The World’s Humor, or the Falsification of Incidence: On Daniil Kharms

Daniil Kharms, c. 1930

Excerpted from Valery Podoroga, Mimesis: The Literature of the Soviet Avant-Garde, trans. Evgeni V. Pavlov (Verso, 2024).

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Daniil Kharms was the virtuoso of the technique of incidence.1 True, in Kharms it does not have the meaning of some wonderful, incredible thing that can happen to everyone, that can interrupt the boredom of life. Kharms actually contrasts an incident with a miracle: one expects a miracle, but it is not possible, while an incident is not expected, but is possible (and it kills faith in miracles). One set of his texts Kharms called “incidences.” Describing incidents is the only complete form of the literary record. A lack of understanding of what happened as an intrigue. A minimalist style is chosen, and that only reinforces the effect of an almost biblical simplicity of utterance, at times to the point of absurdity. An utterance appears to be largely meaningless precisely because of the oversimplicity, brevity, and monotony of what is happening. Everything is immediately immersed in the boredom of repetition. To use chance as seems appropriate; as a result, every incident is presented in the form of a random occurrence, not as an event. An incident cannot become an event. There is no need to look for a deeper understanding of the causes of what happened, because these causes have no meaning.

At first glance, Kharms’s theory of incidence is close to the Dadaist tradition (and not to surrealism). Above all, because Oberiu’s “incidents” contain nothing miraculous, but plenty that is curious, mocking, satiri­cally grotesque, incredible, that becomes a comical gesture, which does not need any interpretation. Kharms’s incidents are not about what hap­pened, but about what happens all the time and what is difficult to call an incident. There is something grotesque about it; there is a skillful “perver­sity” in the play of mind: I would call it a falsification of incidence. Indeed, for Kharms an incident is a short story, extremely concise in terms of length, and minimalist in style; and it is not even a “short story,” but a light weapon of war used to attack a traditional literary form such as a “long-form story” (a novella, a novel, or a long poem) that has a plot line, characters, an end and a beginning. Kharms understood his own tech­nique very well, and even taught others how to write “incidents.” Thus, he distinguished between three different types of incidents: an “explanation,” a description, and, finally, what he called a “demonstrated phenomenon.” Here is what he wrote about this: “A phenomenon of this sort, despite its abstractness and semantic remoteness, must be taken literally. Any action described in this way attains the maximum specificity. Description ceases to be description and becomes the action itself, to which one may attach a unitary label. Hence also the name of the device: “Labelled action” (which is the same as a demonstrated action).”2 In sum, an incident is distin­guished by demonstrativeness; Kharms rejects a rhetoric of image, rejects all representation; an incident must shock us with its literalness; in other words, it must have a performative effect.

Even if we take longer texts by Kharms (it does not matter if they are poetry, prose, or plays), we can see that they are all made up of the same smaller forms—of “incidents.” Moreover, there is no particular sequence when it comes to the plot; everything is added haphazardly, without any explanation and randomly, as if it had just occurred to the author (and he was too lazy to cross it out). What is being demonstrated by this? For example, characters A and B produce a comic effect while they are swapping places, repeating one another, as long as actions that violate behavioral norms are imposed on them. First, we see a sort of rocking motion; it resembles a dance, and it comes before the start of a rotation. Various pieces join the action: this one and that one, this and that. There is no dialectics here, only perhaps a purely musical form of repetition. Each “incident” deals with a finite nothing; it ends with the complete disintegration of the hero or his environment, and this attraction to “destruction” determines the continuity of repetition, rocking, which ulti­mately becomes what Lipavsky called reverse rotation (not necessarily just in a counterclockwise direction). Each incident has one obsessive theme, expressed in one verb form (for example, to lie down, to sleep, to fall out/to fall down, to hit in the face, to fly, to die, to not be, to not have, and so on). This, however, does not mean that the entire action is necessarily built around one verb; often in more complex “incidents” it is interrupted by the intrusion of another, no less random factor. The monotony of a story-incident, its predictability, is violated by the discrepancy between the subject’s action and the verb form used in connection with it. The beginning of each “incident” is as random as its end.

Here are some examples of Kharms’s “incidents”:

There was once a redheaded man, who had no eyes or ears. He had no hair either, so people called him redheaded only in a manner of speak­ing. He couldn’t speak, since he had no mouth. He also had no nose. He didn’t even have arms or legs. And he didn’t have a stomach, and he didn’t have a back, and he didn’t have a spine, and he didn’t have any insides. He had nothing. So it’s impossible to understand what we’re talking about. Far better if we talk about him no longer.3

The Plummeting Old Women

A certain old woman, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of a window, plummeted to the ground, and was smashed to pieces. Another old woman leaned out of the window and began looking at the remains of the first one, but she also, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of the window, plummeted to the ground, and was smashed to pieces. Then a third old woman plummeted from the window, then a fourth, then a fifth. By the time a sixth old woman had plummeted down, I was fed up watching them, and went off to Mal’tseviskiy Market where, it was said, a knitted shawl had been given to a certain blind woman.4

Incidents

One day, Orlov stuffed himself with mashed peas and died. And Krylov, on finding out about this, also died. And Spiridonov died of his own accord. And Spiridonov’s wife fell off the sideboard and also died. And Spiridonov’s children drowned in the pond. And Spiridonov’s grand­mother hit the bottle and took to the road. And Mikhailovich stopped combing his hair and went down with mange. And Kruglov sketched a woman with a whip in her hands and went out of his mind. And Per­ekhrestov received four hundred rubles by wire and put on such airs that he got chucked out of work. They are good people all—but they can’t keep their feet firmly on the ground.5

An Encounter

On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was wending his way home.

And that’s just about all there is to it.6

Mashkin Killed Koshkin

Comrade Koshkin danced around Comrade Mashkin.

Comrade Mashkin followed Comrade Koshkin with his eyes.

Comrade Koshkin insultingly waved his arms and repulsively shook his legs.

Comrade Mashkin put on a frown.

Comrade Koshkin twitched his belly and stamped his right foot.

Comrade Mashkin let out a cry and flung himself at Comrade Koshkin.

Comrade Koshkin tried to run away, but stumbled and was over­taken by Comrade Mashkin.

Comrade Mashkin struck Comrade Koshkin on the head with his fist.

Comrade Koshkin let out a cry and fell to his hands and knees.

Comrade Mashkin put the boot in to Comrade Koshkin under the belly and once more struck his across the skull with his fist.

Comrade Koshkin measured his length on the floor and died.

Mashkin killed Koshkin.7

Fight Story

Alexey Alexeyevich squashed Andrei Karlovich beneath him and, having pummeled his face, let him go.

Andrei Karlovich turned pale with rage, threw himself at Alexey Alexeyevich, and hit him in the teeth.

Alexey Alexeyevich, surprised by such a quick attack, fell on the floor. Then Andrei Karlovich straddled him, took his dentures out of his mouth and so thoroughly worked over Alexey Alexeyevich with them that the latter rose from the floor with a mutilated face and a torn nostril. With his hands over his face, Alexei Alexeyevich ran away.

Meanwhile, Andrei Karlovich wiped down his dentures, inserted them into his mouth, clicked his teeth together, looked around and, catching no glimpse of Alexei Alexeyevich, went looking for him.8

The Dream

Kalugin fell asleep and had a dream that he was sitting in some bushes and a policeman was walking past the bushes.

Kalugin woke up, scratched his mouth, and went to sleep again and had another dream that he was walking past some bushes and that a policeman had hidden in the bushes and was sitting there.

Kalugin woke up, put a newspaper under his head, so as not to wet the pillow from his dribblings, and went to sleep again; and again he had a dream that he was sitting in some bushes and a policeman was walking past the bushes.

Kalugin woke up, changed the newspaper, lay down, and went to sleep again. He fell asleep and had another dream that he was walking past some bushes and a policeman was sitting in the bushes.

At this point Kalugin woke up and decided not to sleep any more, but he immediately fell asleep and had a dream that he was sitting behind a policeman and some bushes were walking past.

Kalugin let out a yell and tossed about in bed but couldn’t wake up.

Kalugin slept straight through for four days and four nights and on the fifth day he awoke so emaciated that he had to tie his boots to his feet with string, so that they didn’t fall off. In the bakery where Kalugin always bought wheaten bread, they didn’t recognize him and handed him a half-rye loaf.

And a sanitary commission which was going round the apartments, on catching sight of Kalugin, decided that he was insanitary and no use for anything and instructed the janitors to throw Kalugin out with the rubbish.

Kalugin was folded in two and thrown out as rubbish.9

Let us take a closer look at these examples. Is there not an obvious gap between our own corporeal habit, which allows us to gain new experi­ences without rejecting the previously acquired ones, and the interactions of bodies that we encounter when we look at Kharms’s “incidents”? Com­plete conversion of the subject, violation of manageability: the verb takes over the position of the subject, turning the latter into an appendage of action, which leads to a loss of meaning, since the subject means nothing in and of itself. In standard grammar the subject does not lose its main functions; in fact, they are often emphasized. Here, however, there is a ban on any natural—mimetic—response that would point the reader in the direction of real events and facts that must somehow correlate with the story. As a result, there is a strong comic effect. What we see before us are empty signs, hieroglyphs, and ciphers, even the names of char­acters mean nothing. There is no room for referential illusion. Its lack is compensated with a wave of laughter; the comedy is the only reality that the poet is taking into consideration. The language is bloodless; it loses its living flesh; the phrases are abstract, flat, and express nothing but naked activity; but this is only true until some juxtaposition causes shock, or a temporary misunderstanding, which is then reinforced in the presentation of “what actually happened.” The incident is part of a comic demonstration of reality, it is precisely humor that gives us back a sense of reality. Nonsense acquires meaning as soon as the play of laugh­ter begins. That is why, in Kharms, nonsense makes sense, why humor incredibly convincingly falsifies any explanation of what happened.

Laughter is our reaction to the gesticulation of someone who suddenly falls for no apparent reason. What then is the gesture of Oberiu? I think this gesture has three components: abyss, emptiness, and Nothing.

In the Duino Elegies Rilke refers to the “circumspection of a human gesture” as having an inner limit that prevents it from becoming violent, too obvious, unguarded.

Didn’t the caution of human gestures on Attic steles
amaze you? Weren’t love and separation placed
on those shoulders so lightly they seemed made
of other stuff than we are? Remember the hands:
despite the power in the torso, they lie weightless.
The self-controlled knew this: we can only go this far.
All we can do is touch one another like this.10

Thus, in my opinion, the gesture of Oberiu is imprudent, transgressive, without an awareness of inner measure. It is directed at objects, bodies, and events, and it is never returned. The curve of the unreturned gesture. A gesture that belongs to no one or a transcendental gesture? After the gesture invades the language-world, the language separates itself from the world, and the world changes its face; it is no longer the same world. In it, there is no language guarded by our gestures. Therefore, the gesture of Oberiu is always destructive, though I cannot say it is violent. Perhaps the collection of individual poetic gestures of each of the members of Oberiu would be quite rich. We learn about them in autobiographical notes, new legends, rumors, memories of friends, partners, and con­temporaries. The poetic worlds of Vvedensky and Kharms can only exist as long as their “imprudent gesture” is repeated. The physical energy of the gesture is impressive, it attracts us from the first moments of reading, and it is perhaps the only thing we enjoy so fully. The gesture of Oberiu controls the logic of repeating the same action for different objects. The object is extracted from its everyday environment and immediately loses its usual qualities and forms of existence. We acquire the meaning of the event not from a set of particularly positioned objects, but from the event itself, which is by its nature pre-substantive and located in the realm of the pre-meaning.

The gesture produced by Oberiu’s poetic energy is an event in which everyday things acquire new modes of existence. Old women fall and plummet all the time, precisely because they are dead, and they are dead because they constantly fall, rise back to their feet, only to fall again … The gesture of a forced-but-free fall (“collapse”) is elaborated in the chain of repetitions of a single event. The gesture of Oberiu “endures,” it cannot be completed, so it repeats itself again and again, giving objects and bodies the chance to get rid of their former properties. These gestures are never lacking, there must always be too many of them, they are “incidents”: gestures of a scuffle, eating, coitus, cutting off organs and stitching them back on, gestures of bodies that are walking, standing, sitting, crawling, lying, flying, rising, falling …

Once upon a time, a fly collided with the forehead of a gentleman running by and, passing through his head, exited out the back.11

And the wind, blowing into the hillside, passed right through it, not even throwing it off its path. It was as though this hill of chart­aceous origin had lost its property of impermeability. For example, a gull had transected the hill in its flight. It went right through it as though through a cloud. This observation was confirmed by several witnesses.12

All of a sudden, a fly zoomed out of the house, buzzed around and around, and slammed into the igumen’s forehead. It slammed into his forehead, flew through his head, and exiting out the back, flew back into the house.13

If we read these transparent and childishly pure texts carefully, we should not limit ourselves to the tasks of a philologist-practitioner or a psychiatrist-theorist, who would create a list of similar gestures-events. It can be said that practically any work in the archive of Oberiu, espe­cially a small one, is capable of expressing its own gesture inherent in the entirety of its boredom and monstrosity of non-accomplishment, of actively expressing the absence of any action. The gesture of Oberiu is a source of meaninglessness; it is valuable in and of itself; it is already an event and therefore it does not need to be interpreted (“to make sense”); it is meant for nothing, it is simply the discovery of new possibilities of existence of objects and bodies, mired in a boredom of time and therefore immovable and dead.

The order of the kinetic organization of an “incident” can be different: a chain (a relay) of repeated actions; a splitting, or an exhaustion of the properties of an object, an event, a corporeal image; a double game of this-or-that (a kind of exchange between this and that). The incident draws many nonreal and made-up random accidents into its ironic play. In my opinion, Kharms as a comedian is closest to Buster Keaton. Behind the absurdity and the meaninglessness of his “incidents,” we must see a laughter-related comic motivation: we are made to laugh, we are forced to laugh at nonsense, thus neutralizing its dramatic impact. Kharms’s techniques are close to Buster Keaton’s so-called “gags.” What’s a gag? It is a character’s action that leads to a collision with the outside world. A gag is an element of a comic situation, it is absurd, because it exists on its own, independent of a situation in which it suddenly manifests itself: “if the gag opens out on absurd discourse, it never does so in a gratuitous manner, that is to say, never independently of the disturbed realistic dis­course. It is precisely by overstepping the norms of the realistic story that the gag makes those realistic norms apparent.”14 A gag is an ostensibly destructive and violent tool invented by the silent cinema for a comic refutation of behavioral norms. Like gags, Kharms’s set of gestures in his “incidents” is unmotivated and at the same time absolutely random, his comedy is intrusive. A gag is a sudden short-circuiting of the opposites that creates a spark; this is what causes a spasm of laughter. This is the laughter mechanism in Keaton’s gags: it is the circuit of action that would be impermissible and extremely dangerous for the hero in real life. It is so easy to break the orderly routine of daily life; one only requires two or three “precise” hits of a gag. Randomness enters life by means of a gag; one of the aims of this operation is to represent the world as being much less secure than it appears. Gags are the response of an “insignificant man” to the dangerous technical environment that surrounds him. The kinetic energy of Kharms’s “incidents” is sapped by repetition and the absurdity of what is happening, yet it is present in each of them quite clearly; something always happens while not happening. The incident never took place after all; but that does not mean it did not happen. Any action is a chain or an entire cluster of actions, where everything that is predictable is actively eroding the conventional standard of behavior. The incident is blocked by nonsense. Kharms’s every incident is a col­lection of depictions of the nonsensical. It can be said that the genuine incident is the opposite of nonsense, for it happens, i.e., it has a beginning and an end in time.