It was Ching's story that inspired British novelist Christopher Priest to pen The Prestige, the rich source material for Christopher Nolan's latest cinematic puzzler, back in the early '90s. His deception, his maintenance of misdirection, his commitment to this one trick was so fundamental, it affected every waking second of his life. His creaking, shuffling gait was an affectation, maintained obsessively throughout his off-stage life, so as to disguise the reality that, during the show, he's carrying this large, heavy, water-filled receptacle clenched between his legs, concealed masterfully beneath his flowing robe. The fact was that he wasn't as frail as he appeared.

He closely guarded the secret of how he performed this trick, which required no elaborate contraptions no smoke, no mirrors.Ĭhing's secret didn't die with him, though. This frail Chinese magician's speciality was the materialisation of various objects from beneath a simple piece of cloth which he spread upon the stage, his show climaxing with the astonishing unveiling from thin air of a huge goldfish bowl, filled to the brim with water and weighing roughly 80lbs.

The literary investment in unspeakable and often immaterial violence emerges in Bachner’s readings as a complex and ideologically varied literary solution to the political geography of violence in our time.At the turn of the 20th Century, when the popularity of stage magic was at its peak, one of the most celebrated performers was a prestidigitator named Chee Ling Qua, known on the boards as Ching Ling Foo.

Instead, she argues, both trauma studies and the fiction to which it responds institutionalize an inability to address violence.Įxamining such works as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Bachner locates the postwar prestige of violence in the disjunction between the privileged security of wealthier Americans and the violence perpetrated by the United States abroad. Bachner takes issue with the claim made within trauma studies that history is the site of violent trauma inaccessible to ordinary representation. Genocide, terrorism, war, torture, slavery, rape, and murder are major themes, yet the writers insist that such events are unspeakable. In The Prestige of Violence Sally Bachner argues that, starting in the 1960s, American fiction laid claim to the status of serious literature by placing violence at the heart of its mission and then insisting that this violence could not be represented.īachner demonstrates how many of the most influential novels of this period are united by the dramatic opposition they draw between a debased and untrustworthy conventional language, on the one hand, and a violence that appears to be prelinguistic and unquestionable, on the other.

The prestige novel