The Fantastic in Fiction

For we are no longer innocent, we who do not see and do not remember, we incurious ones, we conspirators in disappearance.  I too murdered Elaine Coleman.  Let this account be entered in the record.

Honestly, I just love this as an ending sentence.  Throughout the whole story we see the narrator struggling to remember this woman he had known when he was younger.  He digs up old memories of minuscule interactions with Elaine, none of which were particularly remarkable in the moment, but together
they build to the conclusion we see above.  The disappearance of Elaine Coleman may have been due to a literal fading away, but it’s also an incredibly powerful metaphor for how people who live unremarkable lives can vanish from our brains and return only when something horrible happens to them.  This combination of possibly real memories and current day reminders of Elaine’s disappearance serve to keep the readers wondering how Elaine really vanished and whether our narrator is reliable or if his memories are artificial ones prompted by some sort of obsession on his part.

The death of the mouse is desirable in every way, but will life without him really be pleasurable? Will the mouse’s absence satisfy him entirely? Is it conceivable that he may miss the mouse, from time to time? Is it possible that he needs the mouse, is some disturbing way? (18)

The cat’s reluctance to eat the mouse, despite it being his one goal in life, suggests a codependence between the two. This codependence is enforced by the mouse’s action of wiping himself out of existence in the next paragraph after he erases the cat. A world in which the other did not exist would be, on the surface, incredibly easier for both: the cat would not be injured attempting to catch the mouse, while the mouse’s quest for food would be unhindered. However, while it would be easier they would remain unfulfilled. This looming emptiness forces the cat and the mouse to face the reality that they cannot live without the other. By erasing the cat and them himself from existence in the next paragraph, the mouse allows them both to escape from a world in which their one goal, unhindered access to cheese for the mouse and killing the mouse for the cat, would forever be out of reach due to their reliance on each other. As the cat and mouse are cartoon characters, the viewer need not worry about what happens after the curtains close, assured in the knowledge that the characters will be back and healthy in the next episode. However, the final words of the the story “THE END” (18) contain a far less comforting message for this cat and mouse; this incarnation of cat and mouse became too aware of their relationship and thus they had to be removed forever allowing new incarnations to replace them for the next episode. The fateful term “THE END” not only closes the story but also closes the curtains on the existence of this cat and mouse. By placing this story at the beginning of the collections prepares the reader for Millhauser’s penchant for the fantastic element of exaggeration that is seen throughout the entire collection through a medium that, to the modern viewer is easily digestible.

Within the story of “Cat ‘N’ Mouse” by Steven Millhauser, the cat tirelessly spends all of his time attempting to capture and kill the mouse, while on the other hand, the mouse tries to relax in his little home along with outsmarting the cat on his cheese outings. The author is detailed in the schemes throughout, while giving the true sense of a cartoon, implementing the common genre with dynamite, hearts beating so hard they protrude from the chest, being electrified by lightning indoors, hearts as eyes, and many other troupes of unrealistic happenings where the cat survives. The surprising twist in this commonly seen theme was the psychological thinking toward the end. There is the instance of where the mouse is thinking about his relationship with the cat, wondering whether they could ever be friends. Then at the very end, just as the cat is about to destroy the mouse (which would complete his mission), he takes a moment to contemplate if it’s “conceivable that he may miss the mouse,” and second guessing if he actually wants the mouse out of his life. Due to the cat’s second guessing, the mouse does not hesitate to erase the entire cat, and then himself. Growing more attached to the two characters as the two developed, it seems to give a reader hope that the two need each other and could one day live in peace, which made the demise of both of them not expected, especially as the characters, as similar TV shows, are “supposed to” live on, with the two continuing their scheming and outsmarting forever. Although the two are both gone, the mouse possibly could have thought that it was better to be erased than to live without the cat, who gave him not only entertainment but purpose.

“Haven’t they much in common, after all? Both are bachelors, indoor sorts, who enjoy the comforts of a cozy domesticity; both are secretive; both take pleasure in plots and schemes.”

This quote stuck out to me because it took the magic of the cartoon and brought it into a human plane. These characters are no longer a brilliant mouse and a scheming cat. They are your everyday homebodies. Millhauser stepped away from the magic of a cat being blown up and surviving with nothing more than ash on his face and caused us to look at these beings as something closer to ourselves. Millhauser examines the unsatisfaction of humans through cartoon characters. We will never be able to be satisfied in life because once we have the one thing we want “most” we then realize that we have no purpose left. It won’t be until we find another want or realize our own demise that we can be content.

Steven Millhauser

“…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 Transatlantica (2003).

“I’m fanatically reluctant to say that fiction ought to do one thing rather than another. I do know what I want from fiction. I want it to exhilarate me, to unbind my eyes, to murder and resurrect me, to harm me in some fruitful way. But that said, yes, the journey into intense feeling and the conquest of unknown emotional territory is something fiction can make possible.” — In Bomb (2003)

“Legitimate, bona fide monsters do in fact make occasional appearances in my work, but what interests me is something quite different. What interests me—not exclusively, but in relation to the monstrous—is the place where the familiar begins to turn strange. When things cease to be themselves, when they begin to turn into something else, which has no name—that is a region I’m always drawn to. This, I think, accounts for my interest in night scenes, in childhood, in bands of prowling adolescent girls, in underground and attic places, in obsession, in heightened states of awareness. In this sense, it might easily be argued that the wondrous and the monstrous are very much the same.” — In Bomb (2003)