in a very general way, i think there are two kinds of so-called minimalism. i don't think they have names, so i'll call them 'representational' and 'avant-garde'. the second one, i think, comes from the work of Gordon Lish and those influenced by him. the first one seems more like 'realism,' but it is not really realism, it just seems that way.
1. 'avant-garde' minimalism: concerned with language, so that the content of the story is the language of the story. or, another way of saying it, it is the language of the story which draws attention to itself, to how words do things and how sentences get put together. therefore, in these type of stories, sometimes sentences are very strange, purposefully. the author is writing a 'thing' here, or 'making art' in an 'avant-garde' way. because the language of the thing draws attention to itself, or is 'primary,' plot or stuff happening is secondary, or nonexistent. the reader is not drawn into 'plot', but into language. this is basically William Gass, but with the label of minimalism slapped onto it. i consider this to be 'high' art or something. (edit: probably a kind of formalism).
i consider these authors, mostly recent, to be: Gordon Lish, Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, Gary Lutz, Sam Lipsyte (a little), early (Lish edited) Carver. there are some online people who maybe do similar things, who could be considered 'avant-garde' minimalists, and i would say Kim Chinquee, Tao Lin, Deb Olin Unferth are these people, among others. i think this is a big trend in some online venues. possibles are: Amy Hempel (more plotty) and Ben Marcus. it seems important to say that these types of stories are often shorter than ten pages, and even more times, are shorter than 1,000 words, making them very good for online things.
here are a couple examples of what i'm talking about:
Diane Williams
Gary Lutz
here also is a brief snippet of interview with Lutz, rehashing the same thing Gass (i think) once said about film.
i think it's clear from that brief thing of the Lutz interview that more 'plot-driven' writing, like a love between step-siblings, is frowned upon.
2. 'representational' minimalism: concerned with characters. psychological and emotional depth looked for in the best of these stories. plot is there, but is secondary (sort of) to the emotional development of the characters. language is both representational and more quietly a form of content, in that it 'represents' a bleak and doomed kind of everydayness (the avant-garde minimalists, i would argue, do not address this because their content (ie, their language) cannot make the reader feel this bleak type of thing). what makes these minimalists 'representational' and not 'realistic' is hard to describe, but i think it's about how characters are made, move and develop on the page in a world just slightly off, more amplified, and more lost or strange and a little more 'cartoony', than our own.
i consider these writers to be Joy Williams, Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Amy Hempel (again, sort of), later Carver, Jane Bowles (i won't go back further), Nicholson Baker, Mary Robison, Michael Knight - i would not consider Alice Munro or authors like that to fit here. i'm not sure who online practitioners of this might be. i think this might be a dying thing, where 'avant-garde' takes over. there is a Barthelme story and Knight story over on the right for examples of this. an interesting tactic, i think, of some of these types of stories is 'fantasy fulfillment,' in which the story allows room for a fantasy of small scale to happen, as in Driver. these people are/were doing new things, too, but i think they get a little cast out or shadowed by more blantantly 'avant-garde' writing.
3. i like both kinds of writing, though i prefer the second group. Joy Williams a lot. what i think annoys me is that the second group is perceived as more traditional and therefore, somehow, less artistic or creative or something (as in Lutz interview). i don't think i have anything else to say except that i dislike such a perception.
i'm probably going to stop posting such long things for a while and do shorter posts.
18 comments:
should we be writing minimalist stuff? what other kinds of writing, good writing, is out there? writing that's not all wrapped up in the experimental and wrapped up in itself? i like these long posts.
i just like so-called minimalism (less a mode than a particular way of seeing things). what you said about experimental stuff is good. i agree. i don't know. i think the attraction is that whatever is new and newly experimental is viewed as the 'next' thing, the thing that will last maybe and be seen as a 'changer' of writing. like literary movements or something. this is maybe happening with online stuff and has been for a while.
i will blog about other writing when i make another longer post.
enjoyed the clarity
probably have more to say, but not right now.
I've had a couple of realizations lately, thanks to some of the things you linked to on the right.
Mainly the Rick essay and the Gass stuff.
Not realizations, actually...um..what's the word?
(sorry, I'm playing poker while trying to write this, so I can't form sentences, apparently)
Clarification, synthification, a pulling together of scattered things
this post adds to that
gracias
also encouraged me to read some of this shit i'm supposed to read
and maybe do some phd-finishing-related things--agh, let's not get carried away--but at least some more serious work.
reading Barth Floating Opera right now, too, randomishly, so there's dovetail, as well as ancestry
as you say
a way of seeing
G, there is also a good interview with rick in New Ohio Review, but only part of it is online. have you seen that? i will link later. i will look forward to what more you might write. i haven't read Floating Opera, but Lost in the Funhouse depressed me a lot.
I wrote a lengthy comment, but it fell apart. I'll try again later.
I haven't read funhouse, but I found floating opera somewhat uplifting.
From the Spills the Bean interview: John Barth had written two beautiful and straightforward books and two equally beautiful and oblique books.
I presume I've read one of the straightforward ones, and you one of the oblique ones.
What was depressing about it? Or do I have to have read it?
I like the perspective, historical and otherwise, that the Bean(s) essay offers. I like your avant-garde vs. representational deal.
I have read the part of the NOR interview that's available online, which is why I was happy to discover (here) the essay it was referencing. Appreciated that perspective as well. The history lesson. Tidy packages.
Here's a Barth thing you may have already read, which I haven't read all of yet--it doesn't grab me the way Rick's does, but it'll be interesting, I think, when I have the concentration to read it fully--maybe tomorrow:
http://weberjournal.weber.edu/archive/archive%20A%20%20Vol.%201-10.3/Vol.%204.2/4.2barth.htm
it's all there, though it looks like it isn't because they inserted some note in the middle of the fourth paragraph.
i like that barth essay a lot, though i don't necessarily like how it is written. Lost in the Funhouse depressed me because the knowledge of everything, including story, was so overwhelming and (seemingly) complete that i felt completely false. i don't feel that way anymore. it was a good book, worth reading.
this seems like a very even-tempered essay with an even-tempered message at the end, which i appreciate. i think i tried to say something similar in a very early post called 'this vs. that,' but i don't think i wrote that post with much care, maybe.
thanks for this. i'm going to put it up somewhere along with a couple other interesting things i just found.
I can't keep up with signifiers and crap w/out a chart:
http://www.971menu.com/barthesChart.jpg
oops, here's a better one...i stop now:
http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/imk/MEVIT2110/v06/undervisningsmateriale/i/barthes.png
i agree with pretty much everything you say there. especially about the 'avant-garde' stuff. i like when you say both representational and avant-garde are their own meaning. that's a really good way of saying that. i wish i would've said that. i think another thing that representational does or does better than say avant-garde or other forms of writing is that it takes the popular vernacular and twists it into something else - this is a not fully formed idea, i may not even mention it again, but it seems like i missed saying anything about it before.
anyway, this is really smart and brings in a lot of other ideas. can i post your long response in an actual blog post? i'll give you credit and everything and maybe try to work the chart in, too, if i can figure out how.
Representational work knows it's representational. Realistic work doesn't, or won't admit it. It goes to all sorts of lengths to hide the fact. Many devices are developed in order to get around or between the realistic rules.
Representational work realizes that it doesn't make a shit whether the organ is made of cats or pipes. In fact, it's funny if the thing represented (organ) is made of something like cats.
Realistic work can only make cat-organs if someone is insane or dreaming,or, oddly enough, a wizard or prophet.
(sidebar: this is why i can't get into serious discussions about mainstream science fiction or fantasy--people try to argue that it's representational when it's clearly just fantasy realism--your zombie movies..hmm, i can only imagine fairly low-grade discussions about most of those, but I'm no aficionado--sorry we never got to talk about them more (which doesn't mean I want to do so, except over beers)--as I said,
sidebar).
Both your representational and your avant-garde minimalism are their own meaning. The Barth essay, which largely characterizes minimalism by its economy of expression, seems to overlook the fact that realistic work tends to look for meaning outside of itself (or to provide meaning to the world outside of itself). Unfortunately, what it generally finds (and provides), no matter how many tropes it dispenses with, is more tropes, more myths, and so the search seems a bit funny, in a tragic way.
What you're calling representational(-ism) is its own meaning--or its meaning arises out of the play between the signifier and the signified.
The upshot is this:
Realism uses signifiers as if they were scientific instruments, treating them as though they were intrinsically linked by concrete rules to their signifieds, at least within the context of the individual work, in order to manipulate signs (meanings).
Representational-ism admits (or ignores--you can see that realism can never ignore it, only deny it) the fact of its representational nature, after the author's having internalized the notion that there is no intrinsic (and certainly not 1:1) link between word and object/concept, by deploying its signifiers in such a way as to create an emptied sign.
In Southern Gothic, we can talk about what a house represents, what a kitchen represents, but this, oddly enough, makes it a realistic story, and not a representational one in the sense I think you mean. You mean it re-presents the house, or presents it again, I take it. The realistic work treats the signifier "house") as if it were the signified (building in which I live), and the realistically-circumscribed author sees the world as signified by the work or sees the work as signified by the world, depending on the direction he's thinking at the moment--this is where we get life imitating art imitating life, because the practice creates a sign that is essentially a feedback loop--the sign 'house'/the building I live in becomes a form feeding on itself.
In a representational postmodern piece, "house" can signify anything and anything can signify house. The chickens had had their long houses clipped, so they couldn't make it over the fence. I drank my house dry.
The link is broken, the connections ground away. The house sign, comprised of the signifier "house" and the concept of the place in which I live, is now empty--it is a form without content other than its formfulness, form-ness or its formation/formulation whatever. When you read it, it crackles at you, because you're getting not a conduit from some reaction in the author's mind (best case--worst case, some long-ago reaction borrowed by this author and served to you cold), you're getting THE reaction (chemical-like). This is your avant-garde, it seems to me.
What you've here labeled representational(-ism), I think, takes this emptied sign and feeds it back into the realism machine. This is where the minimalism comes in. It seems more complex than a simple matter of economy. The minimalist, it seems to me at the moment, intentionally avoids feeding the loop. Economy helps, but there's no reason work can't be verbose, even downright discursive, and still work outside the signs. I think the quality of the economy is more telling than the quantity.
Example:
She turned suddenly, sensing the man behind her.
VS
She turned. The man was there.
The economy here is not in words, but something else. The first one, in its melodramatic fashion, plays into any number of tropes and is scarred. The second less so--it gives the feedback loop a pass, for the most part, short-circuits it, even. I'm not saying the second one is all that great, but it would stand a far better chance of surviving a CW workshop.
So that's my take on what you're calling representational minimalism VS realism. (I've no quibbles with your terminology--just making sure throughout to keep what you said in front of me (don't want to get confused with a more general definition of representation).)
I'm pretty sure I've left some loose ends, but I'm tired and don't feel like rereading for the fifth time. I'm also sure that I'm overlooking any number of things. I've also gotten some things wrong, no doubt. Best
case, I just resaid things already better said. Straighten me out, won't you?
Fer sure. I thought maybe I got a little carried away...
i always get a little carried away. i'm really good at it. this is good, though, and makes me understand the 'avant-garde' stuff more.
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