Steven Millhauser’s “A Voice in the Night” and Flannery O’Connor’s Romance Short Fiction

As I have mentioned before, I much admire the stories of Steven Millhauser.  If you have not read his “new and selected stories,” We Others, published last year, you owe it to yourself to buy it for you and your best friend for Christmas, or whatever end-of-the year holiday you favor.

I like Millhauser’s new story, “A Voice in the Night,” in the Dec. 10 issue of The New Yorker. Every author has been asked the question at a reading a lecture, or an interview: “Where do you get your ideas?”  Steven Millhauser’s answer is: “a voice in the night.”  I think it is a good metaphor for the compulsion one must have to be a writer. I firmly believe that to be a writer, you must feel an irresistible, inescapable compulsion to write.  I think of Raymond Carver, feeling frustrated because he is stuck in a Laundromat in Iowa City when he wants to be home writing, or when Alice Munro had to rent a little apartment to get away from her domestic chores long enough to write.  Both describe the need to write as something that calls them. Sherwood Anderson described his “voice in the night” in this way:

Having, from a conversation overheard […] got the tone of a tale, I was like a woman who has just become impregnated. Something was growing inside me. At night when I lay in my bed I could feel the heels of the tale kicking against the walls of my body.” 

All writers have also been asked at readings, lectures, and interviews, ” When did you decide to become a writer?”  Steven Millhauser’s answer in this story is: “Three thousand years ago in the temple of Shiloh.”  His story “A Voice in the Night” is his fictional account of the source of his writing obsession.

“A Voice in the Night” is divided up into four three-part sections:

Section I is a retelling of the story in 1 Samuel, Chapter 3, in which the boy Samuel, age 12, hears his named called in the night three times and thinks it is Eli, the high priest of the temple of Shiloh;

Section II takes place in 1950, in which an American boy age, seven, lies awake in his bed for four straight nights, thinking of the Samuel story and wondering if he will know how to respond if he hears a voice in the night;

Section III focuses on the boy at the age of sixty-eight, now an author, thinking about his father, his Jewish education, and his long-ago waiting for the voice in the night.

The story is about ‘being called” or “having a calling.” Once in high school, when the boy asked his father, a university professor, if he liked teaching, the father answered: “If I were a millionaire, I would pay for the privilege of teaching.”  The son is moved by this answer, knows he has heard something important, and is proud and envious of his father, thinking he wants to say that someday; he knows it is “a calling.  Samuel’s call in the night.”

The author’s childhood is filled with three elements that contribute to the writer’s calling:

 First, stories, in this case, stories from the Jewish tradition: Joseph in the pit, the parting of the Red Sea, David soothing the soul of Saul with his harp; and children’s tales of Rapunzel being called to let down her hair, Dr. Doolittle telling of the pushmi-pullyu’

 Second, the mysterious sounds of words, as when his father said the Rabbi was making boys jabber words they did not understand, calling it “pure gibberish.” And the boy liked that word for the sound of it—gibberish;

Third, sentences: his father tells him the three greatest opening sentences in all of literature are: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”; “Call me Ishmael,” and the opening of the children’s book “Tootle”: Far, far to the west of everywhere is the village of Lower Trainswich.”

“A Voice in the Night” with the author seeing understanding the nature of his own calling:

“A calling. Not Samuel’s calling but another.  Not that way but this way. Samuel ministering unto the Lord; his father-teacher ministering unto the generations.  And the son? What about him?  Far, far to the west of everywhere, ministering unto the Muse.  Thanks, Old Sea-Parter, for leaving me be. Tired now.  Soon we’ll all sleep.”

“A Voice in the Night” not only responds to the questions, “Where do your stories come from? And “When did you become a writer,” it also responds to the kind of fiction that Millhauser finds most irresistible—the modern romance form, most often embodied in the short story form.

In the Oct 3, 2008 issue of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Steven Millhauser published a short essay entitled “The Ambition of the Short Story.”

You can find it at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Millhauser-t.html?_r=0

I quote below the conclusion of that essay:

The short story believes in transformation. It believes in hidden powers. The novel prefers things in plain view. It has no patience with individual grains of sand, which glitter but are difficult to see. The novel wants to sweep everything into its mighty embrace — shores, mountains, continents. But it can never succeed, because the world is vaster than a novel, the world rushes away at every point. The novel leaps restlessly from place to place, always hungry, always dissatisfied, always fearful of coming to an end — because when it stops, exhausted but never at peace, the world will have escaped it.

The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the short story feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the novel. It becomes as big as the universe.

Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power. The ponderous mass of the novel strikes it as the laughable image of weakness. The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.

 Before Millhauser, one of the most important advocates for this kind of fiction was Flannery O’Connor.  In the essay “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in her collection Mystery and Manners, O’Connor claimed that the social sciences had “cast a dreary blight on the public approach to fiction.” (The paper was first read in 1960 at Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Georgia; one can only wonder, had she lived, what she would have said fifty years later when social approaches to fiction have narrowed artistic and critical vision even more).  O’Connor complains that many readers and critics “demand a realism of fact which may, in the end, limit fiction’s scope, associating the only legitimate material for fiction with the movement of social forces, with the typical, with fidelity to the way things look and happen in normal life.

However, O’Connor’s “voice in the night” comes not as a demand for “realism of fact,” but rather for what she called “the modern romance tradition.”  I have discussed O’Connor’s role in this tradition in the introduction to the book I edited last year entitled Critical Insights:  Flannery O’Connor, and will not repeat here my comments there.  Both O’Connor and Millhauser’s identification with the romantic tradition of the romance explains why they are such masters of the short story form—a form that is much more aligned with “mystery” than with “manners.”  O’Connor says works in this tradition make alive some experience we are not accustomed to observe every day, experiences which ordinary folk may never experience in their ordinary lives.  She says the fictional qualities of the romance “lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected” and that it is this kind of “realism” she wants to consider. It is a fiction that more closely aligned with poetry, a fiction that is “initially set going by literature more than by life.” 

O’Connor says if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, “then what he sees on the surface will be or interest to him only as far as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.”  For the romance writer, “the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted.”

When Frank Kermode in his Norton lectures several years ago asked, "Why Are Narratives Obscure?" he cited Kafka's parable  "Before the Law" in The Trial. It’s about a man who comes to beg admission to the Law but is kept out by a doorkeeper.  So he sits there year after year in inconclusive conversation with the doorkeeper outside the door unable to get in. When he is old and near death, he sees an immortal radiance streaming from the door.  He asks the doorkeeper why he alone has come to this door and receives this reply: "This door was intended only for you.  Now I am going to shut it."  A terrible parable, you would have to agree.  "To perceive the radiance of the shrine," says Kermode, "is not to gain access to it; the Law, or the Kingdom to those within, such as the doorkeeper, may be powerful and beautiful, but to those outside they are absolutely inexplicable.  This is a mystery.  While the insiders protect the Law without understanding it, the outsiders like us see an uninterpretable radiance and die."  A terrible parable indeed.

Kermode is concerned, of course, with the radiant obscurity of parables. The word “parable” is used in the Gospel of Mark as a synonym for "mystery."  It is the radiance Eudora Welty refers to when she says the "first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of its own.  It is wrapped in an atmosphere.  This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initially obscures its plain, real shape." To Marlowe, sitting Buddha-like on the deck telling the story of Kurtz, to outsiders to the mystery, the "meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

Why is there more mystery in short stories than in novels?

First there is the historical and prehistorical source of the short story in myth and oral tale that, by its very nature, was concerned with mystery, for everything was mystery and story was the only explanatory model available.  A genre never completely departs from its origins.

Second, there is short story's dependence more on pattern than plot for its structure.  As a result of this dependence, the action of a short story is more apt to be organized around an implicit principle or idea rather than a series of events occurring causally in time

Third, there is the mystery of motivation in short stories.  It is not easy to determine why Bartleby prefers not to, what Roderick Usher is so afraid of.  Part of the problem may be the short story's close relationship to the romance form, which, allegorical in its nature, develops characters that, even as they seem to be like real people in the real world, are driven by the discourse demands of the narrative and thus act as if they are obsessed, propelled by some central force rather than merely logically, causally, or randomly.

Flannery O'Connor says "The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery." 

Steven Millhauser, who hearkened to the “voice in the night,” would surely agree.

PEN/O.Henry Stories: 2012--Alternate Reality in the Short Story--Wilson, Millhauser, Groff

I have always argued that there are two basic modes of experience in prose fiction: one which involves the development and acceptance of the everyday world of phenomenonal, sensate, and logical relation--a realm which the novel has always taken for its own--and the other, which involves an experiences that challenge the acceptance of the reality as simply sensate and reasonable--a realm which has dominated the short story since its beginnings.

The novel involves an active quest for reality, a search for identity that is actually a reconciliation of the self with the social and experiential world—a reconciliation that is finally conceptually accepted, based on the experience one has undergone. The short story often takes a character who has reached, or is in the process of reaching, such a conceptual identity through reason, experience, or a combination of both, and confronts him or her with the world of spirit, which then challenges his conceptual framework of reason and experience. Short fiction is a fundamental form because human beings’ earliest stories were stories of an encounter (given Mircea Eliade’s division of primal reality into the Sacred and the Profane) with the sacred.  Narrative in its primal origins is of "an experience" concretely felt, not "experience" generally conceived, and the short story still retains that primal aspect.

Kevin Wilson, “A Birth in the Woods”

When Kevin Wilson was asked once how he balances the real and the strange in his stories and keeps them believable, he suggested that when you present something strange and perhaps impossible, you simply incorporate it into the story without making a big deal about it, thus making it more readily accepted by the reader. 

“A Birth in the Woods” begins and ends with blood.  The father cuts his finger to help Caleb, age 6, become accustomed with blood as normal and ordinary.  But blood, as Wilson’s story explores, is not ordinary; it has magical powers beginning in birth, as imaged in the mother’s “bloody show,” and ending in death, when the mother’s blood will not stop flowing. The framework of the story is that of two young parents who have decided they will “make a world apart from the world” by living unaccommodated out in the woods.  The immediate focus is on their decision to allow Caleb to assist in the birth of the new baby.

The story establishes a primal scene:  The house in the woods, the snow “filling up the space around the house until they were the only people left on earth, three of them crowded together, the fourth still to come.”  Then comes the “labor,” the work of childbirth, and the omnipresent blood.  All this is intense enough, but then Wilson does a strange thing; he makes the baby a freakish creature, “covered all over in dark black hair…slicked with blood and mucus,” with a long bearlike snout and useless claws for fingers.  When the baby growls, Caleb knows that it is not his brother, not a baby, “but an animal, a creature, something wild.”

While the reader is still puzzling over this seemingly superfluous birth of the horrifying and the grotesque, Wilson then does another strange thing.  The father leaves to get help and Caleb hears the brakes squealing and a crash, “the sound of metal twisting, the world giving up its shape.” We expect the mother to die, but why the father? If we are not to think of this story as a tale of supernatural horror, in the mode of Ambrose Bierce, then how do we understand the seemingly meaningless death of the father and the grotesque birth of an animal-like baby?

Caleb feels hatred toward the thing that has killed his mother, leaving her hollowed out and empty. However, when he begins to smother the infant, he knows he must obey his mother’s request to protect his brother; he suckles the child with honey on a stick and gives it its first toy--the blood spattered wooden duck his father made for him earlier.  He begins teaching the child, saying, “Duck…though the word sounded as if it were from a language that had died out hundreds of years ago.”

I don’t agree with Laura Furman’s view that the story is about how every child is a victim of his parents’ choices, in this case, a joyful arrogant belief that they can make a new Eden and raise the child in a utopia.  This all seems to me to be merely the real-world social context for a story about blood, birth, horror, death, and responsibility.  And I don’t believe that Wilson is merely trying to give the reader a little shot of horror, although he does succeed in doing that.  The story, in my opinion, is about primal reality, unassisted by social support systems of doctors, nurses, and hospitals.  We like to think that these can protect us, but ultimately, it is just birth and death.  To Caleb the infant is what seems the inevitable result of the blood soaked horror he has witnessed—something alien and strange—an intruder, ugly and unwanted. The mother and the father both die, leaving Caleb alone to suckle and teach his little brother, as a reminder that we are all ultimately alone--except, that is, for our brother, which we must love as ourself, for it is all we have.

Steven Millhauser, “Phantoms”

While most short-story writers in the last two decades joined the realist rebellion against the fabulism of the seventies--e.g. Barth, Barthelme, Coover--Steven Millhauser has stayed true to the fantastic tradition that extends from Scherazade to Poe and from Kafka to Borges, playfully exploring the freedom of the imagination to reject the ordinary world of the mundane and explore the incredible world of purely aesthetic creation. Whether his stories focus on magic carpets, men who marry frogs, automatons, balloon flights, or labyrinths that lie beneath everyday reality, Millhauser embodies one of the most powerful traditions of short fiction--the magical story of the reality of artifice. 

Karen Carlson wrote in a comment to this blog that she was perplexed by the acclaim “Phantoms” has received—having won a Pushcart Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and selected for Best American Short Stories.  I have read the story several times and would like to suggest that what Millhauser, one of our greatest short-story writers, has captured in “Phantoms” is an exploration of humankind’s most perplexing existential and social problem—our sense that we live in a world inhabited by “The Other.”  In one section of the story—divided into separate sections describing case studies of encounters with the phantoms, theories about what they are, refutations of the theories, and history of their manifestation—Millhauser describes “The Look,” which the phantoms cast in people’s direction before turning away.

In Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre uses the terms “The Other” and “The Look” to refer to the phenomenological problem of human interactions and perception. When one recognizes that someone is a subjective being, then one becomes an object to that person.  Thus, to maintain our illusion of our own subjectivity, it behooves us to make objects out of the Other; or else our world is “haunted” by the values of the Other.

The phenomenological terms “the Other” and “the Look,” as further interpreted by Simone de Beauvoir, have been adopted by feminist criticism to refer to the way men have objectified women by their stare, denying them subjectivity, transforming them into objects.  More recently, the same terms have been adopted by cultural critics to refer to the way that a dominant culture objectifies another culture, making them into the Other.

What Millhauser has captured here is a quintessential narrative about all human apprehensions of something or someone else outside the self—ranging from the basic impetus for all religion-i.e. that there is another life outside ordinary everyday life—to the basis of human discrimination based on race, gender, sexual preference, etc. 

With this perspective in mind, one can understand the purpose of the various sections of the story. For example, one section deals with “crossing over,” which usually refers to intermingling between the phantoms and the nonphantoms.  Often phantoms are made scapegoats for fears and weaknesses, and are referred to as “one of them.” Anyone familiar with the history of racism in America will recall that it was not that long ago that the majority of Americans were sternly against white people marrying black people, just as many today are sternly against people of the same gender marrying each other.  And, please forgive the reference to an old slur, but many may remember that African Americans were once referred to by whites as “spooks.”

Anytime one individual or one group classifies another person or another group as an object in the world, an “Other,” the pathway is open for scapegoating and placing blame of one’s fears and insecurities on the Other.  For example, the fact that when a child goes missing in the story, people say the phantoms have lured him or her into their fold, is an echo of the common irrational belief that homosexuals should not be teachers or scout leaders because they will try to seduce others into the gay lifestyle.

The two theories most central to a social reading of the story are Explanation # 3, which asserts that humans and the phantoms were once a single race, which at some point divided into two societies, and Explanation # 4, which asserts that the phantoms have always been here and that we are intruders who seized their land and drove them into hiding.  However, the most basic and encompassing theory is Explanation #6, which, drawing from modern studies in cognitive psychology, claim that our bodies, and thus all objects, are nothing but artificial constructs of our brains.  “The world is a great seeming.” Everyone, therefore, is a phantom; there is nothing out there but projections of our imagination.

Lauren Groff, “Eyewall”

In her author comments, Groff says this story came to her in terms of its structure.  When she thought of the word “hurricane,” she saw a despairing character at the centre of a harsh circular wind, “whipping enormously urgent leitmotifs around and around her at blinding speed.”  I like this description, because it reminds me that whatever the reader thinks about what is happening in a story, the author is always thinking in terms of how the language and structure of the story create an aesthetic  experience.  If you come to “Eyewall” expecting Hurricane Katrina social commentary, you will be disappointed.  Groff uses a the eyewall of a hurricane—located just outside the “eye” of the storm where the most destructive rain and wind exist--as a real-world vehicle for a story about the disruption of everyday reality, a disruption that intertwines stuff of the imagination with stuff of the world—stuff of the past with stuff of the present.

Groff has great fun using language the way all poets use language--to defamiliarize the world.  “I felt, rather than saw, the power out. Time erased itself from the appliances and the lights winked shut.”  The world is turned terrifyingly, and yet somehow comically grotesque, upside down, inside out:  “My best laying hen was scraped from under the house and slid in a horrifying diagonal across the window.”  The apparitions of both her husband and her old college boyfriend come bearing literary allusions, as if to remind us that what we are involved in her is not a natural or a social phenomenon, but a poetic phenomenon, a thing of language, in which, not stuff, but leitmotifs, swirl about in a highly controlled way. (N.B.: When the narrator tells her husband that she is letting his literary career languish, he says, “La belle dame sans merci” (Keats); her old college boyfriend says to her, “You’re old! You’re old!  You should wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled” (T. S. Eliot)

Although folks who have experienced hurricanes or witnessed the effects of tornados know that the storm can create strange juxtapositions, such as bathroom fixtures in the tops of trees, and cars pushed into houses, Groff extends these to surrealistic extremes: “On my way downstairs, I passed a congregation of exhausted armadillos on the landing.  Birds had filled the Florida room, cardinals and whip-poor-wills and owls.”  The story is structurally and rhythmically a language delight, combining, as the short story always does when done well, the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Note:  I apologize for an earlier glitch in this post which made the right margins bleed off in sections.

Steven Millhauser and The Reality of Artifice

I had just finished reading Steven Millhauser’s new book, We Others: New and Selected Stories, when I received my copy of Best American Short Stories, 2011, which reprinted his story “Phantoms,” from McSweeneys. And then, son-of-a-gun, in came the Nov. 14 issue of The New Yorker with his story “Miracle Polish.” As was said of the ubiquitous Mr. Browne in Joyce’s “The Dead,” Millhauser has of late been “laid on like the gas.” That’s all right by me. Steven Millhauser is always a welcome guest in my mind.

We Others includes fourteen stories from Millhauser’s previous four collections (In the Penny Arcade, 1986; The Barnum Museum, 1990; The Knife Thrower, 1998; and Dangerous Laughter, 2008. It also includes seven “new” stories: “The Slap,” “The White Glove,” “Getting Closer,” The Invasion from Outer Space,” “People of the Book,” “The Next Thing,” and the novella-length title story “We Others.”

The Millhauser story chosen for the 2011 Best American Short Stories, “Phantoms,” is also a ghost story, in which Millhauser explores one his favorite “romantic” concepts—that there is another dimension of reality surrounding us, a dimension of spirits of those who have died. “Phantoms” is made up of various “case studies” in which these spirits appear to people, interspersed with various hypotheses or explanations of what they are. For example, one explanation is that the phantoms are “the unwanted or unacknowledged portions of ourselves, which we try to evade but continually encounter; they make us uneasy because we know them; they are ourselves.” Given Millhauser’s “romantic” view of reality, perhaps his favorite hypothesis is that we are all phantoms, that our bodies are artificial constructs of our brains and we are dream creations. “The world itself is a great seeming.”

Millhauser’s most recent story in the new issue of The New Yorker, “Miracle Polish,” is a “concept” stories that draws on nineteenth-century German romantic notions, which Millhauser has used before. For example, in his story “August Eschenburg,” he explores Heinrich von Kleist’s paradoxical notion that, from the perspective of art, the automaton is preferable to the human--a concept most fully developed in Kleist's dialogue, "On the Puppet Theatre," in which a famous dancer tells Kleist that puppets are better able to express grace and beauty in their motions than human beings because they have no choice but to obey mechanical principles; the more that the human element of the puppeteer can be removed, the more perfect the dance the puppets perform.

The purest form of grace exists, says the dancer, only in those who either have no consciousness or those who have infinite consciousness--either the puppet or God. When Kleist responds that this theory suggests that we must eat from the tree of knowledge once again and then fall back into a state of innocence, the dancer replies, "by all means...that is the last chapter in the history of the world." Critic Robert Langbaum has suggested that this is the central myth of romantic literature: the psychologized and secular version of the myth of the Fall, for the Fall to the romantics is indeed a fall into consciousness. For Kleist, says Langbaum, art becomes the back door to Eden, in that art delivers us from self-consciousness through ritual. And indeed it is ritual rather than self-consciousness that characterizes Kleist's fiction.

Nineteenth-century German Romantic, E.T.A. Hoffman’s “A New Year’s Eve Adventure” is a story within a story which is sometimes published only with the insert story and entitled "The Story of the Lost Reflection." Erasmus Spikher is a man who has lost his reflection; another character in the story, Peter Schlemihl, who lost his shadow, is from Adalbert Chamisso's novel of that name published in 1814. These stories belongs within a romantic tradition in German nineteenth-century Romanticism-- a tradition of the novelle that begins with Goethe and develops in more detail with the works of Ludwig Tieck, Adalbert Chamisso, and Hoffman himself.

American readers are most familiar with the tradition in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, both of whom make use of the familiar convention of the double figure which is based on the notion of the split in the self between the body and the soul. The stories of Hoffmann mark the beginning of the Romantic insistence that reality is of the imagination only. Moreover, Hoffmann's combination of psychological realism and fairytale conventions is a key factor in the development of the short story genre in America with the works of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Such a transition is part of that major shift in the nineteenth century that critic M. H. Abrams says characterizes the basic concepts and patterns of romantic philosophy and art, that is, as displaced and reconstituted theology or as a secularized form of devotional experience. The resulting basic tendency of the romantic revolution is to naturalize the supernatural and humanize the divine.

Millhauser’s “Miracle Polish” begins in traditional folklore fashion: A stranger comes to the door with something for sale called “Miracle Polish.” When the protagonist buys a bottle of the polish and shines his mirror with it, he seems to see himself differently: “There was a freshness to my body, a kind of mild glow that I had never seen before… What I saw was a man who had something to look forward to, man who expected things of life.” This transformation becomes an obsession with him, and he polishes all the mirrors in his house and buys many more mirrors to polish and hang so that everywhere he turns he sees his transformed self. However, when he tries to involve the woman with whom he has a relationship in his mirror obsession, she accuses him of preferring the woman in the mirror to her actual physical self.

As in many other Millhauser stories, “Miracle Polish” is a metaphorical exploration of the Platonic notion that underlies all romanticism—the reality of artifice. The narrator’s sense of growing obsession is typical of the romantic short story that gave birth to the form in the early nineteenth century. Edgar Allan Poe has always been accused of being indifferent to living, flesh and blood subjects. W. H. Auden has said there is no place in any of his stories for "the human individual as he actually exists in space and time," that is, as a natural creature and an historical person. Richard Wilbur in his famous Library of Congress Lecture in 1959 concluded that Poe's aesthetic that "art should repudiate everything human and earthly," was insane. However, the repudiation of "reality" as being only everyday human experience is precisely what myth and folklore--the primal forerunners of the short story--are based on. Poe's aesthetic, and thus the dominant aesthetic of the short story, has always been based on this same assumption that the artistic objectification of desire is true reality.

Millhauser is motivated by the same obsessions that drove William Blake--to see a world in a grain of sand, to affirm that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Steven Millhauser, "Getting Closer"

I have always had this nagging notion that if I could figure out what makes a short story by a great short story writer so…well, you know…great, I could come close to figuring out what the basic characteristics of a great short story really are.

I know, I know, it is not that clear-cut. After all, in seeking to find out the generic qualities of the short story generally, one first has to admit that there are many different sub-genres of the form. There certainly seems to be significant differences between the short stories of that great short story writer Alice Munro and that great short story writer, Steven Millhauser. The former seems bound to some notion of realism (whatever that means) and the latter seems more aligned with the imaginative. This does not mean that Munro’s stories lack imagination or that Millhauser’s stories have no contact with reality. After all, the conventions of realism are no less literary conventions than the conventions of irrealism (whatever that means). It just means that knowing how to read a story by Alice Munro does not necessarily mean one knows how to read a short story by Steven Millhauser.

Or does it? Because they are short stories, regardless of the seeming difference of their “reality assumptions,” do the short stories of two seemingly different short story writers, such as Alice Munro and Steven Millhauser, have qualities that are common to the short story generically but that are not common to the novel?

At least one thing that Munro and Millhauser have in common: The New Yorker is willing to pay them a fairly decent fee for the right to publish one of their stories. Good on you, New Yorker, good on you! I have read Steven Millhauser’s story “Getting Closer,” which appeared in The New Yorker on January 4, 20111, five times now, and I have read Alice Munro’s story “Axis,” which appeared in The New Yorker on January 31 five times as well. I like both these stories very much and could, with pleasure, read them several more times, and I probably will. They do indeed seem radically different. I will try to understand the Millhauser this week and the Munro story next week.

Steven Millhauser, “Getting Closer”

Millhauser’s “Getting Closer” is quite short, taking up about two and a half New Yorker pages—about seven columns. The central character is a boy, “nine, going on ten.” The point of view is third-person limited, meaning that the narrator is inside the boy’s mind, but not inside the mind of the minor characters—the grandmother, the sister Julia (13), the father, the mother. The event is a Saturday family outing to Indian Cove to go swimming in the river there. Those are the characters, the point of view, the setting in time and space. The question the reader asks next, of course, is: What happens?

But “happens” is precisely what Millhauser’s story is about. This is not a story about a particular happening, but rather a story about the essential significance of “happening.” The story begins with the boy’s readiness to begin the day’s activity. But as soon as the narrator (who is not the boy, but who stays within the mind of the by reflecting his thoughts in a much more sophisticated way than the boy could express) says the boy is “ready to begin,” the narrator reflects, “Though who’s to say when anything begins really?” After considering the various possibilities of when the day begins, the narrator reflects that the boy knows that it will truly begin when he enters the water. But the boy is not eager to rush into things; he enjoys prolonging the excitement of moving toward the moment he enters the water.

The story then shifts to the activity around him—his sister, Julie, age 13, splashing in the water, his mother telling him to run along, his grandmother sitting in a chair under a pine tree, the details of the physical world around him, his memory of the way his father and grandmother talk to him. The boy stands in a specific place in space and thinks that behind him lies the entire world and before lies the entire world. He likes standing there thinking such things. As he moves toward the water’s edge, he feels everything has led up to this moment when the day will officially begin. But he wants to hang on.

“He’s shaken deep down, as though he’ll lose something if the day begins. If he goes into the river, he’ll lose the excitement, the feeling that everything matters because he’s getting closer and closer to the moment he’s been waiting for. When you have that feeling, everything’s full of life, every leaf, every pebble. But when you begin you’re using things up.”

The boy begins to feel nervous that when the day begins, things will rush away from him, and he sees everything ending, that ending is everywhere, embedded in the beginning. Via the narrator, the boy reflects: “They don’t tell you about it. It’s hidden away in things. Under the shinning skin of the world, everything’s dead and gone.” He thinks that the sun is setting, his grandmother is dying, his mother is growing old, Julia’s dying, his father is dying. But he thinks if he stands still, maybe he can keep it all from happening, things will stop and no one will ever die. Again through the narrator, he reflects:

“You can’t live unless there’s a way to hold on to things. He can’t go back because he’s already used it all up, he can’t go forward because then it all begins to end, he’s stuck in this place where nothing means anything, it’s streaming in on him like a darkness, like a sickness he’s seen something he isn’t supposed to see, only grownups are allowed to see it, it’s making him old, it’s ruining everything, his temples are pounding, his eyes are pounding, he feels a scream rising in his chest, he’s going to fall down onto the sandy orange earth.”

But his sister calls to him and with a “wild cry that tears through his throat he steps over the line and begins his day.” And with this the story ends.

So what is this story about? Apparently not much of anything, but essentially about the ultimate meaning of everything. It’s about what all stories are about, about life in its quintessential movement in time, about the basic human desire to escape time, to defeat death. It’s why we have religion, why we write poetry, what constitutes the essential heroism of humanity. The boy experiences the ultimate anxiety, the sickness unto death.

Melville’s Ahab expresses it best:

“Look ye, Starbuck, all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the molding of their features. The white whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. 'Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung.”

Fitzgerald’s Gatsby also defies it. When Nick tells him he can’t repeat the past, his response is: "Can’t repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!"
At the end of the novel, Nick reflects:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Nick survives and so does Ishmael, but they are not heroes. They do not attempt what mere mortals say cannot be accomplished—defeat time, defeat death, which is, of course, the secret of Christ’s message.

What the boy experiences in Millhauser’s story are intimations of mortality. It is what Ishmael discovers about the whiteness of the whale:

“When we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper…. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

It is what Keats understands about the Grecian Urn’s ability to stop time and achieve immortality:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
…….
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
……..
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Stephen Millhauser has a perceptive understanding of the short story’s unique qualities, which he expressed well in an essay in the New York Times a couple of years ago. Here are a few excerpts. The URL for the essay is listed below:

Steven Millhauser, “The Ambition of the Short Story,” New York Times, Oct 3, 2008
The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: “I’m not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t want me.” Rarely has one form so dominated another. … The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do?
……………………………………..
Of course there are virtues associated with smallness. Even the novel will grant as much. Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The novel is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.

…………………………………….
Can it be that the little short story dares to have ambitions of its own? … I imagine the short story harboring a wish. I imagine the short story saying to the novel: You can have everything — everything — all I ask is a single grain of sand. The novel, with a careless shrug, a shrug both cheerful and contemptuous, grants the wish.
………………………………………

But that grain of sand is the story’s way out. That grain of sand is the story’s salvation. I take my cue from William Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand.” Think of it: the world in a grain of sand; which is to say, every part of the world, however small, contains the world entirely. Or to put it another way: if you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself.
………………………………

The short story believes in transformation. It believes in hidden powers. The novel prefers things in plain view. It has no patience with individual grains of sand, which glitter but are difficult to see. … The short story concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there — right there, in the palm of its hand — lies the universe.
……………………………….
Therein lies the immodesty of the short story, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power… The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/books/review/Millhauser-t.html

Next week, I will make an effort to understand Alice Munro’s “Axis.”

Kevin Wilson, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

Tunneling to the Center of the Earth is Kevin Wilson’s first book. The eleven stories were originally published in such places as Ploughshares, The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Greensboro Review. Two of them—“The Choir Director’s Story” and the title story—were chosen for New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best in 2005 and 2006. The book received decent reviews in The New York Times and The Boston Globe, comparing Wilson’s quirky little stories to those of George Saunders and Steven Millhauser.

I enjoyed Wilson’s stories, especially the first one entitled “Grand Stand-In.” One of the most intriguing and socially significant stories in the book, it plays the “what-if” game of imagining what it would be like if in our modern displaced society without extended families, there existed an organization that “rented” out grandparents to families who had lost them. The narrator of the story, a “grandmother” who works for a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider, admits that although such a concept is incredibly, undeniably weird (as is true of most of Wilson’s stories), once you accept the concept, it begins to make some bizarre kind of sense.

With the exception of two more realistic stories, “Mortal Combat” and “Go, Fight, Win,” most of the stories are based on “what if” social or conceptual premises, primarily about nonexistent and unusual jobs. One works in a Scrabble factory, searching for Q’s. Another is the curator of a museum that houses things that are ordinarily junk, but which have been transformed into something interesting and valuable simply because someone collected them, such as jars of toenail clippings. Another advises businesses on such possibilities as how many people would be killed if a disgruntled worker came back to take revenge on his former coworkers or how many people would die if a bus got stuck in a freak blizzard during rush-hour traffic.

Steven Millhauser's short fictions are, like Wilson’s, "suppose" stories. Suppose someone built the ultimate shopping mall? Suppose adolescent female mystery was really caused by witches? Suppose there was an amusement park that opened the door to an alternate reality. Suppose you took an ordinary entertainment, illusion, or metaphor and pushed it as far as it would go." One could say that all of Millhauser's stories go "too far," that is, if the intensive "too far" existed in his vocabulary. While most short-story writers in the last two decades joined the realist rebellion against the fabulism of the seventies, Steven Millhauser has stayed true to the fantastic tradition that extends from Scherazade to Poe and from Kafka to Borges, playfully exploring the freedom of the imagination to reject the ordinary world of the mundane and explore the incredible world of purely aesthetic creation.

His favorite personae are the impresario, the maestro, the necromancer, the wizard, Prospero on his island, Edison in his laboratory, Barnum in his circus ring. Whether his stories focus on magic carpets, men who marry frogs, automatons, balloon flights, or labyrinths that lie beneath everyday reality, Millhauser embodies one of the most powerful traditions of short fiction--the magical story of the reality of artifice. Millhauser is our most brilliant practicing romantic, for whom surface reality is merely an uninteresting illusion and ultimate reality is always sleight of hand

When George Saunder's first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline appeared in 1996, it received rave reviews, with well-known writers such as Garrison Keillor and Thomas Pynchon calling Saunders a "brilliant new satirist" with a voice "astoundingly tuned." Based on that one book, Saunders was a finalist for the 1996 PEN/Hemingway Award, and New Yorker magazine named him one of the twenty best American fiction writers under forty. The reviewers of Saunders' first two collections have called him variously "a cool satirist," "a savage satirist," and a "searing satirist." Typical of the satirist's need for an object of attack, Saunders says he always starts off earnestly toward a target; however, he self-deprecatingly notes, "like the hunting dog who trots out to get the pheasant," he usually comes back with "the lower half of a Barbie doll."

In one of my favorite Saunders stories, "Sea Oak." A man works at a male strip club called Joysticks and lives with his aunt, sister, and cousin in a subsidized apartment complex called Sea Oak, where there is no sea and no oak, only a rear view of FedEx. Saunders evokes some funny bits here: the Board of Health who visits the club to make sure the men's penises won't show, a television program of computer simulations of tragedies that never actually occurred but theoretically could. However, the story becomes most absurd when aunt Bernie dies and returns from the grave as a zombie who urges the narrator to show his penis so he can make more money.

The ostensible satiric point of the story is Bernie's expression of the unfulfilled longings of all the losers who die unheralded. However, what the reader most remembers is the grotesque image of Bernie's ears, nose, arms, and legs decaying and falling off. If there is a central thematic line in the story, it occurs when the narrator puts what is left of Bernie's body in a Hefty bag, thinking maybe there are angry dead people everywhere, hiding in rooms and bossing around their scared relatives. The story ends with Bernie's voice in the narrator's dreams crying the anthem perhaps of every pathetic, and somehow sympathetic, loser in Saunders’s collection--"Some People get everything and I got nothing. Why? Why did that happen?"

Although I can see the similarity between Wilson’s stories and those of Millhauser and Saunders, and I did enjoy the clever concepts that Wilson creates, I don’t think he has the imagination of Millhauser or the satiric vision of Saunders.

When Wilson was asked how he balances the real and the strange in his stories and keeps them believable, he says that the trick is that he works hard at embracing the ridiculous nature of the stories without making the concerns of the characters ridiculous. He also suggests that when you present something strange and perhaps impossible, you simply incorporate it into the story without making a big deal about it, thus making it more readily accepted by the reader.

I think those are both helpful suggestions about writing "what if" stories.