Conscious Illusions: Secular Magic, Perception, Narrative and Dreams

The human mind seems to have a craving for being deceived. Consciousness can expand the perceptual world beyond the tangible, verifiable, concrete, and ontologically stable. Sometimes humans use technologies to push the boundary between imagination and reality, from philosophical toys for perceptual illusions to cinematic devices giving the illusion of a life-like flow. Every night, however, millions of minds are spontaneously dreaming themselves into bizarre fantasies and illusory perceptions. Some of these conscious illusions are narratively textured, others have been explored and represented by literary narratives.

Organised by Marco Bernini, this afternoon seminar – inaugurating the works of the Narrative and Cognition Lab – will host two talks by leading experts in the narrative representation of secular magic and optical illusions (Dominique Jullien) and narrative and/in dream cognition (Richard Walsh). Join us at dusk, when illusions thrive, and bring your own take, theory, questions, discipline to contribute to this interdisciplinary discussion!

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Dominque Jullien: 'Secular magic, special effects and technologies of illusion in Proust'

Taking as a starting point my current research project on technologies of optical mediation and illusionism in contemporary fiction, I would like to focus on some of the scenes of animated furniture in Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past. This represents a recurrent motif, from the opening pages (where armchairs, doors and windows spin and fly) to various hotel episodes that feature reactive furniture endowed with agency. This discourse of “magic” is, of course, Proust’s way of describing complex mental states, such as memory, habit or hypnagogic states.

I propose to look at three different yet interlocking issues: (1) the appropriation of magic tropes for the description of cognitive processes and mental states in conversation with the developing scientific interest in secular magic’s techniques (along with the reciprocal interest of secular magicians for science). Alfred Binet’s work on manipulation of attention and his ground-breaking use of chronophotographic technology to isolate the stages of the magician’s sleight of hand, complements the Proustian aesthetics which grants a legitimate place to illusion in the cognitive processs. (2) A second path of inquiry cross-reads the novel against the background of (acknowledged or unacknowledged) popular technologies of illusion. These include, in addition to numerous precinematic devices and philosophical toys, the féerie (fairy play or pantomime), whose elaborate illusionistic stagecraft and “magical” world was later appropriated into early trick films and the invention of special effects and animation by the likes of Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón. This cross-reading strategy contradicts or at least complicates Proust’s ostensibly negative judgment on cinematography and technology in general in his novel, and (3) opens up a third path of inquiry: the confrontation between magic and technology (and their fraught relationship to artistic creativity), associated with a general anxiety that seems to announce the posthuman condition and spectral quality of modern media. My analysis of magic and technology here builds on the work of Terry Castle (“Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie”) and Jeffrey Sconce (Haunted Media), but also engages with Eric Kluitenberg’s concept of imaginary media.

Dominique Jullien is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She writes and lectures on a wide range of topics: on modern and contemporary fiction, particularly Proust and Borges, with a focus on intertextuality, reception studies, translation studies, East-West intercultural dialogue, travel narratives, media studies and world literature. She has published widely on the Western reception of the 1001 Nights: Proust et ses modèles: les Mille et une nuits et les Mémoires de Saint-Simon (1989); Les Amoureux de Schéhérazade: Variations modernes sur les Mille et Une Nuits (2009), as well as numerous articles on this subject. An interest in travel narratives yielded a book on French travelers’ descriptions of America (Récits du Nouveau Monde: les voyageurs français en Amérique de Chateaubriand à nos jours, 1992) as well as several articles on Oriental travelogues. Her most recent monograph is Borges, Buddhism and World Literature: A Morphology of Renunciation Tales (2019). Her current project looks at technologies of optical mediation and illusionism in contemporary fiction, particularly the ways in which writers (such as Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Poe or Proust) respond creatively to the challenges of a visually dominant culture. Screens and Illusionism: Alternative Teleologies of Mediation, co-edited with Peter J. Bloom, is forthcoming with Edinburgh U. P. (“Film and Intermediality Series”), and she is currently on sabbatical leave as a visiting fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, UK, working on a new related monograph.

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Richard Walsh: 'Cognition, Dreaming and Narrative Form'

My perspective upon narrative cognition has its origins in literary research, progressively reframed by transmedial and interdisciplinary conceptions of the scope of narrative. One specific focus of this theoretical journey has been the relation between narrative and dreaming. In this talk I distinguish my approach from current accounts of dreaming based upon predictive processing, arguing that dreaming is a good example of the reflexive turn within cognition itself that is the condition of mental representation, most notably as an effect of narrative cognition. In dreaming the perceptual faculties become the semiotic media of mental representations in a dynamic feedback loop primed for narrative elaboration. Dreaming is a modality of spontaneous thought, and an entirely attentional process – the dream just is the ongoing cognitive-perceptual articulation of what the mind presents to itself. It generates a second-order feedback loop between its own narrative articulation and an implicit systemic context of meaning, distinct from the feedback between neural processing and situated agency of the predictive processing model itself. In this respect dreaming is the archetypal cognitive form of fictionality in the rhetorical sense. Underdetermined by the stimulus of unconscious brain activity that occasions it, dreaming elaborates upon that stimulus in a kind of dynamic pareidolia, on the fly, so generating an evaluative context of cognitive significance. The inaugural reflexiveness of dreaming implies a conception of dream lucidity at odds with most current formulations, both because it posits some degree of metacognition as intrinsic to dreaming, and because it implies that lucidity is a modality of thought rather than a qualitative distinction between experiential states. My talk will elaborate upon, and illustrate, the foregoing line of argument; then by way of conclusion I’ll step back and consider some of the significant research prospects I see in the larger question of narrative’s relation to cognition.

Richard Walsh is a narratologist and founder/director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies at the University of York. Much of his work in narrative theory has retained a strong literary focus, while articulating a fundamental critique of some basic concepts and assumptions in narratology: the narrator, story and discourse, mimesis, voice, emotional involvement, narrative creativity and fictionality itself—see The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007). In this literary vein of research he has also co-edited volumes of essays on Narratology and Ideology (2018) and Fictionality in Literature (2022), as well as a special issue of Style on “Fictionality as Rhetoric” (2020). His engagement with narrative theory, however, is increasingly interdisciplinary in scope, and his research has extended to film, graphic narrative, interactive media, AI, scientific narratives, narrative selfhood, music and dreams. His work on the challenges that complex systems present to narrative understanding resulted in, among other collaborations, the co-edited volume Narrating Complexity (2018), an interdisciplinary dialogue between narratologists and complex system scientists. More fundamentally, he is interested in the scope and (especially) the limits of narrative as a mode of cognition - as, most fundamentally, the innate form in which we grasp process. This basic cognitive conception of narrative form raises large questions about the continuities between its elementary function in embodied sensemaking and the many elaborate cultural manifestations of narrative. He has also pioneered a narratological approach to dreams, and he has been a core team member of the interdisciplinary project on dreams, narrative and cognition at Durham (thresholdworlds.org.uk).

This event is brought to you by the Narrative and Cognition Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. If you have any queries about the event or the work of the Lab, please contact Marco Bernini.