The Pleasures of Illusion
What good are illusions? According to folklorists Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice, illusions are very good indeed, especially for children from infancy to adolescence. In their book, Barker and Rice establish a previously unrecognized genre of folklore: folk illusions. “We define folk illusions as traditionalized verbal and/or kinesthetic actions performed in order to effect an intended perceptual illusion for one or more participants” (4). To warrant perceptual illusions as a genre of folklore, the collectors characterize their “participant roles, morphological similarities, performance positions, priming periods, and ludic qualities” (29). Folk Illusions: Children, Folklore, and the Sciences of Perception offers a compendium of perceptual illusions, gathered from performers across the country, sorted into formally related perceptual categories, and analyzed under various theories of perception.
We assume that perception brings us reality: we see, hear, and touch what is actually there. Perceptual illusions reveal that this is not so. It is perfectly possible to see what is not there, hear what is not said, and feel what does not exist. When a magician tosses a coin back and forth from one hand to another, we “see” the trajectory of the coin on the last toss even though the coin is no longer there, so we are surprised when the magician takes the coin out of our ear with her other hand: we see what is not there. This illusion can be elaborated into the Ping-Pong illusion or imaginary tennis, in which performers hit an imaginary ball, sometimes accompanied by a sound imitating the thwack of the ball against the paddle (59). When a performer (Barker and Rice call this role the agent) instructs her mark (the patient) to mouth either the words “elephant shoe” or “olive juice” to the boy across the room, the patient may be embarrassed to discover her perceiver saw her to be saying “I love you”: he hears what is not said (65). If the agent stands behind the patient, puts his fist on the patient’s head, and slaps the top of his fist, saying, “Crack an egg on your head,” then runs his fingers down the patient’s head, neck, and back, saying, “Let the yolk run down,” the patient may have the sensation of raw egg running from her head down her back, a sensation that makes her shiver, hence, the illusion’s folk name, The Chills (40): she feels what does not exist. The assumption, as they suggest, that you just open your eyes and see is the illusion (8). Perceptual illusions reveal what is illusory about perception (7). They are, in effect, disillusionments. Why is this a pleasure?
The primary performers and perceivers of folk illusions are children, from infancy through adolescence. In early infancy, folk illusions are unintelligible; after adolescence, they lose their fascination. Perception is not a biological endowment; it is a social accomplishment undertaken over the course of childhood. As perception settles into the body, it pares off sensory information the perceiver does not need to make sense of the world (174, 62). The illusions recover this disregarded information. As a consequence, their performers “come to realize…that their own and their playmates’ perceptual systems can be systematically manipulated to perceive unrealities or unanticipated realities” (69). The capacity to hover between realities or between reality and unreality constitutes part of the pleasure of the illusions. If the unreality presents itself as supernatural, as in Bloody Mary in the Mirror and other mirror summonings (143-154), then the pleasure of evoking it becomes even more magical. The illusions plunge the child fleetingly into an existential disequilibrium, akin to the physical disequilibrium he might feel on first riding on a merry-go-round horse or a rollercoaster. The illusions create safe danger, like imagining the living room floor is an ocean and the pieces of furniture are boats between which you must leap without falling into the water (163). To bring about this pleasure, children cultivate perceptual illusions even as they are in the process of learning to perceive.
The perceptual illusions are themselves utterly charming. As you read through the dozens of illusions Barker and Rice examine, set out in their contexts of both collection and performance, you will be transported to childhood. Part of their pleasure was that the illusions took you by surprise. If somebody handed you a box under whose weight she seemed to be staggering and it turned out to be light, you found yourself flinging it up in the air. It is not that you have an “inner Sherlock” (Barker and Rice’s term), who consciously expects the box to be heavy (77, 136). Though there is indeed something anticipatory about perception, it is not conscious. The body learns perception as it learns itself in the course of moving about in the world. It is a corporeal faculty, not a cognitive one. In phenomenological terms, the body is unreflectively set for what it anticipates but the person becomes conscious of what she anticipated only after her anticipation is flouted. The illusion awakens perceivers to what they expect.
The perceptual, psychological, and philosophical consequentiality of perceptual illusions is disguised by what the authors call the “triviality barrier” (25, 192). In the guise of play, the children, like Brandon Barker and Claiborne Rice, investigate the difficult question of what perception is. Each chapter conducts the reader through a set of formally related illusions and investigates the perceptual puzzles they raise. The work does not solve these puzzles. Rather, it invites scholars to take up its philosophical provocations. Join them in their investigation. It will be a pleasure.
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[Review length: 926 words • Review posted on September 3, 2020]