I know we’ve talked about this in class a lot with Millhauser stories: So many of them are written in the third person and as a historical document. Stories like “The Other Town,” “The Tower,” and “The Dome” are all written with similar fact-based narratives that span large periods of time. These stories give the illusion of an unbiased narrator, someone who has no personal investment in the way the story is told, so we take everything they say as truth. It simply feels like a documentary about a certain subject.
I’ve tried to understand why Millhauser repeatedly uses this form, why he comes back to it again and again. So often in class we hear that famous JGB phrase: “The story tells us more about the person telling it than the actual story” (or something like that). But with this unidentified narrator we lose a whole part of the story. At first I thought we were losing bias, that there was less room for interpretation when we lose a narrator. But the more I read these stories, the more I realize it’s the opposite. Because there are no opinions mixed in with the stories, we have very little idea of the reasoning behind any of the actions. Like in “Eisenheim The Illusionist” we can only see the actions of Eisenheim. We have no real interaction with him; we never hear him speak; we never get to experience first-hand what he was like. We also only ever get the audience’s outward reactions; we never understand how the illusions made them feel, or why they were so drawn to them.
Also telling the story of something like it’s a document allows us to fully witness every event in that person/object’s life and dissect it like we are reading a history book. We are able to see how everything starts and how everything ends. There’s no room for interpretation when it comes to the actual events taking place, just instead leaving room for interpretations about the character’s motives.
Kaia: Lots to think about here in this post. It certainly seems true that encountering a narrator who appears to be merely reciting the facts of an historical circumstance from which he is emotionally — though not always intellectually — detached serves as a device to persuade the reader of the narrative’s “truth.” It is, as I’ve said in class, a kind of enhanced “Once upon a time…” Also often contained within these narratives is the suggestion that in the midst of our everyday lives we have somehow forgotten these remarkable stories, and the narrator is unearthing them for our edification. What I’ve said repeatedly in class is stolen from my mentor, John Barth, who used to tell us all the time that “Stories are not about what happens; they are about who it happens to.” And strangely, with these pseudo-historical narratives, the person to whom it is happening is…well, the reader. Millhauser is so very interested in wonder — the wonder produced by magic, by artifice, by story. Again and again his stories seem to revel in that wonder. On the Quotations page of this blog, the first passage is from a Millhauser interview: “What I look for in a work of art is something that might be called an expansion of being, a sense of mysterious exhilaration…” In’t that what “wonder” is?
I think that the detached nature of the narrative also causes the reader to question the prevalence of the fantastic in the story’s world; are there other fantastic things that have since happened in this world, hence the matter-of-fact nature of the narrative, or was this just a one-time thing that has since been confirmed and accepted as fact as history went on?
I think the story’s level of fantastic is easily blurred in this form of writing as it is a widely accepted event and it is stated to matter-of-fact. This throws the readers into the narrative easier as it assumes we have experienced what the characters have which makes it harder to pull the fantastic out of it at first. It reads like a historical document for that purpose. What other purposes could this be used for?
I think stories written like this don;t only tell us about the narrator more than the focus of this story I think it also tells us about Steven Millhauser. We can tell what he is comfortable writing and that he is very diverse in how he writes these documents. These stories all have the same form, but they are distinct from each other. “The Dome” is read like a lecture from after the dome appears while “the Other Town” is written closer to the events. I wonder what else we can detect from Steven Millhauser’s writing comfort zone.