Archival Legerdemain: Robert-Houdin, Houdini and the Book

Abstract

In the introduction to his Memoirs of Robert-Houdin, Ambassador, Author, and Conjurer (1858), the French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin reinscribes his stage performance as text: ‘Could I not, each evening when the clock strikes eight, continue my performances under another form? My public shall be the reader, and my stage a book’. The high time of stage magic coincided with the explosion of publishing and print media in the nineteenth century; the magicians formed by this emergent media culture represented themselves readers and writers as well as a performers. A half century later, Robert-Houdin’s most famous reader, escapist Harry Houdini, turned on the namesake he had only known through the medium of that memoir. Houdini’s The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin (1908), is an unflattering ‘exposé’ of his idol’s claims to invention and originality that leans heavily on Houdini’s large library of magical texts and print ephemera. Pitting narrative and archival historicism against one another, Houdini’s efforts to re-write his namesake’s legacy mark a cultural desire to transform and escape expressed not only through the performed manipulation of his body, but his manipulation of the book and the archive as well.