The Optimal Gauge of the Absurd

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Robert Fenhagen’s Beautiful People is a very short (I would say concise) story that is not concerned at all with beautiful people. Nor is it an essay on beauty, and what beauty may mean to different (beautiful) people, as seen (and perceived) from different (possibly beautiful) angles.

It is rather a minimalist piece of absurd literature that is about beautiful people as much as Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (La cantatrice chauve) is about bald sopranos. Truth be told, both beautiful people and bald sopranos (and their equally juxtaposable positions) are only pretexts for the setting in of the absurd in a kind of literature that is absurd only inasmuch as its absurdness does not become an absurdity on its own merits. And the essential difference between the absurdness of a piece of absurd literature and the absurdity that it may fall prey to by all accounts is the optimal gauge of the absurd by which measure one is to know the proper length of a literary text that is edging on the absurd itself.

What is, then, the best length for any literary text to become literature of the absurd? Is there such a textual limit at which the absurd can penetrate literature and make its presence known in the form of the literature of the absurd?

The answer may seem nothing short of absurd itself. Yet, the answer is neither absurd nor possible. The answer is beyond the absurd of the situation that has made it plausible in the first place. In fact, the answer is utterly unknown to the asker except for a few historical hints that, on their own, cannot compose a fully articulate answer.

These hints are simple literary innuendos that should not be taken into consideration unless the asker is willing to do with them as if they were the stuff the...

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...the absurd, which states almost absurdly that the shorter, more concise a text is, the less likely absurd it can be, is no law at all. For how can it be so, and how can he abide by it, when his Beautiful People, who are quite absent from their title-supposed presence, are the living proof that the absurd of the literature of the absurd is gauge-proof and, most of all, immeasurable? After all, would gauging up the absurd not lead to the very absurdity to which the absurdness of any piece of absurd literature is striving not to fall prey? Obviously, Robert Fenhagen would not (could not) be in disagreement with his own writing. By its very nature, the absurd is as limitless as the hawk’s gaze gauging up the limitlessness of the process of enumeration of all the things standing between the two (equally absurd) ends of its food’s coming into being and in classic prey form.

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