The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales
by Alex Rose
2007
A little while ago, I read a novel called Impossible Views of the World. The title refers to a specific kind of forgery, one that purports to be from a particular time, but that could not have been made then, because it relies on knowledge or techniques that weren't available at the time. In the novel, author Lucy Ives claims that such forgeries are especially desirable, precisely because of the false hope they offer. By being better than the real thing, they offer the hope that the world is secretly more interesting than most people know, that those secrets are attainable to the discerning connoisseur, who proves themself better than others just by being in the know.
It's that same desire, I think, for hidden esoteric knowledge, that lies at the heart of Alex Rose's The Musical Illusionist. Rose is self-consciously channeling Borges and Italo Calvino here, writing fictions in the style of nonfiction, in the idiom and syntax of truth. This is a collection of short stories written to sound like a museum catalog, with text like a guided tour between sections, illustrated mostly with public domain maps and diagrams. (I suppose this also resembles the SCP, but that seems more coincidental than deliberate.)
Rose invents things that don't exist, that couldn't exist in the times and places he says they're from, and presents them as artifacts from a plausible but unreal past. His inventions are false, but not overtly fantastical, relying on extensions of real phenomena rather than magic. And he always introduces them, these fictional things, after first talking about things that are real but little known, real but unusual - the sort of things that show up in wunderkammern and cabinets of curiosity and Atlas Obscura articles. In the chapter on a display of microorganisms, for example, he first discusses the extreme environments that archaea live in, before suggesting the existence of a foot-long, single-celled macro-bacteria that lives inside certain animal livers. The line between truth and fabrication is blurred. I think all the extremophiles he mentioned are real, for example, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn he slipped a fake into the list.
The tour guide sections are formatted interestingly. Each sentence crosses the spine to cover the whole two-page spread. (It would've been impressive if you could also read down each page, but Rose didn't manage that trick.) The stories themselves are formatted normally. The guide claims that you're visiting an underground library, that you can only reach it by waiting at an abandoned subway stop after hours, that you'll see the exhibits out the train windows. Each story describes one exhibit, and there are sometimes several on the same general topic in a row. The phenomena being described kind of get less plausible as you go, but it's not a very strong trend.
If there's one danger, in fact, it'd that the stories themselves are a little boring. There are stories about time, about language - but in general, there are no characters, and unlike Invisible Cities or Einstein's Dreams, which invite the reader to think about their own experiences of place and time, there's no personal connection either, so they feel detached from humanity. Mostly they're like, 'imagine this thing - isn't it cool? wouldn't it be cool if it existed?' And it would, but also, there's a limit. Real things that fall along the boundaries we draw between concepts, or that somehow fit outside of our usual organizing schema, definitely are cool, and learning about them can challenge how we think about the world. But Rose's objects are more like thought experiments.
The title story, for example, purports to tell the story of a French composer living in the mid-19th century, who manages to write extremely postmodern, avant garde music that like, sounds like it moves around auditorium as though thrown by a ventriloquist, or that somehow amplifies and incorporates all the audience noises of rustling coats and squeaking seats into the performance, or that's basically atonal noise, or that is silent, but is accompanied by a projection of colored lights onto a white sheet so precise and vivid that each audience member's brain synethetically generates their own experience of music, etc. And somehow one man has the skill and fortune to write all this, an orchestra capable of playing it, and countless audiences who never riot and burn his concert hall down in shock or disgust. It's a mix of things that are possible but couldn't be done as impressively as described, things that supposedly happened a hundred or so years earlier than reality, things that rely on knowledge of modern music theory or advanced neurological imaging, and things that probably wouldn't work at all, allegedly working perfectly. It's kind of interesting to imagine, but at the same time, Rose somehow doesn't engage or move me as much as other authors writing in this way have.
It's that same desire, I think, for hidden esoteric knowledge, that lies at the heart of Alex Rose's The Musical Illusionist. Rose is self-consciously channeling Borges and Italo Calvino here, writing fictions in the style of nonfiction, in the idiom and syntax of truth. This is a collection of short stories written to sound like a museum catalog, with text like a guided tour between sections, illustrated mostly with public domain maps and diagrams. (I suppose this also resembles the SCP, but that seems more coincidental than deliberate.)
Rose invents things that don't exist, that couldn't exist in the times and places he says they're from, and presents them as artifacts from a plausible but unreal past. His inventions are false, but not overtly fantastical, relying on extensions of real phenomena rather than magic. And he always introduces them, these fictional things, after first talking about things that are real but little known, real but unusual - the sort of things that show up in wunderkammern and cabinets of curiosity and Atlas Obscura articles. In the chapter on a display of microorganisms, for example, he first discusses the extreme environments that archaea live in, before suggesting the existence of a foot-long, single-celled macro-bacteria that lives inside certain animal livers. The line between truth and fabrication is blurred. I think all the extremophiles he mentioned are real, for example, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn he slipped a fake into the list.
The tour guide sections are formatted interestingly. Each sentence crosses the spine to cover the whole two-page spread. (It would've been impressive if you could also read down each page, but Rose didn't manage that trick.) The stories themselves are formatted normally. The guide claims that you're visiting an underground library, that you can only reach it by waiting at an abandoned subway stop after hours, that you'll see the exhibits out the train windows. Each story describes one exhibit, and there are sometimes several on the same general topic in a row. The phenomena being described kind of get less plausible as you go, but it's not a very strong trend.
If there's one danger, in fact, it'd that the stories themselves are a little boring. There are stories about time, about language - but in general, there are no characters, and unlike Invisible Cities or Einstein's Dreams, which invite the reader to think about their own experiences of place and time, there's no personal connection either, so they feel detached from humanity. Mostly they're like, 'imagine this thing - isn't it cool? wouldn't it be cool if it existed?' And it would, but also, there's a limit. Real things that fall along the boundaries we draw between concepts, or that somehow fit outside of our usual organizing schema, definitely are cool, and learning about them can challenge how we think about the world. But Rose's objects are more like thought experiments.
The title story, for example, purports to tell the story of a French composer living in the mid-19th century, who manages to write extremely postmodern, avant garde music that like, sounds like it moves around auditorium as though thrown by a ventriloquist, or that somehow amplifies and incorporates all the audience noises of rustling coats and squeaking seats into the performance, or that's basically atonal noise, or that is silent, but is accompanied by a projection of colored lights onto a white sheet so precise and vivid that each audience member's brain synethetically generates their own experience of music, etc. And somehow one man has the skill and fortune to write all this, an orchestra capable of playing it, and countless audiences who never riot and burn his concert hall down in shock or disgust. It's a mix of things that are possible but couldn't be done as impressively as described, things that supposedly happened a hundred or so years earlier than reality, things that rely on knowledge of modern music theory or advanced neurological imaging, and things that probably wouldn't work at all, allegedly working perfectly. It's kind of interesting to imagine, but at the same time, Rose somehow doesn't engage or move me as much as other authors writing in this way have.
This sounds really interesting, but ya if the writing itself doesn't land...
ReplyDeleteIt's odd. I went in with a recommendation, but no knowledge of what it was about. But if I HAD known, I would've expected to like it more. I'm not sure if it's Rose's writing, or if I'm just in a mood. And it's not bad! But it also didn't excite me the way I wished it would.
Delete