Understanding Steven Millhauser

Chapter 4: From the Realm of Morpheus

CHAPTER 4 From the Realm of Morpheus Steven Millhauser’s third novel appeared almost a decade after Portrait of a Romantic (1986). As Danielle Alexander notes, Knopf offered to publish From the Realm of Morpheus, but only if the author was willing to make cuts in the manuscript, and Millhauser was unwilling. Although his dedication to his novel’s integrity is commendable, Millhauser’s decision was unfortunate because he missed the opportunity to have his third novel join his earlier two as publications of Knopf, highly regarded as a publisher of distinguished fiction . It was not until some years after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his next novel, Martin Dressler, that Knopf would renew its interest in his work, publishing Dangerous Laughter and then We Others. After Millhauser shortened the manuscript, Morrow published From the Realm of Morpheus in 1986, the same year In the Penny Arcade appeared. The author subsequently admitted that his earlier attempt to publish the entire manuscript of a thousand-plus pages was an “error,” adding that his decision to reduce the manuscript’s length marked a “disenchantment with the aggression of length,” which moved him toward “shorter forms.”1 In writing the original manuscript, Millhauser apparently joined his more imaginative characters in their frustration with their craft’s conventions, impelling them to overreach—in a sense, to color outside the lines. The lack of critical response from book reviewers and academics was hardly surprising, since From the Realm of Morpheus challenges readers with its straining of the conventional notions of a novel. In a limited sense of the term, From the Realm of Morpheus may be classified as a novel. Its sections, or “chapters,” are held together by the narrator, a young American named Carl Hausman,2 who sets the “plot” in motion when he pursues a baseball down into the Realm of Morpheus where he becomes 36 UNDERSTANDING STEVEN MILLHAUSER the guest of Morpheus, the god of dreams. Like Dante telling his story of being led through the Inferno by Virgil, Carl tells his of exploring the subterranean “Realm” with Morpheus as guide. Carl’s function as narrator limits his development as a character, turning him into the lens through which readers see Morpheus. If one convention of the novel is the expectation that its central figure(s) will change, that convention is held in abeyance. As a god, Morpheus presumably cannot actually “change,” although he seems to. And the young mortal at the end seems little different from the Carl who entered the realm of Morpheus, rather like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. From the Realm of Morpheus strains the conventions of the novel even more by being a conglomeration of short stories, or even novellas. These strains on the novel’s conventions may lead readers to ask: Where is the sense of direction here? If the organizing principle seems almost “spatial,” one section or story added to another, would it not be possible to rearrange the sections of From the Realm of Morpheus without any significant sense of difference? And more to the point of Millhauser’s initial refusal to cut the extremely long manuscript, is it not possible to eliminate one or more sections of what amounts to a collection of shorter fiction, tied together through Carl, and Morpheus, who leads him through this “realm”? Would it change the work as a whole, for example, to excise the journey to the moon, which “ends” the book? Several longer sections in From the Realm of Morpheus are important forerunners of Millhauser’s later interest in the novella. This troublesome term “novella” has come into use as a means of denoting a narrative in the middle ground between the short story’s restricted plot development and limited cast of characters, producing greater focus and compression, and the novel’s expansiveness and ability to represent character change in a longer time span. Writers are frequently asked if they know at the outset whether the narrative they are writing will become a short story or a novel. Their usual response is that the narrative takes control and the author is less a puppeteer manipulating the story and more a stenographer taking it all down in haste, producing a short story or novella or novel as the narrative dictates. Despite the efforts to define these three forms as having qualitative differences, the matter usually comes down to page count. Because most of the stories in From the Realm of Morpheus are “tales,” they contain...