The narrowed voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver

Studies in Short Fiction; Newberry; Winter 1994; Trussler, Michael

Full Text:

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune.

--Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night A Traveller (244)

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.

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."(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)

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. Ihab 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 fractures 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 many postmodernist critics disparage writers such as Carver, Charles Newman's diatribe against

Neo-Realism (a kingdom of which, according td 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"

antistyles are rootless, deflective; both destabilize discors; both challenge literature's ability to denote precisely the

referent.

In his essay "On Writing," Carver delineates the rudiments of his poetics:

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

Chenetier 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 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

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. Chenetier writes:

What mimetic dimensions the texts retain have to do with a somewhat imitative exploration of the radical 'beance'

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.

In his essay "On the Interpretation of Ordinary Language," Louis Marin differentiates between using "ordinary

language" and understanding its limitations. Referring to an unarticulated "thought in the back of the mind" that

severs the speaker, who employs ordinary language, from the language used, Marin writes:

The thought in the back of the mind...hollows out ordinary discourse...creating an internal distance which makes its

utterance alien to its enunciation, decentering it from the subject who formulates it, disappropriating it from the self

who offers it as an expression of himself...in order to make ordinary discourse into a speech "totally other."

(255-56)

To Marin, who bases his argument on one of Pascal's parables, possessing the "thought in the back of the mind"

characterizes a speaker who knows the limitations of ordinary discourse, but finds himself or herself restricted to

its use. Consequently, the unarticulated thought is a position that grants the speaker a degree of latitude, of

freedom. While many of Carver's narrators are unaware of the manner in which ordinary discourse serves to ensnare

them, to exacerbate their difficulties, this is not to say that Carver, as author of the texts, is similarly positioned.

Rather, Carver uses ordinary discourse to create "an internal distance," a displacement, that severs the text from the

character/narrators who give it "enunciation." One means of investigating this narrative strategy is to examine a

story that employs a third-person narrator, since the narratorial activity present in such a story overtly indicates

the disjunctions that are only latent in the first-person narrations.

The language, the language fails them...--the language is divorced from their minds... William Carlos Williams,

Paterson (11-12)

In "Why Don't You Dance" a presumably divorced man surveys, from the vantage point of his kitchen window,

the bedroom suite and various other household effects he has placed on his front yard. After connecting his

appliances with an extension cord, the man heads off to buy the essentials: whiskey, beer and food. In his absence a

young couple, who are "furnishing a little apartment," decide that a yard sale must be taking place and "make

themselves at home" by examining the appliances, eventually turning on the television. When the man returns later,

he encourages the couple to make offers for the furniture, drink whiskey and dance. "Weeks later," after

summarizing the events of the evening, the young woman unsuccessfully attempts to articulate their meaning: "She

kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit

trying" (10).

In many ways "Why Don't You Dance?" is a contemporary fable that underscores the difficulty of producing

meaning through narration; the story enacts the distressing condition that occurs when narrative discourse seems to

collapse by proving incapable of ranting meaning to events. From the outset of the story, the inherent difficulty

involved in the interpretation of events is suggested. The movement of furniture would seem to be an act of

simplicity: a relationship has foundered and household objects are being sold. However, it is possible that this

parody of everyday order ("things looked much the way that they had in the bedroom") is an artifice that, among

other things, is an attempt to make a statement to the neighbors: "They thought that they'd seen everything over

here. But they haven't seen this" (9). That the character is vaguely Prospero-like is also suggested by Charles E.

May: the character "metaphorically externalizes his failed marriage on the front lawn and then silently watches a

young couple repeat that failure in 'play'" (72). The man's actions may thus be seen to contain a narrative that

remains inchoate, unless one is privy to his intentions in removing the furniture. The young couple logically assume

that they have been presented with a yard sale, but the young woman senses that something is amiss ("they must

be desperate or something"), since yard sales do not, as a rule, take place at night. By having the young couple

continue to act as though their interpretation is correct, Carver implicitly warns the reader that he or she too should

be wary of hermeneutic certitude.

In an interview with Michael Schumacher, Carver stated that "most of my stories start pretty near the end of the

arc of the dramatic conflict" (Conversations 229). Subtly suggesting an anterior narrative, the narrator creates a gap,

an omission that necessarily limits the reader's ability to determine the significance of what is articulated in the

story. By accentuating the enigmatic nature of the events, the embedded narrative associated with the young

woman ("she kept talking") temporarily encourages the reader to forego interpretation. In this way, Carver initially

manipulates the reader into a relationship of complicity with the young woman, thus effectively, as Chenetier

writes, "shutting the story down" (179). However, the embedded narrative (offering an internally collapsing

interpretation of the events in the story) implicitly expands the perimeters of the narration to include the reader's

necessary but paradoxical involvement. The reader may wish to emend the young woman's rendition of the events

("we got real pissed and danced") but, when it comes to interpreting the significance of the events, the reader's

position is not substantially different from the young woman's. Faced with the text's negativity--a narration that is

hollowed out by silence, a narrator who is often mute about causation and reticent regarding detail--the reader's

attempts at interpretation must necessarily be provisional.

A consideration of Carver's oral style in public readings intimates the importance of distinguishing the histoire of

"Why Don't You Dance?" from its mode of discours. When reading the story, the reader encounters typographical

spaces between the scenes; however, when Carver read his stories in public he ignored these textual spaces,

preferring instead to read the text as if it were one uninterrupted narrative. For the reader of a Carver story, then,

these typographical gaps become a visible reminder of the invisible "landscape" beneath the surface of the story.

That the narration is replete with lacunae is obvious to the reader; what undermines the reader's ability to interpret

is the difficulty in determining the identity of the voice that grants shape to the discours.

Chenetier and others have noted Carver's unusual use of deictics; for Chenetier, Carver's frequent use of

"unjustified deictics bludgeons presence on the reader" (166). While Carver's deictic specificity in "Why Don't You

Dance?" may suggest the relics of ownership (the definite articles "the chiffonier," "the desk" opposed to the

indefinite "a portable heater," "a rattan chair" ambiguously suggest a division between what belonged to the man

and what belonged to the absent woman), the deictics also serve to invoke distance and separation. Chenetier is

correct to argue that the deictics produce a sense of "presence," but the identical words also create a sense of the

text's alien, absent "doubleness," since the reader is presented with a narrative that is already happening, thereby

excluding him or her.(6)

The text's doubleness is augmented by the narration's oscillation in focalization. Initially, the man appears to be the

focalizer, but when he returns from shopping it is impossible to determine specifically which character presides

over focalization, suggesting that the narrator is a separate agent from the characters, fluctuating between internal

and external focalization. Such a narrative practice is not unique (one might call it the primary strategy of the initial

sections of Ulysses), but in Carver, it is impossible to dissect the narration in order to determine who is speaking

and to whom the narration is addressed. In the first section of the story, it appears as if the man is speaking to

himself (one could quite easily substitute the first-person for the third). But with "the man waved his hand at this

preposterous question" (7; emphasis added), the question of focalization becomes problematic: who is speaking,

the narrator (external) or the character (internal)? This distinction may seem moot at first, but the meaning of the

word "preposterous" is dependent upon who is using it. If the sentiment comes from the character, "preposterous"

operates on the level of verisimilitude--the man is frustrated with haggling--but if the sentiment belongs to the

narrator, the scope of the judgment is much more severe. More enigmatic is the self-referential "Why don't you kids

dance?" he decided to say, and then he said it. 'Why don't you dance?'" (8; emphasis added). The reference to the

title of the story would seem to suggest a vaguely Somerset Maughamian raconteur, but when Maugham uses this

device, the narrator participates in some way inside the text. In "Why Don't You Dance?" this is impossible owing

to the description of the young woman's inability to give shape to the earlier events. A movement that occurs

simultaneously between an authorial interjection (subtly reinforcing the text as "text"), a reference that is specific to

a character, and the hint of an external narrator who records the events of the story for no apparent reason,

dismantles the reader's ability to ascertain the perimeters of the narration. The problematic nature of this story's

narration is perhaps similar to the inversion of everyday order that has been created through the displacement of

furniture. Although the items of furniture have been "connected" through the extension cord and although

everything "works no different from how it was when they were inside," an act of defamiliarization has

nevertheless still taken place. Similarly, the narration's fluctuation between the internal and the external ensures that

the narration cannot be grounded or centered. In both instances, oppositions are maintained not as much to

accentuate the two counterparts but to draw attention to the process that creates the polarities. Chenetier describes

this practice as "bifurcation": the surface is split between what is apparent to the reader and what is absent. One

might say that Carver's style of narration in "Why Don't You Dance?" resembles that of Conrad's narrator, in

"Heart of Darkness," for whom "the meaning of an episode [is] not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the

tale which brought it out" (Conrad 48). Dismantling internal context, depending upon the reader's inability to

formulate the negative, Carver's story refutes closure.

In order to clarify the manner in which Carver decentralizes his narrator's voice in "Why Don't You Dance?," let us

return to the removal of household objects and compare it to Henry David Thoreau's description of a similar

"house-cleaning." In the "Sounds" section of Walden, Thoreau revels in the "fresh prospect" of viewing his

furniture sitting outside his cabin after he has washed the floor with water and sand:

It was pleasant to see my whole household effects spread out on the grass...so much more interesting most familiar

objects look out of doors than in the house....A bird sits on the next bough...life-everlasting grows under the table,

and blackberry vines run round its legs....It looked as if this was the way these forms came to be transferred to our

furniture...because they once stood in their midst. (158)

The delight expressed in Thoreau's mundane movement of household objects concerns the repudiation and collapse

of demarcation. Through the relocation of the "familiar," Thoreau observes the harmony that exists between

opposites; the internal (objects that have been classified by civilization) and the external (Nature) are no longer seen

to be antithetical. A fundamental estrangement has taken place, but, owing to Thoreau's perception of

continuity--"blackberry' entwined around a table leg reminds him that his furniture was originally part of

Nature--and his discursive voice (his "I"), this estrangement allows him to overcome the perceptual boundary that

stringently separates opposites. This is not to say that Thoreau insists that there is no difference between the

internal and the external; rather, the movement of furniture allows him to emphasize the manner in which discourse

can evade opposition by accentuating unity over separation.(7) Both writers describe a situation in which the

removal of furniture signifies a problem for the text to resolve. Rather than employing this estrangement motif to

focus on the recuperative powers of discourse, Carver uses the inversion of everyday order to emphasize the

manner in which narration may serve to splinter narrators from themselves, their narratees and often from the

experience that occasioned the narrative.

In "Why Don't You Dance?" the thin, diminutive surface made available to the reader is composed of several

narratives, none of which is completed by being understood by an audience. The owner of the house orchestrates a

drama that may be an attempt to communicate to his neighbors, the young couple, or his absent lover. Perhaps it is

addressed to no one at all. Wishing to communicate to her friends the significance of the evening, the young woman

discovers that her narrative is incapable of reviewing "what matters"; her unsatisfactory "story" serves to separate

her from both the experience itself and what she desires to communicate to her narratees. Finally, there is Carver's

decision to create a text that is grounded in indeterminacy, in which the reader is confronted by silence. In each

situation the use of narrative posits the possibility of communitas while simultaneously emphasizing the solitude

of its creator.

Edward W. Said's observations on narration, in The World, the Text, and the Critic, elucidate the rift between

narrative levels that occurs in stories such as "Why Don't You Dance?":

Words convey the presence to each other of speaker and hearer but not a mutual comprehension. Each sentence

drives a sharper wedge between intention (wanting to speak) and communication. Finally wanting-to-speak, a

specifically verbal intention, is forced to confront the insufficiency, and indeed the absence, of words for that

intention. (103-04)

The young woman's narrative culminates in an unsaid rejection of the subsequent events; by including this narrative

aporia, the narrator of "Why Don't You Dance?" appears to falter. There is the intention for speech, but the

narrator appears to recognize implicitly that the words used in the overall narration are also "insufficient"; the

significance of both narratives is finally inscrutable. Frequently Carver's narrators try "to make a connection"

("Viewfinder") and find themselves "all out of words inside" ("Gazebo"). What Said calls "wanting-to-speak" is a

condition of desperate desire, but it is a desire that is constrained by an inability to fashion a mode of discourse

that is capable of meeting the "Other." Instead, Carver's characters offer narratives often to the air, implicitly

suggesting that the meaning of events is inextricable from the events themselves. In other situations, narrative

becomes a screen to distance the speaker from other characters ("Fat"). Sometimes Carver characters use narrative

as a blunt instrument to wield against other characters ("Put Yourself in My Shoes"), but in almost every story ("A

Small, Good Thing" is possibly an exception), the fabrication of narrative entails the fracture of exclusion,

frequently severing a narrator from the narrative that has been created.

In Carver's work, the creation of narrative is inextricable from the experience of time, and this engages the

problematic relation between the construction of narrative and the perception of history. A generally accepted

function of narrative is that it assigns significance to what would otherwise be unconnected events. By allowing

significance, narrative tends to create a dialectic in the experience of time in which certain situations (motifs,

privileged utterances) are granted an explanatory or revelatory status. Although David Gates argues that within a

Carver story "there's always what Joyce called an 'epiphany,' a moment in which something is understood" (70),

such a reading is contentious for two reasons. Privileged details in a Carver story that seem to possess an epiphanic

status by allowing an entrance for interpretation are only gestures within parataxis; while a Carver story often

possesses what Alain Arias-Mission calls "luminous markers" (628), which appear to connect the fragments of a

given text, these moments are always provisional. Epiphanies are suggested but they are resisted, because part of

Carver's technique is to arrest the movement from ignorance to illumination through a reluctance to imbue a surface

event with any metaphysical identity or power. The urge to view various events or images as nodes that offer a

means of interpretation (to both characters and the reader) does, however, point to a crucial dilemma in Carver's

work: Carver's approach to narrative stresses the radical temporality of experience, insofar as his characters depend

upon what Chenetier has described as "the concentrated exploration of the potential meanings attached to a single

incident" (167). Frequently Carver is hesitant to imbue his stories with anything more than a vague residue of

anterior events, severing the connection between the past and the present. When a story (such as "Sacks") is

focused toward the past, the present is almost completely effaced, suggesting that the events are irrevocably

distanced, precluding continuity.

Unlike Alice Munro, whose stories often entail the juxtaposing of two distinct chronologies that are mediated

through narrative (each event dialectically affecting the other) to create a provisional sense of history,(8) Carver

creates stories that are often "a border between two nothings," in which previous events, if they are included at all,

offer little or no aid in interpreting the present.

Narrative discourse in Carver, then, is a discourse of exclusion. Perpetually threatening to erode the position of its

practitioners simultaneously with the necessity of their engaging in it, narrative involves separation rather than

recovery. But silence, too, has its opposite: voice. Occluded narratives depend upon those that are given shape

through their articulation in writing. What draws us as readers to Carver's work, what is so compelling in our

dialogue with the texts, is the manner in which they manifest a dialectical relationship between the unsaid and the

spoken. Margaret Atwood's description, in Murder in the Dark, of the relation between what is shown on a page

and what is intimated, hidden from view, can be turned into a commentary on Carver's short stories: "Beneath the

page is another story. Beneath the page is a story. Beneath the page is everything that has ever happened, most of

which you would rather not hear about....Nevertheless, you want to know, nothing will stop you" (45).

1 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 eulogy for Donald Barthelme lauds him as the "thinking

man's minimalist."

2 According to Joshua Gilder, "the motivating impulse behind minimalist literature" is a "'fear of life'" (80).

3 Despite 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), each

respective "minimalism" enacts an examination and criticism of the medium it employs.

4 Clarke 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).

5 Clarke'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 stories

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.

6 Walter J. Ong would perhaps disagree with my belief that Carver's deictics create a barrier between reader and

text. In "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," Ong describes how Hemingway's "use of the definite article"

creates a fictitious "reader" to whom the actual reader must adjust: "The reader--every reader--is being cast in the

role of a close companion of the writer" (13). Thus the phrase "in the late summer of that year" (from A Farewell

to Arms) implies a reader who does not need to be told the actual date; and the "real" reader "pretends" to share

that knowledge. I am uncomfortable with Ong's ideas regarding Hemingway's deictics for no reasons. While reading

entails interpreting a narrator's narratee, it does not follow that the actual reader necessarily identifies with the

narratee. Narratees are fictional constructs devised by fictive narrators; and as such, it is a problem for the actual

reader to assume the narratee's role. (Whether or not a text's narratee is "familiar" with a narrator's position varies

with each text; for instance, Camus's The Fall posits a narratee who oscillates in his understanding of Clamence.)

Secondly, the philosophical world-view underlying Ong's theorizing is perhaps too optimistic with regard to

Hemingway's writing; he writes: "to substitute for the indefinite article a demonstrative pronoun of proximity,

'this,' is one of the many indications of the tendency of present-day man to feel his lifeworld--which is now more

than ever the whole world--as in-close to him" (21). It is my view that Hemingway's decision to create narrators

who use deictics indicating "proximity" demonstrates a much more nihilistic attitude than Ong suggests. The world

may be "in-close," but such an experience often creates alienation. Hemingway and Carver create narrators who use

demonstrative pronouns to exacerbate this alienation by limiting the actual reader's ability to "enter" a story as an

equal of the narrator. In fact, the actual reader resembles a voyeur who is witness to an elliptical exchange between

two "people" he or she does not know. We sense meanings that we cannot corroborate. For me, much of

minimalism's power resides in its indeterminacy.

7 William H. Schurr sees Thoreau's "I" (as well as Whitman's) as the attempt to dismantle Kant's "distinction

between the knowable 'phenomenon' and the ding-an-sich, the unknowable 'noumenon'" (54).

8 For instance, see Munro's "Miles City, Montana" in The Progress of Love.

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I would like to thank Linda Hutcheon, Russell Brown and Mark Levene for their helpful advice regarding this

article.

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