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The narrowed voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver
Studies in Short Fiction; Newberry; Winter 1994; Trussler, Michael

Full Text:
Copyright Newberry College Winter 1994


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
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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
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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,
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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
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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"
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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.

ii

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
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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("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
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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
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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
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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.

WORKS CITED

Arias-Misson, Alain. "Absent Talkers." Partisan Review 49 (1982): 625-
28.

Atwood, Margaret. Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems.
Toronto: Coach House, 1983.

Barth, John. "A Few Words About Minimalism." New York Times Book
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Review 28 Dec. 1986 2+

--. "Thinking Man's Minimalist: Honoring Barthelme." New York Times
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Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter's Night A Traveller. 1979. Trans.
William Weaver. Toronto: Lester and Orpen
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Carver, Raymond. "A Serious Talk." Audiotape. American Audio Prose
Library, 1983.

--. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Eds. Marshall Bruce Gentry and
William L. Stull. Jackson: UP of
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--. "Why Don't You Dance?" What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
New York: Vintage, 1982. 3-10.

Chenetier, Marc. "Living On/Off the 'Reserve.'" Critical Angles:
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Clarke, Graham. "Investing the Glimpse: Raymond Carver and the Syntax
of Silence." The New American Writing:
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Conrad, Joseph. "Heart of Darkness." Youth and Two Other Stories. New
York: Doubleday, 1926. 45-162.

Gates, David. "Carver: To Make a Long Story Short." [Rev. of Where I'm
Calling From.] Newsweek 6 Tune 1988:
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Gilder, Joshua. "Less is Less." New Criterion 6 (Feb. 1983): 78-82.

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Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner's, 1964.

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Levin, Kim. "The State of the Art." Beyond Modernism: Essays on Art
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Criticism. Ed. Josue Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 239-59.

May, Charles E. "Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction." Short Story
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Riggins, Stephen. "Michel Foucault: The Minimalist Self." Michel
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Rockwell, John. "The Death and Life of Minimalism." New York Times 21
Dec. 1986: sec. 5: 1+.

Said, Edward W. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge:
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Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1963.

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