Taking life philosophically.
23 March 2010
I was not familiar with Steven Millhauser’s work before I stumbled on the mention of his Dangerous Laughter (2008) on the New York Times’ list of the best books of 2008. I had only seen a film based on one of his short stories, The Illusionist (2006). But I immediately liked Millhauser’s style when I opened the book. He knows what he wants to say, chooses his words well and writes carefully.
A lot of Dangerous Laughter can be read as philosophical fiction. Most of the stories are based on counterfactuals. Most of the time what he does is follow one single idea to all of its logical conclusions. The structure of a typical story is that of a simple thought experiment. It may not do justice to Millhauser’s artistic vision to describe his work thus, and I do not mean that there is nothing else to be found in the stories. But I found this aspect particularly interesting.
In philosophy, thought experiments are used to think about theories and principles. For example, they can be used to see whether a moral principle corresponds to our moral intuitions. If it is possible to construct a thought experiment of a situation in which our intuitions and the principle give different results (typically, if one of them allows something and the other prohibits it), we conclude that they are in contradiction. Either we need to accept that our intuitions are wrong or modify the principle or abandon it altogether. The point is that even flawed principles often seem quite plausible at first, and only through the use of imagination we can find out that there are problems with them.
Millhauser is not a philosopher, and his thought experiments are generally creative rather than argumentative. This is illustrated best by the stories that are of impossible worlds, worlds that cannot properly exist even in the imagination. “The Tower”, a story about a tower that reaches up to heaven, is an example of this. A material tower, no matter how high, cannot reach immaterial heaven, and the material body of a person can not go to a place that is not even a physical place.
However, Millhauser is not only a writer of impossible worlds. A lot of the time the worlds he describes are possible, while still nonexistent. What makes them impossible varies. Sometimes they have elements that are too difficult for human beings to make or build, such as domes that enclose entire countries in “The Dome” or paintings that literally express movement in “A Precursor of the Cinema”. Sometimes the elements just seem unlikely because they contradict a long-term trend: in “A Change in Fashion” fashion designers start to design clothes that hide and cover more and more of the body instead of exposing it. But in all cases, the logic of “what if?” is followed through and all the implications are considered.
It is easy to see the thinking behind the stories. Most if not all of them are connected to an issue in real life. The connection can be ethical (“The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman”) or aesthetic (“A Precursor of the Cinema”), for example. Millhauser’s technique of interpreting metaphorical language literally works most beautifully in “The Other Town”, which—in addition to being an exploration of the importance of literature and fictional works in general—enables Millhauser to discuss what I believe are some of his own views on writing.
The journal of Timo Laine (contact information). Cultural commentary from the perspective of a philosophy student in Helsinki.