Steven Millhauser

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It seems clear enough at first where to place Steven Millhauser’s short fiction. In its use of the fantastic and grotesque, it springs directly from the American tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, with traces of Herman Melville thrown in. Millhauser’s European forebears include E. T. A. Hoffmann and Franz Kafka; more recent international influences include Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov. That his work also coincides with that of other American postmodernists, such as Robert Coover and John Barth, is not surprising either. Yet his work cannot be so easily pigeonholed.

As in the work of Borges and Nabokov, Millhauser’s work is filled with doubles, slightly obtuse scholarly narrators, and at times a seemingly infinite series of regressions. Yet the metafictional aspects of Borges’s and Nabokov’s work often leave readers feeling that they have missed out on some cosmic point or joke that only the authors and their acolytes share. In Millhauser’s work, this layered effect gives his readers a sense of depth and a clear indication of the questions he is asking about the interrelationships of art, life, dreams, and reality. Similarly, the anguish that Kafka’s characters undergo in his parables often seems too personal for readers to share; in Millhauser, such suffering arises not only out of the human condition but also out of the artistic dilemmas in so many of his stories. In short, Millhauser’s fictional worlds, while often as mysterious as those of his predecessors, are both more accessible and more comprehensible—and admitting this removes none of their accompanying sense of wonder. His fantastic kingdoms, albeit rooted in reality, defamiliarize the mundane world of daylight and habit. Nevertheless, he is quite capable of writing the typically anthologized type of epiphanic, realistic short story, such as “A Protest Against the Sun” or “A Day in the Country.”

Even though Millhauser has admitted that he often writes about “failures,” they are often specifically American failures, who share a sense of vision with such quintessentially American figures as Thomas Edison and Walt Disney; his dreamers’ machineries and domains are always doomed to failure, because they attempt to engulf and break down the borders between their experience and their dreams.

“August Eschenburg”

Some of Millhauser’s most important stories are miniature portraits of the artist. This story is the first of these. Eschenburg is a designer and constructor of miniature automatons, and, like many of Millhauser’s other artistic protagonists, explores with his lifelike creations the interstices between real life and the artificiality of the imagination; in Eschenburg’s work, “realism itself [is] being pressed into the service of a higher law.” Eschenburg’s triumphs are overshadowed by the successes of his artistic double (a characteristic Millhauser device), Hausenstein, whose figures are unabashedly sensual and satisfy the baser instincts of their audience. Thus it seems as if Hausenstein’s appeal to the degraded tastes of the audience, the “Untermensch,” as he calls them, has triumphed. Yet even as Eschenburg wanders out of the plot, the inner fire that has led him to construct his analogues of life has not deserted him. “His ambition was to insert his dreams into the world, and if they were the wrong dreams, then he would dream them in solitude.” He has failed, like so many of Millhauser’s artistic protagonists, but he is not defeated.

“A Game of Clue”

One of the most striking aspects of Millhauser’s short fiction is his ability to stretch the form by making a narrative out of the most unlikely subjects. In this case it is the juxtaposition of a normal, realistic narrative concerning four young people playing a popular board game...

(This entire section contains 1504 words.)

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with, in alternating paragraphs, descriptions of the actions of the well-known characters in that game, such as Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet. They and their surroundings are described with a scrupulosity bordering on the laborious. Even though the action “in” the game veers towards the licentious, as the Colonel attempts to seduce Miss Scarlet, the action is also paradoxically moving toward a sense of stasis. The mansion itself becomes a characteristic Millhauser edifice, with a series of rooms and secret passages branching off into labyrinthine infinity. The human characters playing the game are also trapped in a sense of stasis, as they each silently wonder about their present problems and their futures: playing the game itself provides a balm, “a spot of time” as it were. A chance passerby looks on the game “and feels a yearning so deep that he wants to cry out in anguish, though in fact he continues steadily, even cheerfully, on his way.”

“The Little Kingdom of Franklin J. Payne”

Franklin Payne is the first of Millhauser’s early twentieth century American dreamers. His career loosely resembles that of pioneering American cartoonist Winsor McCay. Payne begins as an illustrator for that favorite site of Millhauser, the dime museum. Becoming an editorial cartoonist, Payne also draws comic strips, in which he explores the boundaries of reality and the imagination. When his characters become too unconstrained, deconstructing the panels that enclose them, they feel “a craving for the lines and shadows of the actual world.” Payne soon meets his artistic double, Max Horn, whose own work is derivative and characterless. When Payne begins creating his own silent black-and-white cartoons, Horn, Disney-like, sets up his own assembly-line cartoon studio, which Payne rejects. His laborious technique of drawing each frame individually gives “the shimmer of a dream” to his work. Max ends up stealing Payne’s wife, but he cannot steal Payne’s soul. Payne’s last work ends with his main character erasing himself; even though reality must be served, it is imperativeto smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise—well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.

“Catalogue of the Exhibition”

This portrait of the artist is presented in the form of a catalog commentary on the works the artist has created. Millhauser’s triumph is to create a completely fictitious yet nonetheless highly believable major nineteenth century American painter. However, unlike August Eschenburg’s automatons or Franklin Payne’s cartoons, Moorash’s work is not grounded in realism; he is, according to Millhauser, a sort of American J. M. W. Turner—his paintings are romantically, fantastically abstract. Many of Millhauser’s artists inhabit both the mundane day and the transfigured night, but Moorash is totally an inhabitant of the night. In his work “the world and the dreamer intermingle and dissolve.” Moorash’s menage echoes William Wordsworth’s in England’s Lake District: He lives with his sister, with whom he is uncomfortably close. The plot is out of Poe via Nabokov. Not only is Moorash doubled in the character of William Pinney, but also his sister is duplicated in Pinney’s sister. As the catalog progresses, Moorash’s work becomes more fantastic: “It is as if only by smashing what he once called ‘the mimetic fetters’ that Moorash could release into paint the human mystery.” While others of Millhauser’s artists walk into the sunset, the ending of this unabashedly romantic artist is suitably lurid and melodramatic.

The Knife Thrower, and Other Stories

Millhauser’s collection of stories shows him moving further away from the classic realistic mode of the short story. Some stories at first resemble that mode, such as “The Visit,” in which the narrator visits an old friend, but the story soon takes a turn toward John Collier’s His Monkey Wife (1930) as the friend turns out to be married to a large frog, who shows no sign of becoming a princess. Many of the stories are communally narrated, as a voice only known as “we” wonders what the young girls in the town are doing (“The Sisterhood of Night”) or describes subterranean passageways (“Beneath the Cellars of Our Town”).

The most significant stories in the collection characteristically concern artists, and in each case, Millhauser’s vision has grown darker. In the title story, the knife thrower deliberately and artfully wounds his target, culminating in death. The theme is subtly linked to current American preoccupations with violence: “If such performances were encouraged, if they were even tolerated, what might we expect in the future?” “The New Automaton Theater” is a development of “August Eschenburg,” but here the artist, Graum, deliberately enhances the artificiality of his creations and invites the audience to become one with them: “We yearn to mingle with these strange newcomers, to pass into their clockwork lives.” Such a dissolution, the story hints, would be “terrifying.” In “Paradise Park,” Charles Sarabee, creator-designer of an early twentieth century amusement park, must resort to ever-increasing thrills to lure his audience. He becomes a modern Pied Piper, working toward “a magical or mystical park from which the unwary visitor would never return.” In the dreams of Millhauser’s artists begin not responsibilities but an escape from them, and his work increasingly identifies their siren-song lure and danger.

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