TNY weekend reader: it got smaller and smaller till I couldn’t read it anymore
Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)
This week’s fiction in TNY, “In the reign of Harad IV” by Steven Millhauser is a story that will ring true for those of us who have known the tragic but boring insanity (should I say tragically boring?) of the paranoid genius. The King’s maker of miniatures is continually seized by a restlessness he can’t exhaust except temporarily, by creating miniatures exponentially smaller and smaller until they become invisible to the naked eye. And yet he must surpass himself. His work becomes visible only in his imagination.
The story is a parable and applies very well to real life.
For example, the real life king’s magician I once knew was writing a book on Tate’s theory of knots and it’s relation to Lacan’s psychoanalytical practices. (Feel free to wolf-whistle or guffaw or smoke a pipe.) He became increasingly resentful, feeling that he was “giving away” equations and solutions he’d labored so hard for years to understand himself. He proceeded to alter the manuscript I’d typed into his computer (as his apprentice), throwing mathematical falsities into equations and explanations until his work became so obscure that he lost the book deal, his friends, his girlfriend, and took to the bottle. He continues his work in Beverly Hills, conducting an invisible seminar with rich misfits, drawing knots after hours in an empty classroom belonging to an English School for Japanese businessmen.
So very like the the maker of miniatures, who is visited by his abandoned apprentices curious to see what he’s been working on behind closed doors for so long. He shows them his latest and most brilliant work, and :
” knowing that they had seen nothing, that their words were hollow, and that they would never visit him again, returned with some impatience to his work; and as he sank below the crust of the visible world, into his dazzling kingdom, he understood that he had travelled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.”
Millhauser’s story perfectly recreates this gradual spiralling through the “floor” of the visible into the world of the invisible. He describes this descent from the tiny to the tinier to the invisible so well that I had the impression, while reading, that the story itself was getting smaller and smaller, and harder to read, till it became just a strange diamond shaped spot that looked like this: 
