IMAGES LISTED
01 A plate from the 1787 edition of Baron Munchausen's
Gulliver Revived. Munchausen is synonymous with vainglorious
boasting.
02 a rubber tank inflated to deceive the enemy and in
use on East Anglian airfields by American forces up to the end of the
Cold War.
03 An American newspaper photograph May 1949.
04 from Charles Cotton, The Complete Gamester,
London Wilford 1725.
05 The Second and Last part of Conny-catching.
1592
06 an occupational hazrd explained by Punch,
February 13th 1929, p.194 11 x 14cms by Ridgwell, "The Magician Who
Failed To Produce His "Ticket"..
07 St.James visiting the Magician Hermogenes,
engraving, 1565 ; 21 x 29cms.
08 anon., The History of Magicians,
London 1805.
09 from Henri Decremps, The Conjuror Unmasked,
Stalker [London] 1788
10 Rembrandt's great etching Faust, 16 x 21 c1652.
11 These illustrations are extraordinary in their clarity
and ambition in showing the intricacies of the gulling of the customer.
I show two illustrations from this classic of revelation - Walter B.Gibson,
The Bunco Book, originally published in 1946.and recommend
the Citadel Press reprint of 1986, from Lyle Stuart Inc., Secaucus, New
Jersey. Gibson was a Master Magician, and author of the mythic series,
The Shadow. |
| But what happens if the narrator lies ?
• Herman Melville, The Confidence Man ,
• Thomas Mann Felix Krull, The Confidence Man
• Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire,
• Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls,
• Edgar Alan Poe, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.1843
• Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying.
• P.T.Barnum, The Autobiography of a Showman.
• N.Hawthorn,The House of the Seven Gables
IMAGES
• Escher; the optical illusion.
• Jan Steen, the card sharp.
• Duchamp, Rrose Selavy, altered ego.
• Bosch, the Trickster
Films
• Mamet, The House of Games, 1987 and much recommended. Everyone
has their tell.
• The Big Parade about Kim Il Sung.
• Ceaucescu documentary
• Orson Welles, broadcast The War of the Worlds.
• Kelly/Donen, Singing in the Rain
• Honoré Daumier, the invention of Robert Macaire.
Excerpt: House of Games,
The Tell; Mike, "Now the guy from Vegas (he points at the back room)
has got a shitload of my money. He's got a 'tell'. OK ? When he's bluffing,
okay, he plays with his little gold ring. Now I caught him doing it. N'he
knows I did, so he stopped. He's conscious of himself. I want you to do
me this favour. I want you to be my girlfriend for a while, come in the
game, you stand behind me, watch me play. We get in a big hand okay ?
I, uh, I go to pee you watch this guy, and tell me, does he play with
his gold ring. I know he's bluffing. I win the big hand. I'll forget the
eight hundred dollars your friend owes." David Mamet, House of
Games, screenplay, Methuen London 1988.
Political Lies.
"The trouble with telling a lie is that you always have to remember
it and be able to repeat it when necessary or risk embarrassing embarrassing
inconsistency. Eventually the lie takes on a life of its own, with consequences
that can snowball until they cannot be controlled.Kim Il Sung is a consummate
liar. One of the longest running examples of his mendacity concerns his
country's programme to develop nuclear weapons. North Korea thought it
could bamboozle the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is why it
agreed a couple of years ago to allow inspections of its facilities. But
Kim underestimated American satellite intelligence...Risking discovery,
North Korea announced its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty...The crisis that has triggered this has abated but the falsehoods
on which North Korea's Communist society have been based continue, swollen
to such a degree that they consume the entire country."The Great
Leader and the Dear Leader". Leader in the Independent Newspaper
just before Kim's Death.
Types of mendacity
• The creation of a narrative per se.
• The creation of a personality: Orpen, Duchamp, Lewis.
• The creation of a technology.
• The language of lying The Half Truth. Economical with the truth,
the actualite.
Pale Fire; completed 1961, the mad comedy of two worlds
in conjunction. The foreword, poem, commentary, and index.
The Confidence Man; the title leads to anticipations;the
celebrated cavalcade of potential suspects on the river boat. "there
was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts and foreigners; men of business
and men of pleasure; parlour men and backwoodsmen, farm-hunters and fame-hunters;
heiress-hunters, gold-hunters, buffalo-hunters, bee-hunters, happiness-hunters,
truth-hunters, and still keener, hunters after all these hunters. Fine
ladies in slippers and moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern
philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scot, Danes; Sante Fe traders in
striped blankets, and Broad way bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking
Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers
in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves,
black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish creoles and old fashioned
French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazurus; jesters and mourners,
teetotallers and convivialists, deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists
and clay-eaters; Sioux chiefs as solemn as High Priests. In short a piebald
Parliament, an Anarchasis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform
pilgrim species, man." ; see also pp 229-231, Melville's characters
discuss Autolycus.
Booklist
Philip Kerr, The Penguin Book of Lies, Penguin London 1991; the basic
collection of texts - Quintilian,How an orator should employ a lie; Niccolo
Machiavelli, How Princes should honour their word; Michel Montaigne, A
should have a good memory; Sir Richard Steele, On sustaining deceit; William
Hazlitt, Puffing; R.L.Stevenson, Truth of intercourse; Oscar Wilde, The
Decay of Lying; Hansard/Harold Nicholson, We lie Damnably; reference to
the Piltdown Man, Chatterton and the account of how Rasputin was murdered.
Alexander Klein, Grand Deception,The World's Most Spectacular and Successful
Hoaxes, Impostures, Ruses and Frauds, Faber and Faber, London 1956; including
The Abyssian Princess who outwitted the British Navy; Orson Welles and
the Men from Mars and Van Meergren
Walter B.Gibson, The Bunco Book, the Bunco Man from the Carnival Worker,
Sharpers, Confidence man and schemer of the Get Rich Quick Variety, Citadel
Press Seacaucus, NJ 1986 (1946) Gibson was the creator of the character
The Shadow whom Orson Welles played on radio. Featured in this book include
description of The Gold Brick, The Automatic Bowling Alley, The Three
Pin Game, The Wheels of Chance; How Gamblers win at Poker;
Gary Lindberg, The Confidence Man in American Literature, OUP London
1982. "...the confidence man sees more opportunity in New World
fluidity, not merely to improve his lot by cleverness and technical
proficiency, but actually to recast the self through cunning imitation"
Tony Tanner, introduction to Melville's The Confidence Man, OUP Oxford
1989, an excellent analysis of the liar in a fluid social context.
R.L.Gregory and E.Gombrich, Illusion in Nature and Art, Duckworth London
1973, see "Illusion and Art"
and the best single publication is
Mark Jones (ed.) Fake ? The Art of Deception, University of California
Press, Berkeley 1990 (also a British Edition, copyright the British Museum.
see also Carl Sifakis, Hoaxes and Scandals, A Compendium of Deceptions,
Ruses and Swindles, Michael O'Mara Books, London 1993. Published under
Licence from Facts on File.
FILM CLIPS.
The Big Parade, a documentary about the political pageantry and mythology
of the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung.
The War of the Worlds.
The House of Games
The Winter's Tale (the character of Autolycus)
Singing in the Rain.
Into the Woods.
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