The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
Please vote in the Forum Structure Poll. Polling will close at 2PM EST on January 21, 2025.
Maximalism: to the Max!
Podly
you unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered User regular
you unzipped me! it's all coming back! i don't like it!Registered User regular
In the 1600's, The Baroque took the torch from the Renaissance in artistic taste. Renaissance stressed composure, limit, and definition. The Baroque is marked for it's wild exaggeration and emphasis on glory. Thus, this
turned into this:
Something very similar is happening in today's art world - most clearly seen in literature. The minimalism of writers like Carver and Pahalniuk are being succeeded by the large, sprawling works of Pynchon and Wallace. This is not just the world of art turning, however. Minimalist design is being superseded by very maximalist versions. Contrast the paintings, done by Karen Sanders (Wallpiece)
with Beatriz Millhaze's "Succulent Eggplants"
But again, I believe that the biggest differences can be seen in literature. Raymond Carver's story, currently "Little Things" is roughly the same length as David Foster Wallce's "Good People", but the effect could not be more different.
I think that one of the main problems with post-modernism is that it is more interested in reflexive recursion and detachment over pathos and emotional investment, but I find that the maximalist works are much more capable of conveying human experience than minimalist works, which I consider to be one of the essential goals of art.
And the world is probably only going to become more maximalist: wikipedia, file sharing, blogs, and internet forums all lead to an increase in purpose and information. The internet itself is probably the ultimate maximalist work.
I really don't know how to end this.
Trieste - Paris - Zurich
1914-1921
turned into this:
Something very similar is happening in today's art world - most clearly seen in literature. The minimalism of writers like Carver and Pahalniuk are being succeeded by the large, sprawling works of Pynchon and Wallace. This is not just the world of art turning, however. Minimalist design is being superseded by very maximalist versions. Contrast the paintings, done by Karen Sanders (Wallpiece)
with Beatriz Millhaze's "Succulent Eggplants"
But again, I believe that the biggest differences can be seen in literature. Raymond Carver's story, currently "Little Things" is roughly the same length as David Foster Wallce's "Good People", but the effect could not be more different.
I think that one of the main problems with post-modernism is that it is more interested in reflexive recursion and detachment over pathos and emotional investment, but I find that the maximalist works are much more capable of conveying human experience than minimalist works, which I consider to be one of the essential goals of art.
And the world is probably only going to become more maximalist: wikipedia, file sharing, blogs, and internet forums all lead to an increase in purpose and information. The internet itself is probably the ultimate maximalist work.
I really don't know how to end this.
Trieste - Paris - Zurich
1914-1921
Podly on
0
Posts
No they aren't. Neener.
Add some substance to your argument and I'll add some to mine.
Man what? The range of styles, aesthetics, and creations during both of those periods have as broad a field as possible. Bernini and Boromini were both Baroque masters and equal to each other in every way except for Bernini's incredible capacity for assholishness, but they are extremely different in their aesthetics. The only real paradigm shift in the two labels eras is an approach towards creating movement rather than stability. Even then it doesn't hold true as a rule and baroque artists did not have any problem subduing their works out of respect or acquiesence to earlier masters.
As for today's zeitgeist I would say that we have a similiar range. There are the gaudy, diamond studded everything plated with gold yet there is also the elegance and subdued displays of wealth or consumption. You're simplifying things far too much and ignoring the overabundance of niches that our instantaneous telecommunications are allowing to thrive where they otherwise may have faltered.
The internet is FULL of minimalistic styles.
Notice how this forum isn't covered in little swirlies or other patterns? It's stark, simple, and functional, with just a hint of flair.
This is how most of the successful internet is, at least as far as Western sites I've seen go; many Asian websites I've seen tend to be a bit busier, with denser images and so forth.
Sure. Minimalism is written out of fear. It is a fear that there is nothing to say. It is an attempt to distance the writer from his subject, because the subject, by it's very nature of being foreign, the "other," is something that a minimalist author will never truly understand. The minimalist author sees himself as subject to the vicissitudes of an incomprehensible world. So, to avoid paranoia, they make even more distance. They present humanity as something to be photographed, glanced at with a sigh.
The maximalist may even embrace this paranoia, this break in the logic which guards their world, and crash other people's universe's. By running these tests, investigating things like the different ways to lob a tennis ball in Infinite Jest, the author widens his search in an attempt for epiphany, for understanding, for art.
Of course I'm oversimplifying. But what I'm trying to establish is that, for the first time in 60 years, minimalism isn't the de facto art. Artists are starting to challenge conventions that haven't really been moved in a very long time, despite how "provocative" a lot of minimalist art tried to be.
And compare Baroque music with the later Neoclassical music - the difference is most clear there.
Pynchon and Carver predated Pahluniuk and Wallace by, like, decades. I don't really see a progression at work here so much as distinct styles.
Well, I mean, Tristram Shandy is somewhat of a Maximalist book as well. Ulysses maybe too.
Those are just two well known guys. Since Becket, minimalism has been the dominant mode of writing. Pynchon, maybe Gaddis, and DeLillo are the probable exceptions. But the numbers of Maximalist writers are growing. Eggers, Zadie Smith, DFW, Foer (though I kind of think he sucks :P)
edit: har posted this before I saw your post. Interesting that we both mentioned DeLillo. He was kind of a mix though.
Where have you been for the last 50 years?
Alternative poast:
What is hung in a gallery is not the end all be all of art, and the tastes of various 'kingmaker' curators do not define all of art despite what they may want to believe.
Modernism has been dead and buried for decades. While contemporary designs may have kept some of its aesthetics or applied some of its principles in different ways they are by no means inherently a modernist work.
DeLillo is maximalist. Think Hysterical Realism. Nabokov is also kind of a hysterical realist in the sense that he would search small subjects (the butterflies in Ada) will trying to convey and express grand ideas through a number of characters in one novel.
Aesthetically, the non-idiotic sectors of the internet are mostly minimalist. I think the minimalist aesthetic is still overall dominant. This contributes to function as well; anybody can use Google because they don't have to load twelve animated gifs and embedded mp3s. But in function and nature I think I can see maximalism in play. The internet is, as you see, ultimately maximalist, crammed with all sorts of bits and flourishes and sections. However, maximalism does not necessarily imply chaos, and I cannot help but see the internet as an extremely chaotic entity.
As for literature, which is clearly the most important thing to discuss here, I'm not sure I agree with the idea of maximalism as conveying human experience more successfully. Someone like Hemingway can express the human experience masterfully with a tenth of the words of many other writers. A great deal of good, effective literature is letting the reader's mind fill in the gaps; describing every detail can only reduce the effect in some cases, because the words define and limit the sensation and experience that exists as an implied and full entity in the reader's mind. Such an experience, when delineated, is restricted; when left on its own it is free of restriction. Being exhaustive can be counter-productive.
On the other hand, human experience itself is not minimalistic. It is most definitely a thing of countless intricacies and details. The question is whether literature successfully evokes that experience with aminimalist or maximalist style.
Agreed. Sonnets and villanelles et al are around because it's so hard to work with a blank canvas. Restriction leads to new ideas. Works like those done by Pynchon and Wallace leave a LOT of room for failure. However, they also allow for works like The Divine Comedy when true craftsmanship and genius is at stake.
Academic circles mean fuckall.
Which is why the teacher I had who was a successful author? Whose sole sales don't come from making his students buy his book for his classes? Yeah. He writes Sci-fi : http://www.howardvhendrix.com/ .
But teaches in a school where you have to -explain- to the teachers that genre fiction isn't automatically trash.
People, overall, tend to prefer the middle ground. They don't want so much shit packed in to something that they can't discern it, but they still like a little descriptive fluff in there so they can visualize it and immerse themselves.
When guys like Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles started to make self parodies of moderism, minimalism became the dominant mode. Think of the works of people like Bret Easton Ellis. I don't think he's great, but his works are DEFINITELY minimalistically bent. Tobias Wolf. Michael Frayne.
I tend to have a weakness in this area for name dropping.
But there is a difference between restricting the reader and restricting the writer. A sonnet restricts the writer; its effect on the reader can be restrictive but not nearly so much. If anything I think that minimalism vs maximalism is matter of restricting the reader vs restricting the writer. Naturally each must work within a certain boundary, but I feel (to take Will's example) like I am getting into a much more restrictive realm when I read Rushdie than when I read Beckett.
Maximalist literature is much more dense and difficult than minimalist literature, but I think that might be a symptom of the times, as is so often the case with literature. With minimalism the difficulty lies in figuring out what the meaning is behind what the author isn't saying; with maximalism the difficulty lies in establishing what the author is saying at all. Obviously they both have a certain power, and there are enormously successful and excellent works of literature in both styles; I find it difficult to make a judgment that one is more "authentic" than the other, even if that judgment is made only in the context of the contemporary reader and field of literature.
My problem with your post was that you try to present Carver and Palahniuk's writing as representative of an era, and Pynchon and Wallace as representative of another. I'm not sure I agree with any of that. As to what you posted above, I couldn't disagree more. I see Carver as simply a master of the craft, someone who can distill an astounding amount of meaning into a, yeah, I guess you could say minimalistic economy of words. I consider A Small Good Thing the best short story I've ever read. There's no detachment from the subject there.
The irony is that A Small Good Thing is a revision of his earlier story, The Bath. The Bath was written while he was still under the thumb of Gordon Lish, his extremely minimalist and quite influential early editor. A Small Good Thing was Raymond Carver saying "fuck everything you made me do in this story, Lish, because now I'm fucking famous and I can get my draft published without going through you."
I like The Bath intensely more. A Small Good Thing is revoltingly saccharine. Worst ending ever.
Yeah, I just read the story, and now I have to come back here and agree with you.
Also, Little Things creeped me out on a visceral level.
It's the term coined by a guy who hates the stuff he's describing! You love Wallace, why are you embracing Wood's dismissing, perjorative name for that style of literature?
Anyway, I stand somewhere between you and Wood. I agree with you that there's something of-the-moment about maximalism: a world drowning in trivia and chockablock with distractions is going to be fertile ground for authors with magpie minds who can take all the bright shinys and assemble them into a nest, and I like a lot of the books this approach has produced: White Teeth for instance, or Kavalier and Clay, or even, in a lesser vein, something like Cryptonomicon. I think the times are ripe for polymaths like Nabokov, people who can cast their butterfly nets wide and assemble meaning from the ridiculous glut of information out there today. And I completely reject Wood's idea that the book "that knows a thousand things" necessarily "doesn't know one human being."
On the other hand:
A big book is a big commitment and I have to have commensurately more faith in the author to undertake one. If brilliant stories and powerful ideas can be related in three hundred pages then it's hard to make the case for the existence of thousand-page doorstops. Done poorly, maximalism can be an excuse for neurotic or showoffy authors to avoid pruning anything, like Grady Tripp's 2000-page novel in Wonder Boys or the huge fat crate Spaulding Gray used to tote Impossible Vacation around in.
On the other other hand:
There are terrible fat books, but go to a used/rare bookstore and gaze at all the terrible thin books written a few decades ago by people who thought they were Hemingway. Not so great authors. But brief authors. Mediocre brief authors writing about America. About America and about life. Life. Or the everpresent, pernicious background hum of English professors from small colleges writing books about English professors from small colleges. Those guys will never be accused of writing hysterical realism, but fuck if that shit doesn't bore me to tears.
Ultimately:
An author is good based on how well he observes the world around him and how well he relates it to us. I don't think discursion and digression are any more or less limiting than a puritan preoccupation with frugality. Both types of writing have always been with us and I shy away from the notion that one is more valid than the other - not to mention that I think they reflect the work of vastly different worldviews and I'd rather not have the literary establishment trying to pound big pegs into small holes or vice versa.
It is sublime humor to me that the only man on your campus recognized for his writing to the point you could call him "professional" has to explain to all the borderline unpublished writing teachers that what he's doing is valid.
I host a podcast about movies.
Minimalism isn't incompatible with genre writing. A story doesn't have to be about a Northeastern housewife deciding to divorce her husband in order to employ a minimalist aesthetic.
I must confess that I found the David Foster Wallace story in the OP unreadable. It employed a deadly combination of a verbose prose style and an affected manner. I don't think that such dense, stilted writing is necessary for the sake of vitality either--take George Saunders, who's been described as hyper-realistic. His writing has a sort of frenetic energy, and everything seems almost more real than it could be: everything is branded and commodified, for instance. However, his writing flows legibly. That's pretty damn important, and he doesn't sacrifice anything in the realm of vitality to make it happen.
Minimalism is my bag, as a general aesthetic. For one thing, I prefer the author to not do any of the masturbatory shit that people are 'breaking ground' with now, like breaking the fourth wall, or inserting cute little sketches of staplers. When I approach a story, it's fundamentally about experiencing something, and bells and whistles distract from that--and that applies to really aggressive prose styles as much as it does to silly experimental stuff. For another thing, I hate to have the moral of a story fed to me--I want to feel something because the story moves me, not because the author tells me to. That's precisely why I hate the end of A Small Good Thing--it's preachy and saccharine as hell. That's why I liked The Bath--it lets us feel the senselessness and horror of the world, and lets it break us down. It doesn't tell us to feel that way, it makes us feel that way.
Finally, I just appreciate minimalist prose aesthetically. It's more vivid and compelling to me.
I don't like everything that the minimalists did while they were in vogue, and I think a lot of it likely goes too far. I don't like getting rid of quotation marks in most cases, for instance (it feels as artificial and affected to me as turning the text upside down). Still, as a general style, I generally prefer it.
Also, this is babble.
Actually it is a bit of perfectly valid literary theory
It is simply couched in Podly's rather artsy language
It sounded like artsy sociology couched in bullshit
I don't really see anything about sociology in there. If anything it would be a bit closer to psychology.
Regardless, Poldy is talking about the relationship between subject and author, about the author's method of dealing with and investigating humanity/human experience, about the difficulty and even impossibility of truly understanding or expressing the experience or nature of another human being (something that informed Henry James's writing style to a great extent), and the difference in philosophy and function of the two styles when dealing with these issues. This is all pretty common and important stuff when examining a piece of literature, especially stylistically, since an author's view on these issues will inform their writing style so dramatically.
In that quote you'll also notice that he considers concision in a virtue, at least sometimes. I'm really curious why you feel the need to cut literature up into "minimalist" and "maximalist" and then assert the superiority of one over another. You won't find DFW saying anything but nice things for Raymond Carver, for instance, and Amy Hempel adores Rick Moody. There are no trenches dug between them except the ones critics imagine.
But . . . but his teachers love it!
I really enjoyed both of the stores in the OP, by the way. At the moment I'm not sure what to say about either of them, partially because I don't know much about literature.
Very true. Minimalism is actually rather standard in some popularly genre-related story types. Fables, in particular. Minimalism works -especially- well with genres, really, since genres have so many givens you can usually expect, so you don't have to explain things.
It's just that, on average, people like more atmosphere and description that minimalism generally grants.
Wouldn't be Harry Potter without the chocolate frogs, or something.
My personal issue with minimalism is that the champion of it, Hemingway, created some horribly bland worlds. Usually, when I read his works, my brain gives me a mental image as if the whole scene was done with line art cutouts.
I on the other hand get annoyed whenever an author restricts my imagination by telling me details that aren't relevant to the story. The offense can be something as simple as mentioning the color of a person's hair, but the ones that send me into borderline rage are the long-winded blocks of exposition common in much of genre fiction, particularly high fantasy.
This is about the extent of my thoughts on the matter.
O_o
So, wait, did you get upset when they mentioned that hobbits have curly hair?
Is that an irrelevant detail in your opinion? It's important to know something about hobbits just to know what hobbits are. Similarly, the color of a character's shirt can be a relevant detail, because it can tell something about his personality. Mentioning that a character has red hair can be relevant if that's what the main character notices about him or her; we learn something about the MC. When used properly, description and detail focuses the attention of the reader on something and highlights what's important. Used poorly, it's just distracting fluff. That's how I see it anyway.
It can also be difficult to figure out what is and is not important.