Imaginary (literary) artworks, music, books

[Jo498]

Not sure if there already is such a thread.

There are imaginary books within books, also works of visual art or imaginary musical pieces. Probably also in some stageworks and movies. This ranges from gimmicky or even silly to barely disguised REAL pieces to imaginary pieces that are interestingly important for the plot or even including considerable parts of such a book within a book (I can think of at least one supreme example but many others will as well, so I won't mention it right away.)

Which examples can you think of? Which are described in such a fascinating way that one would LOVE to have these imaginary books or pieces of music but alas, they are only imaginary.

[Florestan]

Not sure if there already is such a thread.

There are imaginary books within books, also works of visual art or imaginary musical pieces. Probably also in some stageworks and movies. This ranges from gimmicky or even silly to barely disguised REAL pieces to imaginary pieces that are interestingly important for the plot or even including considerable parts of such a book within a book (I can think of at least one supreme example but many others will as well, so I won't mention it right away.)

Which examples can you think of? Which are described in such a fascinating way that one would LOVE to have these imaginary books or pieces of music but alas, they are only imaginary.

You mean other than Adrian Leverkuhn's compositions and Vinteuil's Sonata?  Nothing comes to my mind right now.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Not sure if there already is such a thread.

There are imaginary books within books, also works of visual art or imaginary musical pieces. Probably also in some stageworks and movies. This ranges from gimmicky or even silly to barely disguised REAL pieces to imaginary pieces that are interestingly important for the plot or even including considerable parts of such a book within a book (I can think of at least one supreme example but many others will as well, so I won't mention it right away.)

Which examples can you think of? Which are described in such a fascinating way that one would LOVE to have these imaginary books or pieces of music but alas, they are only imaginary.

My post crossed with Florestan's, but any of Adrian Leverkühn's compositions in Mann's Doctor Faustus, such as the opera on Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, come immediately to mind.

[Jo498]

Yes, Leverkühn's compositions are maybe the most famous musical case.
I sometimes wondered if Mann had some real life pieces in mind, just as Leverkühn shares some features with Schoenberg (and others with Nietzsche).

In the more lowbrow literature there is HP Lovecraft's "Necronomicon" (not really a literary book though), likewise the eponymous "Cryptonomicon" (a secret cryptographer's bible) by Neal Stephenson. And "Goldstein's book" (forgot the exact wordy title) in "1984". There are also several in children's/youth literature, e.g. "The Neverending Story" (which was my favorite book when I was about 12).

I am pretty sure there must be examples in Borges and Eco (the lost second book of Poetics by Aristotle is only semi-fictitious I believe) and I am sure I encountered others I forgot about.

But the greatest example I am aware of and one the reader gets considerable excerpts of is the book about Jesus and Pilate by the "master" in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I am pretty sure that this structure has been copied by other 20th cent. authors, although I cannot think of an example.
And there are some predecessors as well such as Hoffmann's Kater Murr (the story of the musician Kreisler interspersed with the diary of his tomcat).

[Florestan]

Now that I think of it, Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Zaragoza is both a real and a fictitious book, because what we read is actually the content of a fictitious manuscript found in, well, Zaragoza.

[ritter]

In Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (included in Ficciones), there's an apocryphal volume of the "Anglo-American Encyclopaedia" (the particular volume owned by Adolfo Bioy Casares includes an article on "Uqbar" that is not present in any other copies of the same book). Later they stumble on volume 11 of "A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön", and a whole literary and philosophical mystery starts to develop. I read

I read this many, many years ago, and was very impressed.

And in Jean Giraudoux' Siegfried et le Limousin, the writings of the title character (who is not who he thinks he is) are quite extensively mentioned and quoted. I found it quite proto-Borgean, and it is a beautiful book.

[Spotted Horses]

What comes to mind? The "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoon within a cartoon in The Simpsons. The "Red Monkey" books, which recur in Peppa Pig.

[ritter]

I haven't read it, but Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu deals with two imaginary paintings, one by Porbus and one by the fictional Frenhofer. Picasso illustrated it, and actually rented a studio (where he spent the war years) in the same building on the Rue des Grands-Augustins where the fictional Frenhofer had his studio in Balzac's book.

[Florestan]

Which reminds me: The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

I don't know if Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe contains nominal references to the latter's works.

[Cato]

Now that I think of it, Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Zaragoza is both a real and a fictitious book, because what we read is actually the content of a fictitious manuscript found in, well, Zaragoza.

My post crossed with Florestan's, but any of Adrian Leverkühn's compositions in Mann's Doctor Faustus, such as the opera on Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, come immediately to mind.

WOW!  Precisely these two came to mind when I saw the topic!

An author,  Macdonald Harris (a pseudonym), c. 30 years ago or more wrote a book called Tenth.

Here is a summary:

"...Tenth recounts the transformation of Julian Coates, an obscure professor in a California university, into a creative artist--through the force of fate and his own sometimes shaky but violent will. Called upon by an attractive BBC editor to give a radio talk on a German composer, Julian finds himself undertaking the task of completing the composer's unfinished Tenth Symphony—the symphony that has been mysteriously forbidden to the world's greatest composers. He quickly encounters a formidable antagonist: the composer's "pest of a daughter" who owns the rights to his work. Soon Julian is enmeshed in a complicated web of intrigue involving three women; the editor, the heiress, and his blond and placid California mistress.

Tenth begins by attaching itself playfully to a well-known work of world literature—the Adrian Leverkuhn whose music is discussed is the protagonist of Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. From that point, however, Harris's novel assumes a tone quite its own, light and ironic, then tenebrous and metaphysical by turns. This is a novel directly in the tradition of Harris's previous work, gripping, unsettling, and elegant."

See:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8070974-tenth

I found the book less than compelling, but perhaps someone here would like to form their own opinion.


There is also Hermann Hesse's Narcissus und Goldmund where the latter character is a sculptor/woodcarver of marvelous religious statues.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Robert Browning's dramatic monologue "My Last Duchess" refers to both a painting by "Fra Pandolf" of the duchess whom the Duke of Ferrara likely caused to be murdered, and a reference at the end to:

Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

[Mandryka]

Architecture is art.

Just today on the tube I was reading Georges Perec's Espèces d'espaces - Species of Spaces in English. There's a description of a house he attributes to Frank Lloyd Wright in Michigan which is so crazy that I said to myself that it must be a product of his imagination. There is a Lloyd Wright house in Michigan, I just checked, but it sounds nothing like the madness that Perec describes.

The Perec is here in English, page 8 and 9 of the pdf - 37 - 38 of the book (It's hard to imagine a house which doesn't have a door . . . )

https://doubleoperative.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/perec-georges_species-of-spaces-and-other-pieces.pdf

The real Michigan Lloyd Wright is here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goetsch%E2%80%93Winckler_House

[Jo498]

I was aware of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, or more precisely I read this years ago but was not sure if there were imaginary books featuring prominently.
I don't really want to count mere metafictional framing devices like in Potocki but these are certainly borderline cases, depending on elaboration. Not merely half a page introducing a "message found in a bottle".

As for Hesse, there are a bunch of imaginary Glass bead games described in that novel but as this whole form of art, science or contemplation is imaginary it's again a somewhat different case.

"Itchy and Scratchy Show" is a great example.

Of course buildings count as well, if they have a rôle in the narrative.
As of visual art or artifacts there must be lots of crime/mystery stories with such stolen/craved/lost items, although very often they are mere McGuffins and not really elaborated

There is also Otto Jägermeier but I am loath to really count him because he began as a joke (article German only, use a translator); more precisely as a joke in a book by Herbert Rosendorfer where a bored and mischievous contributor invents him for a musical encyclopedia.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_J%C3%A4germeier

[Mandryka]

Aristotle's Poetics Book 2 in Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose.
Dorian Gray's picture.
John Shade's Pale Fire in Vladimir Nabokov's eponymous novel.
The shield of Achilles in Homer's Iliad.


I think there's something very complex in Part 2 of Don Quixote -- but I can't remember the details (a false Part 2 maybe . . . )

[T. D.]

Any of the works of the oddball savant de Selby, who figures in Flann O'Brien's strange novel The Third Policeman.

Quoting from O'Brien's book: The beauty of reading a page of de Selby is that it leads one inescapably to the happy conviction that one is not, of all nincompoops, the greatest.

https://www.irishphilosophy.com/2014/04/01/de-selby-ireland/

[Jo498]

I rather dislike that piece but in "The Phantom of the Opera" there are numbers from two or three imaginary operas ("Hannibal", "Don Juan triumphant" (the Phantom's opera) and I think another comic opera) in rehearsal scenes.
I'd guess that there are a few similar cases in novels/plays/movies about theatre although one can of course often use real plays/operas.

[SimonNZ]

All of the even numbered chapters in If On A Winters Night A Traveller

[SimonNZ]

Vinteuil's Sonata? 

Elstir's paintings, also.

[ritter]

Oh, and the opera Salammbô in Citizen Kane. It's not 100% fictitious, as we have at least one aria (composed by Bernard Herrmann, and recorded by Kiri Te Kanawa).

[vers la flamme]

In Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (included in Ficciones), there's an apocryphal volume of the "Anglo-American Encyclopaedia" (the particular volume owned by Adolfo Bioy Casares includes an article on "Uqbar" that is not present in any other copies of the same book). Later they stumble on volume 11 of "A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön", and a whole literary and philosophical mystery starts to develop. I read

I read this many, many years ago, and was very impressed.

And in Jean Giraudoux' Siegfried et le Limousin, the writings of the title character (who is not who he thinks he is) are quite extensively mentioned and quoted. I found it quite proto-Borgean, and it is a beautiful book.

Whoa, I'll have to reread Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius—I didn't realize the narrator's friend was supposed to be Adolfo Bioy Casares. I read a book of his last year that blew my mind: The Invention of Morel.