Interviewed by Dario Sulzman
Steven Millhauser, winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Martin Dressler, received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1965. While at Brown University, he wrote parts of Edwin Mullhouse and From the Realm of Morpheus. Until the Pulitzer, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut, Edwin Mullhouse, which brought him critical acclaim. Millhauser followed with a second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, and his first collection of short stories, In the Penny Arcade. His latest book is Dangerous Laughter.
Q: Dangerous Laughter is split into sections—one story labeled an “Opening Cartoon,” followed by three sections titled “Vanishing Acts,” “Impossible Architectures,” and “Heretical Histories.” The sections suggest a kind of performance, particularly that of a magic show, with the writing performing “impossible” feats and “vanishing acts.” Several of your stories, such as “A Precursor to the Cinema” and “Eisenheim the Illusionist” (from The Barnum Museum) involve magician-types. What do you see as the relationship, or connection, between magic acts and the acts of story writing?
A: I see a close connection. Magic acts and stories are both appearances meant to achieve specific effects. Both imply arrangement and manipulation. Both have causes that are concealed from witnesses. Both are public displays. Both suggest special training and secret knowledge.
But there’s a crucial difference. Magic is meant to deceive—the reality behind the act is radically different from the appearance. Art, for me, is nothing if it’s not about more than appearance—if it’s not about the truth of things. The illusions of art are themselves illusory. Art is an appearance that smashes appearance. Art is revelation.
Q: Several of the stories within “Vanishing Acts” deal with the uncanny (“The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” “A Room in the Attic,” and “Dangerous Laughter”). After reading “Behind the Blue Curtain” in The Barnum Museum, I realized that much of the uncanny in these stories, their eeriness, centers on the ghostliness of certain characters. Protagonists become obsessed with characters who they cannot see, or whose presence—in the case of Clara Shuler—seems to emerge from an almost otherworldly source. What appeal does ghostliness have for you, and why do you think it causes obsession and unease?
A: I think ghostliness appeals to me because I don’t believe in ghosts. Since I don’t believe in them, they’re liberated from boring associations with the afterlife. This means they can be used in more adventurous ways. Ghostliness suggests opposite things to me. It suggests something unfulfilled or incomplete about life—Elaine Coleman is a ghost because inattention has eaten away at her sense of herself. But ghostliness isn’t only a depletion. It still gives off its old aura of the mysterious, the unknown. And the world is not fully known. Familiar objects shimmer with the ungraspable. Ghosts can also be about that.
Q: In a previous interview (with BOMB Magazine), you spoke of childhood as a metaphor for a way of perceiving the world. The stories I mention from “Vanishing Acts” also draw heavily upon adolescent experience. Is there something about the adolescent experience in these stories that you find different from the childhood perspective? If so, what dimensions do you see the adolescent perspective adding to your stories?
A: It’s utterly different. Childhood is a self-enclosed world. It defines itself against the self-enclosed world of adults. Adolescence represents the disruption of childhood. It’s the restless time, the time of dissatisfaction. Adolescence looks in two directions and rejects both. It looks one way toward childhood and another toward adulthood, and feels twice banished. It erects its own laws, which it only half believes in. Sometimes it experiences an immense nostalgia for childhood, more often a disdain. It’s suspicious of adulthood, which it fears as a destiny. It tosses restlessly and doesn’t know what to do. The restlessness of adolescence is good for stories. It keeps them uneasy.
Q: You use a number of different narrative perspectives in Dangerous Laughter. Along with more traditional third- and first-person perspectives, some of your stories use more unconventional narrative voices, such as the collective “we” voice, in stories like “The Other Town,” or almost biblically omniscient third-person narrators in stories like “The Tower” and “The Dome.” What importance do you feel that perspective plays in your creative process?
A: Those voices get me away from more conventional narrative slants. I use them to liberate myself from myself.
Q: Several stories in Dangerous Laughter are not stories of individuals, but of societies and communities. What attracts you to this form of storytelling, and what does it allow you to explore—or evoke—in a story that an individual narrator does not?
A: The main thing it allows me is a pronoun: we. Because most stories come in the form of “I” or “he/she,” the mere presence of “we” excites me. It promises the unknown, the undiscovered. But it isn’t just a way of not feeling impatient with the over-familiar. It also allows me to do specific things. It allows me, for instance, to explore the response of a carefully defined group to some disturbing event—the performance of a murderous artist, the rise of a mysterious new form of architecture. The implications become social instead of merely personal.
Sometimes the “we” is itself the voice of a disruptive group, which defines itself against a larger community that disapproves of it. And I like the sheer paradox of “we.” After all, what does it mean to speak in the plural? Is it even possible? Sometimes an “I” breaks free from the “we” and presents itself as a personal voice within the “we”—an effect I use deliberately. The effects of this tantalizing pronoun have hardly begun to be explored.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: Earnest; playful.
Q: What book do you feel you suffered for the most? How?
A: My first, unpublished novel, written in my early twenties. It almost killed me, but it turned me into a writer.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you writing these recent pages (Dangerous Laughter)?
A: The stories were written over a ten-year period. When it came to arranging them, I was startled to discover that they formed themselves into coherent groups.
Q: Do you have a writerly habit you’d like to break?
A: The habit of falling into an abyss between stories.
