Finding the Magic in Magic

Why would someone want to see a magic trick? There’s a simple question. A magician will answer, applying his own zeal, ‘because it’s so cool.’

No, it isn’t.

That is, your average person doesn’t think magic is cool. People on the street class magic tricks on about the same entertainment level with long elevator rides. Oh god, they cringe, not a bloody magician!

Why don’t they like magicians?

To most, the magician is perceived of as a show-off. In he comes, to a place where everyone is having a lovely time, announcing, ‘I would now like to interrupt your interesting conversations in order to drool coins from my mouth and tuck colourful handkerchiefs into my fist. I also have some corny one-liners and off-colour insults that wouldn’t amuse a baboon. Look at me, now.’

You know it’s true.

The theatrical magician must, therefore, always begin with an uphill climb. The audience groans at the very thought of him, and he must win them over with an engaging personality (most important!), a well-conceived routine or act, and some effects that are truly effective. If he succeeds in this, his audience will enjoy the experience and consider him to be a cut above the run-of-the-mill magician. In essence, he wins them over to his performance but not to the art of magic. And, so, the next magician will have to make that same uphill climb.

A magician may avoid that climb altogether with the use of defamiliarity. If the audience does not at once recognize the performer as a magician, they are open to being entertained as there is no coin drooling, no look-at-me. Instead, this promises to be a fascinating examination of some engaging artifact. This guy doesn’t appear to be a magician. He is something else. A storyteller, perhaps?

Defamiliarization is what Freud did in his consulting room. You may be uncomfortable talking to the doctor, but Freud had a collection of antique figurines on his desk. He would ask you to pick one out and address your concerns to the one that made you feel most comfortable. Of course, the doctor listened in.

In the same way, the performance deflects all of the spectator’s wariness about magicians onto an interesting curio. Because the item—or the story, or the stage setting, or even the costume—is something the spectator takes pleasure in considering, and because the tale surrounding it is engaging, the magic part of the presentation sneaks in through the back door (psychologically speaking), and the spectator is blind-sided by an effect—startled by the unexpected.

The Russian school of formalism called it ostranenie, and it is the attempt in literature to make the familiar appear strange and the common uncommon. ‘Habit is the enemy of art’ cry the Russians, quite correctly. Words become poetry when they force us to see and experience what we otherwise only accept. 

Thus it is with magic.

The audience accepts that a magician will attempt to deceive them with a trick. When the magician succeeds, he has done nothing beyond the expected and the accepted, and it is therefore not particularly noteworthy or entertaining. When he fails, however, he is jeered because he doesn’t rise to what is socially expected of him.

When, however, the magician comes clothed in the weeds of the storyteller, the audience no longer knows what to expect. They accept that a storyteller will enchant them with words, and this is what they begin to expect. The experience is thereby defamiliarized.

This is not a magic trick, they convince themselves, and so they come to perceive this magic with new eyes: eyes with which they are suddenly forced to see, and emotions that compel them to experience the moment beyond their generally accepted expectations.

Lulled into the belief that they are experiencing a real moment, they accept those ‘realities’ of the storyteller and are suddenly and unexpectedly startled by the now-defamiliarized experience of the concealed magic within the story.

The story, therefore, must be worth the hearing; only then can the magic become magical.