" `The light, dark as butterscotch': In-Betweenness, or the Poetics of Light and Darkness in Steven Millhauser's "The Room in the Attic" and "Cathay""
Résumé
This article aims at studying the poetics of light and darkness in Millhauser’s short stories “Cathay” and “The Room in the Attic”: in the first, the protagonist favors darkness and imagination over light and revelation and in the second, Asian concubines play with what is hidden and what is shown, while the narrator plays with light and darkness. How do light and darkness interact, and how do they become narrative tools which come to reflexively comment on the very art of fiction-making? This article studies how Millhauser reverses the classical representations of light and darkness, and how this opposition feeds an art of in-betweenness.