Eugène Ionesco

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Ionesco and the Comedy of the Absurd

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Like Beckett, [Ionesco] does not take literature seriously, though he keeps on writing plays. He acknowledges his indebtedness to Kafka, who shared his obsessions. His plays, like the fiction of Kafka, are not intended to convey a message, a rationally defined meaning. He composed The Bald Soprano in order "to prove that nothing had any real importance."… He finds existence "sometimes unbearable, painful, heavy and stultifying, and sometimes it seems to be the manifestation of God himself, all light."…

It must take a great deal of courage for a dramatist of the absurd to write at all. He must fight his own battle of the mind against the enervating feeling of futility. He is caught in the meshes of the destructive logic that supports his aesthetic of the absurd. If life, insofar as he can make out, is without meaning or purpose, then why take the trouble to repeat the lugubrious theme that life is without meaning or purpose? If, however, he is not bothered by the need to justify his creative venture, he is brought up short by the difficulty of embodying his vision of a reality that cannot be framed in words. How, as he practices the art of the absurd, can he name the unnameable? How give flesh and form to the ineffable experience of nada? (p. 223)

In order to capture the elusive features of the Absurd, Ionesco focuses on the elements of the comic, the grotesque, and the contingent in the life of man. Death for Ionesco represents the upsurge of the uncanny, the threat of nothingness, the quintessence of the Absurd. He protests against the fate of death, though he realizes that his protest is but an ineffectual gesture, an empty outburst of rhetoric. The finality of death reveals the distinctive character of the Absurd. The tragic and the comic interpenetrate. The drama of the Absurd is born of the dismaying insight that modern man, despite all his technological conquests, cannot escape his mortal lot…. The absurdist hero struggles fiercely against annihilation, but in the end, as in Ionesco's The Killer, he is overcome.

The type of drama called forth by this numinous encounter with the Absurd eliminates the possibility of tragic affirmation in the manner of the ancient Greeks. The absurd is simply there, a tremendum mysterium that is neither to be worshiped as divine nor assailed as diabolical; it is a haunting consciousness of the nothingness that waits for man. The tragedy of the absurd, like the nihilistic tragedy, seems to be a contradiction in terms. There is nothing the dramatist of the Absurd can affirm. Born of paradox and culminating in paradox, his plays abandon all illusion, though he is aware that these illusions constitute the essential humanity of man, his never-ceasing search for transcendence. The intimations of the Absurd emerge from this conflict between these all-too-human illusions and the adamantine in-difference of the universe. The absurdist hero is defeated and dragged under, but he never pretends that the outcome will be other than it turns out to be. A dauntless truthseeker, he prefers, like Bérenger, the protagonist of The Killer, to know the worst that will befall him rather than to remain deluded. He is able to endure the wounds that existence can inflict upon him and laugh at his mortal predicament. (pp. 224-25)

The humor Ionesco employs is at bottom a method for ordering the inchoate mass of material that the world places at the disposal of his imagination. (p. 225)

[Ionesco] is the visionary poet who can never get used to the strangeness of existence. He can make no sense of this phantasmagoric universe, these phantom presences that represent people, these moving lights and shadows and the all-enveloping curtain of darkness. He looks on the world as a rare spectacle, an incomprehensible and yet amusing show and he reacts to it with a sense of wonder, but it also induces anxiety and dread. He is caught in a series of irreconcilable contradictions. "Nothing is atrocious, everything is atrocious. Nothing is comic. Everything is tragic. Nothing is tragic, everything is comic, everything is real, unreal, possible, impossible, conceivable, inconceivable." His work, despite its exploitation of the comic vein, gives expression to an obsessive pessimism. Death is the epitome of the Absurd…. Death overtakes all men, regardless of their merit, and if that is so, then what is the purpose of living? Ionesco remarks: "We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously." He cannot forget himself because he cannot forget that he must die, those he loves will die, and the world will ultimately come to an end.

Death is the supreme humiliation man is made to suffer, the outrage he is powerless to prevent. Death is meted out to all; and it is this knowledge that leads Ionesco to stress the vanity of life. All his reading, all the works of art he has studied, emphasize the implacable truth he perceived early in life: the inevitability of death. Why should he concern himself with the social, economic, and political problems of the hour when he knows that we are slated to die and that no revolution can save us from death. (p. 227)

Though Ionesco's obsession is fixed on death, it is not, like the work of Edward Young and Thomas L. Beddoes, morbid in content. It voices a universal theme. It is a source of anguish, and it is this metaphysical anguish, which never lets up, that incites him to creativity. By writing he keeps the issue of mortality alive even though this intensifies the anguish he feels, anguish born of the "fear of nothingness."… It is this accursed knowledge that we are doomed to die that turns us into killers. Death is the tormenting question mark for which we can find no answer. Though this perpetual "Why" that we ask gets us nowhere in the end, we continue to interrogate the world of being. Why for millennia should the sons of Adam resign themselves to the intolerable imposition of death? If they begin to love life, they are soon overcome by the certainty that it will shortly be taken away from them. "This is the incredible thing: to love a life that has been thrust upon me and that is snatched away from me just when I have accepted it."… He is afraid that in dwelling repeatedly on this archetypal theme he may yield to the vice of self-pity or indulge in sentimentality. He writes: "I have been, I still am tormented at once by the dread of death, the horror of the void, and by an eager, impatient desire to live. Why does one long to live, what does living mean?"… He does not know the answer. It is the thought of death that makes living an impossible burden to bear. Like Camus, Ionesco rejects suicide as "unforgivable failure; and we must not fail."…

Ionesco comes to grips with the theme of death in The Killer and, later, in Exit the King. (p. 228)

Offhand no theme seems less promising than the one Ionesco has chosen to deal with in [Exit the King.] What dramatically fruitful results can be derived from the thanatopsian motif? The agonizing struggle to cling to life of a king who is dying and knows he is dying—what, after all, can the most gifted and original playwright do with such refractory material? The words of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, the poignant cry of memento mori, the Dance of Death, the sermons and sonnets of John Donne, the lucubrations of the Graveyard School of poets—the potentialities of such an essentially static and sterile theme have already been exhausted. Nothing new can be added; no genuine conflict can possibly arise. The battle the condemned person wages is cruelly unjust. As in Andreyev's play The Life of Man, Death is always the winner. There is never a moment of doubt as to the final outcome. However desperate his resistance, the chosen victim must give in. It is only a matter of time. Here is the grim drama each man acts out at the end of his life: a drama that lacks the element of suspense. The plot must, of necessity, follow a preestablished pattern. Why did Ionesco revert to this theme that he had already sounded in The Killer?

Because it sums up the distinctive aesthetic of the Absurd. Because … death is Ionesco's constant obsession, the primary source of his inspiration. In Exit the King he is writing a twentieth-century version of Everyman, in which the theological and moral gloss is left out. There is no God to pass judgment on life or to intercede for the dying man. Heaven and hell no longer exist. After death, there is—nothing.

Ionesco invests the theme with universal overtones. Each man is the virtual ruler of a kingdom, his body, which he is forced to surrender after a comparatively brief reign. The outlying provinces renounce their allegiance; the parts of the internal kingdom refuse to obey their sovereign. Or they break down, one by one, and are no longer capable of responding to his commands. He ceases to be in control of his subjects; he lacks the strength to support his crown and scepter. (pp. 229-30)

Charles I. Glicksberg, "Ionesco and the Comedy of the Absurd," in his The Literature of Nihilism (© 1975 by Associated University Presses, Inc.), Bucknell University Press, 1975, pp. 222-33.

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