Magical Arts

I saw, too, that David Blaine is absolutely sincere in his belief that the way forward for a young magician lies not in mastering the tricks but in mastering the mind of the modern age, with its relentless appetite for speed and for the sensational-dressed-as-the-real. And I thought I sensed in Swiss the urge to say what all of us would like to say—that traditions are not just encumbrances, that a novel is not news, that an essay is a different thing from an Internet rant, that techniques are the probity and ethic of magic, the real work. The crafts that we have mastered are, in part, the tricks that we have learned, and though we know how much knowledge the tricks enfold, still, tricks is what they are. I felt for Jamy, and for us, and for the boy caught between.

f all the arguments that can preoccupy the mindful magician, the most important involves what is called the Too Perfect theory. Jamy Ian Swiss has written about it often. Presaged by Vernon himself, and formalized by the illusionist Rick Johnsson in a 1971 article, the Too Perfect theory says, basically, that any trick that simply astounds will give itself away. If, for instance, a magician smokes a cigarette and then makes it pass through an ordinary quarter, the only reasonable explanation is that it isn’t an ordinary quarter; the spectator will immediately know that it’s a trick quarter, with a hinge.

What makes a trick work is not the inherent astoundingness of its effect but the magician’s ability to suggest any number of possible explanations, none of them conclusive, and none of them quite obvious. As the law professor and magician Christopher Hanna has noted, two of the best ways of making a too perfect trick work are “reducing the claim” and “raising the proof.” Reducing the claim means roughing up the illusion so that the spectator isn’t even sure she saw one—bringing the cigarette in and out of the coin so quickly that the viewer doesn’t know if the trick is in the coin or in her eyes. Raising the proof is more demanding. Derek Dingle, a famous closeup man, adjusted the Cigarette Through Quarter trick by palming and replacing one gaffed quarter with another. One quarter had a small hole in it, the other a spring hinge. By exposing the holed coin, then palming that one and replacing it with the hinged coin, he led the spectator to think not There must be two trick coins but How could even the trick coin I’ve seen do that trick? Or one might multiply the possible explanations, in a card-guessing trick, by going through an elaborate charade of “reading” the spectator’s face and voice, so that, when the forced card is guessed, the obviousness of the trick is, well, obviated.