Voiceless Vanguard: The Infantilist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde

Chapter Four. Infant Mind: Daniil Kharms, Childish Alogism, and OBERIU Literature of the Absurd

156 Chapter Four Infant Mind: Daniil Kharms, Childish Alogism, and OBERIU Literature of the Absurd “I spent four months in the incubator. I remember only that the incubator was made of glass, transparent, and had a thermometer. I sat inside the incubator on cotton wool. I remember no more than that.” —Daniil Kharms, “Incubation Period” IF HENRI BERGSON first links laughter and the comic to “a revival of the sensations of childhood,”1 then Sigmund Freud pushes this thought to its logical conclusion when he links the comic to the infantile state of mind. In Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud traces the development of wit to the impulse “to elude reason” and “substitute for the adult an infantile state of mind,”2 while in his theoretical discussion of “The Infantile and the Comic,” he defines the comic as “the awakening of the infantile” or the “regaining of ‘lost infantile laughing.’”3 Nowhere could such a bond between comic laughter and the infantile, and against the rule of reason, be more evident than in the absurdist literature of the Russian poet and prose writer Daniil Kharms (1905–1942). (See figure 34.) For the writings of this late avant-garde writer exhibit an infantile defiance of adult reason that employs childish alogism to comic effect.4 Whether writing for children or for adults, Kharms authors infant nonsense populated by infants and children, pervaded by infantile play and humor, and influenced by children ’s logic and lore. Thus giving voice to the infantile under the guise of the comic and through metatextual play, Kharms advances the infantilism of the avant-garde to the level of an ‘infantilist’ aesthetic. His darkly comic prose also contains existential and ethical dimensions; by writing the infantile , Kharm grants voice to the un-speaking subject who heretofore has remained voiceless. The paradox remains, however, since, as Jakovljevic says, “infancy can’t be remembered, only figured. Itself mute, the infant is given to language. Once it acquires language, it can’t speak its muteness.”5 Like Bely, Kharms remains trapped in the infantilist paradox. In the prose fragment “Incubation Period” (“Inkubatornyi period”; Infant Mind 157 1935) quoted above, Kharms makes the ludicrous claim that he remembers the view he saw as a premature infant confined to an incubator for the first four months of his life.6 This patently absurd account of preternatural memory and precocious self-awareness counters the widespread and widely documented psychological phenomenon of infantile amnesia,7 and instead endows the premature infant with awareness, thought, and memory. As a result, it evokes an image of a self-aware homunculus held captive in an incubator, or an adult mind in an infant body. In this and the other supposedly autobiographical fragment that precedes it, the narrative substitutes the infantile for the adult and the adult for the infantile. Forced by the narrative into experiencing this jarring substitution, the reader faces a comic disjuncture that revives “lost infantile laughing,” to borrow the words of Freud written thirty years before. In this sense we see that the workings of Kharmsian humor accord with the views on the comic and infantile represented by his contempories Henri Figure 34. Photograph of Daniil Iuvachev Kharms, by Levitskii, 1906 Published in Marina Durnovo, Moi muzh Daniil Kharms, ed. Vladimir Glotser (Moscow: B.S.G. Press, 2000). Personal archive of Vladimir Glotser; used with permission of the publisher. Infantilist Aesthetics 158 Bergson and Sigmund Freud. Kharms’s aesthetic devotion to pleasure and play with respect to language and logic, as well as his comic usage of repetition and inversion, seem distinctly Bergsonian,8 while the darker features of Kharmsian humor evoke the theories of Freud. Freud makes a similar distinction, though he oversimplifies Bergson. If we still continue with our attempt to find the nature of the comic in the foreconscious association of the infantile, we have to go a step further than Bergson and admit that the comparison resulting in the comic need not necessarily awake old childish pleasure and play, but that it is enough if it touches childish nature in general, perhaps even childish pain.9 Indeed, the dark humor and comic cruelty of Kharmsian prose writings do conjure childish pain; the laughter they provoke often verges on Schadenfreude or slapstick humor. In this respect they resemble the casual cruelty of child lore, the uncensored form created by children themselves, and stand in contrast...