie Marmon Silko, a widely read Laguna Pueblo writer, recounts in her novel Ceremony the story of a skillful evil gambler who uses his talents to acquire magical power over his victims. Other magicians in the traditional stories cited in the novel are equally destructive, and the strong implication is that magic is a form of distraction from the properly sacred, and is thus by definition evil. Good magic, these labels suggest, generates and follows from good gambling. Magic in this sense is an extraordinary ritual effect that overlaps with the sacred. In addition, I would argue that a different kind of magic has a place in the design strategies of tribal casinos. Side by side with the representations of indigenous inheritances and ritual gambling one commonly discovers decorations that exoticize American Indian cultures and seem blatantly based on European American stereotypes and advertising strategies. These images and commentaries frame and encourage the exotic, magical thinking that some players are inclined to bring with them to casinos. At Foxwoods, for example, the “Rainmaker,” a giant, urethane sculpture of an Indian in loin cloth and war bonnet, kneels with bow and arrow aimed toward the sky while colored lights play across his body and a voice-over narrative tells his hunting tale. Nearby, cocktail waitresses sport buck-skin, fringed mini-skirts and feathered head bands. At Acoma’s Sky City Casino, brightly colored pamphlets advertise experiences that blend “old and new” in “Acoma at the crossroads of nature, heritage and the spirit of fun.” Like the advertisements for Foxwoods describing it as the place in Connecticut where “Nature and Lady Luck Meet,” the Acoma pamphlet makes an advertising jingle out of

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the trope of “Native traditionalism” to highlight the casino’s “Indianness” in tones that lack the subtlety of the muted carpet and wall designs. Similarly, the casino’s glossy link on the tribe’s otherwise unpretentious website urges visitors to “See History, Make History, Where the Sky’s the Limit, For Everyone (Acoma Business Enterprises).” At Mohegan Sun, one discovers the Arrowhead Lounge, the Bow and Arrow Bar. Similiar visual rhetoric evokes fetishized icons of Indian life drawn from American popular culture and mirrored back to its non-Native customers. These images and design strategies are not so different, perhaps, from the “American Indian” mysticisms conjured up by performers on Las Vegas and Atlantic City stages for the sake of exoticizing their magic performances. There is perhaps more than a little smoke and mirrors, more than a bit of sleight of hand, in such representations of Indian identity in Native casinos themselves, where the stereotypes seem to be those American consumers one might expect to find in a tribal casino. Are these reductions intended to appeal to non-Native players by making them feel that they can somehow relate to their hosts’ self-exoticising gestures, and in this seemingly inappropriate environment, pursue their own forms of magical thinking? It has been implied by some writers, for example, John J. Bodinger de Uriarte and Celeste Lacroix, that the strange mixtures of references to specific tribal narratives and images on the one hand and popular stereotypes on the other are the inadvertent expressions of desperate efforts to recapture “tradition” as a means of asserting nationhood in the present. But why should such strategies be considered inadvertent when they constitute a distinct pattern in tribal casinos throughout the United States; and when they seem to evoke atmospheres conducive to gambling by clients from off the reservations and thus to increasting profits? Tribal spokespeople have never, to my knowledge, affirmed or implied these intentions; nor, for that matter, has any spokesperson for Indian casino management articulated the distinctions I make here between more convincing artwork and design strategies on the one hand and the reductive Indian motifs on the other. An article that appeared in a local newspaper shortly after Foxwoods opened reported that in response to criticism of the cocktail waitress’s outfits “tribal leaders countered that the . . . tunics . . . were chosen because they are comfortable and conform to the casino’s Indian motif.” At about the same time, Kenneth Reels, tribal council vice chairman, commented that “The Pequots, not the hired . . . managers, selected the uniforms because they make a statement. This is not just any casino. The uniforms say, it’s an Indian casino.”4 These are, after all, American casinos, where such kitschy decor might be expected. Yet it’s hard to ignore

144 Mary Lawlor the historical irony in the idea that such fragments of an iconography, which has helped to foster the disempowerment of Native society since the seventeenth century, are now being put to use in reverse order to redress the massive economic injustices of the present as well as the past. In pointing out these ironies, I do not want to suggest that Native American casinos systematically play a sort of sleight of hand by ensnaring their customers or seducing them into losing control of their money or their selves while tribal members stand by snickering (as a recent episode of South Park suggests); nor are these kitchy devices the signs of an assimilation that cancels out the possibility of something culturally different going on in the business and aesthetic strategies deployed in tribal casinos. I would argue that they are simply employed to attract gamblers and thus to further the success of projects aimed at bolstering the economic health and social infrastructures of communities that colonialism and colonial discourse—which included such stereotypes and much worse—once helped reduce to the terms of European and European American authority.

WESTERN GAMBLING MAGIC AND THE COLONIAL LEGACY Can gambling have any sacred valence in contemporary casinos when players do not know about, much less subscribe to, notions of Native tradition or spirituality when they throw the dice or play the slot machines? Before answering with a resounding “no,” we might note that magical and sacred traditions attached to gambling and to games of chance in the ancient and medieval West. As Gerda Reith and others have explained, in pre-Christian and even early modern Europe, the concept of chance figures as a blanket term for the unreadable intents and processes associated with extra-human, transcendent agents.5 In ancient Greece and Rome, the meanings of chance were accessed through the extraordinary interpretive and magical skills of priests, priestesses, and prophets; and one of the more common forms of divination was gambling. Reith argues that gambling does not “grow out of” or away from practices of magic and divination to become a separate, entirely secular form at any period in Western history (17). A European American gambler thus comes to the casino with his or her own discursive and historical context that suggests a possible intervention of the magical and the sacred in gambling. As Reith puts it, “few concepts are as alien to human thought as the notion of pure chance—the idea that events have no identifiable cause and

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no particular meaning” (157). In spite of scientific projects to measure chance that emerged in the seventeenth century and came to be known as probability theory—what Reith calls “the apologist of secularised chance”— the concept still has a way of attaching magical, indeed mystical, reverberations to itself in any number of sites of popular culture. Reith argues that the religious enters into gambler cosmology to the extent that determinants of events are understood to emit from elsewhere (174–175). In this sense, “chance” tends to recall its medieval meaning as a sign of cosmic power and may be said to overlap with notions of Christian Providence. Gambling is the form of contemporary popular culture that most commonly invokes these understandings of chance. A player who comes to a casino or bingo hall equipped with private incantations and magical rituals intended to foster success can be said to approach gambling as if it were a pre-modern practice as well as a form of secular entertainment. The gambler’s performance, the movement of play supplemented with the ritual gesture or object, is charged with possibility and excites every moment in the time of play. The enchanted, magical act performed by the gambler will either gild her future or send her into the depths of despair. Reith’s research showed her that gamblers in the United States and England regularly perform private forms of magic in the hopes of securing success. From talking to dice and roulette wheels to finding secret messages in slot machine screens and performing a psychological state of despair about winning, gamblers try to “outwit” the materials of the games through magical language and psychological trickery. In addition, special objects, places, times of day, decks of cards, and persons associated with important wins acquire special magic power in the ever shifting procedures of gambling ritual. Reith quotes D. Bolen, who “likens the gambler’s mind to that of the magician: ‘The modern gambler behaves as though he . . . can control or contradict the laws of probability by certain types of thought or action. He is not unlike the sorcerer who has similar ceremony and paraphernalia’ ” (167). As New Age spiritualists are drawn to the exotic concepts and rituals associated in U.S. popular culture with Native American traditionalism, so too, I would argue, are gamblers, in their hopes for access to the designs of destiny and to the possibilities for magical transformation of their lives in the special environments of Indian casinos. The nature spiritualities and magical sensibilities central to popular Indian iconography provocatively mirror the private mysticisms players bring to casino gambling. It seems reasonable to consider, then, that the reductive images of Indianness in tribal casinos described earlier speak to these magical aspirations in player psychology.

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The deployment of such icons appears in some ways to conflict with the sacred conceptual framework proper to Native gambling traditions; yet it is easy to understand why these conflicts would be accepted. First, the pressing material needs in Native America generally demand that tribal leaders pursue whatever means are available to better conditions in their communities. Second, illogical associations have long since been conventions of corporate advertising in North America, so that taking advantage of stereotypes that have currency in broader public discourse would only make sense for tribal management strategies that seek to attract as many players as possible. A third reason for which the conflicting trends in tribal casinos seem to be acceptable takes analysis in a different direction. The contradictions point to the history of colonialism and the long years of marginalization, economic and thus cultural, of Native America from the prosperity of the United States. Tribal interests have been dominated by Western influences for generations, and yet, while Native Americans have been dominated by the West they have not by and large been invited to share in its prosperity. It can be argued, then, that in equal measure, American Indian tribes have not participated in the hegemonic cultural experiences of European America. The data presented at the beginning of this essay on poverty reflect the multiple effects of the history of colonization of Native America by the United States. Often relocated from their homelands and confined to arid reservations far from metropolitan centers of commerce and industry, tribes have, since the nineteenth century, had a difficult time feeding themselves and have rarely been able to attract lucrative businesses to invest in reservation economies. The exceptions have been mining and ranching overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but these projects have been infamously mismanaged, and billions of dollars have been lost that should have gone into individual Native American accounts. Reform programs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to create conditions under which tribal people could assimilate to the economy of the dominant society, but these programs were often conducted in a spirit of race prejudice and in a cloud of ignorance about Native worldviews. They largely failed. These separate social conditions have meant that American Indian tribes have to a great degree never been persuaded to share the worldviews and ideologies of the larger society. Living under a different set of cultural conditions, they have not been entirely subsumed into the cultural hegemony. The concept of “assimilation” means that one is persuaded, in the deep sense Antonio Gramsci meant with his term “hegemony,” to know and represent experience to oneself and to others according to the conceptual and moral frameworks that prevail in the culture to which one assimilates. Given the

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exclusion of Native Americans from the economic life of the United States, it seems reasonable to argue that the experiences and worldviews of the larger society have had lesser purchase among most tribal citizens.6 We can see, then, how arguments can be and in fact are made for the historical justice of the Native casino movement. Tribal leaders indeed point to the modest adjustments in the profound imbalances that have weighed so long on tribal life. Native accounts of the functions of Indian casinos, emphasizing the inherited, endogenous practices and meanings of gambling, supplement these arguments by referring to the fiscal benefits that are meant to redress in some degree the damages of colonialism. Facing their critics’ charges of the immorality of gambling and the injustice of legal privileges based on identity claims, casino tribes demonstrate their simultaneously Native and postmodern styles of being. If their exclusion from the general economy of the United States is not recognized, the fact that American Indians have not, by and large, comprehensively assimilated to the dominant society is not recognized either. Thus one of the central complaints issued in U.S. public criticism of the Indian casino phenomenon is that the rights of tribes to operate these winning venues derive from a mistaken or deluded notion on the part of the federal government that the tribes constitute an ethnically and culturally special category of the population. This presumed Indian difference, opponents claim, should not be cited as the cause of economic and social marginalization since it unjustly creates the legal handicap tribes currently enjoy in the corporate casino industry. But if American Indians have been and continue to be excluded from the larger U.S. economic prosperity, are these “handicaps” really so unjust? And if tribal populations have to some degree embraced the dominant culture’s worldviews, then it seems well-worth asking whether it is the sacred or the sleight of hand that prevails in tribal casino design strategies and their intended effects on players’ performances. If we do not ask the question because we assume that Native Americans have assimilated and we assume that the casino designs are nothing but familiar instances of corporate manipulation of its consumers, then we miss seeing that something culturally different informs tribal gaming. And if we do not ask because we assume that Native Americans have not assimilated and that therefore the design motifs are in themselves as sacred as the ideas they refer to, then we miss seeing the very complex, layered, and I would argue justified processes of introducing magic and the performance of the sacred into the fabric of the casinos. Given the long history of gaming among Native peoples, it is difficult to dismiss the tropes of traditionalism in tribal casinos or to assert that Indian casinos have nothing conceptually to do with older gaming traditions that engage the sacred and the magical. Even if we agree that the secular,

148 Mary Lawlor individualistic, and acquisitive contexts of contemporary casino gaming marks a significant shift from the contexts of the older modes,7 we should keep in mind that the ends toward which tribes often claim their casinos are aimed—the strengthening of tribal sovereignty and the revitalization of Native cultures—includes the sacred and the communal, as well as the economic at its heart. In this sense, the history of casino development performs the role of magical action as defined in this book, as precisely the transformation of contemporary Native societies through the artful performance of seemingly impossible effects. The political dimension of the casino history is intricately attached to the sacred and manifests Silvia Federici’s definition of magic as that which emphasizes the connections between “matter and spirit . . . where every element is in sympathetic relation with the rest” (14). As a business practice, a site of popular culture, an engagement with Native sacred concepts, and of the redress of colonial violence, the Native American tribal gaming industry gives legitimacy to the claims made at Dakota Magic Casino Hotel and many other Native casino venues that the “new buffalo” indeed offers some form of magic for everyone.

NOTES 1. State and local governments do not have default legal authority to oversee or to regulate Native commerce conducted on reservation lands. Only the federal government has this authority, according to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution; and according to the Indian Trade and Intercourse Laws of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In theory, then, an Indian tribe can operate whatever business it likes within the bounds of federal law. Thus tribes are not limited by the same regulations regarding commerce in a given state that other citizens are. 2. IGRA also mandates annual audits of gaming enterprises by outside parties, to include review of service and supply contracts. The National Indian Gaming Commission oversees management contracts with the aim of keeping the casinos free of organized crime and ensuring to the maximum extent possible rational accounting systems and profit-generating practices. See IGRA Sec. 5, b, 1, A & B; Sec. 5, b, 3 in Eadington, Indian Gaming and the Law, 259–260. 3. On the ritual cultivation of power for effective gambling, see, e.g., Gendar, 82. 4. Hilary Waldman, “Casino’s Start Exceeds Expectations” and “New Casino a Sure Bet For a Good Story.” 5. Reith, 17. Also see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, particularly chapters two and four, “The Magic of the Medieval Church” and “Providence,” respectively. 6. Ranajit Guha has made this argument in the case of India, but with much wider reference to colonized and postcolonial nations in Dominance without Hegemony.

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7. It should be noted that this argument has a great deal of power among many Native representatives as well. Among the Mohawk community at Akwesasne in upstate New York, the passions run so strong between those who find such practices to be profanations of older, culturally contextualized forms of gaming and those who support casinos that violence has erupted. See Pasquaretta, Gambling and Survival 171, 187–199.

WORKS CITED Acoma Business Enterprises. “Sky City: Acoma at the Crossroads of Nature, Heritage and the Spirit of Fun” and “Acoma Sky City: Old and New,” www. skycitycasino.com. Bodinger de Uriarte, John J. “Imagining the Nation with House Odds: Representing American Indian Identity at Mashantucket.” Ethnohistory 50.3 (2003): 549–565. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Stephen F. Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. “Millenial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12.2 (2000): 291–343. Culin, R. Stewart. Games of the North American Indians, 24th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1907: 267–327. Davis, James A. and Samuel M. Otterstrom. “Growth of Indian Gaming in the United States,” in Casino Gambling in America: Origins, Trends, Impacts, ed. Klaus Meyer-Arendt and Rudi Hartmann. New York: Cognizant Communication, 1998. 50–65. Eadington, William R., ed. Indian Gaming and the Law. Reno, Nevada: Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming, 1998. ———. “Casino Gaming: Origins, Trends, and Impacts,” in Casino Gambling in America: Origins, Trends, and Impacts, ed. Klaus Meyer-Arendt and Rudi Hartmann. New York: Cognizant Communication, 1998. 3–10. Eisler, Kim. Revenge of the Pequots: How a Small American Tribe Created the World’s Most Profitable Casino. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001. Faris, James. The Nightway: A History and a History of Documentation of a Navajo Ceremonial. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1994. Federici, Silvia. “History of Nature—The Great Caliban: The Struggle Against the Rebel Body.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 15.3 (September 2004): 13–14. Gabriel, Kathryn. Gambler Way: Indian Gaming in Mythology, History and Archaeology in North America. Boulder: Johnson Books, 1996. Gendar, Jeannine. Grass Games and Moon Races: California Indian Games and Toys. Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1995. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday, 1959.

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Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Indian Country Today: Special Edition on Tourism and Gaming. August 30, 2004. Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Reprinted in Indian Gaming and the Law, ed. William R. Eadington. Reno: Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming, 1998: 255–290. Jorgensen, Joseph. The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1972. Lacroix, Celeste C. “Wealth, Power and Identity: A Critical Reading of Competing Discourses About the Mashantucket Pequots and Foxwoods.” PhD dissertation, Ohio University College of Communication, 1999. Mason, W. Dale. Indian Gaming: Tribal Sovereignty and American Politics. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2000: 43–69. Melmer, David. “Tourism Makes Good Economic Sense.” Indian Country Today August 30, 2004. National Congress of American Indians. http://www.ncai.org/main/pages/issues/ community_development/economic_dev.asp. National Indian Gaming Association. “Tribal Government Gaming, the Native American Success Story: An Analysis of the Economic Impact of Tribal Government Gaming in 2003.” March 2004. www.indiangaming.org/info/ pr/presskit/statistics/shtml. National Indian Gaming Commission. “Tribal Gaming Revenues,” http://www. nigc.gov/nigc/nigcControl?option=TRIBAL REVENUE. NativeBiz. “Indian Casinos Pull in Record $25 Billion.” June 5, 2007. http:// www.nativebiz.com/community/News,file=article,nid=15594.html. Pasquaretta, Paul. Gambling and Survival in Native North America. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2003. 21.2 (Summer 1996): 21–33. Reichard, Gladys. Navajo Religion. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1930. Reith, Gerda. The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1986. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Penguin, 1991. Tooker, Elizabeth, ed. Native North American Spirituality of the Eastern Woodlands. Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1979. Waldman, Hilary. “Casino’s Start Exceeds Expectations.” Hartford Courant February 22, 1992. ———. “New Casino a Sure Bet For a Good Story.” Hartford Courant February 12, 1992.

7. Outdoing Ching Ling Foo Christopher Stahl

Christopher Stahl is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. His dissertation examines magic in relation to narratives of the body at the turn of the twentieth century. In this materialist performance history, Stahl interrogates the career of American magician William Robinson. Performing in yellowface as Chinese conjuror Chung Ling Soo, Robinson became one of the most popular entertainers of the early twentieth century. Stahl links Robinson to his sometime rival Chee Ling Qua, an actual Chinese magician who toured the American vaudeville circuit under the stage name Ching Ling Foo. Stahl analyzes these acts within the history of urban capital, notions of race, and global migration. How did magic transform the body of the exotic Other into a popular entertainment commodity? Were performers able to resist or subvert this process?

COMMODIFYING “ORIENTAL” MAGIC In 1910, the eyes of many passers-by strolling through the streets of the British port city of Bristol were no doubt drawn to the wall of brightly colored posters announcing that Chung Ling Soo, celebrated Chinese conjuror, would be appearing soon at the Palace Theatre. If, like a flaneur, someone had paused and stepped out of the crowd to examine them, that person would have noticed patterns amidst the jumble of the images: sinuous Oriental dragons, colorful Asiatic fans and paper lanterns, and (most prominently) a slim figure with his hair pulled back tightly into a queue. In one poster, he rode a charging warhorse and carried a yellow silk pennant that fluttered at the end of a lance. In another, his face was emblazoned on a giant blue ginger jar, around which a tiny woman in a silk shirt and trousers shyly peeked. In yet a third—this one occupying the upper right corner of the wall display—the man (now garbed in the

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spiked helmet and military dress the spectator might have associated with a Mandarin warlord) held a plate before his chest while facing down a firing squad of turbaned men. Across the top of each lithograph, the name of the magician appeared in a script designed to imitate the strokes of an inked-dipped brush. In truth, Chung Ling Soo was the stage name of American-born conjuror William Ellsworth Robinson. By the time of this appearance in Bristol— documented only by an uncredited black-and-white photograph of this poster-covered wall—he was considered to be one of the most popular performers on the English variety stage. Respected by his colleagues for his showmanship and his skill in crafting inventive large-scale illusions, he seems mostly remembered by magic historians today for the dramatic circumstances surrounding his death when a bullet-catching trick went terribly wrong in 1918. Although Robinson had been performing as Chung Ling Soo for nearly two decades, the British public at the time seemed startled to learn what had been common knowledge among professional magicians: the celebrated Chinese conjuror was actually an American, a masquerade that had gone unquestioned almost from the start. A year prior to Robinson’s fatal accident, fellow magician William Goldston speculated on his colleague’s immense and enduring popularity in an interview for the trade magazine The Magician Monthly: “Chung Ling Soo has succeeded because he has always presented to the public that which they like and not which he might prefer” (73). The statement is a provocative one. Throughout the article, Goldston implied that Robinson’s success depended as much on the nearly immersive manner in which he embodied his alter ego as on the performance of crowd-pleasing tricks. Leaving aside the unanswered question of what Robinson-as-Soo might actually prefer, the poster-covered wall in Bristol was an excellent illustration of the magician giving the public that which they liked. While a few of the images depicted the spectacular illusions— such as Defying the Bullets—one might have expected to see in Soo’s act,1 most operated as a catalogue of early-twentieth-century England’s fraught obsession with chinoiserie. The numerous postures and actions invoked figures as diverse as the cruel despot of the well-known “Yellow Peril” stories of M. P. Shiel, the nationalistic Boxers who had laid siege to Peking at the turn of the century, and the childish bureaucrats who were stock characters in popular operettas set in the quasi-mythic Far East. Even the image of Soo’s face on the ginger jar was a clever metonym in which the hard porcelain dishware that was common to every respectable British household stood in for the country from which it took its name, which then stood in

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 153 for the conjuror himself. The sheer variety of Soo’s Chinese bodies in these mass-produced lithographs suggested that he could be all things to every spectator. This unnamed wall of posters helps to illuminate the link between the business of successful showmanship and processes of representation by which certain bodies were transformed into commodities at the start of the twentieth century. Part of stage magic’s allure was its promise of encountering those mysterious Others who populated world’s fairs, vaudeville melodramas, early cinema, living dioramas, panoramas, dime museums, pulp novels, and illustrated monthly magazines. In his widereaching study of the modern conjuring act, Simon During notes that while stage conjuring had became a part of mainstream entertainment by the end of the nineteenth century, there was a sense among the general public that “real magic was still ascribed to those on the margins” (107). It was difficult for nonwhite magicians to succeed, he suggests, because the underlying cultural biases that associated “magic” with the assumption of unearthly power were often used to reinforce racist and sexist stereotypes. Professional conjurors, who were mostly white and male, would trade on this association by creating and marketing fictitious, exotic personas—the Hindoo, the Chinaman, the Arab—which were drawn from the imperial or colonial margins. However, both magic and these marginal bodies were framed by discursive practices that made understanding this intersection far from simple at the turn of the twentieth century. Since the earliest days of contact and conquest, European explorers had brought back human “specimens” for scientific display, aesthetic contemplation, and entertainment. For contemporary visual artist and performance theorist Coco Fusco, these practices—which found their greatest outlet in the development of mass culture during the nineteenth century—were often “living expressions of colonial fantasies [that] helped forge a special place in the European and Euro-American imagination for nonwhite people and their cultures” (149). Both the space of these displays and the performances generated by them would become important ways audiences in the West negotiated their anxieties about the seemingly alien cultures and bodies of the East. By examining the conjuring act—and, in this case, the multiple discourses of cultural contact and ethnographic display that informed how the Asian body was staged within the conjuring act—we can begin to understand not only how those who were assumed to be from the margins came to be represented for the pleasure of Western audiences, but also the means by which those representations were naturalized.

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William Robinson was known for spending lavishly on the design and production of his posters and three-sheets, often sending stagehands ahead of his arrival to plaster the walls of that city with images of Chung Ling Soo. City walls, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, are ideologically charged spaces that both reflect and constitute the values, beliefs, and tastes of those who live nearby and pass by them. Walking through the French port of Marseilles, Benjamin noted that the poster-covered walls in the center of the city—the nexus of business and entertainment—had “sold their whole length many hundreds of times” (“Marseilles” 135). The “gaudy patterns” made by the repetition of brightly colored posters on the walls he passed contained images of the innocent schoolgirl of the “Chocolat Menier” advertisements alongside close-ups of sultry screen temptress Delores del Rio. That these contradictory, yet iconic, representations of femininity could be juxtaposed without irony helped Benjamin understand that “ ‘the threatening and alluring’ face of myth was alive and everywhere” in the urban–industrial landscape (Buck-Morss 254). Mass advertising could infinitely reproduce diverse and contradictory fantasies to enchant the urban walker. I begin by invoking Walter Benjamin because, as Michael Taussig reminds us, he was fascinated by “the surfacing of ‘the primitive’ within modernity as a direct result of modernity” (20). Benjamin believed that modern imitative technologies staged fantastic images of the Other, drawn from the recesses of the cultural imagination, which had material and political effect. City walls transformed what was displayed on them into products by mechanically repeating the same sets of images, the same sets of gestures again and again until they achieved an almost dream-like familiarity. The lithographs advertising Chung Ling Soo’s appearance in Bristol operated under a logic similar to what Benjamin experienced decades later in Marseille, crystallizing the almost incoherent surplus of Chinese bodies on display into one desirable entertainment commodity for the English passer-by. Because of the graphic complexity and relative lack of text of these posters, the magician would come to be associated with the fantastic images that surrounded him. Chung Ling Soo would be fixed into the mind of the spectator, alleviating the uncomfortable Otherness of the foreign body by making it into something that could be bought, sold, or consumed. These processes were in play from the moment Robinson began performing as Soo at London’s Alhambra Theatre in May 1900. In 1902, the British journal Magic observed, “The outcome of [Chung Ling Soo’s] success has been the wholesale manufacture of Chinese Conjurors” (Stanyon 18). Invoking the metaphor of an assembly line, writer Ellis Stanyon imagined Soo as an industrial mold into which other magicians’ Chinese-themed

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 155 acts had come to be poured. “Chinese” in this case indicated a style of conjuring rather than a country of origin, and Robinson had now become the standard against which other similar acts would be compared and evaluated: an original for others to imitate. What was lost within the praise was the acknowledgment that Robinson’s act was itself a copy of another’s work. Chung Ling Soo was an early example of what Jean Baudrillard would later refer to as a simulacrum: an imitation that had become more real than the thing it was imitating (2). Imitating the act of another was a widespread practice in stage magic around the turn of the twentieth century. It was common knowledge among professional magicians that Robinson had based Chung Ling Soo on the performances of a Chinese-born conjuror who went by the stage name of Ching Ling Foo.2 Born Chee Ling Qua, he was rumored to earn one thousand dollars a week touring on the Keith–Albee vaudeville circuit during the 1899–1900 season, making him the highest-paid variety performer in the United States (“Vaudeville Views” 24). Ching’s signature feat was the sudden materialization of a massive bowl of water, seemingly from nowhere. Walking slowly onto the stage with a large silk cloth draped over one arm, he would stand on an Oriental carpet to indicate that there were no trap doors beneath him. Whirling the cloth in both hands, he crouched down and swept it across the floor. Suddenly, he would rise and point to the porcelain bowl of water that had materialized at his feet. He then whirled the cloth around the bowl a second time in one fluid motion. Swimming ducks now bobbed in the water and were quickly shooed from the stage. As the crowd grew quiet, he spun the cloth one final time. A small Asian child would rise from the bowl and bow to Ching. The trick was a familiar one that had been presented by touring Chinese acrobats during the nineteenth century; yet something about the magician’s style of performance mesmerized and baffled vaudeville audiences. Robinson was not alone in his imitation of Ching. At least two travesty acts played opposite him during his final New York City performances in the late spring of 1900. No less than five cinematic attractions were produced that invoked his name, although only one featured the magician himself.3 The stage and screen imitations all centered around some form of the Water Bowl Production, seeming to use it as a metonym for Ching himself and what he had come to represent. The only extant film of this group—Ching Ling Foo Outdone—was produced and released by Thomas Edison’s film company in early February 1900. It remained in Edison’s catalogue for over five years, longer than any other trick film from that era and long after the magician it claimed to surpass had gone back to China.

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Despite this proliferation of water bowls, the original Chinese conjuror— Ching Ling Foo—has become a minor figure in contemporary magic history, seen almost always as the shadow of William Robinson, the magician who had copied him. The work of this essay is to illuminate the cultural assumptions that subtended the staging of the Chinese conjuring act, in order to help us understand how the anxiety-producing body of the Other, at the turn of the twentieth century, was transformed into a series of signifiers and fantasies that could be copied, manipulated, contained, and consumed. I will begin by looking at a moment in 1905 when original and copy—Ching Ling Foo and Chung Ling Soo—were supposed to face another in a magician’s duel, a series of tricks that would have determined for the public who was the better Chinese conjuror. What I would like to argue is that such questions of authenticity were always already framed by the ideologies of colonial contact and ethnographic display. To do this, I must conjure up Ching himself, a figure who was as much a construction as the man he was supposed to face in 1905. I hope to demonstrate how the magic act illuminates those threatening and alluring fantasies that go into constructing a seemingly authentic Chinese body.

PERFORMING CHINESE IDENTITY In latter half of December 1904, Robinson had been booked for a threemonth engagement at the London Hippodrome. In a letter to a friend, he commented that he was concerned to find that two Chinese-based acts would also be playing a short distance from his theater. Of the two, the impending arrival of Ching Ling Foo, who embarking on a tour of Europe, was no doubt more troubling for Robinson (Steinmeyer 253). At this point in his career, Robinson used Chinese elements in his act—embroidered fabric, dragon imagery—mostly for decorative purposes. As magic historian Jim Steinmeyer notes, Robinson’s performance as Chung Ling Soo was as a “Chinese magician who mostly performed European or American tricks” (253). Nevertheless, he had managed to convince the British press that he was actually from China by the clever way he staged interviews by using one of his performers—a Chinese acrobat—as an interpreter, as well as through the canny use of Orientalist iconography in his publicity materials. Presenting his act in the proximity of a performer whose authenticity as Chinese was virtually unassailable presented Robinson with the very real risk of exposure by comparison. However, this very proximity is what allowed his performance as Chung Ling Soo to be seen as more, rather than less, authentic.

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 157 Steinmeyer suggests that Ching’s manager Leon Mooser, in an attempt to gain publicity for his client, pressed this question of authenticity by proposing a magical dual to be judged by representatives of London newspapers (255). The January 1, 1905, issue of the Weekly Dispatch carried the challenge, which offered a sizable monetary award if Chung Ling Soo failed to perform ten out of twenty tricks from Ching Ling Foo’s act or if Ching failed to perform even one trick from Soo’s act. Filled with dark hints of blood feuds between rival dynasties of Chinese wizards, the tone of the reporting seemed more appropriate to a dime novel than an interview: “ ‘He one foreign devil,’ says Ching, who opens at the Empire next week. ‘I smell him when I sit . . . in Hippodrome last week . . . Him wear robes him have him head chop for if he go China. He wear woman’s dress—him one big fool’ ” (“Chung v. Ching” 87). Within this context, it was difficult to know what was exaggerated and what was factual in the article. Even the claim that Ching Ling Foo was the only “native-born Chinese sorcerer at the present time” and the attendant revelation that Chung Ling Soo was an American named Robinson seemed to be taken in the spirit of deep insult between countrymen rather than of exposure. In fact, an undated article from the Express repeated the same information, but rendered Ching’s quotes in a quaint, almost literary manner: “ ‘Why,’ said [Ching], ‘he has been photographed in robes which it would be death for any Chinaman short of one of royal rank to wear.’ At least, this is what he said when his pidgin English had been made clear by [his manager] Mr. Mooser” (“Chung Ling Soo Declines” 90). After this curious moment of making Ching sound as if he were a character in a drawing-room comedy, the Express article quickly reverted back to stereotypical forms of transliteration. “Englishman all ‘likee,’ ” the article continued, adding (in the same pidgin dialect) Ching’s observation that the Chinese body does not dress for aesthetics (90). It is a Western conceit, he implied, that sees an ornate costume as a symbol of cultural authenticity. Yet, through this deadening of his speech, it was likely that what appeared to be a more subtle point about cultural assumptions was lost to the reader. Ironically, Ching’s insistence on speaking for himself seemed to have undermined the force of his challenge by allowing the newspaper to transform him into a kind of text—a character from one of the Boxer Rebellion novels that had recently become popular, for instance—for their readership. As Edward Said has demonstrated, fantasies of the Orient are “premised on exteriority” (20); that is, the Oriental body is presumed to lack the Western subject’s complex sense of self and is thus reduced to easily understandable cultural or racial characteristics. Consider the way those same newspapers represented

158 Christopher Stahl Chung Ling Soo’s reply to the challenge: the reporter for the Weekly Dispatch spoke only to a “Chinese secretary” who said his master was “wroth with the street sorcerer who has slandered him,” adding that Soo’s own history “is as clear and ‘brilliant as a spring morning, when the zephyr’s idle play and fleecy flecks float o’er the azure sky’ ” (“Chung v. Ching” 88), while the Express merely commented that Soo would “ride slowly through the City in his Chinese attire, and that the people may judge his nationality for himself” (“Chung Ling Soo Declines” 91). Robinson’s response to the reporters was canny for the way it sought to turn a potentially negative revelation to his advantage by playing on the attendant publicity and making the question of authenticity one that the public could ultimately decide on sight. Both magicians then were rendered by the press into easily recognized literary characters—Ching into the semi-articulate foreigner from a strange and violent culture and Soo into a Mandarin whose cruelty and command comes from his isolation. As if by a magic neither of them anticipated or could control, the troubling questions about cultural authenticity with which Ching Ling Foo hoped to confront his rival were changed into a conflict of status between alien bodies. By reframing the challenge in this manner, the London newspapers were complicit in what Said would call “render[ing the Orient’s] mysteries plain for and to the West” (21). The theatricality of Soo’s reply mapped the contest onto the grid of British class structures, something that would arguably be more familiar to the average newspaper reader than these more subtle and serious questions about cultural appropriation. The contest became less about legitimacy than about competing narratives of the Chinese body—of its appropriate representation—in the minds of the British public. Perhaps even more than narratives of Chineseness, it became about competing modes of self-production. By presenting his body as silent and remote, Robinson allowed the public to fill in the gaps about what they wanted to see in Soo. It would seem that both magicians were somewhat aware of these dynamics. Robinson insisted that a glass screen separate the two magicians, perhaps out of fear that Ching would rip the false queue from his head in front of reporters. Perhaps Ching realized that the initial basis of the challenge was lost in the uncontrollable swirl of Orientalist fantasy, as his manager countered by insisting that Chung Ling Soo should first appear in front of members of the Chinese legation in London to prove his claims about his nationality. While the Weekly Dispatch had agreed to the former condition, the paper ignored the latter request. Defending the choice in a later article, the editors wrote: It has been sought in some quarters to change the issue into one of the nationality of the rivals. This is a mistake. The public is not interested in the ancestry

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 159 of Soo or Foo, it is interested in their conjuring, and this is the question the Weekly Dispatch wished to solve. (“Soo and Foo” 92)

With the issue recast as a contest of who was the better “Chinese conjuror” (in Ellis Stanyon’s sense of the term) rather than a test of cultural legitimacy, Ching perhaps felt that he had little to gain. In this respect, the editors of the Weekly Dispatch were not completely right. In the absence of an alternative way of interpreting what was put before them, the public enthusiastically embraced the vision of Chinese conjuring put forth by Chung Ling Soo, which had, I would suggest, been predetermined for them. The spectacular arrival of Soo’s entourage at the office of the Weekly Dispatch in a red touring car on January 7, the performance of his tricks— the production of a basket of food for the reporters who had gathered for the lunchtime contest, his skillful performance of the Chinese Linking Rings, the summersault that ended with the sudden appearance of a crystal bowl filled with goldfish—and the conspicuous absence of his would-be challenger on the other side of the glass wall were all duly reported in great detail by the London press. Chung Ling Soo was hailed as the authentic Chinese conjuror and Ching Ling Foo as his poor imitation. In a coy reversal of his isolation leading up to the contest, the headlines suggested that Soo’s power was so great that it had turned his rival invisible. They were correct, but the magic was not his alone.

THE SAVAGE MAGIC OF THE GOLDEN BOUGH Constructing a new identity for the stage, as documented by vaudeville historian Robert Snyder, was often a way for immigrant and working-class entertainers to appeal to a broader, middle-class audience. However, entertainers were not always acting in ways that reflected the dominant culture’s pleasure; instead, popular values and expectations were often altered as a result of performances that translated the tastes of the margins into the mainstream (43). Assuming a strongly stereotyped ethnic identity was also a popular tactic that allowed both performer and audience to uncritically tap into culturally mediated knowledge about the body being performed for them—performances whose stereotypical representations could be taken for examples of authentic behavior. These fictions—like most forms of minstrelsy—derived much of their charge from an idea of the other, rather than from a careful process of studied mimicry. As a result, the performer’s actual ethnic or cultural identity could sometimes go unremarked. The codes of minstrelsy may be taken by members of the audience

160 Christopher Stahl as reflecting authentic behavior, yet there was often little question that the performer was, in fact, performing. While Chinese conjuring may operate under similar logic to minstrelsy, the fact that Robinson’s act was seen as more authentic than Ching Ling Foo’s can help us locate the place of magic within the Western social imaginary. By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a widespread debate about the persistence of superstitions and the function of the occult within the supposedly rational and scientific modern world that found its most public expression in the publication of James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1900). As a wide-ranging study of mythology and religious practices, the book was an almost overwhelming tabulation of facts and rituals drawn from writings of early cultural anthropologists and colonial explorers. Although its central claims were quickly challenged by scholars, the book was nevertheless astonishingly popular among the middle-class reading public in the Anglophone world during the first several decades of the twentieth century. By contextualizing the development of certain aspects of Frazer’s thinking across the book’s first two editions, I want to illuminate how the biases and stereotypes about unearthly power that During had referred to as “real magic” (107) came to be associated with the body of the Other. In response to criticism that he had not sufficiently differentiated magic and religion in the first edition (1890) of his multivolume study, Frazer attempted to articulate a more comprehensive theory of what he called “sympathetic magic” in the second edition (1900): Manifold as are the applications of this crude philosophy—for a philosophy it is as well as an art—the fundamental principles on which it is based would seem to be reducible to two; first that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that things that have once been in contact, but have ceased to be so, continue to act on each other as if the contact still persisted. From the first of these principles, the savage infers that he can produce any desired effect merely by imitating it; from the second he concludes that he can influence at pleasure and at any distance, any person of whom, or any thing of which, he possesses an article. (9)

For Frazer, magic was not merely a set of ritual practices with the sole aim of some fantastic or supernatural response; it also encompassed a concordant way of encountering and perceiving the world. The presence of such practices should not be taken as proof of actual occult power, but instead indicate how the so-called savage made inductive (almost scientific, Frazer cautiously added) conclusions in order to quantify the seemingly unknowable operation of the world. Nevertheless, magic, as he commented in

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 161 the preface, would “represent a lower intellectual stratum” than religion, which it had preceded in every society across the globe (xvi). Frazer was saying nothing new here; rather, he was redacting and popularizing the theories of several other English ethnographers. In this evolutionary model of human thought, magical thinking would become (as Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert noted with heavy skepticism in their 1902 critique of the second edition) the foundation on which the “whole mystical and scientific universe of primitive man” was constructed (Mauss 16). Both the seemingly ritualized actions of the savage magician, and the thought processes behind them, would come to be considered to be the provenance of the Others who populated the margins of Western modernity and had subsequently become the objects of ethnographic study and display throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These ideologies were embedded not only in the content of The Golden Bough, but in the way the text itself was structured. Mary Beard has argued that the book’s immense and enduring appeal depended in large part from the way it explicitly placed industrial modernity and late imperialism in a comparative relationship to both the peoples at the fringes of the commonwealth and the classical Western past (“Frazer” 174). Beginning in the groves of Nemi, where a sacred priest–king guarded a holy branch—which Frazer suggested was the basis for the story of golden bough that would grant the bearer safe passage to the underworld in Virgil’s Aeneid—the reader would be taken on a trip through fantastic lands and be witness to strange customs before ending back on the shores of ancient Italy. By beginning and ending with an invocation of one of the touchstones of classical culture in the West, Beard continues, Frazer’s book acts as a “metaphorical voyage into the wild, the unknown, the Other” (“Frazer” 176). If the implicit comparisons between the wild world of the Other and modern society were discomfiting, the reader could be reassured by the parade of exotic rituals that the modern world was still a far superior place to live. Frazer’s taxonomy of sympathetic magic, the concept that power derives from either imitative action or contagious contact, might profitably be revisited as a theory of mimesis within modernity rather than as a simple artifact of Britain’s fading imperium. In Michael Taussig’s reading of Frazer, this mimesis is a “two-layered” process that involves not only simply copying some person or thing, but also engaging in a “palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived” (21).4 It is, in a way, a method of performing another’s body by taking on its lineaments. In The Golden Bough, these actions are frequently bound up in the control or destruction of the body being copied by the magician.

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However, as Taussig further points out, this model of mimesis does not depend on lifelike or exact representation to be considered “faithful” or effective; instead, the copy can draw its power by being a kind of imaginative translation of the original (52). The act of crafting an imitation within Frazer’s definition of magical practice suggests that what is represented takes on the properties of the original to the point that the original itself is somehow altered. In the case of Chinese conjuring, Frazer could help us see that mimesis is not about staging a realistic representation of a Chinese magician, but about presenting a copy that reflects the ideological framework that surrounds the one doing the copying. I might put Fraser’s claims about magical sympathy a little differently than Taussig: through the Chinese conjuror’s imitative practices, temporality becomes upended to the point that effects become almost inseparable from the actions that caused them. Robinson’s imitation of Ching’s act did not just cause Chung Ling Soo to take on the unassailable lineaments of Chineseness; it caused Ching’s subsequent performances—as well as the performances of other Chinese magicians and acrobats touring Britain at the time—to become less interesting in the public eye (Steinmeyer 266). Using Frazer’s theory of magical mimesis, we might argue that the slippages between imitator and imitated caused the imitation to become more real, to take on a kind of strange half-life by which it was able to reach back and diminish perceptions of the original.

EXHIBITING CULTURAL SUPERIORITY While The Golden Bough is unlikely to be an accurate representation of how magic functions among so-called primitive and ancient cultures, it nevertheless stands as a lens through which we can view how middle-class English and American audiences came to associate ideas about magic with the body of the Other. The book enacted the same kind of encounters readers had come to expect from the world’s fairs and similar ethnographic spectacles that were a regular part of mass entertainment since the middle of the nineteenth century. The rhetorical tensions of the text, Mary Beard suggests, found their real world analogue in these pageants where “native villages” that purported to represent real life outside the West existed side by side with exhibitions of “traditional” European and American folklore practices. Seeing Frazer as part of this larger cultural discourse illustrates what Beard refers to as the “complicated transactions of watching, and comparing, other cultures” that were enacted by both participants and

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 163 spectators alike (“Afterword” 191). While these displays promised to be financially rewarding, participants were often deeply ambivalent about the implications of performing their culture in a manner that reinforced stereotypes about savagery and civilization. European and American conjurors were also prone to engaging in those same kinds of complicated transactions, simultaneously acknowledging the “roots” of their art in an ancient or quasi-mythic Oriental past while disavowing the contemporary practices of Eastern magicians as being inartistic or laughably crude. Part of the professionalization of stage magic involved not only adopting Eastern-sounding names (Robinson had performed previously under the names Achmed Ben Ali, Nana Sahib, and Abdul Khan), but also adapting tricks that had been described in ethnographic writing or seen in the touring shows of foreign conjurors (During 109). Perhaps the best example of this would be the Chinese Linking Rings, which had become a staple of Western magic after U.S. and European conjurors witnessed it being performed by touring companies of Asian jugglers and acrobats in the 1820s (“Chinese Magic” 98). Illusions such as the Linking Rings, while still maintaining a patina of exoticism, were often considered to be aesthetically superior in their translated forms than in their original contexts. Robinson himself had written, in a 1898 article on Indian street magic for Mahatma, that “those persons who have not been fortunate enough to witness one of their exhibitions must rely to a certain extent upon what has been described to them, either in print or in person” (35). The sleights of hand used by Indian street magicians were physically identical to those employed by Western conjurors, he claimed, yet the so-called wonders of Eastern mystics—such as producing a sack of rabbits from an empty basket or cutting and restoring a strip of turban cloth—were often surrounded by ritualistic semi-religious “tomfoolery” and thus appeared “ludicrous instead of marvelous” in comparison (35). Robinson might have been speaking of those who read Frazer when he implied that the Indian magicians’ reputation for performing impossible feats derived from the public relying too much on what they found in travel books. The irony, of course, is that Robinson would have only been able to see the tricks of the Eastern magicians he described within the context of Orientalist displays at world’s fairs. His view of the limits of authentic nonWestern magic was always already compromised by the ideological frame of the ethnographic spectacle. Robinson’s perspective about non-Western magic was not unique among his peers and still persists in more subtle ways. Harry Houdini, who thought Robinson behaved abominably by taking out ads in the London

164 Christopher Stahl press touting himself as the “Original Chinese Conjuror,” nevertheless cast Ching in the role of a naive foreigner betrayed by incompetent management and a lack of familiarity with Western customs. The abortive dual with Ching Ling Foo has become a set piece of almost every treatment of Robinson’s life; as a result, the relationship between the two magicians begin to take on the lineaments of Aristotelian tragedy, a series of misrecognitions and personality flaws that rush the characters toward their inevitable fates. My research has indicated that the way Ching Ling Foo was described in the press and by other magicians had changed after 1905, almost as if his peers sought to provide a rationale that would justify what had happened. In biographies published decades after Robinson’s death, many of these differences in how Ching was represented have been smoothed over into what appears at first glance to be a coherent history. Much primary biographical information about him was drawn from two roughly contemporaneous sources: a short interview published in the June 3, 1899, issue of the New York Dramatic Mirror and a page-long reminiscence by David Abbott that appeared in the April 1909 issue of The Sphinx, an American magician’s magazine. I would argue that Ching’s portrayal in both of these texts was framed by many of the cultural biases about the body of the non-Western magician I have been identifying. Further, he not only seemed deeply aware of these forces, but he appeared to negotiate them as best as possible in what were highly unfavorable conditions. The desire by magic historians to create a seamless narrative about choices in the face of what might have been an unwinnable fight in 1905 can be seen as an attempt to explain the seemingly strange actions of an unruly performing body. During the summer of 1898, Ching performed at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exhibition and Indian Congress held in Omaha. Abbott’s article from The Sphinx described encountering the magician for the first time during a visit to the Chinese Village, which had been built on the midway: Stepping inside one saw Chinese life in its simplicity, and was for a time transported to the Orient, while America seemed far away. I wandered through this miniature Chinese city, and of course, visited the Chinese theatre, which lasted for hours—all one continuous monotony, except when this was broken by the unique performances of Ching Ling Foo. (9)

Ethnographic displays such as this one served multiple purposes within the logic of the world’s fair. They were presented to the visitor under the aegis of progressive instruction, as a means for the viewer to gain first-hand knowledge about the vastness and strangeness of the known world. They

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 165 also reminded spectators of their separation from world being represented, reinforcing their sense of belonging to the West and (in Abbott’s case) the lack of familiarity with the protocols and idioms of the culture being performed. The foreign villages of the midway formed a spatial and ideological counterpoint to the pillared exhibition halls and classical statuary (all painted to look like the iridescent marble) that comprised the main fair grounds of the Omaha Exposition. Not only could fair-goers visit a Cairo street, a replica of the Parthenon, or sample a mix of Spanish, Italian, and Greek culture in the “Cosmopolis,” they could also lose themselves in entire settlements purporting to depict everyday life in Ireland, Germany, and China. We can also see, in the list of ethnographic displays, a startling example of the “terrifying and alluring face of myth” that Benjamin had noticed on the walls of Marseilles: a Moorish Village, described in a popular ladies’ magazine as “the most pretentious reproduction of Eastern life yet attempted,” side by side with a faux plantation in which fair-goers could experience “life in the Sunny South” (Reasoner 617). Timothy Mitchell has persuasively argued that presentations such as these “transform the [foreign] world into a system of objects” whose spatial arrangements serve to evoke the larger themes of the exposition itself (295). The Omaha Exposition, which also convened one of the largest gatherings of native tribes in American history, wove the United States’ growing economic and imperial power into an overarching narrative of the country’s cultural and technological progress. Abbott’s recollection of his first encounter with Ching indicates that the authenticity of ethnographic display depends heavily on its ability to make the Western viewer feel spatially and temporally disconnected from the outside world, while never allowing him to forget that he is still ideologically a part of that world. Although these sensations would be taken as proof that what the spectator saw reflected an objective truth, they were as manufactured as the buildings themselves. America may seem far away from Abbott for the moment, yet what he saw as the Chinese Village’s bewildering realness soon transformed into boredom until he encountered a set of repeated actions and gestures he thought he could recognize: a magic trick. Even then, he had doubts about what precisely he was witnessing. Ching would take a strip of what appeared to be paper and slowly tear it into smaller strips that would then join together into the longer strip again. This process would be repeated several times, much to the amazement of Abbott and his wife, who were unable to determine the method or if the material was paper or “some queer Chinese substance that he could fuse together . . . and draw out into a new strip like a spider draws out its web, or something of the

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kind” (9). Without recourse to explanation, even Abbott—a skilled magician himself—was forced to fall back on language that reinstated Ching within the framework of the exhibition, casting the wonder he had observed as something more akin to an exotic ritual than to a magic trick. This trip to the Chinese Village appears to have been Abbott’s only personal contact with Ching, as the rest of his article recounts what other magicians claimed to have witnessed during his time in Omaha. One story in particular seems to have been told with the events of 1905 in mind. Leon Herrmann, a French–German conjuror, whose recently deceased uncle— Alexander Herrmann—had been one of the two most popular stage magicians in the United States, had arrived in Omaha for a short engagement in late 1898 as part of a coast-to-coast tour. In Abbott’s secondhand retelling, Herrmann had noticed a crowd of Chinese spectators in the audience and walked over to the edge of the stage to perform the Linking Rings for them. Ching, reported to be part of the group, merely stared coldly at the stage. The story continues: a few days later, he rented the same theater to give a special performance of his own and began with the Linking Rings, which he performed in a far more vibrant manner than Herrmann. Halfway through the routine, he snorted in disgust. Throwing the rings off stage “as utterly below his standard of art,” he then dazzled the audience with a series of never-before seen fire-eating and ribbon-production tricks (9). The implication is that Ching, who spoke little English, had seen Herrmann’s act as an insult and performed his own scathing retort by showing that Herrmann’s translated version of “authentic” Chinese magic was, in fact, tomfoolery. What Abbott and his source do not directly say is that William Robinson (who was part of Leon Herrmann’s company at the time) would likely have witnessed Ching’s contemptuous gesture. Steinmeyer’s biography of Robinson picks up on this point and makes it explicit: in different circumstances, he suggests, Robinson and Ching could have met and become close friends (179). The story in The Sphinx served two purposes: it established Ching Ling Foo as a man whose pride made him thin-skinned and prone to irrational acts. However, it also subtly implied that he was a better magician than Robinson by showing that he was a superior magician to Robinson’s employer. In this way, the 1905 dual could be considered part of a deepseeded rivalry that had been going on for several years. However, it seems that in fact this encounter never took place. Steinmeyer’s otherwise well-researched biography of William Robinson, which attempts to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between the two magicians, relies heavily on Abbott’s article. The constant rehearsal of racialized competition within the Ching–Robinson relationship

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 167 suggests that this particular narrative had become so compelling that it overwhelmed the more subtle and complicated facts of the case. The Omaha World-Herald does record that the Herrmann the Great Company played a two-day engagement at Boyd’s Theater on November 9 and 10, 1898, and that Ching Ling Foo gave a performance in the same location the following week. Both magicians were warmly received by the press, but no mention was made of Ching hurling his props into the wings. In fact, tour records reveal that Herrmann’s troupe (including Robinson) had continued east and was performing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that night. The press had billed Ching’s November 16, 1898, performance at Boyd’s as his farewell; the Exposition had closed down on November 1 and he was preparing to tour on one of the Midwestern vaudeville circuits (“Finale” 3). What this chronology means is that while Ching might have witnessed Herrmann (and Robinson) perform, neither Herrmann nor Robinson would have been able to see any version of Ching Ling Foo’s act in Omaha. We are forced then to ask: what is the likelihood that Ching would have rented a theater for the sole purpose of staging a reply to a man who was over 250 miles away at the time? It is certain that elements of the stories about him had been selectively recalled or colorfully interpolated for Abbott’s article; yet, they have taken on the luster of truth for the way they seem to explain so much about the situation in 1905. So let us imagine, for a moment, that Ching Ling Foo did cast his set of Linking Rings to one side during his performance on November 16, 1898. What would the value be of such a gesture, if Herrmann or Robinson were not there to see it? To answer a question like this, we must also imagine not only how Ching was seen by these Western magicians, but how he might have seen them from his vantage point performing in the Chinese Village or sitting in “native” dress in the audience at Boyd’s. Mitchell speculates that the subjects of nineteenth-century Orientalist spectacles often were trapped within the performative ideologies of these ethnographic displays even if they were not physically at an exhibition site. Some nineteenth century Arab visitors, after days of being gawked at in the streets of Paris as if they were living illustrations from a travel book, would later construct accounts of their experiences that described Europeans as “a curious people with an uncontainable eagerness to stand and stare” (Mitchell 292). They seemed particularly aware (more so than the native Europeans themselves) that the French streets and shops were arranged in a manner as artificial as the world inside the exhibition halls. Mitchell continues: “Non-Europeans encountered in Europe what one might call . . . the age of the world-as-exhibition. The world-as-exhibition means not an exhibition of the world but the world

168 Christopher Stahl organized and grasped as if it were an exhibition” (296). In such a world, as Ching perhaps came to realize, he could do little to escape the ethnographic contexts in which he had come to be displayed, even after the midway, the Chinese theater, and the faux plantation had crumbled to ruin. In such a world, the Orient and its performances were quickly reduced to signs and commodities. It is no wonder that he might have thrown the Linking Rings from the stage in mid-performance. Perhaps it is not that such a trick was beneath his artistry, but that he understood what the trick signified—the commodification of the Orient into a body that could be easily contained and consumed—was beneath his contempt. For those who could not see the organization of the world, this would be a puzzling, uncivilized gesture that would confirm popular assumptions about the “threatening and alluring” savages who populated the margins.

EXORCIZING THE GHOST OF CHINESE LABOR “World exhibitions are the sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish,” Walter Benjamin wrote, adding that the framework of entertainment that surrounded these events blinded visitors as to how they would come to objectify and desire what they see (“Paris” 151). Every product, every labor, every material relationship was transformed into an amusement (or “phantasmagoria”) in which an object was worth the sensations it provided (152). But this metamorphosis was not a condition unique to the exposition hall or the midway. The arrangement and display of Asian bodies within mass culture had helped to create modes of encounter that reflected the United States’ complex and shifting relationship to China and Chinese labor. The figure of the Chinese magician had become another site where these anxieties could be staged and negotiated. In a way, Ching’s act rested at the center of an uneasy triangulation between labor and capital, magic and art, and fantasies about the body of the Other. In June 1899, New York City was gripped by an early summer heat wave. Yet, according to one newspaper, Ching Ling Foo was “the coolest person in the house,” as his sold-out run at the Union Square Theatre was extended yet again (“Keith’s” 288). A week earlier, an interview with Ching that discussed his life before and after the Omaha Exhibition had appeared in the New York Dramatic Mirror. His act, which had so impressed and mystified David Abbott, also caught the attention of Colonel Hopkins, a vaudeville impresario based in Chicago. Within six months, B. F. Keith and Edward F. Albee had contracted the magician to appear in New York City as the

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 169 first stop in what they hoped would be a lucrative multiyear tour. However, shortly before he arrived in New York City, Ching was taken into custody and threatened with deportation under the provisions of the Geary Act (the official name of the Chinese Exclusion Act), which had further limited Chinese immigration since its passage in 1892. The immediate publicity surrounding the arrest, and the way it was later portrayed in the Dramatic Mirror, indicate that Ching’s performances (to say nothing of the magician himself ) were still framed by the ideologies of ethnographic display. Under the Geary Act, not only were skilled and unskilled workers still prohibited from entering the United States, but those Chinese involved in “mining, fishing, huckstering, [and] laundry”—trades that been exempt from prior immigration embargoes—were similarly denied entry (Tsai 97). This prohibition was suspended for the duration of the Omaha Exposition, with the understanding that the laborers who had built the Chinese Village, and the people who performed there, would return to China after the event ended. Mae M. Ngai, in an analysis of Asian displays at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (for which the American government allowed a similar waiver), speculates that the production of these villages by local Chinese American entrepreneurs, who provided most of the capital for building and running them, reflected a strategy of staging and marketing a form of Chinese culture that they hoped would combat the law’s increasing xenophobia. While they were philosophically committed to modernizing China and improving its relationship with the West, they nevertheless chose to emphasize “ancient and traditional culture” within the fair’s villages. For Ngai, this decision was in keeping with what she identifies as the “division of labor” of the Columbia Exposition itself: the hard separation between the industrial and agricultural modernity of the White City versus the “commercialized exoticism” of the Midway (62). Ngai’s research emphasizes that performers involved in ethnographic spectacles were often engaged in complex forms of intercultural negotiation that were marked by a tactical ambivalence about what their participation in them could mean. We can see this in the way Ching Ling Foo presented himself in the Dramatic Mirror interview. Speaking through an interpreter, he told the reporter that he had studied conjuring as a hobby, but had only taken it up professionally two years earlier. His real job, he claimed, was as a businessman for a trading company with a branch office in Pekin, where he was born, and San Francisco, where he had been working prior to joining a troupe of performers on their way to the Omaha Exposition (“A Wonderful Conjuror” 16). But if this were the case, his threatened deportation seems curious; he and others who decided to stay in the Midwest were arrested

170 Christopher Stahl on April 1, 1898, and held without bond until their case could be heard by a district judge in Chicago, a situation consistent with the Geary Act’s suspension of habeas corpus for laborers. What followed the arrest was strange flurry of publicity, as if the press could not decide which narrative about Ching should be the correct one. A small article in the New York Times the day after the arrest claimed that he had appeared at the Omaha Exposition only by permission of the emperor of China, who now desired that his favorite conjuror be recalled to the celestial court (“Chinese Magician” 1). Days later, the Chicago Tribune reported that Ching was granted an extension on his hearing date so he could travel to San Francisco to secure proof that he was in the country legally as a merchant (“Respite” 7). While the proper paperwork would have immediately settled the matter, the court’s final ruling in late April 1899 had nothing to do with the mercantile business or the emperor’s need to be entertained: the provisions of the Geary Act did not apply “to performers in the same sense as to laborers” (“Chinese Conjuror” 8). Actors and other “public performers” would now be allowed to remain in the United States for as long as they wished. On a basic level, this distinction followed the same Romantic notions that had underpinned the Western conceit that the work of art should disavow the “work” (in a literal sense) that went into producing it. We can also detect a trace of what Ngai referred to as the ethnographic display’s “division of labor” embedded in the court’s decision. The Chinese body had legal value as long as it was seen to be performing, rather than working. The performances of such bodies, the ruling seemed to say, did not constitute an explicit economic threat since they were easily contained and consumed by a public hungry for exoticism, for the phantasmagorias produced by those assumed to be from the margins. Chinese magicians could become part of the entertainment business to the extent that their magic made the threat of labor associated with their bodies mysteriously disappear. The Dramatic Mirror interview also mentioned the court’s decision, adding that Ching had decided to stay in the United States for good, as “he likes the country and the people very much” (“A Wonderful Conjuror” 16). Nevertheless, the claim that he was primarily a businessman—like the conflicting stories about why he was being deported—appeared to be an attempt to find secure footing in a cultural terrain where his legal status could shift at any time. Even the Omaha World-Herald, which had praised his work so highly when he was safely lodged within the framework of the Chinese Village, took a dim view of the court’s decision and railed against what it saw as Ching’s manipulation of the law. In a masthead editorial, the

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 171 paper wrote that by marking a distinction between art and labor, the court had rendered the Geary Act unenforceable: John Chinaman is a very imitative gentleman, and he will now proceed to learn how to perform a few sleight-of-hand tricks, spout a few lines from some Chinese playwright and then thunder across the boards in a tin suit and fierce demeanor. Then he will come to the United States and proceed to open a laundry, enter some kitchen or engage in one of the many vocations pursued by his brethren. (“Chinese Exclusion Act” 4)

Beneath the racist and xenophobic narrative of the editorial, we can read an anxiety about the laboring body of the Other colliding with the concerns about authenticity and truthfulness that have plagued performers for centuries. The court’s ruling about Ching exposed an uncomfortable reality: the specter of the laundry worker and the cook whose work was proscribed by law had always hovered behind the seemingly simple natives and clever magicians who charmed the visitors to the midway.

AFTERWORD There can be a tendency to see those who performed in exposition spectacles as both authentic in their self-presentation and completely victimized by the display apparatus. Similarly, magic historians have often failed to question the extent to which nonwhite and non-Western conjurors have constructed their public and performance personas. In the case of Ching Ling Foo, it has often seemed that the body on the vaudeville and variety stage was seen no differently than the body that broke David Abbott’s boredom in the Chinese Village. However, the logic of the ethnographic display teaches us that “authenticity” was a commodity produced for spectators to consume. While there is little doubt that the ideologies behind mass cultural displays were often structured by colonialist or imperialist discourse, the ambiguities in the way Ching appeared in press accounts indicated that he was quite aware of the ways he was being framed. What this suggests to me is that Ching Ling Foo was in many ways as much of a constructed performance persona as Chung Ling Soo. Thus, his insistence on speaking for himself in London in 1905 does not suggest truculence or naiveté so much as a performative intervention—an awareness of the precariousness of his cultural position that echoed his earlier negotiation of the American press following his threatened deportation. That he ultimately failed, and that his failure should be smoothed over by his fellow

172 Christopher Stahl magicians in the following years, should be seen as evidence of the way that contradictory narratives of the marginal body had come to be contained within the intersecting frameworks of entertainment and commerce. The work of this essay has been to understand how that process was naturalized and to try to give Chee Ling Qua a subjective presence behind the façade of the simple “Chinese conjuror” who vanished in the wake of multiple simulacra. Ching did not stay in America, as he had announced in the Dramatic Mirror. By the spring of 1900, weary of fighting about his contract and tired of touring the East Coast, he made plans to take his family back to China. His final weeks were spent in New York City, playing at the same theater where he had dazzled audiences a year earlier. In an effort to drum up publicity, his manager announced a contest: anyone who could duplicate the Water Bowl Production would be paid a large cash prize. William Robinson, who had left Leon Herrmann’s show, arrived at the theater one evening with his equipment and was turned away. Months later, Robinson gave his first performance as Chung Ling Soo at London’s Alhambra Theatre. If an audience were to travel a few blocks from the theater where Ching was giving those final New York performances, they could see comedian Charles T. Aldridge in the Ching Ling Foo act he had developed for the short-lived musical entertainment The Girl from Up There. At another theater, they could laugh as The Great Lafayette, a talented mimic, produced a water bowl in a style that rivaled Ching’s own. However, this version ended with the production of two children in blackface performing a high-stepping cakewalk around the stage. Although it is uncertain if Lafayette had anything more on his mind than provoking laughter by the sudden shock of seeing two minstrel children emerge from the tub of water, the strange juxtaposition of his yellow face make-up with the children’s blackface showed for an instant how practices of racial impersonation depended on the complicity of the audiences to read and accept the codes they saw as authentic. In yet another vaudeville house, as a restless audience waited for the next act to take the stage, someone might have looked up and paused as a short film by Thomas Edison was projected on the curtain. In it, a man wearing tails and knee breeches would step toward the center of a Victorian parlor and bow. He would spread a cloth on the ground and lift it, each time revealing a new item, the most prominent of which was a huge tub of water. Finally, the container of water would vanish and a small boy in a Fauntleroy collar would appear in its place.

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 173 While the film would seem to suggest that the real magician—Ching Ling Foo—could be bested by technology that could duplicate his every feat, I would argue that the film derived its power from the audience recognizing the trick itself. All these acts had made the production of a bowl of water a metonym for the original magician. So what if the man himself had gone back to his native country? What he had come to represent—the product of his labor—would remain. The proliferation of Chinese conjurors at the turn of the twentieth century suggested that the body of the Other could be infinitely reproduced for our pleasure, that the work of magic in the age of mechanical reproduction was to make the process of such replication vanish. And if such replication could take place, it further suggested that those bodies could come to function as a sort of commodity, with their exoticness acting as the fetish that waved away questions of their labor or intrinsic value. This was the savage magic of the modern world.

NOTES 1. In The Master Magicians: Their Lives and Most Famous Tricks, Walter Gibson argues that Robinson added the bullet catch to his act in the early 1900s as a direct result of growing anti-Chinese sentiment in England brought on by the Boxer Uprising. Unwilling to jeopardize the early success of the Chung Ling Soo persona by revealing his true nationality, he staged his execution in front of a firing squad of stagehands dressed as anti-British Boxers (121). Although Jim Steinmeyer notes that Robinson seldom performed the trick after his popularity had been secured, its dramatic representation on promotional posters implies that Robinson wanted to keep the ideas behind the trick (and the possibility of its performance) firmly in the minds of the viewing public. 2. Although most historic accounts give Ching Ling Foo’s real name as Chee Ling Qua, the characters with which he autographed photographs are rendered in pinyin as Zhu Lianhui. I have made the decision to refer to him in this essay as either Ching Ling Foo or Ching, as part of the purpose of my argument is to explore the ways he was framed and constructed by the same ideologies that transliterated his name for Western sensibilities. (By contrast, the magic community and British press tended to refer to Chung Ling Soo just as “Soo.”) I will also use the names of Chinese places or people as they are rendered in the source material. 3. The online catalogue for the American Film Institute contains an entry for The Wonder, Ching Ling Foo (1900), produced by Philadelphia-based filmmaker Siegmund Lubin. Although the catalogue indicates that it was made

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prior to Edison’s film, it was not released until two months after Ching Ling Foo Outdone. A display ad in the April 7, 1900, issue of the New York Clipper touts Lubin’s film as showing the real magician and his company, claiming (perhaps in response to Ching’s announcement that he was returning to China the following month) that it is just like watching the act on stage. The film does not appear in Lubin’s catalogue the following year. 4. There is a small, but notable, issue of contextualization Taussig leaves out in his discussion of Frazer. He rehearses Mauss and Hubert’s critique of Frazer, which first appeared in the pages of Anné sociologique in 1902, but only cites the vastly expanded third edition of The Golden Bough, which appeared in 1910. Frazer’s extensive 150-page description of what he called “sympathetic magic” in the third edition was significantly shorter and less developed in the second edition, upon which Mauss and Hubert based their criticisms. I think the general scope of Taussig’s arguments about Frazer and mimesis are still valid, but this essay draws from the second edition since that version would have been in wide circulation around the time of the nonmeeting of Ching Ling Foo and Chung Ling Soo.

WORKS CITED “A Wonderful Conjuror.” New York Dramatic Mirror June 3, 1899. 16. Abbott, David. “A Reminiscence of Ching Ling Foo.” The Sphinx April 1909. 9. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Beard, Mary. “Frazer, Leach, and Virgil: The Popularity (and Unpopularity) of The Golden Bough.” In Modes of Comparison: Theory and Practice. Ed. Aram A. Yengoyan. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. 161–187. ———. “Afterword.” 188–192. Benjamin, Walter. “Marseilles.” In Reflections. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken, 1986. 131–136. ———. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” 146–162. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1989. “Chinese Conjuror to Stay. Ching Ling Foo Discharged from the Custody of Federal Officials.” New York Times April 27, 1899. 8. “Chinese Magic in the West.” The Sphinx June 1938. 98, 101. “Chinese Magician to Go Home. The Emperor Wants Him, and an American Official Arrests Him.” New York Times April 2, 1899. 1. “Ching Ling Foo.” AFI Catalog. 2007. The American Film Institute. July 14, 2007, http://afi.chadwyck.com. “Ching Ling Foo Gets a Respite.” Chicago Tribune April 7, 1899. 7. “Ching Ling Foo’s Finale.” Omaha World-Herald November 17, 1898. 3.

Outdoing Ching Ling Foo 175 “Chung Ling Soo Declines Ching Ling Foo’s Challenge: Dignity Too Sublime.” Express (date unknown). Rpt. in The Silence of Chung Ling Soo. Ed. Todd Karr. Seattle: The Miracle Factory, 2001. 89–91. “Chung v. Ching: One of the Greatest Encounters of Modern Times. Battle of Sorcerers, who will do Magic on Either Side of a Glass Screen.” Weekly Dispatch January 1, 1905. Rpt. in The Silence of Chung Ling Soo. Ed. Todd Karr. Seattle: The Miracle Factory, 2001. 87–89. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1900. Fusco, Coco. “The Other History of Intercultural Performance.” TDR: The Drama Review 38.1 (1994). 143–167. Gibson, Walter. The Master Magicians: Their Lives and Most Famous Tricks. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966. Goldston, Will. “The Silent Performance: An Interview with Chung Ling Soo.” The Magician Monthly January 1917. 26–27. Rpt. in The Silence of Chung Ling Soo. Ed. Todd Karr. Seattle: The Miracle Factory, 2001. 73–75. “Keith’s Union Square Theatre.” New York Clipper June 10, 1899. 288. Mauss, Marcel. A General Theory of Magic. Trans. Robert Brain. New York: Routledge, 2001. Mitchell, Timothy. “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order.” In Colonialism and Culture. Ed. Nicholas B. Dirks. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992. 289–317. Ngai, Mae M. “Transnationalism and Transformation of the ‘Other’: Response to the Presidential Address.” American Quarterly May 2005. 59–65. Reasoner, Elsie. “A National Wonder: The Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition.” Godey’s Magazine June 1898. 609–617. Robinson, Wm. E. “Indian Jugglery.” Mahatma, vol. 1, no. 11 (May 1898) and vol. 1, no. 12 (June 1898): 110, 122–123. Rpt. in The Silence of Chung Ling Soo. Ed. Todd Karr. Seattle: The Miracle Factory, 2001. 35–40. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Snyder, Robert W. The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. “Soo and Foo: Hippodrome Wizard’s Feats at the W.D. Office. Foo Invisible, Although He was the Issuer of the Original Challenge.” Weekly Dispatch January 8, 1905. Rpt. in The Silence of Chung Ling Soo. Ed. Todd Karr. Seattle: The Miracle Factory, 2001. 92–97. Stanyon, Ellis. “Chung Ling Soo (W. E. Robinson): Marvellous Chinese Conjuror.” Magic, vol. 3, no. 3 (December 1902). 17–18. Rpt. in The Silence of Chung Ling Soo. Ed. Todd Karr. Seattle: The Miracle Factory, 2001. 67–68. Steinmeyer, Jim. The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the “Marvelous Chinese Conjuror.” New York: Carroll & Graff, 2005.

176 Christopher Stahl Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge, 1993. “The Chinese Exclusion Act.” Omaha World-Herald April 30, 1899. 4. Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. China and the Overseas Chinese in the United States, 1868– 1911. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1983. “Vaudeville Views.” Washington Post January 14, 1900. 24.

8. Intersecting Illusions: Performing Magic, Disability, and Gender Karen Dearborn

Karen Dearborn is Professor and founding director of dance at Muhlenberg College. Previously, Dearborn served for ten years on the faculty of the National Theatre of the Deaf Professional Summer School. Dearborn analyzes the work of two contemporary magicians, Jim Passé and René Lavand, both of whom are disabled; Passé uses a wheelchair, and Lavand (a master of card manipulation) has only one hand. Dearborn’s analysis draws upon disability studies and gender studies. Dearborn inquires into the ways performances by Passé and Lavand represent disability and masculinity. How do these magicians construct the relationship between the disabled body and masculine identity? How do they use magic to disrupt, affirm, manipulate, and transform societal beliefs about disability and gender?

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ituating the words magic and disability together conjures images of cure, of bodily disassembling and reassembling, of bondage and escape. Consider the classic act of sawing a woman in half and then making her whole again, or symbolically killing her by penetrating her body with a series of knives, only to assist her energetic and youthfully luscious body out of the box moments later. Consider also Houdini’s impossible escapes from confinement. Much current stage magic relies on a narrative of disabling captivity, followed by magical release and transformation. These images address societal anxieties about a loss of personal control and individual desire for power to escape bodily deterioration and death. Witnessing the magician disabling himself or someone else and then, through extraordinary cleverness, undoing it implies that the magician can dictate destiny. He thus assuages fears of disability and death.

178 Karen Dearborn What, then, happens to fantasies of liberation from bondage and physical mastery when the magician on stage has a visible physical disability? How does configuring a physical disability and the role of the all-powerful magician on one body disrupt and resituate understandings of agency and dependency? Traditional images would seem to cast magicians and people with disabilities on opposite ends of a binary: the magician heals, the person needs healing; the magician is powerful, the disabled person is weak; the magician transcends labor, the disabled person requires assistive labor. The problematic juxtaposition of magician and disability demands new ways of seeing and defining both disability and ability. When the visibly disabled body enters the discourse of bondage and freedom, theoretical, emotional, and psychological understandings of bondage become corporeal reality. In this essay, I examine the performances of two magicians with physical disabilities to show how they recalibrate notions of capability and incapacity to reveal powerful components of cultural belief systems about what it means to be human and live the good life. On August 12, 2007, I performed a Google search using the keywords “magic” and “disability.”1 The findings are a revealing barometer of how Americans currently juxtapose magic and disability. Numerous sites make the assumption that disability needs fixing and purport to provide magic solutions to the challenges arising from disabled conditions. For example, one site offers advice on how to win disability benefits from Social Security with “certain magic words” thus linking the economic bondage often correlated with disability to the need for magic to escape this disadvantage (http:// www.disabilityforms.com/). Other sites, such as “Healing of Magic,” suggest teaching magic tricks as a mode of therapy for people with disabilities (http:// www.magictherapy.com/). The Disability Resource Center sells incontinence supplies named the “Magic Bullet,” “Magic Cleanse,” and “Cran Magic” to alleviate the social confinement often associated with disability (http://www. blvd.com/Incontinent_Supplies/). Disney World offers “Magic Kingdom— Disability Helper” (http://www.disneyclubs.com/misc/disabilty_helper.htm) to assist disabled park-goers, even as Ragged Edge Magazine Online, a publication within the disability community, traces Disney’s lack of compliance with the Americans with Disability Act in articles such as “Magic Kingdom Lacks Magic for Some” (http://www.ragged-edge-mag.com/0399/c399drn. htm). The first magician with a disability to appear in this Google search is the “The Amazing Jeffo” (http://amazingjeffo.com/). Here a different yet equally potent view of disability is presented. Posted articles on this site such as “Blinded by Magic: Amazing Jeffo Gives Children New Insight” and “A Hero Among Us” valorize disability.

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Although these websites are certainly not exhaustive, they point to some of the general themes surrounding disability. Disability is an economic disadvantage and a drain on national resources. It is a medical condition that needs fixing. Able-bodied people are called on to help the person with a disability. Disability causes social embarrassment. Disability demands political action to determine rights of access. And heroism awaits the disabled person who is able to overcome disability in socially approved ways. If these represent accepted patterns for seeing disability, stage magicians with a physical disability must negotiate these images to create characters that invite alternative understandings of ability while simultaneously casting their magic on the audience. Their acts must move beyond the trick they are overtly performing to the equally magical act of moving in and out of disability to disrupt the abled/disabled binary. Making things appear and disappear is the magician’s stock in trade. How these magicians manipulate the presumed audience gaze to create illusions tells much about current societal desires: what people want to see, or not to see, and how difference is framed on the bodies and identities of others. For the purposes of this essay, I examine performances of two internationally known stage magicians, Jim Passé and René Lavand. Jim Passé is an illusionist whose legs were paralyzed in a 1995 accident during the unloading of a crate containing machinery for a new illusion (Passé, “Magic”). He currently performs his stage illusions while riding in an electric wheelchair. Lavand is a close-up magician who lost his right hand in a car accident when he was nine years old (Lavand, Magic from the Soul 18). Both artists creatively use their physical disability to reimagine magic by using and losing their disability as part of the magic act. They affirm, confirm, and redefine notions of the good life and the quest for spiritual and physical transformation. My analysis of their performances draws on disability studies, a field of inquiry concerned with the politics of identity and representation. As Lennard Davis explains, this area of critical investigation “is reflective of the new historical revisionism allowed by the introduction of the concept of disability into practices of Marxist, feminist, queer, ethnic, postcolonial, and postmodern criticism” (Reader 5). “Disability studies interrogates the formation of bodies, the signification of bodies, and the national interest in producing templates for bodies and souls” (Bending 45). Disability is a mutable category that encompasses a wide range of physical conditions. On this broad continuum, ability/disability shifts with changing environments. Davis reminds us that “Anyone can become disabled and it is also possible for a person with disabilities to be ‘cured’ and become ‘normal’ ”

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(Handbook 536). Corresponding to the fluidity of the category, Passé and Lavand represent different degrees of physical disability, and they have different approaches to performing disability. Although these magicians were born a generation apart, their performances reveal how definitions of disability have altered over the past forty years. In addition to disability, their performances also query gender concerns: their masculine bodies have to be read against (feminizing) disabilities. My goal is to reveal the complexity of performing disability within a society that has constructed disability at the margins as a way to affirm beliefs about normalcy and shared experience. My aim is to explore how these magic acts configure the personal as performance and ride the various currents of politically loaded representations of disability. Examination of their “acts” reveals the shifting landscape of ideas about wholeness, power, and physical agency alive in America today. I am also interested in their magic—their techniques to reveal and conceal that which marks them at the margins, yet also provides economic, political, and social access that moves them closer to the imagined center demarcated as normal. How do they play the audience? How do they use the magician’s toolbox of misdirection and deception to create events that alter perceptions of disability? How do they manage the unstable intersections of disability, femininity, and masculinity to cast their magic on American audiences?

PARADOX SPHERE Two years after his accident, Jim Passé designed the illusion Paradox Sphere, which MAGIC Magazine named best new illusion in 1997. Passé presented the illusion on NBC’s World’s Greatest Magic V, and it is this performance that I describe here. As the title suggests, the piece presents a contradiction, a paradox, the truth of which can only be unraveled through careful scrutiny. The piece begins, as do all the magic acts in the show, with an introduction by host John Ritter: Like all truly great magicians, our next performer makes it his life to challenge the boundaries of reality. As if that weren’t enough, he has also overcome his own personal challenges to bring us one of the most unique mysteries in magic. Ladies and gentlemen, give a warm welcome to a truly amazing man, Jim Passé!

Ritter’s introduction immediately focuses audience attention on challenges and boundaries, and the opening images of Paradox Sphere

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confirm the challenge and a path for recovery: science. The stage is adorned with a table containing the instruments of a chemist’s lab: a small, clear globe with electric currents running through the center and a large beaker with smoke billowing out. Female dancers arise from prone positions, appearing out of the fog that covers the stage floor. Their long-sleeved silvery unitards are conservative in comparison to the dress of the typical magician’s assistant, and the choreography is more futuristic writhing and modern angst than sexy distraction. Also visible is Passé, seated center stage behind a metallic modernistic cauldron. Yellow and black stripes decorating the rim alert the audience to danger within. Slowly, the wheelchair lifts Passé to a standing position. He extracts a long spear and dips it into the dangerous potion that has electronically arisen from his futuristic brew. A dancer ceremoniously takes the spear, and Jim motors toward the audience, performs a conventional magician gesture by slicing his hands in a decisive sideward motion, then turns and travels upstage to position himself beside a large metal sphere sitting on a platform. While he is maneuvering across the stage, a narrative voice-over interjects: “What you are watching is real; the wheelchair is not a stage prop. Jim has overcome physical challenges to realize his life dream of becoming a stage illusionist.” Because the narrator has interrupted the trick to remind the audience of Passé’s disability, let me, too, pause to consider the various frames and the setup of the illusion before continuing with the main events in Paradox Sphere. Clearly, John Ritter’s introduction and the narrator’s commentary direct attention to Passé’s paralysis and his heroism in overcoming a tragedy. The words cast his situation as personal and conflate his life story with his magic. The implication is that he is doubly amazing because of his disability. This portrayal of a disabled character is familiar and comforting because it provides reassurance that disabled people do just fine if they work hard enough, thereby assuaging any able-bodied guilt in the audience. This is the quintessential and pervasive happy ending, or as John E. Smith characterizes it, the “feel-good moment” that able-bodied people crave when confronted with disability. However, Jim Passé was a magician and stage illusionist well before his accident, and it is disturbing that the voice-over does not acknowledge these years of dedication and study. He achieved his life dream, if not yet international stature, before his accident. The frame constructed by the show’s directors inflates and perpetuates the fiction of disabled hero. This, however, is only part of the story—the part Passé did not control. In contrast to Ritter’s emphasis on disability, Passé obscures the reading of his disability. In magic vernacular, he misdirects audience attention by

182 Karen Dearborn situating his wheelchair behind the metal cauldron at the opening of the act. What is seen is the magician, not the wheelchair. When he mysteriously rises, it is because of, not in spite of, his wheelchair. He has at once created a magic illusion and inverted the concept of the wheelchair as a place of confinement. In this performance, the wheelchair empowers. While the narrator is busy trying to convince the audience that the wheelchair is not a prop and that Passé is truly disabled, Passé himself has cast the wheelchair as a potent tool of his magic trade. In “The Politics of Staring,” Rosemarie Garland Thomson argues that staring is an intense form of looking at the disability in a way that rarely broadens to encompass the whole body of the person with a disability. The intent is to diagnose variation and establish the parameters of difference between spectator and the spectacle of the aberrant body (56–57). In performing the Paradox Sphere, the fog and dancers conspire to obscure this diagnostic gaze and divert the stare that often defines and confines the disabled body. Rather than succumbing to a position as the object of fascination—a freak or medical case—Passé has cast himself in the role of scientist, someone who holds special powers and knowledge. His magic, the real illusion, is disrupting the subject position of the disabled body by transforming himself from an object of pity to one empowered to heal the body. He performs control and mastery while his body testifies to the unpredictability of life. Instead of needing a cure, Passé needs a patient on which to operate. The paradox he will perform requires another disabled body, and the magic resides in the link between his body and that of his patient. Standing beside the empty metal sphere while riding on wheels of metal amplifies this connection. After the dancing assistants cover the sphere with a black cloth, Passé demonstrates his authority over metal by levitating the orb. Next, the dancers remove the cloth to reveal a woman trapped inside the sphere. His patient has arrived. She sits, head bowed, legs folded, hands gripping the bars of her metallic prison. Her short black hair and skimpy black top work in opposition to the dancers’ garb, and her pose, actions, and dress combine to create the image of an exotic other. The dancers encircle her and curiously poke and prod her body. She is clearly an anomalous specimen. Suddenly, as if jolted by an electric shock, she flings her arms out to grab two dancers, who struggle from her clutches as the remaining dancers scurry away. The implication is that Passé’s patient definitely needs a cure; her body marks her as other, and her uncontrolled misbehavior is too untamed for civilized society. Passé next pokes his spear through the orb-shaped cage and dissects the specimen into upper and lower body halves as she winces with pain. He

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commands the assistants to turn her upper half in a 360-degree circle while his specimen’s legs remain statically encased within the immobile lower half of the sphere. Mobility/immobility, dissected halves, revolve in a pas de deux between doctor and patient. Passé again gestures to levitate the top half of the sphere upward while smoke billows forth from the dissected and separated bottom. Through the mist, assistants reach into the split orb to remove (like a rabbit out of a hat) a beautiful blonde woman clad in a skimpy white costume. The image is one of birth, extraction, or release; Passé, the scientist, the magician, has brought beauty out of ugliness. The perfectly formed angelic woman in white, a contrast to the unruly woman in black, meekly takes Passé’s outstretched hand, bows, and exits, presumably on her way to normal and fulfilling future. To finish his tango with the encaged woman in black, Passé reassembles her and the sphere. He then grabs the black cloth, recovers the sphere, and slowly motors toward the audience, dragging the cloth off to reveal the now-empty cage. She has disappeared. Passé stops and gazes at the audience while they applaud. The illusion is complete. This magic act works within the premises of bondage/escape and disassembly/reassembly, both of which are dominant narratives in the magician’s arsenal of tricks. Images of a lone, all-powerful man surrounded by a bevy of female assistants, a violent penetration of a captive female and dismembering of her body, followed by reassembly, are all standard fare for stage illusionists. Nevertheless, there is a paradox in this equation. The inescapable association of Passé’s paralyzed legs with the dark specimen’s immobile lower half and the spherical, metallic natures of the wheelchair and the orb-shaped cage symbolically links the active male with the passive female. The twinning of disability on the magician’s body with that of the female assistant moves Passé away from the hypermasculine persona adopted by many stage illusionists to a location outside of the standard masculine/feminine binary. His legs and her legs are immobile; her upper half and his remain alive; good is born from evil. Miraculous redemption is performed on these twinned, damaged specimens. He is the wounded healer who paradoxically orchestrates the recovery and healing of another, and by metaphorical extension, himself. The technique to this double illusion, however, relies on a sacrificial female body to dissect, make disappear, and restore. The association of the disabled body as female or castrated male has deep roots in Western history. To retain his role as a mystical, magical, and powerful man, Passé must also perform an escape from the feminization of disability as part of the trick. As Lenore Manderson and Susan Peake argue, “Since masculinity is defined

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as able-bodied and active, the disabled man is an oxymoron. Becoming disabled for a man means to ‘cross the fence’ and take on the stigmatizing constructs of the masculine body made feminine and soft” (233). To subvert this position, Passé relies on overtly performing masculine domination and aggression on the female body. Nonetheless, the association of his disability with her body complicates his position. The image of woman as a dangerous animal in need of confinement is played out on both the female and disabled bodies in this scene, with both of them encaged. His treatment of her as a specimen to be dissected echoes his own status as a medical specimen, yet he simultaneously embodies the masculine role of alchemist–medical examiner. His dual character acquires additional meaning when one considers that the medieval field of alchemy was devoted to transmuting base metals into gold, discovering a universal cure for disease, and finding the elixir of longevity. Although alchemy and magic have long been intertwined, it is the pervasive use of metal in Paradox Sphere that captures attention. The dancing assistants resemble metal in their costuming and stiff movements; the cauldron of magic potion is encased within a series of metal canisters; the magic sphere is metal; and Passé’s locomotion is by metal wheels. Magic and alchemy, transformation from base metal to gold, from disease to life—this is more than a trick; it is a message. The paradox of the wheelchair is revealed: the wheelchair does not confine but emancipates. Equally potent is the message that disability and life coexist. The transmutation of base metal into gold is also enacted in the flesh when Passé dissects the woman of darkness and evil to extract the woman of light and beauty. The “something good from bad” theme is triumphantly sounded. This message affirms beliefs that bad things happen for a reason, and that if life gives us lemons, we are expected to make lemonade. As a metaphor for proper disabled behavior, this is a clear admonishment not to be a whiny crip,2 but a cheerful one. This moment also speaks to the disabled experience and what Beatrice Wright describes as one of the important components for the positive transformation to self-acceptance: the “containment” of the consequences of disability by combating stereotypes and separating the physical realities of disability from socially imposed barriers. Passé literally contains and confines evil, then locates and rescues the good from inside the bad. In the end, he also sends both darkness and light away. He rejects the women, both good and evil, by sending them offstage. What remains is the man who enacted the transformation. By refusing the stereotypical disabled binaries of happiness and despair, tragedy and triumph, while disrupting and embracing the male/female binary, the

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magical finale reveals a human being, in all his complexity, gazing out at the audience. From his wheelchair, Passé claims the paradox and invites a reexamination of the fallacy of simplistic thinking about what it means to live with a disability. The intersecting illusions of gender, disability, and magic transport him from constructs of disability as incapacity to occupy a place of agency and power not typically attributed to paralysis. But it is important to remember that the emancipation of his disabled male body comes at the expense of the sacrificial female body.

IT’S ALL LIES René Lavand first astounded American audiences in 1962 when he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show billed as “the one-armed magician from Argentina” (A. Smith). A close-up artist of international fame, his card manipulations have delighted audiences for decades. Thirty years later, on NBC’s World’s Greatest Magic II, the master of ceremonies, Alan Thicke, like Sullivan, framed his introductory remarks to delineate Lavand’s disability and nationality: “While growing up in Argentina our next magician fell victim to a tragic accident, in which he lost the use of his right hand. He persevered and triumphed to become the reigning grand master of close-up magic. From the New Magical Empire, René Lavand!” Comparing these two introductions, Sullivan’s from 1962 and Thicke’s from 1995, illuminates the changing tide from earlier depictions of disabled performers as anomalous freaks to heroes in the face of adversity. Garland Thomson, mapping the rise and fall of the freak show on American stages, links the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific quest for a “knowable truth” through demarcation of physical difference to the popularity of freak shows: “With dwarfs as well as armless and legless ‘wonders,’ the pitchmen charged their audiences to determine the precise parameters of human wholeness and the limits of free agency . . . Freak shows were to the masses what science was to the emerging elite: an opportunity to formulate the self in terms of what it was not” (Extraordinary 59). Sullivan’s 1962 introduction echoes the pitchman’s call to marvel at difference; thirty years later, Thicke draws attention to perseverance and triumph. Sullivan sensationalizes and actually misnames his disability (“one-armed”), while Thicke glosses over the amputated hand (“lost the use of ”). In thirty years, Lavand’s disability/ability has been transformed from armless wonder to grand master—a magic trick indeed. Implicit in Thicke’s introduction is the invitation to admire the man who works in spite of his

186 Karen Dearborn of disability. The introduction asks the audience, in effect, to politely avert from gawking at difference, to focus instead on admiring his perseverance over tragedy. Like NBC’s frame of Passé’s act, these introductions are not of the magician’s making. Typically, when Lavand performs, his disability is not disclosed until the end of the performance. Richard Kaufman, coauthor with Lavand of Lavand’s autobiography, The Mysteries of My Life (1998), describes the scene: In his shows for laymen, you see, he is introduced simply as René Lavand, not “René Lavand the One-Armed Magician.” The audience does not know he has only one real hand—all they see is a man doing magic tricks who keeps one hand in his pocket . . . After the show, the emcee explains that René has only one hand, and then the audience is really knocked for a loop . . . The emcee’s remark is the coup de grace: the brick hitting their heads, a final retrospective boost of appreciation for him. There is also a final analysis on the part of the audience: in their assessment of his performance all they remember is that it was so amazing they don’t care if he used one hand, two hands, or three hands. (11)

So Lavand, like Passé, orchestrates his own outing; disability, like the cards he so deftly manipulates, is revealed on his terms. What Kaufman and the performance highlight is Lavand’s ability. Disability is the final trick played on the audience, who has been enraptured by the performance, with no thought of physical variety or difference. The moment of surprise causes the audience members to rethink their understanding of what disability means. The extraordinary artistry and technical craft of Lavand’s card magic upsets the classification of disability as impairment, incompetence, impotence, lack, or weakness; the generally accepted definition of what constitutes disability is disclosed to be a lie. However, this final revealing and embracing of difference through disability sounds another familiar theme: through loss comes extraordinary facility. Lavand’s story about himself attributes his extraordinary ability to a physical disability. In his autobiography and postperformance talks, Lavand claims, “It was an accident that definitively determined the path I would take. It seems as if I owe so much to that cruel twist: my distinct personality, my artistic career, my success in the world” (Kaufman and Lavand 115). Other premiere magicians take up these arguments as well. Juan Tamariz states, “it helps that he has only one hand, a potential handicap that he has turned into a true virtue” (Magic from the Soul 5). In a similar vein, Arturo de Ascanio ventures, “René took advantage of his condition, his multiplied pain, and used it to create a more beautiful magic, like a blind pianist who

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uses his blindness to create more beautiful music” (Magic from the Soul 8). Although all three men emphasize the artistry of Lavand’s total performance, it is his development of one-handed card manipulation techniques that has elevated his stature among the community of magicians. Out of necessity, he created unique, much-admired, virtuosic ways of maneuvering cards. When teaching his tricks, Lavand is quick to assure participants, “Of course this can be done with two hands.” His simple statement places disability in a position of normalcy, as if having two hands were the aberration. However, in the inner circles of the magic community, it is well understood that performing the tricks with two hands would be a disability. A second hand used in the execution of the trick would interfere with its technique, and a second performative, nontechnical hand would only muddy and complicate its elegance by drawing attention away precisely when the magician does not want it (Hass). Thus, Lavand’s performance simultaneously claims normalcy and disability to unsettle cultural notions that bodily perfection is the marker of success. His performance argues that physical imperfection leads to success. Lennard Davis observes, “Successful disabled people . . . have their disability erased by their success” (Enforcing 9). Even so, the embodied fact of Passé’s and Lavand’s disabilities and their professional success refuses erasure and demands reconsideration of the impulse to eradicate difference. The medical approach to fixing bodies that fall outside the norm is called into question. These magicians are reminders that there is beauty in variety. Yet paradoxically, both magicians sometimes make their disability disappear. As Kaufman describes earlier, Lavand’s magic act does efface his disability, at least overtly, until the final moment. What, then, does his performance with cards convey about the intersection of disability and magic? Although card tricks seem tame when compared with splitting a woman in two, similar themes of masculine mastery and control, dismemberment and reassembly, and pain are executed at the card table. Consider the vocabulary of card handling, cutting, shuffling, dealing, and reassembling. As Lavand points out, in his native Spanish, deck is a feminine noun, which narrows the expository gap between Passé’s illusion and Lavand’s card manipulations. Lavand, in his trick “Why Do the Colors Alternate Themselves?” also establishes the female deck as other when he says repeatedly, “It’s simply that playing cards are mystical, ritualistic, ancient, and mysterious” (Kaufman and Lavand 53). His performance casts the female deck as primitive and without order. When he deftly manipulates these female players, he simultaneously claims and disclaims the power to control the outcome. The magic spell he concocts hints toward a suspenseful question: can man

188 Karen Dearborn conquer and control not only a female other, but also the unpredictable events of life? While physically enacting cutting and reassembling the deck, Lavand’s performance script in the trick “A Little Diversion” insists: “But it’s all lies, because I didn’t split the deck, I didn’t reassemble the deck, I didn’t complete the cut—I always keep the Three of Hearts under my control” (Kaufman and Lavand 42). These words reassure that physical fractures are merely an illusion and that human control is sovereign. What man breaks can be made whole again. Indeed, Lavand’s severed hand has, in effect, given him extraordinary control and exposed the lie of loss through amputation. At the same time, his persona slides from agent in charge to witness of larger magical powers. The message is that he has conquered chaos, either through extraordinary willpower or through spiritual intervention. Controlling the outcome of life’s random events is beautifully enacted in Lavand’s performance “It Can’t Be Done Any Slower,” which aired on NBC’s World’s Greatest Magic II. Consider the title and its repeated incantation throughout the act. Implied is his absolute control: no one can do it more slowly. The setup for the piece has Lavand, clad in black suit, vest, and tie and seated at a green felt table between a lovely woman with flowing blonde hair and an equally beautiful brunette in a red dress. Two younger women also sit at the table, and men in suits and women in evening wear stand around the table. Lavand is the center of the performance, the elder statesman who commands attention of young and old, men and women. After shuffling and cutting the cards, he presents six cards, three red (ace, two, three of hearts) and three black (jack, queen, king of spades) and announces, “I am not going to do this quickly.” Over the next four minutes, he dexterously manipulates the six cards with one hand to present four variations of what magicians know as an Oil and Water effect—where the cards are seemingly mixed up but each time magically sort themselves by color. Midway, after a second impossible separation, he interjects, “Nothing is more overwhelming than the truth.” For the grand finale, Lavand asks, “Do you recall that I began this trick shuffling the cards well—mixing them up? Once again let me finish it by shuffling and cutting the cards.” He then rises to splay the entire deck on the table in perfect numerical order by suit. Magically, his shuffling and cutting have reassembled the deck in perfect sequence. The message—the magic trick—is his ability to create order out of chaos, to control the seemingly random actions of life. Besides fooling the audience with his sleight of hand, there is another falsehood lurking in his performance, one he cleverly disguises, related to societal rejection/repulsion of the amputated body. Lavand actually wears a prosthetic hand, but he never uses it in his performances (Kaufman 11). He

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keeps it in his pocket throughout the act. This is partially for practical reasons. Close-up magic relies on the magician’s ability to direct the audience’s gaze toward and away from the hands at key moments. The artificiality of a prosthetic device invites staring. In order to do his tricks, he must hide his disability, lest the audience focus on nothing else. He also cannot risk associations of the loss of limb with castration. If the audience questions his masculine mastery, his magic becomes suspect as well. Lavand’s refusal to be the object of the diagnostic gaze facilitates his ability to direct attention where needed in order to accomplish the necessary sleight of hand. Finally, yet importantly, pocketing his disability neatly hides the rabbit in the hat that he usually amazes the audience with at the end of the show. As the director of the gaze rather than its object, Lavand takes great pleasure in his place of power in the magic performance. Lavand casts the audience into the position of captive female, conflating the audience with the female magician’s assistant. Lavand, discussing the potency of his magic on the audience, asserts that he does not seek polite applause. Rather, he seduces the audience with suspense-building repetition, until there is a sweet emotion where they “yield to you like a woman in love” (Lavand, “Magical Conversation”). His autobiography goes on to say: The kind of magic that I do is not really for amusement, but rather for amazement. I try to amaze the audience, really shock them, choke the audience good and hard. I strive to bring them to the point of profound anguish [ . . . ] The anguish of the human being when faced with something beyond his understanding . . . (Kaufman and Lavand 8). I put a great deal of emphasis on suspense. And suspense is “No . . . no . . . it can’t be . . . no . . . no . . . YES!” That’s suspense: teasing out the moment, then a BIG release. (52)

Levand’s rhetoric of sexual control and orgasmic relief directly cast him as the masculine and superior power in the equation. His performance persona as the insatiable Latin lover moves Lavand’s body from the potentially feminized position as object of the presumably male gaze to reconfigure himself as the male agent acting upon on the passive, victimized audience. Thus Lavand, like Passé, uses a female “body” (the audience and the cards) to reclaim masculine, nondisabled, power and control over a chaotic world where life-altering accidents happen in an instant. By claiming the masculine role from the traditionally feminized position of disability, these magicians successfully conflate ability and disability, normality and deviance, to pose an enchanting challenge to identity categorization. In essence,

190 Karen Dearborn their performances ask, how do people claim/reclaim what makes them unique while not allowing individual identity to be reduced to what marks one as different? This is the real magic act.

THE MAGICAL ESCAPE Passé and Lavand represent a truly magical condition when one considers the economic, social, and political barriers that confront the disabled population. Historian Paul Longmore argues, I—and most disabled Americans—have been exhorted that if we work hard and “overcome” our disabilities, we can achieve our dreams. We have heard that pledge repeatedly from counselors and educators and “experts,” and from our government too. We have seen it incarnated by disabled heroes and television, those plucky “overcomers” who supposedly inspire us with their refusal to let their disabilities limit them. We are instructed that if we too adopt an indomitable spirit and a cheerful attitude, we can transcend our disabilities and fulfill our dreams. It is a lie. The truth is that the major obstacles we must overcome are pervasive social prejudice, systematic segregation, and institutionalized discrimination. Government social-service policies, in particular, have forced millions of us to the margins of society. Those policies have made the American Dream inaccessible to many disabled citizens. (231)

It is not just the reality of the lives many disabled people live that these magicians seemingly escape, but also the fictions about people with disabilities perpetuated in the media. Traditional readings of the disabled body consider it a body out of control. Because disabled bodies defy a singular fixed category, they threaten to destabilize understandings of self, status, and position. Coupling this body with the character of the magician, the classic controller, inverts status and casts the audience as the body out of control. Suddenly accepted fictions about disability become unbalanced. The very real bodies of Passé and Lavand transcend and reconfigure cultural confinements associated with physical disability. They do this by playing familiar chords to arrest deep-seated anxieties and fears about difference and then magically invert this comfortable world at the last possible moment. Passé’s is the more difficult task because closeting his disability throughout the performance is impossible. His wheelchair immediately marks him and places him outside the American ideal (Murphy 116–117). Nevertheless, his state-of-the-art electronic wheelchair satisfies cultural

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beliefs in consumerism and technology as well as expectations for how a person should respond to disability: research and purchase the best machine money can buy; depend on an engineering feat, not on other humans; take care of yourself; don’t be a burden. The display of advanced medical and technological hardware reassures us that as a society, we are doing our best for the disabled body. The reality, of course, is very different. These machines are expensive and are often not within the economic reach of the disabled person. The human labor needed to move the paralyzed body in and out of the chair and to engage in other physical activities necessary to life is effectively hidden from view. Thus, societal sense of good taste and manners are upheld and the messiness of life magically disappears. Nonetheless, Passé’s performance does not completely erase the realities of his body. In yet another paradox akin to Lavand’s missing-hand finale, Passé waits until the last moment to invert the nonconfrontational reading of his disability he has afforded the audience thus far. In a final twist, the female bodies previously used to divert the audience’s attention from Passé’s body depart the stage, and Passé’s ending actually demands “the stare.” Reclaiming Rebecca Schneider’s “explicit body,” he silently commands the audience to look at him, to see the man, the magician, and the disability. In the quiet, his finale emphatically states, we cannot turn metal to gold or escape disease, disability, and death; however, we can escape disabling attitudes about the perils of difference. Lavand too casts his spell by lulling the audience into a place of familiarity and comfort. His magic depends on getting the audience to relax and to accept that he has the odd quirk of keeping one hand in his pocket while simultaneously almost taunting the audience with his superior ability—as if to say, “I can do this with one hand tied behind my back.” His calm speaking manner and his early credential tricks are designed to assure the audience that he is in complete control of his physical being. His act also successfully subverts association with the cardsharp, that master of deception and deceit. His commentary and patter slide between assertions that what he is performing is a lie and a truth, implying that there might be a hidden reality not easily discerned. By hiding bodily deviance until the card manipulations are complete, he refuses the pity so often heaped on disability. Instead, he frames his artistry as a close-up magician as defined and carved by disability. Like the great general in a need of a war to demonstrate his extraordinary ability, Lavand needed a physical battleground to develop his astonishing virtuosity. Both the general and Lavand require a stage on which to perform superlative ability.

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However, the great escapes these two men perform, like many magical illusions, rely on the female body operating in traditional realms. While these men successfully negotiate the able/disabled binary, they do so in part by heightening the masculine/female binary. They perform masculine superiority and control over the female body as a vehicle for mitigating disability as a feminizing condition. Taking as evidence the unequal numbers of male and female magicians currently performing versus the ratio of female/male magician’s assistants, clearly American audiences expect the men to rule and the women to submit. Lost in Passé’s and Lavand’s narrative celebrating bodily difference is the individual female body. As the wild beast/Madonna and dancing corps in Passé’s world, or the fifty-two cards and the collective feminized audience body in Lavand’s, the women in these acts are defined by physical sameness: they are silent and yielding. Apparently, at least in some contemporary magic acts presented to mainstream America, there is not yet space for the doubly stigmatized disabled female body. In other words, there are no disabled assistants. The paradox here is that while disability makes Passé and Levand doubly amazing, the disabled woman can only occupy the stage if a man can correctly reassemble her. A less-than-perfect female body in the act would presumably refocus attention on the man as less than a man. These men also consolidate their masculine power by moving beyond the male/active and female/passive binaries. Both men perform their acts from chairs; the female characters are the ones in motion. Rather than consuming and dominating the space, the performances reclaim masculinity as superior intellect. Passé motors around the stage, actively performing the scientist as he jabs, stabs and extracts, and Lavand deftly orchestrates his cards, but it is their implied masculine rationality and ability to bring order to a chaos gendered female that audiences are asked to notice and appreciate. The female dancers in Paradox Sphere arise through the mist as though commanded and controlled by Passé, and although their writhing bodies attest to physical presence and action, they are portrayed as intellectually and emotionally vacant, directionless without a man in charge. The dancing chorus cannot understand the caged animal, and the special women, the beast and the Madonna, do not display any intellectual ability. Only Passé understands the scene and knows how to concoct the correct cure for female hysteria. He is the one to administer it, and he ultimately commands the women to leave his world, which they compliantly do. Similarly, Lavand casts his deck as stereotypically female—mysterious, unknowable, and unpredictable except by his command. Not only do these magicians divide and reassemble women, they do this by performing the social fiction

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that divides men from women and casts the male as reasoned intelligence and the female as untamed animal. Although their magic relies on performing masculinity in traditional ways, these men also represent shifts in accepted masculine behaviors from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. Lavand achieved his widespread acclaim more than thirty-five years before Passé and is at least a generation older. Lavand brilliantly articulates a performance persona of the Latin lover, the archetype of the virtuosic male as a site of pleasure and mystical sexual powers in his implied seductions of cards and audience, but Lavand also has patriarchal authority by virtue of his talent and his age. His performance patter casts him as a teacher of mysteries while his calm and gentle demeanor and repeated claims that it is all lies work together to establish his authenticity and his patriarchal authority. Indeed, magicians all over the world call him “El Maestro.” Keeping his disability under wraps conforms to mid-century ideals for men to suffer in silence while taking care of business. In contrast, Passé’s persona aligns more closely with the damaged man currently in cinematic vogue. Scholars investigating how masculinities are performed in Hollywood and European films have noted a shift from men enduring injury inflicted as part of the unfolding story (war pictures or cowboy shootouts) to a new male lead who begins the movie already damaged physically or emotionally, an outcast from the start (Powrie et al. 12). Similar to these new male stars, Passé must wear his disability like armor throughout the performance—from the beginning, he is damaged, but this status may actually give him currency in the current cultural climate. As traditional gender roles have altered, a new hybrid masculinity has emerged in film as a mechanism for realigning the power structures between men and women: “Look how I suffer, look how I am feminized through that suffering (but don’t look at the way in which I consolidate my power over you)” (13). Pat Kirkham, in her analysis of Frank Borzage’s films, explores female spectatorship of the wounded man as erotic gazing and asserts, “The ideal man is one who is partly de-masculinised in order to be partly feminized; who is deconstructed to be reconstructed . . . Wounding makes men more accessible to women’s imagination” (107, italics in original). Passé’s status as the already damaged man may not have been as palatable to the previous generation, which equated masculine power with physical power and sexual prowess. However, as new masculinities emerge, Passé’s demasculinized disability becomes a powerful performance of this realignment of male power. Although Lavand had to work within the masculinities available to his generation and his culture, these are not the same

194 Karen Dearborn masculinities Passé performs. Now the feminized man may actually gain rather than lose status. Wondrously, Passé simultaneously performs superior intellect and agency as masculine while also embodying the feminine life-giving role. Kirkham’s emphasis on deconstruction and reconstruction of masculinity on the screen is the same magic that magicians have been offering audiences for centuries. By occupying a feminized space of deconstruction and miraculously reconstructing that space, these wounded healers amalgamate binaries to appear godlike—whole and unified. Their magic escapes the abled/disabled divide and reformulates the world as controlled by reasoned and disciplined men, with a little help from the mysterious cosmos. Passé’s and Lavand’s magic, the trick performed and the disability performed, resides in the liminal realm of possibility to remodel life and live it on their own terms. By consolidating masculine and feminine potency and overtly playing accepted stereotypes, they convert and divert audience attention to escape confining definitions of disability. Magically, they display agency to shape their own identity outside societal constructs of bodily variation as disabling. Embodying both ends on the continuum of ability/disability, these men triangulate interpretations of physical ability, wholeness, and the human condition. They confound and disrupt the binaries so easily adopted. These magicians, like all magicians, work to establish identities apart from the ordinary, to distinguish themselves as unique, as other, outside the rules average people live by. The power of the magician is seemingly to do the impossible, to defy laws of nature. The magician inverts the power associated with normalcy to claim authority in difference. In their performances, Lavand and Passé unveil the fallacy of assimilation and conformity to challenge audiences with what Garland Thomson names “democracy’s paradox.” Belief in equality presupposes a “sameness of condition, while the promise of freedom suggests the potential for uniqueness” (Extraordinary 43). Performing disability and performing magic demand a rethinking of the urge to eradicate difference as a mechanism for achieving equality and, presumably, creating a better world. Instead, audiences are challenged to imagine the possibility that corporeal lives radically different from their own have value and are worth living. Further exposed are the cultural history and the complicity to confine, bind, pity, dissect, and cure different bodies in the name of sameness. Their magic illustrates that humanity is not determined by likeness to one another. Rather, it is the response to difference that defines humanity.

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NOTES 1. I conducted the Google search discussed here on August 12, 2007, and the results all come from the first two pages of listings for searches on the keywords “disability” and “magic” used together. I originally conducted this search in August 2005 and have periodically repeated it, always with the same basic results. 2. Petra Kuppers explains that the word “ ‘crips’ has a currency as a self-referent for use amongst disabled people” (140). Lennard Davis suggests that disability activists refer to themselves as “crips” to challenge and demystify more polite euphemisms (Bending 38). “Whiny crip” refers to the stereotype of people with disabilities as bitter and angry complainers.

WORKS CITED Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy. London: Verso, 1995. ———. “Identity Politics, Disability, and Culture.” Handbook of Disability Studies. Ed. Gary Albrecht, Katherine Seelman, and Michael Bury. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2001. 535–545. ———. Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York UP, 2002. Davis, Lennard J. ed. The Disability Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1997. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. ———. “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography.” In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Bruggeman, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2002. 56–75. Hass, Lawrence. Personal communication, 2007. Kaufman, Richard. Preface to The Mysteries of My Life. By Richard Kaufman and René Lavand. Washington, DC: Kaufman, 1998. 11. Kaufman, Richard and René Lavand. The Mysteries of My Life. Washington, DC: Kaufman, 1998. Kirkham, P. “Loving Men: Frank Borzage Charles Farrell and the Reconstruction of Masculinity.” In Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women. Ed. P. Kirkham and J. Thumim. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1995. 94–112. Kuppers, Petra. Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. New York: Routledge, 2003. Lavand, René. Magic from the Soul. Pasadena, CA: Mike Caveney’s Magic Words, 1993. ———. “It Can’t Be Done Any Slower.” World’s Greatest Magic II. NBC. Hosted by Alan Thicke. November 22, 1995. ———. “A Magical Conversation with René Lavand.” Public talk, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA. October 24, 2002.

196 Karen Dearborn Longmore, Paul, K. Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003. Manderson, Lenore and Susan Peake. “Men in Motion: Disability and the Performance of Masculinity.” Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Ed. Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005. 230–242. Murphy, Robert. The Body Silent. New York: Holt, 1987. Passé, Jim. “The Magic of Jim Passé.” August 8, 2007, http://www.magicofjimpasse. com:16080/index2.php. ———. “Paradox Sphere.” World’s Greatest Magic V. NBC. Hosted by John Ritter and John Gabriel. November 25, 1998. Powrie, Phil, Ann Davies, and Bruce Babington, eds. The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema. London: Wallflower P, 2004. Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997. Smith, Aaron. “The Magic Depot.” August 8, 2007, http://www.magic.org/store/ product_info.php?products_id=438. Smith, John E. “It’s a Life, Not a Feel-Good Moment.” Washington Post January 9, 2006. Wright, Beatrice. Physical Disability: A Psychosocial Approach. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

9. Through a Glass Darkly: Magic and Religion in Western Thought and Practice Susan L. Schwartz

Susan L. Schwartz is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion Studies at Muhlenberg College. Her research and teaching are in the area of religion and culture, with a focus on India. Schwartz offers a wide-ranging tour of the longstanding tension between religion and magic in western thought and practice. Western thinkers commonly regard religion and magic as foes— antagonistic systems of belief and practice. Conversely, Schwartz demonstrates their profound similarities. The conceptual border separating religion from magic, she argues, is unstable, volatile, and highly revealing. This boundary is a flash point for matters of social hierarchy, gender, religious legitimacy, and geographical location. What does the uneasy relationship between religion and magic suggest about Western anxieties regarding life, death, identity, and authority?

L

ee Siegel, magician, author, and professor of religion, in Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India (1991), quotes an informant to this effect: “Yes, religion is magic, magic is religion. Everywhere” (278). And while there are many ways in which the statement makes perfect sense in India, those are fighting words in Western cultures, where many generations of scholars, theologians, and practitioners have endeavored to draw a distinguishing line between these two activities that share so much in common. What is at stake in that effort? Why is the effort to disentangle them fraught with a high emotional tone? We might well wonder how it is that this issue continues to conjure, much as a magician might, such clouds of obfuscation, not to mention scholarly sleight of hand. There is a long history here that is wildly complex. Recent scholarship provides considerable insight into the topic. The best among these efforts reflect the murky ambivalence and paradoxical nature of both magic and

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religion. It is precisely this murky reflection that is the topic of this essay, and although the full breadth and depth of the available material cannot be properly explored here, a tour of sources and images across boundaries both real and imagined is revealing. We embark on a circuitous voyage through time, geography, and the power of imagination. The setting is a hall of mirrors. It would be inappropriate and misleading to assume that what is currently and commonly meant by use of the word “magic” is consistent with what the word (in English or in any language) meant centuries or millennia ago. Words have lives of their own, hence the study of semantics and semiotics, sense and sensibility. Any word, particularly one of such rich heritage, is bound to change over time and across cultural contexts. The word magic is apparently of Persian origin, and is closely related to magus, which refers to a member of the ancient priestly class in Persia; religion is thus permanently conflated with magic through etymology. Similarly, “religion” is a fairly ambiguous term, derived from the Latin religio, that implies binding or connection, but of what to what is unclear. Those familiar with ethnological research will immediately recall the prevalence of “binding spells” in cultures worldwide. Magic or religion? What are the criteria? In both forms of practice, the efficacious word is essential. That is, the word brings into being that which it names. The Bible begins by acknowledging the power of the speech act: God creates the world by saying, “Let there be light,” and there was. Incantation, mantra, chanting, and the like have characterized and dominated ritual performance throughout the history of religions. How do we reliably and consistently differentiate these practices from magicians’ magical words? Abracadabra is a word derived from a Kabbalistic formula, probably in reference to the ancient god Abraxos, its true significance shrouded in the cumulative mysteries of time and space. It is now a magician’s word, delivered with a wink and an exaggerated flourish. But like much of stage magic, its roots lie in religion. Can it be that if the performer states that the practice is religion, it is perceived as such, and if the practice is identified as magic, it becomes magic? In the beginning was the word: a self-fulfilling prophecy, if ever there was one. Yet, with a frenzied dualism that is itself a thing of wonder, Western scholars, philosophers, and theologians have flaunted their rejection of all things magical in a way that recalls a contemporary magical incantation: “now you see it, now you don’t.” As Jacob Neusner, prolific, controversial, and creative scholar, and coeditor of Religion, Science and Magic: In Concert and In Conflict (1992), observed, “a convention of the history

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of religion in the West, well-established in a variety of studies, is that one group’s holy man is another group’s magician: ‘what I do is a miracle, but what you do is magic’ ” (4–5). And certainly there are gender issues aplenty in this bubbling cauldron: in the struggle for religious authority that continues to characterize religious politics, it has most often been women who have been targeted as witches for engaging in practices that either predated or coexisted with patriarchal monotheisms. As Naomi Janowitz, a scholar of religions in late antiquity, has shown in Magic in the Roman World (2001), “what is called ‘magic’ is sometimes the carrying on of older religious rituals in the face of social and theological changes” (94). Where there is no concrete evidence of prior religious formulations, it may be that women were practicing alternate or parallel systems of belief and ritual, as is so often the case. The more male-dominated institutions of religion insisted upon monolithic canons of theology, the more alternatives proliferated, and so the one became many, as in so many magic tricks we know. The association of women with chthonic powers is present in rabbinic sources that combine biblical references with the influence of Greek and Roman attitudes (93). And those chthonic powers were (and are) characterized by official and authoritative sources as oppositional by their very nature; that is, they are magical, not religious. Randall Styers, a scholar of religion and culture, in Making Magic (2004), explores the ways in which magic has been characterized as “anti-religious,” by a succession of sociologists/anthropologists such as Mauss, Herbert, and Durkheim (88) on the basis of the style and location of its practices; while religion is solemn and public, magic is secretive, furtive, mysterious. Magic has been accused of arrogance, as opposed to religion’s submissiveness (162). Malinowski argued that religion remains fluid and accessible, while magic becomes rigid and centralized (195). Religion is transcendent, while magic is worldly (222). But given the comparative study of religions across cultures and time, it could be successfully argued that those descriptors could be reversed and still be perfectly viable. In The End of Magic (1997), Ariel Glucklich, a scholar of the anthropology and psychology of religion, states that religious ritual is public, and engages the public body, whereas magical ritual is “private and intimate” (114) but later states that “Anyone who looks for clear and fixed criteria for separating magic from religion in the words and actions of the participants is likely to become confused” (225). No doubt! Given the extraordinary diversity of religious practices across cultures, it is not difficult to reverse those binaries entirely, Abracadabra, just like that.

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BORDER DISPUTES: EUROPEAN CHRISTIANITY AND THE HERETICAL “OTHER” Ironically, but not surprisingly, the more religions have attempted to demonize those practices they have classified as magic, the more they have empowered those same practices, acknowledging and affirming through denial that which threatened their own sense of coherence and superiority. Like a magical chest of drawers, the moment one is closed, another opens, and so it has been with efforts to make magic disappear. Rather than receding, it advances. This attempt began early, as testified by Hebrew Scripture, which attacks practices attributed to sorcery. Simon During, an expert in English and Cultural Studies, treats this matter at length in his comprehensive work Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Logic of Secular Magic (2002). As he observes, Early Christianity, as early as Augustine, took up the cause with alacrity (3). It became common to portray as pagan any activity not sanctioned by the Church, although it was damnably difficult to distinguish Christian forms of ritual practice, such as necromancy, from the essentially identical practices of others. The use of various forms of magic was so common in Medieval Europe that Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) characterized the population as “Christians only in name, pagan in fact” (8). Theologians increasingly characterized magical acts as sinful, heretical, and their practitioners as diabolical, setting the stage for the carnage of the witch trials after the fifteenth century, and other related forms of violent suppression. In performance magic, this move is known as misdirection. The audience is encouraged to look elsewhere while the actual magic is taking place before them. Oxford scholar Keith Thomas’s exhaustive history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English folk beliefs, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), details the dramatic shift in attitudes toward magic from the medieval church through the Reformation. This volume, now over thirty years old, contains both language and theory now considered dated, but his detailed analysis is still compelling: it is a classic scholarly study to which current scholarship often responds. Thomas acknowledges that popular practice often exhibited a penchant for prevarication when confronted with official church edicts addressing acceptable forms of healing, divination, and the manipulation or influence of people, objects, substances, and events. It is clear from his research that the medieval church was dominated by magical beliefs, practices, and the attribution of supernatural powers to both persons and artifacts. Reformation theology attempted to distinguish itself formally and to the greatest extent possible from the popular

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and ubiquitous manifestations of magical thinking, relegating all power to the Christian deity and distancing clergy from any association with transformative powers of any sort. Thomas’s obvious uneasiness regarding the distinction between religion and magic is a testament to the thorniness of the issue, not only in the historical period he documents, but also in the 1960s and 1970s, when he conducted his research, and currently. If it were possible to establish magic as inferior to religion by firmly established criteria, as many church theologians attempted to do, the tension would be resolvable. But each attempt to accomplish this goal seems fated to flounder in an atmosphere of smoke and mirrors. Thomas endeavors to draw the boundary by wondering whether or not magic offered, or can offer, a comprehensive worldview that might equal religion’s. But this is one of the places where his distress is most apparent, and most conflicted (cf. 761–766 and the entire concluding chapter, 767–800). The evidence is inherently self-contradictory. While endeavoring to attribute the decline of magic to a combination of Anglican, sociological, economic, intellectual, and technological innovation, Thomas is forced to conclude that these influences actually antedated, at least in popular experience, the shift in worldview that seemed to have relegated magic to the hinterlands of belief and behavior. Increased control over one’s environment as a result of scientific advances, and improved living conditions, may have made resorting to magic less necessary and less attractive, and “the spirit of practical self-help” (789) certainly contributed to decreased reliance on the magician’s stock in trade, but these factors alone cannot account for the shift in attitude Thomas wants to highlight. The theory that magic was an essentially agrarian exercise is easily disproved, as he readily observes (795). And finally, Thomas admits, it is not altogether apparent that magic has, in fact, actually declined: perhaps it has only, to use a very recent descriptor, “morphed.” He quotes Jacob Burckhardt to the effect that religion in the nineteenth century was “rationalism for the few and magic for the many” (798). And in the twentieth century “it is hard to say where ‘science’ stops and ‘magic’ begins” (800). In a way, like a magician’s own lengthy sourcebook of practical and esoteric knowledge, Thomas’ historical tourde-force raises more questions than it can ultimately resolve. It returns us to semiotics, semantics, the simultaneously edifying and mystifying power of language. While the power of the written and spoken word has been essential to both magic and religious ritual, the territory where words are embodied in images, and in performances, is an even more hotly contested arena. Like most border disputes, this one evokes deeply entrenched and passionate

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responses. To make visible what is ordinarily invisible, and to make what is visible disappear, is, after all, a magician’s most ubiquitous skill. “Now you see it, now you don’t.” Just so, religious specialists attempt to make real and tangible that which is, in Western theological circles, invisible and without any physical properties whatsoever. Prejudice against images is most clearly manifest historically in Western cultures, where religious prejudice (“thou shalt worship no image”) against the use of iconography has skewed the power of the visual realm, despite the prodigious use of same in much of Christianity’s own cultural heritage. “Image,” after all, is the etymological root of “imagination”; that is to say, we imagine in images (although not exclusively, to be sure). The observation that both religion and magic rely heavily on the power of imagination is, while dangerous, undeniable. The practitioner of magic relies on the imagination to create and artfully perform the impossible: if it cannot be imagined, it cannot occur; if it is not believed to be impossible, it is not. Western theological traditions, not to be outdone, expect faith and devotion to that which is unseen, and ultimately (and necessarily) beyond concrete proof. This form of belief requires a formidable leap of imagination, much more so than “making believe” in an illusion based on skill. At the root of the tension between these two related forms of practice in the West, therefore, lies the suspicion that the greater illusion—belief without proof—is institutionalized in religion. The more the tools of one resemble the tools of the other, the higher the tension and the more extreme the animosity. The use of iconography (not to mention choreography) in ritual has been a border issue since Moses descended from Sinai and observed his people dancing around a golden calf. During the Reformation, Roman Catholic ritual was itself attacked for its similarities to magic, and the Protestant preference for language over imagery “as a vehicle for spiritual communication” (During 9) reflected the knowledge that magical practices were image-oriented. Like ritual, magic gives primacy to the use of iconography, to the visual and embodied experience, to the performative act. The more hostile Protestant Christianity became toward these practices, the more they demonized both the acts and the actors. “True religion” in the Protestant mold, influenced by Enlightenment theories of mind, emphasized the internal realm of belief and ideation as opposed to the external sphere of ritual action (Styers 5). So entrenched and pervasive was this sensibility that to this day, Western scholarship struggles to address, both fairly and meaningfully, the centrality of ritual to religion in the vast majority of its manifestations worldwide. The use of ritual objects, ceremonial dress, movement, and gesture in ritual all combine to create a highly visual experience, an

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easy target for those who reject imagery as potentially transformative. Those visual and performative qualities that cast a shadow over ritual cast a veritable shroud over the closely related performance of magic. Magic became “a foil for religion” (6) on the stage of popular culture as well as on the stage of academic analysis. As magic and its practitioners were increasingly vilified and persecuted, other (and older) patterns of political and social influence became easier to discern, along with increasingly pressing economic concerns. Those targeted as dangerously magical by the established organs of religious and worldly power were typically the disempowered and marginalized members of the population. Gender was an important factor, as were religious affiliation and national, racial, or ethnic origin. Simon During states that “a patina of racism intruded into the blackness of ‘black magic’ ” (10); previously it was generally associated with magic that worked against the common good, or at least engaged in unacceptable behaviors and outcomes. And to make it worse, Randall Styers asserts “there has been widespread scholarly consensus that magic is ‘the bastard sister of religion.’ Magic has been configured as the illegitimate and effeminized sibling . . .” (Styers 6, quoting E. Bolaji Idowi, African Traditional Religion). White colonialists utilized this oppositional stance to justify its domination of cultures around the globe, arguing that those who practiced magic required the civilizing influence Christian Europe could provide. The use and celebration of iconography and ritual, the visual and performative essence of religions in the non-Protestant world, once they were labeled as magic, served as an ideological support for intrusions, conversions, and insidious domination globally by the sixteenth century. The attribution of female character and magical spirituality to those disenfranchised by these acts provided the seal on the indictment. As Styers observes, “religion is transcendent, metaphysical, ultimate, immaterial; magic is immanent, mundane, willful—and preoccupied with material effects. In this coding religion is a decidedly masculine province, while magic is the realm of women (and sexually suspect men)” (118).

GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND THE SHAMAN’S SHADOW Women were targeted as suspect practitioners early in the Reformation, and it was overwhelmingly women who were the victims of the witch hunters. In a rare instance of bipartisan consensus, “Protestants . . . concurred with Catholics that women were particularly prone to witchcraft. For

204 Susan L. Schwartz example, Luther argued that women were distinctly susceptible to magic and superstition because it was their nature to be timid and fearful” (Styers 36). The fact that to engage in those practices identified as witchcraft at this time, such as midwifery and herbal healing, would have required uncommon bravery, resourcefulness, and conviction seems not to have occurred to these stalwarts of male dominance. The same attitudes prevailed once ethnology began in earnest, during the late nineteenth century. The influential early anthropologists such as Tyler, Frazer, Mauss, and Hubert easily conflated their perception of gender discrimination among the “natives” with their own ambivalence: “women are viewed as particularly prone to magic, not so much because of their physical characteristics as because of the social attitudes and responses those characteristics elicit.” Women are seen as “the font of mysterious activities, the sources of magical power”; since women are largely excluded from most religious cults, “the only practices left to them on their own initiative are magical ones” (205). This sort of analysis was based primarily on speculation, although it at least has the virtue of incorporating sociological factors as significant. But women’s forms of religious practice have been largely inaccessible to scholarship until very recently. In most cultures, there is a gender divide in religion, and only after women gained entrance to the academy and were able to conduct field research have we had reliable data regarding female forms of belief and practice. Such practices are normally kept secret from men, particularly men from outsider cultures, who would rarely be granted permission to interview women at all. Currently, there is an unprecedented volume of research in this area, much of it excellent and compelling in terms of the history of religions and the attribution of official religious authority along gender lines. The implication that men have always practiced religion whereas women have practiced magic betrays a gender bias of embarrassing proportions. Even among performing magicians, authority overwhelmingly resides with men, and the supporting roles are assigned to the feminine or effeminate other. Current fascination with forms of magic and the occult still observes a gender divide. Forms of “magick” convocations and ritual observances in the West proliferate among women, whereas stage magic remains primarily the provenance of men, however many female assistants they may employ, and however decisive those assistants may be in making the performance “work.” Computer and trading card games that invoke magic as their inspiration also dwell primarily in the male realm. Ancient and modern imagery and the practice of various forms of “blood magic,” however, challenge the gender divide with remarkable success. The mysterious powers of a woman’s blood, particularly the blood associated

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with menstruation and childbirth, are commonly among the highlighted features of religious texts and ritual practices across cultures, and men have viewed them as powerfully taboo as far back as sources allow us to peer. The embodied and feminine qualities of magical practice also carry a tangibly sexual, erotic undertone. One of the most common uses of spells and enchantments over time, in addition to healing, has been to influence fertility, attraction, seduction. Religion or magic? Gender, sexuality, and agency have been integral parts of this debate from its beginning. The difficulty of identifying and properly classifying the performer of magic and ritual is formidable to this day, by design. Where mysterious power resides, ambivalence also dwells, and so an air of androgyny is often cultivated. Religious specialists come in many forms: priests, prophets, saviors, mystics, shamans, and others populate the narratives of Western traditions, and their distinguishing characteristics often overlap. These are charismatic, but also mysterious and powerful figures, some beloved, some abhorred, often both, depending on the political and religious climate. The fact that women practitioners have been denied the official recognition that has been granted to men has certainly influenced our cultural perception that there may be many witches but men are the ultimate sorcerers (just as women do most of the cooking but men are the best chefs). The figure of the sorcerer may have the most in common with the shaman, a shadowy figure whose name derives from the Tungus tribe of Siberia. The specific characteristics of shamans that are relevant here are related to healing, the area of concern that has been primary for most of human history. Shamans are traditionally those who are somehow empowered and able to pursue extraordinary practices in the interest of healing the sick and guiding the souls of the dead to whatever afterlife may exist in a given culture, that is, to serve as a psychopomp or guide of souls. To have access to the power of life and death is to be closely associated with divinity and the ultimate forces of the universe. Thus, the shaman is an essential religious specialist, if not the quintessential one. The shaman is a fascinating character, often “called” to this practice as a result of serious illness or abnormal physical/psychological characteristics. Thus s/he is “the wounded healer,” who must suffer in extremis before acquiring the knowledge and tools to apply to others. Often feared as well as respected, they have also often served as the cultural repository for their group or tribe. Because the recitation of etiological narratives were usually part of the healing process, the shaman would have the knowledge of the lineage of the group members and their social dynamics, the origins of illnesses, the sources of power, and even the processes by which the vital

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elements of the biological and psychological realities interact in that society, in order to weave these factors into incantations and recitations that had efficacious power. The reputation in some quarters of the shaman as lunatic is misleading, as Morton Klass has observed (“What Kind of Shaman Would You Want?” in Klass 72–78), for such a figure would by definition have to be both extremely intelligent and physically adept. She or he might also be, by local definition, mad; “lunatic” literally signifies moon madness, and this reference would not be lost on the shaman, who would utilize the purported powers of the night sky. The tools of the shamanic trade might be deceptively simple, such as drums, or extensive and mysterious instruments of healing and transformative power, including words, spells, and narratives, that is, speech acts. The use and manipulation of symbolic items of meaning to the society would be common. The misuse of both power and tools is reported in much of the literature and scholarship, as is a healthy dose of skepticism on the part of participants and practitioners alike. The distinction between a trick that works and a miracle is one made mostly in retrospect. The appearance of efficacious acts is often as powerful as their occurrence. All religious specialists are aware of this psychological reality, which echoes the placebo effect. The gender of shamans is also of essential interest, since they were often of ambivalent sexuality. Just as “the dominant scholarly theories of magic echo and reinforce the rhetoric of various modes of deviance, most notably the rhetoric of sexual nonconformity” (Styers 16), shamans were often characterized as bi- or homosexual, thus combining the powers inherent in the female with those of the male. Traits that might be judged as threatening or nonconformist in the mainstream are viewed as desirable and empowering in this case. Carleton Coon calls shamanism “the oldest profession” (quoted in Styers 190). In this respect, it may appear to be vying with prostitution for a dubious honor. But perhaps it is not an accident that magicians and promiscuous sexuality are prominent features of Las Vegas! Randall Styers has written that “perverse sexuality has remained a persistent marker of magic,” and that “magic is constructed as incorrigibly queer” (183). Perceptions of what is perverse vary wildly from culture to culture and time to time, but in the Christian-dominated West, as we know, ambivalent sexuality and homosexuality remain highly charged religious, political, and social issues. The feminization of magic and the male magician echoes and reflects the image of the shaman, despite the fact that in many cultures shamans actually may be women, as has been true in Korea, for example. On the one hand, to be “feminized” implies disempowerment, but on another (and this one is positioned behind the back), the darker, hidden, and fertile associations

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of the feminine are quite appropriately cast in this case. As is true in the specific case of the shaman, then, the magician may paradoxically be empowered by appearing to blur the distinction between masculine and feminine. Socially problematic sexuality appears to be attributable to both the religious and magical arts, and may, in fact, be understood to enhance the ability of the performer. The extent to which the artful performance of impossible events begins in the dressing room may be a remnant of the ancient religious use of costume and especially masking to enable multiple identities to surface across gender and other boundaries. To translate into physical appearance that which is characterized as “irrational” by common consensus, that is, the ability to work wonders, has often required the choice to problematize or transcend gender identity. In some contexts such sartorial ambivalence may be a vocational prerequisite for both shamans and magicians. When one’s performance defies logic, one’s appearance participates in the effort. Of course the ongoing battle over rationality has left an enormous gray area in which both sorts of practitioners may be seen to flourish.

REASON, LOGIC, AND THE ILLUSIONS OF CONTROL The Age of Reason and the resulting scientific and technological transformation of Western European and North American societies has both shifted and magnified the perceived tension between religion and magic. The newer dualities used to characterize that tension include rationality (a male trait) as opposed to the irrational (inevitably female), supernatural versus natural, “real” as opposed to “illusion.” Protestant Christianity’s emphasis on ideation and faith morphed into an intellectualism that claimed to support its theology and science simultaneously, while discrediting magic still further, a fairly impressive achievement of mental prestidigitation. David Hume, in the eighteenth century, published an “Essay on Miracles” that made the remarkable assertion that “on the balance of probabilities, no miracle (including those on which Christianity is founded) can rationally be considered to have happened. In a word, miracles are illusions” (During 96). Such a statement would be at least as controversial in twenty-firstcentury North America as it was in its own time. What we are willing and able to believe, in terms of magic and religion, what we call it, and where we locate it, serve as indicators of our considerable ambivalence. The greatly abbreviated history provided earlier makes clear a number of observable characteristics and features of religion’s struggle with magic in the

208 Susan L. Schwartz West. For example, it was crucially important for those who sought to use the practices associated with magic in the public sphere, as entertainment, to distance themselves from any appearance of similarity with acknowledged and legitimate forms of religious practice. The stage magician and his many allies in venues of assorted location have had to perform an amazing trick: offering the appearance and technique of a religious specialist while denying any religious content in his performance. But again, this is an illusion: magic, in most if not all of its forms, is a blood relative of religious ritual, sharing its impetus, its goals, its purposes. To influence directly the events, influences, and outcomes of human life, to participate emotionally and physically in those factors, to experience a transformative event that both reinforces and enhances a sense of wonder: all of these goals are addressed by these acts, and they are essentially religious in nature. To perform in such a way so as to enable a synaesthesia of the senses, where boundaries between the physical, the psychological, the ordinary, and the extraordinary (however these are defined in a specific cultural context) become truly porous: these are the definitive characteristics of both magic and religion. The modern Western stage magician is, then, intentionally or not, the shadow form of the religious specialist. The carefully designed and draped costume and makeup, the exaggerated and carefully choreographed gestures, the use of implements of power, the manipulation of the senses and perception, the intonation of efficacious words, all mimic what religious practitioners have acknowledged through time to be the real show of shows, transformative ritual by a spiritual master. The underlying assumption is that there is power behind the scenes; whose power, and how accessible to influence it may be, depends on the context. Whether that power is of this world or of some other, the one who has access to it is the specialist, magician or shaman, priest or prophet. In magic, as in religion, agency is a decisive factor; who is qualified? Who is prepared? How is mastery achieved and transmitted? Does the performer channel power from a deity, from spirits, from primeval forces, from a previous master? Does the power reside in the performer or the performance? What factors determine who the source is and who the agent? Might this question itself address the issue of whether any specific example is religion or magic? Scholars and practitioners are characteristically evasive on this issue: for the former, there seems no objective way to respond, and for the latter, these are secrets not to be divulged. The infinite number of ways in which magic is used in our culture indicates continuing fascination. Indeed, it would seem that magic is omnipresent in our so-called scientific age. The paradox is replete with irony. What is real, what is not, and what is extraordinary and possible are

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contested territories of the mind and heart. Western theological sensibility insists on historical truth, that events flow in an orderly procession designed and overseen by a deity whose actions in time and space may be defined and supported by fact. “God does not play dice with the universe,” said Albert Einstein; scientific determinism eliminates the relevancy of ludic activity and divinatory prognostication from the divine realm, Stephen Hawking notwithstanding. But they are clearly not irrelevant in the human realm.

PERFORMING THE MAGIC/RELIGION SYZYGY: HOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND An amusement park crowded with families indulging in sweets, rides, and concessions unfolds on the screen. A child who wishes to be a grown-up finds his wish granted in a perfect example of the old adage “be careful what you wish for.” Somehow, magically, he becomes physically the man he will be, and must confront, psychologically, all that such a transformation entails. In 1988 the film Big presented this scenario. In all the twists and turns of the plotline and the amusing scenes it produces, the catalyst may be easily overlooked. The means of the transformation is an arcade game called Zoltar, and inside its window sits a dark-skinned, turbaned mannequin that moves only its mouth, and that the main character, Josh, later refers to as some “kind of a devil.” Slow to respond at first, when kicked it jerks into action, and when fed a coin, it grants the wish as a card emerges from the bottom of the mechanism. Only afterward does Josh realize the machine is not plugged in. And only when he wakes in the morning and sees himself in the mirror does he realize that somehow, overnight, he has become his adult self. As in the hall of mirrors in many an amusement park or circus, his reflection seems a trick of light or lens. He is awkward and lost in this new body, which both is and is not him. The child masquerades as an adult, discovers his sexuality, and his insecurity. He is possessed of a particular innocence that preserves his lack of artifice, but leads his female coworker to observe that he is “a grown-up.” Those qualities that in religion and myth are attributed to the archetype of the divine child, or the idiot savant, are present here but are sublimated to further the comic agenda of the film. At the end of Josh’s story, when he makes the decision to return to his child’s body, the man–child must unplug the mechanism before it will work again and restore him to his adolescent self. The image of the magician in Big is stereotypical, and conjures associations of exotic mystery. Here, in a secular New York, the magic takes place

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without any reference to religion, or to the history of the name (and the actual arcade game) Zoltar, and without any gloss of the image. We might imagine that when plugged-in, the magic would not work, a comment, perhaps, on our scientific, electronic mindset: must we unplug in order to be spellbound? Within the fiction of this film, real magic is possible, but never explained; it is associated with the mysterious East, and not with contemporary, secular life. It is believable, but only because it is not true. Big does, however, provide us with a useful example of a radically split persona, the child and the adult. The real Josh, borderline adolescent, is trapped in an adult body. He is lost, seduced on the one hand by the powers of adulthood and its accompanying independence and sexuality, but thrust out of the paradise of childhood, the comforts of family and home. The child is pure but frustrated with longing. Magic offers both transmutation and access to mystery. Childhood offers safety and connection, authority figures, and rules of control. When Josh sees himself in the mirror that first morning, he is terrified by this new image of himself. That the child and the man always inhabit the same body is a psychological insight that echoes through this film. That magic offers a dangerous and seductive alternative to the familiarity of inherited worldviews that might have been its subtext. But this magician is safely enclosed in a box, on the margins of the fair, and the magic is abandoned with him. The mirror self, while attractive and liberating, holds no long-term attraction. This, however, is not usually the case. In the West, the relationship of the stage magician to the religious specialist is identical with the relationship of magic to religion in this part of the world. That relationship is itself quite magical. In fact, it embodies a relationship known to magicians and purveyors of both the exotic and the occult: the doppelganger. A common device in German romantic and fantasy literature, the doppelganger approximates a phenomenon familiar from ethnology and anthropology as well as world folktales, and has been a favorite showpiece for illusionists. A wraith, or spirit, identical in appearance to a particular person, appears suddenly visible to that person and often to others. It is, perhaps, a shadow self, an alternate self, one’s astrally projected soul. Superstition suggests it may appear just as one dies, but it has other roles to play as well. The doppelganger delights in confounding and frightening its double, and may cause trouble by behaving in inappropriate and dangerous ways that will incur disaster. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are an excellent example, for even though only one body is involved, the distinct identities achieve the same effect. In many contexts, this is a horror scenario, with deathly implications.

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The mirror image, the doppelganger, the shadow or the ghost: these are figures that have emerged as essential to this topic, as indeed they are ubiquitous in our fantasy. If religion and magic mirror one another, it is important to remember that mirror images are reversed, and often distorted, as many religious and ethnic traditions have noticed with wonder and concern. A short list of mirror works provides a taste of our continuing fascination. To step through the looking glass is to enter a realm of opposites, where the eyes are easily deceived and what is normally not seen may appear, as Alice discovered (1865, Lewis Carroll). That magicians are said to achieve their effects with “smoke and mirrors” is no casual reference. In the Greek myth, Narcissus innocently fell in love with his own reflection in the water and was therefore doomed by the nymph Echo, who loved him, and who embodies the aural equivalent of a double. Medusa, too, was doomed to turn to stone upon beholding her mirror image. The Tales of Hoffman, an opera by Jacques Offenbach (1881) based on the literary fantasies of E. T. A. Hoffmann, and a film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (1951), features a magician Dapertutto, who captures the souls of his victims by removing their reflection, a theme quite familiar to us through many sources, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1890) manages through magic to project his own decay onto his double, but through it is finally brought to death. Peter Pan loses his shadow and finds his muse (J. M. Barrie, 1904). Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (1950) offers a modernization of the Greek myth of Orpheus, imaging the poet’s entrance into the Infernal Domain through a mirror. By implication, through the mirror lies the essence that survives after death, that is, the soul. From Disney’s Snow White (1938) to Harry Potter (J. K. Rowling, 1998–2007), the image inside the mirror is always somehow more, or disturbingly less, than what is outside. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (1998), published first in the United Kingdom as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in a reference to alchemy, another of religion’s suspect reflections, features a significant mirror for our purposes. The magical Mirror of Erised, which images “the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts,” offers the embodiment of desire. And if that desire is what defines the essence of the original, what one sees is what is most essential to one’s being. Reversed, its name is precisely that, desire. If the act of mirroring reveals the heart and soul, and religion and magic are positioned on either side, it is difficult to ascertain not only which is the original, and which the actual thing-in-itself, but also which is the object of the most desire. To address the deepest longing and portray it as embodied in the image is to approach revelation. Rowling’s example would imply that if religion

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desires to be magic, and magic, religion, each is already its own reflection. This implication underlies the volatile and vociferous rejection of the Harry Potter series by religious groups; the tension between religion and magic in Western theological tradition is still alive and well. What is “inside” and what is “outside” the mirror world is as contested as the boundary itself. And in The Matrix (1999), the beleaguered programmer Thomas Anderson finds that his through-the-mirror self is much more interesting; he is, in fact, “The One,” a quite unambiguous religious reference. The powers he inherently possesses are only accessible on the other side of the mirror, once he has died in the Matrix and been reborn in Reality. For what he thought was real was an illusion, and what had seemed an illusion is real. It is not irrelevant in this respect that the machines who constructed the Matrix discovered that their first effort, an “ideal” world, was not acceptable to the humans, who seemed to require darkness and shadow. Film itself is an optical illusion; filmmakers compound the illusion with their filming techniques and special effects. In 2006, two major motion pictures attempted to capture both the mystery and the paradox of magic. They do, in fact, mirror each other. Both wrangle with the conundrums of this essay: the use of the mirrors, the doppelganger, mirror image or double, the tension between “real magic,” and the simply extraordinary, the boundaries of belief and doubt, magic and religion, science and faith, and the limits of what an audience is willing to accept as possible and miraculous, particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but in the twenty-first as well. The Ilusionist is based on a short story by Steven Millhauser, “Eisenheim The Illusionist,” published in 1990, and set in Vienna. In Milhauser’s story, there is no love interest, only the magician, the increasingly melancholic son of a Jewish cabinetmaker, a haunted persona whose final act of illusion is to disappear from the world entirely, foreshadowing the fate of the Jewish community in Vienna in the decades to follow. The prophetic overtones are hard to miss. In Neil Burger’s film version, Eisenheim manages to produce life out of apparent death; his feats are described as “diabolical,” that is, challenging to current theology to such an extent that they imply a power rival to that of God. In his first performance, he is introduced as a man who has “unlocked the mysteries” of “the forces of the universe”: “life and death, space and time, fate and chance.” The gauntlet is thrown down in that moment. The illusion in which he is first reunited with his longtime love, Sophie (Sophia, Greek for wisdom), is framed as a search for eternal life, and the immortality of the soul (Psyche, in Greek, a word that also means butterfly, a connection apparent in the film). Sophie is mesmerized, cloaked in a

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red robe, and placed before a mirror image. Her double, the mirror image, is seen to be murdered with a sword. From the body a light emanates, escapes the mirror, hovers, and dissipates. The scene sets up the viewer for the film’s ultimate illusion, her staged death at the hands of Crown Prince Leopold, and her resurrection away from the Vienna, to be joined by the illusionist in a triumph of magical deception over worldly power. The prince, a skeptic, describes Eisenheim ironically to his audience as “a wizard who has sold his soul to the devil” in order to obtain supernatural powers. The illusionist admits to having traveled for fifteen years in search of a “real mystery.” But the only one he had truly found was the undying love he held for Sophie. Eisenheim’s illusions owe not a little to the new technologies of the period, particularly the use of light and film, and the cinematography alludes to this with its artful use of effects. Science becomes the magician’s ally in his bid to challenge standard religious belief, a corrupt political dynasty, and the common sense mentality of his place and time. After Sophie apparently succumbs to death, Eisenheim changes the nature of his shows. He appears able to conjure spirits, ghosts, the dead. They materialize in his theater and speak briefly, mysteriously. The audiences believe he is performing the ultimate act of conjuring, bringing back the dead, including Sophie. There is a brief scene in which a spiritualist announces that Eisenheim has provided “hard proof of the soul’s immortality,” a reaffirmation of the spirit in the face of science, opining that the population of the country will, as a result, return to “moral earnestness” and become a “spiritual republic.” The powers that be, however, see this impassioned response and the act itself as politically threatening, and Chief Inspector Uhl, under pressure from the prince, determines to arrest him. But the magician has himself become insubstantial, and his essence disintegrates just as his stage ghosts have done. Eisenheim has manipulated the endgame and its players to full advantage. Presto, the game is his. The trick is revealed to Uhl alone, and to the viewer through the lens of his culminating insight. Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige is adapted from a novel by the same name by Christopher Priest, published in 1995, set in late-nineteenthcentury London. Priest’s novel is a dark, almost Gothic piece, and while the film version retains some of its disturbing tone, it alters the story considerably, all to our benefit here. Two magicians, obsessed with each other’s lives and illusions, struggle to master life and death, the confines of material reality, the ultimate essence of the body’s trap, its insurmountable finitude. As is true in The Illusionist, it is science and technology, in the person of Nikola Tesla, that is the real magician here. In real life, he was called a “mad

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scientist,” and his legendary competition with and dismissal by Thomas Edison is part of the subplot. In the conceit of this story, Tesla invents for Angier a machine that creates duplicates of its subject, the magician, who must kill himself each time the trick is performed in order to maintain the illusion that he is one. The character of Tesla advises its destruction, for as he says “the truly extraordinary” is not welcome in science, and perhaps it will have more success in the art of magic, where mystification is expected. But he cautions Angier that “such a thing will only bring you misery.” The results of its use, both in the novel and in the film, are certainly alarming. It might accurately be described as an infernal creation. Both Borden and Angier have multiple selves—Borden his identical twin, and Angier the doubles generated by Tesla’s machine. The Illusionist toys with our perception of reality but finds resolution in liberation and love: it concludes that the truth can set us free. The Prestige, on the other hand, offers death and shadow; there is no resolution here. Does Tesla’s machine produce clones? Homunculi? Are their deaths murder or suicide? Does the ability to replicate life, to produce a clone, challenge our underlying theological position? Clearly, for many, it does. The sanctity of life, as well as the belief in individual uniqueness, are inherently part of Western religious sensibility. Both of these films question fundamental positions dictated by religious teaching. They rest uneasily on two sides of a mirror. On one side resides challenge, obfuscation, death, but ultimately, resolution. On the other are challenge, death, dissolution, and darkness. As Borden repeatedly asks, are we watching closely? The fictional works that inspired both of these films were written in the last decade of the twentieth century, with their action located in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Western Europe, a time when rapid advances in technology were challenging not only the fundamental assumptions of imbedded theologies but the boundaries of human imagination and the nature of reality. Where did God’s purview end and science begin? What would be the impact of secularism, a by-product of science, on long-cherished foundations of the common worldview grounded in religion? We are still dealing with this tension today, and the resolution is no less problematic, as the release of these two films within the same year makes clear. Where does the magician belong in this minefield? If he can apparently duplicate the creation of life and challenge death, is he not setting himself up in opposition to God? In the either–or mentality of that time and ours, to challenge the authority of the divine in this way is to set up an irresolvable opposition. The magician must be diabolical if his ability is seen to rival the deity’s. So it is that Eisenheim, Borden, and Angier are perceived as consorting

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with the “dark powers.” All three cash in on this conundrum, but some pay a steep price for what is perceived as a bargain with the devil. The infernal powers mirror (and therefore reverse) the divine ones. These films may be read, therefore, as moralizing, cautionary tales from the Western perspective. Life becomes death, death becomes life, and individual identity is lost in a maze of multiple personalities. But there are other options, other mirrors, other lenses. Optical illusions are multifaceted, refracted through perception and experience. Death, afterlife, rebirth, and transformation are the purview of religion as well as magic; the two reflect each other in the many mirrors, doubles, and shadows that line this corridor. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” In I Corinthians 13:11–13 of the biblical text, Paul states: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things, for now we see though a glass, darkly . . .” It is a passage that may be interpreted in multiple ways. In the ongoing ambivalence between religion and magic, the analogy with the mirror is potent. In the context of this essay one could observe that the pull of the glass is invariably strong and compelling, but who can say on which side the darkness is deeper, on which the light more revealing? In art and in film, the play of darkness and light and the artful use of shadow are known as chiaroscuro. We may apply the term as a metaphor to the special effects, both visual and linguistic, that both magicians and religious specialists have always used with panache. In our culture, magic has been relegated to children and women, along with folktales and other suspect vestiges of our shadowy past, neutralized and deprived of real power. It may be found in the darkened womb of a movie theater. Or it is located in masculine Las Vegas, the adult playground where there is perpetual night and, along with other things to blush about, magic happens and then “stays here,” safely secret along with other disreputable behaviors, dominated by power brokers of the monetary sort. There it cohabits with the dark tools of the ancient diviners and inspired magicians: cards, dice, and the apparatus of illusion, as well as the dark and deeply sexual undertones it inevitably conjures. Religion, on the other hand, has been elevated in stature and influence in the social, political, and economic spheres, on a much larger scale than stage magic can hope to emulate. It remains inherently suspicious of implements, ritual performance, speech acts, and visual imagery not sanctified through official channels. And sexuality as well as gender issues remain problematic to its core. Religion’s power burns hot in the twenty-first century. But history has taught us that it can be a very dark force indeed. And so the questions that always haunt this doppelganger/mirroring effect remain compelling in

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the relationship of Western religions to magic: which is the original? On which side of the mirror does authenticity lie? Whose performance of the impossible event embodies truly meaningful and transformative experience? Could it be that, on reflection, it is precisely in this ambivalence that power really lies?

WORKS CITED Burger, Neil. Director, The Illusionist. Bull’s Eye Entertainment, 2006. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. New York: Signet Books, 2000. During, Simon. Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Glucklich, Ariel. The End of Magic. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Idowu, E. Bolaji. African Traditional Religion: A Definition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973. Janowitz, Naomi. Magic in the Roman World, Pagans, Jews and Christians. New York: Routledge, 2001. Klass, Morton. Ordered Universes. Boulder, CO: Westview P, 1995. Marshall, Penny. Director, Big. Twentieth Century Fox Films, 1988. Millhauser, Steven. The Barnum Museum. Champaign, IL:U of Illinois P, 1990. Neusner, Jacob, Frerichs, Ernest S., Flesher, and Paul Virgil McCracken, eds. Religion, Science and Magic: In Concert and In Conflict. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Nolan, Christopher. Director, The Prestige. Newmarket Productions, 2006. Siegel, Lee. The Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Styers, Randall. Making Magic. New York: American Academy of Religion/ Oxford UP, 2004. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Penguin Books, 1971. Wachowski, Andy, and Wachowski, Larry. Directors, The Matrix. Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures, 1999.

10. Illusions about Illusions Robert E. Neale

Robert E. Neale is a freelance writer and magician who previously taught for twentyfour years as Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author of numerous books and essays on magic, psychology, and religion, as well as a prolific creator of magic tricks. Neale’s cross-cultural chapter explores illusion-making, both in magical art and in everyday life. As a model for understanding illusions about illusions, he proposes “the monkey movement”: the ancient image of a monkey being both drawn toward an image in the water and reminded that the image is but a reflection. Neale suggests that the “monkey movement” between illusion and disillusion (and back again) is a familiar feature of human relationships with objects, people, ideas, ideals, and spirituality. Might it also serve as an aesthetic ideal for stage magicians?

I

am here to persuade you that magic runs rampant in our lives and that this is a good thing. We are all magicians–illusionists—who survive, take pleasure, and find meaning in life by means of the illusions we create. Therefore, I am a magician . . . and so are you. When I was a boy, I performed simple magic tricks. A favorite of mine was a large playing card with spots on it, like this. This side is a three. While this side is a four. And this other side is a one and this other side is a six. Three, four, one, six! I thought this magical gag very funny. It is a gag, but it can fool us only for a brief moment. See: this side has five spots; my fingers conceal the spot on the side and you assume that they are covering a blank area to make a four. Or they conceal the blank area and you assume that they are covering a spot to make six. On the other side are two spots, and by the same concealment, you assume that there are either three spots or one spot. The simple magic trick tickled me as a boy because I had been fooled by it and could fool people by it. I confess that it still tickles me. Yes, the stage magician deceives us. He does so by manipulating our illusory notion that things are simply as they seem to us. His or her deceptions

218 Robert E. Neale rely upon our self-deceptions. This trick with the card reminds me that we are performing magic in our daily lives by constantly creating illusions about what is there and not there. Magic tricks are illusions about illusions. So a professional magician is that highly specialized illusionist who reminds us that we are all illusionists. But we may well prefer the illusion that we are not magicians. The professional entertainer who knows this, does not suggest by means of his tricks “Look at me!”, but rather, “look at you.” We will explore this ambiguity by considering three things. First, and most importantly, what I label “the monkey movement.” This is the movement between creating illusion and destroying illusion, the passage from illusionment to disillusionment. It is the great dynamic by which the human animal lives. And those who can help us do it are magicians. So we will briefly explore two sets of magicians: the early religious magicians– clergy, and the modern stage magicians–entertainers.

THE MONKEY MOVEMENT: BETWEEN ILLUSION AND DISILLUSION We begin with monkey movement. The source of my understanding of this movement is not a concept or dogma, but an image. It is from an ancient Chinese painting. A copy of it used to hang on the wall of my college dormitory room. I saw the image every day while in school for two years, and I can still see it clearly. Since that time, I have discovered the theme of the image to be commonplace in Asia and have witnessed other versions of the image in painting, but the one with which I began is what remains for me to rely upon. Imagine the image of a monkey, a spider monkey with those very long arms and legs. At the top of the painting there is a branch of a tree. The monkey is hanging from it by means of one arm. At the bottom of the painting is water. The hanging monkey is looking down into the water and reaching with his free hand for an illusion, a reflection of the moon. That is the image, yet I cannot help but add motion to it. In the actual painting, the monkey is reaching for the illusory reflection of the moon in the water. In my eyes, this motion stops when the fingertips touch the water. This is a moment of shocked realization, of disillusionment. Then the hand is withdrawn. The hand may attend to other matters for a time. The eyes see the illusory reflection again. The hand is alerted, but holds back. It is not going to move. The hand relaxes and attends to other matters again. As before, the eyes see the reflection, the hand is alerted, and holds back again.

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This alternation between other matters and re-alerting continues at a higher and higher rate. Finally the monkey reaches out again for the reflection of the moon and touches the water: disillusion. So every time I see the image in my mind, the monkey is reaching for the reflection, but every time I also see that much has gone on in between the reaching. My image is of a movement between illusionment and disillusionment. All is “monkey movement.” Monkey movement can occur on many levels of behavior, in our interactions with objects, people, ideas, including that highest level of our monkey business—human spirituality. Ideally, spirituality is precisely this action, the perpetual movement between illusion and disillusion. The illusion is the religious perspective of ultimate meaning. The disillusion is common sense reality. I assume that the perpetual monkey movement back and forth between the illusion and disillusion is a natural and rewarding process for the human animal on all levels. But the rhythm and its sustaining results tend to be disrupted. Our habit is to get stuck in one segment of the movement or the other, in reaching for the reflection or in the refusal to reach. Indeed, we are likely not even to be aware of the possibility of the process. We assume a static condition rather than movement. No wonder. Whenever we are bandied back and forth like a shuttlecock between the two conditions we get dizzy. No movement at all is a kind of death through stagnation, but so also is such uncertain and awkward movement without rhythm. Our spirituality in either case is a despairing defensiveness. There is nothing wrong with a little rest. There are enjoyments in both perspectives—calm, security, and righteousness. But our rest tends to become defensive, a holding back from movement, a disavowal of movement, and finally, a forgetting of movement. As the illusioned, we work hard to believe and sustain our beliefs. In all that we do we are determined to convince ourselves and others that our religion is not a lie and that we are sincere. Or, as the disillusioned, we work hard to disbelieve and sustain our disbeliefs. All that we do is for the sake of convincing ourselves and others that religion is a lie and that religious beliefs are insincere. On both sides there is a blind defensiveness that sponsors systematic intolerance and violence. This can kill. And even if it does not, it is such hard work because standing still is not our nature. As either the illusioned or disillusioned we are constantly being teased and tempted. Life is always prompting us to both see and reflect on what we see. To return to our image of monkey movement: some of us end up letting go of the branch and diving into the water and drowning in meaning.

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Others end up hanging onto the branch with both hands and dying from thirst for meaning. Since one hand is enough for holding and the other enough for reaching, we could do better than either of these two options. Spirituality is a perpetual movement between illusion and disillusion. One implication of this understanding of our situation is this: truth lies in creating fiction. The pun about “lies” is intentional and I like it: truth lies in creating fiction. It has many meanings. One is that truth is found by creating fiction. Another is that truth deceives by creating fiction. Finding and deceiving are connected. If both assertions are valid, then we had better hang loose. So yet another meaning is that truth is a process, not an outcome of some sort. An appropriate slogan would be: the process is our most important product. Such a generalization would be anathema to those who have founded themselves in some specific illusion or disillusion. It would be anathema to those who are rendered dizzy by graceless to and fro between those conditions. The pun also means that we do not experience truth by passively seeing or listening to it, but by creative participation. We tend not to see ourselves as creative and so are missing the creativity that does occur in us and guides our lives beyond dizziness and awkwardness. So we will look for help from some early, indigenous magicians who were clergy and some present-day stage magicians who are entertainers.

THE EARLY MAGICIANS—CLERGY In many indigenous tribes and communities, the clergy and other religious leaders did tricks. Training the shaman, medicine man, or priest was long and intensive. There was much to be remembered of oral history and methods of healing, undergone in trance experiences, and mastered in performance of magic tricks. As ethnologists and anthropologists inform us about early practices and some that are prevalent even today, these clergy performed all of the basic tricks of magic.1 We are told that Native Americans produced objects from the bodies of sick clients, made a tent shake, and caused a replica of the sun to rise from a basket. They walked on fire, swallowed arrows, pierced their breasts with harpoons so that blood flowed forth (from a concealed animal bladder full of blood), and featured escapes. In one account, an Eskimo shaman made spirit flights while securely tied with rawhide. One shaman was observed to be bound with his neck secured to his knees and his hands tied behind his back. A pair of bearskin pants

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that were to serve as his flight wings were hung from the ceiling out of his reach. When the lamps were extinguished, winds and spirit noises appeared and the shaman’s voice seemed to come from afar. Upon his return to earth and the relighting of the lamps, the still bound shaman wore the pants on his arms (Weyer 437–438). A fine trick! One of the sort repeated by spiritualists across the continents and cultures. Such deception occurs for the sake of enlightenment as well as entertainment. The new location of the pants is a convincer that the spirit flight had really occurred and, more importantly, that the return of the shaman includes his having obtained new information that will be helpful to his community in crisis. These tricks of the clergy occur in conjunctions with divination, healing, and festivals. In divination, a trick occurs that underscores the validity of the truth discovered. In healing, trickery is part of the process itself, as in palming out a manifestation of the disease within someone. In festivals, the magicians of religious secret societies publicly show off their talents, making puppets move magically, or laying eggs as male magicians. Such trickery is both entertainment and symbolic support of ritual and myth. But deception lies closer to the heart of religion than this. Initiation into religion is initiation into spiritual deception. Why? Because the process is one of movement, monkey movement between illusionment and disillusionment. I’ll give one example and comment on the dynamics of spiritual deception involved. There is an artifact consisting of a flat stick of wood at the end of a long string. It is whirled in the air, around and around, as fast as possible. The result is an eerie sound that prompts its various names—hummer, buzzer, roarer, thunderstick. Anthropologists call it a bull-roarer. They have found it in Europe, including ancient Rome and Greece, Africa, North and South America, and in the South Pacific and Asia. It is a toy, but has been more than that. The mysterious noise prompts analogy with the wind and rain and supernatural forces. So it has been used to produce wind and rain, as a hunting and fishing charm, both to summon and to frighten away spirits, and as a quite effective method for keeping women and children from snooping on men’s secret ceremonies (Haddon 219–258). Listen to it . . . now try to imagine what it would be like to participate in the following religious rite of Australian aborigines, as recounted by Mircea Eliade (1–25). The occasion is the initiation of boys into manhood.

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According to Eliade, the boys have been raised on, and further instructed in, the story of the origin of the ritual. It involves conflict between a good and a bad spirit. The bad spirit is a giant who, along with other destructive behavior, likes to eat up little boys, then try to revive them. The rite itself is about this bad spirit. The boys are warned that the bad spirit is coming near and are told to listen carefully to his voice. They hear this sound, in the distance, and then closer and closer, not knowing about the apparatus. At one point they are covered with blankets and told the evil spirit is coming and that he may well devour them this time. With the bull-roarers close up, and the roaring going on and on, the elders reach under the blanket and use a hammer and chisel to knock out a tooth of each boy. The boys, following what they have been told, think that the spirit is taking a tooth instead of destroying them entirely. On the last day, they are covered with blankets and again they hear the strange and awesome whirring noise. A fire has been built and they hear it crackling. They are told that the evil one is going to burn them. The sound of the spirit gets louder and louder. When the boys are thoroughly terrified, the leaders whip away the blankets and show some actual bull-roarers by breaking them into pieces or burning them. The initiates are instructed to keep the secret of the bull-roarer and, especially, never to reveal its existence to women and children. It would seem then that initiation into religious adulthood can be equally an initiation into spiritual deception. According to this account, what is being worked over in the boys is their belief about spiritual reality. A specific understanding has been carefully nurtured. Elaborate and ingenious techniques of symbolic action have been used, most deceptively, to firmly establish a “naïve realism.” This is a low level of appreciation and understanding of the sacred-child’s faith. The building of this is illusionment. Then comes exposure of the illusion through the revelation and destruction of sacred objects. This is disillusionment. For this making and breaking of an illusion, deception is required. The experience in the puberty rite is both destructive and creative. It is terribly destructive. Listen to an elder charging the initiates: We have always told you that your pains are caused by [the spirit], but you must abandon belief in [this spirit] . . . Just as we did so, also you shall tell the story of [the spirit] to the children so that they shall not know that there is no [spirit] at all . . . You have now become men, just like your ancestors. Keep this explanation for yourselves alone. (di Nola 7)

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This injunction seems absolutely final. Even the props—the bull-roarers— are destroyed. Death is required. Yet this death is followed by rebirth. The destruction is only one stage in the back and forth movement of illusion and disillusion. The purpose of the initiation is to move the initiates to a new and more mature understanding of sacred reality. They are not just left broken, but are taught much more, and thereby are brought to further wisdom about the traditions of the community, becoming an adult part of it, and being responsible for it. For one to discover that the whirring sound of a spirit is made by a bull-roarer is not to eliminate the sacred, but to move to a new level of understanding. In fact, the boys soon make their own bull-roarers. They are devotional objects that the men bring out from concealment, on both personal occasions and those of their secret society, to see, hold, stroke, and upon which to meditate. In early trickery, as can be seen in this example, deceit can be a devotional tool for spiritual growth. I would underscore, however, that in this case the spiritual growth involves the exclusion of women and girls from the ritual and thus perpetuates masculine authority. Female initiation is quite another matter. Nonetheless, Eliade’s example of male initiation into religious adulthood fully incorporates the monkey movement between illusionment and disillusionment. An understanding of ultimate reality is carefully built up only to be totally demolished. Moreover, the movement does not cease, but continues in a special form of training at a more mature level than experienced before. This reliance on a new and mature play space and time is a movement back to illusionment. But surely, what the new initiates learn immediately after the ritual is not their final wisdom. It is also a new building of illusion that will need to be demolished when it has served its purpose. Movement between illusion and disillusion is perpetual. To rest comfortable and permanently at either pole is self-deception. And we cannot tell one pole from the other anyhow! This is how it is when we are prompted by the spirit to lead the symbolic life. The symbols are finite and contingent. We have no option but to continually change in our relationship to them, moving to and from illusion and disillusion. What is striking to Euro-Western observers and students of these early, indigenous spiritualities is the role of deception. For the movement to occur in the most meaningful way, deception is crucial. It is deception that keeps the movement occurring between illusion and disillusion. So we have a central paradox in religion—deceit for the sake of devotion. At least, this is how it can appear to contemporary observers in the Western world. The

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presence of deception in religious institutions is a severe affront to religiously allied people and a clear proof of hypocrisy to humanistic skeptics. But it is how we are moved out of our defensive rests in either illusion or disillusion. These early clergy knew and demonstrate that we have to be tricked into monkey movement.

THE STAGE MAGICIANS—ENTERTAINERS Stage magicians are entertainers of a specific sort. They are magical monkeys who use their tails for the deceptive action of reminding us of our situation. An illusionist is defined as a person who creates illusions, or, as one who is subject to illusions. Most human beings are only subjects, while performers come under both definitions. And perhaps, of all the creative artists, they are distinctive in that they demonstrate the deceptiveness of illusions most openly. But the art can be used in many ways. Are performers offering illusions that are neutral, abnormal, or creative? Neutral illusions are those presented in such a way to both satisfy and serve the audience. Typical performances are entertainments that please by satisfying the audiences’ need for diversion from the struggles of daily life. Destructive illusions are those presented in such a way so as to satisfy performers at the cost of the audience, gaining control over others for their own benefits. Typical performances of pseudo-psychics and confidence artists are examples. The audience may be satisfied as well, but it is diminished rather than served. Creative illusions serve the audience, but are not necessarily appreciated. This is because they do not satisfy as much as stimulate. Art provides a relatively safe experience of chaos. Anything creative is dangerous because possibilities are dangerous. Magic can provoke an audience to experience wonder about anything and everything that is of importance in life. And when it succeeds in provoking, the audience may become anxious and even angry. But ideally, there is a place for stage magic to provide illusions about illusion. Modern stage magicians are a secular development from the early clergy magicians. And old theatrical males can still show some pathways for new performers. Here are some ideas about the magician as father and performance as fathering. (I have previously explored the magician as mother and performance as mothering in another essay, “The Three Mothers of Magic.”)

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My basic premise is that the stage magician–audience relationship can be analogous to the clergy–child relationship. The performer uses deception along with all the other elements of theater to perform ritual. This secular ritual creates the dependence and awe in the audience that fosters the illusion of extraordinary power—mastery beyond the merely human in everyday life. But then, simultaneously, or nearly so, performers can allude to, ridicule, or expose the secrets that create the illusionment, thus disillusioning the audience. This welcomes the audience into association with the stage magicians as colleagues. The chagrined children are invited to move beyond the experience of fooling and being fooled. Indeed, they are stimulated to grow up, encouraged to explore the presence of imaginative mastery in their own lives, enjoy the symbolism of control over life and death, and increase their respect for it. The outcome is the realization by the members of the audience that they too are performers of magic; they too are magicians in their daily lives. That is my summary of the fundamental situation in stage magic. Here are some comments on it. Male stage magicians of all times and places tend to imitate the female magic of birth. The darkening of the auditorium is a form of sensory deprivation and the opening of the curtain renders us more dependent than usual on the stimulation coming from the stage. I like to envision spectators as peeking out from the womb and being astonished by what they see. They behold a performance of a miracle. This miracle, whatever the concrete contents, is about mastery per se—omnipotence, if you will. Being newly born, the audience is open to experiencing that whatever needs to be, can be, and now, is. The miracle is not actually created by the performer alone, but by the relationship between the performance and audience. Otherwise, there are only tricks. It is the partnership that counts. The experience of omnipotence does require a willing audience, but also a performer who both creates dependence and provides caring. The character adopted by the performer varies according to his own possibilities. He can play god, shaman, priest, explorer, scientist, or clown. But the meaning behind the role is about realizing omnipotence. Without creating dependence, the need for omnipotence by the audience is not stimulated. Without demonstrating care, the trust required for sharing power is not kindled. The magician may, in his own manner, play god, but it must be a parental god who is wisely loving. The great stage performers have the ability to create this primal and awesome experience of omnipotence in the audience, at least for moments.

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But who needs a full evening of miracles? Only actual infants. So some effective magicians deliberately back off from the presentation of a series of miracles. Rather, they offer lighter mysteries, comic effects, and the apparent exposes of “sucker” tricks. In addition, they may change the mood within performance of a single trick so that the miracle does not become so overbearing as to close off audience participation. These are all ways of causing what is required—disillusionment. Obviously, as a stern, but well-intentioned father, this does not involve castigating the audience as dumb enough to be fooled, immature enough to want pie in the sky, living in the past enough to ignore science, and so on. Disillusionment is about the human condition in which the performer shares ever so fully. The magician knows that disillusionment is as necessary and as interesting as illusionment. But magicians who offer only illusionment or disillusionment fail the challenge required of the magician as father. Those who limit themselves to one of the two aspects of magic lack confidence in play. They cannot play and so they cannot help an audience play. What this movement back and forth between illusion and disillusion creates is a time and space of play. Illusion is not believed or disbelieved, but, as I have expressed awkwardly, make-believed. To simply believe illusion, to confuse it for the realistic world of common sense, is to be either crazy (if the illusion is totally private) or fundamentalistic (if community is involved). To simply disbelieve it is to narrow one’s humanity. By contrast, to play with illusion respects both its separateness from the other realms and its unique contributions to our lives. The arts and religion do this, but so does stage magic and in a unique way. The arts know and respect illusion, but do not focus on the deception involved in the course of movement between illusionment and disillusionment. Religion knows and respects illusion also, but forgets it repeatedly, resists reminders, and tends to deny the role of deception. Stage magic is, or should be, somewhere in-between. It can present illusion simultaneously as illusion and as meaningful. Still, so what? What I have said has little to say to stage magicians about what tricks to perform or what presentations to offer. It is more a matter of their attitude. If play, illusion, and deception are so very fundamental, then magic need not be trivial and could be illuminating, energizing, and healing. Who can do this? Can anyone do it? What would it be like? I have one example on the contemporary stage—Penn & Teller. Penn & Teller have their own weekly television show out of Las Vegas and have toured the country for years with a full-evening show.2 Penn is the

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large, brash, and talky one, while Teller is small, nice, and silent. Together, they refer to themselves as “the bad boys of magic.” I prefer to label them “the good news guys.” Here are some features of their act. As bad boys of magic, they do exposés. A magical production from a barrel is presented straight, but during the intermission, for an admission of a quarter, you can file by it on stage and see how it works. This presentation is like that of the side show illusions in carnivals and is an exposé. But Teller’s routine of manipulating cigarettes, although it does expose some secrets, manages to fool you anyway. A spirit cabinet gives away no secrets, but mocks spiritualism. A mystifying routine with Mofo the Psychic Gorilla ridicules paranormal beliefs. A bizarre routine with a wood chipper machine and bunny makes fun of animal lovers. And their opening trick of cutting and restoring a length of cloth is a detailed parody of Christianity. Such nerve! There is more than real and fake exposing and simple mockery in the act. They are passionate in their upholding of the lowest lively acts. Teller walks on sharp swords and escapes from handcuffs. Penn juggles lit torches and busted bottles. The close of the act is a mystifying version of the bullet catch wherein Penn shoots and Teller catches a signed bullet in his mouth. Danger, suspense, and mystery. Penn talks about this with devotion and with full acknowledgment of the joy of showing off. And most beautiful of all, the signature piece for Penn & Teller, is the latter’s play with a rose and its shadow, which offers the audience an experience of beauty and awe. So the “bad boys” of magic are also the “good boys” of magic. There are two other routines that most clearly reveal them as good news guys. In a knife throwing routine, a spectator is invited on stage to be placed in front of a target and balloons are attached close to his body. Penn stands back and prepares to throw a knife and break a balloon. The spectator is blindfolded. He hears the balloon pop. The blindfold is removed and he sees the knife in the target next to his body. What the audience knows is that Teller has popped the balloon and stuck a duplicate knife into the target. The routine develops hilariously. The spectator is fooled, while the rest of the audience is fully in on the deception. There is illusionment and disillusionment in a presentation that unites the performers on stage and the members of the audience. The performers and audience cooperate with each other. Here is the other routine. Penn is standing in front of a hospital cart. Sitting on it is a large balloon filled with red liquid. He removes the balloon and speaks about people recovering from deadly injury. As he tells about one who was beaten up and hit in the face with a metal pipe, he uses a pipe

228 Robert E. Neale to hit the balloon without damaging it. As he tells about one who leapt from a bridge and survived, he drops the balloon to the stage and it simply bounces. And as he tells about one who was stabbed, he takes a needle threaded with a white string, pushes it through the balloon without breaking it. It’s magic! Penn replaces the balloon on the cart and covers it with a white cloth. He observes that, despite these miracles, some people just die. As he says this, the balloon, quite unaccountably, breaks and the white cloth becomes stained with blood. It’s magic again! This dynamic is typical in the best of their presentations. Magic is used first to support our illusion of invulnerability. We are reaffirmed in our illusionment. Then the magic occurs to support our return to daily reality. We are reaffirmed in our disillusionment. This is the serious game that Penn & Teller play. They are the self-styled “bad boys of magic.” They do irritate other magicians by exposing tricks and mocking magic. They are also the good boys who are devoted to both scientific thinking and magical mystery. But this is part of a larger dynamic through which they probe what is real and unreal. Their relationship with the audience moves it in and out of dramatic reality with bewildering speed and decisiveness. Their style is most contemporary and it seems to be a quite intentional education of the audience. So when they are at their best, they are disturbing, not just for those magicians who perform on stage, but also for all of us magicians who perform off stage in our daily lives. To me, most magicians perform as if they live in the nineteenth century. Penn & Teller perform as if they live in the twenty-first century. I left their show quite amazed. In response to the vast majority of magicians I have seen, my question is, “Why are you doing what you do?” I do not have to ask Ricky Jay or Jeff McBride or Eugene Burger. Their intent is communicated. But Penn & Teller make their goals clearer than any magicians I have ever witnessed. They have a worldview and they make sure that their tricks communicate it. Compared to most magicians, they did few tricks during the show, about eleven. (Some magicians do more than that in an opening barrage of magic lasting only a few minutes!) Penn emits a daringly vast amount of talk. Teller talks and writes very well off stage. Both care about their magic and the audience appreciates receiving an understanding of what they are about. I have never witnessed such extraordinary magic with a message: from Penn, such preaching as I have rarely heard anywhere; from Teller, such ritual as I have rarely seen anywhere; and from Penn & Teller, an evening of magic with meaning. Although they lash out against the meanings of which

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they disapprove, they have their own meanings to promote. Rest assured, these are good news guys who provoke us with illusions about illusion.

CONCLUSION I would like to think that stage magic can provide us with an experience of fictional reality that uses illusion to remind us of our reliance on morale and enlivens our abiding battle with demoralization. My creed, well, one of them, was stated by the poet (Wallace Stevens, “Adagia” 163): “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.” We must know what such belief cannot do, but never forget what it does achieve. Under some circumstances it grants life. And to know that it is fiction, that there is nothing else, and that one believes in it openly and willingly is a glorious wonder. Remember this spot card I showed you earlier, that is a three and four, or one and six, or two and five? It reminds us that we are all illusionists and that we must be disillusionists as well. We are to move from illusion to disillusion to illusion. To rest in either is destructive. Creativity lies in moving from one to the other. So the magician’s ultimate task is to facilitate our perpetual movement between these two poles. So let us not believe that one side is only a four and that one side is only a three. Nor would it be right to believe that one side is only a six and that one side is only a one. Because they are also two and five. And, who knows, maybe one side is even an eight!3 So take care. And may we all take care of our illusions.

NOTES This essay was originally presented on October 14, 1999, as part of the inaugural season of the Theory and Art of Magic program at Muhlenberg College. An earlier essay version of this presentation was published in The Linking Ring May 2001: 47–56. 1. See my “Early Conjuring Performances” in Magic and Meaning (39–56) for additional examples and discussion. 2. Since the time of this original presentation (October 1999), Penn & Teller have become well-ensconced in Las Vegas with a nightly show at the Rio Hotel and Casino. Also, my descriptions reflect the way they were performing their illusions in their touring show; since then they have changed some of the details.

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3. The spot card is a magician’s prop, “Ken’s Krazy Kard,” created, and first marketed, by Ken Brooke

WORKS CITED Burger, Eugene and Robert E. Neale. Magic and Meaning. Seattle: Hermetic P, 1995. di Nola, Alfonso M. “Demythicization in Certain Primitive Cultures; Cultural Fact and Socioreligious Integration.” History of Religions August 1972: 1–27. Eliade, Mircea. Rides and Symbols of Initiation (formerly titled Birth and Rebirth). Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Haddon, Alfred C. The Study of Man. New York: Putnam and Sons, 1898. Neale, Robert E. “The Three Mothers of Magic” in The Matter of Magic. Allentown: Theory and Art of Magic Press, Forthcoming. Stevens, Wallace. “Adagia” in Opus Posthumous. New York: Random House, 1982. Weyer, E. M. The Eskimos. Quoted by Edward Norbeck. Religion in Primitive Society. Houston: Tourmaline, 1974.

Index Abbott, David P., 26, 164–67, 171 aborigines, Australian, 221–23 advertisements: magic imagery in, 15–16 for stage magicians, 112–14, 151–54, 156–59, 163–64 Alafrez, Abdul, 54 alchemy, 183–85 Aldridge, Charles T., 172 Alexander Film Corporation, 74 Altman, I. I., 74–75 Amazing Jeffo, The, 178 Amazing Jonathan, the, 98 Angel, Criss, 25 animal taming, 126 Anxiety of Influence, The (Bloom), 47–48 Aristotle, 14 art, status of stage magic as, 37–57 artist, romantic model of, 38, 53 assistants, magicians’: as dancers, 181–82, 192 demands on, 93–95 and film, 67, 69–70 gender and, 183–84, 192, 204 and Sawing a Woman in Two illusion, 92–98 as showgirls, 98–99 in subculture of magic, 102 audience: bourgeois, 33–35, 45, 48–51, 54 as child, 226 complicity of, 23

control of, 89–92, 189–90 and desire for belief, 27 as female, 189–90, 192 of film, 66 gaze of, 90 humiliation of, 43, 44–45, 102–103 and illusion/disillusion dynamic, 224–26 misdirection of, 181–82, 189 seen on film, 79–81 in subculture of magic, 102 Western, 153 Augustine, 10, 200 authenticity, 156–59, 216 Balloon of Blood trick (Penn & Teller), 102 Baqt (Egyptian governor), 15 Beckman, Karen, 87–88 Being and Time (Heidegger), 14 belief, desire for, 27, 209–10 Bennett, Valarie Cordell, 93–95 Bertram, Charles, 95 Big (film), 209–10 Bilis, Bernard, 39 biography, performance of, 40 birth imagery, 225–26 See also rebirth theme birthday party magicians, 14 Blackstone, Harry, 63, 68, 75 Blackton, J. Stuart, 61 Blaine, David, 25, 28 Bloom, Harold, 47–48

232

Index

body, the: disabled, 178, 183–95 disciplined, 87, 90–92 female, 93, 183–84 laboring, 91, 101–102 of magician, 88–92 marginal, 153–56 Oriental, 157–58 of the Other, 160–66 performing, 170 at risk, 100–101 Booth, Walter, 61 Bosco (Italian magician), 44–45 Bourdieu, Pierre, 55 Boys Will Be Boys (film), 68 Browning, Tod, 70 Bryan, William Jennings, 121 Buddhism, Pali Canon of, 14 bull-roarer, 221–23 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 146 Burger, Eugene, 7, 14, 21, 228 Burger, Neil, 77–81, 212–15 Burton, Lance, 98–100 Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, 136 Cage, John, 22 Capital (Marx), 111–12 capitalism: and commodification, 107–28 and magician figure, 85–104 card manipulation: amateur, 14, 15, 217 in cheating, 45 by disabled performers, 185–90 and gender, 187–88 Vernon as influence in, 23–24 Carlosbach, Dr. (itinerant magician), 44 casinos: design of, 133, 137–38, 141–42 Las Vegas, 107–109, 123, 125, 143 Native American, 8, 131–48 Castelli (carnival magician), 44 chance, as concept, 144–45 Chaney, Lon, 72 charlatanism, 43, 45–46

Chavigny, Jean, 42 cheating and swindling theme, 23–24, 45 Chinese Linking Rings illusion, 159, 163, 166–67 Chinese-themed acts, 151–74 Ching Ling Foo (Chee Ling Qua), 155–57, 162, 164–73 Ching Ling Foo Outdone (film), 155–56 Christianity, 200–203, 207, 227 Chung Ling Soo, See Robinson, William Ellsworth Clarion Photoplays, 73–74 close-up magic, 179, 185–90 coin tricks, 113, 119–22, 124 collectors, 35, 42 colonialism, 135, 146–47, 156 commodification as magical process, 111–22 community, fantasy life of, 11 Compson, Betty, 70 confidence magic, 23–24 Confidence-Man, The (Melville), 24 Conjuror’s Confessions, A (RobertHoudin): influence of, 38–39, 52, 57 as mythologizing magician figure, 39–43 other magicians in, 41–45 spectatorship in, 48–51 Torrini character as possibly fictional, 41–42 Cooke, Harry G., 68 Coppa, Francesca, 9, 10 Copperfield, David, 98 costume, magician’s, 52, 85–86, 99, 113, 208 Coyote, trickster figure, 22 culture, sociology of, 54–57 Cups and Balls trick: in ancient Egypt, 15 by Bosco, 44–45 by Penn & Teller, 22 Cut and Restored tricks, 28

Index 233

Dakota Magic Casino Hotel, 131–32, 137, 148 Dante (Royal Dynasty of Magic member), 98 Davenport, Dorothy, 72 Davenport Brothers, 26 Dearborn, Karen, 9 Death Defying Acts, 77 debunking, 26, 52 deception, non-magical, 43 deCordova, Richard, 72 Defying the Bullet trick (Chung Ling Soo), 152 Derrida, Jacques, 19, 22 Devant, David, 69, 81 disability: gender and, 183–95 and magic, 177–79 magicians working with, 180–95 studies in, 179–80 Distinction (Bourdieu), 55 divination, 144–45 Doll’s House illusion, 75 doppelganger, 210–11 Downs, T. Nelson, 109, 120–22, 124, 128 Dracula, as capitalist, 98 Dunninger (mind reader), 26 Edison, Thomas, 155, 172, 213–14 Edward, John, 26 Egg Bag trick, 98, 113 Egypt, ancient, magic in, 15 “Eisenheim The Illusionist” (short story), 212 Eliade, Mircea, 221–23 enchantment: Christianity and, 200–201 and “inferior” groups, 50, 153–54 vs. knowing, 23 and modernity, 9 entertainment as business, 26 in Las Vegas, 107 vs. ritual uses of magic, 10

Erdnase, S. W., 23 Erik the Great, 75 escape magic: contemporary, 26 and disability, 183–84, 190–95 on film, 67 by Houdini, 24–25, 90–91 by Penn & Teller, 22, 99–100 Ethereal Suspension routine (RobertHoudin), 46–47 ethnographic display, 153–54, 156, 159–60, 163–71 Evil Gambler figure, 142 Expert at the Card Table, The (Erdnase), 23 Famous Players-Lasky film studio, 68 Fantastic Orange Tree illusion: in The Illusionist film, 77–81 by Robert-Houdin, 46, 78–79 Faust (Goethe), 109, 118–20, 128 Fawkes, Isaac, 109, 112–18, 127 Fechner, Christian, 36 Fédération Française des Artistes Prestidigitateurs, 35 Federici, Silvia, 142, 148 Fejos, Paul, 62 feminization: through disability, 189–95 of magic, 204–207 film: editing in, 63, 66, 76–78 exposure of secrets in, 73–74 gambling theme in, 24 illusionism in, 76–77, 212 as life magic, 18 magical effects cinematically created, 65, 66, 76–81 magician characters in, 61–81, 209–10 mirror images in, 211–16 narrativization of, 65 sound in, 62–63 in stage acts, 69–70, 172–73 “trick,” 61–62, 64–66, 68, 75, 155 finance and magic, 107–28, 133–34 Ford, Francis, 68

234

Index

Forte, Steve, 24 Foucault, Michel, 91–92 Foxwoods Resort Casino, 137, 142–44 France, stage magic in, 33–57 Frankenstein (film), 95 Frazer, James George, 160–63, 174n4 gambling: and magical thinking, 131–33 Native American views of, 134–35, 137–48 in religious context, 133–34, 139–42, 144–48 Western views of, 144–46 Geary Act, 168, 171 gender: and bourgeoisie, 38–39 and disability, 177–78, 183–95 and power, 97–104 and rationality, 207 and religion, 203–207, 215 and stage magic, 85–98, 189–95, 204, 225–26 Gilbert, John, 72 Girl with the Celluloid Mind illusion (Goldin), 69–70 Glenrose, Jan, 95 Goethe, J. W. Von, 109, 118–20, 128 Golden Bough, The (Fraser), 160–63, 174n4 Goldin, Horace: film use by, 69–70 and Sawing a Woman in Two illusion, 73–74, 92–98 and Selbit, 93 Grabel, Lee, 98 Grand Guignol, 96, 97 Great Leon, the, 64, 73 Great Raymond, The, 69 Green, Fitzhugh, 62–63 Grim Game, The (film), 68–69 Guillemin, Fanch, 52–53 Gus-ka-eh sacred bowl game, 140 Harbin, Robert, 93–94 Harlequin, 116–18 Harry Potter series (Rowling), 211

Hass, Lawrence, 9 Hay Foot, Straw Foot (film), 70 Hays, Will, 74 healing, 15, 204, 220 Heidegger, Martin, 14 Herrmann, Alexander, 70, 166 Herrmann, Leon, 166–67, 172 Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (Steinmeyer), 7 historiography of magic, 36–38 Hitchcock, Alfred, 76–77 Hollywood studios, 64–81 Honor Code piece (Penn & Teller), 22–23 Houdini, Harry: on audience gaze, 90 as debunker, 26, 52 escapes of, 24–25, 90–91, 104n4 on exposure of secrets, 73–74 on film, 63, 67–69 Hitchcock and, 76 on Robert-Houdin, 52–53 and Robinson, 163–64 Houdini Pictures Corporation, 69 How to Become a Wizard (RobertHoudin), 38 How to Win at Every Game (RobertHoudin), 37–38 identity: constructing, 152–62, 193 transformation of, 127–28 illusion: cinematic, 65, 66, 76–81 and disillusion, 217–29 mechanical, 78–79 mimetic, 51 optical, 17–18 value of, 16–19 Illusion (film), 62, 65–66 Illusionist, The (Burger), 77–81, 212–15 imagination, 10–11, 202 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988, 136, 148n2

Index 235 International Federation of Magic Societies, 36 Iroquois (Haudenausaunee) confederacy, 140 It Can’t Be Done Any Slower trick (Lavand), 188 It’s Fun to Be Fooled (Goldin), 94 Jack the Ripper, 97 Jay, Ricky, 24, 81, 228 Jones, Graham M., 8, 9, 10 Kabbala, 198 Kaps, Fred, 14 Kearney, Patrick, 70 Keith-Albee-Orpheum conglomerate, 64, 155, 168–69 Kellar, Harry, 26, 68 King, Mac, 98 Kris, Ernst, 42 Kurz, Otto, 42 labor: and the body, 90–92, 101–102 Chinese, 168–73 division of, 99–104, 170 Lady Vanishes, The (Hitchcock), 76–77 Las Vegas: casinos of, 107–109, 123, 125, 143 commodification in, 122–27 entertainment industry in, 9, 107 gender of, 215 as magic capital, 98, 107–109 Lasky, Jesse L., 70 Last Performance, The (Fejos), 62, 73, 74, 75 Laurant, Eugene, 64, 68 Lavand, René, 14, 21, 177, 179–80, 185–95 Law, John, 118 Lawlor, Mary, 8, 10 Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (Kris/Kurz), 42 Legends Casino, 139 levitation, 48, 62, 67, 98 “life magic,” 16–19, 132–48, 217–29

Los Angeles Society of Magicians, 70 Louis-Philippe, King of France, 49 magic: and alchemy, 183–85 and capitalism, 85–104, 107–28 in daily life, 16–19, 29, 132–48, 217–29 definitions of, 8, 12n1, 142, 148, 161–62 devaluation of, 13–15 entertainment vs. ritual uses of, 10 and finance, 108–27 and gambling, 131–48 history of, 36–37 as metaphor for love, 65–66 and the primitive, 50–51 and religion, 10, 14, 28, 133–34, 139–41, 147–48, 197–216, 220–24 vs. science, 9, 14 status as an art, 37–57 sympathetic, 161–62 as term, 198 as way of encountering the world, 160–61 as way of thinking, 132–48 Magic and Meaning (Burger/Neale), 7 Magic and Mystery Exposed, A Complete Screen Exposé of the Baffling Mystery Tura (film), 73–75 Magic Box, The (Siegfried and Roy), 109, 123–27 Magic Bricks illusion (Selbit), 93 Magic Castle, Hollywood, 23 Magic Mirror, The (Neale), 16–17 magic of mind, 25–27 See also, mind reading; spiritualism magic shops, 70, 113, 124 Magical Bulletin, The, 70, 71 Magician, The or, Harlequin, South-Sea Director (Rich), 117–18 magician figure, the: body of, 88–92 and capitalism, 86–104 as financial wizard, 108–27

236 Index magician figure, the—continued gender of, 85–104, 189–95, 204, 226 as man of science/inventor, 38–39, 96–97 modern, 50–57 mythologizing of, 39–43 and ourselves, 20 as religious figure, 208, 210, 220–24 sexual powers of, 189–90, 193 vs. trickster, 22 Magician Monthly, 95 magicians: actors as, 70–72 amateur, 14, 15, 70, 72 and audiences, 48–51, 189–90, 224–26 as characters in film, 61–81, 209–10 disabled, 177–95 as entrepreneurs, 93, 112 great, 14 street, 44, 163 as subculture, 7, 9–10, 102 women as, 95, 101, 192 “magick,” 204–205 marabouts, Muslim clerics, 50 marketplace, power of, 9 Marx, Karl, 98, 111–12, 120, 128 Mashantucket Pequot tribe, 137, 142–44 Master Mystery, The (film serial), 68 Matrix, The (film), 212 Maven, Max, 14, 21, 28 McBride, Jeff, 14, 21, 25, 98, 228 McCambridge, Gerry, 98 Méliès, Georges, 37, 61, 65, 66 Melville, Herman, 24 memory, embodied and finance, 108–109 metamorphosis, 112–18, 120, 126 Milken, Michael, 123 Miller, D. A., 89 Millhauser, Steven, 212 mimesis, 161–62 mind reading, 26 Ministry of Culture, France, 34, 54–56

minstrelsy, 159–60, 172–73 miracles, 51, 199, 207, 228 Mirage Hotel, 107–108, 123, 128 mirror images, 211–16 modernity: disenchantment of, 9, 50–51 and gambling, 133–34 and naturalism, 36 and professionalizing of stage magic, 33–57 and superstition, 160 Mohegan Sun Casino, 138–39, 143 money imagery, 112–22 “monkey movement” of illusion and disillusion, 217–20, 223–24 Mooser, Leon, 157 Moses, 15, 202 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, 74 M-U-M magic magazine, 68 Musée de la Magie, Paris, 35 Mysteries of My Life, The (Lavand/ Kaufman), 186 National Center for the Arts of Magic and Illusion, France, 56 National Indian Gaming Commission, 136 Native American magic: reflected in casino gaming, 8, 131–48 religious aspects of, 133, 139–41, 147–48, 220–21 trickster figures in, 22 naturalism, 36 Neale, Robert E., 7 on life magic, 16–20 on nature of magic, 11, 12n1 on the Sawing, 97–98 Necromancer, The (Rich), 116–17 Neil, Charles Lang, 95 New York Dramatic Mirror, 164, 168–69 Ngai, Mae M., 168–69 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 22

Index 237

Off the Deep End (Penn & Teller), 102–103 Offenbach, Jacques, 211 Omaha World-Herald, 170–71 Organon (Aristotle), 14 Orientalism, 51, 85–86, 151–74 Ortiz, Darwin, 24 Other/otherness, 9, 10, 13–14, 156, 159–66

trickster figures in practice of, 22 pickpockets, 90 Plato, 10, 13–14 “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida), 19 Plouffe, Elizabeth George, 137 plus grand cabaret du monde, Le (TV program), 39 Pope, Dick, 80–81 Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind (Taylor), 17 power: and gender, 189–95, 199 relations within, 97–104 Prestige, The (Nolan), 77, 213–15 probability theory, 145

Pankhurst, Christabel and Sylvia, 88 pantomime, 116–17 Paradox Sphere illusion (Passé), 180–85, 192 Passé, Jim, 177, 179–85, 190–95 Pastrycook of the Palais-Royal trick(Robert-Houdin), 46–47 Pathé-Frères film studio, 65 Patrice, Mademoiselle, 95 Peck, James, 9, 10 Penn & Teller: as debunkers, 26 exposure of secrets by, 23, 227 and illusion/disillusion dynamic, 226–29 and the Sawing, 101–102 as staging post-industrial capitalism, 88, 98–104 as tricksters, 21–23 performance: of disability, 194 of everyday life, 132–48 genealogies in, 108–109, 128 transformative, 132–33 Perkins, Carol, 101 phenomenology: of experiential structures, 16–19 of the secret, 89–92 philosophy: constructed in opposition to magic, 13–14, 19 phenomenology as method in, 16

Radio Film Telepathy illusion (Goldin), 69–70 Rae, Oswald, 95 Randi, James, 26 Raphael (French magician), 33–34, 37, 52, 53–54 rationality, 207–209 reality claims, 26 rebirth theme, 27–28 See also, birth imagery Reels, Kenneth, 143 Reid, Wallace, 72 Reith, Gerda, 144 religion: Christian, 200–203 and gender, 203–207 and illusion/disillusion dynamic, 226 and magic, 10, 14, 28, 133–34, 139–41, 144–48, 197–216, 220–24 Native American, 133–34, 220–21 as term, 198 Religion and the Decline of Magic (Thomas), 200–202 Rich, John, 116–18 Richiardi, Jr., 14, 97 Ritter, John, 180–81 ritual: in daily life, 17 vs. entertainment, 10–11

Nightway Ceremony, Navajo, 140 Noisy Neighbors (film), 74 Nolan, Christopher, 213–15 Norton, Edward, 77, 80–81

238 Index ritual—continued healing, 15 of initiation, 221–24 magical, 199 religious, 202–203 RKO Radio Pictures, 64 Roach, Joseph, 108–109 Robert-Houdin, André Keime, 35 Robert-Houdin, Jean Eugène, 8 ambition of, 46 appeal of to bourgeois, 33–35 as artist, 47–48 autobiographical writing of, 35, 37–57 criticisms of, 34, 52 and Fantastic Orange Tree illusion, 46, 78–79 as “Father of Modern Magic,” 33–36 as icon, 52–53 life of, 35, 40–42 performances of, 46–47 as scientist/inventor, 38–39, 46–47, 57n3 Robinson, William Ellsworth (Chung Ling Soo), 85, 151–59, 164–71 Romanticism, 38, 40, 53 Ross, Richard, 14 Rowling, J. K., 211 Royal Dynasty of Magic, 98 Sawing a Lady/Woman in Two illusion: assistant role in 86–88 as Cut and Restored trick, 28 and disability, 177 exposure of on film, 73–74 by Goldin, 92–98 Penn & Teller on, 101–102 by Selbit, 73, 85, 87–88, 92–96 violence of, 73, 95–98 Schwartz, Susan L., 9, 10 science: and bourgeois manhood, 38–39, 54 vs magic, 9, 14, 19

Second Sight routine, Pinetti’s vs. Robert-Houdin’s, 47–48 secrets: exposure of, 9–10, 23, 37–38, 73–75, 227 as irrelevant, 88 keeping, 87–88 as source of power, 88–92 Selbit, P.T.: Girl-based illusions of, 95–98, 100 and Goldin, 93 as Orientalist, 85–86 and Sawing Through a Woman illusion, 73, 87–88, 92–96 Seminoles, the, 136 sexism, 98–99 sexuality, 101, 189–90, 193, 205, 215 shaman figure, 15, 28, 205–207, 220–21 Shirk, Adam Hull, 64, 70 Shoshone tribe, 140–41 Show, The (film), 62, 70, 72–73, 75 Siegfried and Roy, 107–109, 122–27 Siegfried and Roy: Masters of the Impossible show, 107, 123–27 Sisseton Wahpeton Sioux Tribe, 131–32, 137 Sky City Casino, 138, 142–43 sleight-of-hand, 23–24, 113–14, 163, 188–89 Smith, Albert E., 61 social class: and finance, 109–18 mobility in, 9 Robert-Houdin and, 33–35, 38–39, 54 Society of American Magicians (SAM), 68, 73 Socrates, 22 Soirées Fantastiques (Robert-Houdin), 46–47, 78–79 Solomon, Matthew, 10 Solomon, Thomas, 25 Something to Think About (film), 70 South Sea Bubble, 111, 117–19

Index 239 spectatorial address, 80–81 spells, binding, 198 Sphinx, The, 164–66 Spirit Cabinet (Davenport Brothers), 26 spiritualism, 26, 68–70, 81, 145, 221, 227 spirituality, 10, 220–24 stage/performance magic: advertisements for, 112–14, 151–54, 156–59, 163–64 as ancient form, 15 birth imagery in, 225–26 Chinese-themed acts in, 151–74 costume in, 52, 85–86, 99, 113, 208 “death of,” early 20th-century, 63–64 and disability, 177–95 on film, 61–81 film in, 69–70, 172–73 finance/money imagery in, 107–28 and gender, 85–98, 189–95, 204, 225–26 and illusion/disillusion dynamic, 224–29 in Las Vegas, 9, 98, 107–109 and magic in daily life, 19–28 modern, 51 as producing docile bodies, 87 professionalizing of, 33–57, 163 and ritual magic, 10, 15 status as art-form, 37, 42–43, 104n4 themes/styles in, 20–28 universality of, 15, 20, 28 Stahl, Christopher, 9, 10 Stallybrass, Peter, 45 Steinmeyer, Jim, 7, 95–96, 166–67 stereotypes, ethnic/cultural, 50, 143–44, 153–54, 159–60, 164–73 Sternberg, Josef von, 69 Sting, The (film), 24 studies in magic: fundamental questions in, 7 importance of, 13–14, 19, 28

interdisciplinary approach in, 8–11, 15–16, 28–29 new models in, 11 works in, 7 sucker gag/trick, 102–103, 226 Sufi orders, illusionary techniques of, 50–51 Sullivan, Ed, 185–86 Sun Dance, the, 140–41 Swiss, Jamy Ian, 26, 55 Sword Box trick, 75 sympathetic magic, 161–62 Tales of Hoffman, The (Offenbach), 211 Tamariz, Juan, 14, 21 tarot cards, 22 Taussig, Michael, 161–62, 174n4 Taylor, Shelley E., 17 Terror Island (film), 68 Tertullian, 10 Tesla, Nikola, 213–14 thauma (astonishing wonder), 20–21 Thayer Manufacturing Company, 70 Thicke, Alan, 185–86 thinking: magical, 132–46 ontological status of, 26–27 Thomas, Keith, 200–202 Thomas, Rick, 98 Thurston, Howard, 63, 68–69, 75 Torah, the, 15 Torrini (Edmond de Grisy), as possibly fictional, 41–42 Trans-Mississippi and International Exhibition and Indian Congress of 1898, 164–70 tricks: card, 23–24 coin, 113, 119–22, 124 creation of, 24 disabilities as, 186 exposure of, 73–75 given away, 103–104 as illusions about illusion, 218

240

Index

tricks—continued licensing of, 93 “sucker,” 226 trickster magic, 22–23 Tungus tribe, 205 Twisted Souls (film), 68–69 Underwater Torture Cell (Penn & Teller), 100 Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (Houdini), 52–53 Ute tribe, 140–41 Vanderbilt, Irene, 95 Vanishing Coins From a Goblet trick (Downs), 124 Vanishing Lady illusion, 87–88, 95 vaudeville, 26, 64, 68, 74, 121, 168–69, 172 Veidt, Conrad, 73 Velle, Gaston, 61 Vernon, Dai, 14, 23–24 violence: in film, 73 in stage magic, 73, 95–98, 104n5 Walpole, Robert, 117–18 Water Bowl Production (Ching Ling Foo), 155–56, 172–73 wealth, magical expansion of, 9–10, 107–28, 133–34, 136–37 Weber, Max, 9 Weekly Dispatch, the, 157–59 West of Zanzibar (film), 62, 72–73 Westcar Papyrus, 15 White, Allon, 45

Why Do the Colors Alternate Themselves? trick (Lavand), 187–88 “Why Magic Sucks” (Swiss), 55 William III, King of England, 110 witchcraft, 203–204 women: bodies of, 93, 183, 189–90 images of violence against, 73, 95–98, 183 as magicians, 95, 101 as magicians’ assistants, 86–88, 92–98, 181–84 power of, 199, 225–26 and religion, 203–207 as surplus, 87–88 Wonder, Ching Ling Foo, The (Lubin), 173–74n3 wonder, experience of, 20–22 Wonder, Tommy, 14, 21 “Working with a Magician’s Assistant” (Bennett), 93–95 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893, 169 World’s Greatest Magic series (NBC), 180–81, 185–86 Writing and Drawing Automaton (Robert-Houdin), 48–49 Wynn, Steve, 107–108, 123 Yakima Nation Stick Game Tournament, 139 You Never Know Women (film cycle), 62, 65–67 Young and Innocent (Hitchcock), 76 Zig Zag illusion (Harbin), 93–94