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Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser

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SOURCE: Kinzie, Mary. “Succeeding Borges, Escaping Kafka: On the Fiction of Steven Millhauser.” Salmagundi, no. 92 (fall 1991): 115-44.

[In the following essay, Kinzie explores the defining characteristics of Millhauser's short fiction and finds parallels between his work and that of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka.]

“Sinbad shifts in his seat.” So reads a sentence from a remarkable new story by Steven Millhauser, “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad.”1 The diction, demeanor, indeed the whole rhetorical and genre “set” of that sentence is peculiar. Sinbad, the quasi-mythic hero of the Thousand and One Nights, the object (as Millhauser points out) of Scheherazade's meticulous suspensions of plot over the abyss of her death-sentence, and finally a meandering and befuddled narrator (of particular interest to our author) who can remember each voyage in greater detail than any text has ever suggested but who can no longer recall the order in which his voyages occurred—this classic wanderer, erotic experimenter, and sublime storytelling projection is brought down to a cliché of localized realism as he shifts in his seat.

The remark is a clue to the mode of parody in which Millhauser excels—the spoof of contemporary realistic narration in fiction. He incorporates into his metafictional sublime parodic imitations of what has come to be called fictional minimalism. Millhauser does not entirely believe in the perceptual fluctuations that mark minimalism. By this I mean that he does not believe that reality inheres in the portrayal of ordinary worlds by way of a sedulous attention to the rough and unfocused recordings of sense data on the part of moderately sensitive late adolescents. The obsession with adolescence is there in his work, but thinned out and metaphysicalized. Neither does he believe that reality is to be found in a maximal crowding of the fictional scene with numbers of rounded characters. Nor is this author able to relinquish himself to large and subtle movements of plot, as we might find a novelist like Iris Murdoch doing. As a novelist, in fact, Millhauser seems very much the story-writer translated into an ampler vocabulary, instead of one transformed by taking up a different dialect.

No, Millhauser does not recoil from minimalism in the direction of maximalism. Instead, as I see it, he cleverly applies the smaller-scale techniques of fictional realism to a largely notional as opposed to a realistic landscape. His worlds are accumulations of “options,” chances, whimsical possibilities. They are not quite magical in the García Márquezian sense—again, because most of the characters who move about in them are not only flat and unfocused, but also utterly ordinary in their backgrounds and their hopes (showing the typical profiles, in fact, of the characters in the minimalist mode). There is always a rind of banality cushioning the characters from what threatens to become their destiny. Like the stereotyped figure of the hardened traveller in the stories of the nineteenth century, whom writers like Henry James used so comfortably and cannily, Millhauser's narrator-protagonists frequently stand apart from the worlds they witness.2 Their consciousnesses repel self-knowledge like highly burnished shields. There is in these figures a want of psychological relatedness, indeed a want of psychological being, that might otherwise make them attractive to us as mimetic objects of human fate.

And yet Millhauser's work is perfectly riveting. Indeed, I should say that he is original and inspired in his response to the classic materials of story-telling. So in saying that the work or its heroes want psychological being, I am diagnosing, and attempting to account for, the mysterious interest of the states of withdrawnness Millhauser paints. He blurs both the characters' focus and the focusability of the outer landscapes and events. And in these new stories Millhauser has accomplished a remarkable compression of the realistic with the fantastic, creating in effect his own subtle, clever, funny, breathtaking, and delightful mode of magical realism.

Jorge Luis Borges believed that “the basic devices of all fantastic literature are only four in number, the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time, and the double.”3 The double has clearly fascinated Millhauser; he has explored the abysses of hero-worship and aversion among early adolescents drawn to one another and to an ethos of dread in his novels Edwin Mullhouse and Portrait of a Romantic.4 A variant of the double is the idea of the golem, familiar, Frankenstein, or Pygmalion-creature. Borges, who wrote of such a creation in “The Circular Ruins,” is clearly the model for Millhauser in “The Invention of Robert Herendeen” in the present volume. Between these two fictions, the stylistic resemblances are as striking as the thematic ones:

He comprehended that the effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of was the most arduous task a man could undertake, though he might penetrate all the enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind.

(“The Circular Ruins,” Labyrinths)

… my image-making faculty, far from being impaired, was almost disturbingly strong and resulted in vivid, detailed, elaborate eidola, which longed for release.

(“The Invention of Robert Herendeen,” The Barnum Museum)

The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality. This magical project had exhausted the entire content of his soul. …

(Labyrinths)

I decided to invent a human being by means of the full and rigorous application of my powers of imagination … I would mentally mold a being whose existence would be sustained by the detail and energy of my relentless dreaming.

(The Barnum Museum)

On the fourteenth night he touched the pulmonary artery with his finger, and then the whole heart, inside and out … then he … set about to envision another of the principal organs. Within a year he reached the skeleton, the eyelids. The innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task. He dreamt a complete man, a youth, but this youth could not speak. … Night after night, the man dreamt him as asleep.

(Labyrinths)

I spent two nights and two days imagining her hands, summoning them out of vagueness into the precision of being. On the third night I realized that I had still failed to envision the exact pattern of veins on the back of each hand, the movements of the skin between the fingers, the intricate configuration of creases on each reddish knuckle. It seemed to me that only by an act of fanatical precision could I knit her into existence, rescue her from the continual tug of vagueness.

(The Barnum Museum)

In each case in the paired sets of excerpts above, the writers see the double in terms of enormity, exaggeration, and monstrosity. The rhetorical gravity of the narratives reflects the burden of the theme (as shown in such preoccupied phrasings as “fanatical precision,” “intricate configuration,” “elaborate eidola,” “relentless dreaming”—all, as it happens, composed by Millhauser, but with a distinctively Borgesian tang). In each text we discover the reductio of imagining each small cell and organ and feature, a reduction that simultaneously leads to chaos. At its extreme, this making of a new system of existence is a form of both intellectual parody and heresy. For this reason, images and constructs of infinite regress are favored by the Borgesian imagination, almost as a means of avoiding and indulging in the heretical at one and the same time. In works such as Borges's “A New Refutation of Time,” for example, one is not surprised to find mental conundrums like the tortoise and the hare wittily forced into a reading of psychological time (one might even call it “lyrical time”), whereby an infinite number of infinitesimal partitions are to be placed not only upon physical extension but even upon sensuous and affective experience. These partitions are analogous to such tasks as numbering or even (God help us) naming the granules of sand on earth or the strands of hair on the head of one's capricious but, as yet, inert invention, the golem.

Where Millhauser departs from Borges is in his view of heresy. For Robert Herendeen, it is without doubt a much more cerebral and less sacred matter than for the Borges narrator in “The Circular Ruins” to insert a new creation into the contingent world. As if to flaunt his own agnosticism, Herendeen no sooner completes his female creature than he makes a male counterpart for her who becomes his rival for her affections. (This doubling-of-the-double is one of Millhauser's most pervasive imaginative habits.) Where for Borges the double by itself is enough to upset the balance of unity, Millhauser's characters are often perfectly content to keep on repeating, or slightly improving on, a previous “turn.”

When we extrapolate the golem idea as a variant of the double, we see how Borges arrives at his next category, “the contamination of reality by dream.” As Borges puts it in “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” “Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into … reality” (Labyrinths). The same could be said of an invented creature: Like a work, or like a thought, such a creature is a dream inserted into reality. But a dream whose realization sparks a cancerous and corrupting growth. In vertiginous fashion (as Borges might say), the lineage of the double, passing through the golem, also touches the attraction felt by both these writers for literary tampering.

Creating a new understanding of an existing work is understood by both Borges and Millhauser to be an act of magic. Literary critics, who nowadays strive to rival if not abolish the texts that have come down to us, also aspire to magic. But their spells are tame compared to the reverberations of pleased astonishment—and something not unlike a holy fear—which a true cosmopolite of the imagination can produce as s/he inserts an aberration into a received reality. Borges's fictional creation Pierre Menard, a symboliste poet from Nîmes and a contemporary of Paul Valéry (1871-1945), wishes to compose Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. He does not aim to copy it, nor does he intend to make himself into some twin of Cervantes's sensibility. Instead, he undertakes to remain a twentieth-century poet who, from an utterly alien standpoint, having forgotten and then poorly remembering the text from a few readings in youth, in time manages to reproduce “word for word and line for line” a few pages of the Quixote. The act is one of “deliberate anachronism,” radiant with implausibility and “erroneous attribution.” Not for a moment can the reader repress the sensation of artifice. In the little of Pierre Menard's text that survives, writes Borges, “Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer” (Labyrinths).

Menard … has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading; this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique … prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were anterior to the Aeneid. … This technique fills the most placid words with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Celine or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?

(Labyrinths)

Beyond Millhauser's almost incestuous homage to his literary forebear in “The Invention of Robert Herendeen,” the example of Borges's witty and recondite Menard has provoked Millhauser in two of the stories here to delightful tamperings—with A Thousand and One Nights and Through the Looking-Glass. The latter is tampered with in “Alice, Falling,” which presents an interior monologue by Alice as she descends without haste through the White Rabbit's tunnel. It is really the rabbit's home, and on the walls are numerous domestic objects. Using the catalogue technique that occurs under different disguises everywhere in his work, Millhauser (as Alice) lists, speculates about, adjusts, and builds an additional world around the deft accumulations of curios. With plausible period knowledge, Millhauser decorates the White Rabbit's tunnel with a perfect flotsam of Victoriana. The rows of books (including Twenty-Five Village Sermons, Bewick's Birds, The Life and Works of Edwin Landseer, Pope's Homer, and Pilgrim's Progress), remind us of the opus of Pierre Menard (most are apocryphal productions)—not to mention the chronic bookish references, many authentic, that anchor Borges's miniature ficciones. And Millhauser's recurrent and perhaps obsessive style of listing also reminds us of the peculiarly double premise of such assemblages of items: That they form a secret order, that they are thereby exhaustive, and that the world of disordered reality is made clearer by their means.

Another idea, with a darker shading, lurks behind the lists devised by Borges and Millhauser, and that is the apprehension that the lists are idiosyncratic and inexhaustible, like the profusion of another Borges character Funes's memories, like the innumerable hair on the head of the sleeper being “dreamed” into life by the magician in “The Circular Ruins,” or like the redundancy that begins on the six-hundred-and-second night of the Thousand and One Nights, when Scheherazade begins telling the story of her story-telling over from the beginning. (It suffices merely to mention, I expect, how the work-within-the-work and the voyage in time have by now been implicated by the overlapping interests of the two authors.) A horror vacui opens at the idea of the random and eternal reduplication of stories, or of things. And if, in Millhauser's preoccupation with the catalogue, we encounter a more indulgent and welcoming attitude toward the vacuum of repetition, it may have something to do with the younger writer's greater openness to the arena from which Borges so cleverly barred himself, that of realistic narrative. More narrowly considered, Steven Millhauser's preference may tend to the techniques of particulate realism, those of description and setting, which in fiction other than his own are ordinarily marshalled before the action starts: In Millhauser, the real movement of literary originality begins with this preliminary threshold held in a hypnagogic state of abeyance.

.....

So while Millhauser's people are frequently of limited American extraction, they invariably encounter something not entirely “right” about the fit of the world to their experience. There is undoubtedly something wrong about the worlds they encounter, something indefinite, unfinished, yet full of cloudy purpose. There is a certain seductiveness in the lists of the heterogeneous dreck in dime stores and drugstores in Millhauser's novels, and in the ragtag stuff in attics and drawers (Millhauser is positively elegiac about worn and incomplete games of Clue, Monopoly, and Parcheesi, about broken tools and objects of inscrutable origin, and about shabby inserts for old Viewmasters). The touching, the irksome, the obscure, and the formulaic combine in Millhauser's obsession with the ingeniously contrived mechanical toys and dolls in the home of a fourteen-year-old named Eleanor in his 1977 novel Portrait of a Romantic. These curious playthings appear to have been made for Eleanor, or at least lavished upon the child, by adults who have receded from view. One little toy in particular is singled out by Eleanor to exhibit something to the protagonist Arthur Grumm about herself, about himself, or about their intense yet uncertain link to each other. It is a figure of a clown with a white face and blue garments, and preternaturally trembling eyelids. (Here I would beg the reader's indulgence to quote at sufficient length to reproduce something of the mildly monotonous yet undeniably suspenseful precision of Millhauser's descriptive technique.)

Eleanor placed the man carefully in the center of the table. He stood with his legs spread slightly, facing me. His elbows were pressed to his sides, his forearms were extended, and his white, cupped hands were held out palm upwards. The small black eyes gave his white face an expression of intensity that seemed at odds with his clownlike appearance. A white lever one-half inch long protruded from his back. Leaning forward, Eleanor placed in his right hand the red glass ball. Then in his left hand she placed the yellow glass ball. Then reaching around to his back she pushed the lever down. A faint whirring was audible. His head turned to its left, and with a movement of his lids he looked directly at his left hand. Then his head turned to the right, and with a movement of his lids he looked directly at his right hand. There was a pause, as if he were thinking. With a sudden motion he jerked up his right hand, tossing into the air the red glass ball. At once he jerked his left hand to the right, leaving in his right palm the yellow glass ball. He tossed the yellow glass ball into the air and jerked back his left hand to receive the falling red glass ball. … and in this manner he kept one ball always in the air.

(Portrait of a Romantic)

What most fascinates the boy Arthur is the movement of the juggler's head and eyes:

With close attention he followed the motion of each ball from the moment it fell into his left hand to the moment it rose from his upward-jerking right, and glancing at the uptossed ball he at once looked back at the hand about to receive the falling ball—all in a startlingly lifelike manner, enhanced by the movements of the lids and the intense look of the jetblack eyes; but a lifelike manner which, far from obscuring the mechanical elements, served only to emphasize them, as if the very effort to overcome the artificial drew attention to the glassiness of the eyes, the jerking motions of the arms, the white wood of the cheeks; so that it was difficult to say whether the pleasure of the observer lay more in the lifelike illusion of the performance or in the perception of the deceiving artifice itself.

(Ibid, my emphasis)

As Eleanor adds the blue and finally the green glass balls to the blue juggler's burden, the toy figure exhibits greater strain until eventually the red glass ball strikes the edge of his hand and falls, throwing off the trajectories of the other marbles, while the juggler continues to jerk his hands and head as if the balls were still in play.

As a metaphor for Millhauser's pyrotechnics, it is hard to know which makes the greater impression on us, the heavy documentary air of the recitation, the statement about the pleasure of lifelikeness versus the pleasure taken in artificiality, or the image of the so intensely described blue figure jaggedly juggling thin air. That we can discriminate these effects (and affects) as we read suggests that we are enjoying all of them in interdependent measure: We are aware of the artifice despite the closely rendered “pointillism” of the style, and, at the same time, aware of the justice of the little juggler as a metaphor for something in our own failed play and yearning for symmetry. At moments such as these, Millhauser approaches not only Borges but Samuel Beckett in the purity, the grimness, and the tenacious extrusion of his prose.

But although Millhauser frequently suspends the reader over expanses of Beckett-like lucidity and grit, his fiction is also moved by murkier impulses. These often have a petit-bourgeois flavor. For example, although Arthur Grumm in Portrait of a Romantic is mesmerized by and even fixated upon these curious toys, he never reaches any conclusions about them, or about Eleanor's fey character, or about her apparently wealthy and indulgent origins—or even about the illnesses that have apparently kept her dreamily at death's door for months. None of the hero Arthur's chums have visible or even imaginable parents. When they appear, they are frozen in tableaux vivants of an almost mannered nostalgia, stiffened by entrancement, and have little interest in rousing themselves. Indeed, these are the sorts of gothic hiatus also favored by writers like Edgar Allan Poe. Yet Millhauser has also clung to the mid-century suburban American settings and persons, as well as to the undramatic props and locales we associate with suburban childhood—school, family outings, involvement with alter egos, first love, suicidal inklings, and a crushing, subtle, uniform, and often comic ennui. In relation to the novel, of course, the absence of the sort of realistic matrix that distinguishes characters and enlivens plot weakens the comic edge of this boredom: Millhauser's iterative palette of tensely dramatic yet redundant acts, places, tastes, and fears can fray, at times—without accumulating any social or visionary contours to replace them. His clear fictive attraction to the saturated longueurs of E. A. Poe (of which the most hypnotic example is perhaps Poe's monotonous panoramic idyll, “The Domain of Arnheim”) is always derailed by Millhauser's impulse to parody the ennui without curtailing the techniques that produce it.

In short, when reading Millhauser we do not suspend our disbelief. We are not caught in a seamless web. We observe the seams that bind his inventions together. But unlike the experience of reading Borges, Poe, or Beckett, in Millhauser's world we can still make out, through the stitching, the vast stretches of novelistic and prosaic redundancy for which he has such a fondness. This fondness serves him best, I think, in cases where the characters remain essentially ordinary but the world becomes obtrusively, tantalizingly bizarre. In his new book of stories, The Barnum Museum, he brilliantly plays with a radical want of fit between the characters and the odd worlds beyond, as in the stories about Lewis Carroll's Alice, the increasingly sinister images on the sepia postcard and, most brilliantly, in the stories of the mysterious Barnum Museum and of Sinbad.

As I mentioned in my first sentence, Millhauser's Sinbad is launching forth on his eighth voyage, namely one about which no texts exist. He is an old man, drowsing in his beautifully appointed garden, erratically moving his mind over the bits and pieces of his life. The eighth journey is an imaginative one, or one at which Sinbad's imagination persistently falters. As previously noted, he can no longer remember the exact order of the adventures. Not only that, he is episodically uncertain about their number. Perhaps there are some he cannot remember? Perhaps his telling about them to his friends introduces falsehoods, so that there are at least two sets of voyages—those he experienced, and those recited? Or, given the propensity of language to falsify recollection, Sinbad wonders about a further sequence: “Are there perhaps three septads: the seven voyages, the memory of the seven voyages, and the telling of the seven voyages?” He conjectures about himself as well: What if he has merely dreamed the voyages? And if he has, did he do so long ago, or has he “imagined them in his old age and placed them back, far back, in a youth barely remembered?” If the voyages are daydreams, must the reality then be his own uneasy exhaustion in this furiously precise garden with its sundial of white marble sunk in a hexagon of red sand? Under this delusion, “The voyages are rings of red light dancing. There are no voyages, only the worm-thick veins on the back of his hand. Only the heavy body, the laboring heart, the blossoms rotting under the sun.” Age confuses Sinbad's reading of his perceptually immediate sensations, as implicit anxiety about death exaggerates the beating of his heart, the working of his veins, the dizziness in his head under a punishing sun, and the frightful and nauseating whiffs of decaying matter. Clearly, such passages also illustrate how imperious the senses can become when the mind wanders off course.

Occasionally, the senses convene—or coagulate—about the impressions of Sinbad's garden, shifting and changing his view. At one moment it is a hellish and oppressive place, where the body can no longer escape from itself; in this guise, Sinbad's garden in Baghdad is a place of rot and cacophony and sameness. But when it is the voyages which appear to him composed of “banal and boring images,” then Sinbad is easily enraptured by the local paradise about him:

The voyages and adventures … cannot compare with the cry of the blackbird, the sunstruck dome of the mosque, the creak of rigging in the harbor ships, the miraculous structure of a pomegranate or a camel, the shouts of the sellers of dried fruits, the beating out of copper basins in the market of the coppersmiths, the trembling blue shadow cast by falling water on a marble fountain's rim, [in short] the immense collection of precise details that compose the city of Baghdad at this moment.

One sees how local geography comes to represent the physical realm, voyages the mental. For “Baghdad” one might programmatically understand “the body.” When Baghdad is a place of respite, creaturely self-absorption, and thrilling clarity in the present moment, the adventures appear remote, cerebral, and grotesque. When Baghdad is repetitious and overly familiar, “the hellish place of all that is known, the place of boredom and despair,” then his adventures seem to Sinbad utterly clear and real, and we raise no demurral at the idea that he might long to escape the body by setting out on an eighth voyage.

The Baghdad garden becomes dreamlike in other ways. In one “panel” of the story, which Millhauser has divided into page-long vignettes and excursions into various voices, Sinbad sees himself reclining in the garden of the present with the marble sundial casting its rippling shadow on the hexagon of red sand. And Sinbad calls out to his other self, “but he stirred not.” And then he recoils in terror, enters his boat, and encounters one of the frog-folk who tells him, “Unhappiest of mortals, that is a demoncity.” Here Sinbad, in his aged present time, a time which post-dates the last voyage, daydreams that he imagines himself in his garden in the present, only to have the frame of the earlier voyages slipped and fitted around the moment: He had only dreamed he was back in his garden imagining himself on an earlier adventure. Or one can conjecture that Sinbad is sucked back into the text of the voyages by recounting (or by having Scheherazade—or Steven Millhauser—recount for him) a more exact and seductive description of what we are given as, and in, the present time of the final return to Baghdad.

In another panel of Millhauser's Sinbad story, the protagonist is adrowse in the garden murmuring with insects and dense with half-rotten blossoms; the garden (we know from other descriptions in other panels) contains a shrilling blackbird. Suddenly but not surprisingly a great bird, the shadow-image of that enormous roc who appears in two of the Sinbad tales, “settles on the sundial and folds its dark blue wings. … he steps over to touch its shimmering, warm side. The bird … sweep[s] Sinbad onto its back, and at once rises into the air. Sinbad clutches the thick oily feathers as the bird flies over the city” (my emphasis). This infernal noontide apparition persuades Sinbad of its reality by virtue of those uncannily lifelike details—not unlike the trembling eyelids and intensely black pupils of the white-faced juggling toy in Portrait of a Romantic—which here in Millhauser's version guarantee Sinbad's as yet untold realities:

sometimes he remembers what he has never spoken of: the stepping from sun to shadow and shadow to sun as he circled the white dome of the roc's egg, the grass, crushed by his footsteps, rising slowly behind him, the sudden trickle of perspiration on his cheek, the itching of his left palm scraped on a branch of the tree he had climbed shortly before, his head among the leaves, and there, beyond the great white thing in the distance, a greenish-yellow hill shaped like a slightly crushed turban, a slash of yellow shore, the indigo sea.

But Millhauser's Sinbad (or his Scheherazade) is also capable of supposing that such realistic data can support the opposing view just as well, hence that the Baghdad Sinbad is merely an amazement intruded into the real world of a further individual, another Sinbad, one who recites his story “while beyond the open doorway rocs glide in the blue sky, serpents the size of palm trees glisten in the sun.”

Not a small part of Millhauser's skill is revealed in the overlap between two narrative “schedules.” According to one schedule, an alteration of styles or voices performs a constant refreshment of the prose mythm—and of the putative reality behind it. The styles of “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad” are (1) the nineteenth-century translators' heavy-landed locutions, which Millhauser has considerably streamlined, but which he thickens on occasion for purposes of parody and surprise; occasionally, this style is one of pathos, e.g., “I could have cried out for weariness and heart-sorrow”; (2) the second style is that of a Borgesian pedant fussing over variants and interpolations; here, too, Millhauser's intelligence and scholarship provide original “twists,” as when he compares the opinions of the mythographers, examines the various illustrations and frontispieces for the tales, or suggests how the story of Sinbad and things Arabian figure in Joyce's Ulysses; (3) and the third style is that capacious style of the present Sinbad describing to us the facts the other stylists are blind to, namely how it feels to exist in his body, and in his memory, and how he is wont to be somewhat confused among the two.

But according to a second “schedule,” each of these three styles is intensified to saturation or absurdity, in a narrative mode that takes each style to something like its own logical end. The third style, for example, the Style of Presence, traces a consciousness in which rot, decay, and sensory oppression increase as the story progresses. In its turn, the first or nineteenth-century style of decorous and orotund narrative flourish is so cleverly and “sincerely” parodied that, as Millhauser takes up episodes of considerable sweep in the climactic last panels, the stylistic artificiality is far less evident. Similarly, in compounding (or is it reducing to its elements?) the second or pedantic style, Millhauser hits upon the story's most brilliant maneuver. He causes the ambiguities of his own complex Sinbad-narrative to intersect with the shimmering certainties of an American boy's discovery of the Arabian tales. First we hear the slightly nasal drone of the Borgesian lecturer pronouncing a magical verdict, “Every reading of a text is limited and contingent … [thus there are] as many voyages as there are readings.” But then Millhauser writes:

From an infinite number of possible readings, let us imagine one. It is a hot summer afternoon in southern Connecticut. Under the tall pines on the bank of the Housatonic, the shady picnic tables look down at the brown-green water. Bright white barrels mark the swimming area. … The boy is lying on his stomach on a blanket next to [his grandmother], not too close, reading a book. … His mother is laying out the paper plates, opening the box of red, yellow, and blue paper cups, taking out the salt and mustard and relish and potato salad and cucumber slices and carrot sticks. His sister is trying to find a way to make her doll sit at the picnic table without falling over. She is trying to lean the doll against the thermos of pink lemonade. Suddenly he discovers great serpents in the valley, serpents the size of palm trees. … the sun burns down on the backs of his legs, the serpents hiss outside the cave, a pinecone the size of a valley diamond lies on the blanket beside his mother's straw beach bag and her white rubber bathing cap. … He would like this moment to last forever.

(my emphasis)

This moment “when the two worlds are held in harmony”—when the impeccably unpoetic diet and decor of an American family picnic find a kind of happy-humble niche—is one of the most breathtaking in Millhauser's surprising oeuvre. Unlike the satirist, who exploits a deliberate oscillation between high-tone and low, however, Millhauser is attempting to bring the odd extremes of his experience together in an utterly underivative way, despite the multiple literary confluences.

Let us accordingly examine another area of Millhauser's knowledge, the enormous world of American childhood pastimes (pre-television). Although many of the stories he has written are set in Europe, and one in the Middle East, the sensibility at the center of almost every work of Millhauser's resembles the archetypal American personality discussed above. It is un-historied, and oddly unsocialized. Indeed, all of the protagonists are essentially left on their own among their toys. “The Barnum Museum” is an elegy for this replete but self-generated and surreal environment in which the elaborate devices to suspend time suggest how heavy time must have hung on the writer's own hands during his remembered youth.

“The Barnum Museum” is about the unimaginative individual's craving for transport from the ordinary. The story posits at its center a roster of characters of bland demeanor with standardized, if ineffable, longings. As in “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,” the commonplace is a given against which the ingenious, shifting exaggerations run their course. Describing one attraction in the Museum called “the Invisibles,” Millhauser hints at a psychological predisposition in the adults to “yearning, monotony, and bliss”—a triad whose peculiar sequence, with “monotony” protected at its core, provides an important clue to its author's secret method:

It is in the glade that the Invisibles make themselves known. They brush lightly against our arms, bend down the grass blades as they pass, breathe against our cheeks and eyelids, step lightly on our feet. The children shriek in joyful fear, wives cling to their husbands' arms, fathers look about with uncertain smiles. Now and then it happens that a visitor bursts into sobs. …

These clinging wives and diffident fathers are the stereotypes of midcentury American suburbia, for whom monotony will always be at once the stimulus for yearning, and its object. Just as the adults continually surprise in themselves an impulse toward a surrender that is regulated and therapeutic, the strong perimeters of daily law are ever about to dissolve into ghostly aberrations with the banal at their core. So if, by accident, everyone in the town showed up at the Barnum Museum at once (though of course Millhauser, using that faintly overdecorous diction of the formal narrator, describes a situation when “our entire citizenry, by a series of overlapping impulses, will find themselves within these halls”), the city beyond would begin erasing itself, sinking back into a two-dimensional image, rather like that of a film from the postwar period:

For a moment the city will be deserted. … Outside, the streets and buildings will grow vague; street corners will begin to dissolve; unobserved, a garbage-can cover, blown by the wind, will roll silently toward the edge of the world.

The elegiac affection for the fleeting, which Millhauser expresses so eloquently in this passage, forms the counterweight to the reductive and banal in his characterizations. Secretly acknowledging this dichotomy, the author speculates about the contradictory charm of the “mechanical”:

One school of thought maintains that the wonders of the Barnum Museum deliberately invite mechanical explanations that appear satisfactory without quite satisfying, thereby increasing our curiosity and wonder. … Many of us who visit the Hall of Mermaids with a desire to glimpse naked breasts soon find our attention straying to the lower halves, gleaming mysteriously for a moment before vanishing into the black pool.

A quieter variation on the theme of displaced attention produces the rumor that the Museum changes its corridors, the shape of its rooms, not to mention its exhibits—in short, its very terms and architecture—while visitors are wandering about in it:

It is said that if you enter the Barnum Museum by a particular doorway at noon and manage to find your way back by three, the doorway through which you entered will no longer lead to the street, but to a new room, whose doors give glimpses of further rooms and doorways.

Although, when viewed from beyond, the Barnum Museum may occupy the same geographical space as before, within it is subject to variation, vitiation, abridgment.5

The obverse of the law of the mechanical explanation, which satisfies, yet without quite allaying some deeper hunger, is the inevitable exhaustion of wonder, what Steven Millhauser calls “the oppression of astonishment.” “The Barnum Museum” is more replete with fantasy and counter-argument than are Borges stories such as “The Library of Babel” and “The Lottery in Babylon.” But even as one delights in the shiny red boxes that disappear in direct sunlight, the wooden balls from the Black Forest that never come to a stop, the exotic rider on the flying carpet who remains aloft for whole days, “pausing only on the ledges of the upper windows … high up in the great spaces of the hall,” so one is also capable of being wearied by the vertigo of surprise. Millhauser accordingly punctuates his invention with cautions designed, I believe, to forestall boredom by reinterpreting it. Even at these times, the Barnum Museum “bind[s] us to it in yet another way,” by demanding our endurance; he insists on the periodic need to

abandon oneself to desolation. Gaze in despair at the dubious halls, the shabby illusions, the fatuous faces; drink down disillusion; for the museum, in its patience, will survive our heresies, which only bind us to it in another way.

This binding is existential and nostalgic, not casuistical and guilty. Whereas Borges in “The Lottery in Babylon” gives the sinister, omnipotent “Company” complete charge over a network of chance, including the chance of outcomes like murder and betrayal, which links each ticket-holder to the alter ego being hounded or sacrificed, Millhauser by contrast reserves his fictions for gentler doubts and ambiguities. And where the Company in Babylon is infinitely inscrutable, vicious, inaccessible, the directors of the Barnum Museum bemusedly answer to the populace's twin cravings for delusion and incredulity. Borges explores both the cultish and atrocious extensions of ratiocinative mania in his ficciones; Millhauser centers his work on the powdery residue of the almost touching human requirement that one might be amused, distracted, entertained:

If the Barnum Museum is a little suspect, if something of the sly and gimcrack clings to it always, that is simply part of its nature, a fact among other facts. For we are restless, already we are impatient to move through the beckoning doorways. … is it possible that the secret of the museum lies precisely here, in its knowledge that we can never be satisfied? And still the hurdy-gurdy plays, the jugglers' bright balls turn in the air, somewhere the griffin stirs in his sleep. Welcome to the Barnum Museum! For us it's enough, for us it is almost enough.

.....

When I had occasion to meet Mr. Millhauser during the writing of this essay, I mentioned to him my conviction that he was wrestling with and trying to extend the literary example of Borges. Neither abashed by my cleverness nor enthusiastic about the association, he said that, although of course he knew the work of Borges, Franz Kafka had exerted a far greater influence on his career as a writer, and that he had passionately “wrestled” with certain of Kafka's works, notably his Letters to Felice.

This information subdued me. Even as I took up another collection of Steven Millhauser's stories, In the Penny Arcade (1986), and read “Cathay,” August Eschenberg (the hero of the title makes graceful small automata), “Snowmen,” and the title story, Borges returned again and again to mind—Borges, with his fascination for invented worlds (Tlon, Uqbar, the circular ruins, the library of Babel, the garden of forking paths); homages to the impossible past (Pierre Menard, “The Immortal”); magical apprenticeships; secret moments that defeat time; artificial labyrinths and labyrinthine artifices (and here one would merely set forth to list the entire contents of Labyrinths, Ficciones, and Other Inquisitions). Where was one to insert Kafka into this extensive fraternal bonding between the other two?

Of course, with Kafka in mind, one can return to Millhauser stories such as “The Barnum Museum” and “Cathay” and instantly feel the recollective pressure of the modern master of the parable. One readily discerns the shared obsession with shadowy omnipotence (in Kafka, crushing to the individual), whose character is inscrutable. Not only is the “Company” that runs Borges's Babylon lottery evoked by the Barnum Museum's “directors”: These presences in Millhauser also recall the so-called “high command” which has, from all eternity, planned the building of the Great Wall of China, if only as an unlinked series of partial fortifications. The piecemeal character of the construction in the Kafka story is designed both to inspirit the scholar-foremen (who would be daunted by a job of continuous building) and to symbolize as well the impregnability of China as a political entity (in which no continuous fortifications are immediately necessary). For even if the barbarians on their wild horses should flog their mounts toward the village where the speaker stands, “the land,” writes Kafka, “is too vast and would not let them reach us, they would end their course in the empty air.”6

Already, however, one feels the icy breath from Kafka's imagination that sets him apart from other apprentices of the fantastic and arcane. That sense of menace, of enormity, and of intense personal trial even among the arabesques of whimsy let alone the crude ciphers of the ordinary has never been rendered as poignantly by any other writer. In the works by Steven Millhauser which most powerfully argue the presence of Franz Kafka, there is almost no trace of the existential allegory that persuades us of Kafka's antagonistic pertinence to the modern period; Millhauser is almost exclusively preoccupied with metaphors for a state of aesthetic exhaustion he has both sought to create, and thereby been saddled with. Furthermore, and as a concomitant effect of his leaning toward the problematics of making art under conditions of formal, cultural, and technical vitiation, Millhauser is uncomfortable with the primary mode of Franz Kafka—the parable. However attractive this genre may be as an inherited frame, in its implication of belief and its condition of extremity the parable is precisely the mode of thought that is closed to him.

One gains very quickly a feeling for Millhauser's difference from Kafka. His idiosyncrasy is apparent when one contrasts the ingenious “Barnum Museum,” with its benevolent managers devoted to our pleasure, or the eroticized decorum of “Cathay,” to one of the parables contained in Kafka's story “The Great Wall of China” about the impossibility of transmitting and receiving messages, news, information—parables that only augment their potency when fitted to the fearful contemporary context of overdeveloped broadcast media. Among other things, Kafka is perambulating the idea of how absolute power is made more overwhelming by the abstraction of an interminably vast landscape; this vastness in turn is experienced as temporal, Kafka throughout using the index that, of all human experiences, is the most riddling, exhausting, and fateful—time. He toys with the incessant rumors about the Emperor of the present as distinguished from the “Emperor as such” (an sich). Between the current instance and the timeless form falls the suffocating shadow of non sequitur. The hyper-immediate, in the form of error and irrationality, supplants the idea's infinitely extensible abstract origins. “One hears a great many things … but can gather nothing definite. … And besides, any tidings, even if they did reach us, would arrive far too late”:

The Empire is immortal, but the Emperor himself totters and falls from his throne, yes, whole dynasties sink in the end and breathe their last in one death rattle. Of these struggles and sufferings the people will never know; like tardy arrivals, like strangers in a city, they stand at the end of some densely thronged sidestreet peacefully munching the food they have brought with them, while far away in front, in the market square at the [unreachable] heart of the city, the execution of their ruler is proceeding.

(“The Great Wall of China”)

And in a parabolic world where a hurrying messenger needs more than one lifetime to reach even the outer walls of the palace with the message the Emperor has given him in its inner room—in such a world, it goes without saying that the “heart of the city” would be unreachable from this side street. Note, too, this pressure in Kafka of a reality both vicious and stupid; consider the frequency with which, in his work, individuals are humiliated by public exhibition as they are publicly tormented.

In Millhauser, in contrast, the communal self is curiously tame, regressed, aestheticized. Landscapes of yearning and boredom abound. The absolute is a metaphor for exhausted appetites or exhausted play. The palace of his Empire of the Orient is also “so vast that a man cannot pass through all its chambers in a lifetime,”7 but Millhauser's accent falls on the quaintness of the fancy that there are secret wings of the palace that lead independent lives (almost like gods or mythic beasts or temple monkeys), nurturing lineages of the Empire that have evolved unrecognizable languages. More like Borges than Kafka is the swerving of the mind toward infinite regress; the Emperor patronizes the art of miniature-making—erotic paintings on eyelid and breast, or precise reproductions of the endless palace in a miniature of jade, in which there exists a miniature throne room in which is displayed a second miniature palace of jade and “within this second palace, which can scarcely be seen by the naked eye, the artist has again produced the entire Imperial Palace.” Thus it is fitting that Millhauser's most familiar narrative stance is one of externalizing and exoticizing, not suffering, and that his representative style should be one of hypnotized rehearsal rather than human discovery.

The last story in The Barnum Museum is indicative of both the style and the stance just described. In this work a former cabinetmaker in Vienna who does occasional sleight-of-hand tricks decides in his late twenties to go on the stage as a conjurer. The nineteenth century is ominously coming to an end. Magic shows are popular, the public's appetite for them being in some fashion a reflection of the fin-de-siècle romance:

In the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire of the Hapsburgs was nearing the end of its long dissolution, the art of magic flourished as never before. … It was the age of levitations and decapitations, of ghostly apparitions and sudden vanishings, as if the tottering Empire were revealing through the medium of its magicians its secret desire for annihilation.

(“Eisenheim the Illusionist,” The Barnum Museum)

In tune with the theme of loss and the culture's response to loss in varieties of nihilism, Eisenheim perfects a routine called “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” during which children from the audience disappear into a hill on the stage, where they claim to have seen visions either of a golden mountain or of a lurid hell; later—their parents by now quite beside themselves—the children emerge out of a black chest and are restored to their families. Because it treads too close on the hem of taboo, it is one of the many Eisenheim tricks whose very mastery and success prevent him from repeating. I have italicized passages in which Millhauser's quaintly derivative repertorial style is audible:

The Pied Piper of Hamelin never appeared again, but two results had emerged: a certain disturbing quality in Eisenheim's art was now officially acknowledged, and it was rumored that the stern master was being closely watched by Franz Josef's secret police. This last was unlikely, for the Emperor, unlike his notorious grandfather, took little interest in police espionage; but the rumor surrounded Eisenheim like a mist, blurring his sharp outline, darkening his features [among them, a gothically pulsing vein over his left brow] and enhancing his formidable reputation.

Most readers will be sensitive to his curiously ponderous expository style in this excerpt, to its apparent need of the rhythms of catchphrase, and of the unchallenged assumptions about the relation between outer fact and inner furor it carries forward from its exemplars in the nineteenth century. It is as if Millhauser in his narrative guise had not evolved the fully detached “third voice” that the somewhat dandified repertorial mode hints at, yet also as if the authorial “second voice” (that of the poet/writer speaking to us—to continue T. S. Eliot's distinction)—as if this second voice were itself not entirely conversant with the effect it wished to make or with the audience it wished to address. Within this ambiguous narratological terrain, it is clear that Millhauser has determined, at the very least, to extract his theme and his character from the inert context of cliché. Indeed, in his oeuvre this is a fairly standard storytelling procedure—to ground himself in a perceiving consciousness threatened at every turn by the commonplace in thought and expression, and then to perform flirtatious escapes.

I would make two observations about this stylistic gambit. It is not always immune to infection from the mimetic fallacy: Millhauser's texts will often eerily engage in chronic fumbling, manic desultoriness, and exhausted prosaism. But at the same time, I suspect that these qualities of style have emerged—from prolific experiments—as his aesthetic fate. The blots are also the substance and vehicle of the art. In stories like “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” Millhauser makes the contradictory gesture of parodying what he requires—that linguistic atmosphere of banal fluency that surrounds journalism and belles lettres in periods of greatest prose accomplishment. For his style in such stories is a nineteenth-century derivation; practiced at one remove, in the twentieth, the rhetoric is ever so slightly precarious in its flourish:

Eisenheim was not without rivals, whose challenges he invariably met with a decisiveness, some would say ferocity, that left no doubt of his self-esteem.


If Benedetti proved too easy a rival, a far more formidable challenge was posed by the mysterious Passauer. … [He] took the city by storm; and for the first time there was talk that Eisenheim had met his match, perhaps even—was it possible?—his master.

But then, out of the shufflings of the more predictable materials will come marvels of surprise, part of whose ingenuity comes in overstepping the convention of the repertorial genre. During Passauer's final performance, for example, a silver thimble produces unlikely enormities like a small mahogany table and a silver salver, on which, most incredibly, steams a roast duck.8 The repertorial genre is then double-crossed again, not by continued transgression into fairy tale, but by another of Millhauser's excursions (of the sort that prolong the anecdotal texture of his tales) into doublings. Passauer's final performance ends as the magician makes everything on stage disappear, including himself:

Suddenly he burst into a demonic laugh, and reaching up to his face he tore off a rubber mask and revealed himself to be Eisenheim. The collective gasp sounded like a great furnace igniting; someone burst into hysterical sobs. The audience, understanding at last, rose to its feet and cheered the great master of illusion, who himself had been his own greatest rival and had at the end unmasked himself.

Note the effervescent effect of the clichés, like “demonic laugh,” “hysterical sobs,” “collective gasp,” which issue in that fine unbroken sweep of catchphrases in the final sentence. Cliché is not entirely ironic—for that to hold true, other positions of judgment would have to be adumbrated from which to view the objects of incomplete belief. Nor yet is the use of cliché entirely automatic, as if Millhauser were a novice learning (as at some point August Eschenberg and Eisenheim and Robert Herendeen had to learn) the stages of the conjurer's craft. The moments at which Millhauser hints at such designs are interestingly mercurial. For example, the narrator of “Eisenheim the Illusionist” paraphrases a review of the first show the magician gives in the new century, at which he sits at a glass table in a business suit and calls into existence things only he can move and lift, although the observers from the audience can certainly see them. The narrator's paraphrase of the article, quite close to the grain of the style of the story as a whole, concludes:

But no one had detected any mist, no one had seen the necessary beam of light [for the images to have been merely cinematographic]. However Eisenheim had accomplished the illusion, the effect was incomparable; it appeared that he was summoning objects into existence by the sheer effort of his mind. In this the master illusionist was rejecting the modern conjurer's increasing reliance on machinery and returning the spectator to the troubled heart of magic, which yearned beyond the constricting world of ingenuity and artifice toward the dark realm of transgression.

The narrator passes judgment on these views so as to distinguish them—not entirely convincingly—from his own:

The long review, heavy with fin de siècle portentousness and shot through with a secret restlessness or longing, was the first of several that placed Eisenheim beyond the world of conjuring and saw in him an expression of spiritual striving, as if his art could no longer be talked about in the old way.

Yet Millhauser's narrator is devoted to placing and categorizing Eisenheim precisely “in the old way”—comparing his to the approach of earlier magicians, suggesting the traits Eisenheim has in common with the heroes of gothic romance (brooding inwardness; an aversion to public life that nevertheless permits dazzling, quasi-aristocratic showmanship; profound if inscrutable passions; demonic ennui; mysterious superstitions—he refuses to perform at all during the calendar year 1900—and so on). Surely our narrator concurs in discerning in Eisenheim “an expression of spiritual striving” far beyond trickery. And just as surely the author Millhauser sees in his narrator's insight an example of a craving that, however unsatisfiable, is fundamentally banal.

Even as the clichés of “secret” skill and prodigious discipline are expressed in the figure of Eisenheim—clichés explicitly approved by the narrator's rehearsal—an inescapable atmosphere of mental illness pervades the narrative unironically. In such a medium, the contrivances of mirroring and doubling assume rather a willed than a necessary shape. Mirroring and doubling actually provide technical escapes for the writer, permitting Millhauser to “disappear” Passauer/Eisenheim, to change the brooding-flamboyant showman Eisenheim into a “deeper” and more inward mental traveller, and at last to achieve the magician's own erasure (a seemingly pallid result) out of the intensest engagement with mental powers devalued by the parody-fringe of the style (“by the sheer effort of his mind”).

Such were the kinds of aesthetic ambivalence and chaffing double allegiance that began to make sense, for me, of Millhauser's enigmatic allusion to the influence of the Kafka letters. The clue to his fascination had to lie—has to lie—with the idiosyncrasy of Letters to Felice within Franz Kafka's Gesamtwerk (for, clearly, it is not the Kafka of the classic parables of abasement that continues to seduce him). In the first place, this exorbitantly long collection of letters (amounting to something between 280,000 and 300,000 words)9 is a literary work only in a devious and limited sense: It records the attempt of the 30-year-old Kafka from Prague, a neurotic suitor attracted by Zionism but fearful of leaving his parents' apartment, to compel in an unintellectual, robust Jewish secretary named Felice Bauer in Berlin an increasing state of absolute devotedness to himself while at the same time progressively extricating himself from the worldly commitment to her that his epistolary urgency created. Penelope could not have been more ingenious in untying the hopeful stratagems she had encouraged in the hot, idle youngbloods—except that, in Kafka's case, there was at the last a curious kind of consummation of the heart. His sexual intimacy with Felice far along in their acquaintance resembled the paradox-language Kafka insisted on using between them, inasmuch as the maximum physical intimacy coincided with the dissevering of all Felice's hopes—and, indeed, the complicated and mercurial Franz's hopes—for their eventual worldly union in marriage. Unlike a Liebestod, however, the break with the ordinary signalled by their love-making was a release for Kafka into the solitude he required for writing, and a recoil from self-sacrificial consumption in the beloved.

So Letters to Felice registers a seduction, a seven-year-long literary connivance and imbroglio, but with none of the parabolic and eerie transparency of the creative work. Unlike the magisterial modern parables Kafka produced in the first few months of his acquaintance with Felice—among them “The Judgment” and The Metamorphosis—the letters, as Elias Canetti has pointed out,10 are marked by a style of dull, subliterary nagging. Repetitions abound, and a repetitious brooding over repetitions, redundancies, and contradictions (a veritable textual Thousand and One Nights, with neurotic indecisiveness and contradictory aggression doing the work of the garbling and interpolation that also characterize the anonymous song and story cycles).

The psychological state suggested by these letters is solipsism. As in its neurotic manifestation, the solipsistic mode of the letters is one in which the self is fixed on and restricted to a circular preoccupation with its own private pressures, its own inward terrain. Kafka's dialogue with Felice is manic, unsavory, manipulative. As long as Felice replies frequently and fervently, she is neutralized; when she lapses, writes infrequently, fails to read and comment on Kafka's work, or (what is worse) reads other writers (over nearly all of whom he considered himself superior), then Kafka marshals his persuasive, aggressive prowess to get her back into line. He himself actively wrestles with Felice until she submits to caring for and (at a distance) tending to his surprising demands. When such a precarious perch is achieved, Kafka then writhes and thrashes himself free of her. Distance is always enforced—she in Berlin, he in Prague. He avoided meetings with her, as often as not heading off in the opposite direction for his holidays. Against the background of this perversely comforting separation, Kafka engineers the fanatic, shadow intimacy of letters. One is tempted to agree with Canetti's observation that this was a dialogue Kafka was conducting with himself by way of her.

But this is a dialogue with a self incapable of committing itself to another. Those periods in the correspondence with Felice Bauer when Kafka appears to be in love are marked by his insistence on the supreme demands of his art and the insuperability of his personal idiosyncrasies (the need for a solitude as deep as death; the abhorrence of meat, of crowds, of infants, and of heavy furniture)—not to mention his shamelessness. He permitted his mother to hire a private detective to look into Felice's reputation, and laughingly conveys to her in a letter the information gathered by the detective that she was reputed to be a good cook. When he makes the disclosure, Kafka abjures responsibility, claiming to be sorry that she might have been hurt, rather than contrite for having cooperated in hurting her.

In another appalling twist, Kafka turns his epistolary charm on Felice's emissary and friend, Grete Bloch, sent in late 1913 to Prague to re-establish connection between these two oddly matched specimens whose first engagement (of June 1913) had broken off. Grete seems more Kafka's type, better read, more intellectual than Felice. She accomplishes her bridge-mending mission, but Kafka then transfers his confidentiality to her: They appear to have gossiped together about the absent Felice, and Kafka is particularly unpleasant on the subject of Felice's new gold teeth and how the idea of them at first repelled him (until he discovers how touching this “weakness” made her). Kafka lengthily discusses the costume Grete will wear, as if she were the one about to be married and Felice a mere relation or in-law.

Once again, however, the engagement founders, this time with Grete's help. In a Berlin hotel (the Askanische Hof), at an encounter which Kafka punningly called a Gerichtshof (tribunal), Felice and Grete unite to give evidence against Kafka for his misgivings, his unreliability, his resistance (even aversion) to marriage and to Felice. At this tribunal, Kafka says nothing. The humiliation is great, but also (as it were) successful: It disrupts the nuptial arrangements from which his entire temperament shrank.

It strikes one that Kafka may have found the humiliation stylistically sympathetic to those tendencies in his spirit that drove him to complain and to repeat himself. Unlike Jorge Luis Borges, who finds multiplicity abhorrent, Kafka is relieved to escape into doubles and the doublings-of-the-double (Felice and Grete) whom he can then neutralize, turn into self-reflexive ciphers, recast in the armor of his own resistant silence, like creatures not of flesh but mind-forged. These mirrored selves are like eccentric golems embodying the weaknesses of character and the stalled ambitions of the maker. For him to have been publicly exposed as an empty and unresponsive individual validated Kafka's sense that he was empty, bottomless, unsound (and he was certainly a textbook hypochondriac). His essentially redundant nature forces him to cross again and again over the sore spots in his being. So he created the conditions under which conditions themselves could defeat him, repel him, reduce him to an ostensibly unfinished, gaping, unsatisfiably recursive state.

Something of this sort might begin to explain Steven Millhauser's fascination with this work instead of with any of Kafka's transcendent parables of the modern condition: They, after all, possess a kind of spiritual closure, the closure of fear and perfect despair. The Letters to Felice, on the other hand, exhibit a sensibility committed to staying (at least on the plane of social belonging) incomplete and unattached, even inert, while toying with melancholy rehearsals of all that has been squandered. It may even be that in his interest in the correspondence with Felice, Millhauser is confessing his distress (at most a mild and quizzical distress) at finding himself as a fiction writer more interested in the long and delicate insomnia of sameness and redundancy than he is in authentic change.

It is equally credible that Steven Millhauser may inordinately admire the scale on which, in these letters to Felice Bauer and Grete Bloch, Kafka the suitor condemned himself to a cycle of obsessive returns to the precarious crest of a relation that would only resolve again into hellish betrayals. Perhaps Millhauser discovered, in such shabby exigencies, a compelling model for his own art. For the protagonists we most often meet in Millhauser's work are stretched on a wheel of cruel inertia produced by their own ennui, and turned furiously by an inexhaustible need for design. Like all vicious circles, those of his characters are at most interruptible by fantasies of self-cancellation to which the nightmare of their lives prohibits any effective—even ironic—response.

Notes

  1. In Millhauser's collection of short stories, The Barnum Museum (New York: Poseidon/Simon & Schuster, 1990).

  2. For James the repertorial mode seems almost a recreation from the massive enlargement of characters' consciousness in the novels of the middle and late periods. In the novels, of course, James requires of himself the opposite attitude: Instead of opacity or density, protagonists or lens-figures had to be raw (whether through inexperience—Isabel Archer—or through will—Lambert Strether), so that impressions about the world entered the novels through their eyes with stunning force. For other users of the rigid-narrator figure, like Borges, as we shall see shortly, the mode can be exploited for other varieties of intellectual play.

  3. Paraphrased by James E. Irby in his introduction to Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, eds., Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. xviii.

  4. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, by Steven Millhauser (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) and Portrait of a Romantic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977; rpt. Washington Square Press, 1987).

  5. It is also subject to parody. Consider the carnival coarseness of the air ducts placed so as to lift the women's skirts (and the subsequent fad in full skirts among the girls and women); the interest of so many visitors in viewing the mermaids' bare breasts; the Museum's transformation of teenage Hannah Goodwin, formerly distinguished by a poor complexion (“whiteheads”) and painful shyness; the parody of 1960s flower children in the Museum's “eremites … a small and rigidly disciplined sect who are permitted to dwell [there] permanently. … Their hair is short, their dark robes simple and neat, their vows of silence inviolable. They drink water, eat leftover rolls from the outdoor cafes, and … are said to believe that the world … is a delusion. … they … were born in our city and its suburbs; they are our children (p. 88, my emphasis).

  6. “The Great Wall of China” [1918], in Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1970), p. 90.

  7. Steven Millhauser, “Cathy,” In the Penny Arcade [1985] (New York: Washington Square Press, 1987).

  8. We encounter a similar outlandish fancy, which approaches burlesque, in “Cathay” as well, whose miniature Imperial Palace includes miniature copies of all the Emperor's “cups, bowls, and dishes, and even a pair of scissors so tiny that when fully opened they can be concealed behind the leg of a fly” (In the Penny Arcade).

  9. Based on a rough count of the text edited by Erich Heller and Juergen Born and translated by James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth: Letters to Felice, by Franz Kafka (New York: Schocken, 1973).

  10. Elias Canetti, Kafka's Other Trial [1969], trans. Christopher Middleton (New York: Schocken, 1974).

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