Cuento Insólito Al Azar

Vol.3, No.3
EDITOR’S NOTE

In one of my favorite Hans Christian Andersen stories, “The Nightingale,” the Emperor of China falls in love with the songs of nightingale but he is soon distracted by the gift of an amazing mechanical bird, sent to him by the Emperor of Japan. The story (currently smartly collected in a tiny anthology called Fairy Tales for Computers because it really is abouttechnology) becomes a way to talk about the very human tug between the natural and the artificial.
Millhauser starts his gorgeous “Cathay” with 12 singing birds, which are just like birds except for their golden bodies; that we know they are gold only increases our wonder. “Cathay”—an alternate name for China—takes up where “The Nightingale” left off, almost exactly 140 years earlier. His is a made-upland, a love letter to art, a capsule of loneliness, a painting of beauty that makes me catch my breath from the care and skill of the writer/painter who is adorning each paragraph with filigrees of language while also dipping us over and over again into all that empty white space.
The story first strikes with its beauty. When I read it for the first time (small spoiler alert), I was enrapturedby those painted eyelids. First, the delicacy of the image, and then the perfect progression to the more private canvas of the areola. From one level of elegant seduction to another. And maybe that’s a microcosm of the story’s skillfulness right there—these mini-paintings appear to be just image, just beauty, but a subtle movement takes place and storytelling kicks in. Something shifts when acareful blink across a room leads to the discovery one lover makes of another when clothes come off in a secluded chamber.
I’ve taught this story many times, often as a way into talking about permission and what a story can do. The allure of the chunk paragraphs, each one as carefully tended as a Japanese garden. The marvelous hilarity of those dwarfs! The way he crafts a sentence, like a gracefulcurious watchmaker. The Borgesian mysteries in each room. (When listening to Borges stories on audiotape this past spring, I was struck by the lineage there, too, how Millhauser seems a certain descendant.) Millhauser is always deeply musical and precise with his phrasings, so every sentence is a pleasure, but this story is not simply a pretty list, an accounting of a place. By the end, through themystery and sadness packed inside the images, the story asks us complicated questions about art and wonder. What do we need more? The world, or its reflection? The known, or the imaginative? And how about that ending scene?
And when the Emperor walks those Corridors of Insomnia, corridors “so long that a man galloping on horseback would fail to reach the end of either in the space of a night,”it’s so stunningly exact in its mystery. Millhauser nails down something elusive about what it’s like to be awake all night, as the whole story nails down something fleeting about who we are, and how we live. We need our metaphors to survive, he reminds us, and perhaps we can find our way to transcendence through artifice. These questions seem ever more relevant in our current world, thirty yearsafter the story was published, which happened before internet, and virtual realities, and the big birth of our computer selves.
This is a story that uplifts, and saddens, and bewilders, and shimmers.
Nothing quite like it.


Cathay
by Steven Millhauser
Recommended by Aimee Bender


BIRDS

THE TWELVE SINGING BIRDS in the throne room of the Imperial Palace are made of beaten gold, exceptfor the throats, which are of silver, and the eyes, which are of transparent emerald-green jade. The leaves of the great tree in which they sit are of copper, and the trunk and branches of opaque jade, the whole painted to imitate the natural colors of leaf, stem, and bark. When they sit on the branches, among the thick foliage, the birds are visible as only a glint of gold or flash of jade,...