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  • Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic
  • Fred Nadis (bio)
Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic. By Simon During. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. x+336.

This volume traces the cultural history of stage magic, or "secular magic," from its elite origins in natural magic in the Renaissance to the emergence of a "magic assemblage" in eighteenth-century Europe and on to the onset of mass entertainment in the twentieth century. Simon During suggests [End Page 895] that over the centuries secular magic and its technologies have continued to play cat and mouse with Enlightenment philosophy, ambiguously confirming rationality while offering illusions of its opposite.

During traces the core of the stage magic act to Renaissance-era natural magicians, who had left behind a purely magic worldview centered on "foul spirits" yet retained their interest in vitalist theories of nature and in technologies such as automata and mirrors that could replicate "strange marvels." After the scientific revolution, the natural magic tradition lived on in rational entertainments that combined science with special effects and in the many texts that offered mixes of math puzzles, magic tricks, and science demonstrations. In this same era, the picaresque "jugglers" and hawkers of nostrums and lotteries who populated church festivals and fairs made a bid for respectability in theater. In European theaters, such secular magicians offered stage magic in the guise of "natural philosophers" and broke with their raffish past by lecturing on confidence games and gambling cheats.

Around such performers as Isaac Fawkes of early-eighteenth-century England, During argues, a "magic assemblage" emerged. With the magician at its center, often serving as the show's producer, the assemblage encompassed much of what we would now call show business. It incorporated not only such "deceptive" entertainments as optical illusions, automata, magic-lantern shows, "phantasmagorias," ventriloquism, sleight of hand, puppetry, hydraulics displays, and juggling but also the feigned magic of mind reading and hypnosis and such "reality acts" as trained animals, feats of strength, posture mastery, balloon ascensions, and "joy rides."

In addition to a detailed history of the emergence of stage magic and allied entertainment forms in London—research building on that of Richard Altick in The Shows of London (1978)—During argues that nineteenth-century authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, E. T. A. Hoffman, and, later, Raymond Roussel transferred the aesthetic of secular magic to literature. He insists that the artificial marvels these authors purveyed, like those of their contemporaries on stage, did not compensate for the loss of real magic but catered to a new ironic sensibility. He then examines how the fading magic assemblage reassembled in early film—in this case building on Erik Barnouw's thesis in the Magician and the Cinema (1981).

Expanding the cultural and intellectual dimensions of these earlier histories, During inspects elite responses to the culture of the image that new media such as the stereoscope, photograph, kaleidoscope, and magic lantern fostered. Such past critiques relied on the Spinozist premise that new optical devices should be used to moral purposes, that is, to reveal the presence of the divine in nature and not to foster illusions, inflame the imagination, or stupefy. During argues that many current cultural studies academics follow this same Spinozist tendency, albeit adding Foucault's premise that the "rational" devices of the Enlightenment further "subjected" the public. Noting that Jonathon Crary in his Techniques of the [End Page 896] Observer (1990) willfully left the magic lantern out of his account of optical media, During argues that intellectuals still do not recognize that the game of "masking" and "disclosure" basic to the magic assemblage has provided a street-level commentary on the Enlightenment's tendency to reveal and hide power relations.

This argument, however, unmasks During's allegiances as well, as he has overlooked that American scholars of P. T. Barnum beginning with Neil Harris in Humbug! The Art of P. T. Barnum (1973) have stressed Barnum's use of an "operational aesthetic"—that is, an unspoken contract with the public that the showman's impostures and subsequent disclosures would wise them up to the machinations of power and commerce. Likewise, while During's historical excavation...

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