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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.
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 largecirculation 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 upand-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.