What is Minimalism?
We will find later that silence is a tool that is often used my minimalist writers. Often in these cases, minimalism is based on a concern with the implications of an emotion or a single mood: a space of occupation (and consciousness) where the syntax is equally concerned with what is silent and what is spoken.
With me so far?
A famous Ernest Hemingway writing rule: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”
A few aphorisms about minimalism are “Form follows function” and “Less is more”.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION:
* Literary minimalism arose in response to the meta-fiction trend of the 1960s and early 1970s and continues through the present day.
* Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces. In music, minimalism is characterized by repetition and a steady pulse; in painting, by only a few colors and basic geometric shapes; and in literature, by economy with words.
* Minimalist authors have a specific style. They hesitate to use adjectives and adverbs, and would not even think about droning on and on about seemingly meaningless details – page after page after page. Minimalist works often include ordinary subject matters, have straightforward narratives, focus on single moods or emotions, and consist of characters who don’t think out loud. Such authors force readers to take an active role in the creative process; instead of providing every minute detail, the author provides a general context and then allows the reader’s imagination to shape the story.
* Minimalism reflects quite a few contemporary thoughts. Most notably, we must recognize the growing complexities of the modern world and see that minimalist works refuse to hash out every minute detail of this reality. This type of work also suggests that contemporary life is both too plain and too consistent to allow for overly spectacular and dramatic creative works. Lastly, minimalism indicates the post-modern thought that stories cannot exist without readers.
* Minimalist authors include the following: Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, Emily Dickinson, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robison, and Frederick Barthelme�to name a few.
SANDRA CISNEROS:
In an interview, Cisneros says, “You can say a phrase in Spanish, and you can choose to not translate it, but you can make it understood through the context.” It is in this way that Cisneros shows herself as a minimalist author. She gives her readers, who speak a variety of different languages, a story or a context and then allows their imaginations and intuitions about language to shape the story and lead it in whatever direction they choose.
Perhaps you have read some of Cisneros’ poetry or short fiction. In a well-known work of short stories, The House on Mango Street, some of the works are not even a full page long – talk about minimalism. Born to a Mexican father and a Chicana mother, Cisneros identifies with the American, the Spanish, and the Mexican. Authors with similar backgrounds in Spanish speaking cultures, include Helena Maria Viramontes and Junot Diaz. Have you read Cisneros, Viramontes, Diaz or an author whose style is much like these three authors? If so, have you found minimalism to be a pervasive theme of their writing, and could this be related to their backgrounds?
The New York Times Book Review about Diaz: “Like Raymond Carver, Diaz transfigures disorder and disorientation with a rigorous sense of formâÂ?¦[he] wrings the heart with finely calibrated restraint.”
EMILY DICKINSON:
Though she writes from a different era, some of her work is seen as minimalist work, including this poem, “Snake”:
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him, -did you not?
His notice sudden is.
The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun, –
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.
Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
As student, Sebastian Lockwood says, Emily Dickinson’s poems have helped to create “the sharpest rock lyrics ever written.” Here is a quote from his fascinating theories on Emily Dickinson’s modern day rock influence:
One of the first songs we wrote for this was Zero at the Bone…I knew that we would have to work with elision and rearrangement. This was daunting if not sacrilegious: like being asked to rearrange a Faberge egg with a pen knife. However, if the end result is students singing her lines, then it felt worthwhile.
A rock/pop song first and foremost needs a hook. A line that carves: like a rolling stoneâÂ?¦ I cant get noâÂ?¦ Who are youâÂ?¦ All we are is dust in the windâÂ?¦ (A superior line, Dickinson’s, Dust is the only secret, comes to mind.) I’m sure you can supply many more, but are any as good as: Zero at the Bone? Zero is a rock word as is bone, together they give that winsome blues passive aggressive delivery. Now when we return to the poem we find a number of other lines that have that gem impact: whiplash () in the sunâÂ?¦ when a Boy and BarefootâÂ?¦ tighter breathing. Now add a simple bass line and build the song. We need verse, chorus and bridge. By using certain of the lines and arranging them to fit this matrix we achieve one of the most achingly beautiful blues songs imaginable.
Developing the song we worked on the constriction ofâÂ?¦tighter breathing, repeated over and over before the release into: âÂ?¦ Zero at the Bone – As we did so there was an eerie echo of [a] description of the heavy, tighter, breathing of Dickinson’s last two unconscious days before the release.
The poem itself and its contemporary musical interpretation both have minimalist qualities. Most notably, the poem begins with blatant narrative qualities and ends by allowing the reader to interpret what “zero at the bone” might mean in the given context. Repetition is a characterization of minimalist music and therefore, the repetition of “zero at the bone” provides a minimalist tone to the already minimalist poem. How do you interpret this important phrase, “zero at the bone”?
RAYMOND CARVER:
“Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” -Raymond Carver
A notable force in minimalist literature through both poetry and short stories. After reading his poems, it can go almost without saying that Carver is classified as a minimalist poet. “Drinking While Driving” has overly narrative qualities and there is absolutely no question as to what might be going on in the poem. Similarly, both “Fear” and “An Afternoon” leave little to the imagination and include few adjectives and adverbs, if any. The repetitious qualities of “Fear” also give the poem minimalist attributes.
For Graham Clarke, Carver is “the quintessential minimalist, seemingly reducing to an absolute spareness both his subject matter and his treatment of it.”
Brief excerpts from Two Interviews with Raymond Carver
RC: My stories are better known, but, myself, I love my poetry. Relationship? My stories and my poems are both short. (Laughs.) I write them the same way, and I’d say the effects are similar. There’s a compression of language, of emotion, that isn’t to be found in the novel. The short story and the poem, I’ve often said, are closer to each other than the short story and the novel.
CG: You approach the problem of image the same way?
RC: Oh, image. You know, I don’t feel, as someone said to me, that I center my poems or my stories on an image. The image emerges from the story, not the other way around. I don’t think in terms of image when write.
RC: Critics often use the term “minimalist” when discussing my prose. But it’s a label that bothers me: it suggests the idea of a narrow vision of life, low ambitions, and limited cultural horizons. And, frankly, I don’t believe that’s my case. Sure, my writing is lean and tends to avoid any excess.
Many contemporary young writers have found inspiration through Raymond Carver’s minimalist poetry and short prose. Make a five minute attempt at writing a poem in a style similar to Carver’s. Next, go back and quickly analyze your own poem. Did you write in a narrative style? Did you write about an everyday topic or routine of yours? Count the number of adjectives and adverbs you used. How focused were you, did you stay on a single topic or emotion, or did you cover a variety of topics? After having tried this exercise, do you think that it takes a specific type of person to successfully write minimalist works?
This short exercise was an attempt to demonstrate the plethora of factors that must come together in order to produce minimalist poetry. As Carver said, “Critics often use the term “minimalist” when discussing my prose. But it’s a label that bothers me: it suggests the idea of a narrow vision of life, low ambitions, and limited cultural horizons”; he was certainly not the only classified minimalist who felt this way. It is very important to note that minimalist poetry, prose, art, and music all rely on a culmination of factors that come together in order for them to be classified as such.
