Conclusion

In Minimalism and the Short Story-Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary Robison, Cynthia Hallett asserts that minimalism is Carver’s “most identifying trademark” (45); indeed, the writer “has become the quintessential referent for minimalism” (9). Carver’s association with minimalism has long been a sore spot with his partisans-with the decided exception of Hallett-because of the term’s self-evidently negative connotations. My definition of minimalism is narrow and technical. With minimalism, I refer merely to a style privileging economy, simple diction, clear syntax, and omission with few if any attempts to totalize the meaning of the experience presented (especially in the form of commentary from an omniscient narrator). By no means, however, is this the only definition of the term. The Mississippi Review 40-41 (1985) spends nearly a hundred pages in the most substantial attempt to define minimalism, the contradictory essays illustrating the difficulty of defining sweeping terms and literary movements especially when they are ongoing. The applicability of key portions of these definitions to Carver’s work is, to say the least, problematical. Believing that the minimalist doctrine holds that the “work of art is not an effort of communication,” John Biguenet contends that “Minimalists are the slaves of Derrida,” abdicating the power to create meaning and “quite literally … ceas[ing] to be authors” (44, 45). Yet Carver, the writer most aligned with minimalism, repeatedly insisted that fiction and poetry must involve communication. Novelist Linsey Abrams sees “a retreat” from “the language of emotion” (27), yet Joe Bellamy asserts just the contrary: “Another obvious aspect” of minimalism is “its emphasis upon suffering or feeling rather than intellect” (35). As “in Hemingway,” the flat surface “often seems to be a strategy for leading the reader to a deeper emotional response” (35-36). For Bellamy, minimalism is a “mutiny” against postmodernism (31), a rebellion manifest in such things as interest in lifestyle and geographical place (34). Yet Carver’s work is not rooted in a particular place. Of the minimalists in general, Kim Herzinger observes that their work is not “tethered to place” in the manner of earlier realism (19). Minimalism is not a rebellion against postmodernism, according to Herzinger, but rather the movement de-emphasizes “certain Post-modernist tendencies” such as “irony, self-reflexiveness,” and “overt concern[s] with the limitations of language” (12). Although generally subtle, irony and self-reflexiveness are important in Carver as is his “obsessive” concern with “the failure of human dialogue” (Facknitz, “The Calm” 288). In an article published in Studies in Short Fiction, Trussler defines minimalism as “an interrogation of the boundaries” of both “literature” and “knowledge” and “an examination and criticism of the medium it employs” (27, 24). Some stories have significant metafictional implications, yet if we accept Trussler’s view that this quality is central to Carver’s minimalism, we must convict the author of unintended triumphs, for he claimed “that fiction about fiction or about the experience of writing fiction is not very viable or lasting” (Stull, “Life and Death” 184) and subsequently dismissed the metafictional post-modernists: “What a shame, such an excess of ambition crowned by so little success” (Durante 195).