The Fictional Conception of Magic

If we were to ask different groups of people these questions:

Why does Superman fly?

The answers will be: Because he has powers, because he's from Krypton…

Why does Copperfield fly?

The answers will be: Because he uses wires, magnetism,...

In the first case, the answer really gets at the why, but in the second, it's actually about the how.

Realistic magic aims to dismantle all possible answers to the 'how', but even so, it still focuses on the 'how,' on the rational/real aspect.

Fictional magic is based on posing a 'why' that dismisses the rational thinking of 'how'.

That being said - which is really the conclusion I reached when writing this text - let's get down to business!

In the writings of “Cajón de sastre”, where Gabi Pareras and others share their vision of fictional magic, there's a moment when Gabi mentions to Javier Piñeiro that it might be more accurate to speak of a “fictional conception” rather than "fictional magic" and I couldn't agree more.

It's common for us to hear “fictional” and associate it with fiction, thus assuming it's a type of magic where stories of one kind or another are told. However, the concept Gabi refers to has much more to do with the “nature” of the magician when performing magic and the experience they offer the audience.

In that sense, in La Vía Mágica, Juan Tamariz already suggests that the magician, when going to perform magic, should assume a role. In fact, he follows Nelms, who Gabi later follows in his “El efecto (para un mundo de ficción mágica)”. So Tamariz suggests that we can be a magician with powers, live in a reality where phenomena happen around us, or that we all have powers.

These roles have to do with our character, but behind that, deeper, we must choose a paradigm, a framework for our magic. One of them is to assume that the spectator knows there's a trick - everyone knows it - and to wrestle with that knowledge, with their intellect, in the style of Juan Tamariz and his false trails. It's about dismantling, one by one, all the layers of the spectator's rationality until only emotion remains (crossing the magical rainbow, as Tamariz would say).

The other option is to create a shared world where what we see can actually happen.

In Flor de Coleridge, Gabi presents us with a world based on this author's poem:

What if you slept?
And what if in your sleep, you dreamed?
And what if in your dream you went to heaven
and there you picked a strange and beautiful flower?
And what if, when you awoke...
you held that flower in your hand?

As he draws us into that world, we choose a card - a number. And that dreamed number, like Coleridge's flower, materializes in our hand.

In this created reality, this reality that the magician and spectator share for a time, the trick doesn't exist. There's no need to explicitly state that it's been shuffled, the effect happens for another reason, because in that reality, dreamed flowers become real. It's not an experience that challenges the intellect but an emotional one.

While watching a superhero movie, we don't need anyone to tell us: “See? No wires, he's really flying”. That would pull us out of the fiction and tell us about a trick (the 'how-it's-done'), which, although we know it exists, adds nothing to the aesthetic/emotional experience we are having. Likewise, if before watching a romance film, the actors came out telling us how poorly they get along, the subsequent fiction would suffer. It's true that we can later discuss how this or that is done, but at the moment of the experience, it's not relevant, because it adds nothing to the experience we are having; in fact, it detracts from it.

In a way, while realistic magic seeks to bend the intellect's reality in a struggle with it, fictional magic aims to reach emotion directly, without a prior battle with the intellect, but rather that we surrender directly to the purely emotional artistic experience. If an art experience is approached through logic, it's no longer an artistic experience, but rather a study. If we focus on how someone plays the guitar, or on the brushstrokes of a painting, we're not truly experiencing what the artist intended.

If we think about it, all arts (music, theater, painting, cinema...) go directly to that emotional part, speaking to the right hemisphere. The problem with magic is that, as an art form directly based on the clash with daily reality, the spectator tends to look for the trick, the origin of that dissonance. Faced with a challenge to reality, the left, rational hemisphere jumps in to understand what the heck is going on. Surely it was like that in cinema before too - I imagine the reactions to Mèliés' films - but now we let ourselves go, we're already used to it, we know we should just go with the flow in movies. Even if a rational moral dilemma is presented, it's done within the proposed fiction and that generates greater immersion in the fiction (which can endure after the fiction - I've had countless debates around the dilemmas posed by Battlestar Galactica, which makes it a much more vivid series, because I've shared those dilemmas with the characters). The magician must create that world himself. Gabi used to say that when performing, the magician had a bunch of lights behind him that spelled "trick," and his goal was to turn off those lights one by one.

There are countless types of fictional magic, it's not a rigid concept, nor did Gabi invent it, but he has highlighted its importance and thought about it systematically. When Fred Kaps struggles with his cards in his brilliant Homing card, that's fictional. He, as the magician (character), doesn't understand what's happening, while the performer (actor) knows perfectly well. He presents us with a fiction, a phenomenon that is happening, and it has nothing to do with a trick, not even to deny it like realistic magic; the trick doesn't exist in the world proposed by Kaps.

Another brilliant example, provided by Ricardo Rodriguez in his equally brilliant Magia de Altura, is that of a magician, Manuel Villar, who leaves his cigarette in an ashtray and then, above the smoke, levitates a ball of paper. He has just created a reality where smoke holds paper in the air. The trick doesn't appear anywhere there; the trick has no place in that reality. It's not explicit; there's no need to even speak to create magical fiction.

These three examples, one allegorical with its story, another with a rebellion of objects, and another with a magical reality, are clearly different and don't require a preceding story.

Gabi said that once you enter the world of fictional magic, within the paradigm it proposes, the landscape is the same, but the way you look at it changes. The same effects require the same resources, making it seem like it's shuffled, etc., but here it's not explicit (“Have you shuffled well?”) but rather it aims for it to be more implicit.

This also ties in with something Gabi often said: the intellect argues, sensations don't. If I explicitly state the actions, the intellect can jump in ("It's well shuffled" “Well, you shuffled it, you might have pulled a fast one on me”). If it's implicit, if the shuffle is felt, our mind doesn't dispute that sensation. We create a reality based on sensations, which is much more solid than a rationalized one - as Morpheus tells Neo: How do we distinguish reality from signals sent to our brain? If what we feel isn't real, how can we distinguish reality and fiction?

If we can make the spectator feel everything we want them to feel, letting their intellect go to sleep - that's the hard part - and enjoy a magical experience in a world created for those in the room, we will have entered a magical fiction. And for that, we must avoid drawing the intellect's attention. Try to get into a movie with the director's commentary playing. I don't know if it's possible, but it sure would be tough.

Now, we need to build the mechanisms that help create that shared reality. A lot comes from Ascanio, that slippery gaze, that invisible technique, and that weightlessness that allows our mind to see the actions and enjoy the plastic aesthetic and poetics without the intellect's alarms going off.

On the other hand, the realistic and fictional conceptions are not mutually exclusive. Ricardo Rodriguez already published in “Una propuesta de reconciliación” (see Magia de Altura) that they can coexist on different levels. In a way, one encapsulates the other: we all know tangible reality, we all know there's a trick, but the surrounding fantasy creates that fiction.

Not only that, but the method can appear in fictional magic without delving into the explanation of the magical phenomenon. In the previous example, Fred Kaps is about to perform an effect with several red-spot cards; he's going to do a trick. The magician explicitly states an effect, however, in the shared reality, the cards decide he won't be able to do it, specifically the Queen, which insists on appearing to the magician's annoyance (who is the first one surprised). This shows that the method Gabi refers to is the one associated with the phenomenon. Just like you can watch a movie that shows a film crew without breaking the fiction.

Gabi discusses in his “El efecto (para un mundo de ficción mágica)” several different effects. One of them is the 'cochecito' (toy car) effect, made famous by Juan Tamariz. One day, discussing the different models of 'cochecito' that exist with magicians, we commented that the simpler, the better. That's because it leaves fewer loopholes for the intellect (one of the problems with so-called technological magic is precisely that it leaves too many loopholes for the intellect to take refuge if technology is detected). In that sense, the simpler the elements, the clearer the execution and handling, the less explicit the demonstration of the absence of trickery in the elements associated with the phenomenon needs to be. In fictional magic, the phenomenon is everything, because it explains the fictional reality we live in.

If the car is made of transparent acrylic, it's seen, it's felt, that it can't have a hidden gimmick. If it's made of building blocks (as I was told existed), more emphasis must be placed on the element's harmlessness (even if false) because that isn't felt, and then the intellect jumps in to ask questions. This also highlights the importance of naturalizing the elements, as Ganson says in his Magia de cerca, not so much for letting them be examined, but for using or handing them out while we're looking for something, or using them beforehand, like knives to open an envelope before a color-changing knife routine. All of this helps to build a fiction while minimizing the need to explicitly state anything.

In summary, the fictional conception is based on creating a shared reality where magic happens. The 'why' of the phenomenon can be anything, but it's not the method. It seeks a purely sensory experience, where the intellect doesn't fight but rather relaxes, like watching a movie in a theater.

And that's where I'll stop. This is a lengthy topic, and much excellent material has been written on it by Gabi, Gea, Ricardo Rodriguez, Javier Piñeiro, and many others. I wholeheartedly recommend visiting “Las cosas de Gabi”'s page, watching his interviews, reading his texts (some of which feature collaborations with the aforementioned magicians), and, most importantly, seeing him perform magic.

You can reread the conclusion I wrote at the very beginning.

Food for thought: Where is fiction easier to achieve? Within which branches of magic? Where is it more difficult?

If anything isn't clear, which wouldn't be surprising, please comment below and we can discuss it.

Thanks for reading.

Bibliography.

“El Efecto, para un «mundo» de ficción mágica”. Gabriel Pareras, Self-published.

Magia de cerca. Vol 1. Lewis Ganson. Ed. Marré.

Magia y presentación. Henning Nemls. Ed CYMYS.

La vía mágica. Juan Tamariz. Ed. Frakson.

Magia de Altura y más. Ricardo Rodríguez. Ed. El caballo del Malo.

Cajón de sastre. Gabi Pareras and others. Self-published.