Understanding Steven Millhauser

Chapter 10: Enchanted Night: A Novella

CHAPTER 10 Enchanted Night: A Novella Enchanted Night is unique among Steven Millhauser’s novellas. Unlike the three in Little Kingdoms or in The King in the Tree, Enchanted Night is the only novella Millhauser has published by itself. At one hundred pages Enchanted Night is about the size of “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne,” one of three novellas in Little Kingdoms. As with the 1997 reprinting of The Barnum Museum (1990) by Dalkey Archive Press, Crown’s decision to publish Enchanted Night as a separate novella offers testimony to the collateral value of Millhauser’s winning the Pulitzer Prize for Martin Dressler in 1997. Although not perhaps unique to this novella, Enchanted Night distinguishes itself from the others in its highly lyrical or musical elements. In his March 2003 Transatlantica interview with Marc Chénetier, Millhauser himself spoke of how “the conception of the work was musical—a theme and variations on a summer night.” He goes on to explain the relevance of the epigraph from Ben Jonson’s 1603 poem “Hymn to Diana” in the lines Lay thy bow of pearl apart and thy crystal-shining quiver. Give unto the flying hart Space to breathe, how short soever. These lines indicate that, “in Enchanted Night, I gave the flying hart—the restless heart—a little space to breathe. Day will come soon enough.” At this novella’s center is yet another of Millhauser’s expressions of his own enchantment with the night.1 In reading this narrative, taking place on a single summer night, readers are reminded of how much of the first two 102 UNDERSTANDING STEVEN MILLHAUSER novels was comprised of night scenes. In the Chénetier interview the novelist says that “art is connected in my mind—in my body—with a sense of enhancement, of radical pleasure, of affirmation, of revelry. Darkness is the element against which this deeper force asserts itself. It may even be that this force deliberately seeks out darkness, in order to assert itself more radically.” In the novella “Franklin Payne,” it is no coincidence that Payne drafts his animations at night nor that even after color has become possible he insists on continuing to do black-and-white drawings because he sees them as intrinsic to the art of animation. Enchanted Night is unique on yet another score. Unlike the other novellas , Enchanted Night resembles a collection of stories whose narrative threads or “plots” are interrupted by each other. The “plot” of numerous “characters ” out on this summer night is rendered through narrative units of widely differing length, with titles of varying pertinence. Although readers may be willing to take each section as a vignette, or discrete expression of a moonlit summer night’s impact on those who are outdoors, it is natural for some readers to anticipate the novella’s disclosure of connections among these figures of the night. The time setting also defines Enchanted Night. This is one “enchanted night,” and because the season is summer it is a short “night,” the narrative occurring between midnight and dawn about 5:00 a.m. This time compression contributes a sense of urgency. If the narrative is to offer some “sense of an ending,” there is little time to do it. Additionally the shortened time-span raises the issue of genre once again: How does a novella differ from a short story or novel other than in its length? How dependent is the novella on communicating a sense of a reasonably developed action with some resolution? Yet another element of the time setting deserves attention. Once again we are in Millhauser Country, the small-town America of the author’s childhood in southern Connecticut. This novella deliberately leaves the time vague in an effort to capture a summer night’s essence. There are some clues that the year might be sometime in the 1950s. The setting seems not to be the 1930s or ’40s, with the impact of first the Depression and later World War II. And it is not the ’60s or ’70s with their cultural upheaval, evident even in rural America. Additionally these people are outdoors in part because indoors is hot, given that even window air conditioners for bedrooms are not yet in general use. Finally the narrative suggests the ’50s in the inklings of looming cultural change within the postwar “good times” of that era. One indication of a darker underside is the figures of Smitty and Blake as amusing expressions of a ’50s...