Sunday, December 26, 2004
The Metamorphosis: American Stage Magic, 1890-1930
When he began his career as a stage magician and escapist, Hungarian-born Erich Weiss took the stage name of his idol, Robert-Houdin, the world's most famous magician, who had broken away from the traditional Merlin-esque costume of starry robes and invented the iconic image of the magician in modern formal wear. Hungarian Erich Weiss was transformed into the Italian-by-way-of-French Harry Houdini, who travelled the world debunking spiritualism and superstition and dazzling audiences with his greatest illusion, The Metamorphosis. Over the next forty years, two other men would follow his lead in reinventing their ethnic identity before donning the coat and tails of the stage magician: Anglo-American William Robinson adopted Chinese dress and makeup as Chung Ling Soo, in homage to the great Chinese magician Ching Ling Foo, a contemporary of Houdini's; and African-American Benjamin Rucker took on the name of his magician mentor Prince Herman, invented a Zulu medicine-man origin for himself, and performed for racially-mixed audiences in Harlem as Black Herman.
Meanwhile, waves of immigrants were reinventing themselves as American all over the country, and migration from the countryside to the cities was erasing longstanding cultural and regional distinctions. Racial originalism, the theory that each of the "races" of humanity was created independently, was slowly being debunked by evolutionary theory. The myth of the Wild West was falling apart, propped up by aging Old West shows, and the last sparks of the Native American way of life went out after the failure of the Ghost Dance. Modernism was sweeping through every facet of American life, transforming everything about how people lived and how they regarded themselves. The Metamorphosis.
There's a great novel here, or a play, or an epic poem, but I'm not going to write it. Magic, performance, identity, race, immigration, ghosts, superstition, spiritualism, science, the industrial revolution, the labor movement, Manifest Destiny, carnivals, museums of curiosities, phrenology, urban squalor, Houdini, William James, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Geronimo, H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, H.P. Blavatsky, and P.T. Barnum. Somebody ought to get on it.
Sources:
Meanwhile, waves of immigrants were reinventing themselves as American all over the country, and migration from the countryside to the cities was erasing longstanding cultural and regional distinctions. Racial originalism, the theory that each of the "races" of humanity was created independently, was slowly being debunked by evolutionary theory. The myth of the Wild West was falling apart, propped up by aging Old West shows, and the last sparks of the Native American way of life went out after the failure of the Ghost Dance. Modernism was sweeping through every facet of American life, transforming everything about how people lived and how they regarded themselves. The Metamorphosis.
There's a great novel here, or a play, or an epic poem, but I'm not going to write it. Magic, performance, identity, race, immigration, ghosts, superstition, spiritualism, science, the industrial revolution, the labor movement, Manifest Destiny, carnivals, museums of curiosities, phrenology, urban squalor, Houdini, William James, "Buffalo Bill" Cody, Geronimo, H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, H.P. Blavatsky, and P.T. Barnum. Somebody ought to get on it.
Sources:
- World of Wonders by Robertson Davies: stage magic and carnival life
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon: escapism and immigration
- The Metaphysical Club by Louis Menand: modernism, originalism, spiritualism, legal science
- Kung Fu, the television series: the exile of Kwai Chang Cain echoes Judeo-Christian legends of Caine and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, and also deals with new cultural collisions in almost every action-packed episode
- Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx: sacrifice of ethnic identity, invention of the American self
- Carnivale, the television series: I'm waiting for the first season on DVD so I can get a fix of early-1900's supernatural carnival action
- The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson: Buffalo Bill, serial killers, regional and ethnic identity as performance at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. A real page-turner, if you can stomach historical fiction masquerading as history
- Cremaster 2, directed by Matthew Barney: a performance of Houdini's Metamorphosis parallels the rituals surrounding the mythologized execution of Gary Gilmore in the film
