Trance-Migrations : Stories of India, Tales of Hypnosis

Listen to what I am about to tell you: do not read this book alone. You really shouldn’t. In one of the most playful experiments ever put between two covers, every other section of __Trance-Migrations__ prescribes that you read its incantatory tales out loud to a lover, friend, or confidant, in order to hypnotize in preparation for Lee Siegel’s exploration of an enchanting India. To read and hear this book is to experience a particular kind of relationship, and that’s precisely the point: hypnosis, the book will demonstrate, is an essential aspect of our most significant relationships, an inherent dimension of love, religion, medicine, politics, and literature, a fundamental dynamic between lover and beloved, deity and votary, physician and patient, ruler and subject, and, indeed, reader and listener. Even if you can’t read this with a partner—and I stress that you certainly ought to—you will still be in rich company. There is Shambaraswami, an itinerant magician, hypnotist, and storyteller to whom villagers turn for spells that will bring them wealth or love; José-Custodio de Faria, a Goan priest hypnotizing young and beautiful women in nineteenth-century Parisian salons; James Esdaile, a Scottish physician for the East India Company in Calcutta, experimenting on abject Bengalis with mesmerism as a surgical anesthetic; and Lee Siegel, a writer traveling in India to learn all that he can about hypnosis, yoga, past life regressions, colonialism, orientalism, magic spells, and, above all, the power of story. And then there is you: descending through these histories—these tales within tales, trances within trances, dreams within dreams—toward a place where the distinctions between reverie and reality dissolve. Here the world within the book and that in which the book is read come startlingly together. It’s one of the most creative works we have ever published, a dazzling combination of literary prowess, scholarly erudition, and psychological exploration—all tempered by warm humor and a sharp wit. It is informing, entertaining, and, above all, mesmerizing. Listen to what I am about to tell you: do not read this book alone. You really shouldn't. In one of the most playful experiments ever put between two covers, every other section of Trance-Migrations prescribes that you read its incantatory tales out loud to a lover, friend, or confidant, in order to hypnotize in preparation for Lee Siegel's exploration of an enchanting India. To read and hear this book is to experience a particular kind of relationship, and that's precisely the point: hypnosis, the book will demonstrate, is an essential aspect of our most significant relationships, an inherent dimension of love, religion, medicine, politics, and literature, a fundamental dynamic between lover and beloved, deity and votary, physician and patient, ruler and subject, and, indeed, reader and listener. Even if you can't read this with a partner--and I stress that you certainly ought to--you will still be in rich company. There is Shambaraswami, an itinerant magician, hypnotist, and storyteller to whom villagers turn for spells that will bring them wealth or love; José-Custodio de Faria, a Goan priest hypnotizing young and beautiful women in nineteenth-century Parisian salons; James Esdaile, a Scottish physician for the East India Company in Calcutta, experimenting on abject Bengalis with mesmerism as a surgical anesthetic; and Lee Siegel, a writer traveling in India to learn all that he can about hypnosis, yoga, past life regressions, colonialism, orientalism, magic spells, and, above all, the power of story. And then there is you: descending through these histories--these tales within tales, trances within trances, dreams within dreams--toward a place where the distinctions between reverie and reality dissolve. Here the world within the book and that in which the book is read come startlingly together. It's one of the most creative works we have ever published, a dazzling combination of literary prowess, scholarly erudition, and psychological exploration--all tempered by warm humor and a sharp wit. It is informing, entertaining, and, above all, mesmerizing. -- From publisher's website Part non-fiction, part short fiction; part memoir, part essay, Trance-migrations is both an entertaining and informative read and a thoroughly original and creative experiment in metafiction. Combining great erudition with sophisticated word play and bawdy humor, it alternates sections containing stories-- both fictional and non-fictional--to be read by the reader to her or himself with sections of stories to be read aloud to a listener. In the latter cases Siegel intends that the listener actually go into a hypnotic trance out of which the reader will eventually awaken her or him. In this way the narrative form of the book performs a hypnotic induction script out of which the listener awakens to find that it is impossible to tell what really happened, just as in hypnosis the line between fact and fiction is irremediably blurred. Siegel uses hypnosis and the dynamic between hypnotist and hypnosand as a way of exploring other power dynamics -- between lovers, between writer and reader (or listener), between masculine colonial culture and the feminized East, between God (or gods) and mortals, and ultimately between memory historical and personal and constantly shifting meaning. The book is above all about reading as a hypnotic experience. Through stories based on motifs and characters from both Indian mythology and from real life (notably Abb Faria, a Goan Catholic monk who gained notoriety in the early nineteenth century with demonstrations of magnetism in Paris, and James Esdaile, a Scottish surgeon for the East India Company who experimented with mesmerism as a surgical anesthetic in Calcutta), Siegel epitomizes and elucidates the psychological and political dynamics of a fascination with a mysterious Orient, and reveals the anxieties embedded in such fascination. Intends to demonstrate that hynotism is an essential aspect of our most significant relationships, an inherent dimension of love, religion, medicine, politics, and literature, a fundamental dynamic between lover and beloved, deity and votary, physician and patient, ruler and subject, and, indeed, reader and listener.