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This book offers a comprehensive account of the absurd in prose fiction. As well as providing a basis for courses on absurdist literature (whether in fiction or in drama), it offers a broadly based philosophical background. Sections covering theoretical approaches and an overview of the historical literary antecedents to the ‘modern’ absurd introduce the largely twentieth-century core chapters. In addition to discussing a variety of literary movements (from Surrealism to the Russian OBERIU), the book offers detailed case studies of four prominent exponents of the absurd: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Daniil Kharms and Flann O'Brien. There is also wide discussion of other English-language and European contributors to the phenomenon of the absurd.
Hallgrimsson has created Kharmsian ‘music dramas’ (his opera Die Wält der Zwischenfälle, or ‘Whirled of Incidents’, premiered in Lübeck and Vienna in 2005). A publication called Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens (presenting itself as ‘The Journal of the Institute of Advanced Surreal and Absurd Studies’ and all but dedicated to Kharms) launched its first issue in 2003.2 Translations of works by Kharms (and other OBERIU members) have even contrived to appear in New American Writing (Number 20, 2002), followed by a new anthology (from the same translators), with an
talented friend and close associate Aleksandr Vvedensky and the major poet Nikolai Daniil Kharms 159 Zabolotsky, to form the literary and artistic grouping OBERIU (the nearacronym of the ‘Association of Real Art’).5 This short-lived movement, in effect something resembling a union between Futurist aesthetics and Formalist approaches and considering itself a ‘left flank’ of the literary avant-garde, caused a minor sensation with a highly unconventional theatrical evening entitled ‘Three Left Hours’ (‘Tri levykh chasa’) in 1928. This included a performance of Kharms
deliberate critical attitude in surrealism’, challenging ‘all forms of accepted belief’ (quoted in Breton, 1978, 188).50 Black humour, of which Swift is designated ‘the veritable initiator’ (190), according to Breton, ‘at a certain temperature, can alone play the role of a safety valve’ (246). This ‘psychic apparatus of black humour’ (ibid.) reached such a temperature in the Leningrad of the late 1920s and through the 1930s, as evidenced by the The twentieth century 85 activities of the OBERIU movement (a near acronym of the ‘Association of Real Art’ – ‘Ob”edinenie real
. The heyday of Theatre of the Absurd, in most estimations, would run from about 1950 (with the key Ionesco and Beckett productions), probably to the 1970s – and we have already paid some attention to a few of Pinter’s later works from a decade or so beyond that. Francesca Coppa (in Raby, 52) notes that many writers ‘have built their careers filling in Pinterian silences’ – amounting to ‘a generation of black comedy’. Some of these figures will be mentioned when we eventually come to consider a possible category of ‘post-absurdism’. (Soviet) Russia: the OBERIU At the
Vvedensky, absurdists of the late 1920s and through the Beyond the absurd? 289 1930s, and representatives of the OBERIU movement, unpublished and persecuted in their lifetimes and rediscovered over the last three decades of the twentieth century. Another Russian writer to undergo such recent rediscovery (in so far as he had ever been discovered in the first place) is Leonid Dobychin (1896–1936), who published stories unconventional in plotline and darkly satirical in their view of the new society. In 1935 his short novel The Town of N (Gorod En) appeared; following
“rationalization,” as pursued by the government and by architects in the rather chaotic and sometimes surreal 1920s, was the critique of “working” with objects. What the designer Toporkov called predmentost, or “objectmindedness,” became a poetic device of a group called OBERIU (Association of Real Art) that explored socialist life as the theatre of the absurd. Members of this group rendered ludicrous the tragi-comic interpretations of the Soviet quotidian that statisticians, architects, and art critics set out to reform. The proclaimed principle guiding the work was also
be seen as anticipatory of the position ascribed in the theory of OBERIU theatre to ‘dramatic plot’, which ‘glimmers, so to speak, behind the action [and] is replaced by a scenic plot which arises spontaneously from all the elements of our spectacle’ (Gibian, 254); rather than ‘scenic plot’ here, for Gogol’s prose, we might understand ‘discursive plot’ (or, again, Popkin’s ‘verbal clutter’). Noses also feature in Shakespeare. The Fool asks Lear: ‘Thou canst tell why one’s nose stands i’th’middle on’s face?’ (King Lear, I.v). Cloten, in Cymbeline (III.i), declares