Recently Read: Fictional Museums by SJ Fowler & Natalia Zagorka-Thomas
In his recent novel, SJ Fowler has imagined for us a dystopian future in which terrible climactic surges occur. Violent tremors and fogs are releasing noxious gases, killing everyone who is trapped outdoors. “Ash and pumice rains down.” As the nameless museum guard who narrates MUEUM puts it, “we are not at the ‘what’s worst for human health above all factors‘ stage yet. We’re getting there.”
Nevertheless, rebuilding is constantly going on. “Culture begins in the history we rebuild. History begins in the Museum rebuilt.” The Museum is an immense repository, with more than one hundred galleries, countless secret rooms, barracks for its workers, and a Great Hall.
MUEUM is narrated by an unnamed male museum guard who seems to be warehoused there, although whether this is voluntary or not is unclear. “I am not a visitor,” he admits one day. “I can’t own anything, nothing can be given to me.” What is clear is that the living and working situation for the guards is highly regimented and there can be extreme penalties for stepping out of line. One day, another guard complains to the narrator, “The Union was big back when the new Museum opened. There is no Union now. After our nine-and-a-half hours, or five-hundred-and-seventieth minute, the day ends and we return to barracks. Once every seven weeks we are allowed, or rather it is our turn, to take our lunch breaks in the Clemency Galleries, or Knocking Shops, whatever you’d like to call them, at the back of the Museum.” 43
The guard’s job is generally boring, but visitors want to touch the objects and they pester him with stupid questions. “Is it real?” “So they’re replicas, eh?” “Is it real or not?” He carries “a small implement” that “resembles a gunstock warclub” for his personal safety, in case one of the visitors gets out of hand. Then one day a curator says to him, “It’s not all real,” and he can scarcely believe what he has heard. “Please,” the curator begs him, “keep on telling them. Not to touch.”
His brief description of the museum makes it sound as if its galleries are dedicated to displaying the history of violence.
To get to Egypt you walk through seven galleries. I pass Augustus, Nero, Caligula, Tiberious, with their children and swimming pools and horrible fake blood. I pass markets with soft manacles for the visitors to try on, in all sizes, small to large. I pass early military tactics, with the shield wall and open toed sandals and the conviction to stab not what is in front of you but what is to your right. I pass gladiators and the trident net combo or the film, with disinfected headphones, on a loop. Some Christian stuff and the automated Seneca. That’s just Rome at its quickest. . . Then there’s some properly modern paraphernalia, what happened afterwards, how hard an act that was to follow and where it moved onto, the Empire, etc. . .
One day, two guards maliciously slip something into the narrator’s tea and he spends the day hallucinating in the Writing Room, where, ironically, his spelling goes to hell for several hours and several pages. “Museums? Museums. Musems. Musums. Meseums. I coup my ears to the big doome above me.” This is one of the two central events that befall the narrator before the book comes to an abruptly poetic conclusion. Both events are strange, seemingly random, and terrifying (especially the second), and I think both occur without the book making completely clear what their real purpose was. Regardless, the pleasure of reading Fowler’s icy, mysterious prose overcame whatever questions I had about his plot. Fowler, who is primarily a poet and a visual artist, worked as a guard at the British Museum from 2007 to 2014, so he writes from experience. Although the dangerous weather plays a small role in the novel, it’s not really an example of ecofiction. The novel is largely concerned with our relationships to violence and to sex. MUEUM (Tenement Press, 2022)
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My second museum book is not really about a museum but about a hoard, which is an archaeological term for a collection of valuable objects or artifacts. In this case, however, the value is only in the eye of the beholder. Natalia Zagorka-Thomas is the curator and author of The Camden Town Hoard: A Collection of Archeological Artefacts Excavated Along London’s Regent’s Canal During Summer 2021 (London: Studio Expurgamento & CB Editions, 2022). It’s a beautifully-produced pocket guide to the strange ancient objects rescued from oblivion and given tall tales of strange utility by a group of guest writers. This farce of an archeological handbook is brilliant and laugh-out-loud funny. There are rat aqualungs, a teaselwangler, an ectoplasm tube, and many other fanciful items, each stunningly photographed like invaluable museum objects and lovingly described in serious museum-speak.
In his Foreword, independent curator and former museum director David Thorpe writes: “The purpose of the museum has changed. As has that of the curator, the artefact, and the audience. Now we are all curators, organising and exhibiting our lives.” And he reminds us of the mudlarks, men who in previous centuries scavenged objects from along the banks of the River Thames for items of any value that they could sell. During the Covid lockdown, Natalia Zagorka-Thomas filtered through the detritus that resulted from the dredging of Regents Canal in London, looking for objects. This book represents part of what she found.
[Recently Read is an occasional post in which I do shorter accounts of two or three books that I recently found worthy of note.]
Vertigo 