From the Archive: “Throwing Dirt on the Grave of Minimalism” — Roundtable Talk
By Alex Wexelman
American author Mary Gaitskill in 1988
Literary movements come and go. Literary figures less so. In 1988, at the Summer Writers' Festival at Columbia University, the Columbia Journal proposed holding a round-table discussion to address issues facing writers today. The panel brought together Madison Smartt Bell, Mary Gaitskill, Tom Jenks, Stephen Koch, and Meg Wolitzer. Held very soon after Raymond Carver kicked the bucket, this group of writers got together for a round-table discussion on Minimalist writing then in its decline.
But before we get into it, some background on Minimalism. Roughly a decade after it became the predominant style in the art world, Minimalism—a pared down writing style influenced by the likes of Ernest Hemingway—became a popular trend in literature. Carver was king, but writers such as Anne Beattie, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, Frederick Barthelme, and Cormac McCarthy became associated with the school that was seen as a reaction to the amped-up, zany, metafictional works of the New Fiction writers of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Defending the wayward movement, John Updike told Charlie Rose that while they were minimalist in style, they were not in feeling. (I cannot find the exact interview so please allow me this paraphrase.) This group that got together at Columbia was less interested in understanding than in driving in the stake. The talk is titled, “Throwing Dirt on the Grave of Minimalism” perhaps after what Bell said: “What we are doing here is composing the epitaph of this movement described as minimalism.” She went on to say, “I don't want to think of myself and my fellow human beings as being sort of quasi-faceless clones drifting around in this twilight zone," which for me, is the essential image of minimalism.”
Today, Minimalism is just another tool to draw upon. Writers in MFAs don’t want to adhere to one style lest they get accused of boxing themselves into a genre. Ask anyone at Columbia what type of writing they’re doing and they’ll reply, “literary fiction,” which is a fancy way of saying Realism of some sort. Reading this roundtable is fascinating because you can hear how exhausted Gaitskill, et al, are by the hegemony this movement had on the landscape of the 1980s. What the predominant style of today is is hard to say. When writing, and its readers, is so atomized, it’s hard to say if another panel like this will ever exist. So dig in. Enjoy the lambasting and excoriating words. It’s worth a read if even as a piece of bygone history.
