THEORIES OF FICTIONAL WORLDS IN ABSURD LITERATURE
THEORIES OF FICTIONAL WORLDS IN ABSURD LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: This article is part of a larger research on the possible worlds of absurd fiction and focuses on three theories applied to texts representative of the literature of the absurd: the make-believe theory, formulated by Kendall Walton, Thomas Pavel's theory of prominent structures and his theories of objects of Alexius Meinong and Terence Parsons. The corpus of this paper includes texts by Urmuz (Pâlnia și Stamate, Cotadi și Dragomir, Ismail și Turnavitu) and Eugène Ionesco (Scaunele). Absurd texts are anti-mimetic texts that, according to the make-believe theory, create through the game of what would be, contradictory possible worlds, which captivates the reader. With props in real world, they are configured as incoherent, inhomogeneous universes. Scaunele by Ionesco is a genuine simulated show, a game of imagination, with comic and tragic elements at the same time. The theory of prominent structures created by Thomas Paul highlights the presence in Urmuz's texts of possible worlds without a correspondent in reality, bearing the seal of the author's originality. The elements that compound the primary and secondary ontology of the urmuzian fictional universe are not isomorphic, creating for the reader the intuition of contact with the absurd. Meinong's and Parsons's theories of objects and non-existent objects applied to fragments of Urmuz's prose highlight their belonging to the category of the absurd by the presence of non-existent objects, in whose list of properties contradictions and impossibilities meet.

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