Order and meaning

After Paris Spleen the prose poem became a symbol of a new way of writing—a form of literary plain-speaking, however ornate and elaborate some prose poems were in practice. It was. Form not dressed in literature’s conventional fineries and, instead, brought street life, autobiographical memories, personal feelings, and subjective impressions into its sphere, sometimes all at once. Its narratives did not necessarily cohere and were not always completed. In the hands of Arthur Rimbaud [October 21!], especially in his last work, the illuminations, prose poetry may also be said to have inaugurated the movement around what became known as surrealism in the 1920s—an idea of literature, and art more generally, as antirationalist and connected to dream-life and the unconscious. 

Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton, 30

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942)

If Baudelaire tells us “the narratives in Paris Spleen could be read in any order, Daniil Kharms and Matvei Yankelevich tell us otherwise. Kharms seems to believe that the correct order is out of order; in other words, any order that goes against the usual logic of cause and effect. Not flexible, like Baudelaire, but determined to make his readers stop and think instead of making assumptions or taking consequences or beginnings for granted.

According to translator Matvei Yankelevich:

For Kharms, the poem must—through the “clean” or correct order of its words—itself become an object in the world that is capable of doing something that changes the world."

It isn’t just words or thoughts printed on paper, it is a thing as real as a crystal inkwell standing in front of me on the table. It seems that those verses have become a thing, and one can take them off the page and throw them at a window, and the window would break. That’s what words can do!

The destruction of previously established connections between words and their meanings, things and their functions, and events and their causes is a prerequisite for the establishment of connections more truthful, more real.

He parodies narrative structures and undresses the mimetic function of art. Birth, love, heroism, violence, and death are made senseless through slapstick. The major tools of Kharms’s short prose works are digression and interruption; with these he attempts to save literature from its enslavement to progress.

Prompt: Write a series of fragments in order. Rearrange it. Then write a third version in a new order that makes sense (or non-sense) to you. (20 minutes)