The Columbia History of the American Novel

irony. Millhauser is the most ironic of writers. He writes, that is to say, in a style at once extravagant and self- conscious, confident and guilty. What looks to be the smile of imagination eager to take everything for its province is also the self-mocking smile of one who knows too well that imagshy; ination can be neither innocent nor robust, effectual nor free. Irony in Millhauser is the sign of imagination disabused, slyly giving itself over to procedures by which it will exercise its powers only to conshy; front the ultimate failure of those very powers. In the expression of this irony there is joy, but it is the harsh, pyrrhic joy of consciousness triumphant over its own creative powers and illusions. Millhauser creates in the Barnum Museum what he calls 'a realm of wonder,' but as he leads us through its 'gaudy halls' and 'brash abundance' he cannot but note 'a certain coarseness,' and worse, a capacity even in the most stirring exhibits to inspire 'boredom and nausea,' stushy; pefaction, desolation. This is in itself only modestly disturbing, reshy; flecting as it may what are merely changing moods. More insidious by far is the suggestion that the oppositions presented in such a work are themselves not to be seriously entertained, that the very language of wonder is itself so tainted by excess and cliché that it ought not to convey what it ostensibly intends. Even the disillusion so steadily interposed between the poet and his reverie is compromised, literary, inauthentic — not always farcical or ridiculous, but at least slightly exaggerated so as to seem a parody of an earlier mode of austere disillusion.

In fact, parody is so bound up with irony in Millhauser as almost to seem an integral component of his stance. This is not parody as we find it in other postmodern writers, in Barth or in Barthelme, to take two illustrious examples. In novels like The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat- Boy, parody — say, of seventeenth-century English and American prose, or the language of savior myths — is employed to revivify our relation to the past and thereby to empower Barth's claim to a mythmaking novel of the future. In Barthelme, as Charles Molesworth has written, we have 'a field of free-floating parody, where no anchoring content or style serves as the central vehicle of -749- intention against which the other structures are judged or intershy; preted.' This yields, in Barthelme, not only an indiscriminateness in the targeting of objectives but also 'a feeling of the author's lack of responsibility,' which enthusiasts rather celebrate as 'decentering' or 'undecidability.' Millhauser's parody is neither future-oriented nor irresponsibly nihilistic, neither voraciously imperialistic nor inshy; discriminate. Neither can parody in Millhauser be reduced to an anxshy; ious competition with models or a desire to recuperate energies asshy; sociated with earlier literary cultures. If he would surely agree with the painter Robert Motherwell that every intelligent artist carries the whole culture of modern art in his head, and that 'his real subject' is likely to be that whole culture, he would no doubt find it harder to accept that 'everything' he creates 'is both an homage and a critique.' Such a formulation too emphatically suggests that the writer proceeds with targets before him, that in parodying literary biography he is criticizing literary biography, that in simultaneously parodying and investing in romantic archetypes his primary goal is to say something about romanticism.

But Millhauser parodies in the more radical spirit of the Thomas Mann who in 1944 noted in his diary that 'I myself know only one style: parody.' This was not in Mann a boastful statement, and of course there is nothing boastful even in the most riotous of Millhauser's fictions. If, like Mann, Millhauser knows only parody, this must be understood as reflecting a disciplined refusal to escape from self-consciousness, from a sense of the potential or actual hollowness, conventionality, ludicrousness of his own best language and ideas. Erich Heller, in his 1958 book Thomas Mann: The Ironic German, develops this view of the radical artist with surpassing lucidity, and nowhere more powerfully than in a passage he quotes from Nietzsche: the artist, Nietzsche writes, 'reaches the ultimate point of his greatness only when he has learned how to see himself and his art beneath himself — when he knows how to laugh at himself.' Millhauser consistently sees himself and his art beneath himself: so one believes in reading his novels and stories. What he parodies, more than any genre-convention or empty discourse, is his own steadfast effort to rise above the conventional, the trivial, the shoddy. In parshy; odying even the most lucid and earnest of literary employments, inshy; cluding the helplessly familiar language of affection and admiration, -750- Millhauser takes on what Heller terms 'the misgiving that the pursuit of art may have become incompatible with authenticity.' For Millhauser, the essential thrust of parody is not critique — however much he may criticize moribund forms and corruptions of spirit — but autocritique. The irony and pervasive melancholy of his art consist in its steady acknowledgment that the exercise of creative freedom can only authentically issue in the truth of its inadequacy.

Though other writers have adopted some such dark view of art and of the condition of language, few have expressed it with such seriousness and grave amusement. However obvious the differences between Millhauser and modernist masters like Mann and Kafka, he reminds us of their severe gaiety, their powers of detachment and melancholy serenity. The avant-garde element in Millhauser is clear not in his power to enrage or to shock but in his sense — expressed in a prose vigorous and precise — that to explore the boundaries of conshy; sciousness and invention is to discover not inexhaustibility but limit. The greatest of avant-garde writers have understood that an oppresshy; sive sense of limitation was inherent in the energetic, sometimes fushy; rious attempt to overcome expressive constraints. If the selfproclaimed avant-garde in the United States has often seemed unduly, not to say preposterously, overconfident, that has usually reflected a lack of seriousness associated with the view that limits exist only to be ignored or wished away. The German writer Hans Magnus Enshy; zensberger writes of 'the historic avant-garde' that 'never did it try to play it safe with the excuse that what it was doing was nothing more than an 'experiment.'' The contemporary avant-garde, lacking the seriousness of its predecessors, too often adopts the guise of breakthrough and irresponsibility as 'trademark and as camouflage.' The fiction of Millhauser, in its exigence, reminds us of all that the imagination wishes it were free to accomplish, and impresses upon us the infinite longing for culminations we are increasingly without the resources to believe in. In so doing, Millhauser helps restore to the avant-garde project a scruple and seriousness largely abandoned by ambitious American writers in the late years of this century.

Robert Boyers

-751-

Biographies of American Authors

Edward Abbey (1927-89)

Though Abbey was born in Pennsylvania, a preoccupation with the desert landscape of the Southwest — predominantly Arizona and New Mexico — and issues of the environment inform all of his fiction, as well as his life. His experience as a Park Ranger and firefighter finds resonance in his famous work The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975). His other works include Desert Solitaire (1968) and The Fool's Progress (1988). His final novel, Hayduke Lives! (1990), is a sequel to the popular Monkey Wrench Gang.

Walter Abish (1931-)

Born in Vienna, Abish fled Austria with his family and arrived in Shanghai in 1940. In 1960 Abish came to the United States, where he worked as an urban planner. In his challenging, experimental fiction, Abish deconstructs the continuity of ordinary events. Alphabetical Africa (1974), In the Future Perfect (1977), and How German Is It (1980) have established Abish's reputation as a central voice among avant-garde novelists.

Kathy Acker (1947-)

Raised in New York, Acker has lived in San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego, where she has avowedly pursued a lifestyle corresponding to the stark merge of sexuality, feminism, and 'punk' aesthetics in-753- habiting her fiction. Her novels include Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Great Expectations (1982), and, most recently, Seven Cardinal Sins (1990) and In Memoriam to Identity (1990).

Louisa May Alcott (1832-88)

Alcott, daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the transcendentalist circle of Emerson and Thoreau. At sixteen she published her first book, Flower Fables, and from an early age she worked to help support her family. Her first novel was Moods (1864). Little Women (1868-69) was an immediate