elimae

Minimalism
Deron Bauman

Minimalism is the effect of a conscious effort to present written elements with the fewest words necessary to deliver the maximum readable impact.

Scale is irrelevant to a definition of minimalism: a minimalist output might range, in the fictional, from the paragraph-length micro fiction, to a novel-length manuscript. Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms is an example of a traditional length novel (two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty pages) executed minimally (see three sections below.) Minimalism, therefore, is concerned with appropriate attention to detail at the sentence level more than with the length of the individual work.

Efficiency of effort, impact of result, attention to detail, precision of execution, relevance of description, care taken in production, skillful implementation of experience to practice, all are outcomes of, and reasons for, paying attention to and delivering from a minimalist approach.

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Gordon Lish, Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Diane Williams, Brian Evenson, Amy Hempel, Eugene Marten, Gary Lutz, Ben Marcus, and Ken Sparling are twentieth century practitioners of Minimalism. Exceptions: much of Carver's attention to detail can be attributed to Lish. Hannah's work, from Bats Out of Hell on, has tended away from the minimal, although, often, with positive results (see five sections below). The scale of Stein's work has ranged to outputs of great length (see two sections above.) Ernest Hemingway is mostly irrelevant to this conversation, because of issues of consistency, after A Farewell to Arms.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Examples of minimalism can be found in many written traditions, regardless of culture, contemporary or otherwise. The Epic of Gilgamesh is an example of a narrative transcribed from the oral tradition which, in its implementation, tends toward the minimal. Haiku, obviously, is an early example as well. Certain sentences and sections from even the largest works exhibit an attention to necessary detail that might rival the contemporary masters. And, religious, as well as political or journalistic passages are often notable for their clarity, precision and it. Minimalism, therefore, can be recognized in a variety of genres. Literature, perhaps counter-intuitively, is not its only source, and, as in the example of journalism, may be more ubiquitous, and therefore, transparent, than commonly thought.

As with any tendency, writers too devoted to a method may endanger their writing by causing a reaction in the reader of distrust due to a too conscious effort to mimic the effect of a particular style. Certain minimalist writers achieve a surface level of accomplishment which leaves the reader unengaged. James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake achieves the opposite effect. His attention to detail at the sentence level, even in the context of a book plus seven hundred pages in length, allows access to a multitude of implications, thoughts, histories, and interweavings without the delutionary effect of sentences that say something but mean nothing more than what it is they say.

Approaching the craft of writing with the knowledge, expectation, and vocation of efficiency informs a writer with the understanding of what is necessary in a sentence and what can be left behind so that the writer, at some point (hopefully), can leave exactly the right wrong thing included.

Don DeLillo (in some cases), Thomas Bernhard (in not so obvious ways), Guy Davenport, Cormac McCarthy (on occasion, and in the context of a detail), William Faulkner (in the sense of words well-placed (sometimes) for sound), Gabrial Garcia Marquez (for the same reasons, plus the creation of a viable genre), Saul Bellow (in association with craft), J.D. Salinger, certainly, for quite the same reason as Bellow (multiplied), and numerous other writers of craft, intelligence, and wit exhibit efficiencies of language, that, although not purely minimal, place them in a realm that begins to transcend the necessities for the genre.

(A proportion of the sentences in this essay overstep the boundaries of simplicity necessitated by a pure dedication to minimalism (this one, included.))