more lit/rock synergy

The whole minimalism v maximalism debate seems to me to have petered out. My uncharitable side thinks that those who championed Carver (mainly middle class undergrads) liked his prose because it was easy to read and played to their fantasies of escaping the middle classes and longings for an "authentic" lifestyle (witness the slacker generation). The notion that one style is better than another seems to me to be especially retarded. Styles aren't things that are good or bad in and of themselves, but there may be better examples within certain styles.

But then again maybe I'm wrong; sometimes it's fun to think of writers' work in relation to the min/max debate. Such as: Is Sebald a minimalist or a maximalist? Discuss

The Gass quote comes from his essay "The Concept of Character in Fiction," in which he writes ~

"We do visualize, I suppose. Where did I leave my gloves? And then I ransack a room in my mind until I find them. But the room I ransack is abstract--a simple schema. I leave out the drapes and the carpet, and I think of the room as a set of likely glove locations. The proportion of words which we can visualize is small, but quite apart from that, another barrier to the belief that vivid imagining is the secret of a character's power is the fact that when we watch the pictures which a writer's words have directed us to make, we miss their meaning, for the point is never the picture. It also takes concentration, visualization does--takes slowing down; and this alone is enough to rule it out of novels, which are never waiting, always flowing on."

Then follows a particularly florid passage from Under the Volcano.

Gass resumes ~

"And so forth. Do you have all that? the salmonberries and the thimbleberries? I'm afraid you'll be all day about it. One reason is that our imaginings are mostly imprecise. They are vague and general. Even when colored, they're gray."

Now, taking Gass at his word, I wonder how much description is merely a sales-gimmick, so to speak, a display of competent language skills to convince the reader the writer knows what s/he's doing. An avenue to establish and maintain authority. A lulling, or a distrcating, the reader into considering the story, or at least entertaining the story while the reader daydreams about other things in addition. Any other ideas along these lines about the purpose of description?

brilliant

I guess I wasn't really serious when I asked whether Sebald is min/max. My point was that I think the paucity of the distinction is revealed by the ability to claim (and I think you can) that someone like Sebald can be considered both minimal and maximal.

Don't get me wrong, I love W Gass; but I don't think he's right on this one. (It sounds to me like he's re-presenting Sartre's comments on the phenomenology of reading, from ??? gee I almost had it but now it's gone). Most of the time Gass' flippantly poetic prose pulls me in, but sometimes I think he uses it to conceal a poor argument. And here would be a case in point. I think if you intuit what it is like to read a vividly descriptive section of prose, you won't find it to be an "abstract... simple schema". That sounds to me more like a crude diagram/stick figure. I think if anything, reading descriptive prose elicits things (call them what you want... qualia, sense impressions etc.) which are "like" visual experiences, in the sense of giving the impression of colour/contrast... if anything they seem to me to be like visual echoes. But I happily agree that they're not specific, but the issue of specificity has to be separated from the issue of visual-like versus non-visual.

As for suggesting some aesthetic principle for/against elaborate/fancy description: such a thing is anathema to me. If a writer feels more inclined to one style versus another, then all that I care about is how well they do it, and whether it feels to me to be an authentic extension of their sensibility (or something).

Phew... sorry about all that

"As for suggesting some aesthetic principle for/against elaborate/fancy description: such a thing is anathema to me. If a writer feels more inclined to one style versus another, then all that I care about is how well they do it, and whether it feels to me to be an authentic extension of their sensibility (or something)."

I can't take Gass to task since I haven't read enough of his work. I remain curious, though, whether he is on to something about the effect of description. My instinct is to agree with you, but in reflecting on my own fiction reading experience since reading that Gass essay, I've observed my mind wandering quite a bit while scenes are being described. I'm still wondering whether what's happening with lush prose, say Proust's, is that, while certainly I am absorbing it, and visualizing the verbal cues, I'm also concurrently daydreaming and reflecting on my own life. This is reading into Gass's statement, but nevertheless I'm still questioning how much lush prose is regarded as "better writing" owes to the degree to which it lulls us into a sort of stupor, or to put it another way, serves as an excuse for us to engage in deep reflection. As in, when we're reading George Eliot, or James Joyce, what we're really doing is using those dense texts as excuses to think about our own situations. Then the more minimal the style, the better it would be, since it would be less distracting, and make for a more pure reading experience, as opposed to a starting off point, and background theme, for introspection.

Which is maybe what's missing from Gass' take, at least as I'm perceiving it. Lazy description can just be a maddening way of filling space, cataloging a setting rather than actually invoking it. But purposeful description is about something more than just painting pictures in the reader's mind; it's about the effect of the language itself. Writers are not painters, and the experience of reading is of course different than the experience of seeing a painting or photograph. The words are the only means of representation, and so they become to some degree the things they represent, and the way they're worked and combined or split apart, the rhythms and patterns of the syllables and sentences, dictates the effectiveness of the representation. And that can be done badly or well, with many words or few.