The museum as we know it began with the sixteenth-century cabinet of marvels, or wunderkammer. Such “cabinets” were the joy of eccentric, rapaciously curious collectors of specimens both natural (naturalia) and manmade (artefacta). Often, the items housed in the wunderkammer “belonged together only because they had been collected,” as Jonathan Buckley writes of the holdings of his fictitious Sanderson-Perceval Museum in The Great Concert of the Night. “Not every museum possesses items that are marvellous, but all objects in a museum emit some sort of charge; they have a resonant presence . . . They are untouchable.”
Buckley’s narrator, David, is an employee of this tiny, financially troubled museum, a curator and guardian of its modest treasure hoard: artefacta such as glass jellyfish and musical instruments, naturalia such as a stillborn baby whose exposed muscles and blood vessels “gleam like varnished wax.”
This urbane, erudite, but utterly humorless aesthete resembles no one in literature so much as Des Esseintes, the protagonist (one shudders to call him a hero) of J. K. Huysmans’s Decadent masterpiece, Against Nature. Like Des Esseintes, a dissipated aristocrat, David is, when we first encounter him, shut up alone in his “castle.” It is New Year’s Eve, and he is brooding upon the bottomless mere of the past—specifically, the memories summoned by a film called Le Grand Concert de la Nuit.
David, you see, used to date the star of the Le Grand Concert, a woman named Imogen Gough—though “date” is both too contemporary and too demotic a word for what passed between these two. Imogen, lost not only to the past but also to the (spoiler alert) moth-eaten, onyx-black cloak of death, is David’s own immortal beloved. “Imogen imagined the ideal final scene,” Buckley writes. “Her mother would administer the releasing dose on a Sunday morning, so that the church bells would be the last thing that Imogen would hear.”
Reader, beware: Staying up until the ball drops isn’t going to be easy.
There is no disputing that Buckley’s prose is as exquisitely wrought as, say, Benvenuto Cellini’s Saliera. Intricate sentences turn and engage each other like the myriad gears of some fabulous seventeenth-century automaton: “She described to me,” David recalls, “the ranks of mummified bodies [in the catacombs at Palermo], leaning out of their niches to watch the visitors pass by. Their teeth erupted through skin that had turned into flimsy bark; their mouths made the shapes of screaming and of idiotic laughter; they clasped their desiccated hands, as though in attendance at a funeral.”
This is evocative writing about fascinating stuff, but in the service of what? The story Buckley tells, scrubbed of its carapace-like accretion of oddities and quotations, is about people in love not with each other but with their self-image as sophisticates—and there is nothing in the book to suggest that this is deliberate or intended as satire. Not even a parallel plot about David’s friendship with a benignly deranged homeless man (whose discursions on “energy” are the book’s lone stab at comic relief) can make David seem like more than a stack of wall texts with a libido.
The would-be emotional cruces of the novel are Imogen’s long illness and death and, prior to that, an impenetrably hazy excursion to some kind of Eyes Wide Shut orgy mansion. (Buckley must, like his narrator, exist at so great a remove from real life that he has no clue how silly his book is threatening to become.) But it is an insuperable challenge to care what becomes of a Languid Pixie Dream Girl who says things such as, “If someone were to bottle the perfume of second-hand bookshops, [I] would buy it.”
There is a right way to write this kind of fragmentary, ruminative relationship postmortem: cf. Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, a wunderkammer of words that is warmer, more emotionally credible, and vastly less self-regarding than what Buckley has given us. But Offill’s book is about people (naturalia), not automata (artefacta). Its characters love and suffer, rather than exist as mouthpieces for their author’s knowledge. It is telling that there are other women in Buckley’s book (an ex-wife, a sister, a mother-in-law, other actresses), but it is only with effort that the reader can tell them apart or remember what they’re doing there.
The paradox of The Great Concert of the Night is that its antiquarian curiosities, medical, historical, literary, artistic, and otherwise, will appeal primarily to a sort of Old World-polymath manqué, whose interest in the past is shallow, predictable, and all too often morbid. For a true polymath of the kind David may imagine himself to be, the Stoics, Jacobus de Voragine, and the brothers Goncourt; the incorruptible saints in glass boxes and the fetal Siamese twins in jars; and a magic-lantern procession of tedious art house movies represent not esoteric knowledge but rather the past for beginners. This is hipsterism for the carriage trade; this is Gustave Moreau’s long-lost Pinterest board.
That is not to fault Buckley for losing an obscurity arms race. It is to note that certain things pass quickly from being curiosities to being old hat because they appeal to a callow sensibility. The Stoics have been co-opted by self-help and tech bros. The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, with its lurid medical displays, promises to keep the public “disturbingly informed.” Of course, the gross-out hagiographies of the Golden Legend or the spooky relics preserved in Europe’s cathedrals are more titillating than, say, the Summa Theologica.
We can thank The Great Concert of the Night for revealing the limitations of the wunderkammer sensibility. To be mesmerized by curiosities, to let the mind flit from one flashy or bewitching or ghoulish object to the next, is often to ignore the substantial, the meaningful, the things that seem bone-dry or dull at first but that reward sustained attention. We can thank Buckley and his two-dimensional, interchangeable sophisticates for reminding us that it’s people, not things, who most often answer to that description.