Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (review)
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Max Weber insisted that, for moderns, enchantment is predicated on “intellectual sacrifice.” Landy and Saler disagree. The essays they have gathered together investigate experiences of enchantment that occur not in spite of modern disenchantment but by means of it. Building on the work of Simon During, Landy shows how Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin’s magical demonstrations were designed to debunk sorcery, even as they extended opportunities for “lucid self-delusion”; Landy goes on to draw connections between such “secular magic” and the poetic practice of Stéphane Mallarmé. The relationship of aesthetic experience to states of suspended disbelief receives equally suggestive treatment from Nicholas Paige, who explores the gothic and the fantastic as testing grounds “for a dramatic redefinition of the relation of reality to the imagination.” Whether Weber would recognize all of the experiences discussed in this collection as varieties of enchantment is debatable; but in testing the boundaries of the category, the writers offer provocative and often brilliant meditations on the possibilities of secular modernity.
Joanna Picciotto, associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England
