Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. [Vol. 3.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 23)

STUDIES - László Dányi: Decoding Decoded Systems: An Interpretation of Steven Millhauser's "In the Penny Arcade"

In one of his essays Philip Stevick compares Jean Stafford's "A Country Love Song" and three new fictions, namely texts by Barthelme, Brautigan and Coover, with the recent past. If I compare Millhauser's story to the criteria provided by Stevick I must surmise that in spite of the novelty which definitely lies in the text more elements of the Millhauser text coincide with the so-called "modernist" Stafford passage than with those of the texts from new fictions. What are the common elements? Millhauser's story like Stafford's projects the reader "into a world of waiting, expecting" (Stevick 194), and after the first long paragraph the reader is mesmerized. In both stories decay and disintegration are central elements, and the torpor and the blight of the present are juxtaposed to past memories, even to the implication of reminiscent past value judgments which attach certain dignity to the past (195). The shoddy present is often contrasted with the past through the "as if' clause, which "seems to imply that the empirical reality being described is rather bizarre, sufficiently unfamiliar so that some conjectural cause must be supplied to account whimsically for its being so bizarre" (198). Furthermore, at the end of Millhauser's story the narrator offers an epiphanic insight, a sort of unraveling and unfolding as he claims that he knows the truth and understands the secret of the penny arcade, "For this was the only penny arcade, the true penny arcade. There was no other" (Millhauser 145). Refering back to the part in which I mentioned the novelty of Millhauser's story, and following Stevick's analysis I conclude that the story bears a lot of common elements with the new fictions as well. While reading the text the reader is in a state of uncertainty from the beginning as the penny arcade itself can be a metaphor with several ramifications. This uncertainty creates tension evoked by the lexical, syntactical and semantical structures generated in the text. Another common element is the way the story centers around the problem of "fascination with the junk of our culture" (Stevick 195). In Stevick's article another principle of interpreting fiction in two distinct ways comprises approaches to open and closed spaces, or 14