| Summary: | This dissertation examines five figures associated with magic in contemporary literature: voodoo ghosts, magicians, automata, fortune tellers, and freaks. While glancing at a number of novels, this study chiefly examines five books published between 1972 and 2001: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Allen Kurzweil's A Case of Curiosities, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover, and Thomas Wharton's Salamander. In these novels, figures of magic display different aspects of the work of representation, coded as magic, as well as the effect of magic on representation. In fiction, magic localizes enchantment as an inherent product of the representational act, as spectators or readers are compelled to think about the relation of perception to deception during magical performances. === Magical characters highlight the problems of literary bodies, which in these texts are bizarre, exotic, and glamorous. Ishmael Reed employs voodoo ghosts to liberate the novel from cultural essentialist representational practices; voodoo, the marriage of form to spirit, is plural and polymorphous. As celebrations of trickery, voodoo bodies do not reflect inner character. Similarly, magicians are sleight-of-hand artists or escapologists who confound perception. In Chabon's novel, magicians and super heroes evade the bounds of representation through crafts of illusion. Magicians invent visual illusions; analogous to authors, magicians animate inert forms such as golems or automata. The automaton, a spectacular parody of the human body, questions whether any represented body is alive or not. In Kurzweil's A Case of Curiosities, readers wonder about the veracity of the automaton as extensions of or surrogates for novelistic characters. Fortune tellers, on the other hand, turn bodies into objects of destiny. Tarot readers, such as Efrosina in The Volcano Lover, interpret bodies through visual texts in relation to the past and future. By contrast, in Salamander, the freak poses riddles to readers regarding the authenticity of the body. Not unlike automata or voodoo fetishes, freaks are human puzzles that resemble narrative invention rather than mimetic representations of character. Contemporary novels articulate magical bodies as spirit cabinets, ineffable spaces rendered briefly and spectacularly visible for the delight of readers.
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