Word: absurdum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself actual." Letters made up of letters, fiction made up of fictions, Chinese boxes diminishing to emptiness. Such diminution is what the novel is about. The 772 pages that follow thus constitute a stunningly obsessive exercise in inflatio ad absurdum...
This Ring is the artistic descendant of past parodies--notably Anna Russell's 20-minute reductio ad absurdum--but it is less a parody than a tease. At times it also seems not so much an operatic tetralogy as a four-ring circus, with Sellars as ringmaster, urging his audience to applaud, drawing its attention from one spectacle to the next...
Surely, replied the illustrious British astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, nature would forbid such a reductio ad absurdum as a star so compressed that sit does not shine. But two other astronomers, Mount Wilson Observatory's Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade, were more intellectually adventurous...
...allow himself to think about other women, for he is consumed by guilt. In the last chapters of Love Story, Jenny tells "Preppie" not to feel guilty for robbing her of freedom and adventure. But Ollie believes that he should feel guilty, and so he does, ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nauseum...
...writing himself into a corner of silence. From the start, he was profoundly uninterested in the standard material of literature: heroes and heroines, simulacra of daily reality, incidents, resolution, endings happy or otherwise. Instead, the Dublin-born author seized with Irish tenacity a single perception: reductio is always ad absurdum. At the bottom of every problem, no matter how logically pared down to essentials, lies the abyss. That has been Beckett's destination all along. The wonder is not simply that he has persisted so obsessively at such a self-defeating task. Nor that he abandoned his native English...