Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (review)

Michael Mangan’s Performing Dark Arts is an ambitious attempt to synthesize approximately 4,000 years of magic history, from the decapitation and restoration of a waterfowl described on the ancient Egyptian Westcar papyrus to the presentday illusions of David Blaine. Organized more or less chronologically, the ten chapters of the book include discussions of the work of a number of notable conjurors—Hocus Pocus (the pseudonym of William Vincent), Jean Eugéne Robert-Houdin, Georges Méliès, Harry Houdini, and Blaine–—and readings of several key books about magic from the sixteenth century to the present. Mangan, an accomplished playwright and theatre director, a Shakespeare scholar, and the author of a 2002 book about theatre and masculinity, leads the reader on a whirlwind tour through magic history and beyond, into a cabinet of historical curiosities (chess-playing automatons, pigs that can spell, women sawed in half, spoons bent by psychic energy) that together seek to interrogate the cultural meanings of conjuring across history.

As the title suggests, Performing Dark Arts is fundamentally concerned with issues of performance, a focus that sets it apart from previous critical studies of conjuring and makes for a unique contribution to a growing corpus of scholarship on entertainment magic. This focus raises methodological challenges, because of the ephemeral nature of performance and the dearth of documentary or visual evidence left by conjurors prior to the flourishing of “modern magic” during the mid-nineteenth century. Mangan addresses this challenge by turning to the concept of “performative writing,” which he describes as “writing which functions in a performative manner, in an area between the creative and the critical” (xx). Positing that texts can be understood as acts of performance, Mangan treats books like Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), Robert-Houdin’s Les Secrets de la prestidigitation et de la magie (1868), and Houdini’s Magic Made Easy (1898) as valuable evidence of how magic was defined in different epochs.

Refusing to view conjuring and the occult as mutually exclusive—or as a dialectical pair—Mangan points out that conjurors perform “highly ritualized routines which both invoke and also disavow the supposition of supernatural influence” (17), insisting that entertainment magic and “efficacious magic” (shamanism, witchcraft, spiritualism) always form a “braid” (39). By unraveling the strands of this cultural braid as it was configured in different contexts, the book traces the ways that conjurors and their ilk confronted fundamental “beliefs about the world” (ix) across the centuries. For Mangan, conjuring’s inherent liminality and its tendency to breach (or threaten to breach) boundaries make it a uniquely interesting—if highly complex—index to changes in societal attitudes.

As a historical argument, the book is strongest when linking specific conjuring tricks to broad cultural and historical shifts. Mangan makes this link effectively in chapter 4, juxtaposing seventeenth-century representations of the conjuror’s transformations with England’s transformation from a feudalist to a capitalist economy. This discussion is followed by an insightful analysis of the 1749 Bottle-Conjuror episode, in which a conjuror who had been billed as being able to get inside of a wine bottle never appeared, leading the outraged London audience to trash the theatre. The perpetrator of the hoax was never identified, but the episode garnered wide public attention, which Mangan explains as a product of economic uncertainties plaguing England in the wake of the collapse of the South Sea Company. In another interesting chapter, Mangan discusses performing animals and trick automatons as modes of entertainment that negotiated “the boundaries of what it means to be human” (76) during the eighteenth century.

The book falters, however, when Mangan comes to cinema and the growing role of the media in magic. The invention of cinema marked a turning point in the history of conjuring: conjurors like Méliès, David Devant, and others (who began making and showing films almost immediately) understood moving pictures as a...