The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales, by Alex Rose

Marian Halls

The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales is available from Hotel St. George Press. Please visit their website: hsgpress.com

If one evening by chance you find yourself in a strange city and nowhere to stay, check yourself into the one of the rooms of the Hotel St. George Press, based out of Brooklyn. Inquisitive travelers outside the New York area can as easily reach the hotel of minor wonders at hotelstgeorgepress.com. Explore all the rooms that lend their organization to this literary web journal/budding press, and pay no heed to the initial disappointment of being unable to wander the building physically. In this virtual structure, each darkened corner, cabinet of curios, carefully written registry, or perplexing artifact you ponder in its turn will draw you in, inviting your mind into explorations your feet can never take. Each room of the web journal houses an artist, a musician, or a writer. “Our tenants,” explains the hotel’s Information Desk, “produce improbable histories, sonic ephemera, typographical arcana, scholarly and/or maniacal ramblings, and other curious works of fiction and fancy that give your brain a place to go and think peacefully, exchange ideas meaningfully, wander freely.”

Of the few but acclaimed curiosities to emerge from the doors of the “digital” hotel into the world of physical print, the newest is a collection of short stories by Alex Rose. Rose’s debut book-length title, The Musical Illusionist dedicates itself to tracing out alternate possibilities for history and science, under the premise of a tour through the “Library of Tangents.” It is said that the library “is an archive not of history but of possibility. You’ve heard it described as a vast catalogue of organized deviations – improbable histories, oblique paths, scientific anomalies – documents whose fidelity to truth remains elusive ” (8-9). The tour embarks from a series of subterranean terminals on “old shuttle cars” under the city after midnight. Following this brief initiation, a series of short stories catalog the exhibitions you see the night you take the tour. “You’ve heard much,” the collection begins, “about the Library of Tangents.”

The collection extends seamlessly from the web material, which also shows Rose’s signature (he works as the press’s publisher and designer). A hotel of mysterious origin houses the web journal in its rooms; in a similar fashion, the collection of stories renders the invisible and extra temporal structures of city life in geographic terms. The alternative histories of modern life appearing in The Musical Illusionist are archived and exhibited underground, in the city’s underbelly.

As for the stories themselves, it’s hard for these conjured worlds not to draw you in, convince you of their veracity. Rose demonstrates a bit of a master hand as a historian-inventor (whether it’s a history of science, of ideas, or of a people) – even if, strictly speaking, the histories he relates are fabricated. But this is the modus operandi of the Library. The project banks its success on the spectators’ inability to determine whether the project is an elaborate hoax or scandalously sincere. It isn’t difficult, for instance, to imagine Havra, a small Eastern European community that deliberately resisted the introduction of modern timekeeping for the duration of its existence. Nor do we find it hard to believe that this little-known community slowly died out under the pressures of modern capitalism for its convictions. So by the time you read of Waldemar, a city of infinite choices that is nonetheless entirely self-sufficient, sealed off from the outside world, the possibility no longer feels far-fetched.

That said, some of the stories maintain this balance between the believable and the outlandish more perfectly than others. On one hand, the thematic organization of the Library of Tangents feels plausible and appropriate (there are sections dedicated in turn to language, to time, to topology, to music, and to “neurography”). On the other hand some of these “exhibits” come across with more emphasis than others, leaving one to wonder whether some storylines were fabricated to pad an otherwise thin area of the exhibition. The section on microbes, for instance, in which we learn among other novelties of an alleged strain of dread-inducing bacteria, offers great potential as a subject area for exploring tangential histories, but fails to connect convincingly with the rest of the Library’s collection.

The most compelling exhibits are those that question the inevitability of our relationship to language. The Land of Xhalal for instance: a small tribe whose cosmology dictates that they speak only “in sign despite flawless hearing,” that they maintain in other words a “culture of silence.” The result is a language relying strictly on gesture, connecting them to the physical and metaphysical worlds. There is the Fifth Island of Japan, which reverts to a purely oral tradition after a tsunami wipes out all written documents. The language eventually degenerates into a system of pure tones – different durations, notes, and textures, communicate different meanings, while outsiders hear only music (39-42). There is “Mnemonic Cartografia,” a strange neurological disorder that compels its subject to assign a spatial location to every memory or event. Coupled with the incapacity to forget anything, the disorder results in a terrified, disoriented subject: “walking across the street in his hometown, he is bombarded with a stream of letters, numbers, pictures; the train station is crowded with symbols and signs he’d mentally inscribed there... From this point on, his life is quick to degenerate into a breathless search for new maps, new cities, each adding to the ever-denser and more cluttered palimpsest of his world” (94). Maybe these accounts are most convincing because they suggest that the way language happens for us is fundamental to how we think ourselves as humans. So to think language differently is the quintessential way to think our own history – or our existence – otherwise.

The fantastical subject matter expressed in cold, factual tone of course echoes the work of Borges and Calvino, and there are places where allusions to Calvino’s Invisible Cities are especially prominent. One example, the discussion of a hermetic castle-city, Waldemar, is also a gesture to Borges’ Library of Babel, in its attempt to approach infinity through a continual pursuit of individual particularities. Allusions to the work of Borges and Calvino pervade the individual stories through to the end of the collection, which concludes with the story of an obscure “musical illusionist,” Phelix Lamark. A debate arises as to whether the pursuit of knowledge should occur as an integrated web of connection, as Lamark himself maintains, or dispersed throughout individualized specialties, the prevailing approach at the time (in a letter to a critic, Lamark uses the telling metaphor of “forking paths”).

Lamark, an eccentric 19th century artist, incites the debate about the pursuit of knowledge when he launches a series of experimental concerts to explore Pythagoras’s antiquated notion of the “music of the spheres.” This debate, the final subject of Rose’s book, hints at the point at which the collection aims no longer simply to confront fictional worlds, but also to forge a link with present reality. Lamark defends his work under widespread criticism by questioning the paths of a knowledge that parcels itself into greater and greater subdivision: “ ‘Specialization,’ he wrote, can only lead to further specialization – and to what end? ... Human endeavors will become as fractured as the stars, isolated and scattered, with no constellation to hold them in place.... Innovation without cross-pollination is an absurdity; without integrated research there can be no breadth of imagination.’” (135). The debate taken up between the musical illusionist and his critic continues to raise questions in today’s world, which sees not only the lengthening of job title qualifiers or an increasing demand for advanced degrees, but also the parceling of the globe by industrial specialty or contribution to a world market, and not primarily by culture or language.

This final story in Rose’s collection raises a real question in an (only slightly) imaginary context: What if Lamark’s view had triumphed? What if instead of reading the lines on a stock market quote, we had committed ourselves to hearing the music of the spheres? What if our worlds ran on Kairos – subjective time – rather than Chronos – measured, quantitative time? “What use have we for the recondite and enigmatic in a globalized, iron-fist marketplace? Was Lamark’s premonition correct? Have we hyper-specialized past the point where it benefits us?” (142)

This question provides the link between the Library of Tangents’ “fictions” and the “reality” of the city under which it lurks. Like the remnants of a sunken barge in the Library, whose contents are found perfectly in tact eighty years after sinking, the question of whether reality could have been otherwise might be answered in two ways: “Critics claim that the Library stages these items with the intention of manipulating its passengers into believing such phenomena possible, while others rebuff that the alternative is neither impossible nor even particularly unlikely” (68-69) In this regard, the choice of backdrop for this collection of short stories is significant. The stories are housed in the bowels of the city, which is where, the text argues, all these possibilities, the sounds and sights not audible on the city surface, still effect a kind of force on events, on thought. In this way the collection of stories, or “exhibits,” is a means of rendering the thought of thinkers like Borges and Calvino subterranean, of locating their work and its effects in the space below our present activities and busyness. And this is where, to my mind, The Musical Illusionist renders its most shimmering effects and makes its most significant contribution.