SOURCE: "The Hyperrealistic Short Story: A Postmodern Twilight Zone," in Criticism in the Twilight Zone: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Politics, edited by Danuta Zadworna-Fjellestad and Lennart Bjork, Almqvist & Wikell International, 1990, pp. 144-53.

[In the following essay, Karlsson discusses the features of "minimalism" as represented in the short stories of several writers, including Robison.]

In 1983 the British literary magazine Granta announced the birth of a new American writing which appeared to occupy territories yet unknown, a literary twilight zone. Bill Buford, the editor of Granta, proclaimed: "a new fiction seems to be emerging from America and it is a fiction of a peculiar and haunting kind." Since then a wave of exciting new fiction by young American writers has washed over America and Europe, a wave which began even a decade before Granta's recognition.

The labels assigned to the recent writing are already in abundance and the various names all point to different characteristics. In Britain Granta coined the name "Dirty Realism," which suggests a writing focused on the sordid aspects of life, the dark side of contemporary America. "Minimalist fiction" or just "Minimalism" are probably the most common labels used in the United States to describe the fiction of such writers as Jayne Anne Phillips, Frederick Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Ellen Gilchrist. Together with more imaginative epithets, such as "K-mart Realism," "Hick Chic," and "Post-Vietnam, post-literary, post-modernist blue-collar neo-early-Hemingwayism," these labels indicate some, but by no means all characteristic qualities of this recent trend in American writing.

Apart from those already mentioned, writers like Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Lorrie Moore, Tobias Wolff, and Mary Robison are often considered to belong to the main core of the literary group. In reality there is naturally no such clearly defined group or school of writers—some of them have also publicly expressed their discontent with any kind of literary categorization and have declared their independence and individuality as writers—but it is still possible to talk about typical tendencies, features uniting rather than separating the writers. Although this paper will only deal with short stories from the last two decades, during which there has been a virtual renaissance of the American short story, it must be emphasized that the tendencies can also be found in longer fiction by these and other writers. The focus on short stories in the present paper is therefore not an indication of a trend exclusively committed to short stories, but is rather a choice based on a personal interest in a dynamic genre as well as a question of practicality.

The first major category of principal textual tendencies or strategies, the latent rebellion against realism, is exercised within a representational writing: it is not an overt dismissal of fictional representation, but neither does it seem to be traditional realism. [In "On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean," New York Times Book Review (3 April 1988)] Frederick Barthelme explains how he rejected this established realism, since, among other things "it was full of lies, falsifications of experience for the sake of drama" and because "in constructing the 'see-through' prose, writers too often overlooked the prose itself, the result being cat food." Instead he suggests another type of writing, devoid of customary conventions. He draws a distinction between realism, which according to Barthelme stands for a whole system of literary artifice, and representation, which stands for only one part of the system. Barthelme himself chooses a representational writing:

What you figured was you could try some of this representation stuff … and see what happened. So suddenly you had characters that looked as if you just slowed for them in the parking lot outside the K&B drugstore, but instead of waiting patiently and driving off, as you would in life, now you were talking to them and they were talking back—not in conventional "realist" fashion or as people might in life, but like some characters in trees, or somebody discovering ice, or some other artificial beings in some other artificial text—very careful, very clear, achingly pristine and precise. But because you'd put them right down on an ordinary planet that looked strikingly like ours, the readers were reading right along as if what you'd written was some kind of one-for-one depiction of the real world.

The attack on realism is consequently not a visible one, but rather an invisible subversion. Although Barthelme's world seems real, it becomes conspicuously real and, paradoxically, remarkably artificial—a quality his fiction shares with many of the new writers' works. This deliberately peculiar and intriguing quality sometimes manifests itself in the recent short stories as a sense of absence in characters, events and setting.

The characters in the new American writing are so-called "ordinary people," people who make up the mass culture of blue-collar America; who work as waitresses, truck drivers, secretaries or are unemployed drifters without aims or motives. They are secretive and reticent, and the complexity and richness of their dreams and difficulties can merely be surmised. Painful memories from the Vietnam War, previous marriage disasters, failures in their personal and professional lives seem to loom in their minds, but never surface to a level of communication. These characters are surrounded by silences that tell us more about the absence that permeates their lives than any spoken word could ever communicate.

In Mary Robison's brief story "Yours" the reader is told very little about the characters, how they live and what they think and feel, but the few sketches fully bring out the tragedy of the situation. In the two pages of the story we find out that Allison, who is thirty-five years old, tall and wears a blond natural-hair wig, volunteers afternoons at a children's daycare centre and that this night she and her seventy-year-old husband are sitting up late making jack-o'-lanterns for the children. The expressive faces of the pumpkins are seemingly innocuously described, as is the couple's mutual admiration for each other's work, and yet a feeling of menace creeps in between the lines, only to emerge in the surprising ending:

That night, in their bedroom, a few weeks earlier in her life than had been predicted, Allison began to die. "Don't look at me if my wig comes off," she told Clark. "Please."

Her pulse cords were fluttering under his fingers. She raised her knees and kicked away the comforter. She said something to Clark about the garage being locked.

At the telephone, Clark had a clear view out back and down to the porch. He wanted to get drunk with his wife once more. He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.

He was speaking into the phone now. He watched the jack-o'-lanterns. The jack-o'-lanterns watched him.

In general, the events in the characters' lives are uneventful, trivial. The characters watch the Johnny Carson show on television, go shopping at Safeways, eat cheeseburgers at McDonalds, play bingo, go fishing or get drunk. But most of the time they just wait for something to happen, for a change they cannot realize or verbalize, only sense and anticipate.

In Raymond Carver's short story "Fat" the female narrator is telling her friend Rita about an extremely fat man who once came into the restaurant where she and her husband Rudy work. But the story about the fat man's excessive meal has no punch-line, no climax. The narrator goes on to tell Rita about the couple's dull evening at home, and Carver's story ends:

I can't think of anything to say, so we drink our tea and pretty soon I get up to go to bed. Rudy gets up too, turns off the TV, locks the front door, and begins his unbuttoning.

I get into bed and move clear over to the edge and lie there on my stomach. But right away, as soon as he turns off the light and gets into bed, Rudy begins. I turn on my back and relax some, though it is against my will. But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.

That's a funny story, Rita says, but I can see she doesn't know what to make of it. I feel depressed. But I won't go into it with her. I've already told her too much. She sits there waiting, her dainty fingers poking her hair.

Waiting for what? I'd like to know.

It is August.

My life is going to change. I feel it.

As for the setting, these "low-rent tragedies," as Raymond Carver puts it, often take place in small towns in for example Oregon, Montana or Kentucky, or in drab suburbs of cities like Memphis or New Orleans. The characters' world appears to be familiar, since supermarkets and bars, sales girls and newspaper deliverers, Big Macs and Ivory soap are recognised by the reader as a part of his/her everyday reality. The stories are filled with objects and brand-names, which take on a sharpened intensity contrasted with the unadorned style of the rest of the story. In "Safeways" Frederick Barthelme writes:

She doesn't stop, only pushes on toward the front of the store. You race in the opposite direction, trying to get the waffles and the TV Guide and find her checkout line for a last look, but the store is out of the waffles you want, Kellogg's, so you take the house brand—small squares in a clear plastic bag.

Only three checkers are working; the woman is not in any of the lines. You linger at the magazine minirack on the end of one of the unused counters, thumb through a current People, waiting, feeling foolish.

She arrives unexpectedly out of the aisle behind you—soaps and toiletries—and as she gets in line behind two men, you catch a trace of her scent, delicate and flowerlike, almost jasmine.

You drop People into its wire slot and pick up TV Guide, then push your basket into line behind hers. You stare at the back of her head, the glistening hair, and at her shoulders, noticing, where the fabric is tight to her skin, the precise, shallow relief of straps.

That objects are important to the character of the stories and to the reactions of the reader is clearly underlined by Raymond Carver: "it is possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power" ["On Writing," in Fires, Essays, Poems, Stories, 1986]. Details of setting have traditionally been minimized in short stories and devised to carry maximum significance, to reveal as much as possible about the characters' lives. In the new fiction, however, the overwhelming profusion of details, objects and brand-names does not deepen our knowledge or understanding of characters or plot. Despite their prominent presence these details do not communicate but conversely display uncommunicativeness. They act as physically present tokens of absence, silence and secretiveness. These tokens are present in material while absent in substance, refusing to voice signification in favour of an expression of silence.

Indeed the whole text seems enigmatic and reticent, withholding resolution, revelation and completion. What we expect to be communicated is left out, remains silent, and what we encounter is insufficient, incomplete, gives neither an opening nor a closure. The triviality of action helps to build up suspense, since we are awaiting a climax which will compensate for the uneventful development of the plot; we, like the characters, are awaiting a build-up or a break-down, which remains unexpressed and unknown.

Let us now turn to the second important category of textual strategies, the stress on immediacy, which primarily is represented in narrative tense (the present tense, the future and the imperative), and in brevity of form (short words, short sentences, short units, short short stories).

It may seem curious that a fiction so filled with absence should require presence in the present, in the moment existing right here and now. Critics have commented on and sometimes expressed disapproval of the contemporary stress on the present: they claim that fictional characters lack history and live only in the present, short story writers are said to be only preoccupied with themselves and their immediate problems, and readers are charged with having too short attention spans to be able to concentrate on longer, more elaborate fiction. We are told that this is a sign of the times, a phenomenon which can be explained by pop culture, television, films, videos, Reaganism, overload of information, declining reading skills, university writing programs, and the belief that we are rapidly approaching the end of the world (cf. Barth, Dunn, Gass).

Yet it may be natural that the present tense should dominate these stories where the characters are trapped in the present, surrounded by inertia and emptiness, but also find refuge in the present, since their past remains unspeakable and their future unimaginable. Nevertheless the future tense occasionally appears, as for example in Lorrie Moore's short stories, expressed with the great uncertainty of "mights" and "mays" and "maybes," together with the imperative, to achieve the effect of immediate experience.

This imperative can also be seen as an effacement of the subject, since the direct instructions or prompts seem to delete the presence of the subject. Yet the irrepressible subject always reasserts him/herself in the end, insisting on the necessity of his/her existence, however marginal that position may be. Lorrie Moore's "How to Be an Other Woman" begins in the imperative, giving instructions to an unknown subject:

Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim's Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow. All the stores have closed. You can see your breath on the glass. Draw a peace sign. You are waiting for a bus.

But what looks like directives in the imperative, could in fact be a first or third-person narrative in the present tense, where the subject has been erased: "(We/They) Meet in expensive beige raincoats … First, (I/She) stand(s) in front of Florsheim's Fifty-seventh Street window…." Furthermore, what is initially suppressed emerges later on in the text when the subject is restored in the shape of the second-person: "You can see your breath on the glass … You are waiting for a bus." The ambiguity as regards point of view is further emphasized in the frequent employment of this second-person point of view: "you" is neither the viewpoint of a private first-person nor an objective third-person, or the perspective of the "real" reader. "You" implies an immediate identification with the reader, but simultaneously avoids it by referring to a specific character. It seems to occupy an indeterminate gap, the void between the reader and the character, referring to both but relying on neither.

Finally the brevity of form also expresses a sometimes disturbing sense of immanence or immediacy. The short words and sentences do not only reflect the characters' inarticulateness but also a directness, a closer distance between the word and the action. The brief unit, the fragment and the surrounding ellipses, frustrates the linear narrative, juxtaposing series of frozen images, separated presents in time. The short short story, again a celebrated form, implies a certain uneasiness: it is devoted to a glimpse rather than a vision, a glimpse which promises access to new lives and vistas, but abruptly breaks the promise when the curtain suddenly drops and the reader finds him/herself excluded from the everlasting Never Never Land. I let the short story writer Robert Kelly sum up the emphasis on immediacy in the short stories: "this is the short fiction, the insidious, sudden, alarming, stabbing, tantalizing, annihilating form…."

The short stories' concern with perception and visuality is acknowledged by several literary reviewers who compare the stories to other arts and media. Mary Robison's short stories, for example, have been compared to Hyper- or Superrealistic painting: "Mary Robison's stories recall those '70s superrealistic airbrush paintings of Chevy convertibles, gas stations, hamburger stands and other pop Americana: they dwell on the common, making art of it, with the same unrelenting blown-up detail …" [E. Innes-Brown, "Mary Robison, 'Days'," Fiction International (1980)].

Moreover, the short stories are similar to hyperrealistic painting and sculpture (the prefixes "hyper-," "super-," "photo-," "radical," and "sharp-focus" are alternately used to describe this group of artists) in more than choice of technique and motifs. Just like the writers, the hyperrealistic painters and sculptors of the 1970s (among others Ralph Goings, John Salt, Robert Cottingham, Richard Estes and Duane Hanson) were accused of wanting to take art back to where it was before modernism and even impressionism. The artists were claimed to be interested in a perfection of technique alone, in creating a glossy surface without substance, despite the fact that the "Documenta 5" exhibition in 1972, where the art movement emerged in a fully fledged style, was devoted to the theme of "questioning reality." Extreme verisimilitude was their way of questioning reality; "the photorealists … produce a reality so real that it proclaims its artificiality from the rooftops," as Umberto Eco puts it [in Travels in Hyperreality, 1987]. Initially photorealism seemed to be a return to representation and figuration, "until it became clear that its objects were not to be found in the 'real world' either," as Fredric Jameson explains [in "Postmodernism or Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review (1984)], "but were themselves photographs of that real world, this last now transformed into images, of which the 'realisms' of the photorealist painting is now the simulacrum."

The intense vision of reality achieved by exaggerated verisimilitude and emphasis on immediate experience might also suggest a film-like quality of this fiction. However, the recent short stories do not resemble the metonymic conventional narrative film, but rather the "underground movies" of the sixties or the rock videos of the eighties. [In The Modes of Modern Writing, 1979] David Lodge points out that underground movies deviated from the metonymic norm either by montage or "by parodying and frustrating the syntagm, setting the naturally linear and 'moving' medium against an unmoving object." In underground movies like Andy Warhol's Sleep and Empire from the early sixties, action is replaced by stillness, communication by silence, and plot by perception, which is also the case with many of Frederick Barthelme's and Raymond Carver's stories. In rock videos series of images are brought together according to themes and visual association rather than to a regular plot, and bear some resemblance to fragmentary stories like "Talk Show" by Charles Baxter (1985) and Lorrie Moore's "How" (1985).

Significantly, television plays an important role in the new writing where it becomes a tool for questioning such concepts as "reality" and "origin." In the short stories TV dissolves into life and life dissolves into TV, breaking down distinctions between sender and receiver, subject and object, medium and message. The characters often speak of the TV stars as old friends and feel as close to them as to members of their own family. In Jayne Anne Phillip's "Home" the mother of the family worries about the news announcer Walter Cronkite's health and refers to him as "Walter"; in "Next Door" by Tobias Wolff, a couple are watching "Johnny," i.e. the Johnny Carson show. In the short story, the male character would like to take the announcer of the show, Ed McMahon, with him on a long voyage since "he is always so cheerful." The difference between the artificial image of people on the TV screen and their real flesh-and-blood existence becomes even more evidently blurred in Frederick Barthelme's short story "Violet," in which the protagonist taps on the TV screen to straighten a lock of a newsreader's hair:

A lock of Kathleen's hair has gotten crosswise with her part. I crouch in front of the set, tap the glass, and say, "Kathleen, Kathleen," but she goes on talking. I advance the color intensity and twist the hue knob to change the color of her lips to crimson. "That's better," I say to the television.

Television often occurs in the new fiction as an example of how an image of reality outside is brought into everybody's home and there perceived as more real than its origin. When the newscaster in "Violet" starts to work for another channel and therefore changes her clothes and hair style, she does not seem real any more: "A caller who says his name is Toby, from Tennessee, says that he doesn't think that she's the real Kathleen Sullivan, that the real Kathleen must've gone to heaven." The truly real Kathleen, the woman behind the image, has ceased to exist; what is perceived as "real" is the image on the TV screen, and if that image changes, the "original" image also ceases to exist and there is now a new "real" Kathleen in the form of a new image. This separation and independent relationship between the copy and its origin can be seen as a phenomenon typical of the age of mass media and mass communication—the age of simulacrum.

The media are no longer identifiable as such, but now function, in Jean Baudrillard's words, as "a sort of genetic code which controls the mutation of the real into the hyperreal" ["The Precession of Simulacra," in Art After Modernism, edited by B. Wallis, 1984]. The hyperreal, which Baudrillard defines as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality," in its turn, makes distinctions between the real and the imaginary inoperative. In "an America of furious hyperreality," as Eco writes, "absolute unreality is offered as real presence."

Since the new American short fiction has the same dismantling quality as the hyperreal, I suggest that we call it a Hyperrealistic fiction, rather than Dirty Realist or Minimalist. The recent writing is hyperrealistic in the sense that its extreme verisimilitude creates an "over-realism" also apparent in the motifs and techniques of hyperrealist art. The minimal, "clean" style of the writing corresponds to the clean, stylish surfaces of the airbrush paintings, and the sharp focus on details of American pop culture features in both literature and art. Hyperrealism has in all its forms often been accused of simplicity, since meaning appears to be found only on the surface. And yet its meaning tantalizingly evades the reader/spectator and the fiction and paintings become emotionally and intellectually disturbing, as the objects of the representation continually dissolve into images, or models, of yet another real in an endless process of simulation. Hyperrealistic fiction is therefore hyperrealistic by virtue of form, content and, above all, inherent ideas; the new name moves the stress to the intriguing and disintegrating, the ingenious and disingenuous qualities of the writing, and shifts the focus to wider, more comprehensive spheres of interest.

The final questions then concern the status of the Hyperrealistic short story; whether it can be seen as a natural sequel to or a reaction against its literary forbear, and in which direction Hyperrealism will lead contemporary fiction.

Could the short stories be a retreat to modernist values and traditional realism, and the story writers be the sullen nephews of Hemingway and Chandler? The reticence of the characters, the impersonal narration (perhaps most apparent in Raymond Carver's short stories) and the enigmatic plots, which seem to thrive on Hemingway's famous omissions, are all points that seem to speak for this alternative.

But it is also obvious that the recent short stories are different from for example Hemingway's early short stories in subject matter and underlying ideas. So perhaps Hyperrealism is an extension of realism, a continuation with a new perspective generated by contemporary American society? [In "A Few Words about Minimalism," New York Times Book Review (28 December 1986)], Barth enumerates several political and social factors to account for the current literary trend and mentions, among other things, the "national hangover from the Vietnam war, felt by many to be a trauma literally and figuratively unspeakable," the energy crises of 1973–76 and the subsequent reaction against excess and wastefulness, and the resistance to political and commercial advertising.

Have the slender short stories emerged as a reaction against the "maximalist" metafiction or fabulation by such writers as Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, William Gass and Thomas Pynchon? From this point of view the differences are more emphasized than the similarities: matter-of-fact detachment replaces ironic black humour and low-brow reticence replaces academic intellectuality in a development perceived to be a decline in literary standard.

Or is Hyperrealistic fiction a development of metafiction, in which the new writers deal with essentially the same basic literary and philosophical issues as their predecessors, of playing against reading conventions and standard norms and expectations, as well as of questioning and probing the language of fiction and the fictional "reality" within a representational writing? Frederick Barthelme acknowledges his debts to "the four big guys" (Barth, Gass, Hawkes, and Donald Barthelme), but also points out how his own writing took a different direction in the mid-seventies, when he decided not to become another poor imitator of the four postmodern writers:

So then if you were a trained post-modern guy, sold on the primacy of the word, on image, surface, sound, connotative and denotative play, style and grace, but short on sensitivity to the representational, what you did was drive from Texas to Mississippi and realize … that people were more interesting than words. That idea … was joined by the sense that ordinary experience—almost any ordinary experience—was essentially more complex and interesting than a well-contrived encounter with big-L Language. Then you remembered that experience was itself a language, even if it was a language mostly unknowable, in the sense irreducible … Understandably, you wanted to put these things together—the heightened sense of the valences of words on the one hand, new-up people-interest on the other. ["On Being Wrong"]

So maybe we are dealing with a writing which is partly a socially committed literature, which expresses a concern for the "shopping mall generation" of ordinary blue-collar workers or drifters on the edge of society, and partly an experimental avant-garde fiction, which is attempting to find new means of expression beyond traditional realism and postmodern fiction. Hyperrealistic fiction could also be a fiction of effacement, influenced by contemporary literary criticism and philosophy as well as earlier fiction, but which has internalized ideas of marxism, feminism and post-structuralism and chooses to express the ideas implicitly in its silences rather than explicitly; a strange fiction of absence, which seems to erase itself in its self-assertion, and yet hinges on the obsessive, disturbing persistence of the marginal self.

Whatever it is, it is a literature which raises questions, as yet unanswerable questions of whether it is the faint light of a closing postmodern era or the first glimmer of a new day that is twinkling in the Twilight Zone.