ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt at reading side by side two short stories published fifty years apart: Vladimir Nabokov's "The Visit to the Museum" and "The Barnum Museum", from the collection bearing the same title. Counterintuitively, in an inversion of the familiar Gothic paradigm, "sunlight" and "death" are described as belonging to the same realm, whereas the sources of life and energy seem to flow from the dimly lit, phantasmagoric Museum. Speaking of "the quasi-Gothic hauntedness" of his fiction, Rodriguez et al. have emphasized Steven Millhauser's fraught relationship with realism, as well as his evocation of the uncanny, and frequent use of the fantastic. In a Gothic spectacle of historical progress, the living and the lifeless trade places. Matter is mobilized, ending the "sleep of substance," but is eventually transmogrified into a nightmare of sham grandeur: an endless, infinite delusion, impossible to inhabit.
