Reception and Adaptation: Magic Tricks, Mysteries, Con

Games

by

Joseph Daniel Culpepper

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Comparative Literature
University of Toronto

© Copyright by Joseph Daniel Culpepper 2014

 Reception and Adaptation: Magic Tricks, Mysteries, Con Games

Joseph Daniel Culpepper

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature

University of Toronto

2014

Abstract

This study of the reception and adaptation of magic tricks, murder mysteries, and con games

calls for magic adaptations that create critical imaginative geographies (Said) and writerly

(Barthes) spectators. Its argument begins in the cave of the magician, Alicandre, where a

mystical incantation is heard: "Not in this life, but in the next." These words, and the scene from

which they come in Tony Kushner's The Illusion, provide the guiding metaphor for the

conceptual journey of this dissertation: the process of reincarnation. The first chapter investigates

the deaths of powerful concepts in reader-response theory, rediscovers their existence in other

fields such as speech-act theory, and then applies them in modified forms to the emergent field of

performance studies. Chapter two analyzes the author as a magician who employs principles of

deception by reading vertiginous short stories written by Jorge Luis Borges. I argue that his

techniques for manipulating the willing suspension of disbelief (Coleridge) and for creating

ineffable oggetti mediatori (impossible objects of proof) suggest that fantastic literature (not

magical realism) is the nearest literary equivalent to experiencing magic performed live. With

this Borgesian quality of magic's reality-slippage in mind, cross-cultural and cross-media

comparisons of murder mysteries and con games are made in chapter three. Crime adaptations by

Roald Dahl, Alfred Hitchcock, Pedro Almodóvar, David Mamet and Ricky Jay are analyzed as

different incarnations of specific source texts to compare techniques of deception across multiple
ii
media and to gauge whether these stories produce critical readers/spectators or naive ones.

Chapter four accepts the challenge of performing magic that produces writerly spectators by

physically reconstructing, narratively adapting and socio-historically questioning a nineteenth-

century stage illusion through practice-based research. The scholarly praxis of magic as a

performing art is further articulated in the experimental manifesto with which this dissertation

concludes.

iii
 Acknowledgments
This dissertation is the result of an intense period of growth and change in my life that occurred

thanks to the love, support, and inspiration channeled into its pages by various communities. All

of them have contributed in their own ways to who I am and what you are about to read.

The seeds of this work were sown in my hometown of Sacramento, California. I thank

my mother, my father, my sister, and my grandmother for teaching me perseverance, discipline,

and the ability to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles. I thank Nathan Livni who showed

me my first real card trick, became my first performance partner, and has been my best friend

ever since. I am grateful to Steve, Don, and Leora Johnson who generously gave me my first job

at their wonder-filled magic shop — Grand Illusions. It was there where I began to see the world

through the eyes of a magician.

These shimmering roots spread to the coastal redwoods of UC Santa Cruz, where Kasey

Mohammed, Peter Gizi and Gildas Hamel helped me realize that some poems are magic spells.

Hervé le Mansec first taught me to truly speak and think in another language. This allowed me to

escape the straightjacket of my native English and fundamentally changed my understanding of

how language shapes our subjective realities. I was also lucky, as an undergraduate student in a

graduate seminar, to have Harry Berger Jr. teach me how to apply philosophical concepts to the

study of literature. It was his suggestion to apply to the Centre for Comparative Literature at the

University of Toronto for my MA and PhD.

The Centre is where writing a dissertation on magic and storytelling suddenly became a

viable, living project. This would have been impossible without the patient guidance and wisdom

of my PhD committee. Eva-Lynn Jagoe, with whom I first savored the mystifying stories written

by Jorge Luis Borges, supervised the dissertation with grace, steel and affection. She has

consistently taught me how to be an honest critic of my work. Linda Hutcheon, through her
iv
insightful, thorough and challenging feedback, strengthened nearly every aspect of this

manuscript from start to finish. She has also modeled for me, and many others, how to be a

consummate professional. Stephen Johnson saved me and this project in a number of ways.

Without his expertise as a performance studies scholar and his enthusiastic support of my

practice-based magic research, my study of “The Sphinx” and other illusions would have

remained purely theoretical. Many thoughtful mentors and colleagues helped me to read and edit

partial or complete chapters as they were produced: Neil ten Kortenaar, Charlie Keil, James

Cahill, Martin Zeilinger, Keavy Martin, Baryon Posadas, Joshua Nichols, Ronald Ng, Sarah

O’Brien, Rachel Stapleton, Daniel Brielmaier, Adleen Crappo, Kate Sedon, Lauren Beard,

Matteo Scardellato, Dylan Gordon, Catherine Schwartz, John Mayberry, Jane Freeman, Sasha

Kovacs, Natalie Mathieson, and others all contributed. Will Straw’s external report and lively

comments during my defense gave the dissertation the final intellectual push it needed for me to

consider it done.

John Fraser, master of Massey College, and David Ben, artistic director of Magicana,

each provided me with places to live and libraries to study in over the years. These gentlemen

also invited me and my work into their respective communities. John introduced me to many

brilliant Junior and Senior Fellows at Massey who improved my understanding of this project by

listening to it and comparing it to similarities in their work. A few who come to mind now are

Marcin Kedzior, Dylan Cantwell-Smith, Cara Mckibbin, Anna Shamaeva, Donna Vakalis,

Patrick Boyle, Paul Furgale, Claire Battershill, Cillian O’Hogan, Jordan Guthrie, Olivier Sorin,

Davin Lengyel, Katie Mullins, Hanah Chapman, Tim Barrett, Josh Elcombe, Brys Stafford,

Heather Jessup, Geoffrey Little, Jessica Duffin Wolfe, Heather Sheridan, Michael Valpy, and

Val Ross. I am proud to call all of these talented individuals, and many others, friends.

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 Many magicians have contributed knowledge and feedback that helped to shape the

contents of this dissertation. I sincerely thank Jim Steinmeyer, Edwin Dawes, Peter Lane, Bill

Goodwin, Gabe Fajuri, Julie Eng, Bill Kalush, Ricky Smith, Noah Levine, Nathan Kranzo,

Christian Cagigal, Will Houstoun, Lee Asher, Aaron Fisher, and Alex Slemmer from the North

American and English magic communities. Travel grants from Massey College and U of T’s

School of Graduate Studies funded my research in Buenos Aires where the second chapter was

written. Roberto Mansilla and Pablo Zanatta introduced me to the vibrant history of Argentina’s

magic during that visit. In Barcelona, Gabi Pareras and Joaquin Matas welcomed me into their

local scene like a long lost brother. Gabi’s approach to combining critical theory, literature and

the performance of magic gave me a strong sense of solidarity at a time when I felt very alone.

I wish to thank the performance studies scholars, arts organizations and variety

performers whose support made the final transformation of this dissertation (and my career)

possible. I have become a praxis-based scholar thanks to Antje Budde, Nik Cesare, my dear Ars

Mechanica co-founders (Vojin, Natalie, Sasha, and Myrto), Bruce Barton, Moynan King, Shelley

Liebembuk, Paul Babiak, Paul Stoesser, Sarah Kriger, members of the Accademia dell’Arte (in

Arezzo, Italy), The Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, Performance Studies

International, the Digital Dramaturgy Lab, New Gendai Workstation, the Circus Academy, and

the Toronto Juggling club. Finally, I thank Jessamine Trueman — the circus artist whose love

made the final pages of this particular chapter in my life fly by.

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 Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iv

Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... vii

List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ ix

Prologue Reincarnated Texts and Concepts: Towards Faithful and Free Adaptations ........ x

Chapter 1 Deaths and Reincarnations of Reception Theory .................................................... 1

1 A Genealogy of Rebirths: From Theories of Reception to Theories of Adaptation................. 7

1.1 Rezeptionsästhetik: Origins, Critiques and International Travels ................................................... 8
1.2 Deaths — Post-Structuralism, Polemics and Passing Away ......................................................... 12

2 Reincarnations — Intertextuality, Semiotics and Performance Studies ................................. 15

2.1 Barthes, Inter-texte-ualité, and the Scriptible/Lisible in S/Z ......................................................... 20
2.2 Eco’s Open Text, the Model Reader, and the Double-Model Reader ........................................... 30
2.3 Performance Studies I: Disbelief, Dénégation and Defamiliarization .......................................... 36
2.4 Performance Studies II: Performative Language and Interpretive Communities ......................... 55

3 From Theoretical Underpinnings to a Practice of Fantastic Literature .................................. 72

Chapter 2 Borges: The Author as Magician, the Reader as Spectator .................................. 78

1 Dazzling the Reader: Suspension of Disbelief in Fantastic Literature and “El Aleph” (“The
Aleph”) ................................................................................................................................... 83

2 Exploding Todorov's Model: “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”) and "El
disco" (“The Disk”) ................................................................................................................ 94

3 Conjuring Objects of Proof: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” .................................................. 103

4 Playing God: The Detective Story, Smoke and Political Trickery ....................................... 111

5 From Authenticity to Legitimacy ......................................................................................... 119

Chapter 3 Criminal Adaptations: Hidden Intertexts in the Murder Mystery and the Con
Game .............................................................................................................................. 124

1 Free Adaptations: Successful Aesthetic and Cultural Infidelities ........................................ 126

1.1 Various Incarnations of Dahl's “Lamb to the Slaughter” ............................................................ 128

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 1.2 Sleight-of-Screen vs. Sleight-of-Pen as Sleight-of-Hand............................................................ 132
1.3 Cross-cultural and Cross-media Adaptation and Reception ........................................................ 139
1.4 Is an Ethics of Adaptation and Citation Possible? ...................................................................... 143

2 Ethical and Unethical Adaptations — Mamet, Jay and the Con Game ................................ 146
2.1 Putting the ‘Con’ in ‘Lexicon’: Jay and Mamet .......................................................................... 153
2.2 The Spectator as Victim: Mark-focused Reception Theory ........................................................ 163
2.3 Adapting Psychological Principles of the Con Game to Film ..................................................... 169

3 Seeing Like Criminals, Seeing Like Victims, Seeing Like Magicians ................................ 175

Chapter 4 “The Sphinx” and “The Sage”: Reception and Adaptation in Practice ............ 180

1 “The Sphinx”: Written and Embodied Research .................................................................. 184

2 Egyptian Hall: Imaginative Geographies, Colonialist Collectors and Reality-Slippage ...... 201

3 “The Sage Duban”: Narrative Adaptation as Critical and Aesthetic Response ................... 232

4 Thoughts on Magic Adaptation: A Call for Critical Imaginative Geographies and Writerly
Spectators.............................................................................................................................. 243

Epilogue and Manifesto ............................................................................................................ 245

Works Consulted ....................................................................................................................... 260

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 List of Figures
Fig. 1. Todorov’s categaories of the fantastic. .............................................................................. 85  

Fig. 2. Adapted model of Todorov’s classifications. .................................................................... 98  

Fig. 3. Adaptations and Migrations of "Lamb to the Slaughter". ............................................... 130  

Fig. 4. Woodcut illustration from London’s Illustrated Times, 18 October 1865. ..................... 187  

Fig. 5. Portrait of Joseph Stoddart as Colonel Stodare. .............................................................. 188  

Fig. 6. Frontispiece of Hoffmann’s Modern Magic (1877, second edition). .............................. 189  

Fig. 7. Miniature model of the optical illusion used in Stodare’s “The Sphinx” ........................ 191  

Fig. 8. Photograph of table from “The Sage Duban”. ................................................................. 192  

Fig. 9. Aquatint of the facade of Bullock’s Museum. ................................................................. 206  

Fig. 10. Bust of Ramses II in the British Museum...................................................................... 217  

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 Prologue
Reincarnated Texts and Concepts: Towards Faithful and Free
Adaptations
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the

ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its

successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged.

— T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“Not in this life, but in the next” is the final line of Tony Kushner’s 1988 adaptation of

Pierre Corneille’s seventeenth-century play L’Illusion comique (83). This proclamation of rebirth

is spoken by the Amanuensis, who is the servant of Alicandre — the play’s magician. The cycle

to which it refers is one of reincarnation, performance and adaptation. Therefore, it is an ideal

incantation with which to begin a study of how magic, in particular, and other deceitful

performances, in general, are adapted to various storytelling media through which they are then

received by readers as well as spectators. The Amaneunsis makes his statement after a man

named Pridamant has engaged Alicandre’s otherworldly powers to locate his long-lost son,

Clindor. After the magician consults his version of a crystal ball, in this case a crystal pool of

water, eerily life-like figures appear revealing Clindor’s adventures, misadventures and,

ultimately, his violent murder. Pridamant, convinced that these visions are real, woefully mourns

the death of his son.

Pridamant and the audience then learn that Clindor is not actually dead. He is an actor.

Clindor is a professional deceiver, or what Oscar Wilde would call a “perfectly magnificent liar”

(Wilde 10-11), and we the audience have been watching his various performances along with

Pridamant as if they were real events. The sorcerer Alicandre turns out to be the biggest deceiver

of all in The Illusion. He is the one who consciously presents Clindor’s theatrically framed

x
performances as if they were scenes from everyday life. Counterintuitively, the magic of

Alicandre’s crystal pool is true. In the diegetic world of the play, it does transmit accurate visions

of life over an impossible distance. What makes the magician’s presentation deceitful is his

manipulation of the frame of what the pool shows. He consciously crops out and hides the edges

of the theatre in which Clindor performs. Like the camera of a film director, Alicandre’s magical

pool has the power to make play events appear as though they are part of Pridamant and

Clindor’s lived reality (a reality which is in itself a piece of fiction that we are watching). Thus,

the central illusion in The Illusion is Pridamant’s and the audience’s reception of an

unannounced play-within-a-play.

Alicandre engages in this deception to force Pridamant into experiencing a moment of

sublime emotional crisis.1 The ruse moves Pridamant, a hard, formal and stubborn man, to tears.

It creates the terrifying illusion that his son is dead to impress upon him the opportunity that he

now has for reconciliation. And so, Pridamant leaves the darkness and the apparitions of

Alicandre’s cave, which are also the shadowy illusions of Plato’s cave, to re-enter the world and

to reconcile with his son. On the levels of diegesis and character, then, the central theme in both

Corneille’s and Kushner’s versions of a play about a father’s quest for knowledge is one of

rebirth made possible by the reception of fiction as reality. Sublime recognition is one reception

experience that can result from epic mimesis and trickery.

On a meta-critical level, Kushner’s The Illusion and the concluding line spoken by the

1
The concept of “the sublime” as a simultaneously terrifying and beautiful revelation will

be explored in further depth in the next chapter’s discussion of Todorov’s “fantastic” literature.

For now, I ask the reader to simply note that Pridamant’s devastating reception of Alicandre’s

illusion is also an example of sublime reality-slippage and its power.

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Amanuensis are a reflection on the reincarnation — the re-embodiment, the re-staging, and the

re-telling — of Corneille’s play for North American audiences three centuries after it first

premiered in France. In this sense, I read the line “Not in this life, but in the next” as a meditation

on the process of adaptation itself. It can even be interpreted as a political statement promoting a

philosophy of liberal adaptation, because the Amanuensis is the boldest addition made by

Kushner to his version of the play. Named after a term used in the seventeenth century to denote

“one who copies or writes from the dictation of another” (OED), the Amanuensis appears in the

very first scene of The Illusion as a servant/scribe who is both deaf and mute. I therefore

understand the magical restoration of his tongue and his ensuing power of speech at the end of

the play as a statement made by Kushner that matches his dramaturgical practice: informed yet

free adaptations breath new life into the adapted text. The Illusion gives L’illusion comique a

new tongue, one which self-reflexively recognizes that future adaptations, subsequent lives of the

play, will repeat this process of textual renewal.

The tongue of the Amaneunsis, in the context of this dissertation, is also a symbol for my

argument that studying the performative language used in magic acts and in con games sheds

new light on how human beings turn fiction into reality. Language that actually does what it

says, thanks to speakers who cleverly manipulate it and to social rituals that give it the power to

affect the material world, will be carefully traced in the pages that follow. Subtle transformations

of performative speech-acts, such as "I promise" or "I bet," and body language, such as crossing-

one's heart or shaking another's hand, will be analyzed as deceptive performances move from

theatrical venues to scenes of everyday life. In other words, the magic spells spoken by tongues

onstage will be read against those spoken on the street to discuss the unethical adaptation of

certain storytelling techniques.

On an artistic level, however, the creative altering of the voice of a text allows it to say

xii
something different that a new audience can hear and this should be celebrated. As in Kushner’s

retelling, characters may be added, rhyme schemes may be altered, jokes may be transposed, and

one hundred other minute or extreme changes may be made to customize the transmission of the

play, and its spirit, to the cultural reality of new spectators. The carefully informed yet original

modification that Kushner accomplishes by replacing Corneille’s strict, Alexandrine couplets

with a mixture of free and rhymed verse that manages to capture, to twist, and to transpose the

musical language of the play for a twentieth-century, English-speaking audience is a more

difficult and a more lofty accomplishment than any attempt at a literal translation would have

been.

Restrained, word-for-word, scribe-like attempts at translation, whether they are made

across time and culture in the same media or whether they are made across various media, fall

into the trap of blindly and timidly adhering to the success of past generations. This is the

temptation to slavishly mimic one's predecessors that T.S. Eliot warns us against. Strict

translations lead to conservative adaptations and these are usually motivated by a desire to

replicate the reputation of a text’s previous prestige, success, and popularity in one culture, rather

than a genuine desire to revive the spirit of a text for another time and place. We must accept that

no matter how glorious the past life of a text may have been, once it is incarnated in another

time, place, or medium, it has a new life of its own.2 It must take risks and make a name for itself

2
Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” (Pierre Menard, Author of the

Quixote”) is one example of the division between the past life of a text and its new life as an

adaptation regardless of how faithful or unfaithful it is. Borges’ self-reflexive, meta-commentary

on authorship and originality in relation to adaptation, however, is quite different from the

politics of actual adaptations. A fascinating example of those tensions can be found in Richard

xiii
as an individual.

I argue that tradition today (think: canons or sacred texts) must be even more radically

questioned than Eliot suggests in his famous essay on the art of poetry. Furthermore, this

questioning requires even more rigorous and open-minded study than before. As the media by

which we can tell stories expand, as the depth and range of our historical records of adapted texts

as well as our theoretical concepts (such as the willing suspension of disbelief, denegation, and

more) increase, so does the need to be both an informed scholar and an experimental adaptor.

Literal fidelity, as a plethora of flat, unoriginal, unreflective and commercially-driven

adaptations prove, is a self-stifling mindset in any performing art and this includes magic.

However, the successful reincarnation of a performance text’s spirit, which is the successful

reception of a story or of an idea born to a new time, place, and cultural environment, may occur

through faithfully informed yet risky adaptation.

This experimental approach to storytelling makes it possible to teach a similar yet

slightly different lesson than the one which audiences needed before. Such a lesson reflects upon

a new or a recurring problem faced by the spectators of today with a heightened level of

sophistication, elegance, and risk that does not worship past works. Instead, it recognizes their

achievements and derives inspiration from them. This paradoxically rigorous respect for tradition

and radical break from it, the kind called for by Eliot in theory and rendered extreme by Kushner

Schechner’s article “Drama, Script, Theatre and Performance” in which his TPG (The

Performance Group) created an experimental adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s The Tooth of Crime.

The production resulted in a heated yet productive polemic exchange between Stoppard and

Schechner over the limits of authorship and interpretation (71-73).

xiv
in practice, requires the adaptation to be an instance of fictional and critical rebirth. This process

is one example of the constant striving for intellectual and spiritual growth that powers the

humanities.

Inspired by reader-response theory, spectator-response theory, magic tricks, mysteries

and con games, I choose to combat what critics Robert Stam, Linda Hutcheon and others refer to

as the fidelity discourse in adaptation studies with the syncretic and spiritual metaphor of

reincarnation. This is a different frame of reference than what Marvin Carlson describes in his

theatre criticism as the intertextual haunting of previous performances, though his semiotic

approach to thinking through spectator-response surely informs mine.3 Carlson’s concept of

intertextual haunting is helpful for understanding multiple receptions, but I prefer the less eerie

and more benign concept of invisible past lives connecting to the present as a series of learning

opportunities over the image of ghosts hanging around with unfinished business. Ghosting, for

me, evokes an unresolved, somewhat ominous disunity, while incarnations and reincarnations of

the spirit suggest a continual learning process — a progression of new lessons learned by way of

new experiences.

The mysticism implied by the reincarnation metaphor is fitting, because the performance

of magic tricks as well as any narrative incorporating a magician, such as The Illusion, naturally

raises questions regarding rational versus supernatural explanations for the mysteries of life. The

magician, as cultural descendent of the shaman, has always been consulted regarding two of the

individual’s greatest mysteries in life: birth (where did I come from?) and death (where am I

3
See Marvin Carlson’s book The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine and his

article “Invisible Presences — Performance Intertextuality” for the specific language he uses to

analyze the response of spectators to celebrities, multiple productions and adaptations.

xv
going?). In addition to its otherworldly suggestiveness, the concept of reincarnation forces a

triple analysis — one dedicated to the current incarnation of a text on its own terms (standing

alone as an individual piece), one examining the influence and interconnectedness of its past

lives (where it came from), and one imagining its possible, future incarnations (where it is

going). Kushner’s play serves as a metaphorical reference to magic, to magicians and to the

transformative powers of adaptation. The Illusion’s themes of cyclical narrative, of deception

framed within deception, and of the dead brought back to life circulate throughout this

dissertation’s interrelated chapters on some of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, on con game

adaptations and on my personal experience adapting a nineteenth-century stage illusion for a

twenty-first century stage. Throughout these pages, I argue for the benefits of free yet informed

adaptation as both a critic and a performer. Now, it is time to get started. It is time to die.

xvi
 1

Chapter 1
Deaths and Reincarnations of Reception Theory
Death, as its Tarot card signifies, is always linked to rebirth. And in that same spirit of

renewal, this first chapter, the theoretical framework of my dissertation, maps out the deaths,

births and name changes of reader-response criticism from the late 1960s to the early 2000s. A

large selection of the major contributors from Western Europe and America — Wolfgang Iser,

Hans Robert Jauss, Roland Barthes, Stanley Fish, J.L. Austin, Jane P. Tompkins, Steven

Mailloux, Michael Riffaterre, Umberto Eco, Anne Ubersfeld, Susan Bennett, Marvin Carlson,

Richard Schechner, and Diana Taylor — are put into dialogue with one another to show that

concepts from reader-response theory are not dead; rather, they have been reincarnated and

reapplied within the fields of speech-act theory, intertextuality and performance studies. I place

these concepts within the context of their historical moments, as breakthroughs in North

American and European literary theory, to discuss their transformations as they cross

disciplinary borders, and then push them beyond another boundary by demonstrating their

effectiveness for interpreting and understanding the performance of magic.

This survey of reception theory allows me to emphasize theoretical formulations which

directly link the fiction-making process that occurs during reading to that which occurs during a

magic show and other deceptive performances (such as con games or hoaxes). Reader-response

theory is relevant to the performance of magic, because magic, as a performing art, is so

completely invested in anticipating and shaping the spectator’s perception of the event.

Therefore, when theorists such as Stanley Fish, Michael Riffaterre and others analyze the

reception process by thinking of short stories, poems or novels as events experienced in the

minds of readers, an immediate and mutually enriching connection between magic and reading is

made. These events, which include the deliberate act of reading (the performance of physical and
 2

psychical actions such as turning pages, moving one’s eyes from left to right, from top to bottom,

and imagining), links the ways authors engage readers in fiction-making to the ways magicians

accomplish that same task with spectators. Authors and magicians manipulate our perceptions

through artifice. Through storytelling they allow us to deceive ourselves. Magicians’ and

authors’ artful lies make it possible to temporarily disengage from what we perceive as “normal”

reality to fully access our imaginations and other worlds – story worlds.

Because the flexibility — indeed, the subjective malleability — of reader-response

theory derives from its focus upon the receiver of a text (and a receiver may be a reader, a

spectator and/or a participant), it is a natural point of departure for the experimental, cross-

disciplinary nature of this dissertation. As a field of criticism, reader-response has a special

knack for breaching disciplinary, cultural, and media boundaries; this characteristic is inscribed

in its very name. All theoretical approaches have their individual talents for moving from one

field to another, but their names typically focus upon objects (things), rather than subjects

(individuals). The root words forming these neologisms reveal their primary interests:

intertextuality (studying the text and the intertext — the betweenness of texts), structuralism (the

-ism, or belief, that deep, formal structures generate meanings and that structural relationships

between elements merit even more attention than the elements themselves), post-structuralism (a

direct response and critique of the claims of objectivity and comprehensiveness made by

structuralism), and deconstruction (the action of the verb “to deconstruct”: the action of undoing

construction, and, in the context of Derrida, of thereby exposing unquestioned metaphysical

assumptions about a thing) are only a few examples. Reader-response, on the other hand,

immediately privileges the reader as its central subject. It celebrates individual receptions and

responses to a text. It fought and won its battles against the established oeuvre and the concept of

the Author with a capital ‘A’ as the primary, and even sacred, locus of meaning. As an analytical
 3

lens it created a new perspective from which to study textual meaning – the experience of the

reader.

Reader-response embodies the influence of a new critical perspective emanating from

France in the 1970s, resulting from the intellectual aftershocks following the events of mai 68.

This was also the moment of the linguistic turn in literary studies, the moment of speech-act

theory’s application to literature, the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism, and the

blossoming of radical exchanges in critical theory between France and North America. Common

readers had, in a sense, been oppressed by authors, as literary and cultural monarchs, for too

long. The revolutionary energy of the 1960s in the United States in tandem with the widespread

revolts of mai 68 in France, including students illegally occupying ideological state apparatuses

(universities and cultural centres in particular), fuelled a countercultural re-evaluation of

traditional beliefs in literary studies and critical theory. Two of Roland Barthes’ radical

statements are examples of monumental changes in the previously established hierarchy of

meaning in literary criticism: “la naissance du lecteur doit se payer de la mort de l’Auteur” (“the

birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author”) and “face à l’oeuvre, le Texte

pourrait bien prendre pour devise la parole de l’homme en proie aux démons (Marc, 5, 9) :

« Mon nom est légion, car nous sommes plusieurs. »” (“against the work, . . . the text could well

take as its motto the words of the man possessed by demons (Mark 5:9): ‘My name is Legion:
4
for we are many’”) (Barthes 1: 495, 1214; Heath 148, 160). L’auteur et l’oeuvre are swiftly

dethroned. Texts may be thought of as author-less, because they are composed of countless

4
Translations of Barthes’ articles are by Stephen Heath from the collection Image —

Music — Text (148, 160).

 4

authors (who are the readers as well as those readers’ conceptions of who the author might be).5

Texts are neither stable nor closed, they are instead constructed and deconstructed through a

constant weaving and unweaving, a polysemous coding and decoding, by critics, initiated

readers, and uninitiated readers, all of whom recognize or fail to recognize the intertextual

references – the various, multi-colored, multi-fibrous threads – that cause the text to overflow, to

exceed the material limitations of its paper, ink and binding.

This overflowing of the text, its escape from the confines of the book by way of the

reader’s experience, is crucial for why reader-response has such potential for re-thinking magic

as a performing art, as well as con games and any performances which intentionally deceive

individuals. Once critics begin to analyze the sites of overflow between written texts, theatre

performances, and the experiences of everyday life, a new space opens up for the analysis of

magic. Magicians must always think critically about their art from the point of view of the

spectator, because they know that the only place where magic actually occurs is within the

spectator’s mind. The reception process of magic is one of the qualitative differences between it

and other performing arts. This new space and the manner in which it allows for a different

understanding of magic tricks and con games are charted out here. Mapping the ways in which

the definitions of certain reader-response terms change as they cross disciplinary boundaries

reveals the formation of new conceptual tools for analyzing magic performances.

From the ‘80s to the early ‘90s, the most useful, adaptable concepts championed by

reader-response theory – the death of the author and oeuvre, l’horizon d’atteinte (the horizon of

5
Michel Foucault would call the reader’s, and his community’s, constructions of who the

author is the product of the “author-function.” See his article “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ?” (“What

is an author?”)
 5

expectations), the reading experience as event, blancs (blanks, gaps or dummy slots),

Satzkorrelate (intentional sentence correlatives), le scriptible/lisible (the writerly/readerly

distinction), the willing suspension of disbelief, and interpretive communities – combine with

sympathetic concepts found in intertextuality and speech-act theory. Two such examples are the

“open” text and the performative speech-act. After reader-response theory’s success, its initial

assimilation by other theories, and immediately following its decline in traditional literary

criticism (circa 1990), these same concepts are carried forward, repositioned and given new life

in the semiotics of theatre, in performance studies and in theories of adaptation.

Some of these reader-oriented terms — the horizon of expectations, the reading event,

and blanks (formal terms describing the most basic aspects of the reception process) — may be

applied to the experience of spectators viewing or participating in a performance with little or no

change to their earlier definitions. Other concepts, like the readerly/writerly distinction, grow in

complexity as I analyze them in relation to the participation of model, double-model, and

negative model spectators in magic performances such as “Powers of Darkness” or “The Circus

Card Trick.” This is a logical deepening of sophistication, because the subjective model, or less-

than-model, reader/spectator is the most unpredictable aspect of the reception process.

Thankfully, there is a wonderful abundance and variety of individuals who receive stories in the

world. The readerly/writerly distinction also creates a space for discussing how and what

receivers learn, or fail to learn, from experiencing a story, a magic trick or a con game.

Finally, the reader-response revolution, the linguistic turn and the appearance of semiotic

theatre criticism utterly transform Coleridge’s definition of the willing suspension of disbelief by

mixing it with Anne Ubersfeld’s concept of dénégation (‘denial’ or the willing suspension of

disbelief in performance). This re-envisioning of the aesthetic experience of the spectator during

the reception process, combined with the influence of physically present interpretive
 6

communities, moves the study of fiction-making into new territory both on the level of visual

and tactile reception. This conceptual layering accounts for aspects of the relationship between

the narrative storytelling, the optical and the haptic illusions of magic which govern the art’s

unique aesthetic. Here is a purely visual example: though it is important in any theatre

production to ensure that spectators’ lines of sight allow them a clear view of the actors in a play,

controlling those same lines of sight as perfectly as possible is essential for the effective

presentation of a stage illusion. A spectator who is placed so he cannot see all of the swordplay

in the final, bloody scene of Hamlet, may not have a perfect theatre experience, but that person’s

ability to suspend disbelief and to be immersed in Shakespeare’s play will not be irreparably

damaged. However, if that same spectator, this time sitting in the theatre to watch Houdini

vanish an elephant, is positioned at a poorly controlled angle and is allowed to glimpse the

elephant as it secretly escapes backstage, then any chance of experiencing magic — of being
6
immersed in illusion — is ruined. The role of visual perception for the successful, willing

suspension of disbelief as well as the kind of disbelief elicited, based on what is seen in these two

cases, are related yet qualitatively different. By moving from the earliest to the most recent cycle

of the theoretical reincarnations of reader-response concepts, I establish the previous historical

context of certain terms as well as their current, conceptual importance for spectator-response

analysis today. Performance studies and theories of adaptation are the fields where my

comparative analysis of certain twentieth-century short stories, magic tricks, films and con

games arrives. Reception theory, and its shifting of critical focus onto the reader and the

6
This, incidentally, is not the method by which Houdini vanished his elephant. However,

I am able to make make this point of my argument here without exposing his method. See Jim

Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant to learn more about Houdini’s act.

 7

spectator, is my point of departure.

1 A Genealogy of Rebirths: From Theories of Reception to

Theories of Adaptation
The 1993 ACLA report on the state of the discipline, later published with annexes

as Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, describes “comparative

literature in the new millennium” as a field of fields, drawn to boundaries as

opportunities for boundary-crossing.

— Haun Saussy

“Theory is dead,” is a popular phrase heard around the comparative literature campfire.

Death of a Discipline (2003) is the title of Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak’s most prominent critique

of my chosen field of study. Also, in 2003-4, Haun Saussy, head of the American Comparative

Literature Association’s ten year review, named his draft for the forthcoming report: “Exquisite

Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares.” So, as a new scholar and a new arrival to this

academic scene, I quickly developed an obsession with death. You could call it a theoretical

complex. But as the last title suggests, this morbid interest is less about the death of “theory” (as

the literary comparatist’s disciplinary raison d’être) and more about theories’ multiple deaths

and reincarnations — the stitching together of theoretical and literary corpses, old and new. What

does it mean to say that a literary theory is past its prime? How does a theory die? Where is it

buried and who goes to the funeral?

Certainly these questions regarding intellectual lifespans are motivated by institutional

debates, their prominent thinkers, and the academic polemics which ensue, but they also engage

the crossing of three main sets of boundaries. The births, deaths, and renamings of reader-

response or reception theory, my chosen case study of this phenomenon, result from

transgressions and travels between national, disciplinary and media frontiers. I use the word
 8

transgression, because the import, export, and translation of ideas is sometimes seen as a

“désacralisation” or bastardization by critical scholars who even today, privilege one storytelling

medium over another. Expertise in or a proclivity for prose, theatre, film, or any number of

media is one thing. Indeed, it is a natural result of our scholarly specializations. However, this

specialization sometimes causes scholars to see their objects of study as located within the

chosen media and this righteous belief sometimes seduces them into practicing a form of

intellectual fundamentalism. I return to more recent examples of this prejudice in my discussion

of adaptation theory at the end of this chapter and in chapter four, but one of its earlier moments

coincides with the revolution of reader-response theory as an alternative to privileging the

supposedly pure, nation-based literatures of its day.

1.1 Rezeptionsästhetik: Origins, Critiques and International Travels

It is impossible to discuss Rezeptionsästhetik—reader-response or reception—without

citing the founding contributions of the University of Konstanz (in Southern Germany) and the

group of literary scholars most prominently represented by H.R. Jauss. His work meets with high

regard in France (as revealed by his numerous bibliographical citations in theoretical manuals

such as Méthodes du texte).7 He has also had a significant impact at the University of Toronto

(where he published Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics) and upon studies of

comparative literature in North America in general. Therefore, Jauss and his manifesto for a new

literary history and an understanding of subjective aesthetic experience are a point of origin or a

7
See F. Scherewegen’s mapping, in 1987, of relevant criticism from a French perspective

in “Théories de la réception,” which includes Jauss, Iser, Austin, Genette, Barthes, Eco and many

of their contemporaries as a comparison to Jane P. Tompkins’ survey of reader-response.

 9

touchstone for what the words “reader-response” indicate. Let it be noted that his approach, as

suggested by the –ästhetik suffix of the German term, is primarily concerned with the aesthetic

reception (and production) of the text—not in its immediate political or social influence. This

last characteristic of the Konstanz school’s original brand of thought—its attempted detachment

from social reality and material means of production despite its Marxist inspirations—will be

criticized by both Jane T. Tompkins (in 1980) and other American theorists insisting upon the

need for politically effective and pragmatic criticism. I argue that aesthetic and socio-political

spheres are never completely separate and that announcing and analyzing the point at which this

boundary dissolves is part of the textual critic’s responsibility. For this reason, the final close

readings of this chapter analyze the ethical differences between magic tricks and con games in

terms of social settings and spectator participation. Jauss, despite his focus upon aesthetic purity,

enfranchises the subjective reader as at least an equally important participant in the production of

textual meaning during the reception process. His contribution to critical thought creates a chain

of intellectual reactions, which makes my analysis of magic tricks and con games as performance

texts possible today.

In “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” Jauss’s infamous attack upon

the outmoded, nationalistic, and dangerously universalizing “literary histories” of his day (that is,

what were touted as definitive and canonical collections of “classic” German literature), he calls

for a new, reader-oriented history to acknowledge the social praxis of textual production.

Inspired, in 1969, by the focus on social relationships offered by Marxist and Formalist schools

of thought, Jauss proposes seven theses dedicated to the foundational concept of “the horizon of

expectations” and its capacity to write literary history anew.8 This concept’s revolutionary focus

8
Gadamer’s hermeneutic practice —specifically his concepts of horizon fusion and
 10

upon the reader’s role was quickly adopted and applied by other scholars in both Germany and

the United States.

Shortly after Jauss’s call to arms, Wolfgang Iser, and Stanley Fish published articles

dedicated to the reader’s reception of a text’s sentence. In harmony with Jauss’s privileging of

meaning as something that is not inherent to a “sacred” text but created through a reader’s

expectations and participation, two of his colleagues’ earliest contributions focus on a new

aesthetic lens through which the reading process can be analyzed. In “The Reading Process: A

Phenomenological Approach,” Iser employs Roman Ingarden’s concept of satzkorrelate

(intentional sentence correlatives) to “examine the way in which sequent sentences act upon one

another” (52). His discussion explores how the reader’s either smooth or interrupted reception of

the sentence in literary prose allows for a dynamic creation of the text based on two poles: the

artistic (the text created by the author) and the aesthetic (the text received and in turn created by

the reader).

“Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,” which was first printed in New Literary

History 2 (1970), shares Iser’s aesthetic approach and marks Stanley Fish’s first significant

contribution to reader-response theory. This article also discusses one of the most basic concepts,

the existence of what Iser calls blanks (holes or gaps), which is foundational to reader-response

theory. Fish’s argument for a more subjective, reader-based analysis of texts is made through

close readings of mostly single sentences and their temporal reception within the reader’s mind

“historically effected consciousness” — also had an undeniable influence upon Jauss and his

personal twist on the horizon of expectations. See the final afterword written for Truth and

Method for Gadamer’s personal reflections on this connection (578-579).

 11

(as the phrase is read and received from left to right). Sentences that are logically

counterintuitive (containing double-negatives or contradictory clauses) are used to analyze how

the reader reacts to such ambiguity: “what the sentence does is give the reader something and

then take it away, drawing him on with the unredeemed promise of its return” (72). These

sentences either encourage readers to do an immediate double-take, forcing them to reread them,

or escape the readers’ attention and cause them to miss or to misremember details.

In Roland Barthes S/Z, also published in 1970, these tricky phrases are called scriptible

(writerly) rather than lisible (readerly) (558). They are writerly because they force the reader to

engage with their unconventional difficulty or ambiguity. The sentence’s break with the normal,

declarative convention of a clause or statement, the convention of making grammatical and

logical sense, opens up the same interpretive gaps (Fish calls them “dummy” slots) that Michel

Riffaterre often uses to describe intertextual functions in his work. Barthes describes these holes

as being intrinsic to reading as forgetting: “c’est précisément parce que j’oublie que je lis” (it is

precisely because I forget that I read) (2: 562; Miller 11).9 Riffaterre, Fish, Barthes, and Iser,

during the same period, all focus on the blank spaces left open by the reader’s misunderstanding

of unusual syntax or unfamiliar intertexts as an act of reading occurs (whether it consists of one

sentence, one poem, or an entire book).

In fact, Fish’s “Affective Stylistics” directly engages Riffaterre’s early stylistic methods

of reader-oriented analysis and praises the theorist for reading the poem as an event. Fish claims

that a line of text (or a text itself) “is no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event,

something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader” (72). Both Fish and

Riffaterre, in 1970, resist other New Critics’ denials of any attempt to focus on the psychological

9
Unless noted otherwise, all English translations of S/Z cited are Richard Miller’s.
 12

or aesthetic effects of, for example, a poem as literary artifact. Fish’s article concludes by

insisting that universal meaning or definitive stylistic value judgments are not the purpose of

reader-response theory; rather, its practice is an exercise in “self-sharpening and what it sharpens

is you” (98). Early on, Fish demands that the field ask not the question—what does that mean?—

but the question what does it (the text) or that (the sentence) do? In short, because reader-

response theory is so critically aware of the personal bias or the conventional assumptions made

by a reader, it becomes a didactic approach. By this, I mean that a reader-response approach

forces individuals to question what a sentence in a particular work does in terms made famous by

J.L. Austin — what are its illocutory (affective) and perlocutory (contract-forming) effects upon

you as a subjective reader reading within a particular social context? What things are done by the

words in a sentence?

The interactions of Jauss, Iser, Fish, and Riffaterre establish early ties between European

and North American concepts found in both reader-response and intertextuality studies. The

horizon of expectations, gaps, Satzkorrelate (intentional sentence correlatives), and the text

received and experienced by the reader as an event, are representative of Rezeptionsästhetik and

some of its most important foundational concepts. However, these early accomplishments,

including the formalist and structuralist methods used to achieve them, did not satisfy the

political concerns of the following generation.

1.2 Deaths — Post-Structuralism, Polemics and Passing Away

In 1980, post-structuralism had gained momentum and attacks on “national” literary

canons, in Germany, France, Canada and the United States had been quite successful. One

decade after Jauss’s “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” literary theory had,

quite simply, changed; as concepts, the author and the sacred text as the primary makers of
 13

meaning were dead, or at least dying, and the importance of the reader had rapidly grown.

Reader-response had won its primary battle and now began to come under fire for not being

revolutionary enough. Therefore, the critique of Jane P. Tompkins makes her the next significant

figure in this genealogical mapping of reception theories.

The essay “The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response,” serves as

an unexpected conclusion to Tompkins’s truly extensive survey of reader-response criticism and

her meticulous collection of bibliographical resources in Reader-Response Criticism: From

Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Her argument claims that reader-response critics have not

revolutionized literary theory, but have “merely transposed formalist principles into a new key”

(201). She stresses that although “new criticism” (meaning is in the text) and reader-response

criticism (meaning is in the reader) are diametrically opposed regarding the particular locus of

textual production, the two approaches are both predicated upon the critic’s ability to find and

define meaning. Despite their differences, she sees both of these schools of thought as

institutional efforts to position literary studies as outside of and justifiably separate from the

scientific realms of the academy. In 1980, Tompkins positions the reader-response movement

(beginning in the ‘60s and ‘70s) at the end of an extremely broad framework of literary periods.

Indeed, her essay’s sections are titled “The Classical Period,” “The Renaissance,” “The

Augustan Age,” “The Advent of Formalism,” and, lastly, “Formalism and Beyond” (201-232).

Although her framing is broad, grandiose and at times fallaciously reductive, Tompkins does

provide a lucid and even-handed analysis of the academic and theoretical developments leading

to a reader-oriented school of critical theory.

Tompkins, up until her last paragraph, mourns the loss of the Classical and Renaissance

conceptions of the literary text as a truly effective, poetic and political weapon. Her work is

noteworthy not only as a snapshot of reception theory’s perceived importance and flaws in the
 14

1980s, but also for her two great questions: “What makes one set of perceptual strategies or

literary conventions win out over another?” and “If the world is the product of interpretation,

then who or what determines which interpretive system will prevail?” (226). These difficult

questions are, in part, answered by the influence of speech-act theories upon reader-response

critics and the institutional polemics that help to make or break academic trends within critical

theory communities at large.

Beginning in the 1980s, however, reader-response theory begins to decline just as

deconstructionist, feminist, post-colonialist and other fields of criticism begin to rise. By the

1990s, reader-response criticism is dead as a movement in literary studies. A 2004 polemic by

Michael Bérubé, which plays a check-point role similar to Jane P. Tompkins’ 1980 critique,

states that by 1990, “any informed observer of the academic scene would have to have wondered

where in the world reader-response criticism had gone” (12). From roughly 1990 to 2000, the

field, which experienced a slight death and rebirth after Tompkins and her complaints,

disappears from the scholarly radar screen. In his critique of a critique, Bérubé claims that

Stanley Fish “killed” reader-response “the day he published his Diacritics review of Iser’s The

Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response under the title ‘Why No One’s Afraid of

Wolfgang Iser’“(13). This polemic is a sad exchange where Iser makes a few logical blunders

and is ruthlessly held accountable by Fish. In short, the rezeptionsästhetik aspect of the field

championed by Iser is eliminated from North American criticism and “interpretive communities”

are all that officially remain — “et tu, Fish?” What are we to make of this intellectual stab? What

happens when one of the great forefathers and one of the main branches of a critical field are cut

down?

Bérubé’s assertion, that this polemic attack altered the genealogy of reader-response

criticism, is substantiated by Iser’s interdisciplinary move from psychological and

 15

phenomenological theories of literature to anthropological ones. In an interview with Richard

van Oort, Iser discussed one of his later books The Fictive and the Imaginary, and his shift from

a dyadic model of reading fiction (his original text-to-reader model) to a new triadic model based

on: “the real, the fictive, and the imaginary” (2). Towards the end of his career, Iser’s work is

more concerned with the “felicity” — the truths and lies — of speech-acts and the way that

fiction’s literary conventions engage the social spheres of performance and linguistic

communication.

As noted in a recent French survey of literary theory, Jauss, one of the great founders of

the Konstanz school, similarly removed himself from reception theory’s intellectual genealogy at

the end of his career and before his death in 1997. In 1995, the section titled “Théories de la

réception,” from Méthodes du texte, states that “la pensée de Jauss s’est constamment

transformée et déplacée, à un point tel que ce dont l’auteur s’occupe aujourd’hui ne semble plus

avoir qu’un rapport assez lointain avec ses prémisses de 1970” (“the thought of Jauss has so

constantly transformed and repositioned itself that what the author focuses on today only has a

distant relation to his premises of 1970”) (Schuerewegen 325). But are the deaths of certain

schools of theoretical thought, of their founders, or of theoretical movements such as reader-

response so final? I argue that when an approach to the study of literature like reader-response

casts off its mortal coil(s) and passes away what occurs is an illusory, superficial death. The

spirits of groundbreaking ideas and of theoreticians do not die so easily. Instead, they are

reincarnated — perhaps the ultimate boundary crossing — to new locations, disciplines and

media.

2 Reincarnations — Intertextuality, Semiotics and Performance

Studies
A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things,
 16

interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely

alliance. The tree imposes the verb ‘to be,’ but the fabric of the rhizome is the

conjunction, and . . . and . . . and . . .

— Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Drama, like conjuring, is an art of illusion. A play does not take place on the stage

but in the minds of the spectators.

— Henning Nelms, Magic and Showmanship

Intertextuality is both in-between and a study of the in-between. I imagine it as the

ethereal limbo-place where concepts from reader-response went to mix with other theories before

being reincarnated. As Andrea Bernadelli writes in his article “The Concept of Intertextuality

Thirty Years On: 1967-1997,” intertextuality, whose central tenet is that the text cannot exist or

be interpreted as a self-sufficient whole, has, apart from that core belief, come to be a “confused

state of polysemy” (3). Therefore, he justly argues that the term, like so many in critical theory,

must be repositioned with each new invocation. Here, my invocation of intertextuality does link

to Bernadelli’s chronological survey of its transformations during three decades of literary

theory, but the layers I add as I invoke the term move it beyond his focus on literature to include

performances and adaptations. The confused polysemy of intertextuality, its multivalence, or

again, its in-betweenness is intrinsic to its very nature and is also its greatest strength. In the

history of literary theory, the term embodies a new open-mindedness, one which addresses

subjective as well as collective experiences of storytelling and thus harmonizes with reader-

response. Intertextuality, in short, makes possible the shift from theories of reader-response to

theories of reception (encompassing readers, spectators and participants).

As a theoretical movement officially begun when Julia Kristeva coined the ethereal term

in 1967, intertextuality studies first investigated the reader’s, or, more accurately, readers’,
 17

acknowledgment or ignorance of intertexts, of the sometimes delitescent allusions connecting

one text to another as words are received by the mind and woven, one thread, one denotation and

one connotation at a time, to produce a unique tapestry — an imaginary story world that is

written as much by readers as it is by authors. But why limit the study of this process to readers

and authors, especially when the noun text and so many of its cognates (i.e., textile and texture)

so beautifully remind us that the act of writing is a weaving of voices, of perceptions, of the

words written or read either silently or aloud to describe what is perceived? The roles of body

language, gesture and practiced physical technique are also integral to the act of “weaving” a

story (whether that weaving is done by Penelope keeping her suitors at bay in The Odyssey, by

Madame Defarge naming those who should be executed in A Tale of Two Cities, or by Jean-

Eugène Robert-Houdin sewing secret pockets into his evening wear). Intertextuality theory

reminds us that stories are read and written in the mind of the reader in the same way that magic,

the occurrence of the impossible and the imaginary during live performance, only takes place in

the mind of the spectator. This magic is also only made possible by referring to agreed upon

spells (speech-acts like “open sesame”), rituals and ceremonial gestures (making the holy cross,

pressing the hands together in prayer, the strike of a judge’s gavel) that interpretive communities

invest with the power to perform the impossible. These words and movements transform

imagined desires into real-world results.

Furthermore, intertextuality as a concept reminds us that the intertext, is the text

envisioned in relation to all of the other texts that it invokes and that choose to invoke it. The

intertext is generated by the author/reader, the playwright/spectator or, better yet, the

source/audience, in that intermediate place where meaning is negotiated on a more or less equal

playing field. That space of negotiation can be called communication. And this communication,

this act of language that makes the intertext possible, may be written, spoken or embodied;
 18

visual, oral or tactile; or all of these at the same time. Hence, intertextuality also involves the

study of texts as they move between media — of how media mediate, of how the adaptation of a

story affects the transmission as well as the reception of that story. What I am calling a language

(a written, spoken or body language) creates the double in-betweenness of intertextuality; this

language allows the study of intertextuality to reveal texts that are not necessarily written down;

and this language, specifically the re-thinking of it at the end of the 1960s that helped shape

reader-response, connects intertextuality studies to the study of writing, authors, and readers

without limiting its critical activities to literature alone.

Intertextuality, as a concept, allows my mapping of the deaths and reincarnations of

reception theory to trace concepts in reader-oriented literary theory as they move to spectator-

oriented performance theory. But such a cross-disciplinary move must be made one step, indeed,

one concept, at a time. Thus far this chapter has presented the most characteristic concepts of

reader-response as its identity: the reading experience as event (the act and duration of a reader’s

physical and psychical engagement with a text), the horizon of expectations (what the reader

expects), intentional sentence correlatives (the fictional world created by author and reader as the

reader relates each sentence to each other sentence), blanks (gaps in understanding or holes of

misunderstanding in the reader’s mind created by single words or sentences), the

readerly/writerly distinction (for texts requiring passive as compared to active readers), and

interpretive communities (the social groups that influence a reader’s reception as well as his or

her interpretation of that reception, before, during and after the reading event). Thus far, I have

put the critical voices of Iser, Jauss, Ingarden, Barthes, Fish, Riffaterre, Tompkins, Bérubé and

others into a chronological dialogue with one another to map out early transitions from the reader

to the spectator. However, to account for the subsequent opening of disciplinary boundaries and

epistemological borders within North America and France, to home in on the more experimental
 19

transformations of the analytical tools championed by reader-response, a more abstract and

comparative look at how those tools are employed in various storytelling forms and media will

now be offered. The study of intertextuality becomes the pivot-point that transforms reader-

response theory into reception theory as a means to study the role of the spectator in performance

and adaptation.

This pivoting, as well as the subtle name change from reader-response to reception,

begins with work on intertextuality done by Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Norman Holland,

Steven Mailloux, Anne Ubersfeld, and others. I have chosen this small, international group to

create a rough sketch of the movement. In France, Barthes figuratively kills the author and the

oeuvre at the same time that Jauss, in Germany, is attacking similar concepts to champion the

reader and his horizon of expectations. Eco, as a semiotician, builds upon Barthes’

simultaneously structuralist and post-structuralist concept of the readerly/writerly to engage with

the difficult concept of the hypothetical reader — i.e., the model or implied readers and their

cultural subjectivity. The Italian scholar’s discussions of encyclopedic competence, of participant

reading in open versus closed texts and of genre conventions designed for older versus younger

readers explore the question of whether the author or the reader is in greater control of textual

reception. Eco’s arguments combine with J.L. Austin’s performative speech-act, Steven

Mailloux’s typology of conventions and Norman Holland’s re-definition of the willing

suspension of disbelief to move the semiotics of reader-response into the semiotics of spectator-

response. Finally, Anne Ubersfeld’s concept of “denegation” represents the successful passage of

reader-response concepts from literature to reception studies in theatre. Barthes in particular,

however, is the point of departure for this entire branch of theory that includes intertextuality,

semiotics and reception. His work emphasizes that the central claim of intertextuality — the text

can never be studied as a self-sufficient whole — results from what was, in his moment, a
 20

radical rejection of metaphysical ‘truth’ claims. This was a rebellion against authors and origins.

Such refusal of truth claims is central to magic as a performing art and its celebrations of the

illusions that humanity transforms into realities.

2.1 Barthes, Inter-texte-ualité, and the Scriptible/Lisible in S/Z

Barthes’ early, simultaneous contributions to the semiotic analysis of intertextual codes

(the text as tissue), to the death of the author, and to the death of the oeuvre link the common

goal of intertextuality and reader-response together in the fight against belief in any kind of

sacred “original.” This crucial move towards what he called texte eventually causes a liberation

from the theatrical oeuvre and an embrace of the performance text. In “La mort de l’auteur”

(“The Death of the Author” 1968), Barthes begins by taking classic criticism to task for not

paying attention to the reader and for its suggestion that the lines of a text release a singular,

theological truth that springs from the mouth of an “auteur-Dieu” (author-God) (493). He rejects

the fallacy of origin connected to this conception of writing. He is right to argue instead that “le

texte est un tissu de citations, issues des mille foyers de la culture” (“The text is a tissue of
10
quotations, emanating from innumerable cultural hotbeds”) and that these intertexts will be

10
Stephen Heath’s by now canonical English translation of this line from Barthes’ article

reads “The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (146). I

find that his translation of “foyers,” a French noun with connotations of home and hearth-like

coziness, to the English noun “centres” radiates less heat than the hubs of social activity I

envision when reading the original French. Therefore, I have chosen to re-translate this line to

express the idea that many layers of quotations, like rays of light and warmth emanating from

many fireside conversations, generate the tissues that become a text.

 21

received, recognized and rewritten within the minds of different readers subjectively (494). His

argument, that interpretation must recognize a vast multiplicity of receptions, of individual

readings as (re)writings, not only kills the author as origin, it also kills the concept of the work

(oeuvre) as origin. In “De l’oeuvre au texte” (1971), he extends the raison d’être of

intertextuality beyond the need to focus on the reader’s reception of these intertexts, to

recognizing the adaptability of a text due to its existence as language. As he says, “l’oeuvre se

tient dans la main, le texte se tient dans le langage” (“the work can be held in the hand, the text is

held in language”) (Barthes 1212); this statement, though more conservative than the move

across media that is eventually made by Marvin Carlson, as well as by Richard Schechner and

Diana Taylor, shows the way in which intertextuality and the linguistic turn in literature allow

Barthes and other scholars to escape previously dominant, material limitations of the oeuvre.

Freed by language, the text exceeds the confines of the book, the space of the library shelf and

thereby extends to performance and to mediations of performance. This is precisely what

happens when a magic performance is recreated from a magic manual — the performance text

escapes the book and is brought to life in the voice and hands of the magician. The critical lens

created by the concept of intertextuality allows for a study of the relationship between

performance instructions encoded within a magic manual and the manner in which a reader

deciphers that code. In other words, how is the embodied knowledge that has been transferred to

paper brought back to life? Acknowledging that an illusion exceeds any singular textual

description and any singular embodied performance is only the first stage of reconstructing its

performance techniques and adapting them to a particular production. Consulting whichever text

is currently thought of as the “original” is important, but far more crucial than this is the perusal

of multiple sources — descriptions written by dead and living magicians, period reviews of

historical performances of the magic effect, and the current embodied knowledge of other living
 22

practitioners. All such available material must be considered before a routine, or even an isolated

sleight-of-hand maneuver, becomes a refined performance text stored in the muscle memory of a

professional magician’s hands and body.

Written memory becomes muscle memory. Only two years after Barthes’ “De l’oeuvre

au texte,” in 1973, Richard Schechner refers to this combination of written and performed

documentation as a “script” in the earliest publication of his essay “Drama, Script, Theatre, and

Performance.” In a footnote added to a 2006 edition of that essay, Schechner observes that his

usage of the word “script” is similar to what Barthes and Derrida scholars would have defined as

a texte. Schechner’s major contribution to this term is the concept of a text inhabiting the muscle

memory of a performer’s body:

Someone with a Derridean turn of mind might say that what in 1973 I called a

“script” a deconstructionist would now call a “text.” There are many different

kinds of text — performance texts, dramatic texts, musical texts, movement texts,

painterly texts, etc. A text is a way of inscribing — encoding — information.

Such inscriptions may be on stone, vellum, or paper — or they may be charges on

a silicon chip, memory traces in a dancer’s body, or what have you. (111)

Schechner’s looser definition of a performance “script” as something that may be inscribed in

and transmitted by a body rather than written down is in many ways for theatre studies what

Barthes’ texte is for literary studies. Both terms stand in contrast to the concept of the oeuvre.

The word oeuvre is weighed down by the baggage of the author-God, who can also be a

playwright-God, and implies a reductive, closed view of the text as a book rather than the text as

an adaptable story or script capable of inhabiting various media; in contrast, the flexible

definition of texte grants each medium equal claims for shaping the meaning, the cultural

importance and the reception of a given story. God is dead, the author-God is dead, and the
 23

oeuvre is dead.

These deaths, influenced by Nietzsche and fortified by Michel Foucault’s writings at the

end of the ‘60s and beginning of the ‘70s, reflect a new skepticism toward the interdependent,

illusory concepts of origin, original and originator. Foucault’s approach to intellectual history is

informed by Nietzsche’s approach to philosophy in the sense that both scholars wish to expose

the idea of a simplified, always already present origin – the origin of religion, of morality, or of

an episteme – as an “invention,” a “sleight-of-hand,” an “artifice” (Kunststück) or an illusion

(Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” 140-141). For Foucault and Nietzsche the

“Schwarzkünstler,” or evil magician, responsible for creating the illusion of unquestioned

origins, and, by extension, supposedly universal truths, is often a metaphysician (Aristotle, Plato,

and Schopenhauer are a few whom they name) (140-141). This is an apt comparison. The

performing art of magic, after all, is a study of how we perceive, of how we immediately

interpret those perceptions and then of how we record that mixture of perceptions and

interpretations as either a personal or collective memory of an event.

If “truth,” as Foucault so convincingly argues in his article on Nietzsche, “is undoubtedly

the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the

long baking process of history” (144), then magic puts that baking process on display during the

performance of illusions. But it can also deconstruct the process by which perceptual mistakes

are remembered as actual events, the process by which error is recorded as truth. On the surface

of a stage illusion, i.e. on the level of effect, such as “The Bullet Catch,” a magician is recorded

as having used his mouth to catch a bullet fired from an actual gun; behind the scenes of that

same illusion, on the level of method, the process of how spectators are deceived into receiving

and remembering the clearly impossible event of the bullet catch as factual can be
 24

11
deconstructed. The deconstruction of such an illusion and its documentation serves as a

microcosm for how errors are entered into the historical record as truths.

Barthes’ practical response to Foucault, Nietzsche and others' shattering of the previous,

top-down delivery of meaning in literary works, influenced by the radical spirit of mai 68 events,

is a shift from structuralist to post-structuralist criticism. This intellectual move is exemplified by

his polyvalent, semiotic analysis of S/Z in which he reads Honoré de Balzac’s early, nineteenth-

century novella Sarrasine. Barthes reads this piece of literature as a text of various tissues, of

varying layers of meaning, received or not received by subjective readers. One of the beautiful

and enduring qualities of S/Z as a highly original, experimental piece of literary criticism is the

tension it creates by mixing the scientific rigor of Barthes’ semiotic analysis, his careful mapping

of five codes or voices (the proaïretic, hermeneutic, semic, cultural, and symbolic), with his

poetic refusal to claim any singular or stable meaning. He refuses to privilege any one reading

that would pay tribute to a concept of traditional authorial intention.

I am speaking of Barthes, the theorist, the semiotic scientist turning revolutionary, the

middle Barthes whom Jonathan Culler has lamented as being eclipsed in twenty-first-century

criticism by the writer/poet Barthes. Culler, whose structuralism is more conservative than what I

am proposing in this project, calls for a return to the early and middle period of Barthes’ career

(see “Barthes, Theorist” 439-446). While I am grateful for Culler’s readings of l’effet de réel (the

reality effect) and the texte/oeuvre distinction, I find the liminal, transition point of Barthes’

work, the liberating embrace of intertextuality in S/Z (1970) to be the most fascinating and

productive for interdisciplinary studies today. I see this study as the highpoint of his systematic

11
For a historical comparison of Robert-Houdin’s, Carl Skene’s, David Blaine’s and

other’s adaptation of this effect see Ricky Smith’s article “The Bullet Catch.”
 25

semiotics and also the beginning of an exploratory poetics that leads to his significant work on

photography and on image analysis in general. Barthes, the theorist, is as important as Barthes,

the poet, for his critical movement from linguistics to literature and to visual media via

intertextual analysis. His work creates part of the necessary foundation for performance studies

and for theories of adaptation.

Barthes’ choice of the enigmatic title S/Z at once reflects his analysis of the central

mystery in Sarrasine and performs his concept of the readerly/writerly, revealing its deep

connection to intertextuality and the participation of an implied reader. I say perform, because

the two simple letters and the slash of S/Z ask the reader to do precisely that for which Barthes

argues: “l’enjeu du travail littéraire (de la littérature comme travail), c’est de faire du lecteur, non

plus un consomateur, mais un producteur du texte” (“the goal of literary work (of literature as

work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text”) (558; Miller 4).

And so, the three signs — S, /, Z — are received by the mind of the reader, which goes to work

decoding them and attributing to them possible meanings based on known intertexts. And this

work is done, in fact, each time the cryptic, yet quickly absorbed, title of the book is glimpsed.

And so the title as a unit of reading (what Barthes calls a lexia), first enters my mind, for

example, as a metonymic cipher standing in for the names of Barthes and Balzac (notice the ‘s’

and ‘z’ as representative parts of each author’s whole name). This is fitting, because Barthes is,

after all, choosing to analyze a novella by Balzac to show that even classic texts, which the

former defines as readerly, closed, and offered for passive consumption only, may be opened up,

may in fact be radically re-read via active, critical participation. Barthes and his title actually do

what they say.

Another reading of the title S/Z turns the letters into resonant sounds from the French

language — consonants moving from text to speech. Saying the name of Balzac’s protagonist
 26

aloud — Sarrasine — transforms the second, visual ‘s’ of that name into a ‘z’ sound. And S/Z is,

after all, an analysis of how the young sculptor, Sarrasine, is deceived by his eyes and his ears.

He misreads and misperceives the body and voice of the opera singer La Zambinella, interpreting

them as an ideal, as the true essence, of feminine beauty.

And because the intrigue and mystery that S/Z deconstructs with a line-by-line exegesis

derive from Sarrasine’s flawed reception of La Zambinella and the intertexts which code and

decode her body within his mind, the capital letters of the title also stand for their names linked

together by a deadly slash. Even the order of the letters is significant in this reading of the title,

for the identity of Sarrasine’s love interest, the construction of her female perfection, occurs

within his mind. His obsessive idealization, his Pygmalion-like sculpting of La Zambinella, is a

readerly consumption of her as a beauty object — of her body as surface. Though he is given

hints throughout their interactions that this surface is an illusion, that Zambinella is not a woman,

he refuses to doubt his perceptions of her appearance or to question his interpretations of her.

Part of his misreading is cultural. He is oblivious to a key intertext, a cultural code of the

Italian stage, that would have revealed “her” to be a “him” from their earliest encounter; La

Zambinella is a young castrato who sings the roles of female characters. When Sarrasine,

towards the end of the narrative, sees La Zambinella playing a male character onstage for the

first time and asks Prince Chigi why she is dressed like a man, the Roman Prince treats the

young Parisian artist’s cultural misunderstanding with disdain: “La Zambinella! . . . Vous

moquez-vous ? D’où venez-vous ? Est-il jamais monté de femmes sur les théâtres de Rome ? Et

ne savez-vous pas par quelles créatures les rôles de femmes sont remplis dans les Etats du pape

?” (“‘La Zambinella! . . . Are you joking? Where are you from? Has there ever been a woman on

the Roman Stage? And don’t you know about the creatures who sing roles in the Papal States?’”

725; Miller 250). Shortly after this revelation, Sarrasine, still believing that his keen, artist’s eye
 27

could not be mistaken, kidnaps Zambinella and, at the monarch’s orders, is shortly thereafter

stabbed to death. The Prince’s revelation of an historic, Italian theatre practice unknown to the

Parisian ex-patriot as well as to the implied French reader of Balzac’s novella, serves as the

primary clue that could have solved the mystery of Zambinella’s secret early on. But the

existence of this hidden intertext blindsides Sarrasine’s horizon of expectations in the same way

that it is meant to blindside the reader’s. Barthes, analyzing these lines from Balzac, makes a

simple claim: “Sarrasine meurt d’une lacune de savoir . . . d’un blanc dans le discours des autres”

(“Sarrasine dies from a gap in knowledge . . . from a blank in the discourse of others” 680). The

semiotician describes the world of cultural connotations and intertexts known by Sarrasine in this

matter as a flawed mini-encyclopedia. It is “une fatrasie” (a “farrago,” i.e., a confused

hodgepodge when it comes to certain aspects of Italian culture) (679; Miller 185). This fragile

construction of reality can lead to death if it has a significant defect. In my reading of Barthes’

reading Balzac, the key gap, blank or manque in this personal encyclopedia, which leads to the

protagonist’s fatal misperceptions, is offered to the reader as a lesson on the dangers of a

readerly (a passive, unassuming) rather than a writerly (an active, questioning) approach to

analyzing the world. This is of particular importance when an individual is a foreigner, when

codes of multiple cultures, languages and constructions of gender intersect. For individuals

become more sophisticated readers of foreign literature and of life by questioning their

assumptions, by admitting, with careful modesty and introspection, that their perceptions,

interpretations and conclusions may be a little bit off, or wrong altogether. Humans must always

be adding and updating entries in their personal encyclopedias.

To perform a brief microanalysis of the influence of a foreign language on the reception

process, Barthes does mention that the female article in French disappears from Zambinella’s

name in Balzac’s story after the revelatory scene with the Prince. However, his analysis of the
 28

moment at which gender is transformed is not more specific than this. It seems important to

highlight the fact that Balzac employs a subtle narrative trick to magically transform the gender

of Zambinella as that character is received within the mind of Sarrasine as well as within the

mind of the reader. These two levels of diegetic illusion are not exactly the same. The Prince’s

mocking statement — “‘La Zambinella! . . . Are you joking? . . .” (line 470 of Balzac’s text) —

is the first time that a character’s speech changes Zambinella’s sex by mocking the feminine

article given to it by Sarrasine. However, it is not until line 473 that the French masculine noun

“chanteur” (instead of the feminine “chanteuse”) corroborates the Prince’s statement in the

French edition and effects the transformation of gender in the voice of the narrator. This

expository, third-person voice, in addition to typically being received as more reliable and

neutral, has a qualitatively different effect on the reception process of the reader. If the reader has

any doubts about the Prince’s reliability, those doubts are dispelled by the narrative

corroboration now identifying Zambinella as masculine. It is also interesting to note that this

corroboration does not occur at the same moment in the English translation of S/Z, because the

noun “singer” is not gendered. For readers of the major English translation of S/Z, translated by

Richard Miller, the gender metamorphosis is confirmed a bit later, in line 475, when Zambinella

is referred to as a “musico” (250). This very slight yet significant difference points to how subtle

changes in the timing of reception occur when texts are translated.

One of the lessons of S/Z is that announced theatrical performances sometimes exceed

the theatre to become unannounced performances in “real” life. Ultimately, La Zambinella (Z) is

another man inverted through a process of reception, deception and self-deception to become an

object of female beauty within the mind of Sarrasine (S). His tragic, willful confusion of fiction

with fact is made possible by the castrato tradition, a practice in Europe from roughly the mid-

sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century and one of the most unusual, gruesome and extreme
 29

examples of human nature’s desire to re-write reality. Instead of delving into the history of

castration, or the endless psychoanalytic readings of the subject inspired by Freud and Lacan, I

wish to simply point out that Sarrasine’s misreading of Zambinella – the slash in S/Z — results

from a social practice designed to manipulate the physical development of the human body, and

of genders themselves, for a desired performance aesthetic. Castrating young boys before

puberty prevents developmental changes in the larynx and thus preserves the youthful, feminine

range of their singing voices. This began as a ritualistic practice to create heavenly musicos in

the Roman Catholic church. These singers then began playing female roles in the papal states for

roughly one hundred years of the Italian opera’s history (Heriot 31). They are made neuter,

intentionally rendered blank, one can argue, to make the verisimilar illusion that a female

character singing onstage is actually female that much more convincing; thus, the opera singer

looks (is dressed) and sounds (can sing) like the real thing. In this sense, the slash in Barthes’

title signifies the castration of Zambinella (literally the physical, slashing action), which turns

him/her into a flat surface, a blank canvas, a slightly distorted mirror that at once reflects

Sarrasine’s male identity, his female fantasy and the fantasy of an Italian ritual back to him.

Sarrasine mistakes the mirror’s reflection for reality. In short, as he gazes at a version of himself,

his imagination unwittingly completes the physical sculpting begun by the papacy and what is

now a socially unacceptable performance tradition in opera. The Parisian sculptor chases a false

reception, an illusion created from his lack of cultural knowledge, from his ignorance of

intertexts, and his unquestioning belief in La Zambinella. This is the deception that kills him.

But Sarrasine’s death is not in vain; it allows this study of participatory reading to move

several steps closer to the study of participatory viewing — from fiction-making in literature to

fiction-making in performance. Magic, as a performing art, studies how spectators perceive, how

they interpret those perceptions and, finally, how mixtures of perceptions and interpretations are
 30

recorded as either personal or collective memories of an event. With enough time, a large enough

interpretive community, and the institutionalization of certain events or memories, an

individual’s subjective perception and interpretation of the world may be recorded as a certitude

(as an absolute truth). The human tendency to be overly certain, to believe in a single reading, is

one that magic and critical theory strive to correct. Analyzing Sarrasine’s fate via Barthes’

combination of semiotics and intertextuality gives birth to a new conception of texte, intertexte,

and the goal of the scriptible/lisible distinction — to make readers active producers of texts, not

only consumers of them. That, I should make clear, is the goal of Barthes’ readerly/writerly

distinction and the goal of the genuine critic, but not necessarily the goal of all texts or of all

authorial intentions. Texts that are invested in creating tractable consumers are as important to

analyze as those which strive to attract thoughtful and questioning participants.

2.2 Eco’s Open Text, the Model Reader, and the Double-Model Reader
At the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, Umberto Eco, who exemplifies the

reader as producer with his contributions as a semiotic critic as well as a “detective” story author

(thanks to his novel The Name of the Rose), defines consumer-creating texts as closed rather than

open. The closed/open distinction is just one of several examples in his book, The Role of the

Reader, where he builds upon and extends Barthes’ concept of the readerly/writerly in a helpful

way. For example, his choice of the term model reader expresses the same sense of anticipating a

hypothetical audience that Wolfgang Iser’s implied reader suggests, while avoiding the slightly

universalizing, and pretentious sounding archilecteur (of Riffaterre) or the informed reader (of

Fish). The model reader is both called for by a text — either by direct appeal or by presupposing

a specific encyclopedic competence (linguistic, cultural, etc.) — and directed by said text on how

to decode its content (Eco 7-8). Eco rightly suggests that codes are sent out by the author via the
 31

text in search of model readers who are capable of interpreting those codes. I would add that

performances of all kinds, whether deceptive or not, also telegraph the hypothetical spectator

they have in mind, albeit paratextually, through the selection of their titles, venues, and their

publicity materials.

This is the beginning of a basic filtering; the majority of readers self-select by language,

culture, age, and interest or familiarity with a particular genre and then either continue the

reading event or end it prematurely, based on their ability to participate in the imaginary world of

the text. For me, Eco’s adjective, the model reader, indicates at least two further levels of

screening in this interpretive process, which influence readerly versus writerly participation:

model behavior and good faith. Good faith refers to simply suspending one’s disbelief — to

playing along with the rules of an imaginary story world and believing in it for the duration of

the reading event, even if this means generously overlooking minor inconsistencies. Some

readers, for example, cannot be good faith readers of science fiction, cyberpunk or fantasy

novels, because they find the descriptions of alternative or futuristic worlds simply too irrational,

too far-fetched, to entertain at all.

By model behavior, on the other hand, I mean following the etiquette — the codes of

conduct — indicated by a text. Texts sometimes overtly state how they expect a reader to engage

with them and sometimes subtly imply what kind of reading practice is expected. In Eco’s

examples of Superman comic books and James Bond novels, closed texts encourage a smooth,

readerly acceptance of their narratives; they cue the reader to engage with them relatively

passively by making minimal or no extra-diegetic demands whatsoever. The comics of which he

speaks might have moments of direct address such as ‘turn to page fifteen’ when pages of

advertising must be skipped over to find out what the villain does next. But these moments of

direct address in the narration simply state the order in which the story is to be consumed.
 32

Additionally, the closed comic book text (though there are many open, more demanding ones,

for example, Art Spiegelman’s Maus) typically does not require readers or even encourage them

to develop a large encyclopedia of intertextual knowledge. Eco compares this lack of

experimental, self-reflexive narration and intertextual sophistication to the converse tendencies

of open texts. His quintessential example of an open text is James Joyce’s Ulysses, which

purposefully calls upon readers to disentangle multiple streams of narration and to write meaning

into the structure of its narrative through personal, and subjective, knowledge of Homer’s The

Odyssey. Readers can, of course, deny this intertextual participation by reading Ulysses only as

Ulysses, but this does not change the fact that it requests a writerly reader as its model reader or

that even those previously unfamiliar or less familiar with the The Odyssey will have absorbed

intertextual references (names and characteristics) by the end of the novel that can subsequently

be applied in turn to Homer’s work.

The model reader can never be defined as an absolute (i.e., a constant or invariable

value), and, in fact, negative model readers — those who actively apply Marxist or feminist

readings to Superman comics or those who attempt to read Ulysses at age eleven — must be kept

in mind as examples of textual reception’s unpredictable nature. Eco entertainingly mocks this

kind of reader to iron out the creases of his semiotic approach to reception (Role 9-10). But this

is a missed opportunity, because thinking about these messy, unanticipated readers, the ones who

do not fit the general model called for by a written or performed text, is crucial for understanding

how the sophistication of reading and viewing abilities changes as individuals grow older and

more experienced with various types of texts. In the performance of close-up magic, for

example, almost all children nine-years-old or below are negative model spectators for card

effects in which a selection is lost and then magically found. Though appearances,

disappearances, transformations, animations and any tricks involving live animals are highly
 33

effective for creating the experience of magic within their minds, children are simply too young

to be familiar with the conventions or the cultural intertexts connected to a deck of playing cards.

They may perceive that a card is chosen and then found, but having had little experience at this

point in their lives with card games, they will not come to the conclusion that the card was lost

when shuffled amongst others. Furthermore, the power of being able to locate any card in a deck

of cards has little meaning for them if they have not yet learned to gamble (let us hope), been to a

casino or learned about these cultural practices by other means (at school or via storytelling

media at home). By age eleven or twelve, such effects become more magical; by age forty or

fifty card tricks may be the most desirable form of close-up magic, particularly in the mind of a

seasoned poker or bridge player.

The final synthesis of Eco’s semiotic approach in The Role of the Reader is the most

helpful for understanding the didactic potential of texts which, due to their deceptive narrative

construction, are simultaneously open and closed, encouraging the participation of a “double

model reader” from the outset (204-205). This nuanced concept of the open/closed text and its

double naïf/critical reader results from the semiotician’s penchant for murder mystery narratives

and metatexts (such as Alphonse Allais’s Un drame bien parisien). Eco’s analysis of the naïf

reading as well as the critical re-reading called for by Allais, one that is built into the somewhat

hidden, self-reflexive, and playfully sarcastic meta-discourse of Un drame, can be productively

applied to Borgesian short stories that similarly lull readers into a naive reception of a text before

ending with a paradoxical impossibility calling for a writerly re-reading. “Pierre Menard, autor

del Quijote” (Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”) and “Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su

laberinto” (“Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth”) are just two examples that

come to mind.

The potential for analyzing meta-performance texts from the perspective of a double-
 34

model spectator is equally exciting. This conceptualization has the potential to disentangle the

complexities of the performance/meta-performance structure found in at least three categories of

magic tricks: “sucker effects” (which fool audience members into thinking they know the

method before fooling them again by ruling out the possibility of that method), meta-patter (in

which the magician addresses two different groups of model spectators in the same audience —

laymen, as naïf model spectators, and other magicians, as expert model spectators), and, finally,

Penn and Teller’s avant-garde “The Cups and Balls” (using clear cups) or their stage piece “Blast

Off,” in which they perform the same stage illusion twice (once as an invisible readerly text and

once as an exposed writerly text).12 In meta-patter situations, for example, additional

commentary, a meta-discourse, coded for and addressed to magicians, is added to the superficial

or naive narration of the performance addressed to the lay public. The sequence of one such

comment often given to mixed audiences during performance actions is as follows: “Please pick

a card, sir, any card.” “Thank you, sir, and may the force be with you.” Upon hearing the

technical term force, any magician in the audience unfamiliar with the particular forcing

12
Penn and Teller are, in many ways, at the forefront of magic’s avant-garde, precisely

because their performances create a highly self-reflexive commentary on the performing art

itself. Their rendition of “The Cups and Balls” using clear cups simultaneously reveals and yet

does not reveal the use of an extra ball, the one ahead principle and other principles of magic.

“Blast Off” is a semi-parody of quintessential stage illusions, such as the “Mismade Lady,”

wherein a woman’s (or, in Penn and Teller’s case, a man’s) body appears to be severed into three

different sections and moved to physically impossible locations. Penn and Teller perform the

illusion twice: once as a normal stage illusion and once with entirely transparent props (revealing

the method and the elegant choreography required to make the illusion work).
 35

technique used now desires a re-reading of the performance actions to determine which
13
particular type of force was employed (there are hundreds of possibilities). A layperson, it is

assumed, will read this line as a non-sequitur reference to the concept of life-force as a magical

source of power in the ubiquitous Star Wars films. On one hand, such meta-discourse comments

are inside jokes for critical readers of the performance; on the other hand, their presence and

their incongruity signal the presence of another narrative level by way of intertextual reference.

Such jokes invite naive readers of the performance to become active, critical ones in time for the

next reading opportunity. In all of these examples, routines provide a meta-commentary on the

reception process of magic — the manner in which the volunteer is processing the magician’s

words and actions — during the performance itself.

At the end of the ‘70s, Umberto Eco’s combination of semiotics and intertextual analysis

is a major contribution to reader-response as it becomes spectator-response. His concept of how

a given text filters an extremely large population of readers to select for a range of model readers

(who will both follow textual etiquette and suspend their disbelief in good faith) also applies to

live performances, which are designed to attract a range of model spectators. Eco’s negative

model readers, generally dismissed by him, are even more important for understanding why

magic tricks, mysteries and con games sometimes fail to deceive. Finally, his double-model

reader can easily become the double-model spectator called for in deceptive performances

exhibiting a self-reflexive meta-commentary. All three of these model reader categories become

categories of the model spectator, just as all three (model, negative, and double-model) help to

13
A “force,” as defined by Whaley, is “any one of several methods that gives the

volunteer a false sense of free choice, while he picks the object, number, or color that the

magician has induced him to select” (388).

 36

explain the difference between suspending one’s disbelief while reading compared to suspending

one’s disbelief while viewing.

2.3 Performance Studies I: Disbelief, Dénégation and Defamiliarization

Somehow, even before the curtain rises, even before our eyes have run over the

screen credits or the first line of a poem or story, we have made a special gesture

of “as if.”

— Norman Holland

Have we not seen how disbelief can move mountains? Is it not enough that we

should have found that something is being kept from us? Before one thing and

another there hangs a curtain: let us draw it up!

— Bertolt Brecht

I have stressed readerly/writerly, closed/open, and naïf/critical distinctions for studying

how readers are either deceived or not deceived as they participate in texts as events. Suspending

one’s disbelief while reading, while watching a play in the theatre, and while watching an

unannounced performance in everyday life are all qualitatively different experiences. The

argument being made here is that particular ideas for understanding the fiction-making process

created by reader-response theorists enrich our understanding of the concepts explaining the

spectator’s role in fiction-making as described by certain theatre scholars. The shared

formulations from both of these efforts offer new possibilities for understanding deceptions such

as con games or magic tricks that either complicate or are performed outside of traditional

theatrical frames. As reader-response criticism appears to diminish to the point of death in

literary studies, critical work on spectator-response gains increasing momentum in the study of

theatre and drama. By the time intertextuality radicalizes notions of text and begins smuggling
 37

concepts across disciplinary borders in the ‘70s, experimental studies of unorthodox theatre have

become a new North American discipline: Performance Studies. The linguistic turn allows

speech-act analysis and semiotic approaches to theatre to focus on the spectator and, later, to go

beyond previous limits of what can be defined as performance.

In comparing certain reader-response critics’ notions of how model readers willingly

suspend disbelief to notions of how spectators in the theatre engage in what Anne Ubersfeld

terms dénégation, questions emerge about how defamiliarization operates during announced

versus unannounced performances. What happens when magic renders familiar objects or

physical laws unfamiliar? How do spectators help to create the impossible within their own

minds? And does magic typically call for passive, readerly spectators or active, writerly ones? I

see these questions of how fiction-making occurs in the mind of the audience as central to

performance studies today. As Brecht suggests in the epigraph above, the presence and backstage

workings of certain performances are being kept from us. Now is the time to reveal them — to

draw up the curtain.

Before the curtain even rises, before the title page of a novel is flipped past, the spectator

is already in the theatre and the reader already knows the name of the author and, likely, the

genre of the book about to be read. The willing suspension of disbelief, the mindset of fiction-

making, begins even before the story does. Around the same time that Umberto Eco is

formulating his model approach to the reader’s participation in a given text, Norman Holland

publishes The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968). He bases the following statement on the

work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Norman Guthrie: “it is not belief in an illusion

that draws us into a play or story—just the opposite. It is a conscious disbelief that becomes

suspension of disbelief” (69). Holland then uses excerpts from both novels and plays to discuss

the ways in which reader or audience response is conditioned by pre-existing genre definitions to
 38

engage in either what he calls “reality testing” (non-fiction) versus judging the “sense of reality”

(that which occurs when we know we are reading fiction) (69). I prefer to think of this last

phrase as narrative verisimilitude: how consistent the fictive, internal logic of a story world is.

Similar to Stanley Fish’s discussion of “orphaned” (or unidentifiable) texts, Holland explores the

difference between reading a specific passage as a historical document being evaluated for truth

or as a piece of fiction being evaluated for pleasure. When the text is orphaned and the reader

does not know whether or not its content is fiction or non-fiction, a search for conventional clues

begins. And in most cases, such markers are found right away: the phrase “once upon a time,” a

reference to an impossible creature, or some other tell-tale sign cues the reader to stop reality

testing, to relax, and to begin suspending disbelief. But why is this search happening in the first

place? Because a reader’s everyday mindset is one that is constantly sifting fact from fiction.

This distinction between reality testing and the act of willingly suspending disbelief is as

important for separating non-fiction and fiction as it is for exploring the audience participation

dynamic in an unannounced versus an announced performance. The willing suspension of

disbelief is a kind of tacit consent—the agreement of an audience to receive fiction as fact (to

“play along”) in the face of reality. The act of purchasing a ticket to a theatre or purchasing a

book chosen from a particular section of a book store, i.e., “science fiction,” “fantasy,”

“mystery,” “historical fiction,” etc., is an explicit investment and the beginning of a cultural

ritual in which the receiver agrees to suspend disbelief in a particular way, knowing that the

sender has designed a text to make that experience as powerful as possible within the frame of a

certain genre or mode of storytelling. This contract of good faith can be broken by either party

during the reception process; each party has expectations of the other. Thus, the willing

suspension of disbelief is one of the most salient aspects of the artistic contract that is negotiated

throughout the duration of a performance or the act of reading a book.

 39

But the psychological and physiological aspects of this decision to suspend reality

testing and to more fully engage in fiction-making are quite different when reading a page, when

watching a stage or when encountering an unannounced performance in everyday life. What I

find most intriguing about Holland’s discussion of disbelief is the territory of the reception

process that he leaves unexplored. He frequently repeats the term “absorption” to describe the

physically passive state that receivers adopt as they sit in armchairs while reading, or in theatre

seats while viewing (72-73). But his examples neither leave the traditional limits of the book nor

those of the theatre to explore in a sustained way where the willing suspension of disbelief ends

and reality testing begins.

The closest he comes to examining a physically active spectator as participant is in his

intriguing analogy of the willing suspension of disbelief to hypnosis (85-86). Holland, however,

limits his definition of hypnosis to its obvious psychoanalytic connotations and references in the

work of Freud. He then abandons this analogy rather quickly in favor of comparing the willing

suspension of disbelief to dreaming — again, a state in which an individual is physically passive.

He reasons that because most people have never been hypnotized, but everyone has dreamed,

this less accurate yet more accessible dream analogy is superior for communicating how the

willing suspension of disbelief functions. It also serves as more direct evidence for the primarily

Freudian psychoanalytic approach to reader-response taken throughout his book.

Why not liberate hypnosis from the psychoanalyst’s office to explore its complication of

the willing suspension of disbelief within a performance context? Hypnosis immediately

questions the power and limits of suggestion as well as the paradoxical behavior of volunteers

onstage during a hypnotist show. Spectators called onto the stage are physically very active

during such shows, participating in all manner of demonstrations to display the depth of their

trance-like state. Despite this activity, one can argue that they are intellectually passive or
 40

complicit as they follow the verbal suggestions and commands of the hypnotist. I mention stage

hypnosis, which has been an unorthodox theatrical entertainment since the nineteenth century, as

only one area of performance that is ripe for analyzing performative speech-acts — language that

has the power to do what it says — and the difference between questioning the theatrical

conventions of fiction-making compared to those of literature. Parsing the willing suspension of

disbelief at work in stage hypnosis has not been undertaken by scholars such as Holland, due to

both its dismissal as popular entertainment with little narrative sophistication and its complicated

in-betweenness (one would have to be an expert in both clinical hypnotherapy and in the

practical performance of entertainment hypnosis to distinguish between their different techniques

and effects accurately).14 In this sense, hypnosis as entertainment has suffered from the same

stigma and ignorance that magic has as a performing art: its content is regarded as a collection of

episodic tricks or stunts; its methods and effects are misunderstood precisely because its small

subculture results in an even smaller number of experts who specialize in its history,

performance and cultural function.

To some extent the stigma is deserved. Hypnotist shows, like many magic shows,

generally lack an overarching narrative or a plot driven by an array of psychologically complex

characters in their diegetic worlds. As fictional figures, magicians and hypnotists do become

central in great works of literature, such as Faust, and in milestone films, such as The Cabinet of

Dr. Caligari (1920), but in these narratives their actual performance techniques are almost

14
In his recent West End theatre show in London, titled Svengali, English magician

Darren Brown hypnotizes a spectator and passes a needle through the skin of said spectator’s

hand. This is one example of a text where the willing suspension of disbelief and the effects of

hypnosis could be compared productively.

 41

always stripped of historical accuracy and are distorted to serve the story. The tricks are

subservient to narrative.

The reverse is frequently true of live performances by stage hypnotists and magicians:

their shows tend to be neatly-routined collages of illusions or displays of the unusual and the

impossible that lack an overall story. In this case, the narrative is subservient to tricks. But this is

precisely because a large amount of their performance time is dedicated to direct audience

participation. Constant, experimental and improvisatorial breaching of the fourth wall dominates

to create a different kind of aesthetic experience for which a linear dramatic narrative is

eschewed. This breaching creates two levels of the willing suspension of disbelief within

members of the audience: that of volunteers onstage who are in direct physical and verbal

engagement with the performer, and that of spectators who remain in their seats and in the

comfort of something like the usual separation between house and stage sections of the theatre.

Both groups have willingly suspended reality testing, but individuals called onstage will be

directly, actively engaged in the performance zone compared to those at a more distant, passive

proximity. This is one of the areas of human experience that these performances are in a unique

position to explore: how sustained, relatively intimate interaction between a performer and a

spectator onstage influences the quality of that individual’s reception of the performance as well

as the audience’s reception while watching them — while vicariously living the performance

through the perceptions and reactions of the volunteer.

Magic shows and hypnotist shows allow for the study of how the onstage interaction

between performer and spectator deceives those on and off the stage by breaking with traditional

theatrical conventions — by paradoxically causing real spectators to kinetically interact with

fictional demonstrations of the impossible. A book and a film cannot call a reader or a viewer to

step into the diegetic action for all other readers or viewers to see. This focus on seeing and
 42

hearing in cinema and on imagining in literature builds a stronger fourth wall, because the

dominance of these senses is also an absence of touch (of smell and taste too, but here I shall

limit the discussion to touch). One of the largely unexplored questions regarding suspension of

disbelief that comes to mind after reading Holland’s theorizing of fiction-making is how does

close proximity between performer and spectator, one which engages the sense of touch, affect

the willing suspension of disbelief?

The theatrical criticism of Anne Ubersfeld published at the end of the 1970s and the

beginning of the 1980s, moves at least one step closer to exploring the suspension of disbelief in

live performances and how that experience is influenced by proximity. In Lire le théâtre

(Reading Theatre) (published in 1978), and in subsequent work, the French theatre professor and

director employs the term dénégation to describe a more theatrically specific version of what

Norman Holland calls the willing suspension of disbelief. Though the acts indicated by these

terms, to suspend disbelief or to de-negate, reveal a similarly contradictory “as if” action, their

differences account for qualitatively distinct fiction-making as it occurs in the mind of a reader

compared to the mind of a spectator. The central difference is the physical presence of the actors

and objects creating that story world. In her chapter “Pour une sémiologie de l´espace théâtral”

(“Towards a Semiology of the Theatrical Space”) Ubersfeld discusses the way a spectator

willfully ignores the mundane status of actors and objects during a play. This is dénégation: the

conscious suppression or denial of actors or objects, which the spectator knows to be real in

everyday life, in favor of their imaginary roles being performed onstage. This active state of

denial, however, is ephemeral and localized. It only exists during the reception process.

Ubersfeld points out that denegation is always linked to the radical separation between

the universe of what is shown in the theatre and the universe of what is lived outside of it. Her

definition incorporates yet also moves beyond Holland’s psychoanalytic approach to a semiotic
 43

one that rigorously accounts for the uniqueness of fiction-making in the theatre. She takes care to

simultaneously build on the reader-response concept of the willing suspension of disbelief while

also emphasizing the theatricality implicated by the term. Dénégation (the act of denying,

refusing to recognize or refusing to accept) is distinct from désaveu, from the French verb

désavouer (to disavow), which is stronger denial of having done, seen or agreed to something

(14). Disavowal, I would add, is for serious or legal situations in life; denegation is more of a

theatrical doublethink. The spectator plays along and accepts what is said and shown onstage to

be true. The spectator’s denegation allows at least two contradictory, paradoxical versions of

reality to peacefully cohabitate within his or her psyche. In other words, reality does not

disappear; it becomes a distant, barely perceptible hum within the ongoing noise of the mind as

the alternative reality of the story world takes center stage.

Just as the willing suspension of disbelief receives a new corporeal embodiment in

theatre studies as denegation, Umberto Eco’s model reader is re-embodied as a model spectator

in Ubersfeld’s example of how a chair onstage is received by the audience: “Une chaise sur

scène est une chaise réelle, mais ce n’est pas une chaise du monde, on ne peut pas s’y asseoir” (A

chair on the stage is a real chair, but it is not a chair of the world; one cannot sit in it) (my

emphasis, 15). Eco helps answer why, exactly, an audience member cannot sit in the chair. Some

of the reasons for not getting up from one’s seat to sit on the theatrical stage are based on the

physical divisions separating the diegetic space of the performance, the limbo space of the

audience, and the real-world space lying in wait just outside the doors of the theatre to reclaim

spectators who have temporarily closed themselves into the space of a social ritual. One reason,

then, is that the chair might be difficult, in terms of obstacles, to reach for a spectator wishing to

sit in it; however, this purely physical obstacle, one of proximity, is dependent upon the

architecture of the theatre. That architecture is designed to train or to remind spectators to model
 44

good behavior. Socialized spectators cannot sit in the chair due to the recognized etiquette of the

theatrical ritual, which makes the act of entering the stage space, before the show, after the show,

or at intermission a violation of propriety. During a performance, of course, the entire audience

as well as the cast would pause and stare if a spectator decided to forgo all decorum by taking a

seat onstage. Finally, there is what Ubersfeld would call a psychic barrier preventing such

behavior and what I read into Eco’s model reader as good faith: the willing suspension of

disbelief, that magical enchantment which transforms lies and fictions into truths onstage, is in

full effect by the time spectators see the chair onstage. Therefore, they think of the chair more as

existing only in the diegetic world of the stage, as opposed to the real world, and do not even

consider sitting in it. That chair, the spectator might think, belongs to the castle of Macbeth that I

am pretending exists right before me; the chair is there and in existence for the part of my psyche

embedded in the world of the play. Even so, in the back of my mind, suppressed yet undeniable,

exists the thought that it is a real chair. This doublethink is the paradox of denegation in the

theatre.

The human mind’s ability to willingly engage in the paradoxical action of denegation, of

suspending disbelief despite the actual physical presence of performers’ bodies in front of them

(albeit at a theatrical distance), is complicated by magic as a performing art. Magic effects,

depending on the fictional frame in which they are placed, complicate denegation in three ways.

First, they create visual special effects whose artifice is so invisible when adapted carefully to

traditional theatre that it causes spectators of a live performance to engage in something beyond

denegation. I consider this a moment of fantastic ambiguity, which heightens the receiver’s

subsequent denegation. Another way to describe this reception experience of intense ambiguity

is that spectators’ minds lose track of their perceptions and interpretations — a momentary short

circuit of the senses and the imagination occurs. This forces them to uncomfortably question
 45

their reality testing abilities — they are temporarily profoundly incapable of distinguishing

between reality and mimesis. Second, magic frequently increases the proximity of the spectator

and the performer to the point that touch, a sense not typically engaged in the reception process,

complicates traditional definitions of denegation. Third, magic sometimes lays bare denegation’s

role in the process of live performance through meta-theatrical critique. This final self-reflexive

complication is a contemporary application of what Brecht defines as defamiliarization and has

the same potential for teaching spectators to be more skeptical of how they receive reality

outside of the theatre.

An example of the first aspect, the visual way in which magic questions denegation,

comes from magic historian and illusion designer Jim Steinmeyer’s distinction in Art and

Artifice between the reception of special effects compared to illusions:

In the theatre, a special effect often is designed to be subsumed within the fantasy

of the production. To ignore its presence, to fall under the spell and accept an

effect without question or wonder is the highest compliment, Coleridge’s “willing

suspension of disbelief.” . . . An illusion seeks the opposite. It starts with a basic

reality and attempts to make it deliberately special or surprising. In a magic show,

there is no willing suspension. The magician cannot risk the audience ignoring his

illusions or accepting them as part of a larger context; they must be held apart as

unique. (my emphasis 38)

Steinmeyer’s opposition between special effects in theatre performances and illusions in

professional magic shows is deliberately binary so as to make the point that magic is a

performing art unto itself — a discipline and a profession with an aesthetic of its own. But once

one accepts that magic and traditional theatre are each autonomous, there is nevertheless a

fascinating, liminal space joining the illusions of magic and the special effects of plays, which, in
 46

turn, is where Ubersfeld’s denegation (which is a live performance version of Coleridge’s willing

suspension of disbelief) becomes so compellingly troubled. The key for denegation is that what

has changed in the fiction-making process is that spectators have real physical people and objects

in front them. This is a different type of denial than simply reading a page and imagining that

there are goblins in a story. It is one thing to imagine the existence of these creatures from the

comfort of your living-room armchair; it is quite another experience to have an actor playing the

part of a goblin right in front of you during a performance. The spectator sees that the actor

playing the goblin is moving around through time and space (i.e., physical reality) in the same

manner that people do in everyday life. Therefore, denegation accounts for a different quality of

fiction-making during the reception process. This does not make denegation completely separate

from reading a page and suspending one’s disbelief, for there is definitely crossover, but physical

presence makes theatre as a live performing art special and distinct. Spectators must suspend

their disbelief in a qualitatively different way when encountering live performance.

Raymond Joseph Teller (of the contemporary stage magician duo Penn and Teller) and

his recent adaptations of magic effects to Shakespearean productions is an example of

performance work inhabiting this in-between space of the magic aesthetic, the special effect

aesthetic, and the process of suspending disbelief via denegation. In his first collaboration with

director Aaron Posner, Teller found a way to seamlessly combine a magic effect with the

narrative of A Midsummer Night’s Dream whose performance drew gasps of surprise from its

audience (Close 35-36). In that production, when Oberon extends a hand to place a love potion

onto the eyelids of a sleeping Titania, her entire body levitates for a few moments as his fingers

briefly contact her skin. The collective gasp of the audience can be explained by the fact that

unlike most special effects in Shakespearean productions, Teller’s was designed to offer no

explanation whatsoever for its occurrence. The levitation was made to look impossible with a
 47

level of perfection that audiences are simply not accustomed to seeing live. I read that gasp as the

reception of a fantastic ambiguity, a moment of dissonance for spectators who are willingly

engaged in denegation (i.e., ignoring the real world existence of actors’ bodies to replace them

with the imaginary qualities of faerie characters) and then shocked by a visual impossibility —

by an act which undeniably defies the physical law of gravity. Momentarily, I imagine that

spectators would have been alarmed as their willingly suppressed reality testing suddenly cried

out for an explanation of what was happening. After that initial reaction, the internal verisimilar

logic that love potions cause faeries to levitate in the world of Puck, Bottom and the other

magical creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, would most likely take over and make the

reception of the play’s imaginary world even stronger.

In addition to causing disruptive visual incongruities during the reception process, magic

performances frequently break down the fourth wall by increasing the spectator’s proximity to

the performer and by directly engaging the sense of touch. Traditional denegation does not

account for the complex levels of fiction-making involved in routines such as American

magician Mike Caveney’s “Powers of Darkness,” which is a clear example of magic’s long

tradition of calling spectators onto the stage. This threshold crossing is a central characteristic of

magic’s stage conventions for many reasons, but two of the most pertinent are: 1) its core

aesthetic need to confuse the denegation / reality testing activities of the spectator’s mind to

thereby create a convincing experience of the impossible; 2) the tendency of many magic

routines to be adapted from close-up, face-to-face performance circumstances to those of parlor

and stage environments. A rough performance history of “Powers of Darkness” illustrates this

last point. I recently attended one of Caveney’s performances of this routine in a theatre with a

thrust stage and 200 audience members. Here is a brief description of the effect that was

performed: the magician shows a solid metal square to the audience and asks for a volunteer. As
 48

the spectator makes her way onto the stage, the magician explains that the audience will see the

method of this illusion. The purpose of the routine is to demonstrate the different pleasures of

seeing how magic is created (which the audience does) and of being left in the dark, literally for

the spectator in this case, to experience magic by touch. The spectator is then asked to close and

open her eyes as the magician has her (in this case) hold poses (e.g., hands on hips, hands

clasped, hands on head, etc.), which causes her body to form several natural circles that are

separate from the metal square. The square is then made to magically pass through her body,

impossibly linking and unlinking through her arms several times. The spectator, who has the

sensation of actually feeling the impossible travelings of the metal square take place as it links

and unlinks to her body, is then applauded as she returns to her seat. The magician concludes by

asking the audience to keep what it saw a secret in the name of preserving what has been a series

of unusual, magical sensations for the volunteer.

Though I saw “Powers of Darkness” performed live as just described in 2010, Caveney’s

version is an adaptation of English magician Tony Corinda’s routine published under the same

title in 1975. In turn, Corinda explains that his routine is an adaptation of an effect originally

employed by charlatans during séances who would claim that spirits made a wooden hoop (rather

than the metal square used by Caveney) link to the spectator’s arm (313-317). Thus, a magic

effect originally used to prove one’s ability to manifest spirits in the intimate, close-up setting of

a dark séance room is later adapted to a stage entertainment setting in order to demonstrate two

receptions of a magic effect at once: what the revealed method looks like (the audience point-of-

view) and what it feels like to experience the magic without knowing the secret (the spectator’s

perspective). But in both settings, at least two of its characteristics remain unchanged: its reliance

upon intimate proximity and upon the sense of touch as distinct from the sense of sight.

Caveney’s “Powers of Darkness” embodies the characteristic of touch that makes magic
 49

an unusually tactile performing art, one that calls for a new understanding of the relationship

between denegation, reality testing and the double-model spectator. What happens to the

reception process — to the fiction-making occurring in the spectators’ minds — when the

performer proves to them that the impossible has happened, despite the reality testing of a

volunteer’s sense of touch? Are spectators able to maintain the same separation of reality testing

and denegation when they are passively seated in the theatre compared to when they are actively

engaged — even in direct physical contact as a volunteer — with the performer? The evidence

from “Powers of Darkness” suggests that this is not possible. The mixture of touch with

denegation experienced by the volunteer, creates a particular aesthetic reception within the mind

of this person by intentionally confusing these two, typically separate, experiential boundaries.

Touch is so personal and is so rarely made a direct part of the reception of fiction in theatre or in

other settings that a higher value of real-world veracity is attributed to it as a sense. It is one of

those senses of perception that is generally reserved for reality testing.15 If reading or theatre-

going conventions can train us to adopt certain fiction-making frames of mind, certain

interpretive colorings, that lessen the veracity attributed to types of sensory information (such as

the dominant sight and sound), then what happens when a sense we typical reserve for reality

testing in everyday life (touch) is engaged in a theatre performance? By mixing senses that are

typically reserved for experiencing the real world with those that are ritualistically trained to help

15
Cramped hands, adjusting one’s glasses, or the sensation of fingers turning pages are

two examples of how touch, while reading, is one of the exterior reminders of physical reality

that to some degree distracts from a reader’s imaginary involvement in a story. In this way, touch

does not add to the fiction-making experience — it is a distraction still connected to reality

testing.
 50

spectators willingly suspend disbelief or to engage in denegation, magicians create a paradoxical

space where impossibility invades life. At least, that will be the experience of the model

spectator onstage during “Powers of Darkness.” The rest of the audience will witness that

spectator’s genuine shock as each magical effect happens and play along by applauding, but they

will only be able to imagine what the illusion must feel like by living vicariously through her

onstage reactions. They will see the key method of the effect each time the spectator’s eyes

close, which is why darkness gives the magician powers in this routine. For this reason, the

question of whether the spectator onstage sees the performance a second time (this time from the

revealed, audience perspective) is a question of double spectatorship. In a lesser way, she also

has the ability to re-read the performance by simply asking someone else after the show to

describe what happened while her eyes were closed. Assuming her interlocutor breaks the

contract called for by the magician from his model spectators and tells her the secret, she would

then add a critical reading to her naive one. “Powers of Darkness” gives its onstage volunteer

these choices after its mystery is presented. She may choose to bask in the naive plaisir of not

knowing or she may choose the more writerly jouissance of seeking out the method — of

drawing up the backstage curtain.

But what does it mean to draw up Brecht’s at once literal and metaphorical curtain in this

case? If magic’s aesthetic calls for both passive, readerly spectators as well as active, writerly

ones, how can a particular performance be analyzed to determine which type of reception

process it favors? And if Brecht calls for a theatre that is political, one that causes spectators to

think about life and to act differently outside of the theatre, how does this apply to magic

performances? The short answer to these questions can be summed up in one phrase:

defamiliarization liberates.

Whether or not a magic performance contains an explicitly meta-critical layering (such

 51

as Caveney’s “Powers of Darkness,” Penn and Teller’s “Blast Off” or their rendition of “The

Cups and Balls” with clear cups), its complication of reality testing always defamiliarizes. Part of

magic’s aesthetic raison d’être is to inspire wonder about simple objects, to render the ordinary

extraordinary. This is precisely why it must blur the line between the willing suspension of

disbelief, denegation, and reality testing. This blurring of boundaries, this defamiliarization, is

also what Brecht sees as causing spectators to question the world in new, socially active ways.

Brecht and Steinmeyer both see the defamiliarizing potential of performance as a way to

increase inventive, critical thought stripped of traditional assumptions regarding reality. In a

documentary interview on the meaning of magic, Steinmeyer laments the way in which much of

the world is designed to “make you stop wondering about things” (Wizards of Awe). He provides

a scientific example of how social institutions condition us to not ask certain questions and of

how magic performances amaze us into asking the simple question “Why?” The illusion designer

admits that how leaves change color is still a mystery to him:

If I think about it I don’t understand why the chlorophyll dying makes them turn

red, except that someone told me “We’ve got that figured out; you can stop caring

about it now.” . . . And what a magician does, hopefully, a great magician, is take

a coin, something that you’ve handled hundreds of times, and the coin disappears

and you say: “Gee, there’s something about coins and hands that I’ve never

understood before.” (Wizards of Awe)

Performed correctly, this vanish — a defamiliarization of hands and coins — looks so impossible

that it short-circuits the spectator’s reality testing. There is, of course, no guarantee that a

spectator will leave the magic performance, go home, and pick up a coin from the living room

table with a new sense of wonder; however, there is a possibility that this will happen — that an

individual will respond to a magic performance by re-evaluating his or her assumptions. Even
 52

fewer receivers of such a performance will take the extra step required to research how to

perform the coin vanish by seeking the instruction manuals or the experts explaining it. Fewer

still will then analyze the way in which the method for a coin vanish might be applied to

different objects or how the flaw in human perception being exploited by a particular vanishing

technique might manifest itself in ways that exceed magic as a performing art. And yet, in this

series of diminishing likelihoods, in this spectrum moving from readerly to writerly to living

involvement, the potential for a magic performance to alter a spectator’s approach to

understanding the world is there. This is the potential of amazement, of the experience of magic

within the spectator’s mind, to give the receiver fresh eyes for investigating reality — to ask new

questions which no longer take simple, seemingly known objects, for granted.

In his “Short Organum for the Theatre,” Brecht describes performance, scientific

explanation and defamiliarization as intertwined. His theatre practice calls for a wide array of

alienation (Verfremdung) effects designed to create writerly spectators who will critically engage

with the content of the play being watched and, in subjective ways, apply what they learn to their

own social realities once they leave the theatre (186). The goal of his avant-garde techniques is

never to allow the audience to “fling itself into the story as if it were a river and let itself be

carried vaguely hither and thither” (201). He argues that seamless mimesis enchants and

hypnotizes the very spectators who must be snapped out of such dreamlike reveries both in the

theatre and in everyday life.16 Brecht elucidates this with an example of the kind of critical

16
There is a clear connection between the enchanted spectators Brecht describes and the

members of the “dreaming collective” as defined by Benjamin in “Convolute K” of his Arcades

Project (389). Benjamin, too, wishes to awaken the members of society from the complacent

trance of the readerly, from passive acceptance of the consumption-obsessed arcade.

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awakening he hopes his theatre practice will achieve. He tells the story of Galileo observing a

chandelier as if it were not a familiar, quotidian object, but something alien and unknown:

To transform himself from general passive acceptance to a corresponding state of

suspicious inquiry he would need to develop that detached eye with which the

great Galileo observed a swinging chandelier. He was amazed by this pendulum

motion, as if he had not expected it and could not understand its occurring, and

this enabled him to come on the rules by which it was governed. Here is the

outlook, disconcerting but fruitful, which the theatre must provoke with its

representations of human social life. It must amaze its public, and this can be

achieved by a technique of alienating the familiar. (192)

Indeed, the skeptical eye is achieved by alienating what is supposedly known (e.g., leaves,

chandeliers, coins, objects, and other phenomena), by questioning traditional assumptions and

explanations: it is a perspective developed by way of amazement.

On the one hand, I doubt that Brecht had magic performances in mind when he wrote his

famous essay on the alienation effect. Many of the meta-theatrical techniques that he

recommends for an early- to mid-twentieth-century avant-garde theatre (for example,

recommendations on music, title cards, and acting style) are distancing devices not typically used

in magic shows. On the other hand, gasp-evoking levitations, such as Teller’s in A Midsummer

Night’s Dream, or the intimate engagement of the sense of touch in routines like “Powers of

Darkness” are examples of magic’s special knack for defamiliarizing the familiar. These are

unconventional performance techniques in standard theatre, but they have consistently been

employed by magicians to challenge how spectators test reality and how they engage in fiction.

These techniques create the pleasurable aesthetic experience of magic in the minds of audience

members. They also encourage writerly spectators to question their sensory perceptions, their
 54

interpretations and their ensuing assumptions about chemistry, physics, and other “common

sense” explanations of how the world operates.

Immediately following his example of Galileo and the chandelier, Brecht describes

theatre that alienates the familiar as a practice of “dialectical materialism” or, more simply, a

technique that reveals “society’s laws of motion” (193). One can hear the earlier voices of Marx

and Benjamin in this statement. Brecht’s theatre aims to awaken what Benjamin calls “the

dreaming collective” to social laws, economic facts, and physical realities that will remain

hidden or mystified until members of society become more critical, reflective and writerly. This

is another way to interpret what Brecht means by drawing up the curtain. The performances on

his stage alienate and defamiliarize to create a reception process in which spectators are ideally

active both during and after their visits to the theatre. Magic as a performing art, similar to

Brecht’s theatrical philosophy, encourages its performers and spectators to examine the

boundaries between performance and everyday life from a new, critical perspective. It does this

when performed in the traditional frame of a theatrical setting. It also does this when performed

in a looser fictional frame.

Magic tricks often move outside of the theatre and into other social zones. In these

instances, which range from surprise performances to friendly bets to full-blown con games, a

spectator’s faulty interpretation of reality during a trick can be made to have material

consequences in real life. The following close reading of “The Circus Card Trick” and receptions

by participant spectators demonstrates how speech-acts and interpretive communities illustrate

the difficulty of determining when a theatrically framed magic trick transforms into a different

kind of manipulation — a social and physical deception that sometimes plays on the border of

being criminal and sometimes actually becomes criminal.

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2.4 Performance Studies II: Performative Language and Interpretive

Communities

When the saint baptized the penguins, was this void because the procedure of

baptizing is inappropriate to be applied to penguins, or because there is no

accepted procedure of baptizing anything except humans?

—J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words

Certain acts are made possible by constitutive conventions: promising, playing

chess, making a touchdown . . . . We make sense of acts by invoking interpretive

conventions (traditional, regulative, and constitutive); such conventions constitute

meaning.

—Steven Mailloux, Interpretive Conventions

My response to J.L. Austin’s delightfully absurd question is that if a large enough

interpretive community agrees to recognize the baptizing of penguins for long enough, then

society’s legal and religious institutions will eventually be altered to allow for a new conception

of penguin-hood. As ridiculous as penguins with names recognized by both the courts and the

church may sound, Brecht’s lesson of the theatre, Benjamin’s lesson of the arcade and

Steinmeyer’s lesson of the magic trick is that individuals forget how malleable reality is. People

are fooled, and fool themselves, into believing that there are certain unalterable truths; they are

lulled into consuming commodities without questioning the spells of consumption cast upon

them; in short, they fall into the trap of accepting superficial appearances and superficial

explanations of those appearances as certainties. Magic tricks are a playful short-circuiting of

these certitudes, an entertaining rejection and questioning of what a society chooses to define as

reality’s limits. Con games, on the other hand, are criminal tricks manipulating those same limits
 56

between reality and fiction for unethical gain. When detected, large-scale cons such as Bernard

Madoff’s or Charles Ponzi’s schemes (which tricked investors into believing that non-existent

investment strategies were making excellent returns) are outlawed, litigated and penalized. In

other words, interpretive communities (juries, theatre audiences, and even informal gatherings of

individuals) are constantly defining and evaluating where reality ends, where fiction begins, and

in what context these tricks are or are not acceptable violations of those limits — that is, whether

or not a reality breach is legal or illegal.

The central problem of locating where this transition from reality to fiction takes place,

and of how human beings manipulate language to make that transformation occur, can be

explored by analyzing “The Circus Card Trick” which lies near the border of magic and con

artistry. Though it is far from being a crime, this routine is a taste of grifter-like manipulation.17

It is also a transition point where the “as if” of fiction-making suddenly becomes the “it is” of

reality, which is why J.L. Austin’s study of what happens when words have the power to do what

they say is of such enormous value here. In this analysis, I build upon Austin’s definition of the

performative speech-act, Mailloux’s and Fish’s thoughts on interpretive communities, and

question Anne Ubersfeld’s reading of the performative utterance in theatre. I do this to insist that

distinguishing between the power of language in what Ubersfeld describes as the laboratory-like

conditions of the theatre, as compared to those of untidy reality, is relatively straight-forward

when a theatrical frame is obvious and announced. But what is to be done when the theatrical

frame is ambiguous or unannounced? It is in this scenario that the performative language of

close-up magic and con games becomes a way to explore how members of society have the

17
The U.S. slang word “grifter,” or sometimes “grafter,” is defined by the OED as a

person who “makes money by shady or dishonest means; a thief; a swindler.”

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power to informally turn fiction into reality — to play with the suspension of disbelief and

denegation as human activities operating outside of traditional, neatly-contained limits of the

theatre.

Before delving into the performative language of the trick mentioned above, it must be

understood that certain magic jargon and even some pre-packaged magic tricks sold at retail

shops reveal the potent influence of the grifter or con artist subculture upon magic as a

performing art. “The Circus Card Trick” is what magicians define as a “Sucker Effect.” The

Encyclopedic Dictionary of Magic describes this special category of trick as “any effect where

the magician leads the spectators to believe they have detected the method and then works a

double bluff to surprise them even more” (Whaley 893). These types of tricks, as the terms

“sucker” and “double bluff” suggest, are direct adaptations either of con games or of the con

artist / victim dynamic for entertainment rather than criminal purposes. Before I ever learned to

perform “The Circus Card Trick,” I bought the S.S. Adams Co. mass-manufactured “Coin Con”

for $2.95 from my local magic shop at the age of fourteen. This was my first “sucker effect,”

though I had no knowledge of that phrase at that time or even of what the word “con” actually

meant. I was attracted to the effect, because the demonstrator described it as “the trick that pays

for itself.” He suggested that I simply make it clear at the beginning of the trick that it would cost

the spectator twenty-five cents to see it performed and that they must promise not to get mad

about having to pay this small fee.

This is where a simple Austin performative, the participant’s “I promise,” establishes the

performance price of this magic effect via verbal contract in advance. “Coin Con” is one of the

few performances where the ticket price is the central focus of the drama. The spectator’s

willingly surrendered quarter is placed flat onto a small plastic pedestal with a circle of red felt

cut to the same size of the coin. A plastic lid covers the coin, some magic words and gestures are
 58

performed. The lid is then lifted to reveal only the circle of red felt: the coin has vanished. I

would then either pass out for examination or accidentally nudge the pedestal, which would

make a rattling sound. After hearing the tell-tale rattle of a coin, the spectator would open up the

opposite end of the hollow pedestal with a satisfied grin that they had discovered the trick’s

method. But the grin would vanish, as quickly as the quarter, when they discovered only a plain

metal disc inside that had simulated the rattling sound of a coin. The disk has a message printed

on it that reads “Thanks for the quarter.” After thirteen performances, I had recouped my $2.95

plus tax. I had also, rather unwittingly, learned to perform a trick inspired by the history of con

artistry.

Another, perhaps even clearer, example of a con game adapted to slum, i.e., cheap retail

magic, is the S.S. Adams Company effect named “Money Maker.” This trick, which is a self-

working plastic contraption that appears to print legitimate currency from blank paper, contains

no reference to its con game history in its packaging or instructions. The North American short

con known as the “Money Box,” however, performs exactly the same effect to sell the “mark”18

what appears to be a counterfeiting device for a large sum of money. Later, of course, the mark
19
will discover that the device is useless and that the con artist’s demonstration of it was a trick.

For the moment, however, I prefer to focus upon “Coin Con” because it is a straight-

forward case of an announced magic trick performed outside of a traditional theatrical space. It is

18
A “mark” is the U.S. slang term for the target of a con artist, the victim who is to be

taken advantage of.

19
See Maurer’s The American Confidence Man for documentation of this con (228).
 59

also a clear example of the performative “I promise” as the signing of a performance contract, of

a con-game-inspired sucker effect devoted to “getting the money,” and of the critical training

that such sucker effects offer spectators — that is, an increased ability to detect when fiction may

have material consequences in real life. Participating in and feeling the sting of “Coin Con” is an

exercise in “self-sharpening,” to borrow once again Stanley Fish’s description of how reader-

response criticism teaches us to analyze not what a poem, or any text, means but what it does.

Instead of seeking a poem’s or a performance’s truth, reception theory seeks its practical effect

on the reader. What are the results of the reception process? In terms of spectator-response, I see

the reception and reflection experience of a simple trick like “Coin Con” as related to the reading

experience of a short, clever poem like the following one by e.e. cummings:

l(a

le
af
fa

ll

s)
one
l

iness

Imagine a reader’s reception of this poem as an event: the reader’s eyes most likely move left to

right, and down; left to right, and down; left to right, and down again until the end of the poem.

The eyes then move up and scan just about everywhere to determine what the poem could

possibly be saying. Eventually, an English-speaking reader will be able to spatially rearrange the

cryptic, enjambed letters to create the line “l(a leaf falls)oneliness” or some minor variation

thereof (cummings 1). Once the falling leaf image placed inside of the word “loneliness” has

been deciphered within the reader’s mind, a wide range of interpretations can be made of
 60

cummings’ elegant, minimalist creation. Whatever the reader’s ensuing interpretation might be,

he or she first had to fill in the mysterious blanks, the intentionally ambiguous knowledge gaps,

created by cummings’ pre-meditated enjambment. The reader has a new tool that may be applied

to analyzing any writing that employs similar syntactic tricks. Tricks which anticipate and thwart

the readers left-to-right and top-to-bottom reading strategy will henceforth be more easily

untangled by readers whose senses and interpretation abilities have been sharpened by this poem.

This is at least one lesson that can be taken from the reception process, a way of reading

enigmas that will help the receiver to recognize patterns and to solve future ones more quickly.

As a trick, the self-sharpening, spectator-response lesson of “Coin Con” is to be careful about

making promises with material consequences, and to be skeptical of any performer who offers an

easy explanation for a trick (i.e., the audible rattling in the base of the pedestal simulating the

missing quarter). A skeptical spectator watching this performance a second time would avoid

paying attention to the red herring (the false rattle), would avoid interpreting that rattle as a noise

made by the quarter, and might scan the correct zone of the performance space to determine how

the coin is actually spirited away. In short, a quarter is the price paid for a taste of the kind of

verbal and physical manipulation that the same spectator might experience at the midway games

of the local carnival. Those games cost significantly more than a quarter. In turn, failing to

recognize the chicanery of large-scale financial scams, such as the Ponzi schemes mentioned

earlier or a deception like the Nigerian letter scam, costs significantly more than being

bamboozled at a carnival. The axiom of magician Karl Germain is one description of the didactic

nature of grifter-inspired magic tricks: “A knowledge of conjuring tricks makes a boy more alert

to the trickery of the world he will have to cope with in maturity” (qtd. in Whaley 968).

“The Circus Card Trick” is another basic yet also more sophisticated lesson in the

physical and verbal manipulation made possible by an informal and ambiguous performance
 61

environment. Its simulation of the con game’s manipulation of a spectator’s tendency to engage

in denegation as compared to reality testing is stronger, because its use of performative language

happens in the middle of the routine rather than at the end and because of its invocation of the

performative agreement “I bet” in place of “I promise.” This difference in verb choice also

reflects a difference in the contractual announcement in “Coin Con” compared to “The Circus

Card Trick.” The price of the former trick is clear and is agreed to in advance of the

performance; the latter trick, however, is transformed from an off-hand piece of entertainment to

a proposition bet via ambiguity. The bet made in “The Circus Card Trick” is agreed to in a

spontaneous, off-the-cuff fashion. The manner in which it is presented demonstrates how the

performative verb “to bet” appeals to a specific set of social conventions that have the power to

make a spoken bet felicitous or infelicitous. In other words, the amount of the felicitous bet that

is made in this trick is not fixed at twenty-five cents; it is flexible, fluid and can be determined in

an improvisational manner, customized to the social environment in which the trick is

performed. Fortunately, the first time that I participated in the game-playing narrative that is

“The Circus Card Trick,” the bet that I lost was relatively minor and my deceiver was kind

enough to teach me how I was fooled.

The framing of the performance in which I was deceived was informal. A group of us

who had become friends were snacking, chatting and playing cards before the beginning of our

introduction to acting class. Jason, who has since become a close friend, picked up the cards and

offered to show me a trick. He asked me to shuffle the pack, to pick a card, to memorize it (the

Ace of Hearts), and to place it face-down on top of the shuffled deck. He then asked me to cut

the cards once or twice, thereby burying the selection somewhere in the middle of the pack.

“Fair?” he asked. “Fair,” I replied. He then took the cards and began dealing them face-up onto

the table, for the group to see, one card at a time. He told me to avoid reacting if I saw my card
 62

go by. He was to receive no external clues from me or from anyone else regarding its identity.

Everyone was asked to instead concentrate on the identity of the card — to imagine its suit and

value in their minds. He would know when he had arrived at my card thanks to his powers of

extra sensory perception (ESP). After about half of the deck was dealt, I noticed my Ace of

Hearts flip face-up onto the table and then another three or four cards flip face-up on top of it.

Jason kept turning cards over. He suddenly stopped, apparently receiving some kind of telepathic

signal, gave the next face-down card in his hand a small flick with his index finger and asked:

“What do you bet that the next card I flip over is your card?”

I knew that he had made a mistake. He had already passed my card. I could even see the

tip of it sticking out of the face-up pile on the table. In fact, I was so certain that I answered with

enthusiasm and not a little sarcasm: “My soul!” “Really, you bet your soul that the next card I

turn over is the one you chose?” “Absolutely.” I then watched as Jason’s right hand, the same

hand that had so clearly indicated the next face-down card on top of the deck, moved to the table,

uncovered the Ace of Hearts I had chosen and triumphantly turned it over. There it was: my

chosen card, face-down. Grinning, he said: “You owe me one soul.” Being a man of my word, I

wrote up an improvised deed on a piece of scrap paper, signed it in front of our fellow aspiring

actors as witnesses, and handed it to Jason. Class was about to begin, so our group went into the

theatre, and, after we were out, Jason taught me the trick. I have no idea whether or not he still

has that piece of paper.

The primary lesson that I learned from “The Circus Card Trick” is that confident acting

combined with precise manipulation of the performative verb “to bet” is the key to eliciting the

desired spectator-response: an agreement (i.e., a felicitous wager). The bet that Jason and I made

was successful yet infelicitous in Austin’s terminology. It was playfully sarcastic, rather than

sincere, and, despite Faustian traditions, the interpretive community present had no precedent or
 63

ritual in place for validating the official transaction of my soul. Though Jason certainly

entertained us, and taught me not to fall for this particular performative trap in the future, the

practical result of the speech-act was similar to that of the saint baptizing the penguins. The bet

was void, because it was applied to a soul. If I had bet something else, a dollar perhaps, the

speech-act could have easily been felicitous and I would have incurred a monetary loss. More

importantly, if the betting had occurred in the social context of a bar, a carnival, a circus, or a

horse-race track, Jason could have won material returns from me had he directed the bet more

carefully.

The aforementioned environments are where “The Circus Card Trick” gets its name and

where it was originally performed as a more serious con.20 The most ubiquitous and effective

social context in which to analyze its performative language and its material consequences in my

experience, however, is the North American pub or bar — a liminal, informal environment

where small bets, which I will refer to as proposition bets, are socially acceptable. From the

performer’s point of view, proposition bets are a fascinating study of how the spectator who

makes a bet joins onlookers to form a local and immediate interpretive community, which has

the power to define or reject the felicity of the bet. The bet of “The Circus Card Trick” thus

becomes a social text, an informal performance text, that will be read and interpreted by a

community of individuals who experience it. In Stephen Mailloux’s exploration of the

similarities between communication in speech-act analysis and reading, he makes the rather

conservative statement that “part of a text’s meaning emerges in the reader’s perception of

20
See Roberto Giobbi’s performance manual Card College Light and his description of

the “The Circus Card Trick” for a reference to the trick’s history and to further details on method

(67-75). Incidentally, I prefer to perform a different “glimpse” than the one he mentions.
 64

whether the text follows or violates traditional conventions” (158). Stanley Fish, in his essay on

interpretive communities “Is There A Text in This Class,” goes one step further to argue that

almost all of a text’s meaning emerges from a reader’s interpretation of these conventions. In

addition to agreeing with Fish, I would like to add that social conventions, such as making a

verbal bet or shaking hands, during a performance have varying degrees of power that are

entirely granted or denied by local interpretive communities in the heat of the moment. These

felicitous agreements may be overturned or redefined as infelicitous by larger interpretive

communities retroactively, but local, low-stakes agreements like those made with a handshake

are rarely contested in this manner.

Let it be assumed that, contrary to my personal performance ethics as a magician, I

choose to increase the odds that “The Circus Card Trick” will result in my own material gain.

This can be accomplished by heightening the felicitous conditions of the trick’s bet, which is the

happy or unhappy reception of the bet, in three ways: 1) by choosing a social environment in

which the ritual of betting is a more or less natural and traditional social activity (in this case, the

university pub); 2) by slightly fracturing the fourth wall of the trick’s performance with a

linguistic trap that set for a negative model spectator (i.e., manipulating a spectator to switch

from the activity of denegation to one of reality testing in a premeditated manner); and 3) by

breaking through the fourth wall of the performance more completely with a physical handshake

— an informal yet traditionally strong form of contractual agreement. This final step

symbolically moves the trick from the realm of intangible fiction to the realm of material reality.

For the practical illustration of how these manipulations of spectator-response occur,

imagine that you, several acquaintances and I have all gone out for drinks at a university pub

following a full day of panel discussions and conference presentations at the annual conference

organized by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). All of us have

 65

participated in a panel dedicated to comparative studies of theatre and literature, so we are

naturally discussing each other’s work and the theoretical concepts at the center of our particular

enquiries. I perform a card effect, such as “The Mona Lisa Card Trick,” to illustrate the manner

in which the willing suspension of disbelief and the denegation processes combine to create the

sensation of magic within the mind of the spectator, a visual transformation in the case of this

effect. You and the others in our group respond positively to this short performance with the

exception of one person who insists on knowing how the trick was accomplished. This is an

individual who, it is clear, did not particularly enjoy being deceived visually. I then ask this

spectator, who will be known as Mr. R. (for his insistence upon rational explanations with a

capital “R”), if he would help with another card trick. As a performer, I have thus sifted the

personality types of our small group and selected a suitable participant for “The Circus Card

Trick.” This sifting is the same filtering process described by Eco in his description of how

written texts select for model readers. Mr. R., for the vast majority of card tricks, would not be a

model spectator at all. For magic, in general, he is a negative model spectator, because he is less

willing to suspend disbelief, to denegate, and, in short, to play along with the fiction-making

process required to experience magic within his own mind. This, however, makes him an ideal

candidate for the sucker effect of “The Circus Card Trick,” because the success of the trick

depends upon baiting the spectator into betting on the fact that the magician has failed. The

magician’s failure, in this case, must be an outcome that this spectator desires. This desire

usually stems from a dislike of the magician who is perceived as a threat, because he is a figure

representing the instability and ambiguity of reality. After Mr. R.’s card has been selected, lost,

and flipped face-up onto the table along with the other rejected cards, it will be obvious to him

and to the group that the magician has made an error. In other words, the imaginary fourth wall

of my performance, the zone in which I am presenting the card trick as a demonstration of ESP is
 66

fractured. My extra-sensory perception is seen to have failed once I have skipped past the correct

card and stopped instead on a different face-down one. It is impossible for the spectators at this

moment to believe in the story of the trick, in the fictional presentation of myself as a magician

with ESP, because my mistake so clearly contradicts my supernatural claim. Reality testing —

the spectator’s perception and interpretation that the trick has failed in the real world — is thus

activated and supersedes any willing suspension of disbelief or denegation at this moment.

Paradoxically, this is the same instant at which I act as though I have indeed received a signal

“Ah!” I flick the incorrect face-down card with my right forefinger and ask Mr. R., “What do

you bet that the next card that I flip over is your card?”

The open question, this time directed at a model spectator (Mr. R) for this sucker effect,

demonstrates how the performance of close-up magic, especially when turned into a proposition

bet, poses new questions for the study of Austin’s performative speech-acts. This invitation to

bet, at the moment when an already ambiguous fourth wall is broken, is made real by the same

conventions that Stephen Mailloux discusses when he compares the behavior of readers reading

a certain genre of American fiction to the actions of sports fans participating in certain

conventional rituals at the beginning of live baseball games (127).21 The act of making a bet is a

21
According to Mailloux, in his essay “A Typology of Conventions,” traditional

conventions “are based on precedent and manifested most explicitly in a society’s customs and

rituals. For example, singing the national anthem before a sporting event is a traditional

convention in contemporary American society” (127). Using this national anthem example

throughout, Mailloux breaks his typology of conventions into three categories: Traditional (past

conventions), Regulative (prescriptions regulating future action), and Constitutive (descriptions

determining present meaning).

 67

social custom, a ritual which has certain traditional connotations within the environment of a

North American pub (a place where televised sporting events are watched, where games such as

darts and pool are played, and where bets on particular outcomes are often made). There are

social precedents for the behavior of staking money on what will happen next. In this social

space, betting on a card trick, as opposed to baptizing a penguin, does not strain the spectator’s

or the other group members’ horizons of social expectations. All of these conditions increase the

odds that Mr. R. will voluntarily bet a beer, or even five or ten dollars that I will fail to flip over

his card. The range of his potential responses to the question, however, is quite wide and there is

no absolute guarantee that felicity will ensue. He could refuse to bet or he could render the bet

implausible by betting a sarcastic amount, such as his car, his house, a million dollars and so on.

Though these large bets might be felicitous with the right spectator in the right environment (e.g.,

performing for a billionaire near a high-stakes roulette table in one of Monte Carlo’s casinos),

their material value is far too high to validate them within the social context of a pub. The

traditional conventions imagined for such a space within the minds of the group that will serve as

the bet’s interpretive community must match certain expectations. Therefore, if Mr. R. does not

make a normal bet, I will suggest one: “Would you bet a beer?” This challenge, which is an

opportunity to win a free beer and to prove that the magician does not have psychic abilities, will

typically be too great of a temptation for a model sucker effect spectator such as Mr. R. to refuse.

Any kind of passive consent, such as the vocal responses “yes,” “sure,” and so forth, is then

guided into a more concrete social commitment with a handshake. This physical gesture is paired

with an explicit rephrasing of the bet. I extend my hand to Mr. R. and state: “You bet a beer that

the next card I flip over is not your chosen card, right?” Once the tactile consent of the

handshake is made for the group to see, the informal bonds —the verbal and physical felicity

conditions —of the bet are in place. The fourth wall has also been broken entirely: the spectator
 68

is no longer watching a fictional card trick; he is now participating in a real-world proposition

bet. When I flip over the correct card, the fact that my actions match the literal and explicit

statement of the bet’s terms will trump the fact that the communicative phrasing of the bet was a

linguistic trap. In short, the use of performative language combined with the physical consent of

the handshake and the presence of a local interpretive community will almost always ensure

felicity. Mr. R., in response to the customs, the rituals, and the social pressure of those who

witnessed our informal agreements, both linguistic and tactile, will pay the amount lost. By this

process, the words uttered by the spectator and the performer in “The Circus Card Trick” have

the power to do what they say.

This close reading —based upon my first reception of “The Circus Card Trick” as a

spectator, written documentation of the effect in magic manuals and reference materials, and an

imagined performance situation based upon personal experiences transmitting the same effect to

live spectators — is a contribution to my overall argument that a performance-studies rather than

a theatre-studies approach must be taken to examine the in-betweenness of magic as a

performing art. In other words, the transition I have made via references to Teller’s levitation in a

theatrical production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to Mike Caveney’s stage

adaptation of “Powers of Darknesss,” to the retail effect “Coin Con,” to, finally, various versions

of “The Circus Card Trick” is a trajectory that signals the gradual disintegration of any kind of

stable theatre environment. The walls of the theatre simply cannot contain performance anymore

than the covers of a book can contain textual meaning. This protects us from an oversimplified

experience of the world. Therefore, as helpful as Norman Holland’s distinctions between

Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief and reality testing are for reader-response theory, and

as useful as Anne Ubersfeld’s definition of denegation is for identifying one of the qualitatively

different fiction-making behaviors that occurs in the mind of spectators during theatrical
 69

performance, I propose that these concepts must move beyond what has been defined as theatre

studies into what has become performance studies. The move to privilege the role of the

spectator in the reception process, with the same rigor that reader-response theorists shifted

attention to the reader, has been made by Ubersfeld in her three-volume Lire le théâtre (Reading

Theatre). That shift also occurs in Susan Bennett’s Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production

and Reception. These studies, however, focus on the same passive spectator who is seated at a

safe distance from the action. This is the same kind of theatre-goer described by Holland to flesh

out his conception of the willing suspension of disbelief over forty years ago. This conception of

the spectator results from the frequently passive, epistemological limitations of a disciplinary

approach that takes the word “theatre” as its point of departure. Performance studies, whose

development as a discipline over the last fifty years is concisely described in the opening of

Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire, obviously chooses performance itself as its

object of study. Performance studies sees sacrificing the established academic prestige of theatre

studies as a small price to pay for escaping its entrenched assumptions. Like Taylor, my

particular investment in performance studies as a discipline “derives less from what it is than

what it allows us to do” (16). In the case of magic tricks, mysteries and con games, performance

studies allows this inquiry to draw upon rich theoretical conceptions of receiver-oriented reading,

viewing, and — here is the addition that performance studies facilitates so well — participation.

This includes an individual’s tactile reception of fiction and reality. All of these methods of

reception, but especially this last one, are where I see an opportunity to draw up Brecht’s curtain,

to examine how the fourth wall is broken down, and to explore the self-sharpening lessons

offered by the paradoxical performances of magic tricks and con games. The interactive

reception of tactile performances is how we sharpen our sense of touch.

My focus upon the tactile as a key aspect of the participatory mode of fiction-making,
 70

which is so important for the reception of magic tricks and con games, is similar to Linda

Hutcheon’s discussion of the “kinetic” and the “somatic” reception of texts in her book A Theory

of Adaptation. Hutcheon’s exploration of adapted texts examines media and genres that are used

either to tell stories, to show stories, or to allow interaction with them (xiv). In general, her

description of “somatic” (bodily or corporeal) reception tends toward “kinetic” (motion-related)

interaction to better understand the physical aesthetic of theme-park adaptations like Disney’s

Pirates of the Caribbean ride or the participant-viewer immersion experienced by video-game

players as their rapidly moving fingers connect and respond to the diegetic world of a game

(135-138). To analyze the manipulation of the sense of touch in magic, con artistry and

pickpocketing, however, the spectator’s experience of somatic motion or movement is as

important as his or her experience of static touch. Static touch encompasses the stationary tactile

or haptic aspect of somatic reception. To give just one example, both real and theatrical

pickpocketing often rely upon putting static pressure upon a more sensitive part of the spectator’s

body to direct attention there rather than to the less sensitive wrist from which a watch is being
22
stolen.

The use of performative language, particularly in combination with kinetic and tactile

reception that influences how words do what they say, is central for understanding how the limits

of traditional theatre dissolve into the ambiguous performance settings of everyday life to change

the quality of the sensory perceptions and the imaginary interpretations of a spectator. The

suspension of disbelief, the act of denegation, and fiction-making in general do not only operate

in the theatre. These processes also operate in varying degrees of interrelation in semi-theatrical

zones and in what society considers the zone of the real world.

22
See Jim Ravel and Paul Butler’s book Jim Ravel’s Theatrical Pickpocketing.
 71

Another example of how I see this subject of performative language approached yet not

pushed beyond the realm of the stage occurs in the chapter titled “Saying and Doing in the

Theatre,” by Ubersfeld. There, she performs a careful and rigorous analysis of several speech-

acts uttered in Racine’s Phèdre. She maps the Austinian locutory (meaning-producing),

perlocutory (affect-inducing) and illocutory (contract-forming) elements of imperative

commands issued and obeyed by Phèdre and her nurse as they interact onstage. Ubersfeld’s key

distinction in her analysis of these performatives is that though these speech-acts have the power

to create monumental shifts in power relations between the characters onstage, they have no real-

world illocutory (read: contractual) effect upon the actors playing those characters or upon the

audience. In other words, these commands have the power to result in felicitous contracts

binding the fictional characters to perform certain actions, but this is not so for the actors or the

spectators. Hence, she ends her chapter with a statement suggesting that the language of theatre

operates in a kind of sanitary lab space:

If there is one area in which it would be difficult to deny theatrical mimesis it is—

and maybe there is only the one—the domain of language. The reader-spectator

understands this. He or she understands its meaning, effects, force. He or she

observes it taking place in what one might call “laboratory conditions.” (103)

There is, of course, much to be learned from witnessing the theatrical discourse that Ubersfeld

elsewhere describes as a “mime of speech in the real world,” or as a “scale model” of what

individuals might experience in real life (102). But there is also much to be learned, indeed, a

knowledge only produced by way of a qualitatively different reception experience, through the

analysis of points at which the walls of this theatrical laboratory dissolve. These are moments

when deceptive performances designed to take advantage of passive, readerly participants are

encountered in everyday life. Let us return for a moment to magician Karl Germain’s statement.
 72

How exactly do conjuring tricks equip those who study them with the tools needed to analyze the

trickery of rigged bets, short con games and even elaborate Ponzi schemes? Analyzing speech-

acts from the safety of one’s seat in the theatre is certainly a type of self-sharpening. It is an

intense study of language at one step removed. It is not, however, the same as being called onto

the stage to experience the manipulation of touch that one will experience in so many situations

in real life.

This somatic lesson in self-sharpening places an emphasis on what Diana Taylor and

other performance studies critics refer to as “embodiment” (16). Embodied performance is the

transmission of cultural knowledge that typically escapes written culture. These nuances of

knowing, which include gestures, variable pressures of touch, and other physical movements, are

often as much a part of the reception process as the language that receivers hear or the words that

they read. I do not wish to privilege embodiment above all else. However, I must insist that the

written script, the theatrical utterance, and the performative touch are of equal importance.

Certain performing arts, such as magic, clearly reveal how some performance knowledge is

contained in the archive (in libraries or other collections of material records), while other

performance secrets reside and are passed down through the repertoire (the corporeal, ephemeral

and organic knowledge stored in the bodies of living performers).

3 From Theoretical Underpinnings to a Practice of Fantastic

Literature
We now travel from the crystal pool of Alicandre’s cave to the writing desk of Jorge Luis

Borges. This chapter has focused on certain deaths and reincarnations of reception theory to

establish the theoretical underpinnings of the dissertation. The births, deaths and name changes

of reader-response criticism from the late 1960s to the early 2000s have been mapped out. A

large selection of the major contributors from Western Europe and America — Wolfgang Iser,
 73

Hans Robert Jauss, Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes, J.L. Austin, Jane P. Tompkins, Steven

Mailloux, Michael Riffaterre, Richard Schechner, Susan Bennett, Anne Ubersfeld, Diana Taylor

and others — have been put into dialogue with one another to reveal that concepts from reader-

response theory are not dead. Instead, the combination of these scholars’ ideas suggests the

opposite: that their intellectual tools for understanding reception have been reborn and reapplied

within the fields of speech-act theory, intertextuality and performance studies.

This exploration of reception theory has already emphasized theoretical concepts directly

linking the fiction-making process that occurs during reading to that which occurs during the

experience of magic shows and other deceptive performances (such as proposition bets and con

games). I have argued that reader-response theory is relevant to the performance of magic, first

and foremost, because magic as a performing art is so invested in controlling the spectator’s

perception of the event. Experienced magicians constantly remind their students that the only

place where magic occurs is within the mind of the spectator. Conjurors therefore naturally

privilege the subjective interpretation of events: the individual’s active participation in the

construction of what becomes the performance. This approach to analyzing the text (in this case,

a performance text), which favors the point-of-view of its receiver, is inspired by the iconoclastic

University of Konstanz scholars. Their successful refocusing of critical atention on the reader

inspired subsequent thinkers to argue for the death of the sacred written text as the locus of

textual authority. Privileging the reader’s experience also echoes the cries of the mai ‘68

intertextual critics, led by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, who pronounced the death of the

author. In all three examples, the receiver of the text (whether written or performed) has been

recognized as at least an equal participant in the generation of textual meaning and is often

thought of as the most important individual for understanding what a particular text does.

As we have seen, this liberation and celebration of the receiver of the text are simply the
 74

point of departure for what literary analysis has to teach us about magic as a performing art and,

on a darker note, about con games as crimes. The journey became more interesting and complex

while discussing how ambiguous and difficult texts call for scriptible (writerly) rather than

lisible (readerly) participants. Sarrasine’s fatal misreading of Zambinella has shown us how the

sex-change of a character can be enacted by an author with the subtle magic of transforming an

article from the feminine to the masculine. Sarrasine’s error and death, it has been argued, are an

excellent example of how literature teaches readers to adopt a writerly approach to analyzing the

world. I have argued that forcing readers to become writerly, challenging them to provide a large

portion of textual meaning through subjective analysis while reading and then re-reading, is a

lesson in enigma analysis. Receiving and interpreting literature such as Alphonse Allais’ Un

drame bien parisien (“A Fine Parisian Drama”) or e.e. cummings’ puzzle poem about a leaf are

exercises in self-sharpening and these skills are applicable to written and performed texts that

readers encounter in everyday life.

The stakes of successfully analyzing the performative language employed in difficult

fiction have been seen to increase and to move beyond the reception of subjective individuals

once a person’s local, interpretive community is taken into account. We are, of course, not alone

in everyday life. We exist in relation to our local communities, institutions, national identities

and global realities. The speech-acts that we ourselves use or encounter within these webs of

power are magic spells that give our language the ability to do what it says. This speech-made-

reality power is generated from the individual’s interpretation as negotiated and combined with

group interpretations, which become informally codified (sometimes by the tactile contract of a

handshake) or become more formally institutionalized (sometimes in legal documentation) by

way of larger and more entrenched social formations. Written fiction freezes the magic spells

that we have looked at thus far into a stable, visual place on the page where we can read and re-
 75

read them if we wish to parse their rhetorics to understand exactly how they function.

Live performances (Kushner’s The Illusion, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and

Goethe’s Faust, for example) offer what I consider to be a more visceral, proximal and

theatrically announced experience of such magic spells. These theatrical rituals of communal

fiction-making, compared to the more private act of reading, demand a different kind (rather than

degree) of the willing suspension of disbelief. We have discussed that such traditional theatre,

performed within an explicit and announced fictional frame, signs a contract with its model

spectators when they purchase a ticket at the box office. This token of the fiction-making

agreement is then torn at the threshold of the performance space.

Despite the above differences between live (performed) and frozen (written)

transmission, the script of a play — the written record of the live — shares at least two affinities

with the analysis of the qualitatively different willing suspension of disbelief experienced by a

reader receiving poetry or prose. First — as with written fiction — one may delve back at any

time into the textual record of a play like Kushner’s The Illusion to focus upon the exact wording

of his magic spells. Second, both initial (the live) and subsequent (the written) receptions of a

theatrical text are “safe” in the sense that the receiver has agreed to participate in a communal

ritual of believing that the performance is occurring in real life even though it is not. One can

watch, or even temporarily become, Pridamant as he is duped into thinking that his son is dead.

One can gawk in wonder as the tongue of the Amenuensis is restored and he is miraculously

given back the power of speech. After all of these feats, one can later peruse the written record of

the play to reconstruct exactly how this at once individual and communal ritual of belief gives

theatrical language the power to do what it says (at least, within the diegetic world of the play

and within the imagination of the spectator in the theatre).

This second affinity that live theatrical performances and pieces of written fiction share
 76

— safety — is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing of the imaginary experiences made

possible by safe fiction-making is that the successful enigma-analysis tools sharpened in the

receiver become important implements of potential financial and emotional survival when one

encounters unethical magic spells outside of the theatre: illicit speech-acts. Examples of such

treachery are pieces of fiction posing as non-fiction for personal enrichment,23 the less-than-

ethical proposition bets that were discussed in this chapter (“Coin Con” and the “Circus Card

Trick”), as well as full blown con games such as “The Flue” or other shortchange cons that will

be discussed in chapter three. The curse of relatively safe receptions is that as challenging and as

powerful as some of the speech-acts in written fiction or live theatre performances might be, they

are limited by their occurrence in well-defined fictional zones — in curtained frames. Therefore,

though receivers experientially learn that these storytelling deceptions cannot successfully

happen without their active belief as well as the active belief of the interpretive community

surrounding them, the deceptions, illusions and enchantments encountered occur in an all-too-

safely-announced environment. At some point, the training wheels on the bicycle must come off.

Receivers must eventually navigate the real world where unannounced deceptions occur and

where one is forced to analyze enigmas presented by living criminals and con artists in real time.

How these kinds of willing or unwilling suspensions of disbelief are activated (whether

positive or negative; ethical or unethical; or, as is often the case, a mixture of both)? How I am

23
An excellent example of this kind of pseudo-fiction is Norma Khouri’s bestselling

autobiography Honor Lost, which was published by Random House in 2003 and revealed as a

literary hoax in 2004. Anna Broinowski’s documentary film Forbidden Lie$ (2007) is one of the

most stunning records ever made of a con artist’s ability to lie, manipulate, deceive and charm

individuals.
 77

persuaded by language, its tone, and its narrative arrangement to do what it says (even if what it

says is normally thought of as impossible)? These questions are what is being studied in this

dissertation by looking closely at a variety of media. Why? Because life is and always has been

intermedial.

This chapter has outlined the conceptual tools as well as the three media (fiction, film and

live performance) through which the processes of reception and adaptation will be studied as

they apply to magic. Each of the three following chapters privileges one of these media and what

it teaches us about the pleasures, dangers, and possibilities of the willing suspension of disbelief.

The figure of the magician and the experience of magic as a performing art guide each

discussion. So we move onward, out of Alicandre’s cave and into the language and landscapes of

Borges’ fantastic short stories.

 78

Chapter 2

Borges: The Author as Magician, the Reader as Spectator

Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by so

doing to make it true.

— Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

The magician as he appears in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck stands before a table upon

which the symbols of the other cards rest. These represent the four suits: swords, staffs, cups and

pentacles. He is the figure capable of manipulating these signs to generate both meaning and

mystery. He holds a wand aimed towards the sky (the divine realm), while his other hand points

towards the Earth (grounded reality). Above his head floats the figure eight turned sideways,

representing infinity. This symbol is also his crown, his halo. Now imagine a young Jorge Luis

Borges standing in for the magician on the tarot card. His wand becomes a pen. The suits of the

cards become the categories into which society classifies writing. The thirteen values of each suit

become vowels and consonants that are arranged and rearranged by the author. Most Tarot decks

contain 78 cards. The magician is assigned the number one. His is a paradoxical and self-

referential card, because he is at once contained within the pack (the first of its major arcana) yet

also placed above all other cards in its hierarchy. For this reason, one of the divinatory meanings

of the card is the intoxication of power both “good” and “bad.” There is something inherently

Faustian about the figure of the magician — the paradox of the human who appears to be a deity

or of the deity who appears to be human.

With the last chapter’s groundwork of connecting various reader-response concepts to

other fields of cultural production behind us, we now move to a sustained analysis of written

fiction and certain short stories by Jorge Luis Borges: the author as magician. Here, I propose
 79

that the literary mode, or genre, known as “fantastic literature” is the closest literary equivalent
1
to magic as a performing art. Magical realism, in part because of its name and in part because

many critics attribute the novels of Angela Carter, Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez,

Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison to it as a category, appears to many to be the mode of

writing most closely resembling the illusions performed by magicians. For me, however, magical

realism falls short of being the best candidate for this comparison between arts. Instead, the

powerful reality-slippage and defamiliarization experience that occurs when watching magicians

of the highest calibre perform live (my personal experience being limited thus far to practitioners

in those countries where I have studied: the United States, France, Canada, Spain and Argentina)

is far closer to the aesthetic experience created by the fantastic literature of E.T.A. Hoffmann,

Julio Cortázar and, above all, that of Jorge Luis Borges. Magical realist literature certainly

contains deep and important moments of magic, but its magic events, creatures and objects are

too often accepted as part of the diegetic universes described in those story worlds created by

authors of magical realism.

The magic in Borges’ narratives is more unruly. It is not easily accepted or dismissed.

Instead, it disturbs. It dismays. Reading it leads to surrealistic dreams and waking reveries that

pose profound and sometimes troubling philosophical inquiries. In his short stories, nearly

always, magical objects and effects are encountered that cannot — and must not — be accepted

1
There will be no lengthy debate in what follows about whether the fantastic is either a

literary mode or genre, although Rosemary Jackson’s theoretical reformulation of Tzvetan

Todorov’s model has convinced most critics to label this kind of storytelling a mode. Todorov,

Jackson and Nancy Traill have all written book-length studies reformulating the fantastic

phenomenon’s academic classification.

 80

as having occurred without seriously testing the sanity of both the protagonist and the reader.

Borges reminds us that language is a complex and generative power. As we have discussed, the

power of its written form, when it comes to the experience of magic, is qualitatively different

from that of its spoken form. We have also determined, however, that these two qualitatively

different forms are never completely separate from one another: the gray zones of human

language generation (like those times when our lips barely mouth the words of a text we are

reading) unite these experiences of the spoken and the written so that they exist very near each

other on the continuum of lived existence.

Examining the linguistic sleight-of-hand executed by Borges in his fantastic short stories

moves this study directly to one of the most potent sources of storytelling magic in the twentieth

century. His meta-fictional reality-bending has influenced the critical theorizing of Michel

Foucault,2 the politically volatile fiction of Salman Rushdie and continues to challenge authors

writing both magical realist and fantastic fiction today to create moments of equally troubling

impossibility.3 Borges’ stories create paradoxical receptions that break apart his readers’

2
Foucault notes in his introduction to Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things) that

one of Borges’ short piece “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” inspired his study of language,

meta-language and the human categorizations of knowing that spring from the power of words.
3
Rushdie’s highly controversial and politically significant novel The Satanic Verses cites

Borges’ description of the Manticore in El libro de seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary

Beings) as a direct influence. Rushdie’s adaptation of this fantastic creature is an excellent

example of how words have the power to do what they say. In one of its scenes, an Indian man

named Saladin Chamcha is transformed into a cloven-foot goat (symbolic of his character’s role

as the book’s devil) while living in London. He is arrested, beaten and held captive in a hospital
 81

previous conceptions of how often and how profoundly reality and fiction mix. The result is the

liberating creation of what Galileo and Brecht, as discussed in chapter one, call the “skeptical

eye” — a way of looking at the world anew. The paradoxical reception, the dizzying reality-

slippage, the vertiginous vacillation experienced by the reader during the most magical of

Borges’ storytelling moments have the power to strip away one’s assumptions of what is possible

in life; this liberation is precisely what happens to spectators when they witness great magic. It is

a magic that defamiliarizes. In the same way that Jim Steinmeyer describes how an elegant coin

vanish causes a spectator to rethink the nature of two things that were previously familiar and

even mundane (coins and hands), Borges’ magic effects cause his readers to suddenly revaluate

the assumptions upon which they have previously been operating. This act of fiction-inspired

reevaluation increases their potential for radical and critical thought. Borges’ magician-like

narratives force readers to recognize that the illusions made possible by rituals of writing and

reading are more powerful and more applicable to the opportunities and the perils of everyday

with other Indian minorities who have transformed into monsters. When he is approached by a

Manticore, Saladin asks the creature how the police, the media and the English people have

made these transformations occur. The Manticore explains simply: “‘They describe us. . . .

That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct’”

(174). The suggestion, if I am reading Rushdie correctly, is that the interpretive community

surrounding these characters begins their monstrous transformation. It is completed by the Indian

men themselves, who accept this description. Through the dark magic spells of otherness and

alienation, these men internalize the monstrous perceptions of the now hostile English

community in which they live.

 82

life than current scholarship on the topic has thus far accounted for. Borges intrigues his readers,

he enchants them and then he explodes their realities. He defamiliarizes everyday objects (books,

disks, maps and more) by startling us when they emanate unexpected and deeply meaningful

magic. He renders us childlike before these objects, so that the next time we encounter them in

real life our conception of their possible functions and interactions with living beings has

changed.

Five of Borges’ fantastic stories guide this exploration of the unique magic his writing

allows readers to experience. “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”) is a particularly strong example of how

readers are dazzled — blinded and “dazed” (which is one of the roots of the verb “to dazzle”) to

the point of sensory overload — by what I consider to be one of the purest instances of the

fantastic literature aesthetic. The clarity and notoriety of that short story are the foundation of my

argument that fantastic literature is a didactic and sublime mode of storytelling, one that is made

possible by a particular kind of suspension of disbelief. This reading of “El Aleph” (“The

Aleph”) also classifies the story as a textbook example of Tzvetan Todorov’s original definition

of “le fantastique pur” (“the pure fantastic”) category (49; Howard 52). It therefore contrasts well

with my readings of “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”) and “El disco” (“The

Disk”), which are used to explode passageways into the otherwise solid and systematic

boundaries of Todorov’s theorizing. “El arte es un arma” (“Art is a weapon”), as Diego Rivera

tells us, and the magic of Borges’ writing has the power to blast through innumerable borders

(211). Reading “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” reveals another of the most magician-like

techniques that Borges employs for fracturing reality and causing the experience of what I term

“slippage” within the reader’s mind. In this story, Borges conjures objects of proof — factual

evidence that material has passed from the dream world to the real world — through his

manipulation of how his readers willingly suspend disbelief. Impossible objects of proof are
 83

precisely what magicians like Gabi Pareras and myself attempt to create for spectators in live,

close-up performance situations when we perform magic effects expressing his concept of magia

ficcional (“fictional, or narrative, magic”).4 Analyzing that example of Borges’ transgression of

the fiction and non-fiction categories sets the stage for reading “El tema del traidor y del héroe”

(“The Traitor and the Hero”). Meditating upon this final story demonstrates the self-reflexive

pleasure that Borges takes in playing God. The temptation to unethically manipulate the receiver

of the text for personal glory and social gain is one of the dangers uniting the crafts of the writer

and the magician. Borges, in his most Faustian moments, teaches us how deceptive spells of

storytelling can either empower or disenfranchise the reader outside of the imaginary realm: in

life itself.

1 Dazzling the Reader: Suspension of Disbelief in Fantastic

Literature and “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”)
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T

believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen.

“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.

4
Gabi Pareras’ philosophy of magia ficcional is most thoroughly described in his

manuscript Alicante Ficcional, but has also been outlined in No. 14 of Roberto Mansilla’s magic

journal Profonde (August 2010). The piece of magic that I perform which best expresses

Pareras’ approach to the performance of close-up magic is an unpublished routine called

“Flowers from Paradise.” That routine is an hommage to Samuel Tayolor Coleridge and his

concept of the willing suspension of disbelief.

 84

Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things

before breakfast.”

— Lewis Carroll (a.k.a. Charles Dodgson)

Fantastic literature has the power to teach even hardened, skeptical readers how to once

again believe in the impossible. As a literary genre and mode, the fantastic, I argue, is an

intrinsically didactic tool. Analyzing the complex way in which a fantastic object or event in a

story causes one to doubt the limits of mimetic reality, of genre conventions and, finally, of

reality outside of the text reveals important lessons about the relationship between how we are

deceived while reading and how we are deceived in everyday life. This discussion calls upon

both early and recent scholarship on fantastic literature to focus upon its magical effects as if

they were bursts of fire or light produced from thin air. These are moments that “dazzle” readers,

a verb which means “to daze” both the eyes and the rest of the human senses to produce the

sensation of stupefying awe. It is through this analytic emphasis upon the particular moments

that provoke a fantastic experience in readers that the subversive and defamiliarizing power of

these narratives can be understood, for these are the moments when the experience of reality-

slippage is most blatantly manifest. These are also the moments when the fantastic mode of

storytelling reveals its narrative power to authenticate and to de-authenticate — to undermine the

process by which society teaches us to construct the real.

The structuralist poetics of Todorov and the experimental fiction of Borges are highly

complementary for investigating the in-between spaces of binary oppositions such as fiction vs.

reality. My particular definition of fantastic literature will deepen as the argument in this chapter

unfolds; however, at this point, a brief schematic summary of Todorov’s model fleshed out by

practical examples drawn from the Argentine author as well as two of his major influences (The

Arabian Nights and Edgar Allen Poe) will clarify some basic terminology and key characteristics
 85

of the fantastic:

Uncanny   Fantastic  –   Fantastic  –    Marvelous  

uncanny   marvelous  

Fig. 1. From Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction à la littérature fantastique (The Fantastic: A

5
Structural Approach to a Literary Genre) (49; Howard 44).

The central line in Todorov’s schematic, faithfully reproduced above, is deceptively thin.

For that thin border is specifically where the Bulgarian-born critic pinpoints the experience of the

pure fantastic — a profound vacillation in which both readers and characters can no longer

distinguish what is real from what is not. The fantastic occurs when the reader, usually in tandem

with the protagonist or the narrator of a story, encounters an event so impossible, so shockingly

incongruent with the known laws of the universe, that it produces a strong emotional and

intellectual dissonance. Our personal logic, composed of the convictions and certitudes we have

spent a lifetime forming, is suddenly thrown out the window. This sensation of free fall,

according to Todorov, is generally ephemeral (46; Howard 42). In most narratives, the author

then gives the story a final push towards either a rational explanation (the fantastic-uncanny

category) or a supernatural explanation (the fantastic-marvelous). In both cases, the character

experiencing the fantastic event and readers along for the ride are encouraged to favor one

solution or another to cope with the startling ambiguity produced.

5
All translations of Todorov’s The Fantastic are Richard Howard’s unless otherwise

noted.
 86

Todorov’s principal requirement for fantastic literature is that the model readers called

for by a story must accept the story world presented as one inhabited by living, breathing human

beings similar to themselves (37; Howard 33). In other words, the protagonist and the diegetic

universe described must persuade readers to accept them as versions of reality reasonably similar

to their own.

These two characteristics of fantastic literature — the fact that the reader is forced to

choose either rational rejection or supernatural acceptance of an impossible event and the

occurrence of that event within a real-world environment — are identical to what spectators

experience during an unannounced performance of close-up magic. Two examples of spectator

vacillation and discomfort in response to magic effects that I have performed come to mind

immediately. Both were unintended reactions and took me by surprise. In Sacramento,

California, I once performed a piece of card magic for a woman who responded “That’s not

right. I’m Christian.” I thought that she was joking, but upon further questioning realized that she

was serious and thought that my magic effect was blasphemous. For me, this suggests that any

experience of reality-slippage in the spectator’s mind that is not overtly marked as fictional may

be interpreted as a threat for those ascribing to fundamentalist systems of belief. On another

occasion, in Galicia, Spain, I played what I thought was a harmless magical prank when paying

for pastries at a bakery. I asked the middle-aged woman working there if I could pay in magic

Euros and handed her blank pieces of paper. When she looked at me with confusion and shook

her head, I apologized and said that I could change them into real Euros for her. After using

sleight-of-hand to create a visual transformation of the paper bills into real ones, I offered her the

proper payment. She looked deeply concerned and would not accept the money. I was confused,

because I had performed this magic effect many times with success in other parts of that same

Spanish city, Santiago de Compostela. On those other occasions, the transformation effect
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elicited smiles and delight. “No le gusta la magia, Señora?” (You don’t like magic?) I asked in

response to the baker’s expression of discomfort and distrust. She only shook her head

apprehensively and waited for me to depart. It seems likely that my performance clashed

negatively with one or more of her religious beliefs, cultural superstitions concerning magic or

stereotypes regarding foreigners. Like these surprise magic performances, which cause a

fictional event to arrive out of the blue to clash with reality, fantastic literature sometimes

threatens its receivers and their world views.

The majority of Borges’ short stories begin by situating us in a world where the main

characters are subject to the same laws of nature we encounter in everyday life. Our ability to

identify with the protagonist and to accept as natural the early events of the story is precisely

what makes the fantastic event so startling when it appears. As critic José M. Martínez states,

certain mimetic techniques are required by the very structure of fantastic narratives to create a

highly convincing atmosphere of verisimilitude; some examples are:

. . . a homodiegetic narrator, a first person perspective, the use of a precise and

dated historical context for the development of the plot, the presence of the

author’s contemporaries as fictional characters, the documentary pretentions at the

beginning of the story, and the typical skepticism of the narrator, character

witnesses, and many protagonists of the story. (367)

“El Aleph” (“The Aleph”) relies upon several of these verisimilar devices. It begins with slow-

paced, first-person narration describing Buenos Aires in the 1930s and the death of a woman

who was an intimate friend (Beatriz Viterbo). Among other observations the protagonist

describes his distaste for the late Beatriz’s pedantic first cousin — Carlos Argentino Daneri

(whose middle name mocks Argentine pedantry). Borges (both the author and protagonist) is

forced to listen to Carlos Argentino’s pretentious poetry every year on the occasion of his
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memorial visits to Beatriz’s family home. The mundane nature of these annual conversations is

finally interrupted by what Borges can only explain as Carlos Argentino having lost his mind.

The man claims that the Aleph, a supernatural presence, inhabits his cellar. When the absolutely

skeptical narrator, enshrouded by the darkness of the basement, suddenly sees “una pequeña

esfera tornasolada, de casi intolerable fulgor” (“a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable

brightness”) (1068; Hurley 283), the story enters the realm of fantastic literature. And in this

wondrous moment, as the narrative prose spirals into a fragmented, page-long litany of the

infinite images contained in the tiny Aleph (an impossible list, for the Aleph displays the entire

universe at once), as Borges weeps in response to encountering the supernatural, both the

protagonist and the reader experience awe.

But what type of awe? In addition to the intense vacillation between the real and the un-

real identified by Todorov, the tremulous effect of the fantastic that I experience when reading

“El Aleph” (“The Aleph”) is more precisely described in Immanuel Kant’s “Analytic of the

Sublime.” For him, writing in the eighteenth century, the sublime is a formlessness, a

“boundlessness” (131), an overflowing and overwhelming of an individual’s mind similar to the

encounter with the Aleph just described. Kant emphasizes: the sublime is that “in comparison

with which everything else is small” (134). Indeed, those who see The Aleph and are bombarded

with its vastness feel minuscule by contrast. As an additional distinction, the philosopher

separates the experience of the sublime from the pleasure associated with the experience of

charm or beauty (which are positive pleasures); instead, he defines the sublime as a “negative

pleasure” — one that does “violence to our imagination” (129).

Friedrich Schiller, one of Kant’s German contemporaries, echoes this dichotomy of the

beautiful and the sublime by likening them to two genii that accompany us throughout life. I

wish to add the image of these genii to this dissertation’s definition of the fantastic reception
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experience and its potential for life-changing epiphanies. These genii, I like to imagine, sat on

the shoulders of Galileo as he wondered at the pendulum movements of the chandelier described

in chapter one. In Schiller’s philosophy, the guardian genie representing beauty is linked to

natural, physical perceptions and the earthly senses of the world; the second attendant spirit, who

is “tacit” and “solemn,” represents the sublime and has the power to move us beyond the

shackles of reality to fly over and across “vertiginous depths” (197). Though this second genie is

more ominous, Schiller argues that it ultimately serves to liberate and instruct mankind in a way

that beauty cannot. From this perspective, one that combines Todorov’s literary theory with

German philosophy, the tears shed by Borges in “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”) are not in response to

pure beauty or to pure horror; instead, they are a mixture of both. The tears are a spontaneous

overflow, a débordement, expressing the Kantian state produced by an object whose aesthetical

appreciation combines these two aesthetic experiences: terror mixed with beauty. This is similar

to the experience of standing too close to a large waterfall. This sublime reception of a highly

unusual object (in this case, the fantastic Aleph) “stretches the imagination to its limit” and

thereby signals a special order of awe (Kant 151). The Aleph, as a sublime and fantastic being,

brings with it connotations of violence and negative pleasure. Its infinite nature and undeniable

presence in Carlos Argentino Daneri’s basement shatter the protagonist’s previously stable

conception of reality.

The Aleph also resides within the thin black line of Todorov’s schematic that separates

the moment of astonishment — of absolute vacillation — from the “fantastic-uncanny” and the

“fantastic-marvelous” categories. Our emotional reaction to the impossibility created by the

strange creature is followed by an inevitable question. How do we explain the appearance of

supernatural phenomena in reality? Granted, the reality in question belongs to the diegetic

universe of the short story in which the reader is currently immersed through the shared
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perceptions and thoughts of the protagonist. Still, the question remains: How shall we explain the

paradoxical mixture of what is real with what is not?

Todorov acknowledges that it is impossible to predict subjective responses that

individual readers will have to questions raised by the ambiguous quality of the fantastic.

However, fantastic literature can be categorized based on suggestions offered by the author at the

conclusion of each narrative. Therefore, the participation of an “implicit reader” (Todorov’s

chosen phrase) who is open to the experience of the fantastic and who will reject reading the text

as merely “allegorical” or “poetic” is assumed (Todorov 35-37; Howard 32-33). This reader is

similar to Umberto Eco’s model reader and is part of the structural rigidity or narrowness of

Todorov’s conceptualization that my argument seeks to loosen. Eco’s model reader, double-

model reader and negative model reader categories offer a more broad and nuanced approach to

imagining such hypothetical readers than Todorov’s (see chapter one, section 2.2).

One response the reader may have to the fantastic is to simply accept and marvel at the

impossible. Borges frequently ends his tales with acceptance of the supernatural — a synthesis of

reality as conceived before and after a story’s fantastic event(s). As a result, his characters must

frequently alter their previous and otherwise rational world views (by this I mean views that are

considered normative and rational within a given culture at a given time) to make space for

mysterious entities or objects that exist beyond common understanding. For example, the

persistence of mystery and recognition of the supernatural expressed in the final paragraphs of

“El Aleph” (“The Aleph”), when the narrator insists that he did see the impossible, locate the tale

within Todorov’s realm of the “fantastic-marvelous” (see fig. 1).

The other principle strategy, which is not offered to readers of “El Aleph” (“The

Aleph”), is to demystify the fantastic event with a convincing, rational explanation. This would

be the equivalent of a magician revealing the methods of his magic at the end of a performance
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(or at least appearing to, as English magician Darren Brown so often does).6 Borges rarely

demystifies. Other impossible objects from his fiction — the Zahir (a twenty-centavo coin with

demonic powers),7 a tiny yet impossibly heavy metal cone (from the world of “Tlön”),8 the

infinite book in “El libro de arena” (“The Book of Sand”),9 and more — echo the author’s

frequent refusal to provide the reader with any stable, scientific evidence explaining away the

fantastic. In his critical typology of fantastic objects, José Martínez argues convincingly that the

oggetto mediatore — the object of proof — is in fact presented by Borges as scientific evidence

verifying the fantastic.10 In these cases, the impossible, supernatural object is accepted and

incorporated into a mimetic reality closely resembling our own.

It is no surprise that Borges’ particular style of fantastic literature and impossible object

creation is directly influenced by the blue flower of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The flower is

plucked from the gardens of paradise in a dream and appears, impossibly, the next morning in

6
See, in particular, the recording of Darren Brown’s stage show Something Wicked This

Way Comes.
7
See Jorge Luis Borges’ “El Zahir” (“The Zahir”), 1037.
8
See Jorge Luis Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 833.
9
See Jorge Luis Borges’ “El libro de arena” (“The Book of Sand”), 69.
10
Again, see José M. Martínez’s “Subversion or Oxymoron?: Fantastic Literature and the

Metaphysics of the Object.” As his title indicates, Martínez offers a non-traditional argument

within the fantastic discourse. Using a wealth of examples of impossible objects from Latin

American short stories, he argues that the proof of the fantastic event offered by these physical

items is analogically a proof of Aristotle’s metaphysics — of certain universal laws governing

the objective nature of reality.

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the reality of the dreamer.11 The undeniable presence of the object records a tangible breach of

the reality/fiction boundary within a story and within the mind of the reader. As Marianne Moore

states so lucidly in a poem on the art of poetry, the goal is to present for the reader’s inspection

“imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”12

It is thanks to Coleridge, and to his collaborations with William Wordsworth, that we

have “the willing suspension of disbelief.” This is a key phrase for understanding how the

fiction/reality threshold is crossed to allow flowers, frogs and Alephs to exist in places they

could not possibly be:

In this idea originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads; in which it was agreed that

my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at

least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a

semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that

willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.

(Coleridge 169, my emphasis)

As one of the founders of romanticism in English literature, Coleridge’s task, outlined above, of

endowing supernatural characters with a certain amount of natural truth (or believability) is

nearly one century and a half removed from Borges’ short stories (which slightly pre-empt

postmodern literature’s liberal experimentation in genre-splicing and self-reflexivity). And

though significant temporal, geographic and stylistic differences divide the two authors, the

concept of readers’ “willing suspension of disbelief,” as well as their respective desires to

radically test the limits of poetic faith through written storytelling, unites them.

11
See Borges’ “La Flor de Coleridge” (“Coleridge’s Flower”), 18-20.
12
See Marianne Moore’s “Poetry,” 36-37.
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In this exploration of fantastic literature via Borges, the willing suspension of disbelief is

conceived of as a contractual agreement entered into by the reader as he or she understands the

rules of fiction-making proposed by the author. This employment of the phrase differs

significantly in its privileging of current legal connotations as compared to Coleridge’s original

description, which privileges the moral and religious connotations of his day. The word willing is

emphasized to call attention to the voluntary and active participation of the reader once engaged

with a text. When experimental literature transgresses the fiction/reality boundary, at what point

are readers pleasantly surprised by being deceived and at what point do they feel abused,

betrayed or otherwise contractually wronged?

This question will be reiterated as the short stories examined become increasingly

controversial, but a partial answer begins to take shape by joining Coleridge’s phrase to the

criticism of Fredric Jameson. Anyone watching, reading or listening to a story tends to employ

the willing suspension of disbelief automatically (based on media-specific cues), because this

faculty of the imagination is conditioned by established social conventions. Aural and visual

gestures tap into a codified form of communication cued by normative behaviors and agreed

upon regulations.13 In the case of literature, Jameson points out that genres (tragedy, comedy,

romance and so forth) are written agreements between authors and readers; they are literary

standards designed to provide the context for communication that we usually have during face-

to-face encounters (135). Half of the fun in storytelling, however, is the point when a storyteller

subverts expected genre norms to transgress the contract entered into by transmitter and receiver.

Fantastic literature and unannounced magic performances both breach the willing suspension of

13
See my discussion of interpretive communities and conventions of belief that are

determined by established social rituals in chapter one, section 2.4.

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disbelief contract during fantastic moments to temporarily short-circuit the receiver’s

imagination. This short-circuiting allows receivers to experience the world anew. It is an

effective technique of defamiliarization in both writing and performance, enacted by the hands of

both authors (holding pens) and magicians (holding wands). It is also a dangerously transgressive

storytelling technique, one which risks offending, threatening and disturbing receivers for the

sake of unexpectedly dazzling them.

2 Exploding Todorov's Model: “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death

and the Compass”) and "El disco" (“The Disk”)
The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package.

— Deleuze and Guattari

Rosemary Jackson, along with an entire wave of critics inspired by her book Fantasy:

The Literature of Subversion, argues for the revolutionary potential of fantastic literature; she

renders the fantastic radical by arguing that it “. . . points to or suggests the basis upon which

cultural order rests, for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that

which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems” (4). While Jackson’s

statement is an accurate description of most fantastic literature, it is especially true for the

subversive power of Borges’ short stories. Yet regardless of how subversive a given piece of

fiction may be, it is the scholar’s task to help direct its potential energy to various aesthetic and

political ends as well as to specific contexts; the author provides the explosives, but the receiver

must strategically detonate the package. In this section, analysis of Borges’ fantastic tales will be

planted within and detonate the rigid, structuralist walls of Todorov’s model (developed in the

1970s). The goal is to expand its possibilities and pluralities.

Borges’ techniques for creating volatile fantastic moments and objects within his short

stories are inspired by Coleridge and at least two other literary predecessors: the anonymous
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authors of The Arabian Nights and Edgar Allen Poe. Each of these influences provides a clear

example of the two outermost categories in Todorov’s schematic: the “marvelous” and the

“uncanny” (see fig. 1). Aladdin’s wondrous lamp is a “marvelous” rather than a “fantastic” or a

“fantastic-marvelous” object, because the reader is prepared by the conventions of the

storytelling genre invoked to accept the supernatural as natural from the very outset. As in many

fairy tales or epics (such as The Odyssey), the magical objects, the geniis and the talking animals

of The Arabian Nights produce wonder in the reader, but they are par for the course. Like

Aladdin’s lamp, their appearance within the story does not generate a severe rupture within

reality, because the fictional characters acknowledge that magic, supernatural beings and other

impossible creatures exist. For example, the King’s Vizier suspects that Aladdin used sorcery to

build his palace early on in the narrative of the lamp; wizardry in the world of that tale and others

from The Arabian Nights is simply a part of the diegetic universe constructed and the fiction-

making contract being negotiated (142). Furthermore, the mimetic techniques employed (third-

person narration, indistinct dates and geographical locations as well as a lack of documentary-

like presentation, etc.) cue readers, such as Borges when he first read the tales or Sir Richard

Burton (whose translation dominates the English reception of them), to marvel at a time and

place safely removed from their own.

A moment of pure fantastic vacillation, like the one generated by Borges’ “El Aleph”

(“The Aleph”), is similarly lacking in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” but for converse

reasons. The mimetic verisimilitude of Auguste Dupin’s Paris, as well as the detective’s

skepticism, construct the perfect ambiance for what Todorov defines as the fantastic. Poe simply

chooses to not invoke the supernatural in his narrative. The double murder of Madame

L’Espanaye and her daughter creates a central and profound mystery within the story, but

otherworldly forces are never extended to the reader as a possible explanation. Dupin does not
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conjecture that evil spirits somehow entered and exited the locked-room environment of the

crime scene; instead, he rationally deduces that a bizarre and unfortunate coincidence of events

has occurred. In the end, an escaped orangutan is discovered to be the “uncanny” yet rational

explanation for the gruesome crimes committed. The thought of wild animals loose and roaming

the streets of a major metropolis is deeply frightening rather than fantastic, because though such

an event is not plausible, it is possible. This plausible/possible point of distinction is also what

separates most urban legends (the one about a man killed by crocodiles in the sewer system, or

the one about the child who was given an apple filled with razorblades for Halloween), which

inspire terror within the secular realm of the city imagination without invoking the

supernatural.14 As Christine Brook-Rose states, in Todorov’s definition of the “uncanny” the

“accent is on the reader’s fear, not his hesitation” (152). The reader hesitates as if a crack in

reality has broken the ground beneath his or her feet: the reader is at a loss as to which side of

this newly fractured earth should be stood upon.

Todorov makes a clarifying linguistic analogy between three grammatical tenses and the

three categories focused on thus far — the pure fantastic, the marvelous and the uncanny. These

tenses emphasize the lifespan of the “fantastic” moment: the duration of ambiguity as

experienced by the protagonist and reader. He likens the “marvelous” to the future (the unknown

or the hypothetical), the “uncanny” to the past tense (the familiar or the known) and the pure

“fantastic” to the present tense (an evanescent, indeterminate state). He also performs a close

14
Two of the most recent and comprehensive books cataloguing such urban legends and

analyzing their social functions are Gail de Vos’ Tales Rumors, and Gossip: Exploring

Contemporary Folk Literature in Grades 7-12 (1996) and What Happens Next?: Contemporary

Urban Legends and Popular Culture (2012).

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reading of the ubiquitous imperfect tense in Aurelia, highlighting the linguistic doubt Gérard de

Nerval invokes to intensify the sensation of uncertainty surrounding that narrative’s fantastic

events (42; Howard 38). This analogy is helpful, because it touches upon the motion and

movement of time as marked out by language and how time seems to stop or go haywire in the

presence of the fantastic.

Our definitions of exactly when tomorrow becomes today or today becomes yesterday

are foggy without the artificial aid of a clock, one of our most common authenticity devices.

Time, like language, is not only in constant motion, its motion is also bumped and nudged as

each subjective individual perceives it. Although Todorov’s analogy recognizes the slipperiness

of language, the black and white categories of the fantastic in his schematic are too fixed to

represent that idea of motion.

Instead of attempting to argue and explicate fantastic narratives into the four, well-

defined units separated by lines, why not imagine the stories in question as textual spheres which

orbit through and between the “uncanny,” “fantastic-uncanny,” “fantastic,” “fantastic-

marvelous,” and “marvelous” categories in question? Mapping out and justifying smaller or

larger orbits for fantastic stories which trespass these categories in varying degrees are

reasonable tasks for the literary critic. At the very least, a greater range of motion — the motion

of the living text (alive because it comes to life in the minds of flesh-and-blood readers) — will

be expressed in this adapted theoretical model of the fantastic. Borges’s stories swing through

the walls of Todorov’s model like wrecking balls. His work forces the model to fracture and

change. Here is an illustration of the trajectories, wreckage and weathering that occur when the

model and three fictions by Borges collide:

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Fig. 2. Orbital representations of three texts alive in a three-dimensional version of Todorov’s

15
classifications.

I will argue that the above visual, from left to right, traces the paths of Borges’ “La

muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”), “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”) and “El disco” (“The

Disk”) as they travel through the space of Todorov’s categories. The left and right poles in this

schematic have already been established — the pure “uncanny” territory of “The Murders in the

Rue Morgue” and the pure “marvelous” zone of “Aladdin; or the Wondrous Lamp.” The central

plane — the apex of the “fantastic” — has also been exemplified by the climactic and ambiguous

conclusion of “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”). The time has come to challenge, to break through and

to break open these divisionary planes with the aid of two of Borges’ more volatile fantastic

stories. One key object in each story will reflect the frequent movement of these texts through

and between the boundaries Todorov attempts to stabilize in his discussion of fantastic literature.

It must be kept in mind that the image above is a snapshot of a process that is in constant motion.

The text spheres should be imagined as moving forward and gyrating at different velocities.

15
This graphic is my own adaptation of Todorov’s model.
 99

Their locations within these fantastic categories are never exact; they spin from one place to

another as various events occur within a story and as various readers respond to new

developments. Like the particles of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it is impossible to

determine a specific, static position of a fantastic text at any one time. Therefore, this model

measures the general range of their mimetic fluctuations.

The closest Borges comes to a fantastic object in “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and

the Compass”) is the “Tetragrammaton” — the ineffable, four-lettered name of God in the

Hebrew tradition, which up to the end of the short story suggests a supernatural motivation for

the crimes. The omniscient, third-person narration describes Erik Lönnrot as a detective who

thinks of himself as an Auguste-Dupin-like “reasoning machine,” but who is actually more of an

“aventurero” (“gambler”) (892; Hurely 147). This direct reference to Poe’s typically “uncanny”

brand of detective fiction (based on strange yet natural occurrences) begins to situate “La muerte

y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”) in that same category (see the far lefthand side of the

visual above). However, in a break from the stylistics already discussed in “The Murders in the

Rue Morgue” and from the narration techniques employed by Borges in “El Aleph” (“The

Aleph”), Detective Lönnrot investigates four crimes in a city that has neither a specific location

in time (a year is never given) nor a stable geographic location. He finds the phrase — “La

primera letra del Nombre ha sido articulada” (“The first letter of the name has been written”) —

typed by the typewriter of the first victim, Dr Yarmolinsky, found dead in his room at the Hotel

du Nord (893; Hurley 155). The French name calls to mind Paris. The second crime representing

the second letter of the Tetragrammaton seems to corroborate this when Daniel Simón Azevedo

is killed in what is only described as the western outskirts of “la capital” (“the capital”) (894;

Hurley 149). However, like the mixed nationalities and cultural identities suggested by the

names of the characters in the story, the place names of the third and fourth crimes frustrate any
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attempt on the reader’s part to connect the mimetic world to one particular city in reality. The

penultimate crime occurs in the “Liverpool House” pub (owned by the Irish character Finnegan),

which is located on another French street — the “Rue de Toulon” (894; Hurley 152). This

postmodern mixture of specific cultural identities and connotations combined with otherwise

fragmented and vague environmental descriptions of the city as a whole mirrors the hodgepodge

of rational versus supernatural elements Borges presents to his reader.

The “compass” which leads Detective Lönnrot to the final crime scene is composed of

the following rational and irrational ingredients: a page of the city (whichever it may be) torn

from a Baedeker map, the four cardinal directions on a navigator’s compass, the four dates of the

crimes (a murder is committed on the same day of each month) and the four letters of the

Tetragrammaton — YHVW (Yahweh). Towards the end of the narrative, it seems that Borges

shatters this compass and reveals it to be an illusion of rational evidence mixed with a mystical

search for the name of God. Detective Lönnrot, imagining that his unorthodox navigational

device has solved the crime, that it has pointed him to the exact location and time at which a

Cabbalistic sect is about to commit its final murder, is deceived. Red Scharlach, an enemy

seeking personal vengeance, captures the investigator at the final location (“Villa-Triste-le-Roy”)

and explains that all of these elements — the Tetragrammaton, the map, the compass, and the

predictable dates of the crimes — are his own contrivances, a cunning hoax, a labyrinth designed

to mislead the detective (898-899; Hurley 155). This trickery replaces the supernatural

explanation of the crimes with a rational one, temporarily pushing the story into the “uncanny”

territory.

However, Lönnrot’s final dialogue with Scharlach is a discussion about the next avatars

of their lives. Before the final shot of the story is fired, Borges pushes the reader once more

towards the fantastic. Though the Tetragrammaton is demystified as an artifice, both the
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detective and the criminal mastermind agree to the cosmic nature of their conflict. Like much of

Borges’ detective fiction, this postmodern murder mystery resists classification; it crosses back

and forth between the “uncanny” and the “fantastic-uncanny” as if it were a round ball skirting

square holes. It proposes supernatural forces, replaces them with a rational explanation and then

invokes the supernatural once again (reincarnation and a potentially endless repetition of the

detective/criminal duel) (899; Hurley 156). As critic Maurice J. Bennett concludes, despite

Borges’ skepticism regarding a specific cosmic order, the author returns most frequently to a

“pantheistic notion of the universe as an emanation of God” (267). Somewhere between the cold

hard facts explaining a murder case and the mystical possibility of life after death — between the

“uncanny” and the “fantastic-uncanny” — the textual sphere of “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death

and the Compass”) orbits with each new reading.

Another circular object from Borges’ repertoire of fantastic literature breaks through the

boundary separating the “marvelous” and the “fantastic-marvelous” on the right-hand side of

Todorov’s model. “El disco” (“The Disk”) strains genre classifications. Because it is nestled

between two other short stories, “Avelino Arredondo” and “El libro de arena” (“The Book of

Sand”), both of which situate their narratives in specific times and places with documentary-like

precision, the opening line of “El disco” (“The Disk”) becomes even more ambiguous and

difficult to assign to a specific genre of fiction. “Soy leñador” (“I am a woodcutter”), begins the

first-person narration of a man who is only able to describe his mimetic reality in the most basic

terms (66; Hurley 447). Read in isolation, this statement as well as the protagonist’s self-

proclaimed ignorance of the ocean or anything else beyond the section of forest in which he lives

suggests to the reader that a fairy tale or a fable, possibly set in medieval times, is being told.

However, these narrative cues are subtle enough so that those who read these short stories as a

connected series of fictions might assume the woodcutter to be an ordinary person living in a
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world subject to the same laws of physics as our own. Therefore, when an old vagabond appears

and tells the forest dweller that he is the secret king of the world, because he holds the disk of

Odin, the narrator, as well as the reader, believes the elderly man to be crazy. The woodcutter’s

rational skepticism persists until he is allowed to briefly touch the disk, described as the only

object on earth that has one side. At this moment of fantastic vertigo, created by the perceptual

incongruity of seeing nothing in the old man’s palm yet feeling the “cold,” unmistakable

substance of the object with his own fingertips, the protagonist vacillates between belief and

disbelief (66-67; Hurley 478-479). Hesitation is induced by this tactile, reality-slipping

experience. Moments later, however, this gives way to such strong conviction that the

woodcutter uses his axe to murder the vagabond with the intention of stealing the disk and its

power. This acceptance of the impossible object’s existence by both characters, along with the

lack of immediately recognizable genre-flagging phrases (such as “once upon a time . . .”), at

first causes the short story to swing into the territory of the “fantastic-marvelous.” Yet despite the

movement of “El disco” (“The Disk”) towards what Todorov would call the pure fantastic, one

element of the narrative in particular causes it to spin back towards the “marvelous” literature

zone.

Borges’ allusion to Odin (the supreme god and creator in Scandinavian mythology),

combined with the abnormal characters and setting in “El disco” (“The Disk”), sends the text

into the realm of mythology. Parallel to the earlier discussion of The Arabian Nights, wondrous

objects from epic literature such as The Odyssey or The Iliad do not qualify as fantastic. The

magic of Eris’ golden apple or of Hermes’ winged sandals, like the gods themselves, are

accepted as natural components of mimetic reality once the stylistic presentation of an author

invokes the myth genre. The fact that both characters in “El disco” (“The Disk”) are not

individuals one can easily imagine encountering in daily life, along with their acceptance of
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Odin’s ability to bestow magical powers upon a circular object, cues the reader to imagine the

still extraordinary turn of events as taking place in a fantasy realm that is incompatible with the

realistic setting described by “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”). On the other hand, Odin never actually

appears in “El disco” (“The Disk”) and the narrative signals for a mythological reading are not

explicit. Indeed, it is never clear whether the woodcutter actually understands who Odin is. He

murders based upon the sensory evidence of the one-sided disk that his perceptions provide and

the promise of secret power described by the old man. Furthermore, after the crime is committed,

the semi-invisible disk falls to the forest floor and is apparently lost forever. As the aging

woodcutter continues a possibly endless search for his one-sided prize, the story leaves readers

without compelling proof of the fantastic. Like Odin’s disk, the story oscillates between two

worlds: one of strict mythology (the “marvelous”) and another similar to our own in which the

protagonist changes his worldview to accept the supernatural (the “fantastic-marvelous”).

3 Conjuring Objects of Proof: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

“The metaphysics of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility—they seek

to amaze, astound.”

— Borges

The previous analyses of “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass”) and “El

disco” (“The Disk”) have engaged the question of how authentic/fake and fiction/reality

oppositions appear within the diegetic worlds produced by Borges. The focus has been placed on

fantastic objects, which are experienced as impossible objects that somehow breach and

contaminate “reality.” Certain stories mentioned in relation to Todorov’s categories — Poe’s

detective story, at one extreme, and the fairy-tale-like narratives from The Arabian Nights, at the

other — have been compared to several of Borges’ early, postmodern twists on these genres. “El
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Aleph” (“The Aleph”), has thus far offered the clearest example of the pure fantastic and what I

consider to be the literary equivalent of a performed magic effect. We see the reality-testing of

Borges, as the protagonist and first-person narrator in that story, go haywire (along with our

own) when the supernatural Aleph enters to create a profound sense of reality-slippage. This

slippage occurs within a diegetic world that most readers would consider extremely similar to

their own. However, the genre of this short story, which might be called a fantastic version of

autobiographic metafiction,16 is far from the most extreme example of how Borges (the author)

transgresses established fiction-versus-reality divides to guide how readers willingly suspend

their disbelief. One of the reasons that these stories of his are ideal for expressing the disruptive

power of magic as a performing art, is that Borges conjures up impossible objects of proof using

more than one storytelling strategy.

The case of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (“Tlön” henceforth) reveals a different, more

hoax-like layer of Borges’ narrative technique for creating the strange vacillation that we identify

with fantastic literature. This story raises the stakes of impossible object creation, because its

construction breaches both the fiction/reality borders within its diegetic world and without,

extending beyond that diegetic world to the realm of factual writing. It does so by presenting

itself at times as a rigorous piece of non-fiction. Readers of “Tlön” are cued to engage in a

particular type of reading as reality-testing due to the short story’s stylistic resemblance to an

academic article (which in part explains the ample attention it has received from literary critics).

15
For an in-depth discussion and definition of the postmodern characteristics of

“historiographic metafiction,” whose definition I am playing with a bit here, see Linda

Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction 105-123.

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As a result, the clash of the reader’s reality testing mode with the descriptions of fantastic objects

presenting themselves as facts is disarming and unsettling in a qualitatively different way from

what readers experience in “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”). The performance equivalent of “Tlön”

would be a more premeditated and extreme version of an unannounced magic effect or a piece of

guerrilla theatre or a hoax than the examples that I have provided thus far. “Tlön” transforms the

act of scholarly research into fantastic literature.

In addition to creating several fantastic objects in its text and satisfying the mimetic

characteristics of fantastic literature, as mentioned via Martínez’s definition, “Tlön” introduces

the reader to Borges’ partner in authorial crime. The narrator and author of the short story, once

again both are Borges, begin by recounting a quotation concerning mirrors that Adolfo Bioy

Casares cites during one of their evening chats. Intrigued by those lines from an entry reprinted

in the tenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Borges searches for the citation his friend

mentioned (831; Hurley 69). When he is unable to locate any trace of the phrase, he suspects that

Bioy Casares invented the existence of the reference as a modest and playful form of deception.

This suspicion of his friend and collaborator is particularly amusing when read in conjunction

with knowledge of their works published under the joint-pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq —

literary tricksters, one surmises, will even suspect their collaborators. However, the skepticism of

the protagonist, along with the model reader’s, is dispelled once Bioy hands over a tangible copy

of the encyclopedic entry in question, which is attributed to one of Tlön’s “heresiarchs” (from

the Greek for leader or founder of a school or sect) (831; Hurley 69).

There are several noteworthy moves made by the author to create a distinctly authentic

academic ambience in “Tlön.” First, an invitation is given to informed readers to conflate, in part

or in full, the close, personal relationship Borges and Bioy Casares had in reality as Argentine

literati with their relationship as imitated in the fictional world of the narrative; second, authentic
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and fake references to authors such as De Quincey (authentic) and Silas Haslam (fake) appear

side by side to either directly or indirectly corroborate the existence of scholarly references to

Tlön;17 third, the central, fantastic object — A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön Vol. XI, which depicts

its strange world — is discovered by Borges in the second subsection of the short story. The

sense of vertigo or “dizziness” the protagonist describes when he first holds a weighty volume of

a secret society’s works of culture, humanities and sciences is a fantastic moment of ambiguous

recognition (833; Hurley 71). The uneasiness which this discovery provokes in Borges the

protagonist is evidence of his instinctual desire to deny that such a book could exist. By

introducing a passing reference to Tlön in the preliminary section of the story, by materializing

an entire encyclopedia devoted to the society in the second, and by describing physical evidence

of fantastic objects from Tlön in the third or “postscript” section of the narrative, Borges

consistently reinforces a simulation of academic rigor to justify the increasingly fantastic events

and objects presented.

In other words, a reader of “Tlön” experiences the reality-slippage effects of a triple-

diegetic world. “Section I,” “Section II” and the “Postscript—1947” section each represent

different versions of the narrator/protagonist Borges. The everyday setting and academic

conventions established in the first third of the narrative lay the foundations of the story’s basic

mimetic reality. This layer allows for the mise en abyme effect produced in the second section,

when the fantastic encyclopedia of “Tlön” appears and a much altered Borges delves into the

details of the secret world’s languages and impossible duplicate objects known as “hönir.” These

last items are based on a convincing, alternate conception of physics and psychology (839;

16
For a critical guide to these and Borges’ other fake/authentic references, see Evelyn

Fishburn and Psiche Hughes, A Dictionary of Borges, 71-72; 106.

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Hurley 77). The encyclopedia should not exist, but it does. This is the object of proof bridging

the first mimetic world (similar to the reader’s) to the alien territory of “Tlön.” Thus, there is a

story-world-within-story-world effect produced by sections I and II.

With these layers of the narrative firmly linked together, one embedded in the other via

the encyclopedia as fantastic object, a third, retrospective version of Borges — whose tone is that

of the author revealing the mechanics of his work — delivers a diabolical postscript. This final

section initially appears to be a rational explanation of Tlön and its encyclopedias as a giant

fictional undertaking financed by a millionaire named Ezra Buckley and executed by as many as

three hundred members of his organization (841; Hurley 79). Ah, sighs the reader, all of this was

an elaborate hoax. The literature, the science, the objects with impossible physical properties

were all part of a twisted dream and this Borges, the author behind the curtain of the short Tlön

story, is writing a postscript to explain away any ambiguity. Yet it is precisely at this moment of

relaxation, in this space of the story assumed to be removed both in time (the postscript date is

1947) and in authorial tone (as indicated by self-reflexive observations on the writing process),

that Borges most thoroughly contaminates all three mimetic layers discussed. Sustaining the

serious, rational tone of his postscript, he describes a small Tlönian compass discovered by

someone in Paris, followed by his own eyewitness encounter in Cuchilla Negra, Argentina, of

impossibly heavy metal cones (made from alien metal). The last of these fantastic intrusions, of

these oggetti mediatori that serve as tangible, scientific evidence of a breach between the

fictional and the real, is the most disturbing. Not only do multiple characters portrayed in the

narrative experience the metal cones as discomfortingly otherworldly, they are also linked to the

“image of a deity in certain Tlönian religions” (842; Hurley 80).

The apparently rigorous scholarship surrounding the appearance of fantastic,

otherworldly phenomena causes the “Tlön” narrative to wobble between offering rational,
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skeptical explanations and acknowledging the existence of a secret, mystical society along with

its supernatural universe. At various points, the short story can therefore be classified as either

“fantastic-uncanny” or “fantastic-marvelous” and this masterful, ambivalent shuttling between

the two categories causes “Tlön” to orbit almost directly above the same space as “El Aleph”

(“The Aleph”) — within Todorov’s conception of the pure fantastic.

On a biographical and historical level, “Tlön” offers an excellent point of departure for

exploring Borges’ unusually early tendency to subvert academic conventions for fictional use.

Kimberly A. Nance’s article, “Borges and Georgie,” is a compelling analysis of the influence the

Argentine author’s younger, reading self had upon his older, writing self. After outlining the

body of critical work devoted to studying Borges’ early influences and his biography, Nance

makes a strong argument that the author’s early fascination with the genre conventions of

fantasy, detective stories, epics, folklore and academic literature (encyclopedias, scholarly

articles, etc.) led him to master the conventional codes employed by these types of texts early in

his career. This resulted in his mixture of them in his later work to produce a sense of “textual

vertigo” (23). Nance’s lucid analogy of the medical definition of vertigo (when the

proprioception of the inner ear contradicts an individual’s visual impressions) to Borges’

technique of embedding two conflicting sets of conventions within the same story is a significant

contribution to current scholarship investigating the fantastic. She indicates that he escaped mid-

career boredom with conventional storytelling codes by engaging in experimental parodies of the

detective story with Adolfo Bioy Casares. She also argues that Borges wrote short stories which

specifically deny the reader the ability to choose a dominant interpretation:

Borges begins a story by deploying a given set of narrative conventions (from the

vast inventory that he had observed and cultivated) to evoke a corresponding set

of reader expectations, but then undermines those expectations and introduces

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competing conventions, which are in turn undermined by reasserting the earlier

conventions, a process reiterated so that no one reading finally triumphs. (19)

Nance describes the signal-flare phrases of literature — “Once upon a time,” “yesterday in the

park,” and so forth — as part of a storytelling communication system that readers acquire at a

very early age, the age of bedtime stories and campfire tales. Therefore, she sees the way in

which both writers and readers learn to navigate these codes, to play with them and to parody

them, as an intensely folkloric process. This process begins during children’s early, oral

experiences with works of literature.

As a mature writer, Borges took advantage of more than just the stock, oral storytelling

phrases that cue readers to begin reading a story with a particular genre of fiction in mind.

Knowing that footnotes with specific bibliographic information and academic formatting cause

readers to enter into a specific kind of tacit consent (in this case a non-verbal agreement with the

author that what is read is non-fiction), Borges renders the impossible objects in “Tlön” that

much more disturbing and magical. They are received as more real, more factual, because they

are found mixed in with what readers have been taught to interpret as a more rigorous mode of

writing. Thus the fantastic short story “Tlön” gives us the feeling that it has been fact-checked

and that, even so, its supernatural objects exist.

Different reader expectations and different claims of stable reality lead to different kinds

and degrees of belief. Borges’ manipulation of a “factual” environment to produce supernatural

phenomena is reminiscent of “Project Alpha” — a hoax organized by professional magician and

skeptic James Randi. With the help of Randi, two young sleight-of-hand and mentalist

performers (Steven Shaw, also known as Banachek, and Michael Edwards) used magic

techniques to temporarily persuade two scientists at Washington University in St. Louis,

Missouri, that they had supernatural powers. Dr. Peter Phillips, a physicist, and Mark Schafer, a
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doctoral student in psychology, ran experiments to investigate psychic phenomena and

psychokinetic metal bending under stringent laboratory conditions at the university. The

researchers, though they could never verify their subjects’ extra sensory abilities in the lab,

reported encouraging results during their exploratory tests and were informally convinced of

Shaw’s and Edwards’s genuine abilities to perform psychokinesis (Thalbourne 362-363). These

two performers, who applied to the study as a hoax, seemed to always perform the impossible on

the edge of scientific proof — bending spoons and reading minds. They managed these feats just

frequently enough outside of the lab that the scientists felt they had found experiment

participants with psychic abilities and reported this to their parapsychology colleagues.

James Randi revealed the hoax that he had orchestrated shortly thereafter, which created

a large amount of negative publicity for both the university and its researchers. Responses to the

hoax have been extremely diverse. One of the most thorough and interesting discussions of the

ethical issues surrounding the hoax itself and the difficulty of conducting scientific studies of

supernatural phenomena is titled “Science Versus Showmanship: A History of the Randi Hoax,”

which was written by a member of the University’s research team. One cannot help but let out a

Borgesian laugh while reading psychologist Michael A. Thalbourne’s article. It spends much of

its energy distinguishing between “exploratory” research and “formal” research to protect the

Washington University team from Randi’s criticism of the project’s scientific methods and

observations. How true it is, in both the short story “Tlön” and in the hoax of the McDonnell

Laboratory for Psychical Research, that the more that humans attempt to make hard distinctions

between such categories — the informal and the formal; the non-fact-checked and the fact-

checked — the more disturbing it is when supernatural phenomena appear where it seems

impossible for them to exist.

Unethical hoaxsters, like Borges and James Randi, manipulate the rigorous traditions of
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scientific writing and experimentation to question how the categories of “fact” versus “fiction”

are constructed and who (authors, magicians, or scientists) are the most nimble negotiators of

these realms. The manipulative and transgressive aesthetic of Borges’ short stories, show us that

the power that comes with the study of language as mediator of the human imagination tempts

authors to, like Faust, play God.

4 Playing God: The Detective Story, Smoke and Political Trickery

Experience has demonstrated that the ignorance of the public with regard

to the capabilities of trickery is the principal factor in all problems

connected with every kind of deception. If the public only knew a little

more in this respect, the thousand and one quackeries which flourish in

our midst could not exist.

— John Nevil Maskelyne

You can fool all of the people some of the time.

— Abraham Lincoln

Borges’ consistent unreliability as a narrator in realms of fiction as well as non-fiction

teaches his audience a special form of skepticism. His dedicated readers become natural analysts

of deceptive practices in three ways. First, as Todorov points out, any re-reading of a fantastic

text operates as a meta-reading, because the reader cannot succumb to the fantastic text’s magic

twice. In other words, each meta-reading of a fantastic short story diminishes the “spell” the text

casts and brings its methods for casting that spell more clearly to light (Todorov 95; Howard 90).

A meta-reader of Borges is examining the backstage workings of the strong magic needed to blur

the fiction/reality boundary. Second, Borges makes clear that much if not all of the extra-textual

material (interviews, non-fictional essays, etc.) surrounding his work is suspect. This tactic
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indicates to his readers that he is actively toying with the limits of fact versus fiction within his

short stories as well as outside of them, in the documentation of everyday life. His sources must

constantly be verified. Finally, Borges pays hommage to previous authors and historical

narratives that are deceptive so as to warn us against the tendencies of certain individuals to play

God. This game of power abuse is one that Borges both exposes and knowingly plays himself.

To illustrate this last quality of his fiction more clearly, it is necessary to leave the realm of

fantastic literature and to plant our feet firmly on part of the fictional territory Todorov labels as

the “uncanny”: the rational detective story.

How do all of us, as human beings, learn to process information more carefully? How do

we learn to question our assumptions? Detective narratives like Israel Zangwill’s The Big Bow

Mystery and cloak and dagger tales such as Borges’ “El tema del traidor y del héroe” (“The

Traitor and the Hero”) are fictional stories that demonstrate how humans make false

assumptions. These two stories illustrate specific deceptive devices that can leave the aesthetic

realm and enter the political to fool the uninformed masses. Rather than going into a detailed

analysis of each work, this section will focus on key moments in the two texts when a reader or a

spectator is mislead on the basis of a false assumption. The first will illustrate the power of

breaking previously established detective story conventions, while the second will demonstrate

how a psychological device — the use of “smoke” — is used to deceive readers. Each of the

authors in question will also be discussed in terms of how their exploits are forms of playing

God.

Israel Zangwill was an English author, an early influence on Borges’ study of the

detective genre, and is credited with the invention of the “locked-room” subgenre of murder

mysteries. In his “Introduction: Of Murders and Mysteries,” inserted as a preface in 1894 to

subsequent editions of The Big Bow Mystery (1890), Zangwill explains that he had set about the
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problem of how to write and solve what is now known as the “locked-box” type of murder

mystery well before the publication process: “I said to myself one night that no mystery-monger

had ever murdered a man in a room to which there was no possible access” (8). Zangwill’s

innovative narrative structuring of a man’s murder in a completely isolated location also inspired

him to break a formerly stable murder-mystery convention. His novel is the first to give the main

detective, Mr. Grodman, the role of murderer.

These ploys against readers’ assumptions that 1) the detective cannot possibly be the

murderer, and 2) that the murder takes place while the room is inaccessible, have spawned

countless variations since The Big Bow Mystery’s publication. These creative deviations from

detective story norms clearly had an influence on Borges’ experiments in the genre. In

“Abenjacán el Bojarí, muerto en su laberinto” (“Ibn-Hakam Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His

Labyrinth”) the Argentine author directly cites Zangwill’s Victorian novella, which is seen as the

first pure example of the “locked-room” narrative (1047; Hurley 256). Borges scholars’ Evelyn

Fishburn and Psiche Hughs explain that the crimes committed in such stories are “committed in a

place where all the exits are locked from the outside and there is no criminal inside; the solution

is that the murderer is the person who discovers or pretends to discover the crime” (264). By

making that person a retired detective, Mr. Grodman, Zangwill demonstrates how his readers, up

to the point of The Big Bow Mystery’s publication, often assumed that detective characters were

free of suspicion.18 Even more fascinating than the fact that Grodman secretly murders his

neighbor, while supposedly discovering his dead body, is his more deeply seated motive for the

18
It might be argued that this assumption is less common since the popularity of Agatha

Christie’s stage play The Mousetrap, which anticipates the same assumption to be made by the

receiver of the text and holds the record for the longest run ever in London: 1952 to 2014.
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crime.

The sole reason the ex-detective character commits murder is “the desire to commit a

crime that should baffle detection” (149). After retiring and publishing his memoirs, Mr.

Grodman suffers from extreme boredom and is haunted by the fact that all of the evildoers he

caught were completely unimaginative. His goal in life becomes the execution of a perfectly

undetectable crime. In the end, even though an innocent fall guy has been convicted of the crime,

the ex-detective turns himself in. He does this because he does not want a rival investigator to

receive undeserved credit for solving the crime. With stunningly egotistical panache, Mr.

Grodman confesses the entirety of his crime to the authorities. He insists that a clerk record his

words, because he wants the statement to “form the basis of an appendix to the twenty-fifth

edition — sort of silver wedding — of my book, Criminals I Have Caught” (148). In a moment

of self-reflexive mythmaking, this detective/author character both creates and solves a murder in

order to write the last chapter of his autobiography. He decides to end his career by catching

himself. The man is clearly playing God, ending someone else’s life to perfect his personal

narrative, and wants to be remembered in the history books for doing so.

Zangwill, the flesh-and-blood author of The Big Bow Mystery, also reveals a strange

assumption early readers made about his writing process and a certain pleasure in knowing that

his audience is one step behind him. This alluring power of manipulation in which creators of

murder-mysteries participate is reflected in that introduction to the book’s 1894 edition. Despite

the fact that the author had come up with a solution for his mystery well before it was serialized

in a London newspaper, The Star, he later dedicated a letter to that paper’s editors and general

readership. In the letter, he thanks the hundreds of readers who sent in unsolicited solutions for

The Big Bow Mystery as each installment was printed and circulated. The letter adopts a tongue-

in-cheek style, with its most enjoyably sarcastic moment being Zangwill’s apology for having
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chosen the murderer based on a big list where he checked-off the solutions and suspects

submitted by eager fans; thus, his hand was forced to pick the most unlikely character of all —

ex-detective Grodman — the one who helps to discover the body and solve the crime:

Had I not been impelled by this consideration I should certainly have brought in a

verdict against Mrs. Drabdump, as recommended by the reader who said that,

judging by the illustration in the “Star,” she must be at least seven feet high, and,

therefore, could easily have got on the roof and put her (proportionately) long arm

down the chimney to effect the cut. (9)

Zangwill is on one level making fun of the ludicrous, unrealistic, and overly complex

explanations that many readers came up with — none of which divined his unorthodox choice.

On a public level, the author craftily removes some of the intellectual sting his story must have

had for those readers who tried hardest to determine the mystery’s solution. On a private and

more retrospective level, the author is absolutely amazed that some readers assume that the story

was written one section at a time. This erroneous assumption was made by some, because the

novel was published in individual installments for The Star. The serialization and

commodification of the novel into newspapers sold at newsstands gave the illusion that the text

was being written in installments rather than completed in advance. His final paragraph shows

absolute shock at the fact that some readers took statements from the above citation (his public

letter) seriously, which indicates his mass audience’s inability to understand one of the mystery

story’s narrative prerequisites: “it is obvious that the mystery-story is just the one species of

story that cannot be told impromptu or altered at the last moment, seeing that it demands the

most careful piecing together and the most elaborate dove-tailing” (10). The assumption that

stories are written in the same manner that they are printed and released for public consumption

is a dangerous one. Though Zangwill is only out to deceive his readers and to write a good
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mystery for entertainment purposes, one can imagine how such storytelling tricks might be

applied to political ends.

In his short story “El tema del traidor y del héroe” (“The Traitor and the Hero”), Borges

shows exactly how assumptions about stock characters and the form in which stories are

published can be manipulated to rewrite history. Unlike Zangwill, who baffles his audience by

making his detective character a murderer, Borges turns a heroic Irish rebel into a traitor. It could

be argued that these differences have something to do with the various characteristics separating

the cloak and dagger and the detective story genres. However, I argue that the more significant

difference between these two stories is political intent. Both are murder mysteries, both break

with the assumptions readers make about diametrically opposed stock characters and both reveal

the powerful way publication media (newspapers and history books) influence reader reception.

The key difference between Zangwill’s and Borges’ stories is that the second author ends

his narrative by covering up his protagonist’s crime. He does not bring the central deception of

his story to light or its hero (secretly a traitor) to justice. Instead, Borges focuses on the process

of deception and the creation of mystery. Like a magician, he is once again more interested in the

persistence of the unexplained. For this reason, “El tema del traidor y del héroe” (“The Traitor

and the Hero”) provides an excellent example of a psychological tactic used to fool readers and

spectators alike: a technique that magicians call “smoke.”

“Smoke” is a specific type of red-herring that “creates a false line of logic” rather than

merely confusing its receiver (Whaley 845). This logical fallacy — usually manifesting itself as

an intentional verbal mistake or piece of misinformation — is employed at a particular moment

in the performance of a magic effect. Frequently, the magician accidentally forgets a spectator’s

name or “miscalls” the identity of a spectator’s chosen playing card in what appears to be a

moment of confusion or clumsiness. Almost always, though real mistakes do sometimes happen,
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this supposed accident is timed to create a metaphorical cloud of smoke, one that conceals the

backstage workings of the magic effect and creates a foggy, blank space in the audience’s

memory. With this in mind, let us turn our attention to Borges’ narrative account of Fergus

Kilpatrick’s mysterious death and the moment when a particularly important line of “smoke”

appears in the story:

Otras facetas del enigma inquietan a Ryan. Son de carácter cíclico: parecen repetir

o combinar hechos de remotas regiones, de remotas edades. Así, nadie ignora que

los esbirros que examinaron el cadáver del héroe, hallaron una carta cerrada

que le advertía el riesgo de concurrir al teatro, esa noche; también Julio César, al

encaminarse al lugar donde lo aguardaban los puñales de sus amigos, recibió un

memorial que no llegó a leer, en que iba declarada la traición, con los nombres de

los traidores. (énfasis mío, 889)

[Other aspects of the mystery disturb Ryan; certain things seem almost cyclical,

seem to repeat or combine events from distant places, distant ages. For example:

Everyone knows that the constables who examined the hero’s body found a sealed

letter warning Kilpatrick not to go to the theater that night; Julius Caesar, too, as

he was walking toward the place where the knives of his friends awaited him,

received a note he never read—a note telling him of his betrayal and revealing the

names of his betrayers.] (my emphasis, Hurley 144)

In the above quotation, Borges writes about a fictional biographer — Ryan — who is

researching the murder and subsequent martyrdom of his great grandfather, the Irish rebel Fergus

Kilpatrick. Ryan, after reading certain early nineteenth-century accounts by James Alexander

Nolan (one of his great grandfather’s right-hand men), discovers that his famous relative’s

assassination was actually an elaborately staged suicide. Someone keeps thwarting their planned
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uprisings and Nolan is commanded by Kilpatrick to find out who the traitor is within the rebel

group’s midst. In a strange plot twist, Nolan proves that Kilpatrick, the leader himself, has

betrayed the cause. As punishment for his treason, his group sentences him to death. However,

the now condemned, redemption-seeking Kilpatrick begs that his execution not harm the

rebellion effort. Nolan, with the willing help of the Irish hero-turned-traitor, carefully scripts out

a two-day sequence of events ending with an assassination attempt that both men agree upon.

Everything is successful. Kilpatrick becomes a martyr. The Irish people blame the British for the

assassination. They become enraged and as a result the rebellion is finally victorious. In short,

Nolan pulls off a perfectly successful political deception by adapting scenes from Macbeth and

Julius Caesar (890; Hurley 145).

Borges makes clear to the reader that generations after this mass deception, Ryan

(Kilpatrick’s great grandson) becomes suspicious of the same bit of “smoke” that so effectively

convinced the Irish population that Kilpatrick was unjustly murdered. In other words, the

unopened letter functions in two separate ways at two different historical moments. On the night

of Kilpatrick’s suicide (or staged assassination) and in the months that follow, the letter acts as a

key prop in the political play conceived by Nolan to create outrage and make the rebellion

successful: it is pure “smoke.” The unopened letter was always intended to be found sealed by

the police examining the national hero’s body to reinforce the fact that he was assassinated. To

the Irish populace it seems a tragic mistake that Kilpatrick died with the unopened letter that

could have saved him — right there, in his own pocket! The condemned man knew exactly what

was about to happen though and kept the piece of mail on his person as a kind of insurance

policy. On the night of his death in 1824, it ensured that he would be remembered as a hero

rather than a traitor. After all, why else would he be carrying that letter?

Roughly one century later, this same letter inspires Ryan to investigate the circumstances
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of his great grandfather’s death more rigorously and leads him to the conclusion that truth might

be stranger than fiction, because much of what is assumed to be true actually is fiction. Upon

uncovering the truth and unearthing Nolan’s deception, there is a moment of tension. Will Ryan,

who is about to publish a biography on Kilpatrick, reveal the hero’s unknown act of treachery?

The answer is no. Just as a magician guards the secret methods of his illusions to

produce mystery and to perpetuate belief in the impossible, Ryan chooses to silence the

discovery that would ruin Kilpatrick’s reputation (891; Hurley 146). Even though the crucial

political moment has passed and the revolution is over, the great grandson chooses to preserve

the sparkling, illusory reputation of an Irish hero. After all is said and done, the biography is

published to authenticate the same fake history so many books before had set in motion. The

fictional public within Borges’ short story world will never be told that the mysterious

assassination of Kilpatrick was a setup. The real murderers, Nolan and Kilpatrick himself, will

never be exposed. At this point, Ryan, the biographer realizes that Nolan’s manipulation of the

facts in 1824 is so powerful that he too has become part of its plot — he too has become an

accomplice. This is not the first or the last time that those writing the history books get away

with murder.

5 From Authenticity to Legitimacy

authenticity:

1. as being authoritative or duly authorized.

2. as being in accordance with fact, as being true in substance.

3. as being what it professes in origin or authorship, as being

genuine…

— The O.E.D. (my emphasis)

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legitimacy:

1. a. The fact of being a legitimate child. …

2. Of a government or the title of a sovereign …

3. gen. Conformity to rule or principle; lawfulness. In Logic,

conformity to sound reasoning.

— The O.E.D. (my emphasis)

As “El tema del traidor y del héroe” (“The Traitor and the Hero”) demonstrates, there is

an “inheirent”19 link between the authentic and the legitimate. The historian, Ryan, despite

conflicting ethical impulses, chooses to knowingly fake history (by preparing what appears to be

an “authentic” biography of Kilpatrick) in the name of — what else? — the family name. He lies

to protect his legacy. The sense of his own personal legitimacy, as an extension of his blood

relation to a national hero, is at stake. To preserve a personal narrative, one supporting a complex

cultural and political identity, that he, his relatives and Ireland have constructed, Ryan willingly

deceives.

The subject of this final close reading has been an extension of the primary corpus

belonging to this chapter — fantastic literature — and a segue to the mode of storytelling that

will be discussed next: the con game. We are about to journey from the office of Ryan, the Irish

historian who falsifies history, to the film studios and distribution networks of Hollywood where

19
The misspelling is intentional. The legitimate heir to the rebel throne, Ryan, has

genuineness and authenticity inscribed in his bloodlines and in the letters of his family name:

Kilpatrick. What is assumed to be a non-fictional narrative — the story of his family’s power and

social status — justifies his privileged position in Ireland’s history, in a social hierarchy based on

heroes.
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murder-mysteries and con games are adapted for viewer consumption.

This chapter has parsed certain short stories by Jorge Luis Borges to illustrate how

concepts from reader-response theory (discussed in chapter one) help to explain how magic

effects occur within spectators’ minds during the reading process. I have argued that fantastic

literature, exemplified for me by this Argentine author’s writing, is one of the closest literary

equivalents to the powerful reality-slippage and defamiliarization experienced when spectators

receive live magic performances. This is precisely because Borges’ writing challenges traditional

author/reader relationships and the willing suspension of disbelief process. By doing so, his work

evokes a sensation of reality-slippage within us as readers that somehow explodes our previous

conceptions of daily life. His knack for creating this unusual reception experience is so effective

that some of the twentieth century’s greatest authors and philosophers cite him as an inspiration

for thinking through impossibility. Michel Foucault states that his study on how humans classify

knowledge — Les mots et les choses (The Order of Things) — was born out of his laughter in

response to reading a page by Borges that “secoue . . . toutes les familiarités de la pensée”

(“shatters . . . all the familiar landmarks of thought”) (7). Borges’ extremely subtle and deceptive

techniques as well as the affect they create in the minds of his audience — a startling, intellectual

and emotional vacillation between what is real and what is not real — are those of a magician.

To demonstrate how key concepts of reader-response theory being examined in this

dissertation apply to Borges’ literary magic and to the lived world beyond it, five of his short

stories have been deployed. First, looking directly at the dazzling effect produced by “El Aleph”

(“The Aleph”) established the foundation of my argument that the kind of willing suspension of

disbelief generated by fantastic literature renders it a didactic mode of storytelling akin to magic

as a performing art. Analyzing the moment when the Aleph appears as a moment of sublime

reception and reading the whole story as an example of what Todorov calls “le fantastique pur”
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(“the pure fantastic”), have more clearly defined how destabilizing magic effects call out to and

produce writerly readers. As helpful as Todorov’s model of fantastic literature is, two more of

Borges’ stories “La muerte y la brújula” (“Death and the Compass) and “El disco” (“The Disk”)

were used to explode its rigid structuralism to thereby open it up further. Leonard Cohen’s words

“Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets

in” could be the refrain of those readings.20 The cracks created in Todorov’s model by Borges’

stories allow for the light given off by not just one ideal reader, but by the contributing

imaginations of a multiplicity of readers (model, double-model, negative readers and others) who

are also writers of the fantastic text as its narrative progresses. The objects of impossible proof

conjured by Borges for the reception of these readers in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” were then

compared to those that practitioners of magia ficcional (“fictional, or narrative, magic”) make

appear in the hands of their spectators. Both groups of impossible objects short-circuit the

audience’s willing suspension of disbelief to create the visceral reality-slippage that I argue is so

central to the reception of strong magic. Finally, my analysis of “El tema del traidor y del héroe”

(“The Traitor and the Hero”), along with its reference to the first locked-room murder mystery

written by Israel Zangwill, has suggested that authors, like magicians, revel in playing God and

are tempted to abuse their power.

As promised earlier, the radical potential of the techniques used in fantastic literature to

blur the lines between the fiction/reality and authentic/fake binaries will now be considered for

their applications outside of purely fictional realms. Moving from a comparative study of the

author as magician to one of the storyteller as criminal allows for a shift of emphasis from the

20
Leonard Cohen sings these words in his song “Anthem,” the fifth track on his album

“The Future” (1992).

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mostly aesthetic concerns of the fantastic or sublime moment of deception to issues of legality.

What happens when a storyteller steals from another text without crediting it as a source? What

are the ethics of adapting a real world con game to film and how do we, as a society, respond

when that fictional adaptation subsequently becomes the model for an actual crime?

The answer to these questions reveals the common ground linking the third definitions of

“authenticity” and “legitimacy” emphasized in the epigraphs above. Constructions of the

“authentic,” or the “genuine,” in fiction are intrinsically connected to the rules, principles and

conventions governing law and logic (i.e., rationality) in social systems at large. But how

effective can any legal system be, which derives its authority from social conventions and

established rituals, when attempting to rein in storytellers who break the rules of fiction or the

laws that have been constructed to regulate reality?

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Chapter 3
Criminal Adaptations: Hidden Intertexts in the Murder Mystery and
the Con Game
This chapter continues to investigate the relationship between playing God in fiction and

playing God in reality as these activities relate to the reception and adaptation of crimes both

imaginary and real. Conceptually, my dissertation’s argument now moves from reader-response

to spectator-response with an emphasis on adaptation as infidelity or outright theft, visual

deception, and how successful confidence games are structured as interactive narrative

performances. For all three of these topics, the director’s cinematic mediation of the performer’s

body influences spectator reception and allows for a visual aspect of analysis that is not possible

when studying written fiction. One might argue, of course, that when we read we visualize and

this is true. However, what I wish to emphasize here is the perceptual mediation of reality

accomplished by human eyes, some techniques used to direct and therefore deceive those eyes,

and how those techniques inform directorial choices made in the mediation of filmed narratives.

With this visual preference in mind, three incarnations of the same short murder mystery

narrative — Roald Dahl’s, Alfred Hitchcock’s and Pedro Almodóvar’s versions of “Lamb to the

Slaughter” — will be explored to investigate the aesthetics and the ethics of criminal adaptation.

The murder weapon in this narrative, a leg of lamb, is similar to an object in a magic

performance, because the narration of the story causes it to suddenly appear and then disappear

as if by sleight-of-hand. The protagonist’s choice, in this narrative, to take the law into her own

hands and to cunningly deceive authorities by simulating a performance of her everyday life

activities, is a fictional example of how criminals and con artists deceive us in real life. Each of

the three media forms successfully inhabited by the adapted narrative (a short story, a television

broadcast and a film) is shown to add intertextual, intermedial and cross-cultural layers of
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meaning to “Lamb to the Slaughter.” These media are analyzed as equally important homes of

the text, thereby rejecting the “fidelity” or “bastardization” prejudice found in much adaptation

criticism. The line of thought giving rise to such prejudice against newer media forms and their

adaptations is linked to the argument that meaning is derived from a sacred and originary text. In

other words, another connection between reader-response and spectator-response is their mutual

desire to denounce any trend in criticism that privileges an “original” or “true” source of

meaning for a given narrative. Thus, this first half of the chapter celebrates what can be gained

artistically and culturally by eschewing a blind-faith approach to adapting the source text. In this

sense, it argues for the virtues of infidelity. At the same time, it ends by asking if it is possible to

construct an ethics of citation and adaptation for murder mysteries and con games. I submit that

such an ethics would make greater artistic experimentation possible while also creating more

writerly viewers: spectators with sharper abilities of enigma analysis. The faithful documentation

of a story’s past facilitates the productively unfaithful experiments of its future.

This question, of how to reject the “fidelity” prejudice in adaptation criticism without

neglecting or discounting the importance of historical context and cultural origins, is addressed

in the second half of this chapter’s corpus. This ethical adaptation dilemma is discussed by

analyzing fidelity issues surrounding David Mamet’s adaptation of various con games in House

of Games (1987). The complex and, at times, problematic roles played by Ricky Jay in this film

— actor, professional magician and confidence game consultant — become the center-point of

my argument that adaptations should be both faithful, when it comes to research and knowledge

of a text’s past, and free with regards to that text’s adaptations to new media or the same

medium. I read Jay’s presence as strengthening the historical accuracy of the film’s lexicon (i.e.,

con artist terminology) as well as the adapted, visual performances of the con games themselves.

Mamet’s adaptation of the performative speech-acts used in actual con games, his
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unconventional choice to place the audience in the role of mark or victim during the reception

process and the psychological principles that he borrows from confidence games to deceive the

spectators of his film are my other focal points of analysis. Here, we shall think through these

elements of adaptation in terms of faith, consent and what happens to the fiction-making contract

when events occur without a theatrical frame. Reading the short (simple, contained) and long

(extended, complex) con games in Mamet’s film allows us to compare how a film director, a

magician and real-world con artists employ similar narrative techniques to elicit the voluntary,

and sometimes involuntary, suspension of disbelief in their audiences. I will also compare how

they profit from that belief. In all of these cases, whether legally or illegally, one person is selling

a story and another person is buying it.

1 Free Adaptations: Successful Aesthetic and Cultural

Infidelities
I steal from every single movie ever made […] I steal from everything. Great

artists steal, they don’t do hommages.

— Quentin Tarantino (who stole that last line from T.S. Eliot)

Steal once and they call you a plagiarist; steal a thousand times and they call you a

genius. The art of adaptation is, in many ways, the art of creative and usually acknowledged

thievery. Sometimes a story is lifted from one medium to another (such as from a novel to a

film), but in other cases the act of theft crosses cultural borders rather than artistic ones. In 1994,

Mike White accused filmmaker Quentin Tarantino of unfairly adapting Ringo Lam’s Lung fu

fong wan (1987) to create Reservoir Dogs (released in 1992). White constructed an 11-minute

short film, titled Who Do You Think You’re Fooling? (The Story of a Robbery) (1994), which

juxtaposes the Hong Kong and the U.S. films’ strikingly similar plot elements and camera

angles. Closer scrutiny of this short piece of video criticism reveals that Tarantino and Lam’s
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films complement each other intertextually – exploring interesting parts of the narrative left

unexplored by the other. Here, I would simply like to signal the emotionally charged tone of

White’s title and how this example puts a new twist on an old prejudice that has consistently

plagued adaptation criticism.

“Who do you think you’re fooling?” is the rhetorical question shouted by the betrayed

lover to the unfaithful partner. The question is actually a statement, which assumes guilt and

expresses anger precisely because it is formed as a question: “you should have known better than

to try and lie to me” is the veiled meaning. White as a viewer had developed what he described
1
as a “love affair” with Tarantino and his films. His discovery of the filmmaker’s lack of citation,

however, was the beginning of the end of that relationship. And although White’s video

criticizing Tarantino for not citing Lam’s film as a source of inspiration is in many ways

justified, the tone of its title echoes the counter-productive and self-righteous “infidelity”

discourse found in much adaptation criticism.

In the introductory chapter of his Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and

Practice of Adaptation, Robert Stam identifies terms such as “‘infidelity,’ ‘betrayal,’

‘deformation,’ ‘violation,’ ‘bastardization,’ ‘vulgarization,’ and ‘desecration’” as indicators of

the moralistic and presumptuous tone taken by many literary critics towards adaptations (3).

Here, however, Stam is arguing against the classic prejudice of scholarly connoisseurs regarding

works of literature adapted to film. Like the majority of criticism devoted to tackling questions of

adaptation – George Bluestone’s “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of Film,” Seymour

Chatman’s “What Novels Can Do that Films Can’t (and Vice Versa),” and Bruce Morrissette’s

1
White used this phrase to describe his initial enrapture and later disenchantment with

Tarantino in an interview conducted by email correspondence.

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“Aesthetic Response to Novel and Film” to name just a few – Stam approaches the issue of

adaptation prejudice with the novel/film relationship at the theoretical forefront. But how do

other kinds of adaptation inspire different kinds of bias?

Instead of thumbing his nose at an “inferior” filmic representation of a celebrated Jane

Austen or Charles Dickens’ story, Mike White expresses moral outrage of a different sort; it is as

if Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs has cheated on him (the viewer) by sleeping with another text and

then hiding that fact. In this instance of uncited and unmarked adaptation, fidelity to the

“original” text is not the main problem; instead, fidelity to the spectator (who wishes to be

informed of such textual relations) is paramount. Is there a shift in moral outrage indicative of

the different attitudes concerning cross-medium adaptations (literature to film) versus like-

medium adaptations (film to film)? And if so, how does the added element of a cross-cultural

adaptation influence that bias? In short, we are about to think through how the infidelity

discourse plays out in the field of cultural production when it is applied to changes in media,

changes in cultural location and changes in citational etiquette.

1.1 Various Incarnations of Dahl's “Lamb to the Slaughter”

To engage such questions, I will avoid using the staple food of literary criticism’s diet:

the novel. Instead, Alfred Hitchcock, Roald Dahl, and Pedro Almodóvar’s versions of “Lamb to

the Slaughter” – a television broadcast, a short story, and part of a film respectively – will be

used to analyze the results of cross-cultural and cross-medium “translation.” I place the word

“translation” in quotation marks to indicate its near synonymous relationship to the concept of

adaptation in this discussion. This theoretical proximity is only possible based on the new brand

of translation criticism, which Linda Hutcheon describes as focused on the process of

“transmutation” or “transcoding.” As she explains in A Theory of Adaptation, this is basically the

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recoding of a text into “a new set of conventions as well as signs” (16). In that book, she also

notes that this recent conception of translation is a far cry from old-school approaches, which

idealize the “source” text and denigrate the “target” text. Since at least the beginning of the

twentieth century, adaptation critics have inherited translation critics’ biases toward the

“original” or the “authentic” text.

Here, however, we will focus on the moment of contact and the process of transaction

taking place as multiple languages or texts cross paths. While others might read “Lamb to the

Slaughter” thinking of it in a chronologically determined order of creation (from the source to its

adaptations), I read it according to the necessarily unpredictable order of its reception. One of the

many benefits of focusing upon the moment of translation and reception of “Lamb to the

Slaughter” as an always already adapted text is the elimination of the typical source-to-

adaptation hierarchy. As a professional translator, adapter and screenwriter has recently argued,

translation is adaptation (Paquin 1). The Latin preposition trans – across, beyond or over –

captures the movement of “Lamb to the Slaughter” from one continent and language to the next;

the verb “adapt” – to fit or to modify – signals the text’s multi-media recoding. The combination

of these changes results in a holistic product of multidirectional intersections:

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trans-Atlantic
English American
Short Story T.V. Episode
(Dahl) (Hitchcock)
1953 1955

“Lamb to
tra

l
ra
the
ns

ltu
Slaughter”
-lin

-cu
gu

ss
ist

cro
ic

Spanish
Film
(Almodóvar)
1984

Fig. 3. Adaptations and Migrations of the "Lamb to the Slaughter" text.

This diagram is by no means a complete model of “Lamb to the Slaughter” incarnations.2

There are surely others waiting to be discovered. Therefore, it does not assume that an “ideal”

reader (no such person exists) needs all three versions mentioned to complete some textual

2
Another adaptation of “Lamb to the Slaughter,” one not discussed here or shown in the

visual that I have created, is introduced by Roald Dahl onscreen as the fourth episode of the

British television series Tales of the Unexpected. It aired in 1979 and is notable for the heavy

reverb of its non-diegetic sound effects.

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puzzle to thereby unlock the secret meaning (no such thing exists) of this narrative. It has been

constructed as an equilateral triangle with omnidirectional arrows connecting each different

version of “Lamb to the Slaughter,” because the model makes no assumption as to which

incarnation of the text a viewer will receive first. A receiver may see one, two or all three

versions of the adapted text, but the order of those receptions is unpredictable. Therefore, the

order of a particular receiver’s infidelity bias is also unpredictable. My comparative model’s

purpose is to facilitate readings of each section of this central text’s tripartite and symbiotic

existence as a case study of citation practices, different medias’ aesthetic techniques and the

cultural modifications employed to make each adaptation successful. It is meant to be a tool for

the evaluation of how well a text stands on its own (is successful in its local environment) as well

as how successfully it references and co-exists with other versions of itself. For example, both

Alfred Hitchcock and Roald Dahl’s’ versions of the same story operate autonomously and

independently, but together they reveal a unique short-story-to-television and English-to-

American translation. These attributes are part of what makes them such successful adaptations.

To begin, three specific moments in the TV version will be isolated and compared to

Dahl’s prose version. This method of analysis attempts to read the two texts against the common

critical grain, which often approaches adaptations as necessarily linear events; in other words, as

a literary source and its filmic derivative or a primary source and its secondary instance.3

Frequently, the order of a story’s appearances in the artistic world has little to do with the order

in which the spectator receives them. Despite the fact that Dahl’s fiction was widely read in the

U.S. when the short story was published (1953), Hitchcock’s 1955 broadcast (or one of its

3
Here I cite another two appropriately titled articles: “From Novel to Film” (Michael

Cunningham) and “Films Out of Books” (David Glassco).

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subsequent rebroadcasts) more likely constitutes the average person’s first reception of “Lamb to

the Slaughter.” Therefore, examples of differing artistic renderings will be analyzed through

screen shots first and prose passages second.

1.2 Sleight-of-Screen vs. Sleight-of-Pen as Sleight-of-Hand

Hitchcock’s version uses a special technique to control the spectator’s point of view and

reception of the central narrative event in “Lamb to the Slaughter”: the unique way in which one

shocked, desperate, and temporarily insane housewife kills her husband by hitting him on the

back of the head with a frozen club of meat. The actual murder, which in both Hitchcock and

Dahl’s versions is surprisingly abrupt, is designed to catch the audience, like Patrick Maloney

(the husband), completely off-guard. The following shot-by-shot analysis of the murder begins

right after Mary Maloney has distractedly carried a frozen piece of meat from the garage into the

kitchen. Though Patrick has just announced to his pregnant wife that he loves someone else and

wants a divorce, Mary, in a daze of disbelief, automatically begins to prepare the evening meal:

[Medium shot of Mary unwrapping the leg of lamb on the kitchen table]4

[Long shot of Patrick in the living room preparing to leave without his supper]

PATRICK. “I’m leaving.”

[Medium close-up shot of Mary]

MARY. “Patrick you can’t. You can’t go, you can’t, you can’t.”

The smooth shift from a medium to a medium close-up shot redirects the audience’s

view of Mary away from her hands and the huge leg of lamb nearby. The meal’s main course,

4
This section is a combination of quotations transcribed from Hitchcock’s episode and

my own stylistic observations placed in brackets.

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soon to be a murder weapon, is subtly placed off-screen, out of sight and out of mind. The more

desperate tone in her voice and her increasingly distraught facial expression command the

spectators’ attention and naturally motivate the camera’s closer framing of her body. The

audience, like Mary, has forgotten about the lamb on the table, because Patrick’s impending

departure demands more immediate attention:

PATRICK. “No?”

[This is Patrick’s disinterested response from the living room which openly

adjoins the kitchen. His reply is strictly oral. The camera remains on Mary and her

imploring face]

MARY. “Patrick I won’t let you, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”

PATRICK. “There’s no sense getting hysterical about this whole thing.” [The

camera continues to frame Mary’s face in a medium close-up]

MARY. “Patrick I mean it!”

[Long shot through the open doorway of Patrick as he turns from the writing

desk]

PATRICK. “Try and stop me.”

[Back to the same medium close-up shot of Mary]

At this point, Mary slowly, almost involuntarily, moves from the kitchen and through the

doorway. The only sound heard is a scrape or two of her feet on the linoleum before she steps

onto the living room carpet. The camera follows her movement, tracking smoothly from left to

right. Mobile framing reveals slightly more of Mary’s figure as she approaches Patrick with an

imploring look on her face. To the audience it appears that she is walking with her hands folded

in front of her. As she moves from the the kitchen to the living room, Patrick’s figure, still

standing and bending over the desk, enters the frame. Only in the last second or so of this
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tracking shot is it noticeable that Mary holds onto something with both hands. By the time the

audience realizes that she has invisibly carried the frozen leg of lamb with her from the kitchen,

the murder is taking place. Suddenly her arms heave up, raising the club of meat into full view,

right before crashing it down onto Patrick’s unsuspecting head. Immediately after, she stumbles

in a daze to the kitchen and mechanically puts the lamb into the oven.

Hitchcock’s masterful use of visual deception in this scene is storytelling magic. The

way in which a mundane leg of lamb vanishes from the spectator’s perception and then suddenly

reappears to become a murder weapon creates a powerful moment of surprise. I refer to

Hitchcock’s careful direction of the camera and his principal actor here as sleight-of-screen,

because the manner in which he manipulates his spectators’ reception of the event matches the

subtlety and the naturalness that conjurors employ when performing sleight-of-hand.

In an essay titled “Getting the Mis Out of Misdirection,” master magician Tommy

Wonder argues that elegant direction is far more powerful than misdirection for creating surprise

within the minds of the audience. He poetically describes how the creation of “shadow areas”

occurs as a natural result when a storyteller directs spectators’ attention to the more important,

and therefore better lit, details of a performance (30). Wonder advises magicians to find these

organically occurring areas of inattention, these shadowlands of perception, and to invisibly

execute their secret methods within these areas so as not to distract from the warmer, brighter

zones of attention where the magic effect — the surprising result made possible by the

clandestine move — will be dramatically revealed.

These zones of shadow (inattention) and light (attention) are precisely what Hitchcock’s

direction, the acting of Barbara Bel Geddes (Mary), and the editing of the scene quoted above

manipulate so effectively. The tracking shot of Mary as she crosses from the living room into the

kitchen is framed so that the murder weapon is just barely offscreen. The spectator might notice
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this if Mary ever glanced down at her hands, but Barbara Bel Geddes keeps her character’s gaze

and sight-lines exactly where the emotional drama of this moment in the story directs them:

squarely at Patrick, who stands offscreen and to her right. Hitchcock could have used a closer

shot scale to mediate this part of the story (a close-up of Mary, for example) and this would have

made the murder weapon extremely easy to hide, but such a choice would have produced a less

surprising result. Part of the power of the appearance of the leg of lamb, when Mary finally

reveals its presence in her hands, is derived from the openness that comes with a shot scale and a

framing that is just distant enough to hide the object in question.

Hitchcock makes the same choice that a master magician would when it comes to hiding

a surprise. He choreographs the story so that spectators feel like they were shown everything

openly and naturally, even though a giant, club-like piece of meat was being hidden just outside

of their perceptive grasp. A novice magician, like a novice director, might have buried this

murder weapon farther offscreen, wanting to plunge it into darker shadows unnecessarily.

Hitchcock’s work illustrates the importance of using excellent direction, rather than misdirection,

to shock his audience during this pivotal moment in the murder mystery.

Hitchcock’s sleight-of-screen is related to the narrative technique known as “ellipsis.”

The passionate dialogue and subtle framing just analyzed above represent the filling in of an

ellipsis left open by Dahl’s original text. “Ellipsis,” according to Robert Stam, occurs “where

major or minor events are completely skipped over” (33). For example, the description of Patrick

Maloney’s murder in the short story is described by a mere six lines of prose:

“For God’s sake,” he said, hearing her, but not turning round. “Don’t make supper

for me. I’m going out.”

At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause

she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard
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as she could on the back of his head.

She might just as well have hit him with a steel club. (Dahl 111)

Hitchcock’s scene breaks into and opens up this part of the narrative after Patrick’s line “I’m

going out” (or “I’m leaving,” as is said in the television episode). Narratively and visually, the

filmed segment adds dialogue, facial expressions, and physical movement that the prose version

either leaves vague or does not provide at all. Because Hitchcock is turning an eight-and-one-

half-paged story into a twenty-three-minute television broadcast, he is able to spend extra time

fleshing out the murder scene without eliminating important plot elements. His addition of detail

and filmic sleight-of-hand with a leg of lamb does not slow down the action of the murder itself.

The two presentations of Patrick’s death each highlight the event’s speed. Using two different

artistic techniques, both versions deny premeditation on Mary’s part and emphasize the

unfortunate combination of an unfaithful husband, an unlikely murder weapon, and an impulsive

reaction. Mary’s decision is made during a moment of temporary insanity.

“Ellipsis” in the terminology of both literature and film also refers to the skipping-over

of larger narrative events as a whole in terms of plot-time and story-time. An exaggerated and

cliché example of a technique used to visually cue audiences that a large amount of story time is

passing though only portions of it are shown onscreen is the often parodied training montage

from Rocky (1976). A more subtle example from an art house film would be the opening

sequence of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), in which the protagonist’s long train voyage from

the Eastern to the Western United States is expressed through recurring close-up shots of the

wheels of a train turning, him falling asleep inside its passenger car and the changing faces of his

fellow travelers.

Two other scenes from “Lamb to the Slaughter,” the one following the murder and the

one preceding it, reveal artistic modifications made in Hitchcock’s filmed narrative and Dahl’s
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written one based on ellipsis. After coming to her senses and putting the lamb into the oven to

cook, Mary Maloney decides to cover up her crime by engaging in a deceptive performance

played out on the stage of everyday life. The audience watches her make a phone call to cancel a

date the couple had arranged with friends, because Patrick is terribly “tired” and wants to have

dinner at home. Mary then goes to the grocery store to buy some vegetables for the meal,

creating an alibi for herself during her exchange with the grocer. Dahl’s prose spans an entire

page describing both Mary as she practices what she will say to the grocer and then the

encounter itself, but Hitchcock uses ellipsis to rapidly express this part of the narrative with a

kind of visual summary. The camera shows Mary leave the house and then a quick dissolve-

sequence of her items being rung up at the store, indicating in a few seconds of visuals (plot-

time) the passage of a roughly twenty-minute shopping trip (story-time). The next shot shows

Mary returning home, pretending, even convincing herself, that she has just discovered her

husband’s dead body. She really does cry and sob into the phone as she notifies the police.

Hitchcock uses an ellipsis to visually gloss over the narrative’s shopping trip – constituting an

elision of a minor event and certain details.

In an earlier scene, however, Hitchcock does just the opposite and fills in an elliptical

gap left open in Dahl’s prose. To describe the initial confrontation between Patrick and Mary and

the revelation of his extramarital affair Dahl simply writes: “And he told her. It didn’t take long,

four or five minutes at most, and she sat very still through it all, watching him with a kind of

dazed horror as he went further and further away from her with each word” (110). Here, there is

a specific reference to four or five minutes of story-time passing that the author tells the reader to

skip-over in plot-time. The script (also written by Dahl) as adapted and filmed by Hitchcock fills

in the “he told her” ellipsis with specific dialogue and details:

PATRICK. “I wanna leave you, Mary. You understand me don’t you. I want to
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leave you.”

MARY. “You don’t mean that.”

PATRICK. “Yes I do mean it, and what’s more I want a divorce. There’s

someone else I want to marry. That’s really all there is to it. I love her and she

loves me. Now, we’ve got to be sensible about it all – calm and sensible. I’ll

arrange for the divorce. You’ll have the baby, naturally…”5

By making Patrick’s declaration of infidelity more explicit in the TV broadcast, Hitchcock

quickly establishes the harsh facts of the situation and presents Patrick as a cold and indifferent

person.

Hitchcock’s version embellishes some segments of the “Lamb to the Slaughter”

narrative, while skipping over others developed at greater length in the short story in an

extremely satisfying manner that successfully adapts the text for its transmission and reception

via television. More than once, ellipsis represents a fictional give and take between these two

texts. Read together, these versions of the same basic narrative combine to form a richer and

more aesthetically complex murder mystery. This intersection of two very different media also

reveals an act of cultural and linguistic translation between two distinct English-speaking

countries. This sort of textual promiscuity and experimentation is unfaithful to the concept of an

original or a sacred text in just the right way. Both the UK and the U.S. versions of “Lamb to the

Slaughter” are successful versions of one another, because they are faithful to the diabolical

twists of the story being told yet are freely adapted to the media that house them and to the

vocabulary of the nations where they are received.

5
All quotations are transcribed from Hitchcock’s 1955 episode “Lamb to the Slaughter.”
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1.3 Cross-cultural and Cross-media Adaptation and Reception

Though the theme of marital infidelity and the 1950s gender role represented by Mary’s

character are relevant to English, American and (soon-to-be-discussed) Spanish audiences, the

way the murder weapon is described changes with each retelling of the story. When comparing

Hitchcock and Dahl’s versions, little linguistic markers appear at odd yet significant moments to

signal the presence of cultural modifications. “Lamb to the Slaughter” adapts its language

depending on its geographic location to speak more clearly to the audience receiving it.

Although the English Mary and the American Mary are both stereotypical examples of a

1950s homemaker, they have two different vocabularies and these must be modified for their

local reception communities. This fact is most noticeable during a scene when detective Jack

Noonan (who has the same name in both versions) questions Mary about possible murder

weapons. The central source of suspense and tension in both Hitchcock and Dahl’s stories results

from the investigators’ inability to discover the implement of Patrick Maloney’s demise. Mary

has, of course, cleverly hidden the instrument of death in the most unlikely of places – inside the

oven — and must play dumb. Both detectives explain that they are searching for a heavy, blunt

object and ask her if there is anything in the house that might meet that description. Do you have

something like a club or “a heavy metal bar,” suggests Noonan to the American Mary who then

replies: “oh, like a baseball bat?” Do you have something “like a big spanner,” suggests the

English Jack Noonan to the English Mary (115). The difference may seem a trifle, but use the

word “spanner” instead of “wrench” on American television and 80% of the viewing public will

have no idea what object is being described. Likewise, the average English household might

have a “cricket” bat around, but not a single piece of equipment used to play American baseball.

These linguistic translations and cultural references are necessary textual infidelities (departures

from one text or the other) that must be made as part of the transcontinental adaptation process.
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Though the specific language and references of “Lamb to the Slaughter” must be adapted

to fit their target audiences, the techniques of deception employed by Mary remain exactly the

same. This suggests cross-cultural and cross-media reception of the three methods that the

betrayed housewife uses to avoid prison — a simulated performance of one of her routines in

everyday life, playing dumb and the use of a weapon that can later be eaten — are, at least in

these two cultures, received as universally effective deceptions. It makes sense that the final

vanish of Mary’s magical leg of lamb does not require complex cultural translation, because, as

far as I know, all police eat. Some eat more voraciously than others.

At the end of the Hitchcock Presents episode – as the worn out and hungry detectives

devour the leg of lamb Mary has offered them for dinner – one of the Irish policemen even uses

the word “shillelagh” to imagine what could have been used for the crime. This nuance points to

the stereotypical “Irish cop” character within the U.S. film discourse (particularly strong during

the 1950s). Each culture invokes different linguistic codes to conjure up images of potential

weapons for which they are searching. The overall texts of these two versions are remarkably

similar (mostly because Dahl wrote both of them). At the end of the short story and the TV

episode, Mary has the last laugh and literally chuckles as the police gorge themselves and

wonder aloud about the location of the missing weapon: “probably right under our very noses?”

(116).

Oddly enough, the first shot of the same investigation scene in Pedro Almodóvar’s

version of “Lamb to the Slaughter” is a close-up of a Spanish detective’s nose hovering above a

bowl of cooked meat. At this exact moment, another officer is heard saying that the crime must

have been committed using a very blunt object. Many of the same key elements from the English

and American versions are present in this third take on the narrative including the interrogation

of the murderer. Her name this time is Gloria. However, ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?
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(1984) (What Have I Done to Deserve This?) comes out about thirty years after Dahl and

Hitchcock’s versions and is a strange mixture of the two. The simultaneous influence of both the

U.S. and English texts is in evidence during the quick-paced interview conducted by two idiotic

officers. “¿Buscas algo?” (Looking for something?) asks Gloria, and the two policemen (P1 and

P2) rattle off a round of staccato questioning:

P1. ¿Tiene usted una barra de hierro?

P2. ¿Un bate de béisbol?

P1. ¿Una llave inglesa?

[P1. Do you have a metal bar?

P2. A baseball bat?

P1. A monkey wrench?]6

Aside from these two implicit markers from the other texts (the basball bat and the “llave

inglesa”), there are also key plot similarities. However, Gloria is an entirely different cultural

product than the two Marys previously discussed.

Almodóvar’s film is a melodramatic (yet also tragic) satire of a stereotypically traditional

Spanish family. Being released only five years after Franco’s death, it aims to subvert the

normative values established during the years of his regime. Instead of a short narrative about the

picture-perfect 1950s family destroyed by a husband’s infidelity and subsequent murder, Gloria’s

life is a postmodern portrayal of dysfunction. One of her sons deals drugs; another is sold to a

pedophilic dentist; and her best friend, Cristal, is a prostitute. Gloria is hooked on “No-Doz”

(alertness pills), because when she is not cooking and cleaning for everyone at home, she hires

6
Spanish quotations have been transcribed from the film and the English translations are

my own.
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herself out as a maid to both a karate studio and a wealthy author. When she finally snaps –

clubbing her unfaithful and physically abusive husband with a leg of lamb – she represents a

different kind of female protagonist. When the English or American Patrick Maloney dies the

audience is shocked. When the Spanish Antonio is killed the audience is relieved and might even

experience feelings of joy and liberation. The former male character is dislikable, but the latter is

a disgustingly macho oppressor. He uses Gloria’s bobby pins to clean his ears. He makes no

effort to please her sexually. He forbids her to work outside of the home and, just before he is

murdered, Antonio slaps his wife for refusing to iron a shirt he wants to wear for a date with

Ingrid Muller (his former German mistress). The audience empathizes as Gloria fights back,

putting an end to both him and the legacy of misogynistic entitlement his character embodies.

His death is, in many ways, Franco’s death. Similarly, Gloria’s liberation is the liberation of

Spanish women and minorities who finally have greater cultural room to live their own lives.

Almodóvar’s placement of the short “Lamb to the Slaughter” narrative within his feature

length film is both a subtle hommage (to Hitchcock and Dahl) and a clever rendition of the

suppressed housewife’s revenge.7 Despite many changes – the police do not actually consume

the murder weapon, a green lizard dies who is the crime’s “único testigo” (only witness) and

Gloria lives in one of Madrid’s giant, cube-like and poverty-stricken housing projects – there are

still key characteristics and easily identifiable traits uniting all three stories. Almodóvar’s version

is such a free and unfaithful adaptation of the two others that it is difficult to find a particular

moment where he obviously opens up and enters a particular part of a previously established

narrative. There are no striking camera shot similarities between his and Hitchcock’s

7
Henrik Ibsen’s nineteenth-century play A Doll’s House is one of the most frequently

adapted versions of this theme.

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presentations. Furthermore, the techniques of such a postmodern film (filled with fragmented

allusions to other texts and disjointed chronological events) make it difficult to draw direct

aesthetic comparisons to the straight-forward and linear storytelling of the TV episode or the

short story. Therefore, the film’s real contribution to this chapter’s tripartite model of textual co-

presence lies in its cultural difference, its more modern feminist protagonist and its

demonstration of the fact that even unfaithful and more experimental adaptations increase our

understanding of what a particular text’s social functions might be.

Culturally and politically, Almodóvar adds a strain of convention-breaking rebellion to

the textual mix and a Spanish perspective that dramatically changes the language and the local

politics of this murder mystery. Regardless of their individual contributions, together the U.S.,

English, and Spanish tellings of the same murder mystery represent a successful, multi-

directional, multi-media, and multi-linguistic adaptation and reception of “Lamb to the

Slaughter.” Whether a spectator or a reader receives one version of this text or all three, the

process of experiencing the same story from the vantage points of various cultures, time periods

and media offers a deeper, comparative intimacy with its narrative.

1.4 Is an Ethics of Adaptation and Citation Possible?

Any text that has “slept with” another text, as a postmodern wag once put it, has

also slept with all the other texts that that other text has slept with.

— Robert Stam

The Internet Movie Database’s (IMDB, henceforth) entry in 2005 for ¿Qué he hecho yo

para merecer esto? (What Have I Done to Deserve This?) listed Roald Dahl as a contributing

author with this note: “Lamb to the Slaughter (uncredited source).” In 2013, this listing is no

longer present. Is this the online textual equivalent of a couple announcing their relationship on
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Facebook and then breaking up? Long distance is tough. In all seriousness though, why has this

source been removed from the IMDB listing and why was neither Alfred Hitchcock’s name nor

his 1955 broadcast mentioned? It appears that textual relationships are as fickle as human ones

and that full disclosure is hard to come by.

The fact that the TV version was careful to credit Dahl as author makes perfect sense,

because he wrote the screenplay. But should Almodóvar, who directed and wrote another

screenplay with quite loose references to Dahl’s short story, be chastised for not citing the

English author? Furthermore, is it not possible that the short story was inspired by an uncited

source to begin with? It is difficult to explain exactly why and how adapted material is

referenced precisely because it travels between artistic media, languages and trends in citation

practice. It turns out that a large number (at least five) of the Hitchcock Presents episodes were

adaptations of Dahl’s stories. Therefore, it is likely that many modern-day directors who were

influenced by Hitchcock will retell, in part or in whole, those stories. By doing so, they may

unconsciously adapt both his and Dahl’s work. In such cases of adaptations inspired by

adaptations, what is the filmmaker’s responsibility?

In his contribution to the film Four Rooms (1995), Quentin Tarantino self-reflexively

cites Alfred Hitchcock’s TV broadcast “Man from the South” (also a Roald Dahl short story) as a

source. However, the credits of Four Rooms make no explicit reference to either Dahl or

Hitchcock. Here we have Tarantino apparently violating his own rule. His story in Four Rooms

is more of an hommage to Hitchcock’s “Man from the South” than a simple theft of its contents.

The case of Tarantino brings this exploration of adaptation, translation and fidelity full circle.

One cannot help but feel a bit dizzy. The current state of cross-media and cross-cultural

adaptations is one of extreme citational complexity, a polyamorous chaos. As such it must be

navigated creatively by each individual artist and each subjective receiver.

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Therefore, I argue that an ethics of citation and adaptation is possible. We must embrace

the chaos as individuals. The construction of such an ethics begins on a personal, subjective level

and is created in dialogue with the artistic etiquette of one’s mentors and peers. My adaptation

philosophy when it comes to magic as a performing art is that “fidelity” need not be observed in

terms of artistic content, but must be observed in terms of historical awareness and general

citation. I hope that the discussion above has argued convincingly that proper citation, which aids

in the exploration of previously unknown intertextual relationships, allows for a deeper and more

intimate reception experience of texts like “Lamb to the Slaughter.” Though their citation of one

another is not as thorough as I would prefer, the three incarnations of the short murder mystery

discussed are still examples of successful, productive and provocative infidelities. They stand

alone as self-sufficient tellings of the murder mystery and also combine well with one another

when read as multiple incarnations of the same textual entity. The fact that most of these texts

know of one another, that these texts reveal to us an awareness of their coexistence through

quotations and references, opens up pathways of intertextuality for their receivers to follow.

These paths are just as indispensable for scholars like myself, who study the processes of

adaptation and reception, as they are for artists who will adapt “Lamb to the Slaughter” for future

tellings. Citation, while difficult and perhaps impossible to enforce, allows receivers of all types

to follow the sometimes explicit, sometimes subtle and sometimes secretive trails that link and

lead us from one story to another.

Artists should be free to change the content of a story, to translate it to other languages

and to adapt its expression to other media formats, but that freedom should not be at the cost of

ignoring or obscuring historical sources. Pointing interested viewers, readers and participants to

other known versions of the text, in the credits of a piece at the very least gives individuals

receiving it the opportunity to learn more about its cultural significance at other historical
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moments and during other historical conditions. Discovering such intertextual relations, the

secret sex lives of adapted texts, is more than a simple opportunity to engage in the gossip of

who stole what and from whom. Such discoveries also reveal that the storytelling world is a

larger, more interesting and more interconnected place than it first seems when one has only

received a single version of a text. Lastly, thorough citation of adapted texts helps receivers of a

story to understand what their social function might be. Thinking through that function, what

lesson a story has to teach us locally as well as how that lesson might shift, change or be

modified in another part of the world, gets us closer to understanding what is at stake when

certain stories gain popularity at particular times.

How magician Ricky Jay and director David Mamet chose to adapt illicit con games to

the film House of Games, for example, illustrates the importance of understanding the social

history of certain twentieth-century deceptions as well as their earlier and newer incarnations.

The adaptation of these texts to filmmaking — how completely their methods are revealed to us,

whether we receive them from the perspective of the con artist or from the perspective of the

victim, and how thoroughly we understand their psychological principles — influences our

abilities to subsequently deal with the criminal attempts made to manipulate us in real life.

2 Ethical and Unethical Adaptations — Mamet, Jay and the Con Game
It occurred to me while I was doing House of Games that the difficulty of making

the movie was exactly the same difficulty the confidence man has. For the

confidence man it is depriving the victim of her money; for me it is misleading

the audience sufficiently so they feel pleased when they find out they’ve been

misled, tricking them so that every step is logical, and at the end they’ve defeated

themselves. So, the process of magic and the process of confidence games, and to
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a certain extent the process of drama, are all processes of autosuggestion. They

cause the audience to autosuggest themselves in a way that seems perfectly

logical but is actually false.

— David Mamet

Was I ever tempted to become a con man or a card shark? Yes.

— Ricky Jay

A clip of Ricky Jay’s performance of the con game “Three Card Monte” as broadcast on

the Dinah Shore show in the 1970s elegantly expresses his relationship to the performative

speech-acts, the mark-oriented reception and the narrative principles of deception in David

Mamet’s criminal adaptations. During the talk show, Jay explains to Dinah Shore’s guests that

“Three Card Monte” is a popular street swindle in which the operator, or “broad tosser,”8

shuffles around two black cards and one red card by tossing them onto a small table one at a

time. For a few moments Jay turns toward actress Elizabeth Ashley to give her advice on how to

find the red card or the “money” card. During this action, comedian Steve Martin surreptitiously

picks up the red card, puts a bend in its corner, and then places it back on the table. The studio

audience sees this and laughs, but the magician does not and continues speaking with Ms.

Ashley. He then mixes the cards for her, including the now bent one, and finally asks her where

the red card is. He is promptly interrupted by Martin who says “Want me to guess?”9 Jay assents

8
The “broad tosser” is one name for the dealer who literally throws the “broads” (i.e.

cards) during a Three Card Monte game. See Haydn and Anton’s Notes on Three-Card Monte

for this and other definitions of slang terms related to this particular short con (155).
9
All quotations from this television broadcast have been transcribed by me based on the

insertion of this clip into the recent documentary Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors
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and Martin easily chooses the correct card, the red queen, thanks to its now bent corner. Jay,

slightly perturbed by the comedian’s luck, says that he will mix the cards again. Martin gets out

his wallet and asks if the magician will put fifty dollars on the next round of tosses. Jay

reluctantly agrees, at first. Then he chides: “Is that all? Fifty dollars?” Martin pulls out another

bill and boldly replies: “Hey, fifty-one.” The cards are thrown and Jay asks once again where the

money card is. Martin points to the card with the bend. Jay picks up the card, confirms that the

bent corner is what Martin has been looking at, and then turns it over to reveal a black card.

Martin’s face scrunches up in confusion and dismay as the magician collects his money and the

studio audience applauds the unexpected turn of events.

I open this discussion of con game adaptations found in David Mamet’s film House of

Games with this performance by Ricky Jay for several reasons. First, it is an interesting example

of a performative speech-act — a verbal bet that is given the power to do what it says — which

occurs in a talk show environment as a piece of magician-as-con-artist entertainment. This

performance adapts the ritualized movement of money from one individual to another that occurs

during a short con and this is similar to several adaptations of con games that will be examined in

David Mamet’s film.10 Second, the manner in which Jay chooses to present “Three Card Monte”

of Ricky Jay.
10
The Expert at the Card Table (published in 1902), by S.W. Erdnase, contains the

earliest thorough description of the sleight-of-hand employed by Jay on the Dinah Shore show.

An earlier, less complex, description of “Three Card Monte” can be found in Robert-Houdin’s

Les Tricheries des Grecs (Cardsharpers: Their Tricks Exposed) (1861). Brief references to the

three-card trick appear in M.P. Adam’s The Rich Uncle from Fiji (1795) and, some scholars
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on the Dinah Shore show causes the audience to receive it, along with Steve Martin’s character,

as a victim of the con.11 The sting of this text, similar to discussions in chapter one of “The

Circus Card Trick” and “Coin Con,” is enjoyable for the audience at large, because Martin is the

one who actually loses and because the stakes are low enough to be playful. Still, the storyteller

— Ricky Jay — manipulates spectators as if they too were targets of the con to create what I will

describe as a mark-oriented reception experience that Mamet’s House of Games also produces.

The result in both Jay’s performance and the film’s narrative is the transmission of ethically

complex lessons in enigma analysis. These are experienced and may or may not be internalized

by the audience. Finally, one of the primary source texts from which Ricky Jay adapts his “Three

Card Monte” performance — The Expert at the Card Table by the extremely intelligent and

poetic professional criminal who wrote under the pseudonym S.W. Erdnase — is a fascinating

example of how some of the most effective sleight-of-hand techniques and psychological

principles of manipulation are derived from criminal subcultures.12 As I analyze the language

argue, much earlier.

11
This is how the performance reads for the audience or the model receiver of the text:

Martin attempts to fool the con man and is fooled himself. In reality, Martin and Jay would have

rehearsed this seemingly impromptu bit backstage and before the show.
12
For the sake of brevity, I simplify the processes of adaptation and transmission that

have clearly gone into Ricky Jay’s version of “Three Card Monte.” To begin to understand the

importance of Erdnase’s text for maneuvers such as the invisible transfer of a bent corner from

one card to another, as well as magic mentors like Dai Vernon who interpreted the written

descriptions of such moves and brought Erdnase’s text to life for students like Jay, I recommend
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and the narrative ploys that Mamet adapts from the world of the con artist in the pages that

follow, I will on the one hand explore the benefits of engaging with the dark side of deception

for the purpose of the spectator’s intellectual and emotional training. On the other hand, I will

point out the drawbacks of treating the spectator like a victim to argue that embracing the

swindler’s mentality risks the complicit celebration and glorification of the ugliest and most

abusive traits found in magic as a performing art. The mentality of the swindler and the

cardsharp tempts magicians to not only play at being gods, but to become malevolent, criminal

ones.

Analyzing the language — the slang, the professional terminology and the speech-acts

— of criminal cultures, specifically the non-violent criminal culture of con artists, reveals a

disturbing mode of thought. However, that mode of thought is no less alarming than many of the

daily operations of late capitalism itself. The work of David Mamet, famous for its apt use of the

criminal, corporate and vulgar vernacular, often allows its audience a view into the dark bars and

underhanded dealings within U.S. subcultures. American Buffalo (1975) takes place in an inner-

city pawn shop and is presented in the foul yet poetic language of three petty thieves; Speed-the-

Plow (1976) incorporates the specialized vocabulary of Hollywood producers and promoters to

tell a story of interpersonal betrayal in the movie industry; and, in 1984, Glengarry Glen Ross

won both the Drama Critics’ Award for Best American Play and the Pulitzer Prize for its

depiction of a desperate group of salesmen and their backstabbing manipulations. All of these

plays, though their particular settings and groups vary, challenge spectators with environmentally

determined vocabularies that are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. The audience often

watching Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay.

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feels like it is eavesdropping in the usually inaccessible rooms where different languages —

personal, private, and often ruthless dialects — are spoken within groups. These groups and their

interactions with outsider characters (including the spectators) tend to represent the darker, more

devious strains of their ideological origins: the underworld of U.S. capitalism in the twentieth

century.

One iconic setting in that world, and one of Jay and Mamet’s favorites, is the poker

game in the back room of the bar. Erdnase’s The Expert at the Card Table: A Treatise on the

Science and Art of Manipulating Cards, which describes a thorough system for cheating at such

games, is one of the underground intertexts that flows like a subterranean well of information

beneath the professional work of David Mamet, Steve Martin and Ricky Jay. Years after the

performance of “Three Card Monte” on the Dinah Shore show, which marks an early

collaboration between Jay and Martin, Mamet directed an updated version of the routine that was

performed as part of the theatre show Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants. Another magic routine in

that play, whose monologue is taken nearly word-for-word from Erdnase’s publication, but that

would have been blocked and choreographed by Jay, Mamet and their creative team together, is

an effect in which three queens vanish from three separate piles of more common playing cards

to magically rejoin their fourth sister. The title of that piece is “The Exclusive Coterie” and

opens the third section of The Expert at the Card Table in which “Card Tricks” are discussed

(109). The second section of the book is “Legerdemain” and describes a number of sleight-of-

hand moves that are not quite deceptive enough for the stringent requirements of the professional

cardsharp, but that the author finds suitable for the performance of magic. In those two sections,

the receiver of said magic tricks is referred to as the spectator or “the audience” (127, 193, 196).

The majority of the book’s contents, however, can be found in its first section: “Artifice.” There,

an entire philosophy of how to cheat at cards professionally and invisibly is described in precise
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detail. This section develops a card manipulation system that emphasizes the importance of

uniformity of action, proper deportment and naturalness.13 The tone of this section contains a

significant shift in mentality. As a reader of these pages one is immersed in the mindset of the

cardsharp and is taught to think of and refer to the receiver of one’s artifice as an “opponent” or

“adversary” (107, 119).

The shift between the discourse of the cardsharp and the magician, between the

descriptions of the other as “opponent” vs. “spectator,” occur directly after Erdnase’s entry on

“Three Card Monte” (119-124). His description of the short con works like a hinge in the book.

Although it concludes his section on card table artifice and is taught as a method for employing

sleight-of-hand to beat gambling opponents, it is written-up in quite a jovial tone: “Only three

cards are used, but the more players the merrier” (119). As Gary “Gazzo” Osborne, an

internationally respected magician who briefly worked as a lookout kid for a London monte

mob14 before choosing to abandon the criminal path, told me in a personal interview, “‘Three

Card Monte’ is blatant thievery, but Erdnase wrote it up in such a way that it was like a game.”15

This suggests that since Erdnase, and arguably much earlier, this routine has been one of the

great representatives of those street crimes that has tempted magicians to become criminals and,

vice versa, criminals to become magicians. In terms of adaptation then, “Three Card Monte” is a

13
206 instances of the word “natural” or variations of it occur in Erdnase’s text.
14
A “monte mob” is the general phrase used to describe the entire team of con artists

who work together to perpetrate a “Three Card Monte” game. Again, see Haydn and Anton’s

Notes on Three-Card Monte.

15
I conducted an interview with Gazzo following one of his magic performances at

Toronto’s annual Buskerfest on August 27th, 2013.

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text that Jay, Martin and Mamet have all slept with. As a study of criminal techniques,

psychology and storytelling, it has influenced their collaborations and brought with it a certain

amount of unethical baggage.

2.1 Putting the ‘Con’ in ‘Lexicon’: Jay and Mamet

The magician should seek to take over the spectator’s thinking, and lead him

through the argument of the trick in such a way that the spectator believes he is

thinking for himself. This is the type of manipulation at which the street swindler

excels.

— Whit Haydn, Notes on Three-Card Monte

David Mamet was born and raised in the same metropolis where The Expert at the Card

Table was published: Chicago, Illinois. Growing up in the place that poet Carl Sandburg

immortalized as the wicked, crooked and brutal “City of the Big Shoulders” may be part of why

Mamet has a unique ability to accurately incorporate U.S. slang systems and popular criminal

narratives into his characters’ speech. The Untouchables (1987) and Hoffa (1992), both written

by Mamet, each revive two famously violent criminal icons and their respective twentieth-

century mythologies: Al Capone (Chicago gangsterism and corruption) and Jimmy Hoffa (the

mafia-like Teamsters Union). Mamet’s screenplays are known for their ability to express the

harsh, survival-of-the-fittest mentality intrinsic to many of modern capitalism’s corporate-level

and street-level swindler subcultures. He has a knack for capturing the proper language spoken

by both refined and rough individuals when they speak about deceitfully screwing someone over.

The author’s ear for authentic, accurate terminology has also picked up on a less violent and

more intellectually devious discourse in North American culture: con artistry.

A “confidence game,” as defined by the sociological study Road Hustler, is “a

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nonviolent hustle in which a target is deceived into parting with his money in an atmosphere of

artificially generated trust” (Prus and Sharper 169). And though many theatre and film critics

have commented upon Mamet’s themes of crime, violence, and corporate greed, few have

engaged the deeper ideological significance indicated by the con game in House of Games

(1987). A handful of critics, such as Barry Goldensohn, have noted the presence of Mamet’s

intertwining of deceptive text, speech, and ideology in the film.16 In his essay, “Melville’s The

Confidence Man and His Descendants in David Mamet’s Work,” Goldensohn says “it is not only

in the figure of the confidence man but also in the ongoing debate about trust, confidence, truth,

falsity, deceit, and manipulation that we see the connection between Melville’s novel and all of

Mamet’s plays and films” (158). The general, thematic, and cultural connections between this

playwright, foundational American novels like Melville’s and Ur-characters of U.S. mythology

such as Mark Twain’s famous swindlers (Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer) have thus been

established. How logical that these stories appear just after the birth of the American terms

“confidence game” and “confidence trick,” whose most prolific literary use the Oxford English

Dictionary charts from 1849 to 1959 and not earlier.17

My contribution here is a reading of Mamet’s con game discourse and its roots in the

United States as expressed through the performance adaptation work done by Ricky Jay in the

capacity of con game expert during their collaborations. A rigorous perusal of the codified

16
William F. van Wert’s article “Psychoanalysis and Con Games: House of Games” and

Ilkka Joki’s book Mamet, Bakhtin, and the Dramatic: The Demonic as a Variable of

Addressivity also deserve mention here.

17
The first appearances of these terms are also documented by William E. Lenz, in Fast

Talk and Flush Times, as entering the public U.S. discourse in 1849.
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language of con artists, and how that language is adapted to Mamet’s House of Games, reveals

the presence of certain adapted source texts such as “The Flue.” To bring these connections to

light, I draw upon in-depth studies of professional con artists and magicians. The goal is to

explore the ideological significance of these terminologies and the ways they engage viewers of

Mamet’s film through a deeper analysis of Ricky Jay’s role. For example, are spectators of

House of Games truly taught to be more skeptical, writerly individuals as they watch the film or

do they leave vulnerable as ever to the con games depicted? This question of to what degree con

game adaptations cue spectators to become writerly skeptics depends upon whether or not

writerly (i.e. active) participation is rewarded by the text. This is also determined by how

accurately the con games mediated by the film correspond to those one might encounter in

reality. To answer that question as it pertains to the two Mamet films analyzed here, requires a

deeper understanding of Jay’s expertise.

Ricky Jay is far more famous in the esoteric world of professional magic than in the film

industry. As a scholar of unusual performance, he has written extensively on con games, the

history of variety performance, gambling, dice, and magic.18 His first book Cards as Weapons is

now out of print and has become a collector’s item. (It is currently being sold on Amazon.com

for $300 to $667.) He has also delivered numerous papers and keynote addresses on the history

18
Ricky Jay’s publications include Cards as Weapons (1977), Learned Pigs and

Fireproof Women (1986), Many Mysteries Unraveled or Conjuring Literature in America 1786-

1876 (1990), The Magic Magic Book (1994), Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (2001), Dice:

Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck (2003), Extraordinary Exhibitions: The Wonderful Remains of

an Enormous Head, The Whimsiphusicon & Death to the Savage Unitarians (2005), Ricky Jay

Plays Poker (2006), Magic: 1400s-1950s (2009) and Celebrations of Curious Characters (2010).
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of deception, such as his “The Origins of the Confidence Game” given at the Police Against

Confidence Crime conference.19 Finally, David Mamet directed both of his most recent and most

notable stage performances: Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants (1994) and Ricky Jay: On the Stem

(2002). The former of the two one-man sleight-of-hand shows was revived in Washington D.C.,

at the beginning of May 2005, to rave reviews. This indicates the continuation of his parallel

existences as a professional actor, con artist consultant and magician. Mamet and Jay’s

collaborative projects bridge the gap between these categories as well. In Mamet’s True and

False and Writing in Restaurants, the influence of magic as a performing art is very present in

his theories of acting and writing. However, the intertextual significance of magic, gambling, con

artist terminology, and the structure of the director’s storytelling can be most clearly understood

by looking at how he employs them in his artistic practice. Reading and rereading a scene from

House of Games allows us to analyze how David Mamet (as screenwriter and director) and

Ricky Jay (as confidence game consultant and actor) work together to put the “con” in the film’s

“lexicon.”

The adaptation of a criminal text that one of the characters in Mamet’s film calls “a little

page in the history of the short con” began with a mere thirteen lines written by the Chicago-born

director to create a didactic performance in which an outsider is given a glimpse into the

backstage methods of con artistry (Mamet 26). The scene is composed of three con men — Mike

(Joe Mantegna), George (Ricky Jay) and Joey (Mike Nussbaum) — and their single audience

member, Dr. Margaret Ford (Lindsay Crouse). The latter is a psychologist, though she does not

tell the men this, who has recently seen through a trap set for her by these criminals that was

19
For the most detailed listing of his lectures and publications to date please consult his

web site: http://www.rickyjay.com/bio.html.

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designed to con her out of $6,000. Having just escaped and recognized her assailants for the

criminals they are, she speaks with the three of them as she waits for a cab outside of and across

the street from “The House of Games.” This establishment is simultaneously a bar, a pool hall,

and a poker house — three staples of con artist iconography. The location also acts as a small

theatre of everyday life where the con artists botched a poker game scam meant to swindle

Margaret. Now that the jig is up, she is surprisingly more intrigued than appalled by her

company and begins to ask them about their criminal activities. Joey, Mike and George/Vegas

Man decide to give her a glimpse into the hustling world and argue about which scam to reveal.

They choose not to show her the “Mitt” and instead to explain the “Tap”: a ploy used to short-

change cashiers out of small sums from the register. These are the terms that Mamet chooses in

the original script and they are convincing enough for the average audience member. “Mitt” and

“Tap” both snap off the tongue like those dark and delicious lines spoken by shady characters in

the noir novels of Hammett and Chandler. The closest actual definition that I can find for “Mitt”

in twentieth-century U.S. con artist slang, however, is a game known as the “Big Mitt.” It is

defined by linguist David Maurer in The Big Con as a deception in which a mark is cheated

within the context of a crooked poker game. So, this reference chosen by Mamet has some

historical credibility (285). Yet it seems unlikely that the characters in the film would choose to

expose a con so similar to one they just attempted on Dr. Ford. That would be a redundant

storytelling choice and uncharacteristically repetitive in a Mamet script.

“The Tap,” on the other hand, sounds like an authentic con game to the average viewer,

but is probably an apocryphal name invented by Mamet or borrowed by him from a pulp fiction

source. I can find no reliable reference for “The Tap” as an actual con game practiced in the
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United States.20 Also, Mamet’s description of it in the original script, though it does add

believable flair to the codified vocabulary sprinkled throughout House of Games, is difficult to

follow. The action it describes would be vague and unconvincing for both naive and initiated

viewers as a piece of con artistry that might be performed in the real world. Fortunately, Ricky

Jay, as he is listed in the credits, not only plays “George/Vegas Man,” but is also listed as the

confidence game “consultant.”21 His influence transforms this scene into a more complex study

of criminal adaptation and makes the street con about to be described historically realistic with

one important caveat, which will be discussed later.

In the completed film, the con game’s name has been changed from “The Tap” to “The

Flue” and the manner in which it is performed, taught to Dr. Ford and filmed from the point of

view of both the mark (for performance demonstration) and then the con artist (for behind-the-

20
In Maurer’s Language of the Underworld, there are a few specialized names that have

a similar ring to Mamet’s “The Tap.” “Tap dice” or “Tappers” are names for dice loaded with

mercury, but these do not refer to a con game in and of themselves (193). “Tat” is a noun

describing a mis-spotted die that has only high numbers and is also the name of a short con run

using this same gaff. None of these definitions, however, exactly match the name written by

Mamet.
21
The Internet Movie Database credits Jay with this title: “consultant: con games.” He

also has a well-established consulting company, “Deceptive Practices,” which advertises the

revelation of “arcane knowledge on a need to know basis” (Jay 2003). Aside from providing

theatrical illusions and instruction for House of Games, Forrest Gump, Angels in America (the

Tony award winning Broadway production) and other projects, the company has also been hired

to uncover cheaters and scam artists.

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scenes instruction) enhances the real-world value of the con artist intertexts present in House of

Games. Mamet asked Ricky Jay to contribute real material to the scene as the film’s con artist

consultant. The sequence, which consists of Joey role-playing a manipulation of everyday life

with Dr. Ford wherein he shows her the same mini-con twice, turns out to be nearly double the

length of the screenplay’s original text. Jay contributed this material based on a historical con

game. The result is the following dialogue in which Joey and Dr. Ford simulate the actions of a

short-change routine:

JOEY. You run a candy store. This is the candy store. Now I come into your

candy store and I give you twenty dollars in singles and I say, “excuse me miss

could you please give me a $20 bill. I have to send a registered letter to my

mother.”

MIKE. To your aunt. It’s more pathetic; send it to your aunt.

JOEY. “To my aunt” ...

GEORGE/VEGAS MAN ... And its addressed and there’s a stamp on it ...

JOEY. You give me a $20 bill. Give me the twenty.

[Dr. Ford hands Joey the $20]

And I seal it, and you watch me seal it, in the envelope.

[Joey does this]

Now, I gave you what appears to be $20 in singles. But, when you count it,

there’s only nineteen. And you say, “I’ve only got nineteen.”

DR. FORD. “I’ve only got nineteen.”

JOEY. Here let me count it. And there are only nineteen. “God I’m sorry, let me

get another dollar from my wife in the car. Here hold this a minute.” And I give

you the envelope with the $20 in it. And I take the nineteen dollars and I go home,
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goodbye. And that’s a little larceny called “The Flue.”22

The key deception here, of course, is that the clerk running the candy store thinks that she is

holding an envelope with the $20 from the register inside. When Dr. Ford, playing the role of the

clerk, tears open the envelope she finds that it is empty — she has been subtly robbed. The con

man, played by Joey, leaves with his original nineteen singles as he supposedly goes to the car to

get one more dollar. Unbeknownst to her, he has also departed with the $20 bill from the cash

register. He has used sleight-of-hand to secretly and invisibly steal it from the envelope.

The visual direction of this scene mirrors the perspective of Dr. Ford and is a good

example of how viewers of this short-change con in House of Games first experience it as marks.

She and the audience receive “The Flue” as model, or naive, spectators of the con, because both

she and viewers of the film are unable to detect at which point and by what method Joey

surreptitiously moves the bill from the envelope to his pocket. When Dr. Ford asks how he stole

it, George/Vegas Man replies: “Secrets of the pyramids.” Mike, however, persuades Joey to

reveal the confidence trick’s mechanics by saying: “We owe her one.” After some initial

hesitation, it appears that the audience and the protagonist are initiated into this criminal

subculture’s guarded practices.

To adapt Umberto Eco’s useful reader-response terms to spectator-response (as

discussed in section 2.2 of chapter one), it appears that we now receive the con as negative

model spectators. Negative, because we know that “The Flue” is designed for a mark, a pigeon,

an unsuspecting target. Its performance as a crime does not cue a double-model spectator (i.e. an

initiated or critical spectator) for several good reasons. First, it is a con perpetrated by a single

22
I have transcribed this dialogue from the Criterion Collection’s 2005 re-release of the

film.
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con artist; thus there is no need for the kind of veiled argot such as the mark manipulation

techniques shouted by the card thrower in “Three Card Monte” games as commands to his team

of fake players (Ortiz 202-204).23 In other words, there is no pragmatic need for a writerly or

critical audience to ensure the success of “The Flue.” Second, this short-change con is not

supposed to be read (as in analyzed) or viewed from backstage where its method is visible. We

the audience, along with Dr. Ford, gather from George/Vegas Man’s comments that it is not

supposed to be performed unless it is being used as a crime. “Never wise up a sucker,” as Maurer

has documented, is an underworld maxim (Whiz Mob 192). Still, here are the con artists breaking

their own rules for us. So, we feel as though they are letting us in. This moment of intimacy,

however, is where the real con begins.

Joey’s repeat performance of “The Flue” employs a principle of deception used within

con artistry, magic and many of Mamet’s narratives: the fake revelation. This time the audience

and Dr. Ford are treated to the exposed view of Joey’s actions. The camera shows him using his

mouth to steal the bill out the back of the envelope (a small movement covered by larger licking

and sealing actions). All of the motions and words are repeated, but Joey now allows us (the

23
In his Gambling Scams, magician Darwin Ortiz describes his eye witness account of a

New York monte team using a closing-the-gates technique to physically separate an eager female

mark from her protesting boyfriend. There he notes that the monte tosser worked the following

command into his sing-song patter while throwing the cards: “follow the lady . . . block her man”

(202). The naive, model spectator or the mark receiving patter is cued to misconstrue the noun

“lady” and the possessive pronoun “her” as referring to the red queen or the money card on the

table. The double-model spectator, the monte tosser’s fellow con men, grasp the second meaning

of this sentence, however, and receive it as a stage direction.

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spectator and protagonist) to look over his right shoulder. Suddenly, we feel closer to the con

men. We have viewed the same deceptive text twice and now feel that we have been shown a

secret of their trade.

This deceptive behind-the-scenes invitation in House of Games works on several

different levels. Most obviously, the protagonist and the spectator begin to empathize and

become emotionally attached to the con men. Mike Nussbaum’s character is absolutely charming

and polite in both his appearance and his presentation of the trick. With his white hair, circular

rimmed glasses, light colored suit and bowtie, his formal manner of speaking (clear and correct

enunciation), he has a grandfatherly appeal. Joe Mantegna, as Mike, is charismatic, sharp, and

confident throughout the film. As the young and handsome leader of the group, he speaks about

con artistry and human nature in a direct, calculating and yet forthright manner. When they teach

Dr. Ford, and us as viewers, a con game’s secret, we also begin to learn their specialized

vocabulary (terms like the “Flue”) along with their devious methods. We feel initiated, by

knowing these passwords, and feel to some extent like we can understand and maybe even speak

like one of the gang.

The excitement of learning a con game’s secret is similar to the curious pleasure of being

shown the secret of a magic effect by a knowledgeable performer. The pleasure of being taught

insider information in person is always at least twofold. First, there is the “ah-ha” moment of

appreciating how one’s senses were deceived; second, there is the intimacy of the revelation.

Being shown a secret by a practitioner is a sign of respect and trust. Such sharing generally

makes one feel they have passed from a stage of being culturally uninitiated to initiated. These

positive feelings are two of the reasons that initiates return to a group.

On another night, when Dr. Ford visits the House of Games to continue her underground

education, Mike describes his art with simple phrases and participatory examples: “The basic
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idea is this: it’s called a ‘confidence’ game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No.

Because I give you mine. . . . This is called “Short Con.” Watch closely.” He then has her play

the role of his wife in a quick series of one-act (“short con”) larcenies. Ultimately, Mike seduces

Dr. Ford under the guise of various lessons in con artistry. As they bond during this sequence of

swindler training, Dr. Ford steadily moves from what anthropologists refer to as an “etic” point

of view, the position of the neutral scientist (in her case the position of the non-moralizing

psychologist), to an “emic” perspective: an individual who begins to analyze the behavior of

these con artists as if she were part of their culture. For example, Mike uses simple misdirection

at one point to purloin a key from a hotel’s counter. He then gives Margaret, Dr. Ford’s first

name, the opportunity to take the key and break into an unknown patron’s room for both of them.

What began as a flirtation with con artistry becomes a passionate affair founded on transgression

when she makes love to Mike in the stranger’s room. As a personal souvenir of the event, we see

her quietly steal a pocket knife from the sundry personal items left atop a bureau.

2.2 The Spectator as Victim: Mark-focused Reception Theory

In reality, this night of intimacy turns out to be an illusory and unannounced performance

conducted in the setting of a fancy hotel. Mike’s seduction of Dr. Ford is what the Road Hustler

defines as a “double steer: a double-cross involving a target who believes he is taking advantage

of another” (Prus and Sharper 169).24 The “double steer” is in some ways the con game version

of the “sucker effect” that is sometimes used in magic routines or in proposition bets. Think of

“The Circus Card Trick” as discussed in chapter one, but involving a greater number of

24
This definition comes from the 1977 collaboration of Robert C. Prus (a professor of

Sociology) and C.R.D. Sharper (a former professional con man).

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characters and much higher, real-world stakes. Though convinced that she and Mike are stealing

someone else’s room together, Dr. Ford and the audience later learn that this was a setup. In a

scene of true revelation, near the end of the film, she sneaks back into the “House of Games”

where the audience (peeking with her from the shadows through a point-of-view shot) overhears

the gang describing how the hotel room had been prepared in advance. It had been filled with

objects to simulate a stranger’s belongings. The man whose key they stole from the counter was

actually part of the con artist team. The pocket knife that Margaret took was actually a prop that

belonged to Mike. The entire evening, along with his supposedly intimate revelations of con

artist secrets, was a series of carefully staged and improvised events posing as the coincidences

and accidents of everyday life. Mike’s teaching exercises, even though his demonstration of a

“sympathy con” in a Western Union office is accurate enough, were merely used as tools to gain

her trust under the guise of showing her how to manipulate others.

It may be argued that these fake lessons, designed to gain Dr. Ford’s confidence, do not

always implicate the audience. Her quick fall for Mike, for instance, is clearly dangerous and

impulsive. That being said, there is another intertextual and invisible level to these deceptions

that cons the audience as effectively as Dr. Ford. A re-examination of Ricky Jay and his

contribution of “The Flue,” shows that Mamet and his collaborator deceive spectators on a non-

diegetic level too. In 1998, I was present for the live recording of Terry Gross’s interview with

Ricky Jay in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. At one point, he discussed his Hollywood-based

consultation business (appropriately named Deceptive Practices) and his specific work on House

of Games. It turns out that Jay invented an alternative method, the one that Joey reveals to Dr.

Ford and the audience, to protect the real modus operandi (one that street hustlers still use today).

As “someone who loves the con,” the scholar chose to create a historically plausible yet

inauthentic sleight-of-hand technique as an artistic solution to a strange moral compromise. As

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the qualifying tagline of his consulting firm suggests — “arcane knowledge on a need to know

basis” — the actor/magician is simply, as he tells Terry Gross, “not interested in the gratuitous

exposure of this kind of material.” And so, regarding the true origins and methods of “The Flue,”

the audience is deceived in more ways then one. As a diegetic device in Mamet’s film, the

scam’s explanation falsely characterizes the con artists as friendly and open; in Jay’s adaptation

of the street hustle, the true confidence trick appears to be revealed, but secretly remains veiled.

I would like to point out that “arcane knowledge on a need to know basis” is an

excellent, yet also subjective policy. In this dissertation, for example, it is necessary for me to

reveal certain information to my readers so that an in-depth and rigorous discussion of how con

games are adapted from real life to magic performances and to films can be had. Furthermore,

one’s personal politics and performance philosophy always inform the decision of who needs to

know what. Jay and Mamet, in the case of the short-change con as adapted to House of Games,

reveal a bias that favors criminal practice. My bias here favors spectators as well as scholars who

are willing to invest the time required to read this document and to think through the

complexities of reception and adaptation. Also, I submit that the artistic world is made more rich

by historically accurate adaptations of the con that give writerly readers the chance to analyze

how the short-change ploy functions in various historical circumstances.

For a better example of the real work on a more direct and modern version of the short-

change con, watch, re-watch and study the first three minutes of Fabian Bielinsky’s Argentine

masterpiece Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) (2000). In the first scene of that film, actor Gastón

Pauls performs a short-change con that much more closely resembles those described by linguist

David Maurer in his ethnographic work based on personal interviews with professional
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criminals.25 Bielinsky has no qualms about revealing the exact ways in which a number of cons

are played in Buenos Aires, the economic and government capital of the country. Perhaps this is

because the setting of his drama is a very real economic depression. The catastrophic devaluation

of the Argentine peso had become undeniable by the turn of the twenty-first century. This led to

a run on the country’s banks, in 2001, and resulted in the government effectively freezing the

accounts of its citizens by the end of that year to maintain financial control. In short, the director

of Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) and its intended audience desperately needed to know how they

were being conned out of currency and, on a more fundamental level, the value of that currency.

Jay’s desire to protect the veritable sleight-of-hand used in “The Flue” reveals a core

conflict of interests that separate con games in real life, which are unannounced and closed texts,

from filmic adaptations of con games, which are announced and open texts. Con games are not

designed to produce more writerly, critical spectators, simply because to do so is not in their

economic interests. As criminal texts, extracting money from naive marks is their raison d’être.

To educate is antithetical to their very essence. This is why the con game’s deception when

performed as a crime is not announced and why its marks are “cooled out” (i.e., pacified) after

“the sting”: the moment of monetary loss (Pruss and Sharper 169) (Maurer 288).26 Con games

can produce critical, writerly spectators if significant errors are made during their performance

and the mark becomes aware of the closed text’s deception and malignant intent. Police, also,

25
Many versions of the short-change con are described in the chapter called “The Hype”

in Maurer’s study The American Confidence Man.

26
For more on the fascinating topic of the final “cooling out,” or pacifying the mark,

stage of a con game see The Road Hustler, Notes on Three Card Monte and Erving Goffman’s

essay “On Cooling the Mark Out: Some Aspects of Adaptation to Failure.”
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may become writerly spectators of a con if a team of con artists plays it while being surveilled by

them often enough that they become experts at analyzing it. Such exposure, however, is

dangerous for both the con artists and the con game for it means the announcement of a text that

was always meant to remain secret and closed. It may also mean incarceration.

The filmic mediations of con games in House of Games, however, automatically tend to

create writerly, critical spectators of them. This occurs because the filming of con games allows

for multiple viewings of the exact same performance of a text. Like most entertainment versions

of con games, recording freezes them into a form of media storage that allows for closer scrutiny

and analysis of their deceptive techniques. This repetition is in the economic interests of Mamet

and Jay, for they profit from House of Games being viewed by as many spectators as possible in

cinemas, on DVDs at home or through other commercial formats. The adaptation of con games

for entertainment purposes by magicians, filmmakers and others therefore forces these closed

texts to open as long as not too much fidelity is lost regarding how the cons are actually played.

This filmic mediation of con games allows for an announced reception of what are usually

unannounced crimes during which greater rational analysis of the con being practiced can occur.

For this result — the sharpening of spectators’ abilities in enigma analysis — Mamet and Jay

should be applauded.

However, there is at least one exception to this tendency: “Laying the Note” is defined in

Road Hustler as a general term for the short-change con family of which “The Flue” is a

particular member (Prus and Sharper 170). So while “The Flue” is a historically accurate name

of the con according to both Jay’s interview and David W. Maurer’s The American Confidence

Man (281), the sleight-of-hand method shown in the film is not. Jay’s invented method of “The

Flue” reveals an adversarial approach, similar to the one discussed in Erdnase’s text, adopted by

the magician / con artist expert with regards to the spectator. In this case, both the historical con
 168

game and his fictional adaptation of it are designed to produce a readerly or naive spectator. In

this specific example of a knowingly fake revelation, the only hope of producing a writerly,

critical spectator occurs through the reception of extra-diegetic information coaxed out of Ricky

Jay by Terry Gross during her interview with him. That information then must be applied to a re-

watching of the film in tandem with further critical research. “The Flue” adaptation in House of

Games, unlike the majority of the cons depicted therein, is not designed to produce a critical,

double spectator through filmic mediation.

In an odd twist of fate, however, it does. In his same interview with Terry Gross, Jay

relates an anecdote that challenges the relationship between real and fictional depictions of con

artistry. Sometime after the film’s release, he received a newspaper clipping from a police

investigator friend detailing the arrest of an insurance salesman who had copied and successfully

applied “The Flue’s” invented method to rob cashiers in Denver, Colorado. Ricky Jay tells Gross

that he then sent a note to Mamet joking “this is clearly the only practical thing I’ve ever done in

my life.” Jay’s adaptation in this case does have the potential to produce writerly spectators who

might be better at enigma analysis — at recognizing and avoiding this short-change con. His

invented method produced at least one individual who became a writerly criminal. Paradoxically,

of course, this means that if this newly minted con artist attempted “The Flue” on a cashier who

happened to have watched House of Games closely, that employee might also be a critical viewer

of the deception and detect it immediately.

This instance of art imitating life imitating art is an especially complex form of

performance adaptation and raises questions about the ethics of criminal adaptations, which

paradoxically both aid and stymie the production of writerly spectators. The fact that Ricky Jay

is a celebrity in the magic world and a con game expert, who in this case is more devoted to

protecting the criminal than the general audience member, is rather obscure information. Most
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spectators, including the inspired Denver insurance salesmen, will never be aware that they were

consciously shut out from the real workings of the professional swindler community. In this case,

strangely, this social exclusion did not prevent the salesman from successfully “laying the note”

and hustling cashiers. As our exploration of Mamet and Jay’s collaborative adaptation of the

language, the visual sleight-of-hand and the psychological principles of deception from the con

artist world advances, I will continue to argue that House of Games does produce critical,

writerly spectators even when it holds information back. Con games are some of the most closed

texts in existence, because they are crimes. Thus, it is that much more fascinating when magic as

a performing art and filmmaking as a storytelling media open them up.

2.3 Adapting Psychological Principles of the Con Game to Film

Now, in a bad play, the author will introduce the information frontally. You

actually tell the audience that you are about to give them some information and

that it is important to what happens later in the play. In a good play the

information is delivered almost as an aside. The same mechanism holds true in the

con game. . . . Later you [the audience] use that information, which you think you

got accidentally, to put together what you think are the pieces.

— David Mamet

Ricky Jay’s portrayal of a con artist in House of Games illustrates a few more tools of

narrative trickery similar to the disarming practice of “teaching,” or falsely revealing secret

information to a mark. During her first encounter with the con men, just before the laying-the-

note scene, Mike asks Dr. Ford to sit with him at the poker table (to pose as his girlfriend) and

watch Jay’s character “Vegas Man” as he plays cards. At this point she does not know that she is

part of a play-within-a-play, knowing only Mike and not the others, and is convinced that George
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(Jay’s real character) is an out of town gambler. The audience is also unaware that a play-within-

play is taking place and thus believes the Vegas Man when he threatens both Mike and Dr. Ford

with a gun after Mike mistakenly loses a hand and is slow to pay up. “Gimme the goddamn

money” says Vegas Man. Convinced that the danger is real, the therapist (who was fooled into

backing Mike’s bet) writes a cheque for $6,000. Shorty thereafter, however, she decides not to

hand the check to Jay’s character-within-a-character. The realistic looking pistol leaks a few

drops of water onto the poker table and she realizes that the entire turn of events has been a

scam: the gun is a squirt gun. Mamet adds a nice visual touch by having the lights come up in the

smoky poker room: a theatrical convention that says, “the show is over.” Both Dr. Ford and the

audience relax as the play-within-the-play is revealed.

In this moment, both the con men and Mamet exploit two important assumptions to

further deceive their spectators. Michael Close, a professional magician who has written on how

to theorize spectator assumptions, describes these two presuppositions with the phrases “the

show is over” and “mistakes are not rehearsed.” “Spectators assume that a performer rehearses

his effects in order to produce a smooth, polished performance, free from the tiny, annoying

screw-ups that plague us in everyday life,” writes Close (435). Water leaking from the tip of

Vegas Man’s supposedly deadly weapon is one such error. This group of con artists is a cross

between a group of magicians and a small repertory theatre troupe. Road Hustler also cites “the

practice and rehearsal a given operator has devoted to the polishing of a game,” as one of the

swindler’s chief advantages over the mark or “target” (Prus and Sharper 2). George/Vegas Man,

Mike and Joey have obviously put a lot of time and effort into their poker game performance.

Therefore, when an unforeseen error arrives to break through the show’s artifice, we are at first

dismayed and confused. Then, however, we receive it as an act of chaos — like the unopened

letter warning Kilpatrick of his betrayal in Borges’ short story, we do not imagine that this
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mistake could have been intentional — we buy it hook, line and sinker. Furthermore, Mamet

inserts a joke to remove any suspicion from the moment. When George (the now unmasked

Vegas Man) complains that he knew a squirt gun would never work, Joey replies: “Well, you

didn’t have to load it.” Audience laughter relieves the tension, the collective mood lightens, and

the story moves on to the good-natured conversation between the con men and their missed mark

in “The Flue” scene. Not until much later is the audience forced to reconstruct and reconnect

Mamet’s seemingly disjointed narratives.

At the end of the film, the spectator realizes that all of these smaller cons (at least two of

them are purposeful failures) join together to form a multi-staged “master con.” In other words,

“the show” did not end when the lights came on in the poker room. Dr. Ford is ultimately duped

into handing over $80,000, because she underestimates the acting skills, persistence, and

patience of these criminals. We are taught that we can never trust our ability to distinguish

between announced versus unannounced moments of fiction in the presence of con artists. In

House of Games, these men manipulate social and theatrical conventions to hide the

interconnection of each short con vignette in the film’s diegetic world. Each turns out to be part

of a seamless narrative, not a disparate one-act play. In hindsight, most of the con men’s errors

should have been clues. For example, it simply does not make sense for George to make such a

blunder as unnecessarily filling a fake gun with water, does it? Well, it does if there is a prospect

of a much larger score to be had at the end of a prolonged performance. True to con artist form,

these men have done their homework on Dr. Ford and know that she is capable of yielding much

more than $6,000. Mike, by repeatedly asking what her name is at the beginning of the film, also

hides the fact that his extended confidence trick has already begun. He knows exactly who she is,

but this verbal intentional mistake — his apparent need to be reminded of her name — is a piece

of smoke. To return to one of Close’s magic performance principles: “what appears to be the end
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of a trick is not; it’s really the beginning of the next trick. And what appears to be the start of the

next trick is not; the trick actually began much earlier than was assumed” (435). To better

understand the way intertextual connections are hidden and manipulated within con artist master

narratives and how Mamet applies these deceptive techniques to his films, a more in-depth

explanation of the “short” versus “long” con will be helpful.

“Short” vs. “long” denotes the difference between a quick and an extended narrative

deception. Within both trick formats, however, internal textual relations are obfuscated. The long

form con entails more elaborate preparation, set-up and is often composed of multiple stages. A

good example is the fake horse race con performed by Robert Redford and Paul Newman’s

characters in The Sting (1973), one of the seminal con artist narratives in American popular

culture.27 Peter Bogdanovitch’s Paper Moon (also released in 1973) contains the performance of

a “short” con that serves as another example of the “Laying the Note” or short-change variety

already discussed in House of Games. In the former film, Moses Pray (Ryan O’Neal) enlists the

aid of his ten-year-old daughter Addie Loggins (Tatum O’Neal) to similarly con a store cashier

out of a $20 dollar bill. In Bogdanovitch’s film the clerk, played by Dejah Moore, is tricked into

giving Addie change for a twenty when the little girl actually pays for her candy with a one-

dollar bill. When Addie complains that the she has received insufficient change the clerk says

that she gave her the correct change for a dollar. The little girl begins to cry and whines that the

$20 bill was a birthday present: “It said ‘Happy Birthday Addie.’” The cashier checks and, sure

27
“The Wire,” its phase “The Shut-Out” and other real con games documented by

Maurer appear throughout director George Ray Hill’s The Sting (1973). One of the secrets to this

film’s beautifully unified narrative is the accuracy and care with which authentic con games and

their narrative principles were adapted to its storytelling.

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enough, there is a twenty in the till dedicated to Addie as described. Surprised, but now

convinced that she must have made an error, the woman hands over the excess change to the

underage hustler. How did such a bill get into the cash register? The answer is an example of

how techniques of narrative deception can be applied to commit crimes in everyday life.

Earlier, Moses prepared the bill for his daughter (writing the birthday greeting and her

name on it). He then went in — before her transaction — to pose as an unrelated customer

buying an item. His preliminary purchase, which the store clerk is unable to see as connected to

the mistaken currency exchange that subsequently takes place with Addie, is what magician’s

call pre-show work. Michael Close describes this concept as the “this is the beginning of the

show assumption” (432-433). Just as theatrical conventions make the audience believe that the

play only begins when the curtain goes up (a clever production may have begun setting up the

audience well in advance), the cashier believes that her customer transactions begin and end in

the traditional way — when someone comes to the counter. She simply does not think of the two

dialogues (one with Moses and one with Addie) as part of the same narrative — for her they are

separate self-contained events of everyday life. “When we walk out on stage, or when we walk

up to the table, the spectators assume that we are beginning the show,” states Close of the

magician’s audience (435). Likewise, the father/daughter con artist team predicts the cashier’s

presupposition, plays upon it and avoids suspicion at least until she counts out her cash drawer at

the end of the day. At that point, she may be so convinced as to misremember (or half remember)

the day’s events so that the moment of confusion (with Addie) will stand out clearly, but her

brief and unremarkable interaction with Moses will fade away altogether. Indeed, she may be so

well deceived that no reconstruction of the work-day satisfactorily explains the mysteriously

absent nineteen dollars and some odd change.

In House of Games, Margaret Ford is conned based on the same principle of invisible
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pre-show work. The difference is that she and the audience are fooled together, while in Paper

Moon an insider’s perspective that allows spectators to witnesses the con game’s preliminary

work is given. In Mamet’s film, both the female psychoanalyst and the audience experience

either deception or revelation together. Throughout the story the camera follows Lindsay

Crouse’s character, privileging her point of view. In early scenes of her working alone at her

desk or conducting therapy sessions, we observe patients from her point of view — so much so

that we can read her private notes. This privileged perspective continues up until the film’s final

scene during which she eats lunch at a table by herself. Therefore, when she notices Billy Hahn

— a patient whose victimization initially led her to the con men — climb into a car belonging to

his supposed enemies (criminals Mike, Joey, George, and others), the audience sees a

discrepancy too and begins to realize how early the master con began. Although the spectator, at

this point, is most likely one step ahead of Dr. Ford in suspecting foul play regarding a twist of

ill fate that costs her $80,000, she and the audience share the discovery of definitive proof that

Billy is a confederate (and not a victim) at the same moment. Suddenly, the small, seemingly

isolated narratives within the film — Billy Hahn’s visit, the failed poker game con, the false

sincerity of being “taught” the tricks of the trade — all connect to shatter her previous

assumptions of when the show began. The audience along with the psychoanalyst realizes that

both the screenwriter and the con artists have been lying much earlier and much more completely

than expected.

House of Games, of course, is designed to give the audience an experience of intellectual

and emotional betrayal as related through its main character. As Mamet said in an interview with

John Larr about the process of dramaturgy: “what one wants to do is put the protagonist and the

audience in exactly the same position” (Kane 110). His film intentionally places the audience in

the same reception position as the “mark.” This is a deviation from the approach taken by most
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con game films — The Hustler (1962), The Music Man (1962), The Flim-Flam Man (1967),

Matchstick Men (2003), Catch Me If You Can (2002) and others. These films, as most of the

titles suggest, almost always relate the dynamics of deception from the male con artist’s point of

view. Paper Moon, does, for example, present an unusual father/daughter (male/female) hustling

team, yet it also has the spectators watch the story from the more common hustlers’ position

(Moses and Addie). Though all of these films give the viewer the same vantage point as the

protagonist(s), Mamet’s chooses to tell much more of the story from the outsider’s perspective

— the position of the “mark.” This position changes the didactic aspect of the film and forces the

audience to participate in the process of being fooled as a naive, readerly spectator rather than

the process of fooling. Because we the audience ultimately receive the con much more than we

give it, House of Games teaches us an original lesson. We are forced to reconstruct the language,

the action and the psychological principles of the con’s trickery from the loser’s perspective.

3 Seeing Like Criminals, Seeing Like Victims, Seeing Like Magicians

By exploring the various incarnations of a murder mystery — Dahl’s, Hitchcock’s and

Almodóvar’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” — and various confidence tricks in David Mamet’s House

of Games, this chapter has advanced the dissertation’s discussion of reception and adaptation

from the realm of reader-response to spectator-response. Examining the corpus of criminal

narratives just covered has allowed for a visual aspect of analysis that was not possible when

studying Borges’ written fiction to better understand how magic effects take place within the

minds of readers. Moving to the filmic mediation of criminal acts has given us the opportunity to

conceive of adaptation as infidelity or outright theft, to look closely at how visual deception

(sleight-of-screen) is received by viewers, and how confidence games are structured as

interactive narrative performances that employ specific psychological principles of deception.

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We have, in these pages and at various times, shuttled back and forth between seeing these

primary texts through the eyes of the criminal, the victim and the magician.

Hitchcock’s and Almodóvar’s adaptations of Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” teach us to

see from these three vantage points, but primarily as criminals. Hitchcock’s elegant sleight-of-

screen causes a leg-of-lamb murder weapon to appear as suddenly and as unpredictably for us as

it does for the man whom it murders. Thus, like him, we see by not seeing — by being caught off

guard as naive victims. Re-watching this scene — through the lens of magician Tommy

Wonder’s observations on shadow and light — causes us to view it from a new angle: the angle

of Hitchcock’s deceptiveness as a virtuoso director of our attention. Overall, however, the

omniscient narration of “Lamb to the Slaughter” shows us how the protagonist of this story

cunningly deceives the police and therefore teaches us how to see and think like a criminal. First,

Mary employs a bit of self-deception to convincingly lie to the authorities on the telephone.

Then, she simulates a performance of her shopping routine in everyday life. Finally, she boldly

thinks outside of the box (and the oven) to successfully feed the murder weapon to the

investigators searching for it.

My approach to cross-cultural and cross-media adaptations in the first half of the chapter

embraces transgression, as Mary Maloney does, out of necessity — the need for freedom. Thus, I

have celebrated the productive and liberating experimentation that can be gained artistically and

culturally be being unfaithful to a given source text. Rejecting what Stam and others have

identified as an unproductive and media-biased fidelity discourse is an important step in

developing progressive theories of adaptation, which embrace all media. On the other hand, I

have also argued for a necessarily subjective yet rigorous ethics of citation when adapting texts.

The hope is to create more writerly spectators, or to phrase it differently, to produce viewers with

sharper tools of enigma analysis by providing them with the sources they need to deepen those
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skills.

Mamet’s House of Games and Ricky Jay’s contributions to its narrative as con game

consultant teach us to see the film’s deceptions as victims, as criminals, as more deeply betrayed

victims, and finally, with a little help, as magicians. As viewers accompanying Dr. Ford on her

journey into the world of con games, we share her experience of being targeted as a mark when

we are drawn into the iconography and unfamiliar lexicon of a crooked poker game and the

performative speech-acts of its betting rituals. We are then given the illusion of seeing the short-

change con “The Flue” and other confidence tricks from the backstage point of view of the

criminal. This lesson and the others which follow it, however, prove to be what con artists call a

“double steer,” what magicians call a “sucker effect” and what David Mamet calls good

screenwriting. By employing the deceptive narrative principles of the fake revelation (magic),

the double steer (con artistry) and the unannounced play-within-a-play (theatre), Mamet allows

us to experience the deeper betrayal that Dr. Ford feels after she mistakenly believes that she has

become a critical spectator.

Subsequently, however, and with the aid of intertextual information we are able to see

and analyze these cons through the lens of the magician. “The Flue” does not call for a double-

model reader until and unless one hears Ricky Jay’s extra-diegetic interview with Terry Gross.

Up to that point, the con game — by its very nature — does not seek a double-model (i.e. a

critical) spectator. It is the magician as entertainer and bearer of historical clues, like the correct

terminology of the cons in question, who adds historical information to a con game or a

cardsharping technique through other materials. This allows the con to be produced and received

by a smaller, critical double-model audience. For these reasons, I applied magician Michael

Close’s thoughts on how three assumptions — “the show has not started,” “the show is over” and

“mistakes are not rehearsed” — to a critical analysis of House of Games and its narrative
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structure. The professional magician benefits from critical spectators who will purchase extra-

diegetic material. One example of this is Ricky Jay Plays Poker — a DVD that contains both a

soundtrack with poker-themed music as well as footage of the magician demonstrating

cardsharping techniques that unethical players have used to cheat at cards in the past.

Con games are among the most closed texts a spectator will experience; thus it is that

much more fascinating when the performing art of magic causes their locked doors to open. I

have argued that the magician runs a risk during the process of this opening, however. One

cannot truly understand these criminal subcultures without embedding oneself to a significant

extent within their oral and written traditions. Ah, but there’s the rub. The deeper one delves into

the secrets of professional con artists and advantage players the likelier one is to adopt their

mental stance toward the audience as opponent, adversary, target, mark or victim. This is the

vague and ominous “price” that Erdnase warns his readers of in The Expert at the Card Table

(14). Freud offers a similar warning to would-be psychotherapists: “No one who, like me,

conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to

wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed” (109). The necessarily

closed, defensive and survival-of-the-fittest philosophy required by criminal experts who

specialize in sleight-of-hand is dangerous when adopted by the professional magician. This

mindset often stunts the magician’s ability to connect with and to express love for spectators.

To dazzle, to educate and to entice spectators’ to sharpen their own abilities of enigma

analysis by becoming writerly spectators are, for me, the greatest gifts that a magician can give

the audience. To accomplish these goals effectively, the love-based philosophies of the

twentieth-century Tamariz school of magic and of Gabi Pareras’ magia ficcional (fictional

magic) in Spain are more promising paths to follow than the darker, con-saturated history of

North American magic. As instructive as it is to study the philosophy of the cardsharp in The
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Expert at the Card Table or to appropriate the street swindler’s psychological ploys for the

performance of con game adaptations, the bedrock upon which these approaches are founded is a

predatory love of one’s own power over others. Tamariz’s book La vía mágica (The Magic Way)

articulates an alternative to this approach. His description there of how magicians should lead the

minds of spectators to the beautiful experience of a magical emotion is founded upon love for the

spectator and love for the communal dream of magic itself (18-20). So it is with a disillusioned

understanding of how to analyze deception through the eyes of the criminal that we move

forward. We now exchange the eyes of the criminal for the eyes of the benevolent magician to

seek a healthier relationship with the spectator and the art of magic itself.
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Chapter 4
“The Sphinx” and “The Sage”: Reception and Adaptation in
Practice
Enter the illusion designer’s workshop and the magic theatre. This final chapter moves

this dissertation’s exploration of the relationship between adaptation and reception from

theoretical and critical analysis of magic as a performing art to direct engagement with the

practice of that art onstage. It serves as a retrospective critique of a re-writing, adaptation and

performance of Colonel Stodare’s nineteenth-century stage illusion “The Sphinx,” in which the

magician causes a decapitated head to temporarily regain the powers of life and speech. What

began for me and my team as a straight-forward historical reconstruction of this stage illusion, in

collaboration with the Drama Centre at the University of Toronto, became an experimental

adaptation of it with another narrative: “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban,” from The

Arabian Nights. This mixture of stage illusion and fantastic-marvelous short story resulted in our

performance titled “The Sage Duban,” which ran for three consecutive days at The Studio

Theatre in Toronto (from October 30th to November 1st, 2009).1

In the following pages, I analyze Stodare’s “The Sphinx” on three levels. First, I read it

as a magician searching for the pragmatic details needed to create an act. I discuss it as an object

of historical reconstruction to demonstrate gaps of knowledge that were only possible to fill by

combining university archives, magic community archives, and the embodied knowledge of the

1
“The Sage Duban” was the opening act in the Drama Centre’s Hallowe’en Vaudevilles:

An Evening of Magic, Mayhem, and Melodrama. Each of the production’s three acts were based

on the research of nineteenth-century, Vaudeville-era performances from England, North

America or both.
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repertoire.2 My goal with this first layer of analysis is to show practical evidence of what magic

historians and professionals working within the magic subculture have to offer scholars in the

academy who take the performing art of magic as an object of critical study. The rough and

highly subjective adaptation philosophy, for which I argue in this chapter relies on equal

measures of practical performance and critical inquiry.

Second, I read “The Sphinx” as a magic historian analyzing its socio-cultural

function based on the venue where it was performed: a building in London named Egyptian Hall.

Egyptian Hall was built in 1812 to display the personal wonder cabinet of William Bullock. By

1850, Bullock had established the institution as a natural history museum. By the end of the

century, Egyptian Hall had become an important magic theatre where some of the earliest motion

pictures were shown. Stodare’s illusion is situated in the context of this space where imaginative

geographies flourished and exceeded empirical reality to take on fantastic forms and shapes.

Edwin Dawes begins this historicizing of “The Sphinx” in his book Stodare: The Enigma

Variations by mentioning the popularity of English travel literature set in Egypt, such as Henry

Kinglake’s Eothen (69). He also provides a brief history of Egyptian Hall’s construction, its

exhibits and its early performances in The Great Illusionists (142-150). My discussion in this

chapter builds upon Dawes’s work by asking larger questions regarding what social functions the

venue had for English society in relation to fantasizing about and ordering the foreign East. A

larger corpus of literary texts that were widely read during the lifespan of Egyptian Hall are

considered here. Simon During, another magic scholar, makes a general statement in his study

Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic regarding “The Sphinx” illusion as

2
For more information on this performance studies concept see Diana Taylor’s The

Archive and the Repertoire.

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an invocation of the “long history of literary Orientalism” in England (144). The breadth of his

cultural study, which seeks to map the cultural power of three centuries’ worth of magic

performance in one volume, allows him to touch upon two examples of this tradition in relation

to “The Sphinx” — a short story by the American author Edgar Allen Poe and Baron Edward

Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii (143).3 My analysis narrows its scope to enter

into a more sustained engagement with diverse Orientalist texts produced by nineteenth-century

English culture and with earlier exhibits at Egyptian Hall to explore how these sources help us to

understand what the Orientalist qualities of Stodare’s “The Sphinx” suggest about magic as a

performing art. Susan McCosker’s attentiveness to Egyptian Hall’s origins, its previous exhibits,

such as Professor Faber’s “Euphonia” automaton, and her employment of an early performance

studies methodology begins to expose the curious roots of the venue (570-581).4 My sense is

that this stems from her consultation of Robert Altick’s extremely careful and thorough study,

The Shows of London. All of these works, by an independent magic historian, a cultural studies

scholar, a performance studies scholar, and a literary scholar, provide bits and pieces of

3
During’s approach in Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic is

ambitious in its scope. This leads to a broad, bird’s-eye view of magic history that sometimes

repeats smaller errors in the historical record. For example, Colonel Stodare’s real name is

incorrectly cited as Alfred Inglis (131). Edwin Dawes has cleared up the genealogical confusion

surrounding the performer’s family name and correctly identifies it as Joseph Stoddart in his

book Stodare.
4
McCosker, it should be noted, reproduces specific lines of dialogue from Stodare’s

debut of “The Sphinx.” The source from which she draws these quotations is Geoffrey Lamb’s

Victorian Magic. Lamb’s text, unfortunately, provides no references for this information.
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productive evidence that I bring together here for a new analysis of “The Sphinx.” Altick’s and

Said’s contributions, it should be emphasized, have also been invaluable resources for this

chapter’s deeper critical inquiry into the reality-slippage aesthetic of Egyptian Hall as a site of

English colonialism.

Third, “The Sphinx” will be read in relation to our “The Sage Duban” adaptation from

2009, which was a practical attempt to create a successful cultural and artistic infidelity — a free

yet faithful adaptation. The goal of “The Sage Duban” was to be faithful to the spirits of both

“The Sphinx” and the short story “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” as independent

works of art, while simultaneously causing them to work together as literary and performing arts

that typically remain separate. How one is “faithful to the spirit of something” is always a

subjective question. In the case of “The Sphinx,” our production team was faithful to its form (its

material construction and choreography) while changing its content (its story and politics).

Regarding “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban,” we were faithful to the story’s

content (its theme and characters) while changing its formal vehicle (from a traditional oral story

to a stage illusion). We were faithful to the expression of an aesthetic of powerful and

otherworldly magic in the case of both texts. The magical theme of life after death made possible

by spells unites them. This mutual adaptation of texts facilitates an exploration of how the

willing suspension of disbelief operates when a complex narrative and a stage illusion are

combined. It also allows for a re-examination of the political and cultural values of both texts

within spectators’ imaginations. The re-scripting and adaptation of “The Sphinx” into a tale with

more self-reflexive ramifications allows this chapter to engage in a retrospective analysis of

spectator response in relation to what Edward Said calls “imaginative geography” (53-55). The

presence of imaginative geographies — the mixture of poetic representations with empirical

knowledge of times and places distant from one’s own — in both marvelous short stories and
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stage illusions is one that I interrogate here by way of practice, theory, and post-production

analysis.

1 “The Sphinx”: Written and Embodied Research

Archival memory exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological

remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items supposedly resistant to change.

. . . The repertoire, on the other hand, enacts embodied memory: performances,

gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually

thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.

— Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire

There are more miracles in print now than you’ll ever use. There is, however, a

paucity of the “real work” in print or lectures. It takes most of us a lifetime or

more to develop even bits or pieces of it.

— Rick Johnsson, The Linking Ring

On the night of October 16th, 1865 Colonel Stodare appeared before the audience at

London’s Egyptian Hall carrying a wooden box, which, he explained, contained the decapitated

head of a sphinx. Placing the box on a simple, bare table, he then unlocked and opened its front

to display a mummified head wearing an exotic headdress. Stodare then retreated several paces

to the edge of the stage, at which distance his well-known talents for ventriloquism would be

useless, and issued his command: “Sphinx, awake!” Slowly and miraculously the sphinx came

to life: it opened its eyes, responded to questions, and, finally, recited a number of enigmatic

verses. After the presentation of these impossibilities, Colonel Stodare explained that the

enchantment which gave the sphinx life only lasted fifteen minutes each night and closed the

box. When the audience begged for more, Stodare opened the box to reveal a pile of ashes.
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Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, the sphinx could only be resurrected again at the next evening’s

performance.5

Reconstructing a stage illusion like Colonel Stodare’s “The Sphinx” reveals the

epistemic interdependence of the magic archive, the university archive and the repertoire of

living performers. The dramaturgical research required to create as accurate a picture as possible

of Stodare’s performance in 1865 for our re-staging of it was culled from patents in the public

record, period newspaper reviews, photographs in private collections, magic publications,

academic studies of magic published within the university, and personal correspondence with

illusion designers. All of these documents led to the physical reconstruction of the principal

optical illusion employed in “The Sphinx,” to the choreography and performance secrets needed

to make that illusion deceptive, and to an understanding of the social context explaining why

such a presentation would have been magical and appealing to the minds of Londoners in 1865.

As building a nineteenth-century stage illusion from scratch reveals, the gaps separating

written and embodied knowledge are created by the magic world’s intentional secrecy as well as

the unintentional loss of performance details due to either lack of documentation, the passage of

time or a combination of these factors. In the case of “The Sphinx,” these historical conditions

have led to some informative yet paradoxically vague descriptions of the illusion’s modus

5
This is Stodare’s performance as I currently conceive it. It may contain some

discrepancies or exaggerations inherited from historical sources. I remain uncertain as to the

accuracy of P.H. Cannon’s (Henry Hatton’s) account of the illusion’s ash-filled conclusion

(published in Our Young Folks, November 1866) or of Professor Hoffmann’s description of

Stodare’s patter as published in Modern Magic (1876). I have taken poetic license with the final

line.
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operandi. For example, the language of the British patent that T.W. Tobin and Colonel Stodare

filed in 1865 to protect their intellectual discovery is purposefully vague: “Mirrors are placed

under a table or slab at such angles as to reflect images of surrounding scenery or objects, and at

the same time serve to conceal persons or objects controlled by a conjuror” (Rees and Wilmore

13).

Though the basic secret — that the body of the actor whose head plays the role of the

Sphinx is rendered invisible by mirrors underneath a table — may be inferred from this public

document, there is also no mention of a specific angle or range of angles at which the mirrors

should be placed. There is no explanation for how the actor’s head might appear and then vanish

from the tabletop at the correct moments to create the illusion that The Sphinx’s head arrives,

and then leaves, by way of the box carried on and off stage by the conjuror. The open language

of the patent is paradoxical for it attempts to protect the discovery of a stage illusion principle as

an invention without revealing the secret details that would make “The Sphinx” easily

reproducible by competing illusionists of the day. This vagueness is likely the reason that Tobin

and Stodare’s only patent received “provisional protection” (Rees and Wilmore 13). Thus, the

information provided by this primary source is inadequate for a successful reconstruction of the

illusion without the aid of other, more communicative sources. In this way, the document

continues to guard the secret of “The Sphinx” well after the demise of its creators.

A rather exquisite illustration of Stodare’s “The Sphinx,” which is another primary source

document available in the public archive, visually demonstrates this same epistemological gap of

public versus secret information between not only the archive and the repertoire, but also

between two types of archives: one that I will call the profane or public archive, and another that
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I will call the magic archive.6 The beautifully detailed wood engraving in question can be placed

firmly within the profane archive, first, because it was published in London’s Illustrated Times

on the 18th of October immediately after the illusion’s debut, and second, because it so ideally

presents the optical deception of “The Sphinx” from the perspective of a layperson in the

audience (see fig. 4).

Figure 1: Wood cut illustration from London’s Illustrated Times, 18 October 1865

Fig. 4. Woodcut illustration from London’s Illustrated Times, 18 October 1865.

A particular detail added by the illustrator of this Times image qualifies it as coming from

a model spectator’s point of view: note the natural shadow extending from the legs and table,

created by a light source somewhere to the right and in front of the illusion. In practice, this

shadow is impossible due to the location and arrangement of the mirrors beneath the table as well

6
I prefer these two terms as substitutes for what magicians might call the “lay” or

“laypersons’” archive. In Spanish, one is either “un mago” (“magician”) or “un profano” (a

“layperson”). The adjectives profane and public will be used interchangeably in this sense.
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as lighting restrictions. The table in “The Sphinx” must be lit primarily from above during

performance to shield the mirrors below from any direct light that might cause tell-tale

reflections. However, this small false memory of Stodare’s debut in the illustrator’s mind — the

shading in of a realistic lighting detail caused by the willing suspension of disbelief — is an

example of how magic occurs and persists within the mind of spectators well after the

performance event. This memory of “The Sphinx” as presented to readers of The Times is

precisely the kind of public reception for which Tobin and Stodare strove: one that includes the

willing and unconscious aid of the spectator to create the impossible.

Further proof of this intentional alteration of spectators’ memories by Colonel Stodare is

found in the only known photographic portrait of the magician with his illusion (fig. 5).

Figure 2: Portrait of Joseph Stoddart as Colonel Stodare (79 Daniel, Caveney, and
Fig. 5. Portrait of Joseph Stoddart as ColonelSteinmeyer)
Stodare (79 Daniel, Caveney, and Steinmeyer).

As with the illustration from The Times, it is important to note the duplicity in this visual

representation of “The Sphinx.” This is necessarily a duplicate table and hand-crafted model of
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The Sphinx’s decapitated head. Therefore, rather than an incorrectly remembered and drawn

version of the actual illusion in action, this photo has been staged to give the impression that

Colonel Stodare could actually stand where he is standing, that a shadow could form beneath the

table, and that these were the actual props used in performance.

In contrast to the Times’ illustration of “The Sphinx” and the misleading photographic portrait

of Joseph Stoddart in character as Colonel Stodare posing with his illusion, several other

depictions from the magic archive serve as much more communicative sources. These provided

“The Sage Duban” production team with lucid descriptions of the illusion’s method. They made

it possible to construct our earliest miniature model of “The Sphinx” table to further study its

deceptive optical principles. One illustration (printed via wood engraving) in Hoffman’s Modern

Magic (1876) is a practical and realistic rendering of the modus operandi used in Stodare’s debut

performance (fig. 6).

Figure 3: Frontispiece wood engraving from Hoffmann’s Modern Magic (1877, second
Fig. 6. Frontispiece wood engraving from Hoffmann’s
edition) Modern Magic (1877, second edition).
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Notice in this representation the same elements of head, box, and three-legged table that are

found in the Times illustration, but now with the important additions of the three curtains

required onstage and dotted lines indicating the location of the secret mirrors, the actor’s hidden

body, and a small stool on which he rests.

Add to this illustration (first published in 1876), Jim Steinmeyer’s recent comparison of

“The Sphinx” to other stage illusions (“The Protean Cabinet,” and various Charles Morritt

creations) in Art and Artifice, and it becomes possible to grasp the practical employment of what

is called the “v-mirror” principle from an illusion designer’s point of view (108-138).

Steinmeyer’s analysis is the first I have found that clearly elucidates how spectators' sight-lines

reflect off of the v-shaped mirrors to visually “grab” two sections of the curtains and any scenery

from stage-left and stage-right of the table (142). Because these visually grabbed zones

identically match the backstage space of what is behind the table, an effect of optical continuity

is created (one which takes hours to properly align). The mirrors essentially cloak the body of the

performer playing the role of The Sphinx. The result for the audience is a sense of transparency:

spectators feel as though they see not just underneath and through the table, but also objects from

the mise-en-scène in the space directly behind the table. The early miniature model of “The Sage

Duban” table that we made demonstrates this sense of depth. The v-mirrors each grab the white

curtains and the two real batteries to their right and left to create the illusion of a third battery in

the background. In person, the three dimensional depth of the illusion remains startling even

when one conceptually understands the optical principle being witnessed (fig. 7).
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Fig. 7. Photograph of our miniature model of the optical illusion used in Stodare’s “The Sphinx”
Figure 4: Photograph of our miniature model of the optical illusion used in Stodare’s
“The Sphinx”
Despite the combined information from sources in the profane archive and the magic

archive, our miniature model of “The Sphinx” lacked significant refinement and construction

details needed for creating a fully functional version of the illusion. Some of these performance

tips and secrets — the details that in magic parlance are called “the real work” — ultimately

came from the magic repertoire of a living illusion designer.7 Jim Steinmeyer, both via personal

correspondence and in conversation, generously offered his advice on how to fill in knowledge

gaps concerning construction and set design. His experiential knowledge garnered from a career

of reconstructing nineteenth- and twentieth-century stage illusions provided me with pragmatic

tips on many fronts. Three of the most interesting, in terms of the relationship between

conceptual understanding and practice, were the suggestions of 1/8th-of-an-inch thick mirror

glass, contrasting colors for the carpet and curtains surrounding the illusion (to make it visually

7
See Bart Whaley’s Encyclopedic Dictionary of Magic for a complete definition of this

phrase “real work” and examples of its usage (761-762).

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pop), and the addition of vertical black lines on the table legs to hide the edges of the mirror. I

cannot emphasize enough the value of this last professional touch. One of the most difficult

aspects of lighting the illusion and leveling the set for “The Sage Duban” was ensuring that the

edges of the mirror contacting the ground and the table legs were completely invisible to the

human eye. A close-up photograph of the vertical black lines painted onto the wood reveals how

they are able to make half of a table leg contacting the mirror double itself to look like a

flawlessly complete table leg. This invisible doubling is one part of the optical illusion that feels

like magic in and of itself, no matter how many times one sees it (fig. 8).

Figure 5: Photograph of “The Sage Duban” production’s table leg and black line
masking (notice the disjunction of backgrounds).
Fig. 8. Photograph of “The Sage Duban” production’s table leg with black line masking (notice
the disjunction of backgrounds).

Moving from the public archive to the magic archive to the magic repertoire and mixing

together the different kinds of knowing that these sources offer, led to the process of embodied

learning that became so prominent during the rehearsal and performance stages of reconstructing
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“The Sphinx.” Sometimes this meant applying and building upon a lesson from the repertoire.

For example, Professor John Mayberry and I adapted Steinmeyer’s tip for masking the vertical

seams of the mirror to hide the horizontal ones touching the stage floor. For this bit of

camouflage, we experimented with various unsatisfactory fabrics and carpets before finally

discovering that the bottom of the mirror’s seams vanished when sitting on a floor cloth of black

felt. This solution was, for us, an example of experiential knowledge from someone else’s living

repertoire showing us how to improvise and overcome similar obstacles on our own.

Other refinements of what became embodied knowledge of performing “The Sphinx,”

however, resulted from details, warnings, and anecdotes in the historical archive. Creating the

blocking and business of my character’s movements on stage, for example, was partially

influenced by Henry Hatton’s description of how Stodare (or perhaps another conjuror)

successfully interacted with the illusion table and stage space to give the appearance of natural

movement near a heavily gimmicked piece of furniture:8

The Performer when addressing the audience is always careful to get out of the

angle of the glass, otherwise he, too, might be reflected. He generally stands at the

“wing,” and always, before approaching the table, walks to the foot-lights

(addressing the audience as a pretext for doing so), until in a direct line with leg

No. 2, and then marches straight to the table. (692-693)

8
Though Henry Hatton, also known as P. H. Cannon, publishes a detailed description of

“The Sphinx” in the November, 1866 issue of “Our Young Folks,” it seems likely that he would

have witnessed another performer’s rendition of the Sphinx in North America rather than

Stodare’s. For the time being, I have no evidence that Hatton would have made it to London and

to Stodare’s performances.
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These directions had to be taken with a grain of salt. Marching “straight to the table” and its front

leg both looked and felt awkward compared to making a more casual arc from the downstage

space (where I addressed the audience) to the upstage space (where I placed, unlocked, and,

finally, removed the box containing The Sphinx). This process — the embodied refinement of

suggestions from the archive — was repeated with another of Hatton’s comments in mind: that

the performer’s “fumbling” for the key in his pocket to unlock the box containing The Sphinx

allows the actor playing that part enough time to put his head up through the trap door of the

table (693). Though I discarded the concept of fumbling, we did choreograph the business of

unlocking the padlock, lifting the latch, and lowering the box’s front panel into three distinct

beats to which John Mayberry, who played the role of the disembodied head, could time and

execute his concealed appearance. This created a perfectly natural continuity of action from the

spectator’s point of view during the setting down and opening of the box, as well as the closing

and removal of it at the end of the performance. In practice, these crucial movements had to look

like nothing more than placing a box upon a table, opening it, closing it and then removing it.

Fumbling, overstated movements or any unnecessary bits of business are suspicious actions that

might have distracted spectators, thereby making it difficult for them to focus on willingly

suspending their disbelief.

Anecdotes of Sphinx failures from the written past also served as warnings for how to

avoid accidentally shattering our spectators’ reception of the illusion in 2009. Two noteworthy

tidbits of wisdom inspired parts of our pre-show preparations and my scripted preamble for each

performance of our Sphinx adaptation. The first of these helpful historical mistakes is attributed

to one Mr. Alfred Thompson. His eyes, after being thoroughly deceived by Stodare’s entire

debut performance at Egyptian Hall in 1865, caught sight of two small fingerprint smudges on

one of the mirrors at the show’s conclusion. Thompson, who was a theatre manager and would
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have had some experience with magic of the day, writes euphorically about how these tiny prints

gave him the key to the riddle of “The Sphinx” (Evans 116). Keeping this pitfall in mind, John

Mayberry and I made it part of our pre-performance ritual to meticulously clean the mirrors for

fear of smudges as well as the table’s felt ground cloth for fear of lint from the previous

performance. These measures helped us to avoid ruining the illusion for any spectators as

observant as Thompson was in 1865.

Another safeguard put into active practice during the show derived from the most

amusing account of M. Talrich’s “Le décapité parlant” (“The Talking Head”) attraction, whose

equally rapid success and failure in Paris (c. 1866) resulted in the eventual closure of his

waxwork exhibition called Le Musée Français. “Le décapité parlant” was an inventive adaptation

of Tobin and Stodare’s “The Sphinx” and Madame Tussaud’s popular “Chamber of Horrors” to a

new performance environment. Talrich bought the rights to “The Sphinx” from T. W. Tobin and

designed a version of it that became the central attraction of his new wax museum in Paris.

Robert-Houdin, in Magie et physique amusante (Secrets of Stage Conjuring) (1877), offers a

lush description of the curious exhibits spectators would see before descending into the

cavernous cellar of the Musée Français (902-904). After passing a scene of the famous French

anatomist Dr. Guillaume Dupuytren teaching his students about the inner workings of the human

body and a gruesome tableau depicting a torture scene from the Inquisition, visitors would

advance through an underground corridor to gawk at a mysterious decapitated head resting upon

a table. The head would come to life, tell the story of its own torture and then answer the

audience’s questions. Talrich’s exhibition, however, was undone by poorly managed spectators

who took to throwing or shooting pellets at the head. The actor did not have to endure this torture

for long. Soon, skeptics noticed how poorly aimed pellets would uncannily ricochet off of what

should have been empty space below the table. This quickly betrayed the presence of the hidden
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mirrors responsible for the exhibition. The exposure of what then was sold as a veritable

supernatural attraction (according to Robert-Houdin’s critique) and what today might be thought

of as an unusual performance art piece led to diminishing returns, popular discontent and the

eventual closing of Talrich’s museum (905).

While I had no fear of a formal theatre audience shooting objects at our reconstruction of

The Sphinx, the above anecdote did cause me to worry about another kind of shooting — flash

photography — as well as the possibility of accidental mirror vibrations. I discovered prior to our

final rehearsals that one flash photo would light up the hidden mirror glass like a Christmas tree,

an image that would be so difficult for spectators to erase from their minds that it would likely

destroy any sensation of magic. The solution was to script the following lines into my opening

address to the audience at the beginning of each performance,

Allow me to introduce myself, “The Superlative Pepper,” at your service. I am

here to welcome you to a bizarre night of Vaudeville entertainment. But before I

begin, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to remind you that cell phones, digital

cameras, and other such recording devices did not exist in the nineteenth century.

So if you have these items, please turn them off and hide them immediately.

Thank you.

Fortunately, all of our audience members responded respectfully to this by now common

theatrical request and to this extent became model spectators.

While the ubiquity of personal cameras capable of producing a flash is a visual version

of the same threat of the projectiles that undid M. Talrich’s presentation of the illusion, the other

fear raised by his story was the possibility of causing the mirrors to shake or vibrate even slightly

when the Superlative Pepper made contact with the table. Justin Blum, Paul Babiak, and others

involved in the project observed and directed the choreographed moments during which I set the
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box upon the table and placed its heavy padlock off to one side. These actions had to be both

natural yet also secretly softened to avoid sending vibrations through the table significant enough

to jiggle the mirrors. Ambient light would bounce into the eyes of the audience if my motions

were too exaggerated. Numerous repetitions of these table and box sequences helped to develop

the muscle memory required to interact with the table in an apparently nonchalant manner (as

one would while using any normal table) without causing any scatterings of light.

With the table constructed and the basic choreography blocked, the final gaps to be filled

for an historical reconstruction of “The Sphinx” proved to be the most significant in terms of

how the stage illusion was read and received in 1865 and how this reception would be

qualitatively different in 2009. These gaps were the missing lines of Stodare’s script and the

questions of socio-historical context raised by (re)-writing those lines while imagining his

performing environment. Thus far this analysis has moved from sources in the public archive to

ones from the magic archive and the magic repertoire to focus upon “The Sphinx” as a material

object of historical reconstruction with an eye to pragmatic reconstruction — in short, how to

faithfully rebuild and accurately perform Stodare’s illusion. This is one aspect of the practice-

based research approach for which I advocate in this chapter. This level of detailed performance

information, as far as I can determine, has never been published as an integral aspect of an

academic analysis of “The Sphinx,” due to the practitioner versus theoretician divide. In my

experiences studying and performing magic, there is a significant disconnect between experts

privileging the archive and those favoring the repertoire. This kind of experiential performance

knowledge is one example of what the magic community and its predominantly independent

researchers have to offer the university community. My work seeks to bring together scholars

trained in more meta-critical, archive-oriented disciplines who take magic performance as an

object of cultural, political, or economic study with those who interact with the art on the level of
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lived practice.

Now, I will switch critical perspectives to think about audience reception of “The

Sphinx” from these broader historical and epistemological levels, which allow me to read

Stodare’s performance in relation to weightier socio-historical questions of how magic functions

as a cultural phenomenon in the world at large. This shift in reading stance also reveals what

more theoretically inclined experts in fields such as cultural studies (Simon During),

performance studies (Susan McCosker and Michael Mangan) and literary studies (Robert Altick

and Edward Said) have to offer magicians who strive to reconstruct, document and understand

the great illusions of the past. While none of these scholars individually answers the main

questions of audience reception and social context that plagued me during the scripting process

of “The Sage Duban” project, the convergence of their work has led me to connect “The Sphinx”

to powerful and sometimes disturbing human traditions of exoticism, of ordering reality, and of

reality-slippage. The reception questions that I was forced to ask due to the complete absence of

a reliable script of what Stodare and the actor playing the Sphinx said during in 1865 were the

following:9 why did Joseph Stoddart choose to present his new illusion as a decapitated sphinx

rather than the head of any number of compelling characters (such as M. Talrich’s victim of the

Inquisition, a French aristocrat guillotined during the revolution, or someone else)? Why was

9
As mentioned in a previous footnote, I have yet to see satisfactory documentation for

the words some claim were spoken during Stodare’s 1865 performance. Henry Hatton’s account

is the earliest publication purporting to reproduce lines from “The Sphinx.” His work has led to

Geoffrey Lamb’s republication of it in Victorian Magic (1976) with what appear to be

embellishments. This led Susan McCosker’s to cite Lamb along with his undocumented

embellishments in her dissertation’s discussion of the illusion.

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this choice so magical and appealing for his London audience? And, finally, when the Sphinx

spoke to them, what did it say?

I attempted to answer these questions by outlining a relatively faithful version of

Stodare’s performance script. The idea was trial by reconstruction. This would include having

the Sphinx respond to audience questions or, at the very least, recite lines of verse, as described

by the earliest and most trustworthy review of his London debut. However, there was something

deeply flawed with the kind of personality I imagined the creature would transmit when

interacting with a Torontonian audience in 2009. I wanted The Sphinx to be received as a

mysterious and awesomely powerful figure — a Sphinx that, as one reviewer of Stodare’s said,

would be “worthy of an Oedipus” (10 London Times). The main twist of our production would

be having the role played by a woman, rather than a man, in reference to the fact that Sophocles’

sphinx in Oedipus Rex is female. After all, would it not be terrifying to bring back to life that

monstrous being from the famous Greek myth that tore asunder and devoured those who

incorrectly answered her riddle at the gates of Thebes? But Sophocles’ sphinx, which premiered

onstage c. 429 BCE, is a much later, less benign, and less Egyptian incarnation than the oldest

known, monumental version of the figure: the Great Sphinx at Giza, which was constructed in

approximately 2500 BCE.10 Upon further reflection, it became clear that these particular cultural

connotations did not fit the aesthetic of Stodare’s 1865 performance nor our reconstruction of it

in 2009. Since the threat of the Greek creature is primarily a physical one, there would be

nothing immediately intimidating or frightening about a de-clawed and de-winged Sphinx whose

head is safely contained in a conjuror’s box. The myth of Oedipus and its sphinx was and

10
For more details on the history and symbolic meanings of the Great Sphinx at Giza, see

Mark Lehner’s The Complete Pyramids (127-134).

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certainly remains a cultural reference attached to the history of “The Sphinx” illusion, but the

symbolic power of the Greek monster neither fits the presentational aesthetic nor explains the

cultural connotations represented by the curious object that Stodare presented to Londoners as an

Egyptian relic.

No, what made the illusion particularly compelling and topical to its English audience

was the Egyptianness of the head and how an enchanted, exotic, and foreign icon tapped into a

distinctly British imaginative geography and history that spectators would associate with that

country and with communal conceptions of the “Orient” at that time. Following Napoleon’s brief

occupation of Egypt roughly sixty years earlier (1798-1801), an event which Edward Said

identifies as one of the beginnings of an institutional study of “Oriental” countries by primarily

the French and the British empires at the turn of that century (Said 42-43), England began to

engage in an intensified re-imagining, a cultural and intellectual ordering, of that place.

Exhibitions of oddities and magic performances like “The Sphinx” participated in this English

mystification of Egypt. Through a combination of poetic representations as well as economic and

political expansions, the English began to colonize Egypt. The pre-history and cultural influences

connected to Stodare’s performance in 1865 are fascinating, because they reflect a slow yet

consistent process of English collection, imagination and mystification of Egypt as symbolized

by objects such as a decapitated head brought back to life and made to speak. This is only one

postcolonial lens of many through which “The Sphinx” can be viewed today. That being said,

when the stage illusion is read in relation to the United Kingdom’s becoming a co-owner of the

Suez Canal with France in 1875, followed by Great Britain’s colonization of Egypt by military

force in 1882, it becomes easy to see how a character bearing the military title of “Colonel” who

demonstrates his magical power to literally give and take away life from an object representing

Egypt’s most iconic and exotic landmark appealed to London audiences. Read within this
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political context, Stodare’s performance was an imaginary version of an imminent conquest.

2 Egyptian Hall: Imaginative Geographies, Colonialist Collectors and

Reality-Slippage
In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation:

it is an imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited

and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation

will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,

yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

— Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

What I argue in this second reading of “The Sphinx” is that the willing suspension of

disbelief must be put into socio-historical context to properly understand its relationship to a

community’s sense of imaginative geography and history. Every adaptation of a stage illusion

and every reception by an audience of a performance has a specific time, place and space.

Analyzing these conditions, by which I mean the relevant political, economic and cultural

realities of a given performance, allows for a deeper understanding of how the aesthetic effect

experienced by spectators watching an illusion like Stodare’s “The Sphinx” also has the power to

help create, perpetuate or critique these conditions outside of the theater.

By combining Robert Altick’s detailed study of nineteenth-century London

entertainment with several of Said’s theoretical concepts, “The Sphinx” can be read in the

context of Egyptian Hall — a space that transformed from English wonder cabinet to natural

history museum to, finally, a magic venue whose walls absorbed, over the years and layer by

layer, earlier popular exhibits, works of English travel literature, and magic performances. These

popular exercises in mixing fact and fiction influenced spectators’ receptions of exotic creatures,

of archeological artifacts, and of stage illusions like “The Sphinx,” all of which contributed to
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the cultural power relations negotiated at the venue. The building facilitated and even

institutionalized a communally constructed imaginative geography and imaginative history,

which came to exist in the minds of its patrons by 1865. I will move through three brief close

readings of the venue to map the process of Londoners’ poetic colonization of a very real Egypt

as it occurred in this space and to understand how Stodare’s illusion contributed to an imperial

fantasy that became a reality during the next two decades.

First, reading the façade of Egyptian Hall in tandem with William Bullock’s catalogue

description of the museum’s earliest exhibit shows the founder’s desire to turn his privately

owned wonder cabinet into a national institution dedicated to collecting and classifying the

exotic. The language Bullock uses and the manner in which he calls out to his model English

reader/visitor in his text reveal his interests in a colonial project of collecting and scientifically

classifying creatures and objects from abroad. These items are valuable precisely because they

are rare or unknown (i.e., yet to be classified) in England. Spectators visiting Egyptian Hall pay

an entrance fee to become temporary owners of Bullock’s collection — to vicariously collect,

classify, and assume ownership through him.

Next, analyzing the head of Ramses II as the centerpiece of Giovanni Baptista Belzoni’s

exhibit of Egyptian artifacts in 1821 establishes the success with which Egyptian Hall played its

role as one of England’s earliest natural history museums. By carefully mixing systems of

classification with spectacle, the Hall created an ambience of imaginative history and geography

early on that would be highly conducive to the narratives of later stage illusions and their popular

reception in London. Here I have in mind acts that artists actually brought to the West from the

Orient (such as “The Indian Basket Trick” and the “Indian Mango Trick”) as well as acts like

“The Sphinx,” which originated in England. All of these stage illusions were performed at

Egyptian Hall and generated their own versions of Oriental mystique. “The Sphinx,” however, is
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a clear example of those illusions whose particular exotic aesthetic focused on collecting and

symbolically appropriating the magic of the foreign other.

Finally, comparing the imperialist, master/slave imagery from “The Sphinx” chapter in

Kinglake’s Eothen to the lines that several scholars claim were spoken by Colonel Stodare and

the Sphinx onstage demonstrates how the illusion can be read as an imaginary celebration of

England’s mastery over one of Egypt’s most iconic symbols of power. All of these textual layers

contribute to the shared, national fantasy of England as a colonialist collector and cataloguer of

Egypt in the nineteenth century. This fantasy is precisely what our adaptation chose to resist and

to critique by adapting Stodare’s illusion to “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” — a

narrative in which a different yet also “Orientalized” symbol of power is given its own voice to

tell its own story. The magician who devises and adapts these illusions must also critique their

earliest socio-historical meanings. The purpose of such critique is to understand how the

historical moment influenced a given illusion’s aesthetic reception and how new moments —

shaped by current political and cultural connotations —will influence how audience members

receive and interpret that illusion today.

To read the façade of Egyptian Hall and the institution’s pre-history, I must specify the

manner in which I am borrowing and applying Edward Said’s concepts of imaginative

geography and imaginative history. I invoke the phrase “imaginative geography” to repeat and

extend Said’s use of a concept that describes how human societies tend to define, order and

classify objects as well as living things within their immediate environments in contrast to

vaguely known or foreign things outside of that environment. Said bases the “imaginative

geography” concept on what Claude Lévi-Strauss calls a “science of the concrete,” which is the

human act of assigning names, functions and meanings to local objects as a way of mapping the

world. This environmental delimitation is one way to feel secure in the fact that one’s
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surroundings are known and predictable (Said 53-55). Despite this need for logical ordering

required by the mind, many of the names and classifications used for this task are somewhat

imaginary and arbitrary. They appear as concrete, stable facts to provide human groups with a

sense of positivistic stability, but this stability is only ever partial due to human subjectivity. An

individual interprets physical reality based on immediate subjective perceptions, then cognitively

interprets those perceptions, and finally compares them with the reception experiences of his or

her local, interpretive community to come to some sort of agreement on what an object should be

called or where a boundary lies. One culture’s logic for naming, classifying and delimiting

objects in space, however, is often significantly different from another’s. To confirm this, one

needs only to look at the history of world maps and the seemingly random ever-changing

boundaries drawn there. Those borders serve as a constant reminder of the human tendency to

mix together wishful, magical thinking with empirical measurements of the globe’s physical

features. The current legal and political battles between nations concerning what place names

and boundaries should be written into history books and displayed online via Google Maps, for

example, are evidence of the ever-changing, subjective, and malleable definitions of where “our”

land ends and “their” land begins.11

This combination of the empirical and the poetic, between what is “here” versus “there”

(England/Egypt), also applies to the “interior” versus the “exterior” (the familiar/the foreign), the

“present” versus the “past” (today/antiquity), and the presence of all three binaries within the

architecture of Egyptian Hall. The historical circumstances leading to the building’s

11
See Leuenberger and Schnell’s article “The Politics of Maps: Constructing National

Territories in Israel” for one example of highly contested imaginitive geographies and

manipulative cartographic techniques.

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construction, and its eventual status as one of magic’s most important venues, also reveals these

oppositions. In Orientalism, Said interprets and extends Gaston Bachelard’s ideas from La

poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space) to argue that nations blend the objective realities of

zones such as the East versus the West with their poetic fantasies about them in the same way

that humans imbue the physical realities of their homes with more imaginary qualities:

The objective space of a house—its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms—is far less

important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with

an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel: thus a house may be

haunted, or homelike, or prisonlike, or magical. So space acquires emotional and

even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous

reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here. (my emphasis, Said

55)

In other words, an austere interior closed off by shuttered windows and wrought-iron grills helps

create a prisonlike reception of a house in the same way that creaking wood, decay, and an

appearance of general abandonment will encourage the neighborhood children to tell the ghost

stories that make another house feel haunted. Of course, there is a distinction to be made between

a neighborhood house that unintentionally falls into disrepair, thereby favoring a haunted

reception, compared to a house or another building which is constructed with the express

intention of creating an otherworldly reception. A spectator’s mixing of empirical reality with

poetic imaginings is influenced by a given space in relation to varying degrees of strategically

planned reception, which are orchestrated by the curators of that space.

The façade of Egyptian Hall at Piccadilly, for example, was consciously designed to

encourage Oriental mystification at first sight. It is easy to imagine that Londoners in 1812,

before ever setting foot inside, would have done double-takes as they walked by and tried to
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make sense of the new, paradoxical structure. This is exactly the kind of spectator reception that

founder William Bullock had in mind. Visual evidence of this intent can be seen by scanning an

early aquatint of Egyptian Hall reproduced in The Shows of London (see fig. 9).

Figure 6: Aquatint of the facade of Bollock’s Museum from Ackermann’s The

Fig. 9. Aquatint of the facade ofRepository
Bullock’s Museum from Ackermann’s
of Arts (August, 1815). The Repository of Arts
(August 1815).

Reading the façade’s surface from top to bottom in this image, one sees the word “Museum”

boldly carved into the uppermost part of the cornice, followed by various icons which radiate

Egyptianness: a large scarab beetle and two sphinxes. Immediately below, statues of Isis

(goddess of motherhood, magic and fertility) and Osiris (god of the afterlife) stand, curiously out

of place, upon a block of stone that once again announces the building’s purpose: “London

Museum,” it reads. Here, Egypt’s magic is the object of English collection and classification.

The sensation of a simultaneous collision of the aforementioned binaries in this image —

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of here/there, of interior/exterior, and of present/past — is further heightened by a profusion of

Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have been etched into the frames surrounding the façade’s

iconography. Directly below these frames stands the entrance to Egyptian Hall where a man and

woman traverse its threshold. Even before they enter, I read this couple as having begun the

mental construction of an imaginative geography and history in response to a certain reality-

slippage created by Egyptian Hall. One can picture the man and woman thinking to themselves:

Where is Egypt on the map again? How old are these statues of Isis and Osiris? Are they real?

These are questions in response to a kind of placelessness and a temporal time-out-of-joint effect

created by the building.

The mixture of what were at the time indecipherable hieroglyphs (the building was

constructed in 1812, but the Rosetta Stone was not actively used to decipher these ancient

characters until 1822) with a familiar place name that required no translation — London — and

the authoritative label — Museum — initiates the colonial hierarchy with which Egyptian Hall

presented its exotic collections. The difference in scale of these symbols on the building’s

surface not only mix the foreign and the familiar, but also make the Egyptian icons and writing

much larger and more visually striking than the simple English nouns expressing the institution’s

purpose. Greater size, in this case, does not mean greater authority. The Egyptian icons dazzle

and attract, while the English words label and command.

I read the couple in this aquatint as representative of generic Londoners who, surprised

and intrigued by the sight of perhaps real or perhaps replica ancient Egyptian architecture

materializing in the middle of nineteenth-century London, would have been enticed to inspect the

building more thoroughly. After all, juxtaposed with its fairly uniform neighbors, Egyptian Hall

calls immediate attention to itself. Upon closer investigation, the English nouns hint at the

reasons for this exotic architecture and at the real power relations governing this piece of the
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Orient so anachronistically placed in the heart of London. The pronouncement “Museum”

reveals that these objects are pieces from outside, from over there, and from the past,

conveniently located here, inside England, and now in the ever-evolving present (the present of

1812) where they function as evidence within an institute of study.

Both the façade of Egyptian Hall and the collection’s earliest catalogue establish the

institution as playing the multi-faceted role of collector, naturalist, and colonizer. The museum’s

earliest document celebrates these vocations and then hails visitors as participants in these

national endeavors by way of interpolation:

The Museums of France have been enriched with the spoils of nearly the whole

Continent, and the Gallery of the Louvre contains more treasure in Painting and

Sculpture than perhaps will ever again be amassed in one Collection. But though

her active and persevering Ruler, desirous of making his capital the centre of

every attraction, has contributed to the Museum Naturale, every specimen of

Natural History which in the present state of the Continent could be procured, our

unrivaled Navy, and the extension of our Colonies throughout the habitable

world, present such advantages to this country [England], that the writer feels

confident, that if his exertions are seconded by the Public as they have hitherto

been, he will very shortly be enabled to make a Collection of Natural History far

surpassing anything of the kind at present in existence; and he pledges himself to

exert his utmost power in accomplishing this important work (Bullock iv-v, my

emphasis).

This is Egyptian Hall’s earliest mission statement from its first catalogue. The language of owner

and proprietor William Bullock, its author, reveals that he clearly saw Egyptian Hall as an

institution in direct, international competition with France and the rest of continental Europe.
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Much as the fame of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century inspired

England’s military occupation of it in the nineteenth, the cultural achievements of the Louvre

(founded in 1793) inspired Bullock to transform his private collection of oddities into the

publicly accessible and nationalistic Egyptian Hall. In the paragraph above, he frames the global

competition of the French and British empires within the capital cities of London and Paris

where the race for the greatest natural history museum is also the race to acquire the most

colonial “treasure” conceivable. Bullock was a Liverpool jeweler and silversmith who began his

private collection by purchasing rarities from captains and ships returning to that port city from

abroad (Altick 235). Here, he calls upon the catalogue’s reader as a citizen of England to help

him increase the scale of Egyptian Hall and to raise its status by becoming a collector too (albeit

a vicarious one).

Notice the strategic use of the possessive pronoun “our” in the previous excerpt. The

ideal visitor to the museum, who is also the model reader of this catalogue, is hailed with phrases

of militaristic power: “our unrivaled Navy,” which continues to extend “our Colonies” and, in

these efforts, aims to make England a greater world power than France (Bullock 235). With a

combination of militant and intellectual appeals, the museum positions its visitors as subjects

who vicariously collect objects that are described as both treasure (highly valuable commodities)

and as scientific “specimens.” The possessive “our” of Egyptian Hall, the first person and

pluralized pronoun, is possessive indeed. For to possess as an imagined community of collectors

— to possess as a nation of collectors — through the existence of Egyptian Hall is also to

scientifically classify, to poetically fantasize and to thereby colonize the outside world through

physical objects and institutionalized systems of categorization.

In my reading, Bullock’s catalogue suggests that the economic value and the cultural

importance of the objects on display at Egyptian Hall are determined through this three-step
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process of collecting, classifying and eventually creating a poetic and, as we shall see, magical

appropriation of countries like Egypt. The language of the publication reflects these steps as one

advances through its contents. The museum becomes an enterprise of cultural colonization.

Opposite the opening page, Bullock announces to the reader of his catalogue that he will pay

“full value” for “Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, Shells, Old Paintings, Carvings on Wood

or Ivory, Stained Glass, ancient and foreign Arms and Armour, or any uncommon production of

Art or Nature” (my emphasis). This appeal, combined with the rhetoric of the previous

quotation, reinforces Bullock’s suggestion to his reader that by selling one’s items to him, an

individual is helping England to compete with and to eventually overtake France’s national

collection. His adjectives also indicate that what is valuable about the objects sought is that they

are either “ancient” (from a distant time), “foreign” (from a distant location), or “uncommon”

(i.e., rare, unique and/or abnormal).

This language of imaginative geography and history is followed by sustained

explanations of the Linnaean system of scientific classification. The visitor to Egyptian Hall who

began as an honorary collector now becomes an honorary naturalist. Touring the museum, the

London couple in the previously mentioned aquatint are to be taught the “Linnaean arrangement

of Quadrupeds” with the aid of taxidermic displays presenting roughly sixty species of apes,

baboons and monkeys (iii). A systematic grid, a stable yet always incomplete structure of

classification, is being built within the imaginations of the museum visitors. But the most

exciting and valuable species on display are those which “are not yet described by any

Naturalist” (Bullock 2) — the creatures without fixed labels, which escape the day’s scientific

categories. The qualification that Bullock fails to make, of course, is that no English naturalist

has yet described these species. In their environments of origin these species would most likely

have been known and would have been given names by the local inhabitants. In London,
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however, and well removed from their foreign homelands, the visitor to Bullock’s museum is

invited to help complete the always incomplete classification of Egyptian Hall’s ever-expanding

contents.

The competitive drive to label the most objects, to define, to classify and to control the

greatest number of things from the farthest reaches of the planet as expressed in Bullock’s

catalogue moves from scientific classification to a poetic process of metonymy in Egyptian Hall.

This element of metonymy is reflected in both the physicality of the objects on display and in

their catalogue descriptions. In many exhibits following those dedicated to the animal kingdom,

the part stands in to represent the whole. This phantom whole — this not-there-ness of the

dismembered relic as a type of souvenir — is one of the areas that is most conducive to the

generation of imaginative geography and history. The cultural contexts of empirical objects

presented to viewers at Egyptian Hall vanish along with the parts of them that were lost to decay

(travels through time) or to transport (travels through space). A key example found in Bullock’s

catalogue is a display given the vague title of “Glass Case, containing an Egyptian Mummy”

(131). The item’s description reads: “The Mummy in this collection was brought from Egypt by

the French, and taken from them by an English privateer, and was remarkable for containing

only the head and part of the thigh and leg bones, . . .” (Bullock 131-133). Here, ancient human

remains are cut off from the cultural environment which gave them meaning during the processes

of collection, transcontinental travel, and the changing of hands (from the Egyptians to the

French and from the French to the English) by force. This enforced metonymy through collection

abroad and curation back home transforms the items at Bullock’s museum into special

commodities — specifically, into mystical collectibles — with a series of magical appearances

and disappearances reminiscent of the language Marx uses to describe the commodity in Capital.

The vanishing of the body of the nameless Egyptian mummy described in Bullock’s
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catalogue — a human relic whose cultural history is unknown due to the nebulous succession of

thefts, purchases and sales involved — feeds into the same human tendency to obsess about the

part at the expense of the whole that is required for the production of the commodity fetish. It is

quite fitting therefore that Marx, who researched and wrote the majority of the first volume of

Capital from within another nearby wonder cabinet turned natural history museum (the British

Museum) and published it in 1867 (only two years after Stodare’s performance), employs the

same terminology to analyze capitalism that contemporary stage magicians were using to

describe their fundamental effects: disappearances, productions (or appearances) and

transformations. This shared lexicon is particularly apparent in the section at the end of Marx’s

first chapter titled “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret.” There he explains how the

appearance of the commodity is simultaneously the disappearance of the labor relationships

composing its history. This appearance, or production, of the commodity is accomplished

through an irrational and even mystical reverence for the tangible object once it has taken the

form of a commodity.

One of Marx’s most famous examples of this process describes how a table carved by

hand from a larger mass of wood becomes magically separated from its labor history and social

relations as soon as it takes the shape of a table and enters the exchange economy: “It [the table]

not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on

its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were

to begin dancing of its own free will” (163-164).12 Marx’s basic meaning in this rather fanciful

12
In general I prefer the more recent Ben Fowkes translation of Capital, which I cite

here. In the case of this particular line, however, I prefer Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling’s

translation, which actually uses the phrase “‘table-turning’” (81-82).

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statement is that through a series of substitutions the table as a product of labor becomes a

“sensuous,” “supra-sensible,” and “social” commodity (165). Its use value, as wood, is replaced

by its exchange value on the open market. But I would argue that more important than both of

these well-known transformations for scholars reading Marx today is his implied reference here

to the dancing and speaking tables of the spiritualist performances in London and throughout

Europe in the 1850s. This practice, known variously as “spirit-rapping,” “table tilting,” and

“table turning,” was popularized by spirit mediums who claimed supernatural powers while

employing methods of deception familiar to the day’s magicians.13 Marx knows that the table

newly transformed into a commodity is not speaking or dancing of its own free will — it simply

appears to do so. Its operator, the medium, and its consumers, the audience, have reified the table

into a mystical commodity — one that in spiritualist seances was imagined to mediate

communication with the ghosts.

The severing of the table from its history of labor conditions, the vanishing of the bodies

of those who constructed it once the table appears as a commodity, represents a series of

substitutions that are analogous to the acts of metonymy at Egyptian Hall, where the local stories

of meaningful objects and human remains disappear from Egypt and then reappear in England as

collectible souvenirs. Bullock and the spectators of his exhibits then employ these souvenirs to

13
For a credulous account of table turning in the mid-nineteenth century see Joseph

Ennemoser’s The History of Magic (502); for a scientific explanation exposing the practice in the

same year that it become popular in England see Michael Faraday’s “Professor Faraday on Table

Moving” The Athenaeum (London), No. 1340 (July 2, 1853): 801-803; for Jean-Eugène Robert-

Houdin’s method for magic performances of the same effect at that time see “Esprit Frappeur” in

Comment on devient sorcier (898-901).

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create new and exotic tales, which operate as nationalistic travel narratives controlled by a

collective English cultural imagination. The value — the cultural capital — of the foreign

souvenir is increased by these replacement stories, because they appeal to England’s national

identity. Such narratives become distorted mythologies of Egypt that belong to the perspective of

the colonialist collector. These poetic travel narratives appear and become attached to the

material collectibles of Egyptian Hall just as the collectible object’s local meanings and previous

cultural contexts fade.

For these foreign objects to function as exotic souvenirs they must be incomplete in one

way or another, they must be somehow metonymically cut off from their points of origin. This

lack of a whole is essential. The missing body parts of the Egyptian mummy described in

Bullock’s catalogue, like the absent bodies of Ramses II’s head and the one in Colonel Stodare’s

“The Sphinx,” create the need for a narrative — for a fleshing out of the object’s incompleteness

by its storyteller. And who is the object’s storyteller? Its possessor. Susan Stewart points this out

in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection where her

rather moving application of Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism reveals how we, as

individuals living in the exchange economy of late capitalism, collect souvenirs as an attempt to

capture an authentic trace of our own lived events (On Longing 137). Stewart’s examples of

exotic souvenirs tend to be intimate items that a traveler brings back home: a postcard stamped

and mailed from an exotic location, or the impossibly large ring of a giant sold to spectators at a

circus freak-show (134). These items had to be earned, had to be purchased in person, and by

doing so the possessor buys the power to turn them into props for recounting the story of his or

her travels. These objects contain various charges of magic based on how unlikely, unbelievable

or exotic the lived experience seems to the listener of the story. Yes, the traveler says, I have

been to the little-known island country of Nauru. Here is a post-card, stamped and dated, which I
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sent home from the world’s smallest Republic. Yes, insists the freak-show attendee, I shook

hands with a real giant. This is the ring that he wore. Now let me tell you the whole story.

These objects, which have fairy-tale and quest-like qualities, are real-world versions of

the oggetti mediatori (the objects of proof) discussed in my second chapter. There, my examples

were objects such as the impossibly heavy cone from Borges’ short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis

Tertius” whose inexplicable physical properties are received by the protagonist as a kind of

exotic magic and proof of an alternate universe — one whose existence is hidden from the world

by a secret society. Here, my examples are of objects that create a similar reality-slippage

aesthetic in real-world performance and exhibition environments. These objects are indirectly

purchased by the spectator temporarily, for the price of an admission fee, in an act of ownership-

once-removed. The cultural function of this abstract form of ownership at Egyptian Hall is an

imaginary colonization of Egypt and its magical symbols of power from the comfort of home.

The nameless mummy from Bullock’s catalogue (1812), the head of Ramses II from

Giovanni Baptista Belzoni’s exhibition (1821), as we shall soon see, and the mummified head in

Stodare’s “The Sphinx” (1865) are examples of qualitatively different yet equally mystical

Egyptian souvenirs — objects of proof — whose presentations to the English public build upon

one another to construct a collective exoticism of Egypt as the century progresses. There is a

poetic layering of Egyptianness at Egyptian Hall that heightens the exotic reception of the

objects displayed there as time goes on. Part of my aim with this line of inquiry is to push Susan

Stewart’s observations on the magical qualities of the collectible commodity beyond the

personal, individual and intimate magic of ownership that she investigates so thoroughly in her

work. This move allows us to think through collections like Egyptian Hall and the British

Museum on the grander scale of national imagination and in relation to diverse cultural

productions which influence the magical reception of these objects and the stories in which they
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become props (specifically, in the exotic travel narratives and magic performances examined

here). Stewart does not fully extend the concept of the souvenir’s magic to fantasies at the

national level. Moving to this level of observation allows me to examine what I see as acts of

participant colonial collecting that English spectators engage in by paying for admission to

Egyptian Hall. They do so by paying taxes for “free” entry to the British Museum, by paying to

read travel narratives, and by purchasing tickets to watch stage illusions that fostered communal

fantasies of Egypt. All of these acts of cultural production created a nation of English collectors

who appropriated Egypt through the landscape of an imaginative geography and history before

invading it economically and militarily.

In 1821, Giovanni Babtista Belzoni’s exhibit of archeological artifacts and the

accompanying travel narrative that he sold to London patrons of Egyptian Hall were the next key

contributions to this imaginary conquest. Records of the live exhibition event and its text

demonstrate the fascinating success with which a man who began his career as a circus

performer and a magician became one of England’s earliest and most successful Egyptologists.14

As an independent collector for the crown, Belzoni brought back one of the most significant

poetic symbols of the Orient ever acquired by England’s natural history museums: the head of

Ramses II (fig. 10):

14
For a more detailed account of Belzoni’s exploits as a performer and then as an

Egyptologist, see Ricky Jay’s “Changing Professions” in Celebrations of Curious Characters

(63-65), and Richard Altick’s The Shows of London (243-246).

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Figure 7: Bust of Ramses II, Younger Memnon, currently on display at the British
Fig. 10. Bust of Ramses II, Younger Memnon, currently on display at the British Museum.
Museum.

Per capita ticket sales for the exhibition of this object at Bullock’s museum, along with other

artifacts from the Egyptologist’s voyage, proved the power of its allure and the extent of its

symbolic value (Altick 244-245). Even more important than the “discovery” of the incomplete

statue and its first presentation to the London public are the ways in which Belzoni’s exhibit and

his exploits as a cultural figure resonated within the English imagination. Charles Dickens and

Sir Walter Scott praised him, a bestselling children’s book was written about him, and the

autobiographical account that was published just before his 1821 exhibition — Narrative of the

Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations in

Egypt and Nubia — became a popular piece of travel writing that has been republished by the

British Museum Press as recently as 2001 (Altick 243-244). In short, the story of Ramses II’s

head became successful as a story celebrating its discoverer and collector. The statue of Young

Memnon, along with the other items in the 1821 exhibit, became exotically charged props in the

creation and public consumption of Belzoni’s personal mythology as a nineteenth-century

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English adventurer, privateer, and Egyptologist.

After a successful year-long exhibition run at Egyptian Hall, Belzoni’s discoveries were

sold at auction as collectible commodities now infused with added layers of poetic significance.

These layers of cultural value were generated by the public reception of his personal narrative

and by the general Oriental aesthetic that the venue of Egyptian Hall intensified for London

spectators who visited those items in person. What I am emphasizing here is that in addition to,

and even before, the economic and political gains that England enjoyed during its colonial forays

into Egypt, the country also benefited — and continues to benefit — from the mythos that

figures like Belzoni, venues like Egyptian Hall, and objects like the head of Ramses II, called

into being. This mythology still spills over into the imaginations of foreign visitors to such

cultural institutions. Today, the same statue of Young Memnon is on display at the British

Museum as part of its permanent collection (“Statue of Ramses II”). Though some curatorial

practices have improved since the nineteenth century, the fact that the head remains in England is

a testament to the ways in which colonial power, the cultural exoticism it generates, and the

monetary value of collectible commodities influence today’s postcolonial experience of other

cultures.

Belzoni, his exhibit in 1821, and his autobiographical text are relatively straight-forward

examples of how the narrative of the exotic souvenir becomes the narrative of that souvenir’s

possessor, and, in turn, a national narrative that continues to objectify Egypt’s archeological past,

geographical landscape and its people. Belzoni’s written account lacks the principles of

humanism for which Edward Said argues so eloquently in his introduction to Orientalism (xvii-

xxiii).15 Instead of learning from or empathizing with the individuals whom he encounters

15
The aspect of Said’s definition of humanist cultural research that I find both most
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during his travels, Belzoni describes them as either tools that must be used or obstacles that must

be overcome to achieve his goals. The section of his account, which details the drawn-out

removal of Ramses II’s bust from its temple, “the Memnonium,” is a clear example of his

imperial perspective (Belzoni 109-115). There he comments that the Arab workers whom he

employs and commands are “in point of skill no better than beasts” (112). Furthermore, instead

of gleaning any significant local knowledge about the statue, its temple, and what inhabitants of

the area might have known about it at that time, Belzoni chooses to paint detailed portraits of the

“insolent” officials whom he must either bribe or coerce to ensure that his prize artifact is

transported to his ship (113). Belzoni, shortly after an intricate description of a physical

altercation with one uncooperative official, apologizes for his long description of the event to

readers who “may think my narrative too minute; but I beg to observe, that it is in this way only

the true character of these people can be known” (113). Belzoni, as a colonial Egyptologist, did

not see his written account as one searching for the contextual meanings of the objects he

removed or for the living knowledge that could have been accessed through interpersonal

communication with Egyptians. Instead, he saw his book as documenting both his personal

exploits and his expression of the “true” nature of these foreigners. His text is, in short, a

narrative about the discovery of wondrous foreign objects, of troublesome foreign others, and of

how the author tames them and cunningly acquires their treasures for the enjoyment of the

English public.

compelling and whose absence I find most disappointing in Belzoni’s work is the conviction that

the interpreter’s mind should “actively” make a place in it for the foreign Other with a spirit of

hospitable understanding (xiv).

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One of the unique aspects of Belzoni’s travel narrative is the fact that it is accompanied

by the largest material souvenir, the heaviest and most significant object of proof, to be taken

from Egypt and delivered to England in the early nineteenth century. Even today, the website of

the British Museum notes that the magnificent scale and craftsmanship of the Ramses II statue

caused English curators and museums to begin conceiving of Egyptian artifacts as works of art

on par with those brought from Greece. Greek artifacts had previously held the greatest status

and fetched the highest prices in the realm of ancient collectibles (Miller 198-201). Furthermore,

and once again persisting to this very moment, the British Museum points out that a large hole,

which burrows through the breast of the statue’s granite, is believed to have been made by

Napoleon and his expedition to Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century during a failed attempt

to remove it. Despite improvements in Britain’s understanding of the historical and cultural

context from which the statue was taken, despite the end of the colonial era and the open self-

fashioning of Great Britain as a colonial empire, one of the most important and identifying

characteristics of this sculpture is its continual mythologization as the massive souvenir that

Napoleon failed to capture and that Belzoni successfully brought “home.”

After the 1821 exhibition of the bust of Young Memnon at Egyptian Hall, the English

mythologization of Egypt moved upward — to greater heights, larger monuments, and more

intensely symbolic and abstract narratives of collecting. Thus, the enormous and immovable

Sphinx of Giza became an object of English desire that matched the increasing economic and

militaristic ambitions of the empire. Though still a piece of architecture firmly planted in

material reality, its unobtainable nature meant that as a fantasy object it could accommodate a

colonial narrative of even more epic proportions than Belzoni’s prize. These proportions were

temporal: the Sphinx at Giza is older than the sculpture of Ramses II by roughly 1,200 years.

They were also spatial: the 7.25 tons that Ramses II weighs are relatively manageable compared
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to the roughly 200-ton Sphinx. Being far too large to physically bring back home, the Sphinx

was made part of the nation’s imaginary collection through abstract means: through its

consumption in popular literature and performance.

One of the most influential Orientalist travel narratives linked to Egyptian Hall and

following Belzoni’s exhibit is Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen (first published in 1844), a book

whose grandiloquent description of the Sphinx mythologized it as an object of exotic lust,

seduction, and power. It is worth analyzing the language and the imagery that Kinglake employs

in his chapter devoted to the monument, because Eothen is one of the most common literary

references mentioned in relation to the public reception of Stodare’s stage illusion. For all of

these mentions of Eothen, however, I have yet to come across any sustained analysis of its

chapter on “The Sphinx” or a comparison of that chapter’s tone and meaning to Stodare’s

performance of the same name. I will therefore provide such analysis here as a way to connect

Belzoni’s, Kinglake’s, and Stodare’s multi-modal cultural productions as contributions to

England’s increasing domination of Egypt in both popular imagination and reality.

Kinglake’s bombastic and highly racialized description of the Sphinx’s beauty

establishes English dominance through a rather disturbing master/slave dichotomy, one that has a

different flavor to it than the more blunt prejudice discussed previously in Belzoni’s travel

writing:

And near the Pyramids, more wondrous and more awful than all else in the land

of Egypt, there sits the lonely Sphynx. Comely the creature is, but the comeliness

is not of this world: the once worshipped beast is a deformity and a monster to

this generation; and yet you can see that those lips, so thick and heavy, were

fashioned according to some ancient mould of beauty—some mould of beauty

now forgotten—forgotten because that Greece drew forth Cytherea from the
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flashing foam of the Aegean, and in her image created new forms of beauty, and

made it a law among men that the short and proudly-wreathed lip should stand for

the sign and the main condition of loveliness through all generations to come. Yet

still there lives on the race of those who were beautiful in the fashion of the elder

world; and Christian girls of Coptic blood will look on you with the sad, serious

gaze, and kiss you your charitable hand with the big pouting lips of the very

Sphynx. (285-286)

Thus, Kinglake and his reader are invited to imagine their “charitable” English hands being

kissed by the paradoxically sensual and monstrous lips of an exotic Egyptian woman: a racial

construction written into existence by this author, his contemporaries, and their predecessors.

There is a distinct quality of the master being attracted to the servant’s submissiveness in this

passage. Her beauty, like the ancient beauty and power of the Sphinx is no longer worshipped

here; it is made to worship others. The “Christian girl of Coptic blood” who has inherited the

creature’s full lips now bows her head in the act of acknowledging a superior.

Kinglake continues a racial mystification of this generalized Egyptian woman, of the

Sphinx, and of the mythological past the monument symbolizes for him. Immediately following

the above quotation, he compares the Sphinx to a deity whose “tranquil mein everlasting”

watches, immutable, as ancient Arab and Ottoman conquerors, as well as the Romans, Napoleon,

Herodotus, and Warburton (one of Kinglake’s fellow travel writers who also mythologizes the

Orient)16 pass through the Egyptian landscape to control, influence, and re-imagine the region

with varying degrees of power (Kinglake 286). As Said has remarked, the often repeated motif of

a mystical timelessness is invoked in English travel writing about the Orient and Kinglake’s

16
See Warburton’s The Cross and the Crescent.
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descriptions of the Sphinx are textbook examples of this tropic obsession (Said 72). The author,

who is also the travel narrative’s protagonist, describes the monument as “for ever and ever

inexorable,” “sleepless,” and an idol of “unchangefulness in the midst of change” (286). Most

important of all, his poetic rendering of the Sphinx as an historical object of seemingly infinite

time also frames the history of Egypt as one that is, as if by its very nature, available for

conquest by Britain. The vast size of the Sphinx and the vastness of history to which Kinglake

poetically links the monument are expressed in terms that open up a space for English

colonization. It is as though England is simply the most recent appearance in a long line of

conquerors who form a natural and assumed progression of invasions on Egyptian soil. The

author ends his litany of battle and race references with a final image of the “Englishman”

maintaining his control of India and firmly planting his foot on “the banks of the Nile” to extend

his stance across the Orient (286). This imaginary figure, whose size in this passage has taken on

gigantic and cartoonish proportions to compete with the spectacular scale of the Sphinx, is a

representative of what Kinglake refers to as “the new busy race” (286).

However, as bold as this English figure is who wishes to control both the expansive

landscape and the immeasurable past of Egypt, Kinglake surprisingly emphasizes that this

ambitious colonizer is mortal compared to the immortal Sphinx. It is fascinating that after an

entire passage romanticizing the dominance of the English race over the Egyptians and

supporting his country’s colonial project, Kinglake’s final line is a warning to his readers: “You

dare not mock at the Sphynx” (286). Thus, his chapter ends with a strange, almost paradoxical,

affirmation of the monument’s superiority. Despite Kinglake’s devaluing description of a Coptic

beauty that is past its prime, and despite his construction of an imaginary history and geography

in which England is master and Egypt is the slave, the monument of the god-like Sphinx is not to

be trifled with. Its power, as an immortal religious symbol that watches over the petty
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colonizations and decolonizations of its lands, remains. Thus, the paradox of this chapter is that it

celebrates England’s bold ambition to control a people whose lips resemble those of the Sphinx,

while its narrator simultaneously trembles at those same lips when they are monumentalized in

stone. Kinglake writes as if mocking the Sphinx or dismissing its unearthly power might cause

the monstrous mouth of the statue to open and devour him.

His fear is inspired by the mysteriously divine and foreign magic of the Egyptian other

as embodied by the Sphinx. It is a fear that he passes on to his English readers as they construct

an imaginative geography of that country. His image of Britain as a giant body politic stretching

out across the Orient is similar to other cartoons of the era in which the British empire

consistently conceives of itself as a successful colonizer while that very process of colonization

takes place.17 The difference between some of the more confident self-conceptions of England

within the Orient and Kinglake’s descriptive image of the colonizer is that though his cartoonish

figure confidently plants his foot on the banks of the Nile, he also rather fearfully tiptoes around

the Sphinx. Thus, the author’s imaginary collection of Egypt, its people, and its landscape does

not yet dominate this sacred symbol. The Sphinx, as a monument and as a cultural icon, remains

to be mastered.

Roughly twenty years later, Joseph Stoddart’s performance onstage at Egyptian Hall as

the magician “Colonel Stodare” does just that. His act, “The Sphinx,” not only dares to mock the

mythical creature as a symbol of power, it also tames the entity on a psychological level by

17
One of the most iconic examples of this is Punch magazine’s caricature of Cecil

Rhodes in which a colossal version of the man wearing the stereotypical boots, helmet and gun

of the colonizer has one foot planted in Cairo and another planted on Cape Town (10 December

1892).
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reducing it to a life-sized magical souvenir that is displayed for popular entertainment. As a

cultural text, the performance is an abstract overcoming of the fear that Kinglake reveals in his

chapter on the Sphinx. The magician, Colonel Stodare, demonstrates the dominance of English

magic over Egyptian magic in a stage illusion where he is able to command the creature’s lips.

The plot of this demonstration of power, as described in my summary of its 1865 debut at the

beginning of this chapter, can be broken into three basic parts: the magician sets the mummified

head of an Egyptian sphinx on a bare table; he brings the head to life; then, at the end of his act,

he returns it to death.

Though some of the historical documentation of what Joseph Stoddart (playing

Stodare), and the unknown actor (playing the Sphinx) said onstage in 1865 is unreliable, there is

enough evidence to confirm a continuation as well as a telling power shift in the master/slave

relationship between the image of the magician as a colonial English collector and the image of

the exoticized Sphinx. Notice how in the opening lines of Stodare’s illusion the story of the

decapitated Sphinx becomes subservient to the travel narrative of the magician who now

possesses it:

“During my travels in Egypt, I made the acquaintance of an old Egyptian

magician. When he died he bequeathed me this box. It contains the living head of

an ancient Sphinx which can answer questions. Are you present, Sphinx?” A

voice was heard to reply, “I am here, O Master” (McCosker 578).

Thus, a bodiless, de-clawed, and easily transportable Sphinx is brought back home to England to

be displayed as an enchanted souvenir by the wandering magician and military officer, Colonel

Stodare. How interesting that the magical item is not purchased from the nameless Egyptian

conjuror, but is instead “bequeathed” to the colonial visitor. It is as if Stodare has automatically

and quite naturally inherited the right to be the Sphinx’s master, to remove it from its homeland,
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and to command its ancient magic for display to London audiences. From the beginning to the

end of the illusion, the collector — as possessor and enchanter of the Sphinx — controls its life,

death, and the length of time for which the creature may speak.

The concluding lines of the performance are further evidence of this master/slave and

collector/collected power dynamic: “‘The charm by which I am enabled to revive for a brief

while the ashes of an ancient Egyptian soothsayer . . . lasts only for a few minutes . . . . The head

which astonished you with its mysterious eloquence has now returned to its original ashes’”

(McCosker 579). Stodare’s enactment of a “charm” gives the Sphinx life and then takes it away.

Stodare’s power as a magician exceeds that of the less powerful Egyptian “soothsayer,” because

he is able to so precisely control the lifespan of the Sphinx’s resurrections. These brief periods,

the minutes when the Sphinx is allowed to speak, are timed to end just when the audience is left

wanting more. In typical Barnum and Bailey fashion, Stodare manipulates the death of the

Sphinx to increase ticket sales for the head’s next theatrical appearance, which was usually the

very next day. Londoners, deceived by the unsettling illusion created by a new optical principle

at work onstage, would also be psychologically relieved that one of their own magicians had

tamed and collected some of the exotic magic that they were told was being encountered abroad.

On a metaphorical level, and on the level of theatrical ritual, the message of Stodare’s “The

Sphinx” is that controlling and collecting a mysterious power symbol of this magnitude is now

possible.

The opening and closing dialogue in Stodare’s performance cited above was first

recorded by Geoffrey Lamb in Victorian Magic and later cited by Susan McCosker in her

dissertation “Representative Performances of Stage Magic 1650-1900.” The lines demonstrate

both the core themes of “The Sphinx” illusion and the ease with which embellishments in magic

history are sometimes recorded as fact in academic criticism of the performing art. The desire to
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embellish is a subject that must be touched upon here. Readers may realize that I have

consciously flaunted an academic convention in the above paragraph by citing Stodare’s and the

Sphinx’s lines via Geoffrey Lamb’s book and then Lamb’s lines via McCosker’s dissertation.

One should always cite the original source rather than one author through another indirectly. My

transgression is a conscious one though, and is meant to demonstrate how a very loosely

documented and potentially inaccurate source (Lamb) reveals both what is known about the

script of this 1865 performance, what remains unknown, and how certain gaps in the record have

a tendency to be too liberally filled-in by magic historians. When it comes to magic history, one

must not only cite the original source, one must learn how to detect and interpret

embellishments.18

It is currently impossible to know what exact words were spoken by Stodare and the

Sphinx in 1865. The source that I consider to be the most trustworthy, the earliest review of the

illusion published in the London Times, paraphrases what Stodare and the Sphinx said onstage

without supplying any direct quotations whatsoever. So, from where are Geoffrey Lamb’s

detailed wordings sourced? His book, Victorian Magic, is published nearly a century after

Stodare’s performance and neither provides citations nor a bibliography for lines that I have not

read elsewhere in earlier accounts. Therefore, I was rather surprised to see these direct quotations

of dialogue appear. As far as I can determine these are Lamb’s embellishments, which then enter

18
Historical scholarship must be mindful of embellishments in all fields, of course. Even

so, extra caution is needed when analyzing magic. Magicians have a habit of seducing historians

and are professionally trained to present fiction as fact. Professor Beth Kattleman recently

presented a paper to American Society for Theatre Research on this subject titled “Lying in the

Archives: Magicians, Charlatans and the Economy of Deception” (19 November 2011).
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into the academic realm via McCosker’s otherwise quite carefully researched dissertation. I

mention this for two reasons: first, to ensure that future scholarship in this particular area does

not unquestioningly repeat information recorded by yet unverified sources; and second, to point

out how exaggerations like Geoffrey Lamb’s wording for “The Sphinx” can still be quite

valuable for analyzing the illusion’s cultural significance.

While Lamb’s account cannot be trusted to tell us precisely what Stodare and the Sphinx

said, it does reveal what he would like to imagine was spoken as an English magic historian

looking back and writing an account of “The Sphinx” in the 1970s. The specific lines of dialogue

that he added to his description of the illusion are, after all, plausible. What I find intriguing

about his particular additions to the historical record is that they reveal a desire to render more

poetic the basic master/slave narrative already contained in the earlier and more reliable

description of “The Sphinx.” From the 1860s to the 1970s and even today, the tendency to

uncritically repeat and celebrate the theme of the English master and the Egyptian slave in

mysterious and magical narratives continues. This ideological habit resembles the persistent

celebration and repetition of Belzoni’s story from one century to the next via its curation

alongside the bust of Ramses II in the British Museum. In both cases, the origin story of the

souvenir on display — the voice of the foreign other — is significantly muted and eclipsed by

the story of the collector.

My argument, therefore, is that the exotic magic aesthetic of “The Sphinx” illusion, its

narrative, and the manner in which the historical record of its performance has been embellished

all celebrate and perpetuate an English colonialist-as-collector fantasy, which prefigured and

perhaps even bolstered the British empire’s decision to economically and militarily invade Egypt

shortly after 1865. It is as if Great Britain wished to play out onstage the dream that it already

owned and controlled a power symbol like the Sphinx before capturing and collecting that
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symbol in reality. The economic and political means for realizing this fantasy appeared during

the construction of the Suez Canal (1859-69) and immediately after its completion. Egypt,

through a mix of poor judgement and foreign manipulation, was forced into extreme debt by

France during the canal project and into even worse debt by Britain directly after. The combined

loansharking maneuvers of these two empires effectively bankrupted Egypt, which enabled them

to acquire complete ownership of the canal together.19 By 1875, Britain owned roughly half of

this new “Highway to India” and thereafter rapidly increased the number of trade ships sent

through its waters (Hopkins 373).

During the same years that Britain took substantial control of the Suez Canal (1875) and

then invaded Egypt (1882), at least two other Oriental fantasies played out on Egyptian Hall’s

main stage. One of the most popular illusions being presented at the time was “Psycho” — a

mysterious automaton sculpted, costumed, and presented to English audiences as a Hindu

“fakir.” The nineteenth-century Western use of the word “fakir” is an anglicization of the

Arabic faqīr, which translates as “poor” or “indigent” person. The word became a popular

misnomer for describing a general category of Indian conjuror associated with the suddenly more

accessible subcontinent of India.20 Fakirs were often mendicants or sanyasis (“renouncers” in the

19
For a timeline and loan analysis of the Suez canal and its management by France and

Great Britain, see John Newsinger’s “Liberal Imperialism and the Occupation of Egypt in 1882”

(57-58). Also, see A. G. Hopkins’ “The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the

Occupation of Egypt, 1882” (373-385).

20
Though the Oxford English Dictionary includes a reference to the misapplication and

mistranslation of this foreign word in the English language, one of the only magic historians to

mention the error explicitly is Bart Whaley in his Encyclopedic Dictionary of Magic (347-348).
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Hindi ashram system) and though some certainly did magic tricks to survive, this is a reductive

and inaccurate choice for the Western equivalent of magician or conjuror. “Jadugar,” the Hindi

word for magician (“jadu” for “magic” and “gar” for “doer”) is a much better general equivalent

for the Western concept of a magic performer. The misheard and misunderstood word “fakir,”

however, has a crispness that appeals to an English speaker’s ear. Perhaps its aural resemblance

to the word “fake” also conjures up the image of an exotic master of fakery. Thus, the mystical

automaton “Psycho” was presented as a fakir, who could count, spell words and play cards, and

was extremely popular in London well into the 1880s.

In 1882, precisely when Britain shells Alexandria and invades Cairo under pretenses of

stabilizing a destabilized Egypt to thereby protect its interests in the Suez Canal, the magicians

John Nevil Maskeleyne and George Cooke are selling tickets at Egyptian Hall for one of their

most recent illusions — “Cleopatra’s Needle.” As with the Sphinx, the title of this performance

references a monumental Egyptian power symbol that both exists in reality and was presented

onstage in a miniaturized form. In the act, the English magicians caused a lightweight replica

model of the Egyptian obelisk to impossibly produce two people. The actual monument, which

stands in London today and is still commonly referred to as Cleopatra’s Needle, greatly predates

her reign. It was given to England by the Khedive of Egypt in 1877 and does not have any deep

historical relationship with Cleopatra (Whaley 205). That the popular name Cleopatra’s Needle

has flourished in England despite the fact that the obelisk was erected in Egypt over one

thousand years before her time is yet another example of the English mystification of Egyptian

artifacts and their historical relations. These magic performances, which contributed to new

nineteenth-century English mythologies of the Orient, mark the beginning of Maskelyne and

Cooke’s dominion at Egyptian Hall and the period of time (roughly 1873 to 1904) when the

building that began as William Bullock’s personal wonder-cabinet-turned-natural-history-

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museum transformed into the definitive capital of English magic.

In short, the venue that becomes commonly referred to as “England’s Home of Mystery”

rises to this prominent status in the same ten- to twenty-year period that encompasses Great

Britain’s successful economic and military takeover of Egypt.21 It is difficult to measure the

exact influence that stage illusions such as “The Sphinx” and “Cleopatra’s Needle” had upon the

material, political, and economic actions of the British Empire. There is little doubt, however,

that in the English imagination — and within England as an internalized, imagined community

— Egyptian Hall and the exotic, magical entertainments produced there shaped cultural

conceptions about the East, about its mysteries, and about the hierarchy of English, Egyptian and

Indian magicians outside of the theatre. The symbolic content and narrative themes of many of

Egyptian Hall’s exhibitions and magic productions helped to articulate a master-slave

relationship in which England was dominant and Egypt was subjugated. This power dynamic

played out onstage in multi-modal entertainments that blurred the lines between archeological

artifacts and imaginary fantasies. As a result, this relationship became more completely fixed in

an English conception of reality when received on a stage located within a natural history

museum. I therefore see Joseph Stoddart’s character (Colonel Stodare) and his Sphinx illusion

(1865) as the beginning of an increasingly abstract and conjuring-based celebration of the

colonialist as collector. From this perspective, it is no surprise that the rise of exotic and

Orientalized magic performances at Egyptian Hall coincided with the economic and military fall

of Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century.

21
The association of the phrase “England’s Home of Mystery” with Egyptian Hall was

part of Maskelyne and Cooke’s highly effective publicity campaigns and was emblazoned upon

many magic posters of the era (Jenness 40). Such posters are collectors’ items today.
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3 “The Sage Duban”: Narrative Adaptation as Critical and Aesthetic

Response
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his

appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You

cannot value him alone; you must see him, for contrast and comparison, among

the dead.

— T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“The Sphinx” exemplifies the human tendency to generate imaginary geographies and to

locate magic in the distant, lesser-known lands of the other. In many ways, this is a positive

rather than a negative aspect of human nature. It derives from our earliest experiences of

curiosity and wonder as children exploring an ever-expanding world, the borders of which are

uncharted territories filled with magical possibilities (with objects and forces that may be beyond

anything we have experienced before and which may positively force us to reevaluate our

previous assumptions). As adults exploring the edges of the mapped world, nineteenth-century

English colonizers found it hard to separate this childlike wonder from the capitalistic desire to

possess and dominate. The aesthetic beauty of “The Sphinx” illusion, the basic concept of

bringing an ancient and foreign source of wisdom back to life, is tainted for me by the imperial

politics of its historical moment. What is worrisome about Stodare’s debut performance and its

reception by both spectators and scholars up to the present is the frequently uncritical repetition

of its ethnocentric colonialist themes. This includes its master-slave hierarchy, which explicitly

empowers the collector by weakening the collected. This tradition of erasing local historical

relations by reliance upon superficial (or stereotypical), rather than self-critical, forms of

mystification and spectacle is disturbing when one closely examines many of the cultural

products that magic as a performing art has produced. The uncritical vanishing of voices, of
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foreign contexts, and the subjugation of foreign power symbols are what my production team

and I chose to reverse and to subtly critique by transforming Stodare’s “The Sphinx” (London,

1865) into “The Sage Duban” (Toronto, 2009).

The biggest challenge for our adaptation was finding a way to retain the aesthetic beauty

and exotic ambience of Stodare’s act without repeating a naïve cultural reception of its

prejudices in the twenty-first century. The title of the performance, “The Sage Duban,” alludes to

the best solution that we found: the hybridization of “The Sphinx” with a new narrative, a short

story from The Arabian Nights, titled “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban.” The most

direct means of responding aesthetically and critically — of implementing a practice-based

adaptation philosophy that would preserve the magic of the stage illusion while also

revolutionizing its politics — was a complete re-scripting of its narrative and its main characters.

By significantly modifying the story of the decapitated head, its role as a fantastic relic telling

that story, and the persona of the magician who presents the head, “The Sage Duban” responds to

the progression of colonial collectors who surface when one investigates the history of

exhibitions, travel narratives, and their cultural functions at the performance venue that was

Egyptian Hall.

As a written source text, “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” makes a

response to “The Sphinx” and its historical conditions possible, because it is neither a travel

diary like Belzoni’s account of his archeological plunders, nor a self-celebratory tourist memoir

like Eothen; instead, it is a local, Middle-Eastern narrative that gives its subject of mystification

the power to speak back. “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” is the story of a

mysterious traveler, his impossible traversal of death, and the miraculous way in which he is able

to punish an unjust king from one of the most powerless positions of all — as a victim of

decapitation. It is briefly alluded to by the London Times journalist who reviewed Stodare’s
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debut of “The Sphinx.”22 Apart from this small mention, however, the rather morbid morality

tale has never been placed into a more meaningful or sustained dialogue with the stage illusion.

The plot of “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” focuses on the relationship

between a powerful and wealthy king, who suffers from incurable leprosy, and an itinerant sage

who heals him using a mixture of ritual and chemical magic. King Yunan, overjoyed at his

recovery, showers gifts upon his mystical savior, and thereby arouses a competitive and wrathful

jealousy in his court Vizier. Seeking to displace Duban and to regain his status as the king’s most

beloved counselor, the Vizier eventually convinces the ruler that the sage is a dangerous spy who

must be executed. When the announcement of his execution is made, Duban attempts to dissuade

Yunan from committing this unfair crime by repeating the phrase: “‘Spare me, and God will

spare you. Destroy me, and God will destroy you’” (Haddawy 45). The king, unmoved, ignores

these pleas. The sage, accepting his fate, requests that he at least be allowed to distribute the

wisdom from his personal library before being killed and offers Yunan a book titled The Secret

of Secrets. He instructs the king to place his decapitated head upon a mixture of powders

immediately after it has been struck off and to read from a specific page in that volume. Duban

says that his head will be magically resurrected if he does so. The day of the execution arrives.

The sage’s head is chopped off, placed on the strange powder, and the magical book of secrets is

opened. As Yunan confusedly thumbs through its blank pages, however, Duban’s severed head

comes to life of its own accord, speaks out and reveals to the king that he has just poisoned

22
The article, published on 19 October 1865, likens Stodare’s decapitated Sphinx to the

head of “the Physician Douban,” which might suggest that the author had read the story in an

edition of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments that was anonymously translated to English and

published at the beginning of the 1700s.

 235

himself. The book’s real secret was the deadly venom concealed in its paper. The sage then

criticizes the king’s injustice with several verses:

For long they ruled us arbitrarily,

But suddenly vanished their powerful rule.

Had they been just they would have happily

Lived, but they oppressed, and punishing fate

Afflicted them with ruin deservedly,

And on the morrow the world taunted them,

“Tis tit for tat; blame not just destiny.” (Haddawy 47)

The moral spoken by the head of Duban, the now bodiless yet paradoxically empowered martyr,

is punctuated by the death of King Yunan. The sage’s head also succumbs to death at the end of

his story. As a magician and esoteric apothecary, Duban sacrifices himself to send a political

warning to all tyrants and to forcibly remove one from power. Thus, the “Tale of King Yunan

and the Sage Duban” as a new narrative for Stodare’s “The Sphinx” increases the importance of

the severed head’s role in the telling of its own story.

This pivotal scene — Duban’s resurrection and the killing of the king — not only

demonstrates the increased agency of the severed head as narrator and mastermind of its own

death as political action, but also represents the greatest achievement of our experimental

adaptation. This is the moment when the two adapted texts (the Middle-Eastern short story and

Stodare’s original illusion) and their artistic genres combine most completely to transform

Duban’s head into what the audience receives as a meaningful, fantastic-marvelous relic during

live performance. In “The Sage Duban,” the height of the written text’s macabre magic and the

climactic effect of Stodare’s illusion become one when the victim of execution opens his eyes

and then speaks. This is the point at which spectators of “The Sage Duban” gasp in an instant of
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fantastic vacillation. This is when the walls of the theatre seem to pulse and spin.23 This, to

harken back to my chapter on Todorov’s categories of fantastic literature and the impossible

objects in Borges’ short stories, is the performance’s most pure expression of the audience

encountering that thin and ephemeral line known as the pure fantastic. It is the moment when the

Aleph appears to submerge the viewer in the vast and overwhelming infinity of the universe; it is

the moment when the genie pours forth from Aladdin’s lamp to fill the perceivable world with

thick, blue smoke. It is unadulterated reality-slippage. But it is only a moment: the length of that

ineffable and immediate reception of the fantastic-object within the mind of the spectator. What

happens after the gasp? And how does that instant of cognitive short-circuiting attach to any kind

of narrative meaning?

One of my frustrations with the absence in the historical record of what exactly the

Sphinx character said in Stodare’s presentation of the illusion is that the first lines spoken by the

decapitated head are the most momentous of the entire performance — those lines are wedded to

the most profound magic of the scene and will have the greatest impact upon spectators’

reception of what “The Sage Duban” expresses. So, how does the mind of an audience member

— still reeling from the reception of an illusion that looks startlingly realistic — interpret that

effect in relation to the diegetic world of the “The Sage Duban”? One hopes that the previously

established fantastic-marvelous conventions associated with the universe of The Arabian Nights

and “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” guide the interpretive logic of the audience.

Multiple genre conventions are present in the Middle-Eastern narrative to hint at what kind of

fiction-making should be taking place, including the cue of the opening, fairy-tale like line:

23
The gasps of the audiences on October 30, 31, and November first 2009 are preserved

in the Drama Centre archives at the University of Toronto.

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“There once was a king called Yunan, . . . “ (Haddawy 36).24 In imaginary worlds where kings

can be cured of leprosy, genii are known to exist, and magical spells are cast. Thus, the

potentially distracting or rupturing effect of a stage illusion upon the spectator’s mind is naturally

channeled back into their active imagining of such a world. The overall reception effect is

designed to balance the magic of “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” text with the

magic of the stage illusion as perfectly and as naturally as possible so that one does not subsume

or dominate the other.25 Thus, the Sage Duban’s head becomes a fantastic-marvelous object

from the pages of The Arabian Nights that in the minds of ideal spectators has somehow made its

way into a live performance environment and onto the stage.26

24
The cue for the audience to receive “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” in a

fairy-tale mode of storytelling is even more overt in Sir Richard Burton’s translation: “Know,

thou Ifrit, that in days of Yore and in Ages long gone before, a King called Yunan reigned over

the city of Fars and the land of the Roum” (45).

25
Once again, it is worth mentioning Teller’s adaptation of a powerful levitation illusion

to a production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that came up toward the end of

chapter one. This performance is an example of striking what I consider to be an ideal balance

between story magic and stage conjuring. This is the same moment when Oberon places a love

potion on the eyes of Titania and, for a few moments, her body is rendered weightless as an

expression of that magical drug.

26
There is, of course, no guarantee that every audience member will be an ideal, or, to

borrow Umberto Eco’s adjective once again, a model spectator. Perhaps they have never read

The Arabian Nights or have never heard similar fairy tales. As was seen in the discussion of

reception theory in chapter one, the text calls out to model spectators and attempts to cue even
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And yet, in “The Sage Duban” adaptation, the enchanted head is not received by the

audience solely as a fantastic-marvelous object either. Instead, it is transformed one step further

into a fantastic-marvelous relic with a voice of its own. I say relic, because in this narrative it is

not as though a lifeless object is endowed with magic (like the invisible coin that Borges’ writes

about in “The Disk”) or as though an inanimate stone sculpture has come to life. I disagree, for

example, with Marina Warner’s reading of Duban’s head as an eidolon (a special kind of Greek

idol, which can be described en bref as a statue that appears to, or actually does, speak). This is

how she classifies it in her recent study Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

(205-206). To call the Sage Duban’s head a statue, an automaton or an object is to deny the fact

that the individual character to whom it belongs is a person rather than a thing. The

transformation that takes place in “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban” and in our live

performance’s adaptation of it is one of personhood rather than thingness, because it applies to

body parts that were once attached to a living, breathing being (even if that being is a fictional

character).

To define this quality of personhood further, the fantastic-marvelous relic in question is

human rather than animal and has the all-important power of human speech. Duban’s head,

despite any similarities in reanimation magic, is no monkey’s paw.27 And though it shares the

humanity and the vengeful motive of another relic from the fantastic literature tradition — the

the uninitiated knowing that it will never be one-hundred percent successful.

27
See W.W. Jacob’s famous fantastic short story “The Monkey’s Paw” (published in

1902) for a literary example of an animal relic that is enchanted by an Indian fakir and brought

back to England by a British soldier.

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severed hand that kills its imperialist collector in Guy de Maupassant’s short story “La main” /

“The Hand” — Duban’s uppermost appendage has the all-important lips, throat, and tongue that

allow him to speak. Finally, his head, which we can also call his crown, retains for him the social

status of a spiritual figure. Because his head directly addresses audiences during performances,

he is received by them as a powerful figure, as a sage, both before and after his death. He is

never reduced to a faceless relic or a non-human thing.

The rare ability to mystically come to life and to speak is what distinguishes the Sage

Duban from the exotic relic once housed in Egyptian Hall that he most closely resembles: the

severed head of an Egyptian mummy. This is the same head, discussed earlier in relation to

metonymy, from Bullock’s catalogue and his collection’s first exhibition in 1812 (131). I

mention this curious relic once more, because both the head of the Sage Duban and the head of

this nameless Egyptian mummy are presented as collectible relic commodities. They each exist

as traces of death rituals (one from a beheading; the other from a burial) and thus their value is in

part determined by their decidedly human and exotic dead-alive qualities.

The difference, of course, is that the head in “The Sage Duban” performance, as well as

the one played by the unknown actor in Stodare’s “The Sphinx” illusion, is an abstract

representation. Such heads are fictional relics made from the bodies of fictional characters.

Though they are played by flesh-and-blood actors to make them look convincingly mummified

and to make the illusion of resurrection believable, they are fakes. They are actors posing as

props. The true mummy, bought at an English port and displayed by Bullock in the early 1800s,

was made from real human remains. It was displaced from its grave, added to a collection, and

can be classified as an actual, factual relic. The heads in Stodare’s illusion and in our Sage

Duban performance are convincing magical versions of such a relic. With the help of makeup,

costuming, and acting, these stage heads simulate, as closely as possible, veritable human
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remains to help audience members engage in the “as if” of fiction-making that occurs when one

willingly suspends disbelief in a theatre. By virtue of looking as if they were pulled from the

shelf of a museum like Egyptian Hall, The British Museum, or some other private collection of

oddities, the heads tap into collectors’ and museum visitors’ fantasies of how reality might

rupture if a relic in a display case suddenly came to life and spoke. This is what the combination

of magic performance and storytelling makes possible that a museum visit does not. In “The

Sphinx” and “The Sage Duban,” audience members are allowed to convince themselves that a

fantastic-marvelous relic has supernatural power and, at least for a moment, that a mummified

item in the museum speaks to them. The immediate cultural and political meanings of this

magical speech are shaped by the way in which the magician character presents this fantastic-

marvelous head.

The Superlative Pepper character in “The Sage Duban” was written and performed so as

to give Duban a voice, to place his revolutionary message center stage and to empower him as an

autonomous symbol of foreign magic. As such, the magician in our performance becomes a self-

referential parody and critique of the Colonel Stodare character from “The Sphinx.” The

Superlative Pepper’s name indicates this. It is a conscious refusal of the false military rank of

“Colonel” chosen by Joseph Stoddart and of what I suspect was an intentional francization of his

own last name when he adopted “Stodare” for the second part of his stage moniker. In our

production, the adjective “Superlative” is also a jab at the self-aggrandizing qualifiers used by so

many nineteenth-century as well as modern-day conjurors as part of their stage names.28 The

word is a tongue-in-cheek, meta-amalgamation of them all. Rather than choose a specific

28
The Great Wizard of the North, The Great Lafayette, The King of Koins, The Amazing

Kreskin, and The Amazing Randi are a handful of nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples.
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adjective or social title denoting high status — “The Great ___,” “The Amazing ___,” “Colonel

___,” “Professor ___,” and so forth — why not emulate them all with the general grammatical

term “Superlative,” which has the added benefit of knowingly mocking itself?

The Superlative Pepper’s name is the first hint that his narrative function in “The Sage

Duban” story is to reveal the nineteenth-century magician as a colonialist-collector, while also

shifting as much attention as possible away from his own character and towards Duban as the

self-governing locus of the performance’s magic. In this regard, our adaptation made two subtle

yet significant departures from Colonel Stodare’s presentation of “The Sphinx” illusion. First,

the Superlative Pepper makes clear that Duban’s mummified head was purchased for a large

amount of money from a magician during a journey abroad. This is a reference to the traditions

of exotic collection and commodification of relics that occurred at Egyptian Hall. It is meant to

avoid the sense of entitlement suggested by one version of Stodare’s lines regarding the Sphinx,

in which he rather implausibly is “bequeathed” the relic by an Egyptian conjuror (Lamb 68). The

goal in this presentational change is to eliminate any suggestion that the magic of the exotic other

is easily inherited when one is neither from that place nor has any familial ties with the foreign

magician who owned the relic in question. Bullock and English privateers bought and removed

by force the Egyptian mummy that came to be displayed at Egyptian Hall, just as Belzoni

employed the significant economic and political force of the British empire to acquire the bust of

Ramses II.

The second, and more significant, alteration made to the magician character in “The

Sage Duban” adaptation is the removal of any suggestion that he is a master controlling Duban’s

head as if it were a slave or some kind of captive animal. In our production, the Superlative

Pepper does not cast a spell on Duban’s lifeless head to awaken him. In fact, he is never

commanded to do anything. Instead, Pepper simply states that legend has it that every 144 years
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the telling of the Sage Duban’s story has the power to unlock the box containing him and to

resurrect him. The performance becomes an experiment that puts this rumor to the test. In the

climactic scene already described, when the Sage Duban’s head comes back to life, it does so of

its own accord and speaks lines that effectively put King Yunan in his place. This differs from

Stodare’s version of the illusion, in which the magician “calls” for the Sphinx to open “its” eyes,

to smile, and to make a speech as if the head were something like a bizarre, trained pet, or some

kind of magical familiar, rather than a mystical human being (10 London Times). Thus, the

function of the Superlative Pepper character is primarily one of third-person narration. He helps

Duban tell his story rather than hijacking it to tell one about himself. The result is a performance

about how storytelling as an art, and as a magic ritual, can save lives, end lives, and bring the

dead back to life. It is not dedicated to celebrating the importance or the power of the Superlative

Pepper who is simply the magician-as-colonialist-collector who presents the head of the Sage

Duban to a twenty-first-century audience. The story is ultimately Duban’s and its message is that

unjust tyrants will be overthrown by seemingly impossible means, if necessary.

The script created from “The Tale of King Yunan and the Sage Duban,” Duban’s role as

a fantastic-marvelous head who voices an anti-oppression theme, and the parodic magician

persona who introduces him to the audience as an individual rather than a servant, all transform

Stodare’s colonialist illusion “The Sphinx” (1865) into the postcolonialist adaptation “The Sage

Duban” (2009). I still consider this adaptation to be a short illusion play in-development and one

that, to reiterate the sentiment of T.S. Eliot’s manifesto for writing poetry, is still experimenting

with the most productive ways to rediscover and to build upon magic’s past while also forcing its

illusions into dialogue with other art forms in new and challenging ways. Questioning the

cultural functions and the social histories of those illusions from the nineteenth century that the

West celebrates, is one step towards heightening the self-critical revolution that magic, like
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poetry, music, fiction, and all other arts, requires to respond to the cultural and political realities

of today.

4 Thoughts on Magic Adaptation: A Call for Critical Imaginative

Geographies and Writerly Spectators
This chapter has been an exploration of reception and adaptation in practice. It began

with an analysis of the dramaturgical research of “The Sphinx,” which “The Sage Duban”

adaptation team required to pragmatically reconstruct both the props and the deceptive

choreography of Stodare’s optical illusion. These details, gleaned from written archives and

embodied repertoires, are crucial for ensuring the proper perceptual reception of the illusion’s

magic within the mind of spectators. The cultural significance and interpretive meanings of those

perceptions, however, are of even greater importance. Therefore, a socio-historic analysis of

“The Sphinx” within the context of its performance venue — Egyptian Hall — is literally the

center of this discussion. The history of colonialist collection at the venue and the

overwhelmingly popular reception of “The Sphinx” by London audiences function as a

prefiguring of the British empire’s subsequent conquest of Egypt. Finally, “The Sage Duban”

adaptation has been read as a postcolonial critique and an aesthetic response to what is currently

known about Stodare’s illusion and its presentation. This concluding, post-production analysis is

a record of our faithful-yet-free adaptation experiment and its implications for future adaptations.

This discussion, without my initially realizing it, is also an argument for magic

adaptations which create critical imaginative geographies and writerly spectators. “The Sage

Duban” project, in this sense, contributes to an early personal adaptation philosophy that engages

with the magic of the foreign other through celebration and humanistic exploration of the

unknown rather than a colonialist domination or conquest of it. Future adaptations must be even
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more radical and must create critical imaginative geographies within the minds of spectators

instead of naive ones. Performances in which other foreign magic rituals, ones which may not

resemble Western magic shows whatsoever, need to be placed into thoughtful dialogue with

colonial history and the clash of various cultural conceptions of magic. Such performances call

for a more experimental, avant-garde and Brechtian approach. This approach must mystify its

audiences while also forcing them to question the cultural mythologies and ideological

assumptions of their local community’s magic traditions. In short, the creation of critical

imaginative geographies requires the participation of engaged, writerly and critical spectators.
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Epilogue
and Manifesto
This study of adaptation and reception began in the cave of the magician Alicandre and

with a mystical phrase spoken by his newly enfranchised Amanuensis: “Not in this life, but in

the next.” These words, and the scene from which they come in Kushner’s The Illusion, have

provided one of the guiding metaphors for our conceptual journey throughout these pages: the

process of reincarnation. The theoretical underpinnings of this project came from investigating

the deaths of powerful concepts in reader-response, rediscovering their existence in other fields

such as intertextual studies, and applying them in modified forms to the emerging field of

performance studies.

The desire to analyze the author as a magician who employs principles of deception

arose, not surprisingly perhaps, from the ineffable short stories written by Jorge Luis Borges.

Without his penchant for mysticism, for mystery and for impossible objects, I am not convinced

that that unique tradition known as fantastic literature would ever have revealed itself to me as

the nearest literary equivalent to experiencing great magic performed live. With this Borgesian

quality of magic’s reality-slippage aesthetic in mind, the metaphor of reincarnation guided a few

cross-cultural and cross-media comparisons of darker adaptations in the work of Dahl,

Hitchcock, Almodóvar, Mamet and Jay. Analyzing various versions of the “Lamb to the

Slaughter” murder mystery and “The Flue” confidence trick as different incarnations of specific

source texts led to my argument that visual storytelling media nearly always produce critical

spectators. This is true even when the object of study recorded by the camera is the usually

closed text of an illicit crime such as a short con.

Finally, the practical challenges of reconstructing “The Sphinx” stage illusion and

adapting its magic to a more postcolonial and critical narrative, “The Tale of King Yunan and the
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Sage Duban,” were overcome by thinking through the process of culturally informed

performance adaptation as a form of reincarnation too. In that experiment, the pragmatic

question of how to give the dramatic reanimation of a magic relic meaning onstage led to more

profound questions about the socio-historical functions of the illusion in question. The challenge

of delving into the complex history of Egyptian Hall as a colonial, multi-modal performance

venue breathed new life into my personal philosophy of magic adaptation. As a result, my

current practice-based research as a performance studies scholar and a magician calls for

adaptations of illusions that insist upon the creation of critical imaginative geographies and

writerly spectators.

But what is the future of this work? Another adaptation mantra, sourced from Kenneth

Burke’s A Grammar of Motives, comes to mind as a fitting answer: “The scene contains the act”

(3). This concise statement made by a literary theorist and philosopher came to me first as a

lesson in dramatic adaptation from one of my magic mentors, David Ben. It came to his attention

through discussions and magical collaborations with Teller. To paraphrase Burke’s original use,

this motto means that a scene — a setting or background — determines the act: the action that

should occur in said scene (3). He illustrates this definition with an allusion to a scene in which

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is tempted to follow his Father’s ghost. The Prince’s companions warn

him not to do so, because they worry that the spirit may lead Hamlet to the dark edge of a cliff

and that such an ominous setting might influence him to commit suicide. The suggestion is that

desperate scenes motivate desperate acts.

For the magician, the basic lesson of “the scene contains the act” is one of listening to a

given performance environment to determine what materials and effects might organically be

performed in that place. A basic example of this in practice is Robert-Houdin’s effect of

magically producing a golden coin from inside a bread roll to impress one’s hosts at the
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nineteenth-century dinner table in France (510-512). As he states in his description, this piece is

adapted from the tradition of itinerant conjurors performing magic in the shops of a town to

generate interest in their larger, public performances there. The performer would visit a bakery,

buy a roll or a pastry and produce a gold coin from it. He would then excitedly buy another item,

produce a gold coin from that and continue the feat until the curiosity of those present in the shop

became frenzied. Settings in which a piece of bread is naturally present as part of an

environment’s mise-en-scène become proper scenes for the magical act “La pièce d’or dans un

petit pain” (“The Golden Coin in Dinner Roll”).

A performance of meta-magic created by Penn and Teller for a 1986 broadcast of

Saturday Night Live (SNL hereafter) pushes this adaptation principle of “the scene contains the

act” to another level — the level of understanding newer media settings and the new kinds of

acts made possible by such storytelling technology. In a brief guest appearance that aired at a

time when televised specials would make announcements insisting that their cameras would not

cut away or rely on editing during a magic effect, Penn and Teller appear side-by-side and facing

the camera in a medium-long shot. Penn, who stands behind the duo’s magic table, asks the SNL

studio audience to let viewers at home know that he and Teller are not using any special editing,

blue screens or projections in their performance by shouting “Yeah!” whenever he asks them

“Are we live?” He wants to ensure that spectators outside of the studio know that what they are

seeing on screen is precisely what is being done in person. Teller begins the magic by causing a

card to rise out of a deck. Then, the entire pack levitates one card at a time from his right hand to

his left hand waiting above. A series of inexplicable effects follows, which are presented as

parodies of the day’s most successful magicians. Teller vanishes a tiny jet, a gift-shop-sized

statue of liberty and a miniature Empire State building to lampoon David Copperfield’s

contemporary, large-scale illusions. They then make fun of Harry Blackstone Jr.’s preferences by
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performing downright baffling versions of “The Dancing Handkerchief” and “The Floating Light

Bulb.” The last star to be mocked is Doug Henning. Teller brings out a Rainbow Bright doll to

represent one of Henning’s flower-child stage assistants. The doll impossibly floats up in a pose

reminiscent of Robert-Houdin’s “La Suspension éthéréenne” (“Ethereal Suspension”) (331).

Teller then picks up a small metal hoop, places it above the doll’s head and we watch as it rises

straight up towards the ceiling and out of the camera’s frame.

As Penn delivers the final line “We are Penn and Teller. No longer comedy magicians,

but rather real magicians,” the camera continues its single long take and tracks backwards into

the studio audience space to reveal the act’s modus-operandi: the two magicians have been

hanging upside down for the entire routine. There is a moment of pure reality-slippage along

with a Brechtian pulling-back of the curtain as the camera operator flips the device 180 degrees

to finally show viewers at home the perspective the live studio audience has had throughout the

performance. Suddenly, we are looking at the scene with the same kind of skeptical eyes that

Galileo used to re-evaluate his assumptions about gravity while watching a swinging chandelier.

Penn and Teller continue to “levitate” cards, light bulbs and other props with the aid of gravity

for a few moments to emphasize this revelation before unstrapping their feet from a metal

rigging grid and lowering themselves to the stage.

All within its final few seconds, this six-minute, avant-garde magic act transforms its

viewing audience from passive, naive spectators into active, critical ones who are forced to

ponder the rarified performance environment of Saturday Night Live as well as gravity itself. It

might be argued that those watching from home have the most complete reception experience.

For they are first able to enjoy the readerly plaisir (“pleasure”) of the magical levitations,

vanishes and animations before being left with the writerly jouissance (“bliss”) of pondering

how masterful control of mise-en-scène, acting and technology have the power to completely
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conceal and thereby defamiliarize gravity. However, I would argue that those in the live studio

audience are equally privileged double-model spectators during this performance. The writerly,

meta-view of Penn and Teller performing upside down only a short distance from them is

certainly their primary level of receiving the magic created. This proximity allows them a much

greater amount of time to reflect upon the equally interesting mystery of how 100 little details

are being managed by the pair to create the illusion of everyday naturalness, while

uncomfortably hanging by their feet. How does the cup that Penn seems to be drinking water

from stick to the table? How long did they have to train to memorize this choreography from an

upside down position without having their movements look like those of astronauts afloat in

space? Furthermore, these spectators are free to watch the show from the perspective of those

viewing it from home thanks to monitors placed throughout the studio audience. These spectators

are given the agency to shuttle between a naive or a critical reception experience at any point.

In short, Penn and Teller’s “Upside Down” is an example of magicians experimenting in

an avant-garde manner with Burke’s statement “the scene contains the act” to create highly

inventive adaptations of previously familiar magic effects. Their performance piece does this by

taking advantage of the meta-, dual-audience nature of SNL’s performing environment. The pair

combines their alternative Vaudeville training in breaking the fourth wall. Penn Jillette began his

career as a juggler, clown and fire eater; Teller began as a professional street magician. As a

magic team, both listen to the scene of SNL to create an appropriate act. Because they are

comedy magicians who break the traditional one-man-magic-show mold, because they already

fully understand the possibilities of breaking the fourth wall, and because they are bold enough

to carefully premeditate the execution of an experiment related directly to the technological

mediation environment of SNL, they are able to generate faithful yet free adaptations of the

magic effects they perform upside down.

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For these reasons, the “scene contains the act” is the current refrain of my work as it

strives to create historically informed, theoretically challenging and avant-garde magic.

Following “The Sage Duban” project, I have experimented much more widely with unusual

performance scenes to create unique magic adaptations. This led to a collaboration with

architects and artists at a gallery in Toronto called New Gendai workstation. There, I completed

my first piece of performance art magic, titled “Exits and Entrances,” with architect and

improvisational musician Marcin Kedzior. Since the scene of the gallery was a self-reflexive

meditation on the process of constructing an art gallery, I chose to magically enter and exit the

gallery by penetrating one of its walls with my body. This action produced a hole, a kind of

portal that laid bare the gallery’s interior layers. Out of the ensuing hole, objects representing the

building’s previous lives were produced: a pull of yarn to symbolize when it was a tailor’s shop,

a decaying VHS tape from its time as a video shop, a dusty beer bottle from its existence as a bar

and more.

In 2011, I became the magic consultant and a co-founder of the experimental

performance troupe Ars Mechanica. Instead of adapting magic to an art gallery space, this role

has presented me with the challenge of adapting stage illusions to several theatre environments.

In three diffeent locations we performed a show based on Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of

the telephone and his relationships with his deaf mother and wife. In addition to the obstacles of

devising stage magic effects that expressed the paradox of communication, this kind of

adaptation work has taught me how to teach non-magicians the necessary choreography,

naturalness and sleight-of-hand required to perform magic onstage. As this work on what became

the Summerworks 2013 production of Show and Tell Alexander Bell in Toronto was being

completed, Marcin Kedzior and I were collaborating once again to create an experimental magic

adaptation based on the work of John Cage.

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Cage, as evidenced by the pervasive influence of his meta-musical piece “4’33”” in

which a composition of silence turns the environment where it is performed into the sound of the

composition itself, is an excellent example of how searching for new scenes leads to the creation

of previously unimagined acts. This search is the lifeblood of successfully free yet faithful

adaptations. “Magic Sounds” is the name of the performance that I created in collaboration with

Kedzior who played the roles of musician, dancer and architect as we developed our experiment

inspired by Cage’s work. We began by carefully rereading Cage’s Silence and many of his other

writings roughly one year in advance of performing “Magic Sounds” at The Future of Cage

Credo conference held the 25th-28th of October 2012 in Toronto. The basic goal of the

performance was to see what kind of magic a musician would perform and what kind of music a

magician would make. One part of that performance whose spirit was particularly infused with

the radical tendencies of John Cage’s writings was simply called “Manifesto.” Playing in the

creative scene of Cage’s oeuvre resulted quite naturally in the act of writing a manifesto for

magic.

The writing of “Manifesto” became infused with a greater number of magic effects and

its title was changed to “Experimental Magic Manifesto 1.0” on the occasion of its next

presentation at the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2013 meeting. It transformed

again to become “Experimental Magic Manifesto 2.0” for its adaptation to Stanford’s Prosser

Theater at the nineteenth annual Performance Studies International (PSI) symposium in June

2013. The title of the manifesto, and its parodic appropriation of the numbering system used by

software designers, is only one aspect of its intentionally incomplete nature. The magic effects

performed using the very material pages upon which the manifesto is written become more

expressive of those pages’ content with each of its new lives. Each of these incarnations

constituted a new act performed within the context of a new scene. Like all writing and
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performing, a composition is never complete. Some give better illusions of completeness than

others. Even when a piece of text is literally set in stone it is still modified by subsequent writers,

readers and environmental changes. In other words, a composition is never really dead and this is

a good thing.

As Cage’s work teaches us, the specific site of a performance —its walls, its seats, its

creaky door, the hum of its air conditioning system and above all the living presence of its

spectators — is a new scene, a new setting, a new form. As such, that specific setting demands

new acts, new actions and new content. We must choose the less obvious, the underexplored

scenes, the thus far overlooked cultural settings if we wish to discover and develop new acts. For

these reasons, certain lines in “Experimental Magic Manifesto 2.0” are left blank. For these

reasons, Marcin Kedzior is forced to discover the percussive possibilities of a new performance

space each time the manifesto is enacted. For these reasons, I cannot predict what the actual site

or the word-for-word script of “Experimental Magic Manifesto 3.0” will be. Nevertheless, I can

guarantee that it will be built upon the foundation of the adaptation philosophy developed as a

result of this dissertation. I am also sure that with each performance the manifesto will arrive one

step closer to materializing the interdisciplinary school of avant-garde performance magic that it

imagines. What follows is a script of that text’s most current performance — an imbrication of

theory and practice. The praxis of magic has an ethical responsibility to create a community

where the magician and the spectator are equally powerful:

Experimental Magic Manifesto 2.0

[ ] = setting, actions or tech cues | _______ = audience participation | bold = magic effect

[A music stand at stage-left is turned so that it faces the audience. On this stand sits the
magician’s smartphone, which receives a call from the musician’s phone. The smartphone on the
stand is placed on speaker mode. A stand-up microphone near it is angled to pick up and amplify
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whatever sounds it makes (including feedback). The musician then moves freely throughout the
performance space to rattle his phone as a percussion instrument against the floors, walls,
chairs and spectators. If someone coughs into the phone held by the musician, that cough is
transmitted to the smartphone on the stand and is played through its speakerphone. This sound,
thanks to the microphone, is then broadcast over the theater’s PA system. The effect is an echoic,
otherworldly one. Sometimes it sounds like a megaphone. This arrangement allows the musician
to literally play the room and its spectators as a percussive surface during the magician’s
reading of the manifesto.]

[Begin speakerphone call]

[Musician begins to play the space between performers and the audience]

Magician: Experimental Magic Manifesto 2.0

A phone call is always at least a doubling.

Percussion is Revolution.

Let’s play a game of association:

I say the word “magic.” The first word that you think of is:

[Musician holds phone to become a microphone]

- _______

s/he said the word “_______.” You thought of the word:

- ___________

[This is repeated for each spectator in the room]

We are writing a manifesto for experimental magic.

The manifesto is a radical call to arms, a violent sweeping away of what came before, a
disturbing, often vulgar, often sacrilegious, always shocking and always revolutionary vision of
an art’s future that calls a new group, a new philosophy and a new artistic practice into being.

Magicians will say that we are not performing magic.

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Take a look at the insane, polarizing and also brilliant manifestos written by the Dadaists, the
Surrealists, the Futurists, the Situationists, Fluxus, Antonin Artaud, the authors of Cahiers du
cinéma and so many other fearless and even downright reckless fringe groups whose efforts have
had a lasting influence on the history of art and culture.

[Magician crumples up the first page of the manifesto]

Though these groups initially sprang from the vision of one or a handful of individuals boldly
testing the limits of a particular art, they grew into vibrant philosophies and international avant-
garde movements that quickly exceeded any single artistic discipline.

[Magician turns the first page of the manifesto into a fireball and tosses it towards the audience
on the word “risk”]

Risk is part of their beauty.

They are the shooting stars of incendiary writing.

Percussion, c’est la révolution.

So where are the manifestos written on magic as a performing art?

We cannot seem to find them. North America is a desert into which magic is slowly sinking.

Wandering alone in a blasted, disorienting territory,

[A lone and reverberating whistling effect is created by both the musician and the magician]

Drowning somewhere in Death Valley,

with a broken compass and an empty canteen.

Even so, we see a stream flowing that cannot be dammed.

We see the mirage of an oasis that is not a mirage at all.

Language turns the mirage into then, the oasis into now.

Now, then.

We are writing a manifesto for experimental magic.

We have some demands:

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First, we demand the death of the magician.

[Magician stabs the second page of the manifesto to the wall of the performance space]

Let him self-decapitate.

By this we mean the death of the magician as singular raving ego.

This is the death of the magician as Las Vegas icon, the death of what Gob in Arrested
Development represents and the death of what Jack in Robert Lepage’s Spades is: narcissism and
the spectacular greed of capitalism.

We are tired of every show being a mirror for the reproduction of celebrity — we want to look
into mirrors and not meet ourselves.

We want to meet difference and other worlds,

worlds where we expect ourselves.

We choose the multitude.

The audience is always more important than the magician, because magic only ever truly exists
within the minds of the spectators.

Let us celebrate that: the spectator as magician and the magician as humble custodian of the
impossible.

[whispered] Percussion is revolution

Second, we demand the death of the magic trick.

The phrase “magic trick” is unhealthy.

It points to a negative magician/spectator relationship in which the magician tricks the spectator
with a certain amount of malevolence. This is baggage from the Western history of cardsharping,
advantage play and the victim-oriented language of Erdnase.

“Magic effects” will always be more powerful than “magic tricks.”

When someone asks “Trick or treat?” Which do you choose?

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[Pause]

Children know the answer.

What we want are imaginary gardens with real toads in them.

[A flower is projected onto the third page of the manifesto]

What we want are fields of Coleridge’s flowers from paradise . . .

[Magician produces a real flower to replace its digital projection]

. . . plucked from our dreams,

[Magician smells the flower]

and planted in reality.

[Magician hands the fresh flower to the audience]

So we prefer to spend our lives performing what Spanish and Latin American magicians call
juegos de magia.

In Spanish, one learns to play magic games; not magic tricks.

[Musician kicks the phone, as if it were a soccer ball, and passes it to the magician]

Children are game experts. They are exceptional magic consultants. They understand how
improvisation mingles with constant wonder and the subversion of expectations.

The playful,

[One last soccer-ball-like pass of the phone is made]

clown-infused magic philosophy of Juan Tamariz and the ethereal writings of magia ficcional by
Gabi Pareras allow us to experience three transformations of spirit:

O, how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel a lion; and the lion, finally, a child.

Chas!!!
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We are finally children.

Let us create unexpected magic words like them,

or at least breathe life into the ancient, forgotten ones.

An abracadabra is an abracadabra is an abracadabra. Gertrude Stein said that.

“Spiriti miei, infernali obbedite!”

Bosco said that.

“__________” [Insert a word generated by the audience’s earlier free association],

We said that.

La percusión es la revolución

Third, we demand the death of secrets.

The death of secrets is the birth of sharing and experimentation with alternative performance
techniques.

North American magicians have acquired the distasteful habit of heavily commodifying and
dying with their secrets.

They turn the tiniest sleight-of-hand techniques and the tiniest gimmicks into secrets and then
market them at the wholesale and retail levels in the magic industry. This industry is mostly
funded by magic aficionados who will never perform magic in front of the public. They are toy
train collectors, buying toy trains.

This, along with the limitations that come with corporate “gigs” as the main venue option for
full-time professional magicians, has turned the art in upon itself. The art has become the Villa
Straylight in Gibson’s Neuromancer — a labyrinth of incestuous corporate oligopolies.

And so magic struggles to build bridges to the outside. It struggles to experiment with forms of
ordering. It struggles to intervene in other domains. It struggles to construct the bridges
necessary for a robust avant-garde, for a true magic multitude.

Even so, we see these new bridges rising now. We are here to increase the struggle. We are here
to help magic escape from its self-imposed and hackneyed straightjackets.
 258

Therefore, we demand the active construction of interdisciplinary schools where the secrets of
magic are openly shared with the techniques of object manipulation,

[Magician performs object manipulation with the final page of the manifesto]

acting, clown, bouffon, puppetry, circus, visual arts, filmmaking, new media, digital technology
and on . . . and on . . . and on . . .

We want the kinds of institutions, spaces, and resources that made the experimental
collaborations of John Cage and Merce Cunningham possible.
The first questions are ones of space.
The structural incantations that reveal previously hidden rooms.
Beyond the history, materials and social programming of space;
Toward the entanglement of thought and action in space.
The goal is to make space speak.
We feed and furnish it,
We lay mines into its walls of rock,
When they detonate,
geysers and bouquets of stone erupt to shake us awake.

This is the new magic: the multitude, the effect.

This is the new magic: vibrating bodies creating vibrating fields of thought,

[Marcin makes the elbow of a spectator sing through the telephone]

the use of everything that drifts within range to aid and multiply us.
This is the new magic: revealing ourselves and the world as inherently unmeasurable, despite so
many attempts to flatten life.
This is the new magic: a constant, improvisational grappling with the materials and social
realities to which our bridges lead.
This is the potion we drink to awake from the Sleeping-Beauty haze of Benjamin’s dreaming
collective.

Percussion is revolution

[Magician holds up the final page of the manifesto]

We are writing the manifesto.

[Magician stands on chair]

 259

We are building the schools.

[The lights dim and an image of Borges’ Aleph appears on the page]

We are children,

[The page levitates upwards]

at play in the dream-world-made-real where we will find magic’s avant-garde.

[Blackout]
 260

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