The Surreal as Substance : THE BARNUM MUSEUM <i> By Steven Millhauser (Poseidon Press: $18.95; 237 pp.; 0-671-68640-2) </i>

In more than a few of the 10 stories that comprise “The Barnum Museum” it’s as if a prodigious, bizarre and photographic imagination is struggling mightily to pin itself to the mat of the post-modern story as practiced, for example, by the late Donald Barthelme. Steven Millhauser does his best to distance his art, to make it cool in the manner of accomplished predecessors, but the effect is sometimes like seeing a gorgeous butterfly--say a tiger-swallow-tail--mounted under glass, and then catching a slight twitch in one of its wings.

He can be witty. “Klassik Komix 1” is a comic-book version--the prose divided into sections labeled “Cover” and “Panels” numbered 1 through 44--of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in which the anti-hero is seen regarding a beautiful woman at a party without being able to muster the courage to engage her socially, and is rendered climactically on the cover as “a creature part crustacean and part man” lying on his stomach on the ocean floor. So much for hesitation.

“A Game of Clue,” a novella that opens the collection, alternately evokes a family of grown and almost grown siblings as they play the board game one evening just after being newly reunited at the family house in Connecticut, and the characters, architecture, furnishings and situations unfolding in the English mansion that is the setting of the game. Millhauser charts a seduction between the game-board figures of Colonel ustard and Miss Scarlet that has unexpected emotional nuances. Finding herself reduced to an object under the gaze of this stalwart, heartless womanizer:

“She feels, in that pause of inspection, that she has achieved the condition of utter banality. It is a condition more extreme than death, for to die is to continue to exist in the body; but she has ceased to exist in the body, she is impalpable, the cells of her flesh have dissolved in the solvent of a trite imagination. Despite her revulsion for the vulgar Colonel, Miss Scarlet is grateful to him for permitting her to savor this annihilation.”

The board game has taken a turn into a parlor out of a macabre Henry James. And overlooking this action--to which they remain oblivious--are David Ross, 15; his older brother, Jacob--with his girlfriend Susan--and his older sister, Marian. Millhauser renders their interpersonal complexities with a touch as gentle as it is evocative, and in this dimension the narrative has a fluent realism reminiscent of William Maxwell.

The other, briefer stories seem less involved with relationships per se than with the artist, in various guises and incarnations, and with the power and position of art in the larger community within which it exists. “The Barnum Museum,” the title story, seems an elaborately tedious conceit on this order, the museum being a sort of local circus of freaks and wonders, about which the locals feel, yes, ambivalent.

In another story, a man buys a postcard that seems to change on successive viewings. In “Alice, Falling,” the famous Alice has a nap after a picnic with her sister beside a lake and dreams of falling down the rabbit hole without ever reaching wonderland. In “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad,” the old wanderer at home in his garden in Baghdad dreams another journey while recalling earlier ones with his memory playing an elusive role of its own.

In these works, the odd, remote, supernatural or surreal seems to be perceived as the primary substance of art, a notion that has its most popular literary incarnation in the genre of science fiction, which Millhauser flirts with and never quite embraces. This is a notion that might be argued, but in the end it may come down to a difference in taste. Just how great a writer is Edgar Allen Poe?

The final two stories, “The Invention of Robert Herendeen” and “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” make it clear that Millhauser perceives the artist as a magician, one who works wonders that society and the artist himself may have trouble keeping in proper perspective. In the first story, an unpublished writer imagines into actual being a young woman, her family, and even a male rival for her attention. As things start to go out of control, the narrator concludes: “If only I could remain calm remain calm remain calm then I might be able to imagine what would happen to me next.”

In the final story, Eisenheim, the most celebrated magician of fin de siecle Vienna as the Hapsburg empire nears its end, is able by concentration to create living presences on stage who prove to be impalpable when members of the audience try to touch them. When the chief of police and 12 policemen come to the theater to arrest him, it is because he is guilty of “shaking the foundations of the universe, of undermining reality, and in consequence of doing something far worse: subverting the Empire.” When the police get on stage to take the magician into custody, Eisenheim himself proves to be impalpable, disappears, and is never seen again.

One realizes we are living in a fin de siecle period of our own when the American empire is no longer what it once was, and there is particular resonance to this tale in our day of Jesse Helm’s pronouncements on the proper functioning of the National Endowment for the Arts and the recent arrests for the selling of the 2 Live Crew album. Then too, “Eisenheim the Illusionist” is the narrative in which Millhauser seems finally at home with his vision, masterfully evoking the charged interactions at the crossroads of history and art, a grim face-off between the officialdom of the time-bound and an alchemist of the eternal. Technically conventional, employing none of the post-modernist literary devices the writer uses elsewhere, it is at once the most readable, complex and uniquely daring story of the book.