Раз-сказывание [raspričavanje] хaрактера
Expression of character

Summary/Abstract: Harms’s case “The Blue Notebook No 10”, which is a cisfinite miniature about the infinity of human non-existence, is seen by the author as an a-rational (IT = NON/IT) creative inovation: the defictionalisation of the narrative convention of the character, up to the point of cisfinite zero. Particular attention is drawn to the polemical intertextual “collisions” (The OBERIU Declaration) of Harms’s reddish-brown man with a canonized pattern of the classic Russian realistic (and socrealistic) characterisation (the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner portrait’; procedures, actions). Simultaneously, the ‘demimesis’ of the reddish-brown man destroys the traditional mimetic model of character structuralisation of the European romanesque production. Naturally, with a strong emphasis on the realistic model, which has already become an object of destruction — in the dadadistic avant-garde palimpsests (poeme simultane, dadaistic collage and photomontage, ready-made) as in the romanesque fiction of, for example, F. Kafka, J. Joyce, W. Faulkner, J. P. Sartre, A. Camus. As the defictionalisation of the character the universal epic literary convention in “The Blue Notebook No 10” becomes metapoetic DEFICTION/DEMIMESIS of the character as described by Aristotle in his Poetics.

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