Minimal Thoughts: Cognition in the Wake of Slow Crisis

Accounts of minimalism's ascent in postwar American fiction vary, but one common scholarly perspective links the aesthetic with war fiction, specifically Vietnam War narratives and Ernest Hemingway's World War I short stories. Writing about minimalism in 1986, John Barth describes the Vietnam War — a "trauma literally and figuratively unspeakable" — as motivating certain prominent minimalist approaches. He explains, "'I don't want to talk about it' is the characteristic attitude of 'Nam' veterans in...fiction [and] among many of their real-life counterparts."1 Barth thus summarizes the perspective as mimetic, suggesting that doing justice to trauma's presumed unspeakability means elaborating an aesthetic that recreates this ineffability.2 In this perspective, minimalism just is the language of the Vietnam vet.

Mark McGurl might concur that minimalism is the language of the Vietnam vet, but he regards minimalism not primarily as a trauma aesthetic, but rather as a solution to a socio-pedagogical problem: how to train the many, many World War II veterans entering higher education with limited writing experience? As an allegedly sophisticated and accessible aesthetic, minimalism proved ideal for the "era of mass higher education." Given that these incoming students were encouraged to "write what you know," post-war creative writing pedagogy helped wed minimalism to trauma, and solidified the idea that minimalism, like modernist alienation, could best be understood as a response to war's social and individual distortions.3

Patricia Stuelke draws on McGurl's work to show how minimalism not only offered an accessible style through which to represent the Vietnam War, it also provided a means to depoliticize trauma and to avoid the moralism of "easy" anti-war fiction. For Stuelke, minimalism certainly operated as a mimetic aesthetic, figuring the broken white male psyche, but more importantly, it conveniently avoided moralistic war writing.4

What is vital about all of these accounts is that they center the negative space that minimalist fiction sets into relief. The critical interest in minimalism scrutinizes its omissions, which indicate something lost or hidden: the inability to discuss one's past, the inability to write well, the inability to be political. This deficiency might be valued positively, as Hemingway proposes: "If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened."5 But even so, the focus in these accounts emphasizes what the work leaves out­ ­­— formal training, anti-war politics, and, of course, trauma. 

The attention to absence remains true for both McGurl's and Stuelke's more socio-political theories of minimalism, but proves most salient for the mimetic theory of minimalism. As Barth implies, understanding minimalism mimetically means regarding it as an aesthetic of the unrepresentable, a retreat from language and representation that works by pointing to what isn't said, implicitly directing audience attention to narrative lacunae. And, in this paradigm, trauma is the ultimate negative space to which minimalism gestures by way of its rhythmically straightforward prose, simple sentences, fragmented narration, and dulled affect.

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Weike Wang and Jenny Offill are representative of a group of contemporary women novelists who take up a minimalist aesthetic not to gesture towards what is absent, but rather to render rumination, particularly speculative thinking, in the face of slow crisis.6 These novelists grapple with what Lauren Berlant might call the "crisis within the ordinary"7 — the way that ongoing crisis has become the default state — and place emphasis on the modes of cognition that come in its wake. Whereas the minimalist aesthetic associated with the program era's "psychological realism"8 often accompanies hollowed out, passive characters, who have been thrust into predetermined fates and endless traumatic repetition,9 the women-authored novels I discuss here demonstrate how contemporary minoritized authors draw on a minimalist aesthetic to figure thought and reflection surrounding slow crisis. The re-purposed aesthetic sheds light on how characters actively think through and contemplate their situations. Certainly, the psychological and the affective are inseparable from the cognitive, but what these minimalist narrators locate is some degree of agency through weary pondering that might not be afforded by trauma's psychological determinism. Rumination, theorized by Amanda Anderson as a "species of thinking" that comes in the wake of "moral shock or disturbance" helps describes this cognition,10 which circles restlessly in an indecisive, speculative fashion. Because of rumination's "slow, reiterative" quality,11 it cannot be reduced to a given moment nor fully examined by the "human sciences,"12 requiring instead literature's unique capacity to portray thinking over time. In concert with Anderson's overarching distinction, I suggest that the minoritized minimalisms discussed here shy away from depicting trauma's hallmark psychological symptoms that have their literary correlate in traumatic psychological realism and instead illuminate the thinking that comes in injury's wake. Further, they show that not all injury — particularly crisis ordinariness — comes to us as ineffable trauma. 

In Wang's Chemistry and Offill's Dept. of Speculation, first-person women narrators confront crisis ordinariness on a domestic scale, as their romantic relationships slowly dissolve but never fully break off. Their relationships enter a limbo phase that prompts extensive reflection as the narrators take stock of what they have lost. Offill's novel moves more quickly and unexpectedly into crisis as the narrator's husband is found to be having an affair, but the pace slows again as the couple ultimately reunites in an uneasy truce. In Wang's novel, a similar chronic depressive state follows after the narrator is forced to leave her graduate program due to an erratic outburst and her boyfriend suggests a "break" in their relationship because she cannot commit to marriage. The narrator's ruminations lead from her distressingly unfinished chemistry PhD to her family's history, lingering on her parents' experiences as Chinese immigrants in Michigan. Moreso than Offill's novel, Wang's novel politicizes the domestic crisis, exploring how the narrator's status as a woman-of-color in STEM and a child of Chinese immigrants shapes how she can and cannot sustain her research and her partnership.

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Chemistry and Dept. of Speculation are both minimalist novels — novellas, really — insofar as they are written in a fragmentary, vignette style where each vignette tends to present a single scene or rumination. Most vignettes are under one page and none lasts longer than a few pages. While both novels are narrated in first-person, the narrators refer to other characters by way of roles and types, such as "the best friend" or "the PhD Advisor" in Chemistry and "the husband" or "the shrink" in Dept. of Speculation. So too do the novels contain a disproportionate number of simple sentences as well as many sentences with pared-down word choice and sentence structure, or what Barth might characterize as "Dick-and-Jane" prose.

Yet rather than indexing repression by evacuating emotion, the "Dick-and-Jane" prose in Chemistry and Dept. of Speculation discloses the thinking surrounding feeling, carefully distributing emotive content. In Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River," for example, the protagonist Nick describes the loss of his friend Hopkins, possibly due to the war or sudden wealth:

Here, Hopkins' disappearance sits paratactically on the same plane as the other much more casual details about Nick's life; the loss comes and goes in the narration without the attention it could otherwise generate. The childish ending — "that was a long time ago" — insinuates that the narrative is moving conspicuously quickly through Hopkins' disappearance.

In contrast to Hemingway, the largely declarative sentences and descriptively straightforward prose in Chemistry and Dept. of Speculation are meditative and playful, contributing to the novels' exploratory, speculative mode. Both novels are interested in the child as a source of inspiration on the level of plot, and this comes through formally as well. For instance, Offill's individual sentences have an elementary feel to them, and read as a vignette-unit, they contain a rhythmic, syllabic build associated with prose-poetry. When the wife learns of the husband's affair in Dept. of Speculation, she narrates her inner monologue in third-person via short, simple sentences and repetitive grammatical structures:

In this excerpt, the minimalist prose produces a carefully orchestrated anaphora that serves to emphasize the more descriptive and emotionally charged aspects of the paragraph. When the wife ruminates about "sobbing without unnerving anyone," the slightly longer penultimate sentence in which the phrase appears operates as a deviation from the rhythmically simpler sentences around it, setting into relief the intensity of her anguish. So too is it vital that this example figures the wife planning her emotional expression - thinking about her feelings and how she might possibly feel them. It presents a gendered experience, as though she is deciding how many exclamation marks to include in an email (albeit on a different scale). In this regard, Offill's narrator describes an admittedly distressing thought process that comes alongside feeling. This is not to suggest some sort of cognitive agency trumping feeling — there is after all an extraordinary passivity to the latter half of Offill's novel, consolidated by the switch to third-person narration. Rather, it is to propose that rumination accompanies emotion in these slow crisis novels, as intense feeling is released in a controlled, careful fashion.

A comparable passage can be found in Chemistry during an early scene in the novel when the protagonist, fed up with the advisor's unsupportive attitude, her own experimental failures, and the misogynistic STEM-culture expresses her building anger by breaking lab equipment. Crucially, though, this is not so much a hysterical outburst, but rather a calculated outpouring:

Here again, short sentences and repetitive grammatical structures give the sense of an elementary style of writing, particularly at this climatic moment. Just as in Offill, the "I" does not tell us how she feels. But she is not out of touch with her feelings: she has meditated on how to express them — she chooses beakers because they are cheap, after all, and vigilantly removes her lab coat. The passage strikes a balance in which the narrator is overcome by what seems to be built-up emotion, but also has a degree of agency in how her emotions manifest. In fact, she has already decided what the incident should mean; it is not a "statement" (she would need "argon" for that), but perhaps something more a like a small, pointed assertion. The minimalist aesthetic here is not unfeeling but rather, like in Offill, emphasizes and simultaneously contains the sentiment that arises. One can read in both passages gendered acquiescence; that is, a way to navigate misogynistic expectations for expressing feeling as a woman.16 But one can also read these internal monologues as careful and creative reflections on emotion that offer these women agency in the face of overwhelming sensations and possible victimhood.

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Alongside the short sentences that shed light on the thinking in feeling, the novels' aphoristic, vignette style figures moments of exploratory, speculative thought. Moving between past and present, the temporal jumps in the vignettes are not harrowing flashbacks that yank the narrators unwillingly into the past to revisit trauma, but tentative investigations the narrators initiate. Sources offering possible explanatory frameworks such as self-help advice, Chinese proverbs, and chemistry laws accompany these investigations. Yet, even as protagonists attempt to discern causation, the thought bursts only allow for momentary exploration, such that a given hypothesis is discarded as quickly as it appears.

In Chemistry, the slow, unresolved break-up provides the protagonist with an impetus for a paradigmatic mourning structure: the what-if of speculation, i.e. what would this beloved person do if they were still with me? At the paint shop, the protagonist sees an esoterically named color and suggests that, "If Eric were here, I think he would have laughed."17 Later, a cynical hypothetical about their wedding: "Even if I had made it to a wedding day, I could not have made it down that aisle."18 Speculation operates in a manner typical of the grieving mind and also typical of the protagonist's disciplinary thought habits, replicating the norms of scientific thinking.

Chemistry's vignettes tend to begin with an abstract principle and function as a lab-site for a given hypothesis, offering case studies but rarely achieving clear outcomes. Rumination's "resultlessness" becomes apparent here,19 as the protagonist's thought toys with scientific form while nonetheless resisting certainty, objective or otherwise. Often, the narrator's hypotheses are attempts to investigate causation, specifically about which unsettling habits she might inherit from her emotionally unavailable parents. Other times, the narrator aims to understand where her "Chinese-ness" lies or whether, in a counter-factual world, male privilege might have rescued her Chemistry career. Occasionally, the hypotheses can correctly ascertain causation. But more often, despite the protagonist's frequently referenced fears, her experience is not dictated wholly by intergenerational trauma, and the various forms of determinism that she assumes will govern her life do not transpire. As such, the novel provides further license to move away from a "trauma reading" of the protagonist's flatness which, as Xi Chen has pointed out, operates as a dominant reductive account of "Asian inscrutability." 20 Instead, the novel's quick vignettes and reticent narration constitute "analytic" thinking as Wang has described it,21 but more specifically they represent inconclusive speculative thinking that never fully settles. In this way, minimalism's anti-climax thus returns the protagonist to an unsolvable knot, capturing the chronic, entangled nature of contingent and systemic forces: white supremacy, xenophobia, patriarchy.22 The contemporary aesthetic is therefore a distinct turn away from the apolitical minimalism Stuelke describes. By rendering the thinking attached to overwhelming feelings as well as "minor" ones,23 minimalism sheds light on how systemic oppression both instigates and burdens thought.

In Dept. of Speculation, many of the vignettes, particularly the post-affair ones, are equally conjectural, each one its own department of speculation. The big metaphysical question — "how is [the affair] even possible?"24 voiced by her philosopher friend comes alongside a range of more practical but nonetheless existential questions: should she leave him? Is she getting more attention from men these days? Should she take revenge? What does "the girl" look like? Does she have bangs? Despite the number of forking paths, minimalism reigns supreme, as the vignettes suggest questions and possibilities but rarely develop any at length. In the following, the couple's situation is distilled into two sentences, couched between two others in which "the wife" "tells" her yoga teacher about her marital problems. Both sentences render their instability through anaphora, which also serves to highlight their status as sentence fragments:

Though we never get a full dialogue, we see the narrator's mind move back and forth, playing ping-pong with possibilities. Rumination thus serves as the ultimate action in these novellas, as these contemporary minimalisms reveal minds in motion.

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While literary theories of minimalism have historically yoked it to male-authored war trauma texts, the contemporary women authors discussed here have taken up a minimalist aesthetic to render rumination in response to long slow crises, thereby lighting up cognitive agency rather than unconscious forces. Though crisis ordinariness requires new generic forms, it does not revolve around the ineffable, extraordinary event. And, though Anderson leans towards stressing rumination's capacity to process the latter (a consequence "moral shock or disturbance" or an "acute ethical dilemma"26), these novels reveal rumination as equally bound up with the temporality of slow violence.

Among the many responses that crisis ordinariness provokes, the thinking in Chemistry and Dept. of Speculation centers specifically around grief and loss. This is true not just of the pair discussed here, but of a range of other women-authored novels such as Sigrid Nunez's The Friend, Rachel Cusk's Outline, Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom, and Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This. These minimalist novels of mourning ask: why did it happen? How to find reparation? How to honor what has been lost? To that end, minimalism appears to make space for a conflicted, drawn-out elegy - space for counter-factual speculation and melancholy investigation — in what is otherwise, at least generically, a trauma plot world.

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Christina Fogarasi (@cfog4) is a PhD Candidate at Cornell University whose dissertation focuses on trauma studies, disability studies, therapeutic culture, and the contemporary novel. Her work is forthcoming or published in New Literary History, Studies in American Fiction, and Modern Language Studies as well as LARB and Public Books.

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