AS IF BY MAGIC
Yesterday I went to a magic show. I’m not entirely sure I have ever seen live magic before. As a small child I remember watching Paul Daniels, in tux and toupée, dismember Debbie McGee on TV, sawing her in half and putting her back together. I don’t know that I was much impressed by it. I suppose that I must also have seen close-up magic performed at birthday parties by children’s entertainers, specialists in retrieving coins from unlikely places. I don’t know that I was much impressed by that either. We tend to assume that children are dazzled by magic. But magic, of both the big-box and the close-up variety, depends for its effect on the audience having a solid understanding of where the line between the possible and the impossible is drawn, and as a child I think I lacked such an understanding. After all, almost every day something happened that I had never known to happen before, and so the realm of the possible grew and that of the impossible shrank. But some days the reverse occurred: something that I had assumed to be within the bounds of possibility—the fair and equitable distribution of wealth, say, or world peace—was, I learnt, impossible. In any case, as a child I took impossible things in my stride more easily than I do now. A conjurer found a coin behind my ear? Sure, why not—that morning I had discovered that a giraffe has the same number of vertebrae as a normal-necked human. The world was full of wonders.
Magic, though, did not really count among those wonders, since I knew the secrets of the art, knew how magicians came by their powers: they ordered them from a catalogue and they arrived in the post. At least that was how I had acquired my small stock of magic tricks, performed with zeal for family members. It was the accessories I liked mainly—the dash I cut with cape, hat and wand—and the fact that it was basically fool-proof: as long as you followed the instructions, you were bound to produce the desired effect. Compared to acting or learning to play the piano, this was a cheap way to buy the applause of an audience—especially because it wasn’t even my pocket money buying it. This was in the pre-pocket-money era, before I had acquired even the most rudimentary understanding of how money actually works. At the time, there was nothing too surprising in the fact of a coin appearing out of thin air, since my daily experience (and I’m aware that not all children are so lucky) was that money always effectively appeared out of thin air. For all these various reasons magic did not really impress me as a child, not as much as it does now. Nowadays the world is a more predictable and stable place, and so it is a rare thrill to witness something seemingly inexplicable. But even when I know exactly how the trick is performed it impresses me—I know that when a magician pulls a coin out of thin air it’s just sleight of hand, but I also know how difficult sleight of hand is. The trick holds no mystery, but the trickiness of pulling it off, the sheer technical proficiency, commands an admiration I could not have felt as a child.
Nonetheless, conjuring is now very much associated with childhood and children’s entertainment. The audience at the magic show (a Saturday matinée at a West End theatre) comprised almost exclusively families with small children (although there were a few couples in late middle age—siblings, I suspected, rather than lovers; I imagined this was a walk down memory lane for them, echoing excursions from their own childhood, and that at the interval they would get an ice-cream, like in the old days, and talk about how much London has changed). I do not have a small child of my own, and I immediately regretted not having borrowed one for the occasion. There are some public places in which the presence of a lone adult is not merely an anomaly, but a source of embarrassment. I am not habitually a person who is embarrassed to do things alone. I have gone to the cinema alone on a very regular basis my entire adult life; I have gone to the opera alone; I have been on holiday alone; I have dined alone and drunk alone. I have been perfectly comfortable in all these situations—but not at the magic show. Of course, this was partly to do with being a single, childless woman in an environment that provided a rather vivid reminder that the partnered and childed life is still the default setting, but only partly—it was also to do with the nature of the spectacle.
Certainly, the tricks I saw that afternoon (a mixture of mentalism, legerdemain and big-box illusions) were framed in a child-friendly way. This was emphatically family entertainment, and initially I thought that I was simply embarrassed to be there in the same way I would be embarrassed to be seen on the tube clutching a cuddly toy. I thought the problem was that I was an adult in a world made for children. But there was nothing inherently childish about the tricks themselves (unless is it just the extreme violence they involve, the casual sadism, the sheer bloody heedlessness of it all): with different costumes, different patter and a different set design they could be performed for adults only, in the seediest or sexiest late-night cabaret. (In addition to the magicians, there was also a hula perfomer. Hula, like magic, is something that seems to belong either at children’s parties or in the most decadent of Weimar-style nightclubs.) The problem, I came to realize, was not so much that I was an adult, but that I was alone. Magic, after all, is intended to elicit wonder, to astonish and amaze, and wonder, astonishment and amazement are all emotions that are best shared. This is one of the reasons, I think, that magic, no matter how artfully staged, is not an art form, and going to see magic alone is less satisfying than going to the cinema alone. Art can always be enjoyed in solitude (and for some of us can really only ever be enjoyed in solitude), but when you see a woman you saw get sawn in half not a minute earlier stand up in one piece, magically made whole, when you can’t believe your own eyes, you need to be able to turn to the person next to you for confirmation: ‘Did you see that? Did you see what they just did?’
Retrospectively it seemed obvious that the show would be for children, and odd that I hadn’t anticipated this. (Indeed, I noticed after going to see it that one of the quotations used on the advertising posters on the tube was ‘my kids are still amazed’—as if no adult could ever admit to being impressed by a magic trick.) But my interest in magic was first and foremost professional: my day job is teaching and researching the cultural history of nineteenth-century France, and in nineteenth-century France magic was not for children, or not just for children. Far from existing on the fringes of cultural life, it was an unavoidable part of the cultural mainstream, probably the most popular form of entertainment around—not just in France, but across Europe and North America. This was magic’s golden age. Before then, it had been a disreputable affair. Disreputable first because it was emphatically plebeian. Conjurors belonged to the world of street entertainment; itinerant performers, they appeared at travelling fairs and medicine shows alongside quacks and lion-tamers, jugglers and tumblers, freaks and geeks. Disreputable too, though, because performance magic seemed to come dangerously close to real magic. Either conjurors were charlatans, or they were trafficking with the devil. In either case, there was clearly no place for them in genteel society. This all changed in the nineteenth century, when magic moved from the street into the theatre, and even the middle-class home. Key to this transformation was French illusionist Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), the most celebrated magician of the age. If his name looks vaguely familiar, it is probably because when Ehrich Weisz, a Hungarian-born, Wisconsin-bred rabbi’s son, decided around 1890 to embark on a career as an illusionist, he chose a pseudonym combining the names of his two professional idols, the American Harry Kellar and the European Robert-Houdin, thus becoming Harry Houdini. (His new name also, of course, had the advantage, at a time of pervasive antisemitism, of obscuring his Jewishness.)
No one who went to one of Robert-Houdin’s soirées fantastiques, held at the rather tony theatre he opened in the Palais Royal in Paris in 1845, could imagine him either trafficking with the devil or rubbing shoulders with hoi polloi. Instead of the traditional wizarding robes, he wore a sober black frock coat—the very uniform of bourgeois respectability, with the superadded advantage of proving to the audience that he had nothing up his sleeve. The stage was set as a drawing-room, with elegant Louis XV furniture. His patter was urbane and sophisticated. It was these innovations in the presentation of the tricks, as much as the tricks themselves (an inexhaustible bottle that poured forth any liquor of which audience members were desirous; an orange tree that grew and fruited in front of their eyes, bearing oranges (real, juicy, pulpy oranges!) they were invited to try; levitation, mind-reading, vanishing tricks, and—drum roll, please!—the famous bullet catch), that made such an impression on the audience. He presented his performances not as a circus act, but as a form of legitimate theatre, often describing himself as an actor. Thus in one of his several books about magic, all of which enjoyed great popularity, he wrote: ‘Un prestidigitateur n’est point un jongleur, c’est un acteur jouant un rôle de magicien ; c’est un artiste dont les doigts doivent être plus habiles que prestes / a prestidigitator is not a juggler, but an actor playing the role of a magician; he is an artist whose fingers should be move more skilfully than quickly.’ Robert-Houdin’s contemporary English translator, Sir Lascelles Wraxall, rendered the first part of this as ‘a magician is an actor playing the part of a magician’, a rather riddling comment that, presumably because rather than in spite of its cryptic nature, has become the most famous thing anyone has ever said about stage magic. In the original French, with its distinction between a jongleur and an actor, its meaning is clearer. Stage magicians, Robert-Houdin seems to be suggesting, should not seek to impress the audience by flaunting their physical skill, as jugglers do. Rather everything that happens on stage should happen effortlessly—as if by magic. Elsewhere in the same book, Robert-Houdin says that magic is about producing an effect without a cause. Nothing illustrates this better than one of his inventions: the Mystery Clock. Robert-Houdin started life as a watchmaker, issued from a long line of watchmakers, and his career as a magician was intertwined with a second career as a mechanic and maker of automata, some of which were incorporated into his magic act and some of which were exhibited at various world’s fairs. His mystery clocks were among his most celebrated mechanical productions: the dials, made of glass, are completely transparent, and the hands move with no obvious means of propulsion. The mystery clock presents itself as a timepiece without a movement, keeping time as if by magic. It is the very sign and symbol of Robert-Houdin’s art.
Robert-Houdin dandified magic. Always dressed for dinner, perfectly self-possessed, never anything other than precise and controlled in his movements—as precise and controlled as one of his timepieces—he offered an image of the magician as the man who is always at ease in the world, an image of mastery. It is a curious and regrettable oversight that Walter Benjamin did not include the magician in the Arcades Project, his mammoth study of the cultural life of Paris in the nineteenth century, and more specifically of the consumer dreamworld that came into being in its shopping arcades and world’s fairs, temples of commodity fetishism. For the commodity itself, as Marx perceived, performs a trick (he writes in Capital of ‘the whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities’) and here too the trick consists in producing an effect (value) whilst concealing the cause (the labour that produced it). This deep kinship between magic and commodity capitalism explains both why magic was such a popular cultural form in the nineteenth century and why the cultural work it did passed unnoticed.
It seems to be obligatory, I have noticed, when one undertakes to write about magic, at some point to produce an archly turned sentence starting with the words: ‘After all, the real trick…’ I shall suggest, then, that the real trick was always how successfully magic concealed all the heavy cultural lifting it did. If the nineteenth century was magic’s golden age, this was because it was bound up in all sorts of ways with its great projects: it promoted a certain image of masculine power at home and could also be used to promote an image of European power abroad. Consider Robert-Houdins’s visit to Algeria in 1856, a peculiar footnote in the history of European imperialism. Algeria was at that time a French colony, but uprisings against colonial rule were frequent. In the mid-1850s, one such uprising was brewing in Kabylie, fermented, the French authorities thought, in large part by local religious leaders who were performing miracles to gain influence over the locals. A certain Colonel de Neveu hit upon the idea of inviting Robert-Houdin to Algiers to perform in front of the local notables, and so to prove that French sorcery was more powerful than Algerian sorcery.
Robert-Houdin recounts this magical mission at length in his autobiography. It is here that we find a description of one of the illusions for which he is best remembered: the light and heavy box. The box in question was carried on stage by Robert-Houdin and set down front and centre. He then asked for a volunteer from the audience—any strong young man would do. He invited one such on to the stage and asked him if he thought he could lift the box. The strong young man replied in the affirmative, of course; after all, Robert-Houdin, no longer in the first flush of youth, had been quite able to carry it on stage. The magician then invited him to try and lift the box: with barely any effort, the strong young man did so. Now came the magic: Robert-Houdin waved his wand in the direction of the strong young man and told him that should he try and lift the box again, he would find himself as weak as a woman. Of course, the young man had no choice but to try again, but the box was now so heavy that, even straining every sinew, he was unable to shift it an inch. Baffled and humiliated, he tried again. This time, not only could he not move the box, but when he touched it, he experienced a violent muscular contraction. As Robert-Houdin explains in his autobiography, the secret of the trick lay in the relatively new science of electromagnetism: a switch was flicked backstage and an electrical current passed through the handle of the box, which, now magnetized, stuck fast to a concealed metal plate beneath the stage, whilst also electrocuting the volunteer. Robert-Houdin notes that the electric current was turned off almost instantly: ‘To prolong the commotion would have been barbaric.’
A century later, French soldiers showed no such scruples when they strapped electrodes to their prisoners’ genitals during the Algerian War of Independence.
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In his final book, a teach-yourself-magic guide called The Secrets of Conjuring and Magic, or How to Become a Wizard , Robert-Houdin tells of his disappointment that neither of his sons had wanted to follow in their father’s footsteps (one became a watchmaker, in the family tradition; one joined the army and was killed in action in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, a loss from which Robert-Houdin never recovered and which seems to have precipitated his own death the following year). Following his retirement from the stage, his theatre was taken over by his son-in-law and protégé, Hamilton. In 1888, it was bought by an ambitious, up-and-coming illusionist called Georges Méliès. In his commitment to innovation and experimentation, in his desire to press new technologies into the service of magic and so expand the possibilities of illusion, Méliès was Robert-Houdin’s true heir, but he was also the gravedigger of stage magic as a mainstream cultural form. When Méliès, experimenting with the emergent technology of the cinematograph, poked the moon in the eye with a rocket in his 1902 film A Trip to the Moon, he found a new, incredibly potent way of procuring enchantment. Cinema absorbed illusionism and magic gave way to the magic of the silver screen. The great stage magicians of the nineteenth century, with their frock coats and casual racism, now seem like dinosaurs. But I’m reminded here of the joke Chris Marker makes at the end of The Last Bolshevik, his documentary about Soviet film-maker Aleksandr Medvedkin: you know what happened to dinosaurs? Kids love them.