heterotopias distub

248 volume 1 • issue 3 July / September 2011 •

Not only in the theatre, but there also, the 20th

century was the century of the disappearance ofspace and of time transfigured by massacre.Scientific progress did not produce moralprogress. Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Nazism, thetotalitarianisms, Vietnam present themselves asthe incontrovertible historical evidence. In thewords of Angelica Liddell:

El tiempo ya no ubica las acciones humanassino la descomposición. Un minuto no estiempo, es espacio, espacio desmoronado.Sería como decir este avión tarda en llegartres hospitales bombardeados. Sería comodecir un minuto son tres campos deexterminio. La definición de sufrimientousurpa la definición del espacio y del tiempo(…) La realidad destruida hace que se recurraa la metáfora como generadora de realidadesnuevas. El tiempo y el espacio son sustitutospor tanto por la gran metáfora: LA NADA1

In fact, the undifferentiated death, massiveannihilation, extermination camps and thestaging of horror presupposed a belligerent andstrongly individualistic dramaturgy, an act ofresistance in the era of the failure of humanism.As if it was the only possible way to survive the20th century. Formulating an unconventionallanguage of anguish. Reasserting thecontradiction of our time, that makes sarcasmthe condition of truth.

If there is a common thread to the oeuvre ofthe Franco-Rumanian writer Eugène Ionesco itis that disturbing relation between biographyand history mediated by nihilism and death.Dramatist, novelist, essayist and lecturer, bornin Slatina, Rumania, but of French nationality,he constitutes one of the theatrical authors mostemblematic of the 20th century, with works ofsuch extraordinary relevance as The Bald Soprano(1950), The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952),

HETEROTOPIAS DISTURB: EUGÈNE IONESCOTHROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY

María Ángeles GRANDE ROSALES1

1. Prof., PhD, Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, Dept. of General Linguistics and Literary Theory, University of Granada, SpainCorresponding author: [email protected]

Rhinoceros (1959), A Stroll in the Air (1962), Exitthe King (1962), Hunger and Thirst (1966), Jack, orThe Submission (1970), Macbett (1972), CeFormidable Bordel (1973), The Man with the Luggage(1975), or Journey Among the Dead (1980), also thenovel The Hermit (1973), the autobiographicaldiaries Fragments of a Journal (1967) and PresentPast, Past Present (1968), and various collectionsof essays, aesthetic reflections, newspaperarticles, marginal notes etc. Born to a Rumanianfather and French mother, he moved to Parisaged one and lived in France until 1922, when hewas reclaimed by his father and returned toRumania, where he would continue hissecondary and higher education. Later heachieved the post of cultural attaché of theRumanian delegation of Vichy, definitivelyestablishing himself in France, where heacquired French nationality in 1950.

The success of his dramaturgy led to himbecoming a vital member of the French Academyfrom 1970. He died in Paris in 1994, havingobtained grand recognition, winning theNational Theatre Prize and the Grand Prize ofMonaco in 1969, and the Austrian Grand Prizeof European Literature in 1970. Honourablemember of the French Union of Writers, hisbiography practically encompasses the 20th

century, inaugurating a drama that testifies toits atrocities by means of the absurd and thegrotesque, for him mere extensions of theunusual.

To defend himself from catastrophe, theauthor became ferociously individualist, hesearched for intimate and quotidian truths in theexpression of the incomprehensible. Writing forhim was a way to exorcise his anxiety aboutdeath and nothingness, the evidence for whichis found in, for example, the noisy verbal excessand empty spaces of his dialogues, in the empty

Cultural and Linguistic Communication

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International Journal of Communication Research 249

chairs of an auditorium supposedly expectantfor a message that never arrives, in the wordssuffocated under unending furnishings thatcompletely fill the apartment, bury theinhabitant in its interior, and gradually invadethe staircase, entrance and the streets, in theinsidious soup of Sundays that inundate the cityor in the ceremonial recreation of ancestralrituals regarding the way in which a king dies.Death as living evidence.

In this sense it would appear incidental that,on his personal return to Ítaca at 26 with a grantfrom the French government, his fundedresearch into the theme of death in French poetrynever became a reality as a thesis, as he wasnever able to locate that sentiment in its purestate that so fascinated the French poets. Hechose for his obsession, by contrast, the theatricalroute, a form that he hated in its natural-realistaspect, but which had, through the staged image,the potential to disturb and to move, insofar ashis post dramatic writing left aside the conceptof the stage as a mausoleum of literature toinstead transform itself into a laboratory of socialfantasy. In this way he created a theatre ofviolence, violently comic, violently dramatic.

I. THE EROSION OF LANGUAGE

The mid 20th century was stunned by the forceof a mendacious work, the fortuitous result of adesire on the part of the writer to familiarisehimself with a foreign language. It was when heobtained an example of the Assimil method oflanguage learning, which was amazingly to playan unthinkable role in respect to its originalpurpose: “en 1948, antes de escribir mi primerapieza: La cantante calva, no quería convertirmeen un autor teatral. Ambicionaba simplementeaprender inglés. El aprendizaje del inglés noconduce necesariamente a la dramaturgia. Alcontrario, me convertí en un autor teatral porqueno logré aprender inglés” 2 .

In fact, the text did not so much enable him tolearn an alien language as to absorb a series ofsurprising enunciated truths that he must haveknown already, such as the week has seven days,the ceiling is above and the floor is below, etc,

questions that suddenly seemed to him asastonishing as they were jolting. It was then thatthe desire to learn English gave way toexhibitionism, showing to his contemporaries,without modesty, the true reach of the essentialtruths discovered in his Franco-English phrasebook. And something genuinely unsuspectedtook place, as the literal transcription of thisunexplored linguistic galaxy took on a life of itsown; the simple and shining replicas weredenatured, skilfully distorted into new andunthinkable predicaments.

The later appearance of the Martins, friendsof the Smiths, pushes this unedited vision ofreality further. Their perplexity grows overtime, as until now unnoticed certainties areresurrected, not failing to surprise, therefore,when Mrs Martin, the woman stating these selfevident truths, lets her husband knowinformation that he undoubtedly must knowalready, such as that he works in a bank, andthat they have two children and a maid. Thefiftieth lesson goes even further, widening theambit of axiomatic truths with others morecomplex, which allow us to observe the existencein the same space of antagonistic truths (“thecountry is quieter than a populous city” exclaimsone character; “yes, but in the city the populationis more dense, there are more businesses” comesthe reply). Common expressions, stereotyped,trivial, become outlandish, the truisms invoke asort of nihilism, conscious of the inefficacy oflanguage as a useful instrument forcommunication. The verbal arabesque, sifted bya word-for-word logic, literal meaning or anirrational logic, sustains an ominousincommunicability that is genuinely unsettling.

It is when he felt this profound unease that hebecame aware that he had staged for the firsttime the tragedy of the language of his time, asort of decomposition of reality. He was fullyaware that to destroy language is to destroy theworld. And it is at this point that The BaldSoprano is born, the title of which comes from acasual linguistic lapse in one of the actorsperforming from a copy of the script, and istotally alien to it, there is no soprano with orwithout hair, yet it was considered an excellent

HETEROTOPIAS DISTURB: EUGÈNE IONESCO THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY


title by the author. The play describes a meetingbetween two married couples from England –the protagonists of his Assimil method, of course– to eat dinner in one of their houses, as trivial anepisode as on could find, but which soon takeson Kafkaesque proportions, as the hosts, theSmiths, at the moment the play begins, havealready eaten without waiting for their guests.What is more, when these arrive they go away tochange their clothes, but later return without anyvisible changes, assuring their guests that theyhad not eaten anything anticipating their visitthat, in all other respects, has been totallyunexpected. At the end of the play, everythingstarts again, but this time the Martins replace theSmiths, using identical linguistic registers.

This minimalist plot constitutes a support fora language that is broken up in ludic excitement,where words lose their meaning and characterstheir personality a, divesting themselves of theirpsychology. Talking machines, playful verbalicons; above them an empty plot slips over,shattering into multiple splinters when theincognito, the metaphysical absolute, emergesfrom the nihilism of the every-day. Sometimelater, Heiner Müller would write TheHamletmachine (1977), an anti-drama thatdemonstrates the impossibility in our time ofreturning to write Hamlet. In the same way,Ionesco writes an “anti-piece”, as he liked to say,a stage performance of dramatic, rather thanepic, presence – strictly speaking there is nonarration, something more appropriate to thenovel or cinema – about the impossibility ofmeaningful language, about the efficacy of theunusual, about the dislocation of reality with itsundeniable connotations: in his words: “unincommunicable que comunica” (p.87).

The play’s premiere, on the 11th May 1950, atthe Théâtre de Noctambules, caused one of thosescandals so common in the Paris of the time. Theaudience felt swindled by the absence of asoprano, or even a bald character, and still lessany dramatic conflict. The support of authorssuch as Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian orSaintmont would be fundamental in allowingthe play to receive greater recognition. In fact,the piece has become a classic and has been

shown uninterruptedly since 1957 on a doublebill with The Lesson at the Théâtre de la Huchette, arecord only surpassed by The Mousetrap inLondon.

According to the celebrated critical labelpopularized by Martin Esslin in his eponymousmonograph of 1961, The Theatre of the Absurd,that translates in a certain way, from anexistentialist approach, the European intellectualclimate after Auschwitz in the immediate post-war period, Ionesco was considered, togetherwith Beckett, Adamov, Genet, Tardieu, Pinter,Arrabal etc, one of the main representatives ofthe current in his Parisian dimension.Nevertheless, Ionesco did not consider himselfan existentialist - his antipathy towards Satrewas notorious - but rather in the tradition of theradical avant-garde that transformed dramaticart at the beginning of the century into a newtextuality.

In a time of weak codification, the newdramaturgies brought the antirealism of thevisual avant-garde into the ambit of the theatre,giving rise to a destruction of the sense of thereal. In dramatic language, this caused thedynamiting of the discursive in favour of thefigural, of direct expression, naked, theasemantic as a purpose, as a phantasm thatpresents in itself a new, weightier feeling: “no sehabla de la mentira, la crueldad, la locura, etc,sino que la obra teatral es este absurdo, estemiedo. La literatura cede el paso a la fuerzateatral”3 .

Expressionism, for example, that projectedthe stage as a canvas for an interior landscape, aproduct of the distorted perspective of theprotagonist, lent said deformation to the anti-pieces of Ionesco, where objects acquire theappearance of dreams or are transformed to thepoint of taking on grotesque proportions. Kafkaresounds in the incommunicability, the anguishand the peculiar metamorphosis of Rhinoceros,in the same way that Pirandello is projected in aspectator condemned to find himself exposed bya sarcastic version of himself, all thatoverwhelmed with the sensuality of the 20th

century theatre of images, in which the discreditbrought on the word had tinged the scenic ambit

María Ángeles GRANDE ROSALES

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of sensuality and diffuse atmospheres withdirect expression of the mental, beyond the trapsof reason, dramatic causality and discursivedevelopments.

Dislocation of reality, the resurrection of theanodyne, enables its reintegration in a sort ofpropitious distancing from ontologicalperplexity – that is not social, contra Brecht –that removes mental laziness, of habit, theeverydayness of the working week, and returnsto us a kind of “virginity of the spirit”. From thepoint of view of Ionesco’s personal poetics, towrite a work was to unleash a struggle to saywhat others had not been able to and to translatenew constellations of feeling, recreating in thisway a self-contained personal universe, theprojection of an interior world, a theatre withoutan audience, through which the true event ofdrama occurs not in the work, nor concerns thecharacters, but fundamentally in the spectator:“espero fastidiar a mi público. No hayseparación más perfecta que la que produce elfastidio. De esa manera habré realizado eldistanciamiento de los espectadores en relaciónal espectáculo. El fastidio es la lucidez” (p. 171).

The crisis of thought brings with it a crisis ofvalues and through this, of the capacity oflanguage to tell the truth about the world orother forms of language. The author himselfaffirms that The Bald Soprano and The Lesson are“tentativas de un funcionamiento en el vacío delmecanismo teatral” (p. 159). In the same waythat the visual avant-garde had stripped thework of art bare of anecdotes and figurativemotives, the theatre of Ionesco, in itsintranscendency, its symbolism and speculativeplay, in the outlandish, concerns the elaborationof an abstract or non-realist theatre, where thecomic and tragic give way to the absurd andgrotesque as new aesthetic categories:

Teatro abstracto. Drama puro. Anti-temático,anti-ideológico, anti-realista-socialista, anti-filosófiico, anti-psicológico de boulevard, anti-burgués, redescubrimiento de un nuevoteatro libre, Libre, es decir, liberado, es decir,sin una posición adoptada de antemano,instrumento de indagación: único en poderser sincero, exacto y en poder mostrar las

evidencias ocultas (p. 152).This has subsequently been widely projected,

found even in stage directors as formalist andiconoclastic as Robert Wilson, who met Ionescoat the Festival de Nancy in France in 1972 when hestaged Deafman Glance. There they showed theirmutual admiration. In fact, Act III of A Letterfrom Queen Victoria can be considered pureIonesco, a satire on language among five couplessuddenly silenced by a burst of gunfire heardfrom offstage.

In the same way, The Lesson (1951) illustratesthis iconoclastic attitude towards language, ifeven more virulently, as here it is used tomanipulate and intimidate, to create anddestroy. The work, delicious and disparate,develops according to Ionesco’s habitualformula through which a trivial anecdote takeson dreamlike dimensions. The play depicts aprivate class imparted by a professor to a studentabout diverse study materials. They begin witharithmetic and then move on to languages, untilthe point at which the pedagogic realism of theprofessor leads him to demonstrate the meaningof “knife” by murdering the young boy, who isregrettably afflicted by toothache, and who willconstitute, as we discover from the maid, thefortieth corpse that day. Meanwhile, anotherstudent awaits his class.

The professor teaches languages, alllanguages, presumably, to his student. What issurprising is the method with which it is taught,comparative linguistics, with which he traces anincestuous genealogy encompassing alllanguages, past and present. According to him,all languages come from Spanish, includingLatin, whose differences are, at the final analysis,“ineffable”.

On the other hand, the accumulativeirrationality of the dialogue admits otherconnotations: “it is not enough to know how toadd”, declares the professor during the mathslesson, frustrated by the inability of his studentto carry out the contrary mathematical operationof subtraction. In the work of Ionesco, the knifewill represent both functions, unifying thelanguage while suppressing its differences. Theknife may be seen as a phallic and fatal symbol



of reductionist ideology and the universalisationof power. Semantic anarchy equals moralanarchy. That is why philology is the worst, asthe maid warns, because from the nationalistconnotations of language to its saturation pointas a founding myth, the cacophony of voices inconflict and of differences are silenced. In thiscase, the knife is the weapon that translates thecensorship of totalitarianism to linguisticheteroglossia and the bubbling multiplicity oflanguage.4

Totally opposed to aesthetic realism or toideological theatre, of a thesis of any nature, thework of art goes beyond any ideologicalproselytism, having its own rules, its owncontent. This approach led to accusations ofsolipsism from some quarters, for example fromKenneth Tynan, initially a defender of hisaesthetic but soon to become a polemicalopponent of the social irrelevance of his writing.The controversy, quite heated for its time, whichtook place on the pages of The Observer, had awide impact, drawing in eminent participantssuch as Philip Toynbee and John Berger. Overthe course of the debate he was accused offormalism by such a colossus as Orson Welles,who perspicaciously denounced the realideological affinity of neutrality, related to thisartistic practice, with the concentration camp.The celebrated auteur deduced in conclusionthat his logic is ultimately dangerous, insofar asone cannot prove the failure of language withoutalso demonstrating at the same time the failureof man.

It is possible that Ionesco would acknowledgethis hypothesis. In the final analysis, his theatrelacks social significance in a way that benefits itsmetaphysical operation, which directs itself atthe guts of man, at his loneliness, the pain ofliving, the fear of death, at his existential angst,at the thirst for the absolute, at the constantdesire for meaning in all the things that do nothave it, and ultimately to man staring into theabyss. In the end “las ideologías son falsas, y elarte y la ciencia, verdaderos” (p.191) or, in theother words, “en la neurosis reside la verdad”(p.211).

II. IDENTITARY SPLIT

For his part, Calinescu5 has broached thesubject from the perspective of identitaryconflict, the legacy of an author who was the sonof an extreme nationalist Romanian father and aFrench mother of probable Jewish ancestry.Ionesco frequently referred to the confessionalcharacter of his theatre, centred on the search foranswers about himself. This enabled him toprocess in an absolutely personal way, forexample, the ascent of fascism and theconsequent ideological atrocities and deliriouschauvinism that surrounded his youth inRomania. In this sense, we can analyze assymptomatic one of his most emblematicdramas, Rhinoceros (1959), recognising it as hismost social drama, as well as establishing themultilayered and open character of thisincomparable allegory of denunciation.

Rhinoceros dramatizes the stupefaction ofBérenger – an everyman citizen of a namelessFrench city – when he observes how itsinhabitants are gradually being converted intorhinoceros. In fact, he and Daisy, his lover, arethe only human beings that remain, although shewill vanish, perhaps also transformed into arhinoceros. The powerful image of humanbeings being transformed into wild beasts,gigantic and prehistoric, brings us inevitablyback to Gregor Samsa in La Metamorfosis. If inthe Kafka story (1915) the metamorphosis of anindividual into a spider has a distressing andasphyxiating character, experienced in the firstperson, in this work the monstrosity of theindividuals is produced in a collective form, asthe effect of a silent plague, and is transmitted ina caustic and hilarious form. Faced with thisprevailing irrationality, the rhinoceros and thephenomenon of rhinocerisation, Bérenger willresist, concluding the work with his cry ofdefiance: “…I’m the last man left, and I’mstaying that way until the end. I’m notcapitulating!” A similar heroism, albeit of adifferent nature, to that of the martyr ofAuschwitz of one of his final works, who offersto die voluntarily in place of another (Journeyamong the Dead, 1980).


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There have been substantial hermeneuticderivations from the allegory and the polysemyinherent in the symbol is present in itsmultiplicity of interpretations, for example in thereading of the work as an allegory of the Nazioccupation of France, communist activity in theParisian left during the Cold War, the Frenchpersecution of the Algerians, etc. When it wasperformed on 22nd January 1960 at the Odeónwith Jean-Louis Barrault as the director andactor (Bérenger) fascism would unmistakablyform its backdrop. Still able to understand thework as a tragedy, Ionesco praised theinterpretation as “a terrible farce and a fantasticfable.” Even the green skin of the beasts couldbe considered an allusion to the Nazi uniformsof the Vichy regime. The docile transformationof the humans into rhinoceros, almost passively,without violence, echoes the reaction of theParisians in the first months of occupation.

Nevertheless, in accordance with thedeclarations of the author himself, it would beuseful to understand the play as an indication ofthe identitary split that resulted from the allegedfascisisation of the Romanian intellectualenvironment in which he was formed. In thisway, Anna Quinney6 makes clear that the workcan be understood as a personal settling ofaccounts with friendship, political idealism, anda literary community betrayed. To this can beadded an additional connotation to which wemake reference above, that of the Jewish ancestryof his French mother, Thérèse Ipcar. In fact, thisquestion could not be irrelevant given the milieuof aggressive anti-Semitic fascism so wellestablished in the Romanian intellectual climatein the twenties and thirties, at the time of theIron Guard.

In any case, after his French infancy, thereturn to his country of birth, aged thirteen, atthe request of his father, who had fraudulentlyobtained a divorce and custody of his childrenfrom his first wife, caused him an enormoussetback. He hated Bucharest and its inhabitants.Without being Jewish, his French accent meantthat he was taken to be so, and he sufferedbeatings until his accent changed. He feltdifferent and isolated, in a hostile environment.

Historians such as Leon Volovici haveestablished that fascism in Romania was not,even from a strictly intellectual perspective, aperipheral movement, underground, as hasoften been claimed. It not had only aconsiderable political influence, especially after1930, but also an ideological and spiritual impactthat would remain operative even after theSecond World War. As a member of thisintellectual ambit, Ionesco was sadlyfamiliarized with the situation of friendssuddenly transformed into filthy beasts,brainless and governed by slogans. Therhinoceros may well be compared to thedogmatic, racist and anti-Semitic members of thecultural and political environment of Bucharestin the thirties, where Ionesco was formed andlater defined as an intellectual.

Various facts point to this interpretation,beyond the attack on fascist rhetoric. Forexample, the character of the logician and theparodic nature of his syllogisms (which werehowever real, as in spite of this formula havingbeen used profusely by philosophers andtheologians for its probative character, it was notuntil the 20th century when Bertrand Russelldiscovered some formal errors in the doctrine),who describes the epidemic of pachydermosisas a form of logic as false as it is incontrovertible.Inevitably, the allusion to Emil Cioran, and hisSyllogismes d’amertume (1952), published barelyseven days before this work, would appearobligatory.

In related fashion, the myth of racialsuperiority is present in Rhinoceros in one way oranother throughout the play. In the first act, forexample, the form it takes is that of a debatebetween the characters about whether therhinoceros are Asiatic or African based on thenumber of horns they possess. As those wholived the occupation can testify, a frequentstereotype of Jews as horned men, an almostdemonic image, was a widely recognized as anti-Semitic. On the other hand, the character mostintimately reflective of fascist discourse, Jean, thecivil servant friend of Bérenger, may beconsidered a reference to Cioran and his anti-Semitic and xenophobic diatribes, such as those



expounded upon in his book The Transfigurationof Romania, never translated into French.

Marxist discourse is caricatured in its turn inthe most populist character of the group, Botard,and, of course, Dudard, the alter ego of Satre, asthe author himself had it. The rhinocerisation ofsociety therefore constitutes a social allegory ofinfinite applicability; in Germany the allusion tothe Nazis was inevitable, in Moscow theywanted to censor it, in Buenos Aires the militarygovernment took it to be an attack on Peronism.The plasticity of the word rhinoceros wasparticularly fortunate, moreover. The word, inFrench as in English, refers to both the individualand collective animal, its singular form isidentical to the plural. In other words, one isindistinguishable from the herd, a suitablebreeding ground for totalitarianisms:

Rinoceronte es, sin duda, una pieza antinazipero también, sobre todo, una pieza contralas histerias colectivas y las epidemiascolectivas que se ocultan al amparo de larazón y de las ideas, pero que no dejan de serpor eso grandes enfermedades colectivascuyas ideologías no son sino coartadas (p.86)It is obvious that the reach of this process of

metamorphosis, of rhinocerisation, that has asits counterpart the attitude of resistance of themilitant and conscious protagonist, in the wordsof Ionesco, “el desasosiego del que naturalmentealérgico al contagio, asiste a la metamorfosismental de su colectividad” (p.17), which evenbrought him adverse criticism from those who,such as Pierre Macabru, considered this piece tobe an expression of reactionary individualism,or for those who consider neutrality to be a bluff,as no clear alternative is defended. Ionesco optsfor the vacuum and leaves the spectators toresolve their questions themselves.

On another note, a further impulse to thisidentitary conflict resulted from his Frenchacclimatization. At the time of The Bald Soprano’spremiere in 1950, Ionesco was totally unknownin literary Paris, in spite of being a mature writer.He was approaching forty and had left behind inhis country of birth, which had become a Sovietsatellite, a considerable literary body of work ina hidden and strange language, Romanian.

Writings which moreover were hidden by animplacable censorship until the implosion of thesystem in December 1989, such as a volume ofessays titled No containing polemical articlesabout reputed Romanian writers of the age, thatdid not see the light of day until 1990, or acompilation of journalistic articles from theperiod 1927-1946, En Guerra contra todo el mundo,unedited until 1992. His unstable Romanianliterary identity, strangely tied up in the hatedfigure of his father, whose infidelity, in atraumatic episode, was the cause of a frustratedsuicide attempt on the part of his mother, soongave way to identification with his maternalFrench identity. This was much morecomfortable and promising, and would finallyallow him to be recognized as a Frenchdramaturge translated into multiple languagesand shown in the great theatres of the world. Itcan be said, therefore, that Ionesco has twoidentities that, at least in the realm of fantasy,are opposed yet are overlaid by episodicmoments of reconciliation. Nevertheless, Francewas always his spiritual homeland, the countryof his mother’s family and the place where hefound his rural paradise (the Chapelle-Anthenaise), lost in an irrecoverable past but alivein his memory, as he observes in his diaries.7

It is in the name of this France of his infancythat he felt himself exiled in his native country,above all after it became a prisoner of a bloodyideological delirium, until he managed to returnto his longed for France as cultural attaché to theRomanian delegation of Vichy. The atmospherehe encountered was asphyxiating, butnevertheless he attempted to detach himselfinsofar as his objective was to edit the principalworks of contemporary Romanian literature andthought. He would become an inescapablereference in the historiography of modernFrench theatre, a member of the Academy from1970, recognized and honoured throughout theworld.

Nevertheless, his identity remained hybrid inmoments of lucidity, particularly until the fall ofCeau[escu, the last Eastern European Stalinist.Then he would discover his Romanian self andshow signs of wanting to return, albeit from an


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idealized remembrance of Romanian societyfrom his youth that compares to the French,postulating an ultimately indefensibleanachronistic nostalgia for the constitutionalmonarchy abolished by four decades ofcommunism. In The Intermittent Searching, oneof his last writings, we find what can beconsidered a document of complete overcomingof his identitary-cultural conflict. In this piece ofvoluntarily uncontrolled writing, we find thatRomanian words and memories appear tingedwith nostalgia and affection for a fatherlandwounded by totalitarianism.

In a way, his identitary conflict, his Romanianand French linguistic identity – Ionesco wasperfectly bilingual – reveals an unequivocalparallel, albeit with a diametrically differentapproach, to the career of Samuel Beckett, anIrish man who chose French as his pet languageof exploration and discovery, writing in Francein self-exile from his native Ireland. Heconsciously abandoned a strong language foranother more minoritarian, although one indeedwith added connotations of precision andrigorous clarity that corresponded to a certaincalling for intellectual asceticism in a writerobsessed with writing as a process of progressivepurification emanating from a Joycean stimulus.In any case, he did not abandon English,immersing himself in the difficult task of selftranslation, another form of asceticism, from avehicle, the English language, that wasinevitably complicit, for the Irish Beckett, withscabrous colonial clutches.

In the case of Ionesco, the situation seems tohave formed itself in an inversely proportionalway. The French cultural colony that Romaniabecame in the 19th Century, maintained its neo-Latin language inundated with numerous Slavic,Turkish and Greek elements, over which aFrench lexical gloss was simply applied toenrich, from a civilizing perspective and one ofassumed cultural superiority, specialized ambitssuch as politics, the judiciary, economics andphilosophy.

The fact is that Ionesco had written untilalmost forty years of age in a delimited, marginallanguage that he manipulated perfectly but in

which he had the feeling – expressed in No (1924)– of addressing himself to a public of three-hundred readers. The step to French could notbe, for him, a form of asceticism, as it had beenfor Beckett, but the opposite, an enriching, abroadening of his horizons of expression, anopening to new possibilities for his literarygenius, a creative game. From this perspective,he was situated in the antipodes of Beckett. Nordid he feel it necessary to translate himself intoRomanian because at the time in which heproduced his French work, Romania was anoccupied country, first militarily and thenideologically, by Soviet and nationalcommunism until 1989. The meaning of self-translation for Ionesco was precisely inverted incomparison to Beckett, as his Romanian writingswere the object of translation in this case.

Nevertheless, recognizing his literarytradition impelled him to translate Urmuz toFrench and to champion Caragiale, adopting andtranslating him, together with MónicaLovinescu. Moreover, he would approve of thepublication of the Romanian version of The BaldSoprano in 1965 and, during the period ofrelaxation of communist censorship in Romania,between 1964 and 1972, texts written inRomanian directly about colleagues such asMihai Ralea and Tudor Vianev and, after the fallof the Ceaucescu regime in 1989, he authorizedthe publication of his until then banned writing(En guerra contra todo el mundo and No).

III. THE DISSECTION OF REALITY

In general, the Theatre of the Absurd, and thatof Ionesco in particular, contributes an uneditedvision of reality, a way of looking differently atwhat we have never stopped seeing, and thisnew perspective provokes a sort of destructionof the sense of the world, in the same way, wewould suggest, as Picasso, Dali or Chagall. Inthe same way, the Theatre of the Absurd appearedas the anti-play to classical theatre, to the epicBrechtian system and to the realism of populartheatre. The recurring technique that clears thisfabulous universe, beyond the rupture with theAristotelian principles, tends towards the



constant reiteration of a situation, to a rupture inthe logical-rational functioning of events, to thetemporal paralysis that impedes the normalpassing of chronological time, to the dreamlikeatmosphere that envelops the succession ofscenes and the endowment of symbols withdynamism. Something that we maynonetheless acknowledge from precisereferences, since the avant-garde had broughtabout an aesthetic disorder proceeding from thesubconscious, from angst, delirium,incommunicability and nightmare in thedismantling of the presumed coherence of thereal world, and under the form of distortedstaged images that project this interiorlandscape.

In the theatre of Ionesco the dramaticapproach is projected from antagonism as aparadigm that instrumentalises the problem of alack of meaning, as his theatre invokes tragedyand farce, the prosaic and the poetic, realism andfantasy, the quotidian and the unusual. The lossof the semantic dimension is observed, forexample, in the structural plane, the use ofproliferation as an accumulative linguistic andobjectual value, while in the thematic plane itsignals rather an inquiry into the ego – a nihilismof otherness – that accentuates the introspective-personal character of his more confessionalworks, particularly those written in the Sixties.

The proliferation of objects is a frequenttechnique in his plays. A minimalist set design,atemporal, is inundated with objects that acquirelife and suffocate the characters beneath theirunlimited growth. Invading everything, theyconcretise loneliness, abandonment, thehypertrophy of the material, the victory of anti-spiritual forces. This is what happens in Amadeoor How to Get out of Trouble (1954): theprotagonists have been unable to rid themselvesof a corpse that has grown little by little forfifteen years but which suddenly begins to sufferfrom “geometric progression”, threatening tobreak the furniture and the walls and force theinhabitants from their apartment.

In a similar way, in The New Tenant (1955) therecently rented room does not have space for theenormous quantity of furniture of the

protagonist and this results in their blocking thestairs, the patio and the street, traffic and themetro are prevented from passing, the Seine isstopped. At the end of the play, the tenant ishidden beneath a gigantic accumulation offurniture and we only hear his voice. By way ofcomparison, in Victims of Duty (1953),Madelaine, from whom a policeman has justordered a cup of coffee, lays a huge quantity ofcups on the table, although nobody comes to takeone, while in The Chairs (1952) two elderlyprotagonists bring numerous chairs for theirinvisible guests until the stage is full andmovement impeded, or in Anger, one of theepisodes of the film Seven Deadly Sins, Ionescoshows us the absurdity and superfluity of aworld that generates its own extinction. Forexample, the soup of Sundays that inundate thecity, a symbol of the anger that drownshumanity, the cholera of nations.

Here we observe a characteristic of enormousinterest in the Ionesquian universe, proceedingfrom the fact that his dramaturgy is closely tiedto scenic plasticity, the importance of images.Objects are not interesting for their use value oras an aid to action but rather seem to reach thestatus of characters: the object is self-moving, itmetamorphosises, resists, inundates the spaceand threatens the character embodied by theactor. In an inversely proportional way, the actorcan find himself degraded to the category of anamorphous object or mannequin, a merephysical support of logos.

Regarding its representation of an inquiryinto the ego, this autobiographical andconfessional temptation, defined as a constant inhis oeuvre, is particularly relevant in those textscentred, not only on the conflict of the individualagainst society such as Jack, or The Submission(1955), The Assassin without Work (1958) orRhinoceros (1959), but also in those moremetaphysical and nihilistic, such as Exit The King(1962) or Hunger and Thirst (1964). In this way,the comical formula of going against the currentis highlighted in the dramatic surrealism of Jack,or The Submission where we find ourselves in thecompany of a Bérenger-esque sort of alter ego ofthe author who appears recurrently in his plays


p. 248-259


– young and weak, unable to resist the pressureof his family, and will end up surrendering tosocial convention, as ridiculous as it may be.Ultimately he bends his desire to be faithful tohimself and exclaims “I adore hash brownpotatoes”.

The protagonist of Hunger and Thirst will alsofeel disoriented, albeit for different reasons.Jean, in the same way as his friend Bérenger, isunable to get used to life, he feels himselfdifferent to the rest, does not know how to live.In this he is different from his wife Marie-Madelaine, who, similarly to all women in theoeuvre of Ionesco, is jovial and affable, hasadapted herself to the conditions of her life, andtries in vain to convince her husband thateverything is going to change. In fact they endup moving to a basement, and while his wifeattempts to make it bright and comfortable, hegives himself up to desperation, complainingconstantly: he is “lucid” and “this is incurable”.Jean finally leaves his home, just as a beautifulgarden appears on the back wall. Marie-Madelaine regrets that Jean never saw it,convinced that this would have dissuaded himfrom his intention to flee. In the end his nomadicwandering makes him a prisoner of a kind ofmonastery-cum-inn, where he longs for the lifehe might have lived together with his wife anddaughter, the only earthly paradise, that in hisignorance he scorned.

Exit the King (1962)8 merits special mention:one of Ionesco’s most obstinate testimonies onhis personal obsession with death and withoutdoubt the most intimate play of his entire legacy.When the production of the author is examinedfrom the point of view of the great myths ofuniversal literature – Rhinoceros and Ulysses, AStroll in the Air with Icarus, Victims of Duty andOedipus, Hunger and Thirst and Faust etc – in thecase of Exit the King the character of Bérengerhas been assimilated to the mythological figureof Prometheus.9 The peculiar universe of KingBérenger would re-examine his attitude towardsdeath as ceremonial fulfilment, following asacralising initiation ritual that sublimates thethreat to mortality as a devastating andincomprehensible existential disintegration:

Escribí esa obra para aprender a morir. Debíaser una lección, como una especie de ejercicioespiritual, una marcha progresiva, etapa poretapa, que intentaba que fuese accesible, haciael fin ineludible 10

In it we observe again the most characteristicaspect of Ionesco’s art, the inflation of a situationuntil it achieves a dramatic effect. The dramaticsituation seen from all angles replaces the plot.And so, for two and a half hours we are presentat the slow but tenacious disintegration of notonly the King Bérenger but also all that belongsto him, the palace, the kingdom, his subjects. Wecould imagine that there are methods, somesubterfuge to avoid death, or that a powerfulman would adopt an attitude more resigned orpositive. This is not the case, however.“Everyone dies for the first time”.

Men know that they are going to die, but theyforget. King Bérenger, instead of preparinghimself for death, avoids the subject, andalthough Marguerite, his first wife, warns himthat he has an hour and a half of life left, he doesnot acknowledge this. He refuses to abdicate, heties himself to the vital sensuality embodied byhis second wife Marie, he tries to give ordersthat will never be carried out, he implores thesun, writes literature, invokes the dead, eventhose who have committed suicide: “Vosotros,los suicidas, enseñadme lo que hay que hacerpara adquirir el asco de la existencia. Enseñadmeel cansancio. ¿Qué droga hay que tomar paraeso?”.

The force of the drama derives from this stepfrom rebellion to acceptance, from unease toimpotence, from a feeling of tremendous painfor his disappearance to total resignation. Onlywhen a quarter of an hour of life remains for theking does he cease his sterile struggle. Bérenger,like Ionesco himself, does not have theconsolation of religion. Death is nothingness,which makes the play an allegory of humanityand its ambiguous transcendental inquiry.11 Therite of preparation for death is brought aboutunder the spiritual guide of Queen Marguerite,a rite inspired, as the author himself makes clear,by the Tibetan book of the dead Bardo Thödol,where as in the Christian rites of commentario



mortis he is invited to divest himself of theburdens of existence and of his clothing.Symbolically, he cleans his cloak of dust andimpurities, and is invited to take his seat on theonly everlasting throne of death and of peace. Aconfessional play, symptomatic, although“insufficiently religious” in the words of theauthor, of the secularized ritual value of theword. Powerful in its problematic, its staging bythe Teatro de la Abadía, directed by José LuisGómez, in 2004, was highly praised andfollowed in the footsteps of the staging broughtabout by José Luis Alonso in 1969 in the MaríaGuerrero.

Provocative, satirical, dreamlike, theological,metaphysical, apolitical, multifaceted: thepersonality of Ionesco has characterized thewide spectrum of his critical reception. Hispowerful individualism and free thinking havebeen cause, perhaps, of a greater ignorance ofhis oeuvre than that of kindred spirits. But hislegacy is unique. Because it is useless, as heaffirmed, to offer a message that has alreadybeen given. Because any valuable work of art, inhis opinion, is the expression of a native andunique intuition, as “al crear un mundo, alinventarlo, el creador lo descubre” (p.66).

In the background, there is an attempt torestore a pristine vision of our universe, asoverwhelmed beings in the absence of feeling,from the conviction that artistic truth is moreprofound, more full of meaning thancommonplace reality, given that realism goesbeyond reality, insofar as it concerns theuniversal condition of man: love,incommunication, fear, death, astonishment. Inthis way alone, in the forensic dissection of thereal, might we realize the strangeness of theworld, the powerful antidote that must precedeinnominate reintegration. This enables Ionescoto formulate in a unique way his intransferrablepoetics of amazement:

Siempre pensé que la verdad de la ficción esmás profunda, está más llena de significadoque la realidad cotidiana. El realismo,socialista o no, está del otro lado de larealidad. La limita, la atenúa, la falsea, no

toma en cuenta nuestras verdades yobsesiones fundamentales: el amor, la muerte,el asombro. Presenta al hombre en unaperspectiva reducida, enajenada; nuestraverdad está en nuestros sueños, en laimaginación; todo, a cada instante, confirmaesta afirmación, La ficción ha precedido a laciencia. Todo lo que soñamos, es decir, todolo que deseamos, es verdadero (…) todo loque soñamos es realizable (…) ha sido posiblevolar porque hemos soñado que volábamos(p.14)As Foucault put it in The Archeaology of

Knowledge, an approach, in another context, thatcould be assimilated into the abrupt freezing ofreality and to the inedited lucidity of the Franco-Romanian playwright’s creations, “Utopiasconsole. Heterotopias disturb.” Although webarely survived the long twentieth century.

References

1. Bermúdez, Dolores (1989) Análisis simbólico del teatrode Ionesco, University of Cádiz.

2. Calinescu, Matei (2005) Ioneso. Recherches identitaires,Paris, Oxus.

3. Glukman, Marta, Eugène Ionesco y su teatro, Santiagode Chile, El espejo de papel.

4. Ionesco, Eugène (2007) Diarios, Páginas de espuma,Madrid.

5. Ionesco, Eugène (1965) Notas y Contranotas. Estudiossobre el teatro, Buenos Aires, Losada.

6. Jean-Blain, Marguerite (2005) Eugène IonescoMystique ou mal-croyant?, Lessius, Bruxelles.

7. Liddell, Angélica, “Un minuto dura tres campos deexterminio: la desaparición del espacio y deltiempo”, en Dramaturgias femeninas de la segundamitad del siglo XX. Espacio y tiempo, Madrid, Visor.

8. Patterson, Jeannette, “Language, Violence and theTotalitarian Ideology of Origins in Ionesco’s LaLeçon and Césaire’s Une tempête”, Au Pire, FrenchForum, Winter/Spreing, 2008, ½.

9. Quinney, Anne, “Excess and Identity: The FrancoRomanian Combats Rhinoceritis”, South CentralReview, Autumn 2007.

10. Vilvandre de Sousa, Cécile (2001) “El rey se muere,de Eugène Ionesco: un rito iniciático sacralizadorde la muerte”, in Francisco Torres Monreal (ed.)El teatro y lo sagrado. De M. de Ghelderode a F.Arrabal, University of Murcia.


p. 248-259


Endnotes

1 Angélica Liddell “Un minuto dura tres campos deexterminio: la desaparición del espacio y deltiempo”, en Dramaturgias femeninas de la segundamitad del siglo XX. Espacio y tiempo, Madrid, Visor,pp. 67-76, pp.67-68.

2 Eugène Ionesco (1962) Notas y Contranotas. Estudiossobre el teatro, Buenos Aires, Losada, 1965, p.147.

3 Marta Glukman , Eugène Ionesco y su teatro, Santiagode Chile, El espejo de papel, p. XX

4 Jeannette Patterson “language, Violence and theTotalitarian Ideology of Origins in Ionesco’s La Leçonand Césaire’s Une tempête”, Au Pire, French Forum,Winter/Spreing, 2008, ½, pp. 195-213.

5 Matei Calinescu, Ioneso. Recherches identitaires, Paris,Oxus, 2005.

6 Anne Quinney “Excess and Identity: The FrancoRomanian Combats Rhinoceritis”, South CentralReview, Autumn 2007, pp.36-52

7 Fragments of a Journal (1967) and Past Present, PresentPast (1968) published in Spanish as Diarios, Paginasde espuma, Madrid, 2007.

8 Cécile Vilvandre de Sousa “El rey se muere, de EugèneIonesco: un rito iniciático sacralizador de la muerte”,in Francisco Torres Monreal (ed.) El teatro y losagrado. De M. de Ghelderode a F. Arrabal, Universityof Murcia, 2001, pp. 581-589.

9 Dolores Bermúdez, Análisis simbólico del teatro deIonesco, University of Cádiz, 1989, p.116

10 Eugène Ionesco, Diarios, Páginas de espuma, Madrid,2007, p.

11 Marguerite Jean-Blain, Eugène Ionesco Mystique oumal-croyant?, Lessius, Bruxelles, 2005.


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