Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications

Is Less More? A Reinvention of Realism

in Raymond Carver’s Minimalist
Short Story

DANIEL JUST

ABSTRACT: With their brevity, ascetic style, and lack of resolutions, Raymond
Carver’s minimalist short stories have often served as an example of an unstylized
and even clumsy attempt to depict the more prosaic aspects of everyday life, result-
ing in a literature of utter banality. Against the background of the unquestioned cul-
tural anticipations of Carver’s critics, the author examines the syntactic uniqueness of
Carver’s minimalism, his turn to linguistic flatness and destitution, and his strategy of
suspending the referentiality of language. The author shows that the aesthetic effect of
these techniques is a paradoxical coexistence of heightened realism and a blankness
of meaning.
Keywords: American short story, Raymond Carver, minimalism, postmodernism,
realism

I n his review of Raymond Carver’s collection of short stories What We Talk about
When We Talk about Love (1981), James Atlas gives one of the first assessments
of a recently emerged short-story form, one that soon became christened “mini-
malist.” Rather abruptly, Atlas opens his article by questioning the artistic value of
these minimalist stories’ austere aesthetic, wondering whether in Carver’s case, less
is more or rather simply less (96). The question “Is less more?” is certainly nothing
new in the arts. It was addressed already in the sixties with the advent of minimalist
art, and its roots go back even further to discussions regarding neoclassical techniques
in narrative literature. What was wrought by this debate about the role of the aesthetic
function of minimalist art, as well as the one surrounding the neoclassical revival
of the literary trope of litotes, was summed up in the statement “less is more.” With

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this soon-to-become famous motto, the critics tried to suggest that through a strategy
of systematically reducing one’s expressive means, this could serve as a method to
amplify the intended artistic effects. With the minimalist short story, however, this
reduction, critics believe, simply went too far. The title of Atlas’s review is self-
explanatory in this respect—in the case of the minimalist story, less is simply less,
meaning that it is not enough.
The first minimalist stories in the late seventies already seemed to be somewhat
out of place. In the same way as the novel, many short stories at this time were borne
along by a spirit of experimentation with linguistic constructions of reality. It was
perhaps most notably William Gass’s formal fragmentation of the story, together with
his technique of pastiche and metacommentary, but also the essayistic style of Donald
Barthelme, humor of John Barth, and linguistic experiments of Walter Abish that
motivated various parodies of fictionality throughout the seventies. As the works of
John Cheever, John Updike, and many others show, the late seventies was also a time
of realism. However, even realism was not untouched by the spirit of stylistic experi-
mentation. The emergence of paradoxical labels such as ironic realism and experimen-
tal realism makes it clear that writers who wanted to depict reality were also looking
for new forms of realism that would capture the essence of the changing world. In
comparison to the clash of interests indicated by the pursuit of experimental realism
and flourishing of postmodern technique, the minimalist short story was immediately
seen as an apparently nonexperimental form of realist discourse. Not fitting into any
of the categories that were supposed to describe the realistic efforts of that period (for
example, ironic realism, fantastic realism, and modern surrealism), minimalists such
as Carver, Ann Beattie, and Frederick Barthelme seemed to perplex critics as to what
exactly their stories were supposed to be as a work of art. For Atlas, William Stull,
Anatole Broyard, and many other American critics in the early eighties, the minimalist
short story represented an example of an unstylized and even clumsy attempt to depict
the more prosaic aspects of everyday life, resulting in a literature of utter banality.
With their brevity, plain style and lack of resolutions, stories collected in
Carver’s book What We Talk about When We Talk about Love became an epitome
of the minimalist approach to the short story. Even just a brief look at these stories
is enough to identify what was so disturbing about them for their early critics.
Using almost exclusively very short descriptive sentences, Carver arranges these
into unusually short paragraphs. Moreover, because these sentences depict only
mundane trivia, their meaning and purpose, as the opening paragraph of Carver’s
well-known story “So Much Water So Close to Home” demonstrates, remain
unclear: “My husband eats with a good appetite. But I don’t think he’s really
hungry. He chews, arms on the table, and stares at something across the room. He
looks at me and looks away. He wipes his mouth on the napkin. He shrugs, and
goes on eating” (79). This story, in which Carver returns to his favorite theme of a
dysfunctional marriage of a working-class couple, describes a fishing trip during
which the husband and his friends find the body of a murdered girl. For Carver, this
rather suspenseful theme, however, continues to be narrated with the same laconic

304 CRITIQUE
narrative voice that we encountered in the first paragraph. Not only is the discovery
of the dead body reported in the same manner as the description of previous activi-
ties but even the characters seem to be undisturbed by their macabre discovery and
continue with their routine:
They parked the car in the mountains and hiked to where they wanted to fish.
They carried their bedrolls, their food, their playing cards, their whiskey.
They saw the girl before they set up the camp. Mel Dorn found her. No clothes
on her at all. She was wedged into some branches that stuck out over the water.
[. . .]
The next morning they cooked breakfast, drank coffee, and drank whiskey,
and then split up to fish. That night they cooked fish, cooked potatoes, drank
coffee, drank whiskey, then took their cooking things and eating things back
down to the river and washed them where the girl was. (81)

As the story proceeds, the banality of its tone does not change. Even the scarce
dialogues between the husband and the wife after his return from the trip do not stir
the monotony of narration. As the story comes to an end, the wife’s presence at the
funeral of the murdered girl is described with the same terseness as the opening scene:
“We move a few steps down the hot sidewalk. People are starting cars. I put out my
hand and hold on to a parking meter. Polished hoods and polished fenders. My head
swims” (87). Indeed, such a sparse account could very well fit the state of a mourner’s
mind during a funeral, but because this story offers only this type of description, two
potentially different situations here become qualitatively indistinguishable. Without
transitions between sentences and with its relentless rhythm of thematic repetitions,
this story gives an impression of perceptions formed from a distance. At the same
time, however, the whole escapes, and only decontextualized details remain apparent.
With no epiphanies or consummations, the ascetic style of stories like this one made
many critics wonder what message such a type of short story seeks to convey.
When looking for the most exemplary minimalist stories, critics usually agree
that these come from Carver’s middle period, represented by stories such as “So
Much Water So Close to Home.” Atlas’s article “Less Is Less,” for instance,
opposes Carver’s style of his stories from his middle period (approximately 1977
to 1983), stories centered on the depiction of narrow lives starved of context and
inhabiting a bland featureless landscape, to the style of his earlier, more fully
developed stories. Atlas wonders why the minimalist style, with no explanations
of events, no revelations or epiphanies, replaces the “more robust, more ‘literary’”
style of Carver’s first collection (98). Atlas asks why “would a writer circumscribe
his talent?” and offers a rhetorical question as an answer—“is it a fear at failing
at something larger?” (98). As Atlas does not hide the fact that for him, literature
has to support our “conviction that we create our own destinies” (97), the position
from which he evaluates minimalism becomes quite clear: Literature has to express
a clear message. For Atlas, a larger and more robust narrative is also a more liter-
ary one; the problem with Carver’s stories in What We Talk about When We Talk

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about Love is thus Carver’s refusal of the very task of literature, namely, to offer a
redemptive assurance that we are masters of our destinies.

***

In spite of the more positive reviews in the late eighties of stories by Carver, Fred-
erick and Donald Barthelme, Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Richard Ford, who
in one way or another became associated with minimalism, the term minimalism
acquired relatively pejorative connotations such that practically none of these writ-
ers wanted to be associated with it. Even though later critics did not always share
the denunciatory attitude of the early reviewers, they frequently returned to earlier
arguments against minimalism’s lack of plot and deceptively plain style. Compara-
tive scholarly studies of different versions of Carver’s rewritten stories, for example,
almost unequivocally show a preference for the longer variants of these stories, which
were praised for their ability to “avoid ambiguity” (Broyard, “Books”). The longer
versions of, for instance, “So Much Water So Close to Home,” “Distance,” “Where
Is Everyone?,” and “A Small, Good Thing,” were seen as being more successful in
responding to many readers’ uneasiness with the sparseness of detail and thus able to
restore a “coherent whole” of the story (Stull 7), allowing for a “fuller understanding”
of the plot and thus providing a “fuller sense of humanity” (Meyer 244).
As the rhetoric of these accounts reveals, readers and critics often approach these
stories with specific expectations. Although the short story as a genre usually portrays
only a select aspect of a life experience, its format does not free it from an obliga-
tion to convey a clear message that would render human experience intelligible in a
larger context. To avoid simply presenting a meaningless “slice of life,” the story is
expected to either frame its content by means of more elaborate stylistic strategies,
such as understatements, litotes, and epiphanies, or to present content that is in some
way meaningful on its own. In short, to paraphrase Leo Bersani’s proposition about
the role of artistic creation in the West, literature is expected to have a redemptive
dimension beyond the everyday—there must be something “more” in the work of art
than just its impoverished material. Because such a dimension is precisely what the
critics find missing in the American minimalist short story, it is rather striking that they
never really address the question of the reasons for, as well as the implications of, the
formal sparseness and pedestrian content of these stories. If, for instance, the reader
feels uneasy about the ambiguous closure of many of these narratives, what does this
reveal about the reader’s expectations? If the subject of these stories is perceived as
uncomfortably vapid and lacking in depth, can this very discomfort act as a mirror
whereby the role of the reader is placed in sharp relief? And last but not least, what
can the ungratified wish fulfillments produced by these texts tell us about the aesthetic
codes valorized by our culture?
As is the case with the majority of literary terms, also the notion of minimalism
emerges as a product of critical discourse. With minimalism, however, this notion
appears as an outcome of the negative reviews it received, that is, a negative pro-

306 CRITIQUE
jection of the cultural anticipations connected to the genre of the short story and
narrative literature in general. Adam Meyer’s study offers perhaps the best example
of these anticipations, not so much because it synthesizes some of the previous
analyses, but because instead of simply stating a subjective preference as Atlas does,
it tries to perform a strictly textual analysis.1 Adopting Herzinger’s definition of
minimalism as a category of “deadpan narratives about ordinary subjects,” Meyer’s
main point is that the “slightness of story”—together with the absence of a clear
ending that would offer some kind of revelation of previous events—creates a sense
of ambiguity about its meaning. Whereas in Carver’s most minimalist narratives the
reader “leaves the story with a feeling of uneasiness and fear” (Meyer 241)2 because
he “does not allow us to get inside of the characters,” in longer stories, by contrast,
he “turns the sum of its fragmentary parts into a coherent whole” and thus “moves
away from the threatening ambiguity” (242–43).
In his article, Meyer repeatedly emphasizes that the paucity of information Carver
gives us often leads to hermeneutic deadlock. Even though endings usually alleviate
this difficulty, Carver’s minimalist stories, as Meyer points out, lack “any kind of
summation, let alone consummation” (248). If the story is minimalist, Meyer would
want at least the ending to be either conclusively explicit or explanatory. Wherever
Carver manages to depart from his strict minimalism, the reader is rewarded with
a “completeness and richness” that offers “a fuller understanding of the story” and
thus “a fuller sense of humanity” (244, 249). Even though Meyer tries to avoid
the denunciatory attitude taken by most of the early reviews, even his attempt at a
structural comparison of Carver’s minimalist and more traditional stories ultimately
reinforces a generally negative view of the shorter pieces. This type of criticism is
nonetheless quite important because, in spite of its effort to offer a nonjudgmental
analysis, it unwittingly reveals deeply rooted cultural expectations about narratives.
For minimalism, then, such criticism paradoxically strengthens its role in unmasking
these expectations.
The cultural consensus that a work of art should be “full” and far-reaching in the
richness of meaning it condenses is implied also in John Aldridge’s reexamination of
minimalism more than a decade after its first emergence. Whereas the central part of
Meyer’s critique of Carver’s stories was the absence of revelatory endings, the crux of
Aldridge’s argument resides in the notion of the understatement. Coming to the same
conclusions as Meyer, Aldridge argues that if the narrative chooses to be minimalist,
it must use such linguistic devices that clearly indicate a richness of meaning under
relatively simple forms and impoverished contents. For Aldridge, such proper form
of minimalism can be found in, for example, Hemingway. Praising Hemingway’s
use of understatements, Aldridge inverts the famous “tip-of-the-iceberg” metaphor to
argue that just this kind of dignity is what is lacking in Carver’s work, “for the por-
tion showing above the surface [in Carver’s stories] appears to be the entire iceberg”
(51). Whereas Hemingway’s minimalist method is seen as a statement of the little
he “deliberately chose to say out of all he might have said,” Carver’s minimalism is
merely a “confession that this is all he had to say” (52). If one does not want to end

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up with Carver’s “thinness of conception” and “opaqueness of execution” (56), one
must try to recuperate meaning through the use of understatements. Only by creating
a sense that there is a mass of meaning hidden underneath the surface can a writer
justify low dramatic voltage and emptiness of depiction.
For Aldridge, the absence of litotes in Carver’s stories is not merely an unfortunate
choice of stylistic premises. The destitute material of these stories and the flatness of
their meaning are rather the result of “a certain poverty of imagination” (56). Even
though other minimalists are said to share this lack of vision, Carver is clearly the
most ill equipped in this respect. In a similar way as Meyer argued that Carver gets
better whenever he manages to depart from his strict minimalism, Aldridge shows a
preference for those minimalists who, like Bobbie Ann Mason, “move away from arid
minimalism” (84). Those who direct attention away from the emotional emptiness
of their characters and “create the illusion of psychological depth and complexity”
manage to overcome the meaninglessness disseminated by Carver’s toneless narrative
voice (58, 65). Next to Mason’s “refreshing” fullness of depiction, Aldridge refers to
Beattie and Donald Barthelme’s ability to break through the minimalist air of bleak-
ness by including satirical passages (69, 75, 84). Satire, together with understatements
and more detailed descriptions, are thus among the devices Aldridge presents as a way
to alleviate the minimalist trivia.
Despite the fact that Aldridge does not add anything new to the previous accounts
of minimalism, his study, again, shows what is expected from narrative literature and
why minimalism fails to meet these expectations. Like Atlas, Aldridge also wonders
why anyone would want to write or read minimalist narratives. Why would readers
want to read stories in which “nothing of significance happens,” and why would writ-
ers write “in this way” when they have “nothing of interest” to say about people who
themselves show “no sign of being of interest?” (66, 77). For Aldridge, creating depth,
or at least an illusion of it, and presenting meaning—either directly through detailed
descriptions or indirectly through irony, satire, and understatements—is what makes
art meaningful. The power of imagination, as well as the creation of semantic and axi-
ological complexity, is, according to Aldridge, the task of the writer. It is precisely this
task that minimalism fails to fulfill. More than a decade after Atlas concluded that in
minimalism, “less is less,” the title of Aldridge’s article makes it clear that things have
not changed. To the contrary, now “less is a lot less.”

***

Leaving aside the question of aesthetic preferences of the wider public, per-
haps the most important reason for the uneasiness caused by the minimalist short
story in academic circles is the difficulty of categorizing it as a genre and iden-
tifying its techniques according to the established pattern of the major literary
paradigms. Although an allusion to realism often serves as a way of explaining
the literary language of the minimalist story, its radically austere prose results in
an extreme form of ellipsis that, critics argue, cannot carry the full weight of a

308 CRITIQUE
realistic rendering of experience (Gorra 155). Such noncompliance with conven-
tional literary determinations is, of course, not the only reason for the ambivalent
reception of minimalism. Because the noncommittal tone of these stories under-
mines the easy identification of the story’s relation to its object of description,
the reader often feels disoriented about the purpose of such a story. Morally
motivated or not, many critics are therefore disturbed by the detached tone that
makes it impossible to determine how a given text relates to the tedium of its
reported actions—does minimalist story criticize or endorse what it describes (be
it consumerism, alcoholism, and so forth)?
It is true that difficulty with clearly categorizing the text’s techniques, determining
its genre and its relation to its subject matter is nothing new and has been a part of
literary studies at least from the advent of the first modernist experiments. However,
this problem acquires quite a different dimension in the minimalist short story. As
it is in the very nature of this story—precisely in its “minimalism”—to suspend the
possibility of a clear determination of the text’s relation to what it talks about, and
as minimalist language is anything but abstract, the question arises whether the very
notion of verisimilitude applies in any way to this type of short story. It is precisely
the question of verisimilitude that causes not only so much discomfort with the
reception of the minimalist story but also a misinterpretation of its aesthetics.
As Gérard Genette has convincingly showed, far from being a transhistorical cat-
egory, as the critics of the minimalist story often believe, verisimilitude rather desig-
nates such a literary technique that is, at each given period, culturally authenticated and
appropriated. The result of this authentication consists primarily in the reader’s easy
recognition of the texts that employ these techniques (Genette 5–21). Contrary to this
permissiveness, the feeling of uneasiness discloses not only the fact that unquestioned
and seemingly natural categories are culturally constructed but also shows that these
cultural valorizations are always based on a principle of exclusion. In other words,
according to Genette, categories such as abstract, realistic, or postmodernist represent
a specific distribution of potential descriptions that exclude—and therefore render
unintelligible—other descriptions of reality. Because the minimalist story does not use
abstract language but, at the same time, is not conventionally realistic, its language and
style therefore necessarily generate perplexing reactions among its readers.
If the kind of realism invented by the minimalist story was not one based on cul-
tural codes that make narrative techniques intelligible as realistic depictions of reality,
what was, then, the historical impulse for such an odd narrative technique? As Mason,
a writer often associated with minimalism, explains, the trend toward bare realism
among minimalists served as “a breaking away from all that [phantasmagoric things
depicted by Barth and Pynchon]” (24). For Mason, realism, at that particular historical
moment in the development of American literature, acted as a reaction against post-
modern methods of parody and pastiche. Interestingly enough, not too many critics
took Mason’s proclaimed break with postmodernism too seriously. Kim Herzinger,
for instance, explicitly describes the “depthlessness” and “plotlessness” of the mini-
malist short story as postmodern (Introduction; “Minimalism”). A similar difficulty

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in categorizing minimalism seems to haunt Barth in his essay “A Few Words about
Minimalism” (1986), perhaps the first systematic attempt to classify the minimalist
short story.
To prepare for a more thorough description of this new narrative form, Barth
opens his article by differentiating between minimalism of style and minimalism of
material. Minimalist style, in his account, includes “a stripped-down vocabulary, a
stripped-down rhetoric, and non-emotive tone,” whereas minimalism of material con-
sists of “minimal characters, minimal exposition, minimal mise-en-scènes, minimal
action and minimal plot” (“Few Words” 68). These two minimalisms, Barth notes,
do not necessarily appear together. There are short pieces with thematic fullness, as
well as long-winded minimalisms. Interestingly enough, the example given by Barth
of short minimalism with a thematic fullness is Jorge Luis Borges, while Samuel
Beckett’s trilogy serves as an example of the long-winded type of minimalism. After
announcing analysis of the American minimalist short story as the primary topic of
his article, Barth thus surprisingly does not demonstrate his argument on American
writers. When he later returns from Borges and Beckett to the American short story,
he neither brings together the various forms of minimalism under consideration nor
does he discuss the distinctiveness of American authors. Instead, he enumerates
minimalist writers and lists textual characteristics, such that minimalism is presented
as the result of a social situation (no time to write), educational situation (American
creative writing workshops), or a reaction to political and cultural situations (Viet-
nam, consumerism, pop culture, and the decline of writing skills).
Notwithstanding whether Barth’s description of the conditions under which mini-
malist stories emerged is historically correct, he never examines the actual literary
techniques that make certain works minimalist and thus fails to analyze both the aes-
thetic and the historical relevance of minimalism. Although one could perhaps talk
about Beckett’s trilogy in terms of certain minimalist aesthetics, such minimalism
would be, both formally and structurally, quite different from the one represented by
the American minimalist short story. This conflation of various types of writing under
the indiscriminate label of minimalism precipitates ambiguous conclusions that are
plentiful in this early attempt at critical exposition of minimalism.
Because those Barth associates with the minimalist short story include writers as
diverse as Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Mary Robinson, and Tobias Wolff,
minimalism in Barth’s account becomes a rather loosely defined term. Donald
Barthelme, for instance, is seen as minimalist because of the fragmentary nature of
his writing—as if the minimalist story were clearly a manifestation of the form of
fragment, as Barth assumes as a matter of fact. Even more importantly, it is rather
questionable to link minimalism with Barthelme’s style of writing, because stylisti-
cally, his stories are parodies of realistic narratives, or even ironic compounds of
stories and essays, a style quite incongruous with Carver, for instance. As becomes
clear in another text in which Barth calls Barthelme a minimalist and, at the same
time, an “urban semi-surrealist” (“Thinking Man’s” 1; emphasis in original),
Barth continues to make the category of minimalism overinclusive and thus rather

310 CRITIQUE
vague. For a garrulous narrator of Barth’s stripe, a vast variety of literary forms and
techniques can be seen as minimalist, to the point where it ceases to be clear how
minimalism differs from other approaches, most notably postmodernism.
To establish conceptual precision, the term minimalism should remain reserved
for those early eighties stories of, for example, Carver, Beattie, Ford, and Mason
that retain austere prose, do not provide detailed descriptions or attempt to depict
psychological depth, and do not turn to either understatements or satire to recover
meaning. In short, minimalist is precisely the type of story that critics such as Atlas,
Aldridge, and Meyer perceive as the early, “arid minimalism” and to which they try
to oppose a qualitatively better, “fuller minimalism” of the later period.
If minimalism should be extricated from some of the seemingly similar techniques
used by writers in the early eighties, it should be also differentiated from its predeces-
sors in the genre of the short story. Tracing back the roots of minimalism, it would
be difficult not to see a structural similarity between the most prominent minimalist,
Carver, and the notoriously impersonal and “innerless” language of Ernest Heming-
way’s short stories. Indeed, Hemingway’s linguistic asceticism and banality of tone
resemble those of Carver in many respects and that even in spite of Aldridge’s belief
in the lack of dignity that Carver’s stories display next to the profound Hemingway.
It is nevertheless important to point to a paradoxical effect of Hemingway’s flat style
that differs greatly from Carver’s—instead of slowing down narration, Hemingway’s
style accelerates it, thus inciting a speedier consumption of the text.
As Harry Levin observes, Hemingway manages to create a sense of overwhelm-
ing action in spite of his thin diction and dull adjectives. By placing the emphasis on
nouns, “continuous forms of the verb, and all kinds of participial constructions” (Levin
110), Hemingway extends his sentences beyond their grammatical capacity. Instead of
being periodic and thus suspending their burden, his sentences gradually break down
and start anew. Following a peculiar logic under which the first part of the sentence,
as grammatically started, implies a correct grammatical form for the second part of the
sentence, Hemingway makes the second parts of his sentences defy the grammatical
rules set up by their beginnings. In this unusual form of anacoluthon, the failure to
finish the sentence as it was planned precipitates an effort to save its meaning in a scat-
tered movement of “bringing the subject as quickly as possible to its object.” As Levin
concludes, this movement “opens up at once into a familiar Hemingway catalogue,
where effects can be gained seriatim by order rather than by construction” (99).
The following passage from “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” can serve as an example
of what Levin has in mind:

But when he no longer was in love, when he was only lying, as to this woman,
now, who had the most money of all, who had all the money there was, who had
had a husband and children, who had taken lovers and been dissatisfied with
them, and who loved him dearly as a writer, as a man, as a companion and as
a proud obsession; it was strange that when he did not love her at all and was
lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money than when he had
really loved her. (Hemingway 45)

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As the following section from the same story demonstrates, a similar effect of
a fast tempo is apparent also in passages that use shorter descriptive sentences
whose journalistic quality made Hemingway famous:
Now she came in sight, walking across the open toward the camp. She was
wearing jodhpurs and carrying her rifle. The two boys had a Tommie slung
and they were coming behind her. She was still a good-looking woman, he
thought, and she had a pleasant body. She had a great talent and appreciation
for the bed, she was not pretty, but he liked her face, she read enormously,
liked to ride and shoot and, certainly, she drank too much. (45)

Despite Hemingway’s nonornamental style, weak syntax, and use of nonenergetic

verbs, many things happen in his stories. The nature of these events and the way they
are stylistically rendered create a strongly proceeding movement that is not found in
most minimalist stories, least of all in those written by Carver in the early eighties.
In the staccato rhythm of both Hemingway’s short sentences and the second parts
of his longer sentences, the reader is forced quickly to proceed to another sentence
to complete the search for meaning. In spite of Hemingway’s puritanical language
that sometimes comes to mind when reading Carver, Hemingway’s terse style does
anything but slow down the narrative flow. Carver’s style, on the other hand, creates
an effect of inhibiting, and at times even suspending, the pursuit of meaning.

***

How, then, can literary criticism begin to understand the minimalist short story
both in its stylistic uniqueness and within the context of the genres of narrative
literature and their historical development? Such a reevaluation should start with a
closer look at the nature of minimalist realism, because it is quite striking that at the
time when novelists and many short-story writers found it historically necessary to
abandon realism, for minimalists and Carver in particular the compromised refer-
entiality of language rather initiated an effort to reinvent realism. Instead of parody
and pastiche, the method became precision. Although Carver rarely clarifies the
motivations behind his techniques, he reveals the ideal sentence he is looking for
in his writings by remarking that one can find “words that can sound so precise
that they even sound flat, but they can still carry, if used right, all the notes” (Fires
18). Neither relying on the referentiality of words as naive realists used to do nor
turning to a postmodern parody of language, Carver, in contrast, turns to its flatness
and destitution. Anecdotally, one could say that his use of exhausted language and
slow rhythm of narrating tries to make, to twist a riddle of J. L. Austin’s linguistics,
words do things. The referentiality of his style arises precisely from the heaviness
and exhaustion of his language—blank and transparent. In other words, Carver
attempts to bring the referentiality of language to the point of its breakdown, but
rather than completing it, he suspends it for inspection. The effect of this height-
ened realism thus becomes paradoxically indistinguishable from a blankness of
meaning that, as he hopes, can still carry all the notes.

312 CRITIQUE
 Most of the stories in Carver’s collection What We Talk about When We Talk about
Love, which offers a perhaps purest form of such heightened realism, are indeed quite
undramatic. This is so primarily because the characters in these stories are almost
never presented as subjects of actions. Instead of reporting action, the dominant mise-
en-scènes of these narratives are reduced to uneventful moments. Carver’s characters
are simply not doing anything—they are sitting, often looking out of the window,
smoking, slowly drinking, rubbing their faces or fingers, or listening to rainfall or
the clock. It is important to point out that these actionless moments do not serve as
a mere preparation for some more substantial kind of action. They are themselves
elevated to objects worthy of prolonged attention and become the only content of the
stories. Coupled with slow delivery, such an impoverished content makes no pretense
toward creating any sense of development or action.
In the early story “Furious Seasons” (1977), for instance, washing, shaving and
drinking coffee become the subject matter of the brief narrative in which they are
treated with ceremonious care. A pivotal scene concentrating on a coffee cup with
brown drops running down its side offers a powerful image that condenses the effect
of timelessness this story generates. Sitting in a kitchen in the gloomy dimness of the
early morning, the protagonist of this story stares at this coffee cup, listening to the
rain outside, the clock inside, and thinking about the dampness of the green ground
under the trees after the rain: “He smoked and drank the coffee and listened to the
clock on the stove squeaking. The coffee slopped over the cup and the brown drops
ran slowly down the side onto the table. He rubbed his fingers through the wet circle
across the rough table top” (29). Motifs of weather and changing seasons, frequent
in Carver’s stories, are also here promptly juxtaposed with banal details with no
obvious relevance to the supposed development of the story. As “Furious Seasons”
approaches its end, this oscillation between details and an abstract absoluteness of
time makes the protagonist remain in essentially the identical situation as at the
beginning. Standing motionless in front of the house with the rain falling on him, the
character does not describe his emotions in this scene nor earlier in the opening one.
And, as the story closes with no sentiments or explanations supplied, the meaning or
“message” of the story remain unclear.
Despite the fact that the sense of motionlessness Carver creates in his stories
necessarily turns the reader’s attention to the character’s consciousness, Carver
never psychologizes his characters. In his stories, characters never contemplate
themselves and only rarely offer a density of consciousness into which they
could plunge. At the same time, however, they are never absentminded. Despite
their lack of action and scarcity of long dialogues, Carver’s characters are always
present in the moment. In depicting the majority of actions as objectless and
self-sufficient, his most minimalist stories thus create a distinct image of the
present in which smoking, sitting, or listening become somewhat disembodied
dispositions severed from subjective agencies. These acts never merely report
characters’ actions but rather mark prolonged moments in the bareness of their
brute existence.

SPRING 2008, VOL. 49, NO. 3 313

 But it would be reductive to perceive Carver’s minimalist stories only in the
light of their thematic concern with the singularity of the moment. Perhaps the
more innovative techniques in Carver’s stories than his character aspects are the
formal devices that carry his themes, such as the aforementioned use of very
short sentences without transitions. At times, the effect of these brusque sen-
tences is further accentuated by a pictorial arrangement of the text on the page.
For example, in “Everything Stuck to Him” (1981), sentences occur on single
lines, standing separated from the surrounding text:
He gets up from his chair and refills their glasses.
That’s it, he says. End of story. I admit it’s not much of one.
I was interested, she says. It was interesting.
He shrugs and carries his drink over to the window. It’s dark now but still
snowing.
Things change, he says. I don’t know how but they do.
Yes, that’s true. (134)

These syntactic strategies, especially when combined with a depersonalized nar-

rative voice and inactive characters, result in a story of stuttering slowness that,
in turn, produces an overall impediment to the act of reading.
Even though the numbing effects of the pictorial organization of the text in
“Everything Stuck to Him” partially have to do with the fact that the passage is
largely a dialogue, the daunting heaviness does not disappear in more descriptive
parts of Carver’s stories. In the story “The Bath” (1981), a story that became the
primary target for critics of minimalism, serving them as an example of how an early
minimalist story can be later rewritten and achieve a much fuller form of expression,
short paragraphs with brief sentences compose most of the text. “The Bath,” which
was substantially enlarged and published two years later as “A Small, Good Thing”
(1983), narrates the story of the parents of a child hit by a car just before his birthday.
The stylistic terseness is perhaps nowhere so difficult to accept as in places where
critics would expect more sympathy. Instead of trying to awaken compassion, Carver
maintains the same abrupt style as one can find in, for instance, “So Much Water So
Close to Home”:
Of course, the birthday party never happened. The birthday boy was in the
hospital instead. The mother sat by the bed. She was waiting for the boy to
wake up. The father hurried over from his office. He sat next to the mother. So
now the both of them waited for the boy to wake up. They waited for hours,
and then the father went home to take a bath. (49)

Besides the hindrance of the act of reading, an important effect of the austere sim-
plicity of stories such as “The Bath” is its ability to unbalance the distance between the
narrator and the narrated. On the one hand, the slowness of delivery together with the
relentless realism of representation utilized in these stories make that which is narrated

314 CRITIQUE
indistinguishable from its narration. This produces a sense of distance for the reader
from that which is narrated in the story. On the other hand, however, because words
lose their density and become transparently nonexpressive, that which is narrated
resists objectification from a distance. The act of narration in a story like “The Bath”
thus becomes a product of a fundamental disjunction: Narration remains focused on
the precision of language, whereas that which is narrated seems to evaporate. As “The
Bath” reaches its end, the same detached tone prevails and even though the language
retains a high level of exactitude for rendering realistic detail, the narrated story fails
to objectify its details into a completed whole: “She got out of the car and went to the
door. She turned on lights and put on water for tea. She opened a can and fed the dog.
She sat down on the sofa with her tea” (56).
As stories such as “The Bath,” “Furious Seasons,” and “So Much Water So Close
to Home” demonstrate, the syntactic uniqueness of the minimalist story lies in the
juxtaposition of incongruent effects of verisimilitude, on one hand, and a collapse
of referentiality on the other. This unification of austere realism with a meticulous
concern for form is rather puzzling for most critics in that they cannot come to terms
with a strategy that combines such contradictory methods. Critics such as Aldridge
and Meyer, then, find refuge in either celebrating the less minimalist works for their
poetic qualities or reproaching the more austere stories for their deadpan aloofness.
This, however, disregards the fact that the minimalist short story is neither a self-
involved experiment with style nor a narrative simply mirroring reality. Indeed, the
problem critics such as Gordon Weaver experience with minimalism is precisely the
impossibility of deciding if it is poetic or lifeless, realistic or self-indulgently stylistic,
focused only on details or suppressing all details altogether.

***

Because minimalism presents a challenge not only to the established notion of

the short story but also to other literary categories such as realism, postmodernism,
and verisimilitude, it is no wonder that the call for a “more humane” and “fuller
minimalism” pertains not only to the reviews of minimalist short stories from the
early eighties but also to subsequent attempts to elevate the supposedly poor mini-
malist aesthetic. Whereas Meyer prefers those of Carver’s stories that are “fuller”
and thus “more humane,” Arthur Saltzman’s study of writers who appeared later in
the eighties cannot hide a similar preference for those who “expanded” minimal-
ism. Again, Saltzman’s rhetoric reveals his uneasiness with the strictly minimalist
techniques, especially when he speculates about the possibilities of transforming
the dead-end aesthetic of minimalism into something “more complete,” and thus
more capable of supporting lyrical sentiments and a fullness of life. Even though
he finds something in minimalism that implies richness, it is nevertheless some-
thing that cannot be sufficiently developed by using the minimalist approaches of
the early eighties. If minimalism has something from the “philosophy of the rich-
ness of a glimpse,” as Saltzman admits, it “boils down the world so that it loses

SPRING 2008, VOL. 49, NO. 3 315

the broth” at the same time (423). Ironically, as in Meyer’s study, minimalism for
Saltzman also lacks complexity and fullness, and therefore has to be expanded, that
is, made less minimalist.
Faithful to the culturally valorized function of art, virtually all assessments of
minimalism expect the narrative to provide a redemptive dimension or, at least,
an aesthetically satisfying and alleviating experience. Formally, critics want to
keep what they perceive as minimalism’s semantics of the richness hidden in
simplicity (the dimension of the “more”—hidden meanings, intensified aesthetic
experience, or potential to illuminate events from daily life), but want the nar-
rative to employ different, aesthetically more acceptable narrative forms. This
demand reveals not only unquestioned expectations about the structure of nar-
ratives but also a fundamental misinterpretation of the minimalist aesthetic. As
literary criticism shows, minimalism’s attempt to exhaust language’s signifying
capacity is found particularly unacceptable if combined with a relentlessly realist
mode of depiction and a lack of symbolic closure. Trying to present alternatives
to minimalism, Saltzman thus admits that both the way Barthelme presents the
quotidian as a supernatural version of American society and the way Nicholson
Baker’s focus on detail transforms and exoticizes the everyday are aesthetically
and culturally more acceptable modes of literary practice than the austerity pre-
sented by traditional minimalists. If Carver’s technique was, as he described it,
“cutting everything down to the marrow” (Plimpton 317), then his strong belief
in “economy in fiction” (Gentry 10) proved a bit too parsimonious for most of
his American critics.3
The denunciatory reviews of the minimalist short story are historically and
culturally important phenomena. It is precisely because of these reviews that the
main aesthetic contribution of minimalism today seems to be its ability to reveal
deeply rooted cultural expectations about narrative literature and art in general. If
one returns to Atlas’s initial question about less being more, one must conclude
that in the case of the minimalist short story, the question “Is less more, or is it
simply less?” is perhaps false and results from a misunderstanding of minimalist
aesthetics. Methodologically, the uniqueness of the minimalist story lies in the
series of disjunctive approaches it embraces: a realistic mode of narrative depic-
tion and an emphasis on the materiality of language; a quasi-mimetic rendering
of events and a radical suspension of meaning; a familiarity with everyday events
and a fundamental estrangement from the quotidian. In the case of the minimalist
story, “less” is therefore neither “more” nor “less.” Instead, this “lessness” simply
represents a syntactic manifestation of the semantic vision this type of short story
tries to convey.

UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX
ESSEX, UNITED KINGDOM

316 CRITIQUE
 NOTES
1. Studies more openly critical of Carver’s minimalist period include Mars-Jones; Stone; Broyard,
“Diffuse”; Howe; and Stull.
2. For these conclusions, see also Chenetier, esp. 176 and 179.
3. It is important to point out that the British critics were more receptive and less judgmental in their
reviews of minimalism. Unlike the American commentators who criticized the form of minimalist stories
as sparse and depthless—thus decreeing the content to be banal—the British critics found the style and
language of these stories to be a legitimate correlative of their content. See Buford.

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