‘Perhaps sound is only an insanity of silence, a mad gibber of empty space grown fearful of listening to itself and hearing nothing.’ — Steven Millhauser
____
Who
‘Steven Millhauser is perhaps one of modern American fiction’s most elusive characters. When his novel, Martin Dressler, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1997, Millhauser told an interviewer that it would not change his life one bit – “I dare it to,” he was quoted as saying. The prize brought many of his older books back into print. As the patina of the prize faded however, they slowly retreated from the shelves and back into the hands of the small but devoted following he has always enjoyed.’ — ric.edu
_____
About
‘Steven Millhauser doesn’t traffic in emotional upheaval or interpersonal conflict. Most fiction writers try to make characters seem like real people, but Millhauser flattens them, giving his books the paradoxical effect of seeming realer than reality. For him, meticulous observation does the work of psychology. Millhauser is also our foremost animist: in his stories, mannequins walk out of department store windows and figures in paintings knock hats off innocent bystanders. His vehicles for these effects are the parable and the confession. There is a disquieting quiet to every Millhauser sentence that makes it immediately recognizable, a feeling that each was recorded for posterity by the last man living.’ — D.T. Max
‘Phenomenal clarity and rapacious movement are only two of the virtues of Millhauser’s Dangerous Laughter, which focuses on the misery wrought by misdirected human desire and ambition. The citizens who build insulated domes over their houses in ‘The Dome’ escalate their ambitions to great literal and figurative heights, but the accomplishment becomes bittersweet. The uncontrollably amused adolescents in the book’s title story, who gather together for laughing sessions, find something ultimately joyless in their mirth. As in earlier works like The Barnum Museum, Millhauser’s tales evolve more like lyrical essays than like stories; the most breathlessly paced sound the most like essays. The painter at the center of ‘A Precursor of the Cinema’ develops from entirely conventional works to paintings that blend photographic realism with inexplicable movement, to—something entirely new. Similarly, haute couture dresses grow in ‘A Change in Fashion’ until the people beneath them disappear, and the socioeconomic tension Millhauser induces is as tight as a corset. Though his exaggerated outlook on contemporary life might seem to be at once uncomfortably clinical and fantastical, Millhauser’s stories draw us in all the more powerfully, extending his peculiar domain further than ever.’ — PW
______
Further
‘The Ambition of the Short Story’, an essay by Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauser Resource @ Answers.com
Steven Millhauser page @ Facebook
‘Getting Closer’, a story by Steven Millhauser @ The New Yorker
‘Mermaid Fever’, a story by Steven Millhauser @ Harpers
Podcast: Alec Baldwin reads Steven Millhauser’s ‘The Dome’
Podcast: Cynthia Ozick reads Steven Millhauser
Steven Millhauser interviewed @ Bomb
‘Dangerous Laughter’ reviewed @ Fanzine
Steven Millhauser’s books @ Bookfinder
_____
Extras
Steven Millhauser Reads From His Work
‘Prospies, Steven Millhauser and Chocolate Milk’
Steven Millhauser: 2012 National Book Festival
Trailer: ‘The Illusionist’, based on Steven Millhauser’s novel
_______
Interview
Would you care to comment on the reasons for your fascination with the world of adolescence?
Steven Millhauser: What’s fascinating about adolescence is that it’s an in‑between state. It feels a tug in two directions: back toward the completed world of childhood, from which it is permanently banished, and forward toward the unknown realm of adulthood, which it both craves and fears. Because it’s an in‑between state, adolescence is fluid, unformed, unsettled, impermanent—in a sense, it doesn’t exist at all. Fiction conventionally presents adolescence as a time of sexual awakening, but for me it feels like the very image of spirit in all its restless striving.
One suggestion I was tempted to make in the book I wrote on your work was that one founding, permanent crisis in your texts consists in the contradictory desire to find a form for dreams and things and a refusal to see this necessary form solidify into anything permanent, a permanent struggle between form and dissolution. How widely have I erred?
SM: Not widely, not narrowly, not at all. One thing I learned from your book—and I learned lots of things—was how often I write about dissolution. It hadn’t struck me before. Why this continual return to images of disappearance, of fading away, of dissolving? It must be that dissolution is the necessary other side of permanence, its logical contradiction. It’s also a fact in the world: the loveliest snowman melts away, civilizations crumble, galaxies die. Against this universal principle of dissolution, the urge for un‑dissolution, for permanence, asserts itself. Form is the response of the spirit to the experience of dissolution.
Is your insistence on dream and the imagination connected with a concern for any kind of transcendence?
SM: No and yes. If by “transcendence” you mean something religious or mystical, then the answer is no. But “transcendence” is a tricky word. Its roots suggest a climbing‑across, a rising‑above, a going‑beyond. In this sense, dream and imagination are nothing but acts of transcendence, since they carry us beyond the limits of immediate sensation. In the same way, memory is also an act of transcendence. But I would make a distinction between secondary imagining and dreaming, and primary imagining and dreaming. The secondary form is whimsical, ignorant, a little bored, a little frivolous—it seeks only distraction. The primary form, though playful like all acts of mind, is radically serious. It seeks to go beyond immediate sensation because it doesn’t believe that sensation fully accounts for the astonishing, ungraspable event called the world. In this sense, dream and imagination are methods of investigating the nature of things, they are precise instruments for exploring reality. But enough, and more than enough. For someone who prefers silence, I’ve been talking far too much. It must be your fault.
Let me be guilty all the way, then: your texts often refer to “something dubious” in the desire of the imagined spectators to “forbidden passions” that “cannot be named.” Pointing as they seem to do to a fascination for the erotic and the deadly, should these mentions, however, be read more widely to suggest a collective desire for further “unspeakable practices,” or are they, less topically, meant to underline the somber side of any imaginative act?
SM: Both; but the second especially. Imagination has the violence and danger of all powerful things. Reason continually comes up against limits, it’s in fact an acknowledgment of limits, but imagination is unstoppable, it wants to smash limits out of sheer exuberance. Its cry is always the same : More! More! The brightest, most playful act of imagination casts a dark shadow.
Quite often in your work you switch back and forth, or rather you oscillate, between imitation and invention, realism and imagination. Does this oscillation constitute or otherwise help you to bring about a new avenue of approach to what you call “the blazing thing that deserves the name of reality”?
SM: It’s interesting to me that you describe what I do as oscillation, since I think of myself as often doing something a bit different: beginning in a conventional way, a way that seems to promise the familiar pleasures or boredoms of realist fiction, and then swerving into something else. But whether I do what I think I do, or in fact oscillate, it’s indeed a method that helps me get at whatever it is I’m trying to get at.
Once, when asked to describe your work, you responded by calling it “enigmatic realism.” Could you expand a little on this enigmatic answer? What is the place of the mysterious in your exploration of the real? Revelation, or clarification, seems to play an important role in your work. How do you articulate revelation in tandem with your profound respect for the shadowy sides of the real?
SM: I was trying to be as enigmatic as possible. But you’re right that revelation, by which I mean something like a secular version of religious vision, feels crucial to my sense of art. I would even argue that the end of all art is revelation. But because there is no final truth to be revealed, no godhead hidden behind the forms of Nature, the revelation can at best shadow forth an intimation of something that can be shown in no other way—or perhaps, if I may adopt your terms, it might be said that revelation, far from dispersing the shadowy sides of the real, reveals precisely those shadowy sides. Is this an enigmatic answer? I hope so.
In an interview you talk about the idea/vision dichotomy : “If I truly wanted to present ideas, I’d write essays. What drives me to write a story is something closer to a picture or vision that I want to complete. I understand that this picture isn’t without meaning, but the meaning is buried in it and works in subterranean ways.” Do your short stories, like your creators’ miniatures or museum-like architectures, reiterate the importance of leaving a picture incomplete so as to endow meaning with a mysterious, metamorphic life of its own?
SM: I don’t adhere to a relentless esthetic of incompletion, if that’s what you mean. But yes, of course, certain kinds of completion are harmful. What’s important is finding the necessary balance between the exhaustive, on the one hand, and the suggestive, on the other. I wouldn’t trust a writer who claimed to know exactly how this is done.
I would like to ask some questions about the craft of writing. In your stories, there is usually a complicated set of problems expressed with some extraordinary clarity. Is this combination of precision and complexity in your work something that you have to work at consciously?
SM: Exactly what brings a story into being remains elusive to me. I’m happy to let it remain elusive. Certainly, once a story has emerged from wherever stories emerge, I work at it relentlessly so that it can become itself as completely as possible. I’m conscious of achieving or failing to achieve certain effects, but that consciousness is often little more than an almost physiological sense of rightness or wrongness. At a certain stage of revision I’m definitely aware of trying to make my language more precise, but the struggle for precision is itself controlled by something deeper that I can’t define and don’t question. And precision is a tricky business. As your own Robbe-Grillet once put it: “Rien n’est plus fantastique que la précision.” As for complexity: complexity alone holds no interest for me. But a precise complexity, a vital complexity—now that is something worth striving for.
You often resort to lists in your short stories. Although the juxtaposition of words often appears heterogeneous, do you organize words according to a certain pattern?
SM: Any system for creating lists would quickly reveal itself as tediously mechanical. But a complete lack of system, a randomness, would be just as bad. The crucial thing about a list is that it must suggest the exhaustive without the possibility of being exhaustive. The exhilarating challenge is to combine smallness and vastness—to imply vastness through smallness, completeness through incompleteness. The items in a list must also harmonize and clash with one another in a way that remains lively, even though a list is inherently boring. A list is a kind of exercise in overcoming impossibilities—that’s what I find so seductive.
In Dangerous Laughter, the maker of miniatures “seemed to sense dimly, just out of reach beyond his inner sight, a farther kingdom. […] He confessed to himself that it was less a seeing than a desire gradually hardening into a certainty.” Do you feel the same way when you are starting a story? That is, do you know beforehand where you are heading, or do you follow your desire to write until it coalesces into a finished piece of work? Do you start with a small, single image in your mind and then enlarge it or explore it, or do you set out more or less with a grasp of the whole?
SM: When I was in my early twenties, I began writing as soon as I had a single image and a vague sense of what I wanted to do. It’s a very youthful, very clumsy way of going about it. I now don’t begin until I know a great deal about the still unwritten story, though I don’t know and don’t want to know everything. To put it another way : the business of knowing only a little, and then knowing a little more, and a little more, now takes place almost entirely in my mind, as well as in notebook jottings, as I slowly prepare for the act of writing. To write down a story while not knowing anything about it, not having any idea at all where you are going, strikes me as ludicrous. It’s also not believable. Writers like to claim such things all the time, but I remain skeptical.
___
Book
Steven Millhauser Dangerous Laughter
Knopf
‘Steven Millhauser’s latest collection opens with a story about Tom and Jerry—that’s right, the cartoon characters. But ‘Cat ’n’ Mouse’ doesn’t resort to easy pop-cultural winking at the reader. Instead, Millhauser portrays this manic animated world with precise, flat descriptions that are more akin to Chekhov than Loony Tunes. It’s a risky opener, but what could have been cutesy nostalgia turns out to be a tale of concentrated dread. At the end, Jerry escapes the cat’s grasp by erasing him with a handy handkerchief. Only then does he understand that in wiping away his hunter, he’s rendered his own life meaningless.
‘The mouse’s realization distills a theme that recurs throughout Millhauser’s work: the possibility that our imaginations might make actual life obsolete. In the new volume, a master miniaturist creates works so small that no one can actually see them; a fashion trend obscures women to the point of oblivion; a forgotten artist named Harlan Crane creates paintings of such vivid dimension and movement that even today’s special-effects wizards aspire to his startling realism.’ — Time Out NY
______
Excerpt
The cat is chasing the mouse through the kitchen: between the blue chair legs, over the tabletop with its red-and-white-checkered tablecloth that is already sliding in great waves, past the sugar bowl falling to the left and the cream jug falling to the right, over the blue chair back, down the chair legs, across the waxed and butter-yellow floor. The cat and the mouse lean backward and try to stop on the slippery wax, which shows their flawless reflections. Sparks shoot from their heels, but it’s much too late: the big door looms. The mouse crashes through, leaving a mouse-shaped hole. The cat crashes through, replacing the mouse-shaped hole with a larger, cat-shaped hole. In the living room they race over the back of the couch, across the piano keys (delicate mouse tune, crash of cat chords), along the blue rug. The fleeing mouse snatches a glance over his shoulder, and when he looks forward again he sees the floor lamp coming closer and closer. Impossible to stop — at the last moment he splits in half and rejoins himself on the other side. Behind him the rushing cat fails to split in half and crashes into the lamp: his head and body push the brass pole into the shape of a trombone. For a moment the cat hangs sideways there, his stiff legs shaking like the clapper of a bell. Then he pulls free and rushes after the mouse, who turns and darts into a mousehole in the baseboard. The cat crashes into the wall and folds up like an accordion. Slowly he unfolds, emitting accordion music. He lies on the floor with his chin on his upraised paw, one eyebrow lifted high in disgust, the claws of his other forepaw tapping the floorboards. A small piece of plaster drops on his head. He raises an outraged eye. A framed painting falls heavily on his head, which plunges out of sight between his shoulders. The painting shows a green tree with bright red apples. The cat’s head struggles to rise, then pops up with the sound of a yanked cork, lifting the picture. Apples fall from the tree and land with a thump on the grass. The cat shudders, winces. A final apple falls. Slowly it rolls toward the frame, drops over the edge, and lands on the cat’s head. In the cat’s eyes, cash registers ring up NO SALE.
The mouse, dressed in a bathrobe and slippers, is sitting in his plump armchair, reading a book. He is tall and slim. His feet rest on a hassock, and a pair of spectacles rest on the end of his long, whiskered nose. Yellow light from a table lamp pours onto the book and dimly illuminates the cozy brown room. On the wall hang a tilted sampler bearing the words HOME SWEET HOME, an oval photograph of the mouse’s mother with her gray hair in a bun, and a reproduction of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon in which all the figures are mice. Near the armchair is a bookcase filled with books, with several titles visible: Martin Cheddarwit, Gouda’s Faust, The Memoirs of Anthony Edam, A History of the Medicheese, the sonnets of Shakespaw. As the mouse reads his book, he reaches without looking toward a dish on the table. The dish is empty: his fingers tap about inside it. The mouse rises and goes over to the cupboard, which is empty except for a tin box with the word CHEESE on it. He opens the box and turns it upside down. Into his palm drops a single toothpick. He gives it a melancholy look. Shaking his head, he returns to his chair and takes up his book. In a bubble above his head a picture appears: he is seated at a long table covered with a white tablecloth. He is holding a fork upright in one fist and a knife upright in the other. A mouse butler dressed in tails sets before him a piece of cheese the size of a wedding cake.
From the mousehole emerges a red telescope. The lens looks to the left, then to the right. A hand issues from the end of the telescope and beckons the mouse forward. The mouse steps from the mousehole, collapses the telescope, and thrusts it into his bathrobe pocket. In the moonlit room he tiptoes carefully, lifting his legs very high, over to the base of the armchair. He dives under the chair and peeks out through the fringe. He emerges from beneath the armchair, slinks over to the couch, and dives under. He peeks out through the fringe. He emerges from beneath the couch and approaches the slightly open kitchen door. He stands flat against the doorjamb, facing the living room, his eyes darting left and right. One leg tiptoes delicately around the jamb. His stretched body snaps after it like a rubber band. In the kitchen he creeps to a moonlit chair, stands pressed against a chair leg, begins to climb. His nose rises over the tabletop: he sees a cream pitcher, a gleaming knife, a looming pepper mill. On a breadboard sits a wedge of cheese. The mouse, hunching his shoulders, tiptoes up to the cheese. From a pocket of his robe he removes a white handkerchief that he ties around his neck. He bends over the cheese, half closing his eyes, as if he were sniffing a flower. With a crashing sound the cat springs onto the table. As he chases the mouse, the tablecloth bunches in waves, the sugar bowl topples, and waterfalls of sugar spill to the floor. An olive from a fallen cocktail glass rolls across the table, knocking into a cup, a saltshaker, a trivet: the objects light up and cause bells to ring, as in a pinball machine. On the floor a brigade of ants is gathering the sugar: one ant catches the falling grains in a bucket, which he dumps into the bucket of a second ant, who dumps the sugar into the bucket of a third ant, all the way across the room, until the last ant dumps it into a waiting truck. The cat chases the mouse over the blue chair back, down the chair legs, across the waxed floor. Both lean backward and try to stop as the big door comes closer and closer.
*
p.s. Hey. ** David, Hi. No, it fell out of my mouth into the bowl of chips and I couldn’t find it. Me too, terrible tooth/gum pain, some months ago, three-part root canal, shit. Enjoy the Cell. Wait, you did. I wonder if they’re coming over here. ** Bzzt, Hey! Sounds good. My email is: denniscooper72@outlook.com. I’m happy that Paris is still taking suave care of you, and … hopefully see you very soon! ** Sypha, Hi. ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ is actually my least favorite Anderson film. I guess my favorites would be ‘Moonrise Kingdom’, ‘Life Aquatic’, ‘Rushmore’, ‘Tenenbaums’, and I do really love the two animated ones ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ and ‘Isle of Dogs’. It’s only one Wachowski doing the new one? That’s weird. I wonder why. I never could figure out what specific things each of them did. Thanks for the report on Andrew’s writing. Yeah, sounds very plotty. Complicatedly. Nothing wrong with that, and the more complicated the better. Flashbacks city? Cool. Hope it has a big payoff. ** Bill, Hi, B. Well, the vast majority of his recent/later video works are online in full, as I guess you saw. I don’t think I saw ‘I.K.U.’. Troubling how? Thanks about the tax thing. I sent in my official letter last night, so we’ll see. ** Tosh Berman, I haven’t read Bill’s new book yet. I liked the previous one. Oh, yeah, since I started making films, I’ve become intolerant of lazy and/or knee-jerk conventions in films that I might have overlooked before. Insiderness is interesting. Have a swell day! ** David Ehrenstein, Happy that you’re a fellow Bill fan! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Well, I hope resolution is on the way, but we’ll see. I don’t exactly trust them at this point. Jesus, what a prick. The guy with the dog. My sister went to a wedding recently, and the guy getting married said he was vaccinated, so she hugged him, etc., and then it turned he was lying and that he was not only not vaccinated, he had covid at the wedding, and she got covid. Charming. Your love’s therapist sounds a little like my old therapist from years back, ha ha. Maybe they all sound like that. My love talking your love into talking his therapist into giving him a bunch of heavy duty meds that he then gives to my love who then secretly slips them into the drink of the cutest guy he has ever seen, G. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yes, Bill’s extremely smart, and excellent with wordage as well as with the pictorial. I hope your arm took a chill pill while you were asleep last night. I tried reading Knausgaard, but his stuff/writing just didn’t appeal to me at all. I should try again though. ** Brendan, Yep, shit is everywhere infringing on everyone these days, that sure seems for sure. But you have Las Vegas with your reach. Man, that does sounds awfully nice. My Las Vegas is my favorite theme park Phantasialand in Germany which I hope to hit and luxuriate in as soon as next week if I’m lucky. Love, me. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! Great to see you! Things have sucked royally of late, but things may be upswinging at the moment.So I’m all right, I think. Cool, yeah, Bill’s great. He and I used to pretty good pals back in the late 90s, early 00s. Thank you for the very promising sounding seven minutes! Mind if I pass them along? Everyone, Excellent filmmaker and fella Nick Toti has a little gift should you choose to accept it. Nick: ‘If you find yourself with seven minutes to spare, here’s a video of Victor DeLorenzo (former drummer of the Violent Femmes) and his bandmate playing an improvised, drone-y piece of music with the musician I’m currently making a documentary about.’ ** Brian, Hey, Brian! I’ve been thinking about you and wondering how you’re doing in your new location and school! Can I infer by your tone that things are going well there and with you? Yay, I’m thrilled you like ‘Lancelot du Lac’. I absolutely adore that film. It’s my second favorite Bresson, and one that people don’t talk/write about so much. That jousting scene is one the greatest things ever committed to film, if you ask me. Obviously I hope you get to do the research on his work. Cool professor. I had a rough couple of weeks, but things are looking up. Still waiting and waiting to get the green light on Zac’s and my new film, but we might get it very soon, possibly, seemingly, hopefully. Otherwise, keeping busy, enjoying the arrival of winter and so on. I think I’m finally going to see ‘Titane’ in the next day or so. Cool, man, so nice to see you. Please do not hesitate to enter here at the drop of your potential pleasure’s hat. Take care, and I hope this week and you are best buds. ** Okay. Today I’m spotlighting a fantastic book by one of my very favorite fiction writers, Steven Millhauser. Highly recommended, need I even say. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 