We all know that we shall die. But Ionesco knows it even as he eagerly reaches for a menu in a restaurant. Even while he eats, he knows he is dying. Each of Ionesco's doubles, the Bérengers in his comedies, knows it too. Not only is death constantly present in everything Ionesco writes, but it is present as dying—one's own and other people's, universal and incessant.

"When the bells toll for a funeral I am overcome with a mysterious anguish, a sort of fascination. We know all the people who die."¹ This is one of the earliest entries in "Scattered Images of Childhood" from Ionesco's Fragments of a Journal. A few pages later, he writes " . . . when I was four or five years old I realized that I should grow older and older and that I should die. At about seven or eight, I said to myself that my mother would die some day and the thought terrified me."² And once again: " . . . the only thing one can know is that death is there waiting for my mother, my family, myself."³

Many years later, in his reminiscences of the Vaugirard Square, close to where he spent his Parisian childhood, Ionesco wrote: "When memory brings back a picture of that street, when I think that almost all those people are now dead, everything does indeed seem to me to be a shadow and evanescence. My head spins with anguish. Really, that is the world: a desert of fading shadows."⁴ And the following two lines, which could have concluded Bérenger's long monologue at his last meeting with the Killer: "It's to Death, above all, that I say 'Why?' with such terror. Death alone can, and will, close my mouth."⁵

Ionesco's double in The Killer says: "We shall all die, this is the only serious alienation." In Fragments of a Journal we read: "The human condition is beyond bearing."⁶ And further: "I cannot understand how it should be that for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years men have accepted life and death in these intolerable conditions: have accepted an existence haunted by the fear of death, amid war and pain, without showing any real, open decisive reaction against it. . . . We are caught in a sort of collective trap and we don't even rebel seriously against it."⁷

One could go on and on citing such quotations, but they are tiresome in their monotony: death is the process of dying, there is no cure for it and no reconciliation. It is as if there were nothing else to say. Ionesco had intended to write his dissertation at the Sorbonne on "Sin and Death in Poetry After Baudelaire." He never completed his thesis. Smitten by death, he became an author of comedies.

According to my simple definition of this theatrical genre, comedy is a spectacle which evokes laughter. "Nothing is more difficult," wrote Molière, "than to amuse les honnêtes gens." Ionesco is one of the finest, if not the finest of modern playwrights who make us laugh. His plays amuse me and amuse us all. The comic power of The Bald Soprano, The Lesson and Amédée compares only with that of Chaplin's early films. They arouse and continue to arouse loud laughter.

What kind of laughter is it, and what is its object? "When I say: is life worth dying for? I am still using words. But at least they are comic."⁸ In other words, dying can be amusing when it is talked about or performed. "For my part," Ionesco explains, "I have never understood the difference people make between the comic and the tragic. As the 'comic' is an intuitive perception of the absurd, it seems to me more hopeless than the 'tragic' The 'comic' offers no escape. I say 'hopeless' but in reality it lies outside the boundaries of hope and despair. . . . For it seems to me that the comic is tragic, and that the tragedy of man is pure derision."⁹

The tragic is a source of metaphysical consolation. The tragic without metaphysics—ordinary dying which nothing will justify, the absurd without hope—is ridiculous. "Pure derision," writes Ionesco. And where does it occur? On stage. The ridiculous-tragic is a theatrical genre. In 1960 he wrote: "But when these older writers use the comic and mix it with the tragic, in the end their characters are no longer funny: it is the tragic that prevails. In my plays it is just the opposite: they start by being comic, are tragic for a moment and end up in comedy or tragicomedy."¹⁰

The term as well as the theatrical genre of tragi-comedy, or tragico-comedy, was invented by Mercury, the god of transformation. "What's that? Are you disappointed/To find it's a tragedy?" he chides Plautus' Amphitryo; "Well, I can easily change it./I am a god, after all./I can easily make a comedy,/And never alter a line."¹¹ Ionesco called The Bald Soprano an anti-play, The Lesson a comic drama, The Chairs a tragic farce. In Victims of Duty, Nicolas explains to the Detective: "No more drama nor tragedy, the tragic's turning comic, the comic is tragic and life's getting more cheerful . . . more cheerful."¹²

"Tragi-comedy" would in this case be a misleading term. The "cheerful life" Nicolas envisions for the Detective is a "tragic farce." Using Aristotelian terms, we would say that terror is to be accompanied by laughter rather than by pity and compassion.^12a The tragic hero must first perform his role clownishly. As a result of this clownish mockery, the terror of his tragic situation is revealed for a moment, only to be overcome by laughter so that life can become "more cheerful" again.

Ionesco has been transforming the ridiculous-tragic into the tragic-ridiculous, both in his reflections, and in his plays from The Chairs, Jack, or the Submission and Amédée, to The Killer and Exit the King. This dual exchange of theatrical signs, the inverted sequence of the tragic and the ridiculous, seems to give the formula for tragic buffoonery. The best and perhaps the oldest description of this theatrical genre, was given by Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night's Dream after he assembles his actors for the first rehearsal. "Marry, our play is 'The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby.'" (I,ii, 11-12)

The "most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby," as the long title indicates, is a "comedy," but it is a "most lamentable" one. This little play, performed by Athenian craftsmen is a burlesque of Romeo and Juliet, which one of the Quartos called "The most excellent and lamentable tragedie." The most cruel death of Romeo and Juliet as well as the most cruel death of Bérenger in The Killer and in Exit the King have been made comic. Nevertheless these comedies are "most lamentable." "Take a tragedy;" Ionesco wrote in his Notes and Counter Notes; "accelerate the movement and you will have a comic play . . . ," and more emphatically: "A burlesque text, play it dramatic. A dramatic text, play it burlesque."¹³

The first performances of Ionesco's plays in the 50's aroused simultaneous delight and resistance, admiration and horror at their astounding novelty. And yet, most astounding in Ionesco's tragic farces was their reversion to the most ancient and the most persistent tradition of comic theatre and carnival pageantry: the world is set on its head, the beggar is proclaimed king, the ship of fools represents the human condition, clowns conduct laical and religious rites, death struts in a procession of masks through city streets, dying is equated with breeding, and life becomes "more cheerful."

The darkness has scarcely descended into the narrow, highwalled street before lights are seen moving in the windows and on the stands; in next to no time the fire has circulated far and wide, and the whole street is lit up by burning candles. . . . It becomes everyone's duty to carry a lighted candle in his hand, and the favorite imprecation of the Romans, "Sia ammazzato," is heard repeatedly on all sides.

"Sia ammazzato chi non porta moccolo:" "Death to anyone who is not carrying a candle." This is what you say to others, while at the same time you try to blow out their candles.

In this way, Goethe begins his description in Italian Journey of the 1788 Carnival in Rome.

The louder the cries of Sia ammazzato, the more these words lose their sinister meaning and you forget that you are in Rome, where, at any other¹⁷ time but Carnival, and for a trifling reason, the wish expressed by these words might be literally fulfilled.

Just as in other languages curses and obscene words are often used as expressions of joy or admiration, so, on this evening, the true meaning of Sia amazzato is completely forgotten, and it becomes a password, a cry of joy, a refrain added to all jokes and compliments. . . .

All ages and all classes contend furiously with each other. Carriage steps are climbed; no chandelier and scarcely a paper lantern is safe. A boy blows out his father's candle, shouting "Sia amazzato il Signore Padre!" In vain the old man scolds him for this outrageous behaviour; the boy claims the freedom of the evening and curses his father all the more vehemently.¹⁴

Ionesco wrote in his Notes, " . . . laughter alone respects no taboo . . . the comic alone is able to give us the strength to beat the tragedy of existence."¹⁵ His earlier "intuition of the absurd," like his "tragedy of existence," is a debt paid to the philosophy fashionable in the 50's. Ionesco's true "intuition," however, was the return to carnival celebration where, like in the ancient Saturnalias, our modern Angst was present, but where masks of Death were accompanied by masks adorned with phalluses, and with this inversion of signs, funeral rites were turned into rites of wedding.

"There is nothing unfamiliar," continues Goethe, "about seeing figures in fancy dress or masks out in the streets under the clear sky. They can be seen every day of the year. No corpse is brought out to the grave without being accompanied by hooded religious fraternities. The monks in their many kinds of costumes accustom the eye to peculiar figures. There seems to be the Carnival all the year round. . . . "¹⁶ I once watched in New Orleans an amateur theatre troupe which chose a funeral as the subject for a ballet. The rhythmic wailing to blues melodies gradually became more and more ecstatic. Voices rose to an ever higher pitch as a coffin was lifted higher and higher. From beneath long black skirts legs squiggled out as if they had a life of their own. A moment later the coffin swayed in the air, like the dancing hips and bellies.

New Orleans is one of the few places where old carnival traditions, which link together images of sex and death, still retain their compelling symbolism. As Goethe continues in his description of the Roman Carnival, "On the side streets are young fellows dressed up as women, one of whom seems to be far advanced in pregnancy. .. . As if from shock, the pregnant woman is taken ill, a chair is brought and the other women give her aid. She moans like a woman in labour, and the next thing you know, she has brought some misshapen thing into the world, to the great amusement of the onlookers."¹⁷

According to the oldest traditions of Saturnalia, the woman who gives birth is Death. "In the famous Kerch terracotta collection," writes Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World, "we find figurines of senile pregnant hags. Moreover, the old hags are laughing. It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed."¹⁸

The body, Bakhtin writes, is shown in its two-fold contradictory process of decay and growth: a pregnant death. The Saturnalian and carnival signs epitomize the perpetuity and continuity of life and thereby negate completely Samuel Beckett's cruel vision of continuous dying: ".. . one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second . . . they give birth astride of the grave. . . ."¹⁹

The death that gives birth in a carnival farce is not a young woman, pregnant with a new death, but an old hag pregnant with a new foetus. The body, which is decaying, conceives. Awe occasions laughter: in the symbolism of carnival it is one and the same body.

One of the fundamental tendencies of the grotesque image of the body is to show two bodies in one: the one giving birth and dying, the other conceived, generated, and born. This is the pregnant and begetting body, or at least a body ready for conception and fertilization. . . ,

In contrast to modern canons, the age of the body is most frequently represented in immediate proximity to birth or death, to infancy or old age, to the womb or the grave, to the bosom that gives life or swallows it up. But at their extreme limit the two bodies unite to form one. The individual is shown at the state when it is recast into a new mold. It is dying and yet unfinished; the body stands on the threshold of the grave and the crib.

The unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements. It is an incarnation of this world at the absolute lower stratum, as the swallowing up and generating principle, as the bodily grave and bosom, as a field which has been sown and in which new shoots are preparing to sprout.²⁰

Remarkably, this description of carnival imagination and wisdom which served Bakhin to introduce the world of Rabelais, is also a surprisingly apt introduction to the world of Ionesco's Jack, or the Submission and The Future Is In Eggs. In both plays, Ionesco appears to be reusing the old formula for a comedy of manners about two families, a shy young man, an ugly miss, a matchmaker, an engagement, a wedding, and a long wait for progeny. But the "naturalistic comedy" becomes a carnival farce, almost an animal farm. The characters are all "Jacks" or "Robertas" with identical face-masks. Their bodies are unfinished, at once decaying and growing. Herded together, they begin to lose even their human shape. Body parts multiply as with the three noses of Roberta II or the nine fingers on her hand.

Jack: . . . You're rich, I'll marry you. . . .

[They put their arms around each other very awkwardly. Jack kisses the noses of Roberta II, one after the other, while Father Jack, Mother Jack, Jacqueline, the Grandparents, Father Robert, and Mother Robert enter without saying a word, one after the other, waddling along, in a sort of ridiculous dance, embarrassing, in a vague circle, around Jack and Roberta II who remain at stage center, awkwardly enlaced. Father Robert silently and slowly strikes his hands together. Mother Robert, her hands clasped behind her neck, makes pirouettes, smiling stupidly. Mother Jack, with an expressionless face, shakes her shoulders in a grotesque fashion. Father Jack pulls up his pants and walks on his heels. Jacqueline nods her head, then they continue to dance, squatting down, while Jack and Roberta II squat down too, and remain motionless. . . . The darkness increases. On stage, the actors utter vague miaows while turning around, bizarre moans, croakings. The darkness increases. We can still see the Jacks and the Roberts crawling on the stage. We can hear their animal noises, then we don't see them any more. We hear only their moans, their sighs, then all fades away, all is extinguished. Again, a gray light comes on. All the characters have disappeared, except Roberta, who is lying down, or rather squatting down, buried beneath her gown. We see only her pale face, with its three noses quivering, and her nine fingers moving like snakes.]²¹

In The Future Is In Eggs, the barnyard changes into a chicken coop. Roberta II lays eggs, one after the other. She is oviparous. There is no limit to multiplying by way of eggs and the eggs are all the same. The future is in the eggs. Indistinguishable Jacko-Robertas will hatch from them. But even in this carnival chicken coop of boundless fertility, where individuality has been eradicated and life is reduced to the egg, death is present. Even before the young wife begins to lay eggs in a basket, grandfather Jack dies. To "die" means to enter an empty frame. As a matter of fact, he will shock the whole family when he steps out of his frame for a moment to hum to himself.

For Freud laughter is the bribe accepted by the censor of morals for permitting a joke that exposes prurient desires and forbidden wishes. However, more strictly prohibited and suppressed to the depths of the subconscious, is the dread of death, the fear that we will die. All of us. The bribe for revealing this dread and this fear is also laughter. The archaic pregnant Death laughs. Amidst piles of carnival litter, the begetting of a misshapen monster by a man dressed as a woman, evokes riotous laughter. Dread of the end spawns a jolly spectacle. "Death and death throes, labor, and childbirth are intimately interwoven. On the other hand, these images are closely linked to laughter. When death and birth are shown in their comic aspect, scatological images in various forms nearly always accompany the gay monsters created by laughter in order to replace the terror that has been defeated."²²

With characteristic insight, Goethe perceived the same interwoven images of death, sex and birth in the carnival pantomimes performed on the streets of Rome: "In the course of all these follies our attention is drawn to the most important stages of human life: a vulgar Pulcinella recalls to us the pleasures of love to which we owe our existence; a Baubo profanes in a public place the mysteries of birth and motherhood, and the many lighted candles remind us of the ultimate ceremony."²³

Pulcinella, as he left the commedia dell' arte for the streets, always wore a black leather mask with an enormous hooked nose over his eyes and brow. Harlequin had a similar mask, but his costume was different. Pulcinella wore a large white cylindrical hat, white breeches and jacket, a hump on his back and padding in his belly.

Entertainment for Children,²⁴ Domenico Tiepolo's ironic title for his series of a hundred wash drawings, is a great "tragic farce." This sad and cheerful, bitter and derisive story covers in a hundred scenes the life of Pulcinella—from his birth out of a turkey's egg to his banishment from eighteenth century Venice.

The title drawing of Tiepolo's Divertimento per li Regazzi shows old Pulcinella pensively gazing at a monument inscribed with the title of this series. Perched on his shoulder is a puppet of a beautiful Venetian woman who is smiling flirtatiously. Her head is inclined away from the tomb, in her hand is a fan. She is blithely swinging her legs, having drawn them out from beneath her dress. Possibly, the drawing symbolizes the death of Carnival and the approach of Lent. Or perhaps it is a burlesque parody of a passion play in which Christ arises from his grave.

Pulcinella dies, but not forever. In a Pier Leone Ghezzi drawing from the early eighteenth century, Pulcinella suddenly arises from his bier, terrifying a family of peasants. In one of the drawings from Tiepolo's Divertimento, Pulcinella's skeleton, wearing the same large white, cylindrical hat, leaps out of a Rococco grave. Death itself wears the clown hat of Pulcinella.

In Domenico Tiepolo's drawings, the streets of Venice are peopled with Pulcinellas. They paw young women under the ledges of terraced vineyards; dance at village celebrations, hunt for partridges, ride elephants in the circus, collect rent from peasants, and stare inquisitively at camels, which like Pulcinellas themselves, have humps on their backs. Not all of the Pulcinellas are male; women also wear the hooked-nosed masks. Pulcinellas have Pulcinella wives and Pulcinella children, who enter the world with potbellies, humps, and black noses. But the Pulcinella in Tiepolo drawings, and perhaps also in some lost story, is not merely the actor and hero in a Venetian comedy of manners or a carnival pantomime. Here he is incarcerated; other Pulcinellas visit him in prison. As in the paintings of Callot and Goya where the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars are depicted, so in Tiepolo's Entertainment for Children we find scenes of hangings and executions. A blind-folded Pulcinella, still wearing a black-nosed mask, awaits execution bound to a stake. Another Pulcinella lies on the ground, already shot. The execution squad itself, rifles poised for firing, consists of Pulcinellas in white hats. In another drawing, Pulcinella, bereft of his hat, but still in his black-nosed mask, dangles from a scaffold where a crowd of Pulcinellas has gathered. The hangman is on a horse and wears the white Pulcinella hat; he, too, is Pulcinella. Pulcinella is the hangman and the hanged man; he is the executioner and the executed. Wars and revolutions are also a tragic farce: the actors and victims are Pulcinellas. Pulcinella is a new Everyman.

All Bérengers in Ionesco's plays are his doubles and at the same time, Everyman. In two small rooms in a basement of the Frick Collection in New York, where in the winter of 1980 Entertainment for Children was exhibited for the first time, I suddenly saw Ionesco's great theatre. Perhaps the Professor in The Lesson who rapes and murders his fourteenth pupil in a row, ought to wear the Pulcinella black mask with a hooked nose and the white hat. Perhaps the Pupil, who is able to multiply multi-digit numbers in her head but cannot subtract, and who suffers a sudden toothache, should wear not only the blouse and the short skirt of a school-girl, but also a little mask with a black hooked nose.

Perhaps the Old Man and the Old Woman in Chairs should also wear Pulcinella masks. Surely, the Orator who after the suicide of the Elders proclaims his final message to empty chairs, should be masked like Pulcinella and could display a hump as well as a potbelly. Wearing the white blouse of Punch and Pierrot and a huge Pulcinella hat, he would draw letters on the blackboard and gesture with his hands like a deaf man. In Amédée or How to Get Rid of It, gigantic legs of a corpse gradually slide into Amédée's and Magdalena's dining room. This corpse may be a murdered lover or the Past, In any case, it is also Death. But here, Death is present only as the legs of a giant dummy. As in carnival imagery, this Death is "a gay monster created by laughter in order to replace the terror that has been defeated."

We "do die," writes Ionesco, "It is horrible and cannot be taken seriously. How can I trust in a world that has no stability, that flits away? One moment I can see Camus, I can see Atlan and suddenly they are gone. It's ridiculous. It almost makes me laugh. Anyway, King Solomon has already exhausted the subject."²⁵ Or, "King Solomon is my master," and yet again, "Yes, the leader I follow is King Solomon; and Job, that contemporary of Beckett."²⁶ Job and Beckett—the comparison is obvious, but what is Solomon's place in this company? "I am the most foolish of men,"²⁷ says Solomon in Ecclesiastes. Precisely this sentence is the one Folly cites with delight in Erasmus' The Praise of Folly.

King Solomon frequently appears in Medieval ribaldries as well as in Medieval and early Renaissance morality plays. His wisdom is always foolish. Ionesco could have written a tragic farce, "Solomon and Job Discourse on Death." In this "Dialogue of the Dead" we would hear again Lucian's derisive laughter.

The Death which comes to Bérenger in the epilogue to The Killer, does not utter a word. This is no longer the archaic pregnant Death, nor the gay carnival Death which gives birth to a new creature in order to overcome the terror. It is the Medieval Death which calls with a sickle on Everyman. Unbridable, irrevocable and ruthless, this Death has no respect for human honor or dignity. When the fifteenth century Everyman proposes a tribe, Death responds with indignation:

Everyman, it may not be, by no way.
I see not by gold, silver, nor riches,
Ne by pope, emperor, king, duke, ne princes;
For, and I would receive gifts great,
All the world I might get;
But my custom is clean contrary.
I give thee no respite. Come hence, and not tarry.²⁸

In The Killer, Death is silent. Bérenger, all alone, must carry on a Medieval dialogue with Death:

You're poor now, aren't you? Do you want some
money? I can find you work, a decent job. . . .
No. You're not poor? Rich then?.... Aaah, I see,
neither rich nor poor! (Chuckle from the KILLER)²⁹

According to Ionesco's stage directions Killer-Death is supposed to be " .. . very small and puny, ill-shaven with a torn hat on his head, and a shabby old gabardine; he has only one eye, which shines with a steely glitter . . ."³⁰ All Medieval texts talk about the hideousness of Death. Yet in folk drama, in the Sicilian Opera dei Puppi, and in the Polish folk theatre, Skeleton-Death is also quite funny. In the Italian theatre of marionettes, Death diligently saws off heads of sinners which then roll off stage to the merriment of the spectators. In Polish folk theatre, King Herod's head is a cabbage which Death reaps, like a peasant his crops. Death in Ionesco merely chuckles as it drowns its victims, in a basin in the Radiant City, where Death gathers its harvest to the perpetual accompaniment of cris de Paris: the banter of concierges, the mumbling of vagabonds, and the shouts of street vendors. lonesco's chuckling Death could wear the mask of Harlequin with a hooked nose and have Pierrot's powdered white face. The Killer is a tragic farce performed on city streets.

We "do die," Ionesco repeats. "It is horrible and cannot be taken seriously." Exit the King is a comedy about dying. It is the only modern comedy about dying and the only comedy with a hero and the main actor who begins dying in the very first scene before he dies in the last one. If Bérenger were dying in a real bed, if he were mourned by a real wife and a real mistress, if he were treated and operated on by real doctors, if a real nurse rearranged real pillows for him, this play would be insufferable. But Bérenger, who is dying in lonesco's comedy, is a King.

"The King," wrote Stanislaw Jerry Lee, "is naked .. . but under such splendid robes."³¹ Bérenger is dying in splendid robes of royalty. He is King, a fairy tale King, a King in a palace assembled by children out of cards; he is King of a carnival masquerade.

Bérenger does not die. The King dies in the company of Queen Marguerite, who was his first wife. Queen Marie, his second wife, and the Doctor, who does not take care of him and who is at once, "a surgeon, a hangman, a bacteriologist, and an astrologer." Bérenger is dressed up as King so that he can die only as King.

Among the most enduring of carnival amusements is the crowning and uncrowning of the beggar enacted so that he can later be abused, scourged and chased. The beggar's coronation in the marketplace shows traces, according to Frazer, of an ancient ritual in which the king's substitute was killed annually in order to "resurrect" the real king. In the carnival travesty, death cannot be taken seriously. The inhabitants of the Isle of Winds in Rabelais' utopia emit gases when they die and their souls, like this unbecoming gas, leave their bodies via rectum. In Seneca's satire Ludus Morte Claudii, Caesar dies in the act of defecation.

In Le roi se meurt, ou la cérémonie, the ceremonies of dying are carnivalesque. " . . . we do die. It is horrible and cannot be taken seriously." Bérenger is lonesco's double. King Bérenger dies to enable Ionesco not to die.

I saw The Bald Soprano and The Lesson for the first time when they opened in Warsaw. I think it was 1956. Subsequently, whenever I was in Paris I would go to the little theatre in the Rue de la Huchette, where The Lesson and The Bald Soprano were continually running. When I was there last in 1965, I was not sure whether the same actress was still playing the Pupil. She seemed less childish. After the performance I visited the Ionescos. I recorded my recollections from this evening in my diary, which was later published in Theatre Notebook:

"Of course, it's the same actress," said Eugène. "The Lesson will go on being performed for another fifty or seventy years. One day the Pupil will die. 1 mean really die, not just on the stage. She will go to heaven, and St. Peter will sternly ask her: 'What did you do in life, my child?' And she will reply, 'What did I do? I was eighteen when I began to act the Pupil in ML lonesco's play at the theatre in the rue de la Huchette. Then I got engaged, to be married, and I went on acting the Pupil. Then I got married. I went on acting the Pupil. Then 1 got pregnant for three months. I stopped acting the Pupil. Then my daughter was born. I went on acting the Pupil. Then Í got a divorce. I went on acting the Pupil. Then I got married again. I went on acting the Pupil. Then my son was born. I went on acting the Pupil. Then I got divorced again. I went on acting the Pupil. Then my daughter had twins. I had to leave Paris for two weeks. Then I went on acting the Pupil' And St. Peter will say, 'M. Ionesco can hardly wait for you; he is attending a rehearsal of The Lesson.'"

Ionesco looked at me, became very sad all of a sudden and said in a choked whisper, "It's not true; I shall not die."³²

* This essay was translated from the Polish by Michael Kott.

¹ Eugène Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal, trans. Jean Stewart (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 8.

² Ionesco, Fragments, p. 10.

³ Ionesco, Fragments, p. 20.

⁴ Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre, trans. Donald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1964), p. 154.

⁵ Ionesco, Fragments, p. 27.

⁶ Ionesco, Fragments, p. 21.

⁷ Ionesco, Fragments, p. 31.

⁸ Ionesco, Fragments, p. 73.

⁹ Ionesco, Notes, p. 27.

¹⁰ Ionesco, Notes, p. 119.

¹¹ Plautus, "Amphitryo" in The Rope And Other Plays, trans. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 230.

¹² Eugène Ionesco, "Victims of Duty," in Plays II, trans. Donald Watson (London: John Calder, 1958), p. 309.

^12a J. S. Doubrovsky, "Ionesco and the Comic of Absurdity," Yale French Studies (23, 1959), p. 9. "This non-Aristotelian theater presents us with a problem which Aristotle had not foreseen: that of pity and fear for which laughter is a chatharsis."

¹³ Ionesco, Notes, p. 228; p. 182.

¹⁴ J. W. Goethe, Italian Journey, trans. W. H. Auden and E. Mayer (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), pp. 467-68.

¹⁵ Ionesco, Notes, p. 144.

¹⁶ Goethe, Italian Journey, p. 448.

¹⁷ Goethe, Italian Journey, pp. 460-61.

¹⁸ Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M.I.T. Press, 1968), pp. 25-26.

¹⁹ Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 57.

²⁰ Bakhtin, Rabelais, pp. 26-27.

²¹ Eugène Ionesco, "Jack or the Submission," in Four Plays, trans. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 109.

²² Bakhtin, Rabelais, p. 151.

²³ Goethe, Italian Journey,, p. 16.

²⁴ Marcia B. Vetrocq, ed., Domenico Tiepolo's Punchinello Drawings (Indiana University Art Museum, 1979).

²⁵ Ionesco, Notes, p. 110.

²⁶ Ionesco, Notes, p. 156.

²⁷ Erasmus, "The Praise of Folly," in The Essential Erasmus (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 164.

²⁸ "Everyman," in Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, ed. A. C. Cawley (New York: Dutton, 1959), p. 210.

²⁹ Eugène Ionesco, The Killer and Other Plays, trans. Donald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 105.

³⁰ Ionesco, The Killer, p. 97.

³¹ S. J. Lee, Unkempt Thoughts, trans. Jack Galazka (New York: St. Martins Press, 1962), n.p.

³² Jan Kott, Theatre Notebook 1947-1967, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (New York: Doubleday, 1968), p. 220.