Icla 2003 Congress “At the Edge”: Margins, Frontiers, Initiatives in Literature and Culture

ICLA 2004 Congress

»At the Edge«: Margins, Frontiers, Initiatives in Literature and Culture

Panel #5, Limits, Limitations, and Liminality (FA5)

Sebastian Donat (Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany):

Absurd Literature: Exploring Limits¹

In Western Europe, absurd literature has usually – beginning with Martin Esslin’s introduction of the term ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ in 1961 – been treated within the concept of traditional ‘genres’ in literary history. The assumption is that we are dealing with a ‘historically limited literary institution’², with texts that can be “examined as fulfilling or disappointing contemporary expectations to the genre”³. This expected scope is in turn directly connected to the exemplary work of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, who started the genre.

As long as this perspective dominated all research into the matter, it also sustained the following four restrictions with all their considerable consequences:

– a spatial, or in terms of literature national, as well as temporal concentration in, even limitation to, Western Europe (starting in France) and the post-bellum,

– a much greater weight placed on drama than on anything else,

– an assumed connection between the philosophy of the absurd and that of French existentialism, especially Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphos (1942),

– and, in direct connection to all this, the general theme or the assumed declaratory authors’ intentions outweighing the particular texts and their textual forms as objects of examination when critics were trying to determing the essential direction of absurdist literature.⁴

Just how rigid that perspective has now become can be seen in the Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, its three volumes, newly created between 1997 and 2003, presenting the most extensive and best respected compendium for literary theory and criticism in the German language. The entry on “Absurdist Theatre”⁵ identifies the term with “avant-garde dramas from the 1950s, especially from France”⁶ and so limits both its historic and regional extension tremendously. Existentialist philosophy is elevated to the place of an indispensable necessity for the “dramatic depiction of an absurd existence”⁷, and at the same time, it must become necessary and even essential to any reader’s expectations for this genre. The considerably wider extension presented in the entry “absurd” limits the usage of the term in literary criticism to “texts dealing with the senselessness of human existence at large” and directly connects it to existentialist philosophy.⁸

What I would like to propose today is to complement this historically and regionally limited usage of the term with a systematic perspective. The starting point will be the dominant forms of utterance found in a group of texts much larger than that containing the traditional theatre of the absurd: A form of consequent resistance to reason, or refusal of meaning. Call it an examination of ‘the absurd’ as an aesthetic, a ‘textual strategy’.⁹ In analogy to ‘grotesqueness’ or ‘parody’¹⁰, the ‘absurd’ then refers to an invariant throughout various genres as an “element of a more or less ‘universal’ communicative competence”¹¹ and sometimes a “group-building structure referring to the common ground of otherwise differing historic genres”.¹² As opposed to ‘primary textual strategies’, such as narrative or drama, which are only available in certain situation types, the absurd can be regarded as a ‘secondary textual strategy’ that will appear in utterances in various situations.¹³ So this strategy might be observed in narrative, in drama and in poetry.

Turning our attention away from the mainly historic examinations to a systematic approach makes it both possible and necessary to redefine some of the basics. Mostly, this concerns the following aspects:

• 
  the new focus will be on the attractive quality of the absurd as a specific type of literary expression that appears throughout various periods and languages;
  
• 
  the scope of potentially interesting texts is widened considerably, not least newly including some areas of Victorian nonsense-literature (e.g. Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll), and likewise of German ‘Unsinnspoesie’ (e.g. Christian Morgenstern and his Gallow Songs, 1905), as well as the Slavic absurd (e.g. Russian avant-garde author Daniil Kharms or contemporary Polish satirist Sławomir Mrożek);
  
• 
  at the same time, we must question the relation of the literary absurd to other textual strategies including black humour, grotesqueness and several others;
  
• 
  the importance of the theatre becomes more relative – it now appears merely as a point where a textual strategy apparent in many periods, and languages is ‘condensated’ in time and space to form one literary genre;
  
• 
  the greater corpus of similarly structured textual forms exposes the one-sidedness of several traditional interpretative approaches (especially the deadly serious existentialist interpretation that regards all such texts as expressions of the “sense of metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition”¹⁴).
  

Beginning with an analysis of a short narrative by Daniil Kharms (1905/1942), arguably the most famous representative of the later Russian avant-garde, and including some examples from other texts, I intend to show that my theoretically motivated complementation of the traditional genre concept involved in the ‘theatre of the absurd’ is supported by a corresponding corpus. In addition, and more importantly, I want to develop a number¹⁵ of necessary and alternative features to look for as structural elements in determining the textual strategy of the ‘absurd’ in literature as an “absolutely or relatively constant component of the ‘communicative competence’”¹⁶.
Blue Notebook No. 10
There was a red-haired man who had no eyes or ears. Neither did he have any hair, so he was called red-haired theoretically.

He couldn’t speak, since he didn’t have a mouth. Neither did he have a nose.

He didn’t even have any arms or legs. He had no stomach and he had no back and he had no spine and he had no innards whatsoever. He had nothing at all! Therefore there’s no knowing whom we are even talking about.

In fact it’s better that we don’t say any more about him.

(Daniil Kharms, in the translation by Neil Cornwell)¹⁷
This text was written in 1937. It serves as an introduction to Kharms’ cycle by the title of Incidents (orig. Slučai) and demonstrates a number of features denoting an absurdist textual strategy. These features are easily identified, as they all constitute conspicuous breaches of a general reader’s expectations.

The opening “There was a red-haired man” introduces a character which, though indeterminate in space and time, is characterized by one significant exterior feature: His read hair. This establishes some essential basic necessities of fictional narrative: We recognize a characteristic introductory phrase, a narrator’s voice demonstrating sovereignty in the choice of information, and a protagonist. The following relative clause – “who had no eyes or ears” – continues the depiction of this character. The drastic bodily defects of this man, his lack of two whole sensory organs, specify the type of the red-haired man to the concrete case of a highly extraordinary, albeit still nameless individual. At this point, we begin to expect that this character will become the protagonist in a likewise extraordinary plot as the narrative progresses.

In the next sentence, the hitherto merely scurrilous narration turns to the absurd. For the following bit of information, “Neither did he have any hair,” contradicts the initial proposition, which claimed that we were dealing with a red-haired man. Such an elementary contradiction in such little space necessitates a good explanation. The following words, “so he was called red-haired theoretically” reveal the man’s red hair to be no more than a lingual convention baring any factual basis. But that explanation is hardly satisfactory, as it does no more than pass the responsibility for the illogical contradiction from the narrator to another character: a collective, rather unspecified, that calls this bald hero a red-haired man. The factual contradiction within the fictitious world results in a basic questionability of the narrator’s competence and reliability. He denies the responsibility for the contents of his report, and worse, he seems utterly uninterested in solving the obvious problem. Instead, he continues his description of the hero’s bodily defects in the same matter-of-fact tone. The logically unobjectionable proposition “He couldn’t speak, since he didn’t have a mouth.” involves an obvious structural contrast to the paradoxical talk of the red-haired bald man. It also reaffirms the impression of an inappropriate apathy on the narrator’s part considering the all but unimaginable physical disabilities of his hero.

If the reader has not long given up any illusionist receptive stance towards this narrative, the following details on the lack of a nose, of arms and of legs will make him do so. Any trust in the imaginarily authentic descriptions presented by the narrator is now suspended, removing one of the most important necessities for the functioning of fictional speech. Attention is diverted away from the text’s pretended reference to its argumentative and lingual structure. Instead, we focus on the seriality of the gradual destruction of the protagonist’s body. Ignoring its uncommon topic, we find that the text has already acquired a high degree of structural predictability in the course of very few lines: The reader is hardly surprised by the continued enumeration¹⁸ of lacking body parts. Even the fact that the lack of stomach, back, spine and innards destroys any kind of probability as to the protagonist’s existence is of secondary importance compared to the rule of the series. Instead, we experience the incoherence in that series (the heterogeneity of the organs, organic complexes, extremities etc.) as well as its redundancy (the lack of a back already implies a lack of spine).

The exclamation “He had nothing at all!” abruptly marks a limit to this series. It surprises us with an emotional participation on the part of the narrator, who is apparently beginning to notice the outrageous quality of his own report. As if suddenly awakened from the semi-conscious mechanical enumeration of his series, he regains some common sense. In this case, that means that he recurs to that basic convention of the narrative that demands that a protagonist be traceable somehow, that is, he must be describable: “Therefore there’s no knowing whom we are even talking about.” While this auto-reflexive remark contributes to the anti-illusionist quality of the text, it yet reinstitutes the narrative function itself. The reader can draw hope once more that the narrator might know what he is doing and what is expected from an acceptable narrative. At least given some non-realistic framework, e.g. that of phantastic literature, narrations involving such incorporal protagonists might yet be conceivable.

But the reader is again disappointed. The lapidary conclusion, “In fact it’s better that we don’t say any more about him.” marks the sudden end of the speech. It is here of all places that we are confronted by a personalized narrator for the first time.¹⁹ But the reader vainly hopes to receive an explanation from the person of the narrator, he is finally left alone and abandoned, questioning the meaning of it all.

This short analysis of Kharms’ “Blue Notebook No. 10” yields some of the basic features of the textual strategy of the absurd.

First and foremost, there is the consistent refusal to make sense. Kharms’ narrative, like all texts dominated by an absurdist textual strategy, allows for no coherent interpretation. This is true in the most emphatic sense. Note that we are not dealing with that well-known multitude of meanings that texts from so many areas of literature will allow for; rather, we confront a lack of even one acceptable perspective for an interpretation, for a comprehension of the whole of the text or at least of its main structures.²⁰ This feature is connected to a general unreliability or absence of evaluating passages. The absurd in literature is marked, among other things, by a principally ambivalent mode of speaking. As opposed to textual strategies such as those of satire and parody, this strategy does without any direct ironical reference to any specific object (be it a group of persons or another text). But even so, many of the features we have just observed do signal an irony, but one that cannot be unequivocally reduced to an ironic solidarity between author and reader, “because the ‘saving’ commentary by the narrator is missing”, thus destabilizing the process of textual comprehension.²¹

So it is symptomatic that many interpreters of absurdist literature seek refuge in existentialist maximal formulas, such as exposing the “absurdity of the human condition itself”²², often coupled with a religious perspective.²³

This overall impression is achieved by exploring the limits of various aspects of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. While the consistent refusal of meaning is a necessary feature of the dominantly absurdist textual strategy, the following enumeration names some alternative features that can appear and combine in various ways in any particular text.²⁴

One characteristic pertaining to Kharms’ “Blue Notebook No. 10” as well as to a number of other texts marked by a dominantly absurdist textual strategy is the serial structure. This can either envelop the whole text or it can be limited to certain parts, as in the example we just saw. Recall the circular song “A dog came in the kitchen” at the beginning of the second act in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, expressing the potentially infinite iteration of the eversame. Or think of the concluding scene in Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, in which all four characters engage their absurd conversation exclusively by creating various kinds of series: Pseudo-idioms, alliterations, end rhymes, and finally even identical repetitions of words. The concluding stage direction reveals seriality to be the constructing principle throughout the ‘anti-drama’: “The whole thing begins anew, the same sentences are uttered, while the curtain slowly drops”. Serial structures are not limited to the characters’ speech, but also appear in their mute actions.²⁵ They result in a mechanization and predictability of the depiction, from which the absurdist textual strategy draws a considerable part of its comical effect.²⁶

Lack of logical coherence is another important feature of absurdist textual strategy.²⁷ It appears, for instance, in the irreconcilability of two predications, as with the bald redhead in Kharms’ “Blue Notebook No. 10”, or in the obvious violation of the rules for logical deduction, especially striking in the chapter “A Mad Tea-Party” in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.²⁸ In drama, the contradiction is often between main text and paratext, between words and actions. One famous example is the conclusion of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?

Estragon: Yes, let’s go.

(stage direction) They do not move.²⁹

Another frequent variation of that lack of logical coherence is in the violation of causality. In its most distinct form, this violation involves a contradiction between cause and effect, as is the case in the seventh scene of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, where the doorbell will ring several times while nobody is outside. But it is also a violation of causality if an effect is inappropriate to its cause. Examples include such cases in which a small cause elicits a disproportionately large or vehement effect. One of the most famous examples is the obstinate “Off with his head!” in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the death sentence with which the Queen of Hearts punishes even the most miniscule of transgressions. This type also covers those utterly inappropriate cruelties that are characteristic for so many absurdist texts.³⁰ But we also encounter the reverse constellation: An inappropriately small effect is part of the standard repertoire of the absurd. It is found in the depicted events³¹ as well as on the level of the characters’ or the narrator’s reactions. This is the systematic home for the apathy of characters and narrator so frequently found in absurdist texts.

Another alternative feature of the absurd as a textual strategy is a suspension of the criterion of relevancy for the tale.³² Taken to its extreme, this method allows for completely limiting a text to the depiction of irrelevant events.³³ Another variation involves in the inappropriate topicalization of details irrelevant to the portrayal of characters and the development of the plot. This feature is often combined with the seriality I discussed earlier and is then even more conspicuous. We already saw the redundancy of several elements in the list of missing body parts in “Blue Notebook No. 10”. In Kharms’ narrative “The Story of the Fighting Men”, which is from the same cycle and only four sentences long, even the naming of the protagonists violates the criterion of relevancy. The names are not only presented in the especially long (and polite) combination of first name and patronymic (Aleksey Alekseyevich and Andrey Karlovich), but they are also presented seven and four times respectively in the short text.³⁴

The irrelevancy of the presented material is not only evident to the recipient; often the fictitious characters are also conscious of this lack. One expression of this awareness is in the explicit topicalization of boredom on the protagonists’ part, as is the case in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot³⁵, or in their bored reaction to events.³⁶

One final alternative feature of absurdist textual strategy that I would like to cover today is the exploration of the limits of architextual affinity. It is often the case that dominantly absurdist textual strategies make it impossible to assign texts unequivocally to certain historic or systematic genres or to specific areas of the literary market. The most evident phenomenon of this kind is the much debated ‘un-childish childishness’³⁷ especially of such texts as those by Lear, Carroll, Morgenstern and Kharms. While it is often difficult to decide whether such texts are even addressed to children, it is frequently the case that texts with a dominantly absurdist textual strategy seem similar to parodies of traditional genres or systematic text classes. They use the specific literary means of expression which traditions and norms associate with those forms and take them ad absurdum by means of a text which belongs itself to that very genre or class.³⁸

So we have found the following features to be indicative of an absurdist textual strategy:

– a necessary feature is the consistent refusal of meaningfulness

– alternative features, which can be chosen and combined in various ways, include: seriality, lack of logical coherence, questionable relevance and subversion of architextual affinities.

This explication of the term is by no means complete. But it does allow us to characterize the textual strategy of the absurd as an expressive form pervading various periods and languages, one that uses specific methods to explore the limits of the most general schemes of thought and action.³⁹

1 I am greatly indebted to Stephan Packard, who translated my text into English.

2 “historisch begrenzte literarische Institution”. Cf. Fricke, Harald: Norm und Abweichung. Eine Philosophie der Literatur, München: C. H. Beck 1981, p. 132.

3 “auf die Erfüllung oder Enttäuschung zeitgenössischer Gattungserwartungen hin untersuchen”. Ibid., p. 136.

4 Cf. Esslin, Martin: The Theatre of the Absurd, Revised Edition, Garden City/New York: Doubleday & Company 1969, S. XIV: “The book is an attempt […] to provide an analysis and elucidation of the meaning and intention of some of their most important plays […]” as well as Tigges, Wim: An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988, p. 129: “[…] it is not so much the aim of the absurdists to free themselves from logic and conventions, as to describe a world that has lost its meaning for man […]”.

5 Frackowiak, Ute: “Absurdes Theater”, in: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, 3 vols., ed. Georg Braungart et al., Berlin u. New York: Walter de Gruyter 1997-2003, vol. 1, pp. 6-7.

6 Ibid., p. 6.

7 Ibid.

8 Frackowiak, Ute: “Absurd”, in: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 1, pp. 4-6, here p. 5. – An entry on “literature of the absurd” or on “absurdist literature” is not included in the compendium.

9 For another much debated systematic complementary to the concept of the genre, see that of the ‘Textsorte’, the ‘text class’ (Fricke, Harald and Stuck, Elisabeth: »Textsorte«, in: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 3, pp. 612-615). In its attention to the particular features of a given text, such as its “motivational, argumentative and actional structure and the context of utterances bound to the text” (“Motivik, Argumentations  und Handlungsstruktur und textgebundene Sprechsituation”, Fricke: Norm und Abweichung, p. 132), there are obvious parallels to the ‘Schreibweise’. But in its aspiration to a classification, it is hardly applicable to the heterogeneous corpus of absurd texts. My systematic use of the term ‘textual strategy’ follows that of the German term ‘Schreibweise’ in Dieter Lamping’s three-part distinction of the concept of genre, setting apart genre traditions (such as French verse satire) from systematic genres or ‘Textsorten’ (such as verse satire) as well as from ‘Schreibweise’ (such as satire). (Cf. Lamping, Dieter: “Probleme der neueren Gattungstheorie”, in: Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. Ein Symposion, ed. Dieter Lamping and Dietrich Weber, Wuppertal: Bergische Universität - Gesamthochschule Wuppertal 1990 [= Wuppertaler Broschüren zur Allgemeinen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 4], pp. 9-43, here pp. 18-24.) Applying this to our topic, we might distinguish between the historically limited genre of the Western European theatre of the absurd during the post-bellum, the systematic text class of “absurdist theatre” (which warrants closer inspection) and the “textual strategy” of the absurd in which various genres overlap.

10 Cf. Verweyen, Theodor and Witting, Gunther: Die Parodie in der neueren deutschen Literatur. Eine systematische Einführung, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1979, esp. pp. 108-112: »Die Parodie: Gattung oder Schreibweise?«.

11 Hempfer, Klaus W: Gattungstheorie. Information und Synthese, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1973, p. 223.

12 Hempfer, Klaus W.: »Schreibweise₂«, in: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 3, pp. 391-393, here p. 391.

13 Cf. Hempfer: Gattungstheorie, pp. 224-5.

14 Esslin: The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 5. The same interpretative scope also limits studies that purport to examine a much larger corpus of texts than did Esslin. E.g., cf. Lennartz, Norbert: Absurdität vor dem Theater des Absurden. Absurde Tendenzen und Paradigmata untersucht an ausgewählten Beispielen von Lord Byron bis T. S. Eliot, Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag 1998 (= Schriftenreihe Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 43), esp. p. 22-24. – Note that observing a dominantly absurdist textual strategy will also effect changes in traditional interpretative patterns concerning the other extreme of expressive options, e.g. questioning the programmatic ‘lack of seriousness’ (supported not least by the author himself) of Christian Morgenstern’s Gallow Songs.

15 A number of such elements – albeit understood more as a collection of typical motifs than as an attempt at a systematic description of absurdist literature – can be found in Jaccard, Jean-Philippe: “Daniil Kharms in the Context of Russian and European Literature of the Absurd”, in: Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd. Essays and Materials, ed. Neill Cornwell, New York: St. Martin’s Press 1991, pp. 49-70. That set includes a perception of the world as resisting reason, a fragmentation of language expressing the lack of coherence in the world as well as a reductive depiction of characters and actions.

16 Hempfer: Gattungstheorie, p. 223.

17 Kharms, Daniil: The Plummeting Old Women, ed. and trans. Neil Cornwell, Dublin: The Lilliput Press 1989, p. 27. Compare the Russian original in Charms, Daniil Ivanovič: Polnoe sobranie sočinenij. Tom 2. Proza i scenki. Dramatičeskie proizvedenija, Sankt-Peterburg 1997, p. 330:

“Golubaja tetrad’ № 10

Byl odin ryžij čelovek, u kotorogo ne bylo glaz i ušej. U nego ne bylo i volos, tak čto ryžim ego nazyvali uslovno.

Govorit’ on ne mog, tak kak u nego ne bylo rta. Nosa tože u nego ne bylo.

U nego ne bylo daže ruk i nog. I života u nego ne bylo, i spiny u nego ne bylo, i chrebta u nego ne bylo, i nikakich vnutrennostej u nego ne bylo. Ničego ne bylo! Tak čto neponjatno, o kom idet reč’.

Už lučše my o nem ne budem bol’še govorit’.”

18 On the poetological import of enumerations in Kharms, cf. Niederbudde, Anke: “Zählen, Erzählen, Unendlichkeit. Mathematische Grund(lagen)fragen im Werk von D. Charms”, in: Die Welt der Slaven 49 (2004), pp. 313-334.

19 The personal pronoun in preceding sentence, “Therefore there’s no knowing whom we are even talking about” [emphasis by S.D.], is no more than a result of the translation. The original features an impersonal construction in its place: “Tak čto neponjatno, o kom idet reč’”. A verbatim translation would say: ‘Therefore it is unintelligible who is spoken about.’

20 Cf. Görner, Rüdiger: Die Kunst des Absurden. Über ein literarisches Phänomen, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1996, p. 50: “Among the effects of absurdist art is that the reader necessarily searches for the ‘meaning of the absurd’. It leads us into a paradoxical situation: We are looking for the meaning of something that decisively presents itself as meaningless. We are waiting for a message that is not intended to reach us.” (“Es gehört zur Wirkungsweise absurder Kunst, daß sie ihre Rezipienten dazu bringt, nach einem ›Sinn des Absurden‹ zu fragen. Sie verleitet uns zu einer paradoxen Situation: Wir suchen nach einer Bedeutung in etwas, das sich dezidiert bedeutungslos gibt. Wir warten auf eine Botschaft, die nicht ankommen soll.”)

21 “angesichts des ausbleibenden ‘erlösenden’ Erzählerkommentars”. – Warning, Rainer: “Ironiesignale und ironische Solidarisierung”, in: Das Komische, ed. Wolfgang Preisendanz and Rainer Warning, München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 1976 (= Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 7), pp. 416-423, here p. 422. – The standard compendium for narratology, Martinez, Matias and Scheffel, Michael: Einführung in die Erzähltheorie, München: C. H. Beck 1999, p. 149, mentions Kharms’ “Blue Notebook No. 10” as an exemplary case for the “insufficiently determinate motivation of the plot” (“Unterbestimmtheit der Motivation des Geschehens”).

22 Esslin: The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 352.

23 Ibid., p. 309: “In expressing the tragic sense of loss at the disappearance of ultimate certainties the Theatre of the Absurd, by a strange paradox, is also a symptom of what probably comes nearest to being a genuine religious quest in our age […].” – Concerning the work of Daniil Kharms, the religious perspective is developed furthest in Carrick, Neil Peter: Daniil Kharms and a theology of the absurd, Ann Arbor/Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services 1995. How speculative such an approach really is becomes obvious at the very beginning of the first chapter: “In a series of irrational miniature prose pieces, Kharms propounds the idea that the world is absurd to its core. Although absurdist in spirit, Kharms’s works are, however, still intelligible to reason. Even the most bizarre aspects of his stories have their place in a larger philosophical scheme that one may describe as an absurdist theology. Yet that broader framework finds no explicit articulation in Kharms’s fiction.« (p. 21.) Cf. the concept of the ‘divine absurd’ in Tokarev, D. V.: “Suščestvuet li literatura absurda?”, in: Russkaja literatura 4 (1999), pp. 26-54, here p. 32. Also cf. Egerding, Elisabeth: Absurde Transzendenz. Interpretation ausgewählter Theaterstücke von Eugène Ionesco, Frnakfurt/Main et al.: Peter Lang 1989.

24 In the conceptual structure of a “interlock of combined and alternated, necessary and alternative features” (“Verschränkung von Kombination und Alternation, von notwendigen und alternativen Merkmalen”) I follow Fricke: Norm und Abweichung, p. 146.

25 E.g. the mute scene in the second act of Waiting for Godot, in which Vladimir, Estragon and Lucky pass their hats, or the chairs being carried in for the invisible guests in Ionesco’s The Chairs, or the constant stream of added furniture in his The New Tenant, or even – with the greatest similarity to slapstick – Kharms’ mini-drama “Pushkin and Gogol” (Kharms: The Plummeting Old Women, p. 31; cf. Kharms: Polnoe sobranie sočinenij. Tom 2, p. 333).

26 This is the case especially when protagonists get caught in series of their own doing, as in Christian Morgenstern’s poem “Gespräch einer Hausschnecke mit sich selbst”, translated by Max Knight as “The Snail’s Monologue”: “Shall I dwell in my shell? | Shall I not dwell in my shell? | Dwell in shell? | Rather not dwell? | Shall I not dwell, | shall I dwell, | dwell in shell | shall I shell, | shallIshellIshallIshellIshallI…?” (Christian Morgenstern’s Galgenlieder. A Selection, trans. Max Knight, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1966, p. 29; cf. Morgenstern, Christian: Werke und Briefe. Kommentierte Ausgabe. Band III. Humoristische Lyrik, ed. Maurice Cureau, Stuttgart: Urachhaus 1990, p. 162).

27 It is this aspect that Levin focuses on. (Cf. Levin, Ilya Davidovich: The Collision of Meanings. The Poetic Language of Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedenskii, Phil. Diss. University of Texas at Austin 1986)

28 To name but two other poignant examples: Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1^st act: “Vladimir: Since he [Lucky; S.D.] has put down his bags it is impossible that we should have asked why he does not do so. Pozzo: Stoutly reasoned!” (Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot, in: Beckett: Dramatische Dichtungen in drei Sprachen, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1981, pp. 363-452, here p. 398); Kharms, “A Sonnet”: “The cashier […] said – I should think seven comes after eight whenever eight comes after seven.” (Kharms: The Plummeting Old Women, p. 13; cf. Kharms: Polnoe sobranie sočinenij. Tom 2, p. 331).

29 Beckett: Waiting for Godot, p. 452.

30 It is especially typical for Edward Lear’s limericks. Consider this example: “There was an Old Man of Whitehaven, | Who danced a quadrille with a Raven; | But they said – ‘It’s absurd, to encourage this bird!’ | So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.” (Lear, Edward: The Complete Nonsense, edited and introduced by Holbrook Jackson, London: Faber and Faber 1961, p. 40.)

31 One example is Sławomir Mrożek’ short narrative “The Chronicle of the Besieged City” (“Chronika oblężonego miasta”) from the collection Słoń (The Elephant), which begins with an enemy attack with fire weapons resulting in the deaths of two tiny fish in an aquarium. Cf. Stephan, Halina: Transcending the Absurd: Drama and Prose of Sławomir Mrożek, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi 1997, p. 79f.

32 By questioning relevancy, unpredictability, non-iterativity and consecutivity of change, the absurdist textual strategy suspends four of a grand total of seven conditions that Wolf Schmid has described as necessary for the events of transgression pertaining to any character. (Schmid, Wolf: Ornamentales Erzählen in der russischen Moderne. Čechov – Babel’ – Zamjatin, Frankfurt/Main etc.: Peter Lang 1992 [= Slavische Literaturen. Texte und Abhandlungen, vol. 2], esp. pp. 107-117.) So it is with some accuracy that we may include the category of the event among those that have their limits tested by absurdist literature.

33 E.g. “A Meeting”, Kharms’ shortest narrative: “Now one day a man went to work, and on the way he met another man who, having bought a Polish loaf, was setting off on his own way home. And that’s all.” (trans. Robin Aizlewood, in: Aizlewood: “Towards an Interpretation of Kharms’s Sluchai”, in: Daniil Kharms and the Poetics of the Absurd, pp. 97-122, here p.. 99; cf. Charms: Polnoe sobranie sočinenij. Tom 2, p. 345.)

34 Cf. Kharms: The Plummeting Old Women, p. 18, as well as Kharms: Polnoe sobranie sočinenij. Tom 2, p. 337.

35 CF. this passage from the 1^st act: “Estragon: In the meantime, nothing happens. Pozzo: You find it tedious? Estragon: Somewhat.” (Beckett: Waiting for Godot, p. 395).

36 For an especially drastic example, see Kharms’ tale “The Plummeting Old Women”, where the first person narrator watches several old women plummeting to their death from a window. His lapidary conclusion: “By the time a sixth old woman had plummeted down, I was fed up watching them, and went off to Mal’tsevskiy Market where, it was said, a knitted shawl had been given to a certain blind man.” (Kharms: The Plummeting Old Women, p. 11; cf. Polnoe sobranie sočinenij. Tom 2, p. 331).

37 ‘Unkindliche Kindlichkeit’, see the successful study in Grob, Thomas: Daniil Charms’ unkindliche Kindlichkeit. Ein literarisches Paradigma der Spätavantgarde im Kontext der russischen Avantgarde, Bern et al.: Peter Lang (= Slavica Helvetica, vol. 45).

38 There is a great number of examples, including Ionesco’s “anti-drama” The Bald Soprano, Morgenstern’s visual poem (?) “Fish’s Night Song” and Kharms’ narrative (!) “A Sonnet”.

39 On top of all this, it also allows us to distinguish gradual levels of the absurdity of a given text in accordance with the number and intensity of alternative features – and, of course, in accordance with the hierarchic relations of the absurd to other involved textual strategies.