The Knife Thrower

by Steven Millhauser

  Came a day when my mother let me stay home while she went shopping at the market at the top of the hill. I wanted to call out after her: stop! make me go with you! I saw her walking across the lawn toward the open garage. My father had taken the bus to work. In my room I raised the blinds and looked out at the brilliant blue sky. For a long time I looked at that sky before unlocking the window, pushing up the glass and screen.

  I set forth high over the back yard and rose smoothly into the blue. I kept my eyes ahead and up, though now and then I let my gaze fall over the carpet’s edge. Down below I saw little red and black roofs, the shadows of houses thrown all on one side, a sunny strip of road fringed with sharp-bent tree-shadows, as if they had been blown sideways by a wind—and here and there, on neat squares of lawn, little carpets flying above their moving shadows. The sky was blue, pure blue. When I next glanced down I saw white puffballs hanging motionless over factory smokestacks, oil tanks like white coins by a glittering brown river. Up above, in all that blue, I saw only a small white cloud, with a little rip at the bottom, as if someone had started to tear it in half. The empty sky was so blue, so richly and thickly blue, that it seemed a thing I ought to be able to feel, like lake water or snow. I had read a story once about a boy who walked into a lake and came to a town on the bottom, and now it seemed to me that I was plunging deep into a lake, even though I was climbing. Below me I saw a misty patch of cloud, rectangles of dark green and butterscotch and brown. The blue stretched above like fields of snow, like fire. I imagined myself standing in my yard, looking up at my carpet growing smaller and smaller until it vanished into blue. I felt myself vanishing into blue. He was vanishing into blue. Below my carpet I saw only blue. In this blue beyond blue, all nothing everywhere, was I still I? I had passed out of sight, the string holding me to earth had snapped, and in these realms of blue I saw no rivers and white towns, no fabulous birds, but only shimmering distances of skyblue heavenblue blue. In that blaze of blue I tried to remember whether the boy in the lake had ever come back; and looking down at that ungraspable blue, which plunged away on both sides, I longed for the hardness under green grass, tree bark scraping my back, sidewalks, dark stones. Maybe it was the fear of never coming back, maybe it was the blue passing into me and soaking me through and through, but a dizziness came over me, I closed my eyes—and it seemed to me that I was falling through the sky, that my carpet had blown away, that the rush of my falling had knocked the wind out of me, that I had died, was about to die, as in a dream when I felt myself falling toward the sharp rocks, that I was running, tumbling, crawling, pursued by blue; and opening my eyes I saw that I had come down within sight of housetops, my hands clutching the edges of my carpet like claws. I swooped lower and soon recognized the rooftops of my neighborhood. There was Joey’s yard, there was my garden, there was my chicken coop, my swing; and landing in the yard I felt the weight of the earth streaming up through me like a burst of joy.

  At dinner I could scarcely keep my eyes open. By bedtime I had a temperature. There were no fits of coughing, no itchy eyes, or raw red lines under runny nostrils—only a steady burning, a heavy weariness, lasting three days. In my bed, under the covers, behind closed blinds, I lay reading a book that kept falling forward onto my chest. On the fourth day I woke feeling alert and cool-skinned. My mother, who for three days had been lowering her hand gently to my forehead and staring at me with grave, searching eyes, now walked briskly about the room, opening blinds with a sharp thin sound, drawing them up with a clatter. In the morning I was allowed to play quietly in the yard. In the afternoon I stood behind my mother on an escalator leading up to boys’ pants. School was less than two weeks away; I had outgrown everything; Grandma was coming up for a visit; Joey’s uncle had brought real horseshoes with him; there was no time, no time for anything at all; and as I walked to school along hot sidewalks shaded by maples, along the sandy roadside past Ciccarelli’s lot, up Franklin Street and along Collins Street, I saw, in the warm and summery September air, like a gigantic birthmark, a brilliant patch of red leaves among the green.

  One rainy day when I was in my room looking for a slipper, I found my rolled-up carpet under the bed. Fluffs of dust stuck to it like bees. Irritably I lugged it down into the cellar and laid it on top of an old trunk under the stairs. On a snowy afternoon in January I chased a ping-pong ball into the light-striped darkness under the cellar stairs. Long spiderwebs like delicate rigging had grown in the dark space, stretching from the rims of barrels to the undersides of the steps. My old carpet lay on the crumbly floor between the trunk and a wooden barrel. “I’ve got it!” I cried, seizing the white ball with its sticky little clump of spiderweb, rubbing it clean with my thumb, bending low as I ducked back into the yellow light of the cellar. The sheen on the dark green table made it look silky. Through a high window I could see the snow slanting down, falling steadily, piling up against the glass.

  THE NEW AUTOMATON THEATER

  OUR CITY is justly proud of its automaton theater. By this I do not mean simply that the difficult and exacting art of the automaton is carried by our masters to a pitch of brilliance unequaled elsewhere, and unimagined by the masters of an earlier age. Rather I mean that by its very nature our automaton theater is deserving of pride, for it is the source of our richest and most spiritual pleasure. We know that without it our lives would lack something, though we cannot say with any certainty what it is that we would lack. And we are proud that ours is a genuinely popular theater, commanding the fervent loyalty of young and old alike. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that from the moment we emerge from the cradle we fall under an enchantment from which we never awake. So pronounced is our devotion, which some call an obsession, that common wisdom distinguishes four separate phases. In childhood we are said to be attracted by the color and movement of these little creatures, in adolescence by the intricate clockwork mechanisms that give them the illusion of life, in adulthood by the truth and beauty of the dramas they enact, and in old age by the timeless perfection of an art that lifts us above the cares of mortality and gives meaning to our lives. Such distinctions are recognized by everyone to be fanciful, yet in their own way they express a truth. For like our masters, who pass from a long apprenticeship to ever-greater heights of achievement, we too pass from the apprenticeship of childish delight to the graver pleasures of a mature and discriminating enjoyment. No one ever outgrows the automaton theater.

  It must be confessed that the precise number of our theaters remains unknown, for not only are they springing up continually, but many of the lesser companies travel from hall to hall without benefit of permanent lodging. The masters themselves may exhibit at a single hall, or in several at once. It is generally agreed that well over eight hundred theaters are in operation throughout our city in the course of a single year; and there is no day during which one cannot attend some hundred performances.

  Despite a great number of books on the subject, the origin of the automaton theater is shrouded in darkness. From the singing birds of Hero of Alexandria to Vaucanson’s duck, every item of clockwork ingenuity has by some authority been cited as an influence; nor have historians failed to lay tribute to the art of Byzantium. Some scholars have gone so far as to lend a questionable authority to Johann Müller’s fly, which legend tells us was able to alight on the hands of all the guests seated in a room before returning to its maker. Yet even if such tales should prove to be true, they would fail to explain our own more elegant art, which not only exceeds the crude imaginings of legend but is entirely explicable and demonstrable. One theory has it that our earliest clockwork artisans—about whom, it is admitted, little is known—were directly influenced by the dollhouse art of medieval Nürnberg, a conjecture to which a certain weight is lent by church records showing that fourteen of our ancestors were born in Nürnberg. What is certain is that the art of the miniature has long flourished in our town, and quite independently of the automaton theater. No home is without its cherrystone basket, its peachpit
troll; and the splendid Hall of Miniatures in our Stadtmuseum is widely known. Yet I would argue that it is precisely our admirable miniatures which reveal their essential difference from our automaton theater. In the Stadtmuseum one can see such marvels of the miniature art as an ark carved from the pit of a cherry, containing three dozen pairs of clearly distinguishable animals, as well as Noah and his sons; and carved from a piece of boxwood one inch long, and displayed beneath a magnifying lens, the winter palace of the Hohenzollerns, with its topiary garden, its orchard of pear trees, and its many rooms, containing more than three hundred pieces of precise furniture. But when one has done admiring the skill of such miniature masterworks, one cannot fail to be struck by their difference from our automaton theater. In the first place, although it is called a miniature theater, these six-inch figures that lend such enchantment to our lives are virtual giants in comparison with the true masterpieces of miniature art. In the second place, the art of the miniature is in essence a lifeless art, an art of stillness, whereas the art of the automaton lies above all in the creation of living motion. Yet having said as much, I do not mean to deny all relation between the miniatures of our museums and the exquisite internal structures—the clockwork souls—of our automatons.

  Although the origin of our art is obscure, and the precise lines of its development difficult to unravel, there is no doubt concerning the tendency of the art during the long course of its distinguished history. That tendency is toward an ever-increasing mastery of the illusion of life. The masterpieces of eighteenth-century clockwork art preserved in our museums are not without a charm and beauty of their own, but in the conquest of motion they can in no way compare to the products of the current age. The art has advanced so rapidly that even our apprentices of twelve exceed the earliest masters, for they can produce figures capable of executing more than five hundred separate motions; and it is well known that in the last two generations our own masters have conquered in their automatons every motion of which a human being is capable. Thus the mechanical challenge inherent in our art has been met and mastered.

  Yet such is the nature of our art that the mechanical is intimately related to the spiritual. It is precisely the brilliance of our advance in clockwork that has enabled our masters to express the full beauty of living human form. Every gesture of the human body, every shade of emotion that expresses itself on a human face, is captured in the mobile forms and features of our miniature automatons. It has even been argued that these finely wrought creatures are capable of expressing in their faces certain deep and complex emotions which the limited human musculature can never hope to achieve. Those who blame our art for too great a reliance on mechanical ingenuity (for we are not without our critics) would do well to consider the relation between the physical and the spiritual, and to ask themselves whether the most poetic feeling in the soul of man can exist without the prosaic agency of a nervous system.

  By its nature, then, our art is mimetic; and each advance has been a new encroachment on the preserves of life. Visitors who see our automatons for the first time are awed and even disturbed by their lifelike qualities. Truly our figures seem to think and breathe. But having acknowledged the mimetic or illusionistic tendency of our art, I hasten to point out that the realism of which I speak must not be misunderstood to mean the narrow and constricting sort that dominates and deadens our literature. It is a realism of means, which in no way excludes the fanciful. There is first of all the traditional distinction between the Children’s Theater and the theater proper. In the Children’s Theater we find as many witches, dragons, ghosts, and walking trees as may delight the imagination of the most implacable dreamer; but they are, if I may risk a paradox, real witches, real dragons, real ghosts, and real walking trees. In these figures, all the resources of clockwork art are brought to bear in the precise and perfected expression of the impossible. The real is used to bring forth the unreal. It is a mimesis of the fantastic, a scrupulous rendering of creatures who differ from real creatures solely by their quality of inexistence. But even the adult theater is by no means to be measured by the laughable banalities of our so-called realistic literature. For here too we can point to a great and pleasing variety of theatrical forms, which have evolved along with the evolving art of clockwork, and which are limited only by the special nature of the art itself. Being a speechless art, it relies entirely on a subtle expressivity of gesture—an apparent limitation that, in the hands of our masters, becomes the very means of its greatness. For these performances, which run from twenty to forty minutes, and are accompanied by such musical effects as may be required, seek no less than music itself to express the inexpressible and give precise and lasting shape to the deepest impulses of the human spirit. Thus some dramas may suggest the ballet, others the mime, still others the silent cinema; yet their form is their own entirely, various as the imagination, but all betraying a secret kinship.

  But even aside from the great variety of our automaton theater, this most realistic and mechanical of arts, which strives for an absolute imitation of Nature, cannot be called realistic without serious qualification. For in the first place, the automatons are but six inches high. This fact alone makes nonsense of the charge that our art is narrowly realistic in spirit and intention. The vogue of life-sized automatons, current some years ago, quite passed us by. Well known is the response evoked by the gross automatons of Count Orsini, upon the occasion of that worthy’s much advertised visit to our city. One imagines the howls of laughter still ringing in his ears. But quite apart from the small size of our automatons is the nature of the pleasure of automaton art itself. It would be foolish to deny that this pleasure is in part a pleasure of imitation, of likeness. It is the pleasure of illusion fully mastered. But precisely this pleasure depends on a second pleasure, which is opposed to the first; or it may be that the pleasure of imitation is itself divisible into two opposing parts. This second pleasure, or this second half of the pleasure of imitation, is a pleasure of unlikeness. With secret joy we perceive every way in which the illusion is not the thing itself, but only an illusion; and this pleasure increases as the illusion itself becomes more compelling. For we are not children, we do not forget we are at the theater. The naturalness of the creatures moving and suffering on their little stage only increases our reverence for the masters who brought them into being.

  These masters, of whom there are never more than twenty or thirty in a generation, are themselves the highest expression of a rigorous system of training that even on its lower levels is capable of producing works of superb skill and enchanting beauty; yet it is notable that despite occasional proposals the method has never cohered into a formal school. In somewhat arbitrary fashion the masters continue to take on apprentices, who move into the workshops and are expected to devote themselves exclusively to their art. Many of course cannot endure the rigors of such a life, which in addition to being narrow and arduous does not even hold out the promise of future prosperity. For it remains curiously true that despite public fervor the masters are, if not impecunious, at any rate far from prosperous. Many reasons have been adduced for this shameful state of affairs, one of the more fanciful being that the masters are so dedicated to their art that external comfort leaves them indifferent. But this can hardly be the case. The masters are not monks; they marry, they have children, they are responsible for maintaining a family with the additional burden of apprentices, not all of whom can pay even for their food. They are human beings like everyone else, with all the cares of suffering humanity, in addition to the burden of their rigorous art. Indeed the grave and sorrowing features of the older masters seem witness of a secret unhappiness. And so a far more plausible explanation of their lack of prosperity is that the laboriousness of the art far exceeds its capacity to pay. The theaters flourish, money pours in; but the construction of a single clockwork figure takes from six months to two or more years. Of course the masters are aided in large part by the higher apprentices, who are permitted to construct hands and
feet, and even entire legs and arms, as well as the clockwork mechanisms of the less expressive portions of the anatomy. Yet even so the master automatist is entirely responsible for the face and head, and the final adjustments of the whole. And although the painting of the scenery on translucent linen—itself a labor of many months—is left almost entirely to the older apprentices, nevertheless the master automatist must provide the original sketches; and the same is true of many other matters, such as the elaborate lighting that, illuminating the beautiful translucencies, is so much a part of our automaton theater. And of course there is the drama itself, the choreography, the sometimes elaborate music. For all these reasons, our daily attendance at the theaters does not lead to prosperity for the masters, though the theater managers invariably live in the best part of town.

  The mechanical skill of the masters, their profound understanding of the secrets of clockwork art, is impressive and even unsettling; but mechanical genius alone does not make a master. That this is so is evident from the fact that some apprentices as early as their thirteenth year are able to construct an automaton whose motions are anatomically flawless. Yet they are far from being masters, for their creatures lack that mysterious quality which makes the true masterpieces of our art seem to think and suffer and breathe. It is true that anatomical perfection is a high level of accomplishment and suffices for the Children’s Theater. Yet when these same apprentices, impatient to be recognized, attempt several years later to start theaters of their own, the lack of spiritual mastery is immediately evident, and they are forced either to resign themselves to a life of service in the Children’s Theater or else to return to the rigors of the higher apprenticeship. Even among those recognized as masters there are perceptible differences of accomplishment, though at a level so high that comparisons tend to take the form of arguments concerning the nature of beauty. Yet it may happen that one master stands out from the others by virtue of some scarcely to be defined yet immediately apparent quality, as our history demonstrates again and again; and as is the case at present, in the disquieting instance of Heinrich Graum.