A FEW WORDS ABOUT MINIMALISM

Date: December 28, 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column
1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By John Barth; John Barth's maximalist novel about a minimalist writer, ''The
Tidewater Tales'' will be published next spring.
Lead:

''LESS is more,'' said Walter Gropius, or Alberto Giacometti, or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,

or Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, or Constantin Brancusi, or Le Corbusier or Ludwig Mies van
der Rohe; the remark (first made in fact by Robert Browning) has been severally
attributed to all of those more or less celebrated more or less minimalists. Like the
bauhaus motto, ''Form follows function,'' it is itself a memorable specimen of the
minimalist esthetic, of which a cardinal principle is that artistic effect may be enhanced
by a radical economy of artistic means, even where such parsimony compromises other
values: completeness, for example, or richness or precision of statement.

The power of that esthetic principle is easy to demonstrate: contrast my eminently

forgettable formulation of it above - ''artistic effect may be enhanced,'' etc. - with the
unforgettable assertion ''Less is more.'' Or consider the following proposition, first with,
and then without, its parenthetical elements:

Minimalism (of one sort or another) is the principle (one of the principles, anyhow)
underlying (what I and many another interested observer consider to be perhaps) the
most impressive phenomenon on the current (North American, especially the United
States) literary scene (the gringo equivalent to el boom int he latin American novel): I
mean the new flowering of the (North) American short story (in particular the kind of
terse, oblique, realistic or hyperrealistic, slightly polotted, extrospective, cool-surfaced
fiction associated int he last 5 to 10 years with such excellent writers as Frederick
Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, James robison, Mary
Robison and Tobias Wolff, and both praised and damned under such labels as ''K-Mart
realism,'' ''hick chic,'' ''Diet-Pepsi minimalism'' and ''post-Vietnam, post-literary,
postmodernist blue-collar neo-early-Hemingwayism'').
Text:

Like any clutch of artists collectively labeled, the wrtiers just mentioned are at least as
different from one another as they are similar. Minimalism, moreover, is not the only
and may not be the most important attribute that their fiction mroe or less shares; those
labels themselves suggest some other aspects and concerns of the New American Short
Story and its proportionate counterpart, the three-eighth-inch novel. But it is their
minimalism I shall speak of (briefly) here, and its antecedence: the idea that, in art at
least, less is more.
IT is an idea surely as old, as enduringly attractive and as ubiquitous as its opposite. In
the beginning was the Word: only later came the bible, not to mention the three-decker
Victorian novel. The oracle at Delphi did not say, ''Exhaustive analysis and
comprehension of one's own psyche may be prerequisite to an understanding of one's
behavior and of the world at large''; it said, ''Know theyself.'' Such inherently minimalist
genres as oracles (fromthe Delphic shrine of apollo to the modern fortune cookie),
proverbs, maxims, aphorisms, epigrams, pensees, mottoes, slogans and quips are
popular in every human century and culture - especially in oral cultures and subcultures,
where mnemonic staying power has high priority - and many specimens of them are
self-reflexive or self-demonstrative: minimalism about minimalism. ''Brevity is the soul
of wit.'' ''Silence is golden.'' ''Vita brevisest, ars longa'' Seneca warns aspiring poets in
his third Epistle; ''Eschew surplusage,'' recommends Mark Twain.

Against the large-scale classical prose pleasures of Herodotus, Thucydides and

Petronius, there are the miniature delights of Aesop's fables and Theophrastus'
''Characters.'' Against such verse epics as the ''Iliad,'' the ''Odyssey'' and the ''Aeneid'' -
and the much longer Sanskrit ''Ramayana,'' ''Mahabharata'' and ''Ocean of Story'' - are
such venerable supercompressive poetic forms as the palindrome (there are long
examples, but the ones we remeber are ''Madam, I'm Adam'' and ''Sex at noon taxes''), or
the single couplet (a modern instance is Ogden Nash's ''Candy is dandy/But liquor is
quicker''), or the feudal Japanese haiku and its Western echoes inthe early-20th-century
imagists up to the contemporary ''skinny peoms'' of, say, Robert Creeley. There are even
single-word poems, or single words tha ought to be poems; the best one I know of I
found inthe Guinness Book of World Records, listed as the ''most succinct word''; the
Tierra del Fuegian word ''mamihlapinatapei.'' In the language of the Land of Fire,
''mamihlapinatapei'' is said to mean: looking into each other's eyes, each hoping that the
other will initiate what both want to do but neither chooses to commence.

The genre of the short story, as Poe distinguished it fromt he traditional tale in his 1842
review of Hawthorne's first collection of stories, is an early manifesto of modern
narrative minimalism: ''In the whole composition there should be no word written, of
which the tendency...is not to the pre-established design...Undue length is...to be
avoided.'' Poe's codification informs such later 19th-century masters of terseness,
selectivity and implicitness (as opposed to leisurely once-upon-a-timelessness, luxuriant
abundance, explicit and extended analysis) as Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov.
Show, don't tell, said Henry James in effect and at length in his prefaces to the 1908
New York edition of his novels. And don't tell a word more than you absolutely need to,
added young Ernest Hemingway, who thus described his ''new theory'' in the early
1920's: ''You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted, and the omitted part
would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.''

The Bauhaus Functionalists were by then already busy unornamenting and abstracting
modern architecture, painting and design; and while functionalism and minimalism are
not the same thing, to say nothing of abstractionism and minimalism (there is nothing
abstract about those early Hemingway stories), they spring from the same impulse: to
strip away the superfluous in order to reveal the necessary, the essential. Never mind
that Voltaire had pointed out, a century and a half before, how indispensable the
superfluous can be (''Le superflu, chose si necessaire''); just as, in modern painting, the
process of stripping away leads from Post-Impressionism thrugh Cubism to the radical
minimalism of Kasimir Malevich's ''White on White'' of 1918, and Ad Reinhardt's all
but imageless ''black paintings'' of the 1950's, so in 20th-century literature the
minimalist succession leads through Hemingway's ''new theory'' to the shorter ficciones
of Jorge Luis Borges and the ever-terser texts of Samuel Beckett, perhaps culminating in
his play ''Breath'' (1969): The curtain opens on a dimly lit stage, empty but for scattered
rubbish; there is heard a single recorded human cry, then a single amplified inspiration
and expiration of breath accompanied by a brightening and redimming of the lights,
then again the cry. Thirty-five seconds after it opened, the curtain closes.

But it closes only on the play, not ont he modern tradition of literary minimalism, which
honorably continues in such next-generation writers as, in America, Donald Barthelme
(''The fragment is the only form I trust,'' says a character in his slender novel ''Snow
White'') and, in the literary generation overlapping and following his, the plentiful
authors of the New American Short Story.

Old or new, fiction can be minimalist in any or all of several ways. There are
minimalisms of unit, form and scale: short words, short sentences and paragraphs,
super-short stories, those three-eighth-inch thin novels aforementioned, and even
minimal bibliographics (Borges's fiction adds up to a few modest, though powerfully
influential, short-story collections). There are minimalisms of style: a stripped-down
vocabulary; a stripped-down syntax that avoids periodic sentences, serial predications
and complex subordinating constructions; a stripped-down rhetoric tha may eschew
figurative language altogether; a stripped-down, non-emotive tone. And there are
minimalisms of material: minimal characters, minimal exposition (''all that David
Copperfield kind of crap,'' says J.D. Salinger's catcher in the rye), minimal mises en
scene, minimal action, minimal plot.

Found together in their purest forms, these several minimalisms add up to an art that - in
the words of its arch-priest, Samuel Beckett, speaking of the painter Bram Van Velde -
expresses ''that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from
which to express, no power to express, no desire to express - together with the
obligation to express.'' But they are not always found together. There are very short
works of great rhetorical, emotional and thematic richness, such as Borges's essential
page, ''Borges and I''; and there are instances of what may fairly be called long-winded
minimalism, such as Samuel Beckett's stark-monumental trilogy from the early 50's:
''Molloy,'' ''Malone Dies'' and ''The Unnameable.'' Parallels abound in the other arts: the
miniature, in painting, is characteristically brimful (minaturism is not minimalism);
Joseph Cornell's little boxes contain universes. The large paintings of mark Rothko,
Franz Kline and Barnett Newman, on the other hand, are as undetailed as the
Washington Monument.

The medieval Roman Catholic Church recognized two opposite roads to grace: the via
negativa of the monk's cell and the hermit's cave, and the via affirmativa of immersion
in human affairs, of being n the world whether o not one is of it. Critics have aptly
borrowed those terms to characterize the difference between Mr. Beckett, for example,
and his erstwhile master James Joyce, himself a maximalist except in his early works.
Other than bone-deep disposition, which is no doubt the great determinant, what
inclines a writer - sometimes almost a cultural generation of writers - to the Negational
Path?
For individuals, it may be by their own acknowledgment largely a matter of past or
present personal circumstances. Raymond Carver writes of a literary apprenticeship in
which his short poems and stories were carved in precious quarter-hours stolen from a
harrowing domestic and economic situation; though he now has professional time
aplenty, the notion besets him that should he presume to attempt even a short novel, he'll
wake to find himself back in those wretched circumstances. An opposite case was
Borges's: his near-total blindness in his latter decades obliged him to the short forms tha
he had elected for other, nonphysical reasons when he was sighted.

TO account for a trend, literary sociologists and culture watchingers point to more
general historical and philosophical factors - not excluding the factor of powerful
models like Borges and Beckett. The influence of early Hemingway on Raymond
Carver, say, is as apparent as the influence of Mr. Carver in turn on a host of other New
American Short-Story writers, and on a much more numerous host of apprentices in
American college fiction-writing programs. But why this model rather than that, other
than its mere and sheer artistic prowess, on which after all it has no monopoly?
Doubtless because this one is felt, by the writers thus more or less influenced, to speak
more strongly to their condition and tha of their readers.

And what is that condition, in the case of the cool-surface realist-minimalist storytellers
of the American 1970's and 80's? In my conversation with them, my reading of their
crticis both positive and negative and my dealings with recent and current apprentice
writers, I have heard cited, among other factors, these half-dozen, ranked here in no
particular order. *Our national hangover from the Vietnam War, felt by many to be a
trauma literally and figuratively unspeakable. ''I don't want to talk about it'' is the
characteristic attitude of ''Nam'' veterans in the fiction of Ann Beattie, Jayne Anne
Phillips and Bobbie Ann Mason - as it is among many of their real-life counterparts (and
as it was among their numberless 20th-century forerunners, especially after the First
World War). This is, of course, one of the two classic attitudes to trauma, the other being
its opposite, adn it can certainly conduce to hedged, nonintrospective, even minimalist
discourse: one remembers Hemingway's early story ''Solidar's Home.'' *The more or
less coincifent energy crisis of 1973-76, and the associated reaction against American
excess adn the wastefulness in general. The popularity of the subcompact car parallels
that (in literary cricles, at least) of the subcompact novel adn the minifiction - though
not, one observes, of the miniskirt, which had nothing to do with conserving material.
*The national decline in reading and writing skills, not only among the young
(including even young apprentice writers, as a group), but among their teachers, many
of whom are themselves the product of an ever-less-demanding educational system and
a society whose narrative-dramatic entertainment and tastes come far more from movies
and television than from literature. This is not to disparge the literacy and general
education of those writers mentioned above, or to suggest that the great writers of the
past were uniformly flawless spellers and grammarians, of wide personal literary
culture. Some were, some weren't; some of today's are, some aren't. but at least among
those of our aspiring writers promising enough to be admitted into good graduate
writing programs - and surely they are not the inferior speciments of their breed - the
general decline in basic language skills over the last two decades is inarguable enough
to make me worry in some instances about their teaching undergraduates. Rarely in their
own writing, whatever its considerable other merits, will one find a sentence of any
syntactical complexity, for example, and inasmuch as a language's repertoire of other-
than-basic syntactical devices permits its users to articulate other-than-basic thoughts
and fellings, Dick-and-Jane prose tends to be emotionally and intellectually poorer than
Henry James prose. Among the great minimalist writers, this impoverishment is elected
and strategic: simplification in the interest of strength, or of some other value. Among
the less great it may be faute de mieux. Among today's ''common readers'' it is
pandemic. *Along with this decline, an ever-dwindling readerly attention span. The
long popular novel still has its devotees, especially aboard large airplanes and on
beaches; but it can scarcely be doubted that many of the hours we bourgeois now spend
with our televisions and video cassette recorders, and in our cars and at the movies, we
used to spend reading novels and novellas and not-so-short stories, partly because those
glitzy other distractions weren't there and partly because we were more generally
conditioned for sustained concentration, in our pleasures as well as in our work. The
Austrian novelist Robert Musil was complaining by 1930 (in his maxi-novel ''The Man
Without Qualities'') that we live in ''the age of the magazine,'' too impatient already
inthe twitchy 20's to read books. Half a century later, in America at least, even the large-
circulation magazine market for fiction had dwindled to a handful of outlets; the readers
weren't there. It is a touching paradox of the New American Short Story - so admirably
straightforward and democratic of access, so steeped in brand names and the popular
culture - that it perforce appears mainly in very small-circulation literary quarterlies
instead of in the likes of Collier's, Liberty and The Saturday Evening Post. But The New
Yorker and Esquire can't publish everybody. *Together with all the above, a reaction on
these authors' part against the ironic, black-humoristic ''fabulism'' and/or the (sometimes
academic) intellectuality and/or the density, here byzantine, there baroque, of some of
their immediate American literary antecedents: the likes of Donald Barthelme, Robert
Coover, Stanley Elkin, William Heller, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut (and, I shall
presume, myself as well). This reaction, where it exists, would seem to pertain as much
to our successors' relentless realism as to their minimalism: among the distinguished
brothers Barthelme, Donald's productions are no less lean than Frederick's or the up-
and-coming Steven's; but their characteristic material, angle of attack and resultant
flavor are different indeed. The formal intricacy of Elder Brother's story ''Sentence,'' for
example (a single nine-page nonsentence), or the direct though satirical intellectuality of
his ''Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel,'' are as foreign to the K-Mart Realists as are the
manic flights of ''Gravity's Rainbow.'' So it goes: The dialogue between fantast and
realist, fabulator and quotidianist, like the dialogue between maximalist and minimalist,
is as old as storytelling, and by no means always adversary. There are innumerable
combinations, coalitions, line-crossings and workings of both sides of the street. *The
reaction against the all but inescapable hyperbole of American advertising, both
commercial and political, with its high-tech manipulativeness and glamorous lies, as
ubiquitous as and more polluted than the air we breathe. How understandable that such
an ambiance, together with whatever other items in this catalogue, might inspire a
fiction dedicated to homely, understated, programmatically unglamorous, even
minimalistic Telling It Like It Is.

That has ever been the ground inspriation, moral-philosophical in character, of

minimalism and its kissing cousin realism intheir many avatars over the centuries, in the
fine arts and elsewhere: the felling that the language (or whatever) has for whatever
reasons become excessive, cluttered, corrupted, fancy, flase. It is the Puritans' reaction
against baroque Catholicism; it is Thoreau's putting behind him even the meager
comforts of the village of Concord.
TO the Lost Generation of World War I survivors, says one of their famous spokesmen
(Frederic Henry in Hemingway's ''Farewell to Arms''), ''Abstract words obscene.''
Wassily Kandinsky said he sought ''not the shell, but the nut.'' The functionalism of the
Bauhaus was inspired in part by admiration for machine technology, in part by revulsion
against the fancy clutter of the gilded Age, in language as well as elsewhere. Teh sinking
of the elegant Titanic has come to symbolize the end of that age, as the sight of some
workmen crushed by a falling Victorian cornice symbolized for young Frank Lloyd
Wright the dead weight of functionless architectural decoration. Flaubert raged against
the blague of bourgeois speech, bureaucratic speech in particular; his passion for the
mot juste involved far more subtraction than addition. The baroque inspires its opposite:
after the excesses of scholasticism comes Descartes's radical reductionism - let us doubt
and discard everything not self-evident and see whether anything indubitable remains
upon which to rebuild. And among the scholatics themselves, three centuries before
Descartes, William of Ockham honed his celebrated razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda
(''Entities are not to be multiplied''). In short, less is more. 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 of art in general: a cycle to be found as well, with
longer rhythms, in the history of philosophy, the history of the culture. Renaisances
beget Reformations, which then beget Counter-Reformations; the seven fat years are
succeeded by seven lean, after which we, no less than the people of Genesis, may look
forward to the recorrection.

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; the low-fat rewards of Samuel Beckett's
''Texts for Nothing'' adn the high-calorie delights of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ''One
Hundred Years of Solitude.'' There truly are more ways than one to heaven. As between
minimalism and its opposite, I pity the reader - or the writer, or the age - too addicted to
either to savor the other.