Literary Minimalism and Jean François Lyotard

Literary Minimalism and Jean François Lyotard

1. Anne Beattie has been called a writer of minimalist fiction. Jean François Lyotard’s theories concerning postmodern expression have many similarities to this style. In this paper some of Lyotard’s philosophical contributions to postmodernism will be presented as mission statements for, and/or an explanations of, the minimalist style.

2. First, minimalism as a style will be explained through examples from Anne Beattie’s story "Girl Talk" along with other commentary. To begin, minimalism, as Madison Smart Bell wrote

. . . may fairly be described as a school because its representative work contains, as if by prescription, a number of specific elements: A trim, ‘minimal style, an obsessive concern for surface detail, a tendency to ignore or eliminate distinctions among the people it renders and a studiedly deterministic, at times nihilistic, vision of the world’ (Rebein 34).

3. Indeed, the minimalist style of writing is one that lacks distinct amounts of color. It is this tedious pen that writes stories such as "Girl Talk," by Anne Beattie, in which a pregnant woman narrates her experience at her boyfriend’s mother’s birthday party. The attention to surface detail that Bell notes can be seen Beattie’s almost page long description of each of the characters’ toes sitting at a table after dinner. The narrator describes each person in detail: "The twins that are not twins have baby toes that curl under" "Craig has square toenails" "Barbara has long toenails" (31). In this segment there does not seem to be anything below the surface --such as social commentary or opinion of humanity--just feet. This devotion to almost pointless description without commentary fits the minimalist style, as Robert Rebein says in his book Hicks, Tribes, and Dirty Realists that minimalism "is neither insightful nor even reasonably articulate" (37).

4. This lack of articulation can also be seen in the opening lines of the story, "Barbara is her chaise. Something is wrong with the pool. . ." (Beattie 28). These lines merely describe things lazily and without meaning, not even using the description that is devoted to toes later in the story.

5. Bell also mentions an aspect of nihilism in regard to minimalism. Among its definitions, Webster’s Dictionary defines nihilism as the belief that "all existence is senseless and there is no possibility of an objective basis for truth." This definition can be applied to minimalism in that the writing style never purports to reveal a truth about the world it creates.