The Narrowed Voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver by Michael Trussler The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. —Italo Calvino, [fon a Winter’s Night A Traveller (244) Mam appears to be rampant. So captivated are contemporary critics with the term’s (supposed) ability to provide precise and final demarcation, that it seems paradoxical to discover the myriad of widely diverse cultural activities jointly labeled by the “minimalist” aesthetic. Repeatedly, however, the term is used pejoratively, a rapid dismissal of an artwork, often made more on moral than stylistic grounds.? Occasionally, as with Barth’s frequent application of the term, it denotes praise; rarely is neutrality involved. In many respects, our culture’s penchant for the term minimalist is similar to its predilection for the label “postmodernist”—making, free and easy use of either as an epithet has become “stylish.” Abused as the term is, its overuse nevertheless signifies a general cultural difficulty in understanding and interpreting contemporary art (“to name is to know” becomes the axiom, from the entertainment pages of newspapers to the critical investigation of literary texts). The prevalence of the term also speaks of the manner in which the various arts media have become intermixed: there is a degree of accuracy in relating Philip Glass and John Cage and Samuel Beckett, owing to their shared interest in “silence” and repetition, for I would like to thank Linda Hutcheon, Russell Brown and Mark Levene for their helpful advice regarding this article \Stephen Riggins entitles an interview with Michel Foucault “The Minimalist Self”; John Rockwell, in The New York Times, argues that “a case can be made for a Minimalist politics, a Minimalist cuisine, Minimalist fashions and even Minimalist lifestyles”; John Barth’s poignant culogy for Donald Barthelme lauds him as the “thinking man’s minimalist.” 2According to Joshua Gilder, “the motivating impulse behind minimalist literature” is a “fear of life’” (80). Studies in Short Fiction 31 (1994): 23-37. Copyright © 1994 by Newberry College. 2324 Studies in Short Fiction instance. A term that is so pervasive in so many diverse areas of concern would seem to defy an all-encompassing definition. Literary minimalism appears to be somewhat protean in its manifest ations; Barth describes minimalist writing as being “terse, oblique, realistic or hyperrealistic, slightly plotted, extrospective, cool-surfaced fiction,” but he then speaks of Beckett, Carver and Donald Barthelme as being minimalists all in the same breath (“A Few Words . . .” 1). It is easy to sympathize with Barth—-using as he does the necessary stratagem of viewing minimalism against its opposite, literary “maximalism”—and find the term to be elusiv Indeed, for Barth, the minimalist /maximalist issue extends to all literature: Beyond their individual and historically local impulses, then, the more or less minimalist authors of the New American Short Story are re-enacting a cyclical correction in the history (and the micro: histories) of literature and art in general. . . . For if there is much to admire in artistic austerity, its opposite is not without merits and joys as well. There are the minimalist pleasures of Emily Dickinson —*Zero at the Bone”—-and the maximalist ones of Walt Whitman. (“A Few Words. . .” 25) Barth’s telescoping of a discussion of minimalism to a paradigm that enacts the decision of what to include/exclude in a literary text is accepted by John Kuehl, who (recalling disputes between Keats and Shelley, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe) writes: “the co-existence of putter-inners and leaver- 3Despite the different media to which the term “minimalist” is applied, the various “minimalisms” seem to share some common features, chief among them an interrogation of the limits of the art so named. Rockwell describes minimalist music as “patterned repetition, seemingly endless length and [the] refusal to come to conventional climaxes” (1). Defining its 1960s manifestation in the visual arts, Kim Levin writes: “minimalism was an art without internal relationships, a reductive art of isolated cubic objects, static and implacable monolithic forms . . . minimalism was the last of the totally exclusive styles, the end of the Modernist mainstream” (28) According to Frederick R. Karl, minimalist literature (which he identifies with postmodernism) focuses on “omission” and “intermittence”: “in such works the reader is aware of the spaces between words, . . . the silence... . Every truly minimalist work is an act of great daring: an effort to reveal or expose by way of negating the real” (384-85). Refusal, exclusion, negation—-words such as these span the respective disciplines in their attempts to circumscribe the term, suggesting an attitude of ascetic denial, even solipsism. Although it is outside the scope of this essay to move beyond literary minimalism, it is helpful to note that the impetus behind the minimalist aesthetic engages far more than a rudimentary nihilism. Intrinsic to a discussion of minimalism is an awareness of minimalism’s self-conscious examination of the perimeters and capabilities of the art in question; through repetition and subversion of convention (music), reduction (the visual arts) and intermittent omission (literature), cach respective “m criticism of the medium it employs imalism” enacts an examination andThe Narrowed Voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver 25 outers—now called maximalists and minimalists—seems commensurate with story-telling itself” (104). Barth’s generally trans-generic (I say “generally trans-generic,” since in his later essay, “It’s a Long Story,” Barth creates a dichotomy between the short story and the novel) ahistorical approach to minimalism is not without its difficulties. By glossing over the specificity accorded to the term by a critic such as Karl, Barth not only attenuates the efficacy of the term “minimalist” itself, but he also fails to discern adequately between the aims of a writer such as Carver and say, a Senecan aphorism. However, Barth’s opposition between compression and “luxuriant abundance, explicit and extended analysis” (“A Few Words . . .” 2) focuses on the central issue a discussion of minimalism in general invokes—namely, the enigmatic relationship between what is present in a text and what is implied through absence. Although I believe that the term “minimalism” verges on being reductive, I think that the “maximalism versus minimalism” debate (in literature) brings to the fore many of the issues attendant upon a discussion of Carver’s short stories, and “Why Don’t You Dance?” in par- ticular. i As was made abundantly clear in numerous interviews, Carver was antagonistic to being described as a “minimalist” writer. Viewing the term as a mere “tag,” Carver believed that it was an unsatisfactory form of critical jargon, often serving to conflate dissimilar writers. Reluctant to accept the adequacy of the “appellation” in general, Carver specified that, if the label was to be used in connection to his own work, it should be reserved for his collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Conversations 44), Numerous critics, while sympathetic to Carver’s distaste for being neatly categorized, have focused on Carver’s central tendency to rely on a poetics that practices Mies van der Rohe’s dictum that “less is more.” For Graham Clarke, Carver is “the quintessential minimalist, seemingly reducing to an absolute spareness both his subject matter and his treatment of it.”* Clarke’s analysis cogently accentuates Carver’s use of “silence”: The minimalism, as such, is based upon an absolute concern with the implications of a single mood: a space of habitation (and consciousness) where the syntax is as much concerned with the silent as it is with the spoken. (105) 4Clarke believes that Carver is even more “minimalist” than his mentor, Hemingway. Comparing the famous scene in “Big Two-Hearted River: II” in which Nick Adams fishes for trout, to a similar scene in Carver's story “The Cabin,” Clarke finds that Carver's story undercuts the mythological and symbolic unity he perceives to be present in the Hemingway. According to Clarke, Carver's fiction “deconstructs the codifying myths even as it re-inscribes them into a context which exposes their pretensions to significance” (103-10).26 Studies in Short Fiction Clarke’s attention to the reciprocity in Carver’s work (extending also to the reciprocity implicit in all literary minimalism) between the silent and the spoken provides a means of investigating not only Carver’s narrative style, but the implications of such a style to our understanding of the short story’s mechanics.5 Carver’s writing, as he himself acknowledged, owed much to Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated “iceberg” aesthetic (seven-eighths of a narrative may take place beneath the surface of the text) and his frequently noted “theory of omission”: “you could omit anything if you knew that [sic] you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (Hemingway 75). Hemingway’s dependency upon ellipsis does considerably more than “make people feel something more than they understood”; it defamiliarizes both the signifier and the referent. Thab Hassan writes that Hemingway distrusted “the accretions of language”; accordingly, his fiction (through its use of ellipsis, repetition and sparse, “ordinary” vocabulary) “creates itself in opposition, and style evolves into a pure anti-style” (88-89). Anti-style, for Hassan, as one of the hallmarks of postmodernism, is a recognition of literature’s limitations; anti-style fractus textual unity and, demonstrating the power of “silence,” it is “an intuition of the great emptiness behind the meticulous shape of things” (83). What is particularly important for an analysis of Carver’s narrative style is Hassan’s description of the “anti-languages” silence “creates”: Some are utterly opaque, others completely transparent. These languages transform the presence of words into semantic absence and unloosen the grammar of consciousness. They accuse common speech. (13) The significance of Hassan’s observations to a discussion of Carver becomes immediately apparent when they are seen against the animosity of critics who believe that writers such as Carver are simply naively referential. Although 5Clarke’s emphasis on Carver's “absolute concern with the implications of a single mood” obviously recalls Poe’s belief that the short story should move toward “a single effect” (47). To comment here at any length about the implications of Carver’s “minimalist” style to our understanding of the short story as a genre is impossible However, we might note that, in Carver’s short fiction, transpired events cannot easily be made to coalesce into the chronological continuity that links a narrated event with the time of narration. The short story’s propensity for hovering over one specific temporal horizon is greatly emphasized in Carver’s work. What Carver's short storics most vigorously explore is the precarious, though inviolable, nature of the single temporal horizon. Let me posit that his work, illuminating the short story’s overall penchant for accentuating a limited temporal horizon, clarifies how short fiction tends to interrogate the hermeneutic significance of viewing events in a seriesThe Narrowed Voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver 27 many postmodernist critics disparage writers such as Carver, Charles Newman’s diatribe against Neo-Realism (a kingdom of which, according to Newman, Carver and Ann Beattie form the “aristocracy”) is perhaps the most extreme in its vitriol: Neo-Realism is an artless analgesic worse than the addiction . . . . Against the mindless misappropriation of the metaphors of modern science [Newman does not approve of Thomas Pynchon], we get the concrete in the form of tennis shoes and the mandatory beer poured over the head . . . . Against the refusal to convince and represent, we get the self-evident which is never demonstrated. (93-94) It is possible to view Carver’s terse prose, with its seemingly transparent qualities (Newman’s “tennis shoe”) and elliptical style, as engaging considerably more than what is suggested in Newman’s excessively denigrating polemic. When viewed as participating in an “anti-language,” the “concrete” does not necessarily reveal a retrograde, naive belief in exact literary referentiality; nor does it imply simplistic notions of epistemology. Rather, as Hassan argues, anti-style (which can be manifested through opaque or transparent writing) may, in fact, entail an interrogation of the boundaries of literature, the boundaries of knowledge. Both the “opaque” and the “transparent” anti- styles are rootless, deflective; both destabilize discours, both challenge literature’s ability to denote precisely the referent. In his essay “On Writing,” Carver delineates the rudiments of his poeti It’s possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring—with immense, even startling power, (24) Undermining the stability of words such as “a woman’s earring,” and investing the phrase with “power,” is their context (or more precisely, their lack of ascertainable context), the demands they place on the reader. Carver places words such as these on the page almost in bas-relief, resulting in what he describes as “tension,” a tension that is created through the narrative strategy of omission: “it’s . .. the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things” (“On Writing” 26). As Marc Chénetier reminds us in his essay “Living On/Off the ‘Reserve,’” “surfaces tend to have two sides [and] the one we see is not the one that matters” (185). Carver’s ellipsis undermines the reader’s ability to concretize adequately “a fork, a stone” owing to his emphasis on “surface.” The reader perceives the surface (event, description), but is incapable of penetrating the surface to discover the28 Studies in Short Fiction occluded meaning or structure that grants the surface its texture, its shape. “Surface,” writes Alan Wilde, “may generate a particular, complex dimensionality of its own” (186). This is not to maintain that a Carver story is hermetically sealed to the reader, but that its particular “dimensionality” engages indeterminacy. For Wilde, “the absence of depth implies the lack not of meaning but of certainties,” a condition that, destabilizing the reader’s ability to interpret, suggests epistemological uncertainty as well (173). The “landscape” beneath “the surface of things” may perhaps be present, but it is invisible. It is precisely this invisibility, this concentration on omission, this narrative strategy of implying rather than stating or explaining, that engenders the paradox of Carver’s writing. Wolfgang Iser refers to this process of employing gaps (which he associates with “modern” literature) as “negativity”: Blanks and negations increase the density of fictional texts, for the omissions and cancellations indicate that practically all the formulations of the text refer to an unformulated background, and so the formulated text has a kind of unformulated double. This “double” we shall call negativity. (225-26) A reader, facing the “formulations” of a Carver text, is beset by the text’s “unformulated double”; hermeneutic difficulty arises from the reader’s inability to ascertain the identity of this doubled text, this “negativity,” a situation that results in considerable uncertainty. Indeed, part of Carver’s stratagem is to employ seemingly “realistic” narrative precisely for the purpose of undermining an epistemology that would maintain that the external world can be readily comprehended. Chénetier writes: What mimetic dimensions the texts retain have to do with a somewhat imitative exploration of the radical ‘hance’ or gap that yawns at the heart of experience, in the presentation, rather than representation, of a world of fractures, a world whose chief activity is a linguistically deprived attempt at making minimal sense. (189) Always hovering beyond a Carver story is the world, mirage-like though it may be. Carver’s “a woman’s earring” engages the distinctive clarity of the world’s phenomenal objects, but behind the “mimetic dimensions” of the text is a narrative voice that disengages itself from the referent. In Hassan’s terms, the narrative voice employs an anti-style, whose articulations are undercut by an obdurate silence. Carver’s use of “ordinary language,” of what he deems “common language, the language of normal discourse, the language we speak to each other in” (“On Writing” 37), paradoxically serves to distance the narrating voice from its origins.