The narrowed voice: minimalism and Raymond Carver

Minimalism 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.1 Repeatedly, however, the term is used pejoratively, a rapid dismissal of an artwork, often made more on moral than stylistic grounds.(2) 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 instance. A term that is so pervasive in so many diverse areas of concern would seem to defy an all-encompassing definition.(3)

Literary minimalism appears to be somewhat protean in its manifestations; 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 elusive. 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 microhistories) 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-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 particular.

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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 "appelation" 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."[4] 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)