AMERICAN LITERARY MINIMALISM by ROBERT CHARLES
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AMERICAN LITERARY MINIMALISM by ROBERT CHARLES CLARK (Under the Direction of James Nagel) ABSTRACT American Literary Minimalism stands as an important yet misunderstood stylistic movement. It is an extension of aesthetics established by a diverse group of authors active in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that includes Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. Works within the tradition reflect several qualities: the prose is “spare” and “clean”; important plot details are often omitted or left out; practitioners tend to excise material during the editing process; and stories tend to be about “common people” as opposed to the powerful and aristocratic. While these descriptors and the many others that have been posited over the years are in some ways helpful, the mode remains poorly defined. The core idea that differentiates American Minimalism from other movements is that prose and poetry should be extremely efficient, allusive, and implicative. The language in this type of fiction tends to be simple and direct. Narrators do not often use ornate adjectives and rarely offer effusive descriptions of scenery or extensive detail about characters’ backgrounds. Because authors tend to use few words, each is invested with a heightened sense of interpretive significance. Allusion and implication by omission are often employed as a means to compensate for limited exposition, to add depth to stories that on the surface may seem superficial or incomplete. Despite being scattered among eleven decades, American Minimalists share a common aesthetic. They were not so much enamored with the idea that “less is more” but that it is possible to write compact prose that still achieves depth of setting, characterization, and plot without including long passages of exposition. Like the haiku poets who stand among their influences, they draw attention to their art rather than themselves. In other words, precision and craftsmanship transcend the allure of egoism. Writers working within the tradition did not invent new techniques but rather used a unique combination of storytelling methods to an extreme degree. When successful, their stories and novels evoke an intellectual and emotive richness not readily apparent at first glance. INDEX WORDS: Minimalism, Dirty Realism, Imagism, Impressionism, Naturalism, Realism, Amy Lowell, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Jay McInerney, Susan Minot, Sandra Cisneros, Cormac McCarthy, In Our Time, Can Grande’s Castle, Cathedral, Bright Lights, Big City, Monkeys, Caramelo, The Road AMERICAN LITERARY MINIMALISM by ROBERT CHARLES CLARK B. A., Wheaton College, 1997 M. A., Furman University, 2003 M. A., The University of Georgia, 2006 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2011 © 2011 Robert Charles Clark All Rights Reserved AMERICAN LITERARY MINIMALISM by ROBERT CHARLES CLARK Major Professor: James Nagel Committee: Hugh Ruppersburg Richard Menke Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2011 iv DEDICATION For Heather v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. James Nagel, for his patience, guidance, and encouragement. I would also like to thank Sammy, Annika, and Joji for giving me joy and inspiration. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 Introduction....................................................................................................................1 2 Amy Lowell, Polyphonic Prose, and the Emergence of American Minimalism.........50 3 L’Ancienne: Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time..........................................................91 4 A Chekhov-Hemingway Amalgamation: Raymond Carver’s Cathedral..................140 5 Popular Minimalism: Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Susan Minot’s Monkeys.................................................................................................................180 6 The Expansion of the Minimalist Tradition: Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ...........................................................................................244 7 Conclusion .................................................................................................................297 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................333 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION American Literary Minimalism stands as an important yet misunderstood stylistic movement. While Cynthia Whitney Hallett, James Dishon McDermott, and John Barth concluded that it began in earnest after 1950, it is an extension of aesthetics established by a diverse group of authors active in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that includes Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound. Hallett, Barth, and others generally agree that works within the tradition reflect several qualities: the prose is “spare” and “clean”; important plot details are often omitted or left out; practitioners tend to excise material during the editing process; and stories tend to be about “common people” as opposed to the powerful and aristocratic. While these descriptors and the many others that have been posited over the years are in some ways helpful, the mode remains poorly defined. The core idea that differentiates American Minimalism from other movements is that prose and poetry should be extremely efficient, allusive, and implicative. The language in this type of fiction tends to be simple and direct. Narrators do not often use ornate adjectives and rarely offer effusive descriptions of scenery or extensive detail about characters’ backgrounds. Because authors tend to use few words, each is invested with a heightened sense of interpretive significance. Allusion and implication by omission are often employed as a means to compensate 2 for limited exposition, to add depth to stories that on the surface may seem superficial or incomplete. Ernest Hemingway is a dominant figure in American Minimalism because his work consistently reflects the major tenets of the mode. From the brief inter-chapters of In Our Time to his late short story “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something,” Hemingway produced fiction that is efficient, allusive, and implicative. He affirmed many of the principles of his one- time mentor Ezra Pound, stressing the importance of authorial self-effacement and direct treatment of subject. His narrators are non-intrusive in that they tell stories without drawing attention to themselves. In Chapter 16 of Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway wrote that “prose is architecture, not interior design, and the Baroque is over. For a writer to put his own intellectual musings . into the mouths of artificially constructed characters which are more remunerative when issued as people in a novel is good economics, perhaps, but does not make literature.”1 Hemingway was commenting on the monetary benefit of publishing fiction versus collections of less lucrative non-fiction essays, but he was also talking about removing reference to himself. The magnitude of his devotion to craft, the precision with which he approached his technique, cannot be overstated. While many imitators followed in the decade after his death, it was not until the 1960s that authors such as Raymond Carver began to seriously revisit Hemingway’s important “Iceberg Theory,” an articulation of his method of implication by omission: 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 thought the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eight of it being above 3 water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. 2 Perhaps the greatest difficulty with Hemingway’s principle is that he conjectured that readers would have a “feeling” about what is missing; the felt absence should not lead to confusion but a desire for further investigation of elements both inside and outside of the text. Hemingway’s Minimalist novel The Sun Also Rises is replete with examples of how the “Iceberg Theory” operates. A particularly good instance occurs in Chapter 7 when Jake Barnes, the protagonist-narrator, and Lady Brett Ashley enter a popular Montmartre cabaret in 1920s Paris called Zelli’s.3 After dancing for a time, the “nigger drummer” waves “at Brett” and the two engage in a brief exchange: “Hahre you?” “Great.” “Thaats good.” He was all teeth and lips. “He’s a great friend of mine,” Brett said. “Damn good drummer.”4 Although this conversation does not seem important, Hemingway implies much. Brett acknowledges that she is friends with the man, and given her sexual promiscuity throughout the novel, Hemingway suggests that they have at one point been romantically involved. The details of the relationship are omitted: Hemingway does not explain how long ago the two were together or the depth of their commitment. In the context of the Iceberg Theory, the conversation represents what resides above the surface, the facts of Brett’s relationship part of what lies below. Additionally, there are broader implications given that Brett and the drummer are not of the same race. While Paris was less divided