Understanding Steven Millhauser

Chapter 6: The Barnum Museum

CHAPTER 6 The Barnum Museum Like In the Penny Arcade, The Barnum Museum (1990) brings together fiction of varying lengths and raises the issue of form. Although length is obviously no reliable gauge of a story’s significance, the longer stories in The Barnum Museum are likely to impress readers the most. The collection begins, for example , with a novella-length story, “A Game of Clue.” The title story, “The Barnum Museum,” may have fewer pages than a novella but has the feel of one. And “Eisenheim the Illusionist” has the impact of a novella without that form’s customary length. Then too, this last story could become the best known because of Neil Burger’s film adaptation, The Illusionist (2006). The Pulitzer Prize for Martin Dressler, The Illusionist film, and preliminary work on a film adaptation of “The Sisterhood of Night”1 are bringing Millhauser’s fiction to the attention of a larger audience. Like “August Eschenburg,” which opened the earlier collection, “A Game of Clue” establishes a realist, historical setting for its unexpected flight into fantasy.2 Assuming readers lack experience with the board-game “Clue,” the narrative describes the “Clue” board simply and completely, before the attentive reader is startled by an unexpected detail: one corner is covered by a saucer containing a burning cigarette. Thus the reality of the board-game is enclosed within the reality of the table on which it lies and the four players of “Clue,” to be introduced. First, however, the narrator describes what else rests on the table in meticulous detail, including, for example, the label on the almost empty, red-wine bottle and the winery’s lettering on a near-empty, souvenir wineglass. This is “realism” with a vengeance. Once the narrative has offered an exhaustive description of the tabletop, down to a “scattering of brown crumbs,” clearly bespeaking the realist mode, it goes on to the exquisitely scrupulous rendering of the mise-en-scène. This THE BARNUM MUSEUM 57 film term is not gratuitous, since the narrative recalls a film script, offering a set designer ample details to construct the scene. The narrative introduces a player—Jacob first—a struggling young poet, whose first section ends with his “solution” of the “whodunit”: Colonel Mustard, with a revolver in the library. Then as though Jacob’s imagination has projected the character, Mustard enters the library, without the revolver, and encounters Miss Scarlet. This pattern is repeated again and again until all the characters/“players” in the “real world,” all the “Clue” characters/“suspects,” all the potential murder weapons and crime scenes are introduced. Then the narrative continues with these two plot-lines. One involves the dynamics of the relationships between the twenty-five-year-old Jacob, his twenty-four-year-old sister Marian, their fifteen-year-old brother David, whose birthday has occasioned the gathering, and Susan, Jacob’s girlfriend, whom he insisted on bringing, without warning his family. This plot-line is “primary” because closer to our world, and yet the world of the six Clue suspects becomes equally compelling . They may be even more compelling, due to Millhauser’s masterstroke in encouraging us to believe that the fantasy lives he has created for these innernarrative , board-game emblems are more “real” than the lives of the fictional characters in the outer narrative. Readers may be surprised to discover how successfully the narrative draws them into believing in these board-game “emblems.” The narrative employs a Bakhtinian “de-familiarization” by voiding emblems of a numbing familiarity and empowering readers to see them through innocent eyes—a child’s vision of the imagined inner being of ordinary objects, reminiscent of “Penny Arcade .” The focus is not, for example, Professor Plum, exploring the secret passageways below, or Mrs. Peacock, wandering aimlessly, but Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlet, and their bizarre relationship. Perhaps “sado-masochistic” is more appropriate to each vying for the power to humiliate the other— Colonel Mustard by forcing himself on Miss Scarlet sexually, while she submits to his possession to demonstrate the meaningless banality of his sexual assault. In this pastiche of What the Butler Saw,3 or a contrived, voyeuristic vignette of rape in a sophisticated milieu, the two “characters” perform what turns out to be mere fantasy, not a “real” sexual encounter. Back of this narrative “performance,” the narrator seems to be smirking and asking readers: Well, what did you expect of markers in a board game—a real encounter? How many sexual encounters are...