Sot-Weed

[barbie gaze]

Rekated to this notion of Grace, to less and more, to Bakhtin and
Scatalogicals:

A FEW WORDS ABOUT MINIMALISM

Barth, in NY Times Books, Dec. 1986

The medieval Roman Catholic Church recognized two opposite roads to grace:
the via negativa of the monk's cell and the hermit's cave, and the via
affirmativa of immersion in human affairs, of being n the world whether o
not one is of it. Critics have aptly borrowed those terms to characterize
the difference between Mr. Beckett, for example, and his erstwhile master
James Joyce, himself a maximalist except in his early works. Other than
bone-deep disposition, which is no doubt the great determinant, what
inclines a writer - sometimes almost a cultural generation of writers - to
the Negational Path?

For if there is much to admire in artistic austerity, its opposite is not
without merits and joys as well. There are the minimalist pleasures of
Emily Dickinson - ''Zero at the Bone'' - and the maximalist ones of Walt
Whitman; the low-fat rewards of Samuel Beckett's ''Texts for Nothing'' adn
the high-calorie delights of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's ''One Hundred Years
of Solitude.'' There truly are more ways than one to heaven. As between
minimalism and its opposite, I pity the reader - or the writer, or the age
- too addicted to either to savor the other.
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