Raymond Carver and the Menace of Minimalism

Author(s): Mark A. R. Facknitz

Source: CEA Critic, Vol. 52, No. 1/2 (FALL 1989-WINTER 1990), pp. 62-73
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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 Raymond Carver and the Menace
of Minimalism

Mark A. R. Facknitz

IN A RECENT SYMPOSIUM ON CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION,

Raymond Carver wondered "who isn't tired to death by now of that stale de-
bate" over minimalism (Delbanco 711). Indeed, though no minimalist writer
is willing to accept the label, paradoxically an unspecifiable minimalism has
become one of the reigning commonplaces of our day, and- like "dirty re-
alism" and photo-realism, with which it shares many characteristics- it is
now so thoroughly ordinary that television programs like Miami Vice and
Moonlighting freely partake of reductive and allusive techniques that min-
imalist fiction writers are generally assumed to have been the first to use.
Quick cuts, elliptical dialogue, blunt ironies, and plain surfaces as narrative
devices originate in a tradition of short story writing that goes back through
Hemingway to Chekhov and Maupassant, and few will be offended by the
assertion that minimalism in fiction is a reflection of the fragmentary and
alienated condition of the twentieth-century self. This is the old news of
modernism. But I suggest that ultimately the problem we lament lies not
in minimalist craft but in a vision of the world that minimalist technique is
wholly adequate to describe. Minimalism, more than any other technique,
emphasizes to the point of cruelty the shortfall between the gifts of the
world and our desire for plenitude.
In The Lonely Voice , Frank O'Connor confesses that he is frequently
exasperated by Hemingway's limited scope. To O'Connor, the "clean, well-
lighted place" may be merely empty- timeless, unpopulated, immune to the
humanity of the voices that drift across the page. "In a charitable mood,"
O'Connor writes, "I sometimes find myself thinking of the clean well-lighted
place as the sort of stage on which Racine's heroes and heroines appear,
free of contact with common things, and carrying on their lofty discussions
of what to Racine seemed most important" (169). But while the sparse
unities and clear lines of classicism may inspire occasional concessions,
O'Connor's attitude is volatile, and he is apt to decide that "this wonderful
technique of Hemingway's is really a technique in search of a subject, and
searching all the time for a clean well-lighted place where all the difficul-
ties of human life can be comfortably ignored" (169). In short, O'Connor

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Mark A. R. Räcknitz

suspects Hemingway of being nihilistic as well as artless. In his guise as

Racine, Hemingway succeeds at depicting his characters as rootless and
disembodied members of a caste deprived of tradition and family. Or, per-
haps, Hemingway may merely be funking his responsibility to understand
a real human situation, one in which his characters ought to be endowed
with free will, a past, and a sense of purpose.
Yet, for Hemingway technique was a form of purgation of dishonesty,
a means of ridding the story of extraneous background that might inhibit
rather than promote the search for truth. In A Moveable Feast , he recalls
his apprenticeship days in Paris when he would tell himself:

"Do not worry. You have always written before and you will
write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write
the truest sentence you know." So finally I would write one true
sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy because there
was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had
heard someone say. (12)

Whatever was cut or rejected before it went on paper Hemingway charac-

terized as "scrollwork or ornament," disfiguring embellishment, and to the
extent that his short stories are the principal models of minimalist fiction,
minimalists must be seen as writers who draw the boundaries of truth and
concern themselves only with the matter that lies within.
In O'Connor's ambivalence, we discover a frustration he has in common
with many readers of current minimalist fiction. For if art cannot satisfy our
desire to be raised out of quotidian existence, then art apparently doesn't
amount to much. Above all, complain such readers, minimalist art does
not require moral involvement- not the author's, not the reader's. The key
precept of minimalism appears to be precisely this requirement that the
work be stripped of judgment and invite no judgment; the minimalist work
deletes any sign of the work's having an intention upon us. The short story,
then, is the preeminent minimalist literary form, for if there is scarcely time
to develop a round character in a short story, there is even less time to
moralize. By the tightness of its focus, the short story inevitably alienates
characters from their larger lives, or, as Frank O'Connor puts it, the story
renders them "symbolically divorced from their normal surroundings and
friends" (24). The Hemingway stories- especially, perhaps, the touchstone
texts of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," "Hills Like White Elephants," and
"Cat in the Rain"- exaggerate the short story's natural hostility to fullness,
most obviously in their ostentatious elimination of moral judgments.
In the works of Raymond Carver, this tendency creates a peculiar ten-
sion. If he is a minimalist, Carver is so in part because he scrupulously
removes himself from any posture that might imply the presence of a mor-
alizing author. His characters, however, are universally the victims of the

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 Critic 52:1-2

death of morality; they are haunted by the absence of spiritual value and
live restless and terrified in a moral void. Readers of Carver are apt to
find his stories either fascinating or irritating. In reviewing Carver's second
collection of stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981),
James Atlas of The Atlantic complained that Carver's "characters are hardly
garrulous; their talk is groping, rudimentary" (97), and essentially they have
nothing to say to one another. Less is less, Atlas says, and "minimality"
may offer the stories "bleak power' only if the reader generously fills in the
gaps caused by the author's absence and the characters' lack of eloquence.
Finally, such "perfect economy" insists that "the writer's responsibility is
only to register what is true in a literal, documentary sense" (97).
Several readers have tried to see the contemporary trend of minimalism
as a phenomenon of the marketplace. Robert Dunn in The New York Times
Book Review writes of it as "fiction that shrinks from life," or what he calls
"private interest fiction," the fiction of the Reagan era, simplistic and self-
satisfied, which "turns inward and finds a paucity, a confusion, an absence"
(24), and which "fails to engage the expansive possibilities of our lives" (25)
Dan Pope, writing in The Gettysburg Review , sees Carver's popularity as
"an influence that has swamped literary journals with blue collar heroes,
mobile homes, Kentucky Fried chicken dinners, and characters named Bob
or Bill or Bud" (332). Madison Bell makes a similar argument. In a 1986
essay for Harpers , he revives James Atlas's title "Less Is Less," which Atlas
himself borrowed from Joshua Gilder of the New Criterion , and Bell pro-
poses that in attempting to compete with film, fiction has found itself at
the absurd limits of technical extremism. The minimalists, says Bell, are
supremely commercial writers, driven not by artistic necessity but by adver-
tising's need for easy blurbs and homogeneity, as well as the entertainment
industry's tendency to define audiences by the lowest common denomina-
tor. Carver and a growing number of minimalist writers- Robison, Phillips,
Hempel, Leavitt, and others- define for Bell "an excessively small literary
world, one in which everyone tends to resemble everyone else," and whose
members cultivate "an obsessive concern for surface detail, a tendency to
ignore or eliminate distinctions among people it renders, and a studiedly
deterministic, at times nihilistic, vision of the world" (65). A practitioner
such as Ann Beattie is blistered for making "nonsense of personal freedom
and personal responsibility" while her characters are "people reduced to a
single common attribute of casual despair" (66). Raymond Carver's story
"Bridle" gets rapped for "dime-store determinism" (66), and finally, when
less is less, much becomes nothing in the view of readers like Bell.
Particularly in Carver's case, it is difficult to demonstrate that despair
is merely superficial, and many readers find Carver's minimalism telling
beyond the measures of technique. Even a generally hostile critic such as
Joe David Bellamy will admit that below the surface there "lies a morass
of inarticulated yearnings and unexamined horrors, repressed violence, the

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Mark A. R. Facknitz

creeping certainty that nothing matters." William Stull situates Carver's

stories in "Hopelessville, USA, the contemporary counterpart of Sherwood
Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio" (2), and he concedes that "at its narrowest, . . .
[Carver's] writing can be acerbic, mannered and predictable" (3). Through
Carver's second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,
and for most of the stories in Cathedral (1983), Stull's judgment applies:
Raymond Carver is an author whose characters fail to communicate and
so reveal "a heartfelt pessimism, a conviction that things never are and
never can be what they should be" (3). But Stull continues. The stories
nevertheless can have an "unsettling immediacy" and "haunting verisimili-
tude" (3), characteristics that Ewing Campbell, in "Raymond Carver and the
Literature of Subtraction," defines as Carver's ability to endow the "spoken
word with subsurface values" and "to create deceptive originality behind
the facade of the commonplace" (70). In defending Carver, Campbell de-
cides that the "literature of subtraction" does not degenerate into a fiction
of mere surface and silliness but instead becomes "the literature of multi-
ple levels, multiple meanings, and even multiple threats" (71). Minimalist
technique, then, may be a sure sign of submerged menace.
Carver's evaluation is simple. He writes, "I think a little menace is fine
to have in a story"; it is "good for the circulation" (Fires 17). In the same
essay, "On Writing," he explains that he derives most of his effects from
the failure of memory and the serendipities of composition. He feels his
way into a story, making himself susceptible to intuition and chance. Once,
when his writing was interrupted with a phone call, a sinister voice asking
for someone named Nelson, Carver found his story invaded by a vague and
threatening character of the same name. Thus, Carver moves from line to
line like a man groping in the dark, depending heavily on chance to help
him find his way. Carver elaborates:

I make up the conversations in my stories. I put the furnishings

and the physical things surrounding people into the stories as I
need those things. Perhaps this is why it's sometimes been said
that my stories are unadorned, stripped down, even 'minimal-
ist.' But maybe it's nothing more than a working marriage of
necessity and convenience that has brought me to writing the
kind of stories I do in the way I do. (21)

In a practical sense, therefore, Carver's stories do appear to emerge more

from an attitude than from a method, or at least the method appears to
be a way of holding oneself open to the suggestions of coincidence and the
subconscious mind, and of limiting oneself to such suggestions and little else.
Marilynne Robinson makes a similar point in her review of Carver's most
recent collection. Writing on Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected
Stories (1988), she argues:

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 Critic 52:1-2

Mr. Carver uses his narrow world to generate suggestive con-

figurations that could not occur in a wider one. His impulse to
simplify is like an attempt to create a hush, not to hear less,
but to hear better. Nothing recurs so powerfully in these stories
as the imagination of another life, always so like the narra-
tor's or the protagonist's own that the imagination of it is an
experience of the self, that fuddled wraith. It is as if the repli-
cation of the conditions of one's life in another's rescued one
from the terrors of accident and randomness, as if the germ of
myth and archetype were found at work in the tepid plasma of
unstructured experience. (35)

But this takes Carver at his best, and in all of his collections there are
stories that only devoted and generous readers could characterize as hav-
ing mythic or archetypal traces of anything. More typically, Carver's min-
imalism appears to deconstruct self-consciously the idea of an anagogie
dimension as characters watch insects in moonlight or drink several bot-
tles of champagne each day to wean themselves from hard liquor. On the
other hand, even in the early collections there are a few stories in which
characters at least dimly guess at lives fuller than their own.
Though Carver built his early reputation on strikingly small and pes-
simistic stories, many readers responded with relief as soon as a few stories
showed a contrary impulse. Almost all academic commentary on Carver
focuses on two stories from Cathedral , the title story and "A Small, Good
Thing." William Stull's "Beyond Hopelessville" looks at "A Small, Good
Thing," a revision of the old stripped-down story "The Bath," and concludes,
in a paraphrase of Thomas Hardy's "Hap" (1898), that "what Carver first
published as an existentialist tale of crass casualty he . . . offers anew as a
story of spiritual rebirth, a minor masterpiece of humanist realism" (13). I
make similar points about "The Train," "A Small, Good Thing," and "Cathe-
dral" in my essays in Studies in Short Fiction ; and in a recent essay, "Narra-
tive Displacement and Literary Faith: Raymond Carver's Inheritance from
Flannery O'Connor," Barbara Lonnquist decides that "perhaps [Carver's]
final inheritance from Flannery O'Connor has been her invincible faith, af-
ter all" (150), suggesting that his most powerful and widely anthologized
stories assert that no situation is ever really hopeless.
In "Finding the Words: The Struggle for Salvation in the Fiction of Ray-
mond Carver," Kathleen Westfall Shute assesses Carver's early career with
the comment that his characters "were bankrupted, pink-slipped, often left
to stumble alone through a detritus that was at core artificial and pecu-
liarly American" (1). They were, she writes, "enmeshed in the unexamined
life" and generally victims of an America that is "a netherland of work-
place, home, and shopping centers" (3). In analyzing two major revisions,
however- "The Bath," which becomes "A Small, Good Thing," and the orig-

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Mark A. R. Facknitz

inai and expanded versions of "So Much Water So Close to Home"- Shute
emphasizes that the revisions reveal a stymied impulse to seek the redemp-
tive moment or recognition that, in her words, finally "resolves nothing be-
yond the expression of [a] desire to confront the 'mystery' " (9). But small
victories amount to large gestures in Carver's work, and, particularly for
readers who followed his course from story to story through the seventies
and eighties, the emergence of a theme of salvation meant a considerable
readjustment, for what had been a landscape of spiritual emptiness now
held the minimal but very real promise of spiritual discovery.
The earliest of such interpretations were abetted by rumors that at
long last Carver had come to grips with alcoholism. To put a cap on such
hypotheses, in the Paris Review interview Carver stated that "Cathedral"
was "totally different in conception and execution" from his previous work.
He went on to comment:

When I wrote "Cathedral" I experienced this rush and I felt,

'This is what it's all about, this is the reason we do this.' It was
different than the stories that had come before. There was an
opening up when I wrote the story. I knew I'd gone as far the
other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting down to the bone.
Any farther in that direction and I'd be at a dead end- writing
stuff and publishing stuff I wouldn't want to read myself, and
that's the truth. (Fires 204)

In other words, what had been a technical manner and a means of discov-
ering the essences of stories had become a personal dead end, a reductio
ad absurdum of craft and heart. Clearly, in "Cathedral" and "A Small,
Good Thing" Carver turns away from the cramped determinism of previ-
ous works. Yet, there was no golden age. Once Carver's language and
vision offered his characters a new breadth of being, there arose a new
threat, the great risk that they would be incapable of making anything of
their freedom. Where once characters could resign themselves to the silly
despondencies of complete loss, in the new mode they had to wonder anx-
iously when their chance to be lifted out of misery and meaninglessness
would come.
In the fall of 1987, Carver had two-thirds of his left lung removed, then
underwent radiation treatments for cancer that made work difficult in the
last year of his life (Kellerman). Six months before, he had delivered the
manuscript of his most recent collection to his editor (Stull, personal commu-
nication). Without knowing it, Carver was selecting for posterity his favorite
stories as well as seven previously uncollected stories. In Where I'm Call-
ing From: New and Selected Stories , two of the new works, "Intimacy" and
"Whoever Was Using This Bed," show Carver seeming to regress to a pre-
Cathedral manner, indulging himself in the kind of torpid kookiness that

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 Critic 52:1-2

characterized Will You Please Be Quiet , Please? and What We Talk About
When We Talk About Love. Indeed, the stories read like self-parodies. But
in other of the new stories, Carver is taking risks and seeking a plenitude
comparable to that he achieves in "A Small, Good Thing" and "Cathedral."
For example, the narrator of "Boxes" finds the sudden equanimity required
to address his neurotic and deeply unhappy mother as "Dear." The pro-
tagonist of "Elephant," another epiphanic story, experiences an ambivalent
but powerful rush of freedom from guilt and responsibility. However, set
beside the earlier redemptive stories, these provide markedly less closure
and more ambiguity. If anything, they are intent on placing insight in a
wholly ironic and inferior mode, rejecting the optimism of the previous
epiphanic stories in favor of a more cynical view that a fortunate few fools
are occasionally possessed by sudden bliss.
Two other stories, "Blackbird Pie" and "Errand," a biographical fantasy
on the death of Anton Chekhov, seem to mark a new and more sophis-
ticated tendency in Carver's work, in particular a willingness to seek his
characters outside the lower classes in late twentieth-century America. In
"Blackbird Pie," Carver uses a distinctly antiminimalist voice, the only clear
instance in his work when he distinguishes between narrator and implied
author. In "Blackbird Pie," Carver's protagonist struggles with the discrep-
ancy between the "plain" facts of the past and the inescapable but incredible
events of the present. In "Errand," Carver himself abolishes the lines be-
tween biography and fiction, shifting imperceptibly from history, through
possibility, to speculation. In each of these stories, Carver achieves some-
thing new, and most important he does it in spite of the menace of an old
fatuity that "Intimacy" and "Whoever Was Using This Bed" do not elude.
In "Menudo," Carver confronts the threat of senselessness head on. He
works with old themes: adultery, alcoholism, insomnia, the febrility of
memory, and the lurking menace of meaninglessness. In the story, a man
wanders the house while his wife sleeps. He looks across the street to the
house of Amanda, his lover, and he imagines her sitting in pink slippers
in a leather chair with full ashtrays around her. He sees, in short, a few
physical appurtenances but nothing of her, and he reflects with glib irony,
"We're nice people, all of us, to a point" (339). As he waits for morning, the
narrator recalls a past whose pernicious patterns seem to be reasserting
themselves. Currently in his second marriage, he watches it break up
in a way similar to the first. His first wife, whom he calls "this girl I
started out with in life, this sweet thing, this gentle soul" (342), had become
increasingly alienated as the marriage deteriorated and had thrown herself
into an arcane quest for meaning. The narrator remembers that "she
wound up going to fortune-tellers, palm readers, crystal ball gazers , looking
for answers, trying to figure out what she should do with her life" (342-43).
In fact, she became so controlled by her appetite for meaning that she quit
her teaching job, wore weird clothing, and tried to levitate, as if the ability

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Mark A. R. Facknitz

to rise physically implied the ability of the spirit to transcend uncertainty

and hurt. No sooner does the narrator relate the first wife's search than
he betrays the emptiness of his own spirit:

When Molly and I were growing up together, she was a part

of me and sure, I was a part of her, too. We loved each other.
It was our destiny. I believed in it myself. But now I don't
know what to believe in. I'm not complaining, simply stating
a fact. I'm down to nothing. And I have to go on like this.
No destiny. Just the next thing meaning whatever you think it
does. Compulsion and error, just like everyone else. (343)

The narrator of "Menudo" appears to be a perfect candidate for the kind

of transforming insight granted to the narrator of "Cathedral" and to the
Weisses of "A Small, Good Thing."
In fact, the open question that provides this plot with its forward motion
is whether or not the poor soul will be handed understanding. As he drinks
warm milk and watches the house across the street, the narrator does
penance, poking away at some guilt left from a bit of stinginess that his
mother's sudden death made it impossible for him to reconcile, and then
he falls into a recollection of his drinking days:

One night I was at my friend Alfredo's house, a bunch of us

drinking and listening to records. I didn't care any longer what
happened to me. Everything, I thought, that could happen had
happened. I felt unbalanced. I felt lost. (347)

He is overtaken by a bad case of the shakes, and to calm and nourish

him Alfredo sets about making a pot of menudo. But as the stew simmers,
the narrator is overpowered by the alcohol. He goes into a spare room,
passes out, sleeps until midday, and wakes to find that all the menudo is
eaten and everyone is gone. In "Cathedral," a revelation comes to a booze-
blunted creature, giving him through human touch fundamental insight
into the spaciousness of the human spirit, and in "A Small, Good Thing"
Ann and Howard Weiss begin to have their terrible grief alleviated by the
power of several obvious symbols of the Eucharist, particularly the bread
the once villainous baker serves them. But there is no such communion in
"Menudo." The narrator and Alfredo drift apart, the gap between them as
unbridgeable as those between the narrator and his mother, his first wife,
and, now, his second wife.
"Menudo" is not about salvation but about a soul who waits for it, wants
it, and needs it, but misses his few slim chances. Indeed, this narrator
seems to be a holdover from Carver's early fiction, for though he has dried
himself out, he continues to be the victim of fate and desire, driven toward
one woman while still in love with another. For all his will-power, he

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 Critic 52:1-2

is unable to conquer the dreadful anomie that he once escaped through

drinking. Within the boundaries of the story, there is no hope for a bright
new prospect. Instead, at dawn we find him acting like a postmodern
Candide, raking his own yard and then, because he must do something
while waiting, moving next door to rake the Baxters' yard. But Baxter,
"a decent, ordinary guy," has no idea how to interpret the presence of his
neighbor in his front yard early in the morning, though of course there
may be lunacy and danger in it. As Baxter pulls off in his car, he raises
his hand in what "could be a salute or a sign of dismissal" (350). In the
manner of the blind man in "Cathedral," the gesture could be a blessing,
but for the moment the narrator cannot tell. He has been on his knees
pulling leaves into a bag, and he waves back, or rather makes a gesture
that he calls "not a wave, exactly, but close to it." Someone he does not
recognize drives by and "gives his horn a friendly little tap," and the story
closes with the narrator crossing the street in the direction of his lover's
house.
This world is potentially compassionate, but the main characters of
"Menudo," "Blackbird Pie," "Boxes," and "Elephant" must live in doubt,
offered and offering obscure signs, crossing streets without a clear sense of
purpose and under the threat that they are simply making old mistakes over
again. In their ambivalence, then, these stories appear to be a return to an
old minimalist manner and message. But like Carver's redemptive stories,
they take their time, they furnish themselves with neighbors, friends, lovers,
food, night and dawn, mysticism and doubt- that is to say, the symbolic
conditions necessary to a redemptive story- and they have heroes who
need understanding and freedom as badly as anyone could. Finally, these
new protagonists deserve saving, for they struggle- with varying degrees
of awareness- to keep themselves open to the sudden invasion of feeling
and meaning. In "Menudo," the man cultivates his own garden and his
neighbor's, hoping for the revelation that, in this best of all possible worlds,
there is ultimately some peace for the lonely sufferer.
But does any of this mean that there really is such a thing as minimal-
ism, either as a literary school of which Carver may be a founder though
not, ultimately, a fellow, or as a set of techniques that some writers em-
ploy in greater and lesser measures, depending on the local demands of
the story they are writing? So slippery is the question, and so firm is the
assumption that there is such a thing, that in 1985 the Mississippi Review
devoted a double issue to minimalism without really offering a satisfactory
definition. John Barth, though able to offer a paradigm for minimalism in
Bauhaus architecture and the sculpture of Gaudier-Brezska and Constan-
tine Brancusi, was unable to find a theoretical center to a literary manner
unlike his own but toward the practitioners of which he felt considerable
sympathy. Potential literary minimalisms were so plentiful that the term
was useless:

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Mark A. R. Facknitz

There are minimalisms of style: a stripped-down vocabulary;

a stripped-down syntax that avoids periodic sentences, serial
predications and complex subordinating constructions; a strip-
ped-down rhetoric that may eschew figurative language alto-
gether; a stripped-down, non-emotive tone. And there are min-
imalisms 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. (2)

Frederick Barthelme, in "On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills

Bean," comes as close as anyone to accepting the heavy /light mantle of
minimalism. The essay is funny and autobiographical, and so the assump-
tion that the crucial moment for contemporary fiction came in a series of
workshops in the MFA program at Johns Hopkins in the early seventies is
not to be taken seriously. The general import of Barthelme's argument is a
different matter, however. For Barthelme, most of the neorealists who are
accused of minimalism came of age in the sixties, a slap-happy time when
stapling a bag of dirt inside a text "recontextualized the prose" (25), but
while the major writers of the decade (Barth, Hawkes, Gass, and Pynchon,
for example) could pull off self-reflexive fiction with flair, the efforts of their
imitators led to a disillusionment with a literary art that seemed ever more
zany and frail. Thus, the generation of writers who began to publish in the
seventies sought a manner that was free of clowning and a realism free of
the taint of big ideas, to them a lamentable quality of late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century fiction. Like Hemingway, Barthelme sees fiction as
a way of putting readers into the lives of characters with the minimum pos-
sible mediation, and he comments that "mostly what's going on with this
new fiction" is that writers and their preferred readers are "rolling down
the windows, trying to get a good whiff of what's out there" (27). The
objective, finally, is as old as Sophocles and Aristophanes: to leave room
for the spectator's imagination, and to break the heart or to make it sing.
There is a minimalism at least in the sense that readers, enthusiastic
as well as deprecatory, think that there is. But minimality is teleological,
not technical, and its threat is not a local hazard of contemporary letters
but a general and menacing character of the age. In this sense, it appears
in the works of Jayne Anne Phillips, in which young characters speak in a
discourse of psychological platitudes, the most common form of closure a
vague regret over the large losses that characters do not have the courage
or desire to confront; in the works of Jay Mclnerney, in which glitz is
all one gets and all one has the right to want; in the works of Richard
Ford, in which violence and defeat often appear the a priori conditions of
human life; and in the works of Bobbie Ann Mason, in whose stories the
television is always on, and whose characters adopt the meager nostrums

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 Critic 52:1-2

of Phil Donahue and the commonplace values of commercials as if they

constituted all the spiritual integument one could need or want.
My argument is that in Carver's career the menace migrated from world
view to the world itself, and the representative late stories function as
tragic allegories in which large souls strive for freedom in a world of ex-
cessively narrow formal constraints. Where minimalism was before a lit-
erary manner, a technique whose possibilities drove meaning to the limit
of terrifying silliness, minimalism defined as a narrowness or poverty of
spirit has become the chief threat in Carver's work. Minimalism now rep-
resents the ultimate antagonist, a nihilistic monster that has the potential
of overwhelming the protagonist with silence, stillness, and senselessness.
No longer is minimalism Hemingway's manner of suggesting the world's
mysterious extensity by what is left out; instead, Carver's recent fictions
press forward as if driven by the fear of discovering that there is no mys-
tery and that minimalist technique may be wholly sufficient to describe the
truth of the human heart. Thus, the implied reader shares the position of
Carver's nameless narrators, waiting to see the rescue but departing the
story without knowing for certain what any of the signs have meant.

Note

I wish to express my thanks to the editors and readers of the CEA Critic, as well as to
the audience that heard and commented on an early version of this essay at the Twentieth-
Century Literature Conference in Louisville in 1989. I am particularly grateful to William
Stull, who read the essay in manuscript and offered valuable insights and references.

Works Cited

Atlas, James. "Less Is Less." Atlantic Monthly June 1981: 96-98.

Barth, John. MA Few Words About Minimalism." New York Times Book Review 28 Dec. 1986:
1-2, 25.
Barthelme, Frederick. "On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean." New York Times
Book Review 3 Apr. 1988: 1, 25-27.
Bell, Madison. "Less Is Less." Harpers Apr. 1986: 64-69.
Bellamy, Joe David. " Will You Please Be Quiet, Please T Harpers Bookletter 26 Apr. 1976.
Campbell, Ewing. "Raymond Carver and the Literature of Subtraction." Balcones Review 1.1
(1987): 69-71.
Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983.

Press, 1988.
Delbanco, Nicholas, ed. "A Symposium on Contemporary Am
terly Review 26.4 (1987): 679-758.
Dunn, Robert. "Fiction That Shrinks from Life." New York T
1, 24-25.
Facknitz, Mark. " The Calm,' 'A Small, Good Thing,' and 'Ca
and the Rediscovery of Human Worth." Studies in Short

Studies in Short Fiction 22.3 (1985): 345-47.

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Mark A. R. Facknitz

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner's, 1964.

Kellerman, Stewart. "Grace Has Come into My Life." New York Times Book Review 15 May
1988: 40.
Lonnquist, Barbara. "Narrative Displacement and Literary Faith: Raymond Carver's Inher-
itance from Flannery O'Connor." Since Flannery O'Connor : Essays on the Contemporary
American Short Story. Ed. Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb: Western
Illinois UP, 1987.
Mississippi Review 40-41 (1985). Ed. Kim A. Herzinger.
O'Connor, Frank. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. New York: Harper-Colophon,
1985.
Pope, Dan. "The Post-Minimalist American Story or What Comes After Carver?" The Gettys-
burg Review 1.2 (1988): 331-42.
Robinson, Marilynne. "Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds." New York Times Book
Review 15 May 1988: 1, 35, 40-41.
Shute, Kathleen Westfall. "Finding the Words: The Struggle for Salvation in the Fiction of
Raymond Carver." The Hollins Critic 24.5 (1987): 1-9.
Stull, William. "Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver. Philological Quar-
terly 64. 1 (1985): 1-15.

James Madison University

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