Judith D. Suther
The generic difference between [Le Solitaire, a novel, and Ce Formidable Bordel!, a play,] is actually slight, beyond obvious and superficial differences in form. Whether or not the generic question be judged a fruitful subject for debate aǵain matters little. The novel is full of "dramatic" techniques and over half the play is built on "non-dramatic" chunks of prose appropriate to a novel…. What I find compelling about this symbiotic pair, however, is not the havoc they play with generic labels, but the images they project of our struggle with the demons of existence. The demons have not changed appreciably since the plays of the '50s, indeed since long before that. What has changed in Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! is the intensity, I would even say the authenticity, of the struggle. Le Solitaire and Le Personnage, Ionesco's unnamed protagonists, try very hard to understand what is happening to them as the hated but protective routine of daily life dissolves into an amorphous disponibilité, time passes, revolutions come and go, and still the awaited event, the ordering agent, does not make itself known. (p. 689)
With some minor divergences and a major one at the end, [the two works] follow the same narrative line, include most of the same characters portrayed similarly, and even share numerous phrases, snatches of dialogue, and techniques of sceneic development. Without presenting my remarks as an "argument" or a "case," I will simply record some reasons why Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! speak to me of a solid, increasingly convincing artistry in Ionesco.
These reasons derive in one way or another from the obsessional presence of death in the novel and the play. Death, or the awareness of death, is not the only interest in either work, but it is the driving force behind their structure, imagery patterns, and minimal plot line. In this sense, Ionesco is offering a kind of extension of Le Roi se meurt (1962)…. Others among Ionesco's more recent plays show this preoccupation with death: Le Piéton de l'air (1963), in which Bérenger, believing in nothing, flies off into space, leaving his daughter behind to recite a litany of dim hope whose key word is "peut-être"; La Soif et la faim (1966), whose setting is progressively swallowed up in mud, the viscous mire of existence and the sign of encroaching death; Jeux de massacre (1970), whose epidemic and famine are presided over by a funereal black monk; Macbett (1972), with its perverse victor Macol who will create a kingdom where evil reigns and death will overtake the inhabitants before their natural term. It is obvious from these plays that Ionesco has tried over a period of years to come to grips with the demon of death. Though it does not dominate the plays of the '50s so insistently as it does those just mentioned, the fact of death is never absent from Ionesco's theatre…. (pp. 690-91)
In Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! death is not personified; it does not nakedly stalk the streets, nor is it embodied in any one character or event or object (as it was, for example, in [earlier plays] …). The awareness of eventual death is the impetus for the very movements of Le Solitaire and Le Personnage. I say "movements" rather than action, since these nameless protagonists, operating in a mode now conventional to post-modern art, displace themselves in space without incurring any of the involvements or repercussions that an act would entail. The sharp and aching knowledge of their own imminent non-being provides a trunk onto which Ionesco...
(This entire section contains 2929 words.)
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grafts the bizarre plants of his imagination, those intertwining growths that reach out through twenty-five years of his plays. These projections, [consistent components of Ionesco's work,] which converge inLe Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! are (1) the repetitious banality of everyday conversations; (2) the proliferation of objects and the related motif of the sameness of people; (3) the passage of time; and (4) the fact of solitude. Underlying them and eventually crowding them out is the spector, occasionally the vision, of death. (p. 691)
However empty [the parrot-like] utterances may be, they help develop the dominant theme of death in both works. They underscore the desperate search of Le Solitaire and Le Personnage for that elusive something, that message from the unknown which will somehow infuse meaning into life before the life itself is swallowed up into the ontological void. (The phrase "vide ontologique" is Ionesco's own, which he uses to describe the sense of non-being that permeates the consciousness of his heroes who are surrounded by objects and propelled by time, but who are unable to establish their own place in either space or time …). (p. 693)
That the banality of these conversations and monologues is intimately tied to the theme of death can be seen clearly in the old woman who sells Le Personnage his new apartment…. [A short, typically Ionescan series of nonsense statements] sets the old woman off on a revery. It is a beautiful revery, telling of the death of the woman's husband and her own awakening to the reality of death…. The wonder of this passage is that it avoids the trap of bathos and balances finely between the ordinary details of this ordinary woman's life, and the sudden lyricism of her confession. Though probably not on a conscious level, the conceit of the oxymoron is at work here apparent opposites, everyday trivia and a personal intimacy with death, become so interrelated as to suggest a new reality of their own. This fusion is effected throughout Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! The terror of death's nearness is increased by the vacuity of life, by the very fact that no advances are ever made toward an understanding of life itself, which soon will end. (p. 694)
The last scene of Ce Formidable Bordel! presents a neat complement to the overstuffing at the end of Le Solitaire. Whereas Le Solitaire is caged by objects, Le Personnage finds himself surrounded by nothing…. His furniture quietly disappears until he is alone in his armchair on a deserted stage. This reversal of the proliferation process was used to great effect in Le Roi se meurt…. In Ce Formidable Bordel!, it functions like the overstuffing in Le Solitaire: in one case, the protagonist is figuratively hemmed in; in the other, he is literally so. The effect is the same. The obsession is also the same, this fertile mania for eschatological images which pervades Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel!
Le Solitaire and Le Personnage see the people in their lives as scarcely more compelling than the objects…. The people are interchangeable, the names are interchangeable, they multiply or disappear like objects…. The soldiers who swarm the streets in Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! owe an obvious debt to an earlier herd of pachyderms. These techniques are, of course, nothing new with Ionesco…. [Interchangeable] and protean creatures have [always] inhabited Ionesco's plays. (pp. 695-96)
Le Solitaire, in particular, tries beyond human bounds to identify one jot of sense in the chaos around and inside him, before his time is up. His effort perhaps comes across more amply than that of Le Personnage because the protagnoist of the play is generally silent, while the first-person narrator of Le Solitaire documents his struggle from its meanest detail to its grandest hallucination. It is the very oversupply of people in the long history of the earth that most puzzles Le Solitaire…. Could they all, he wonders, have been as bewildered, as unanchored, as he is? Could they have died without enlightenment? This sense of exile within the timeless continuity of human life underlies the third major theme of Le Solitarie and Ce Formidable Bordel!—the passage of time.
Although it rather lurks below the surface until the '60s with Le Roi se meurt, the passage of time has haunted Ionesco's plays of the last fifteen years…. This ancient theme, usually dignified by the name tempus fugit when poetry is under discussion, reaches a paroxysm in Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! In the pathological sense, the term paroxysm indicates a crisis or recurrent intensification of a disease; this is precisely what occurs in the novel and the play. In approximately the last third of both …, careening time and violence combine to paint a nightmarish picture of death as it overtakes its victims. (p. 696)
The only antidotes to total disorientation in Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! are drink, sleep, and sex (an occasional and unsuccessful antidote). All three of these induce a temporary oblivion which both imitates and delays the final oblivion….
Once Le Solitaire and Le Personnage reach the depth of alienation at which all temporal reality loses its meaning, the end is in sight. We might expect either of them to stop eating and simply die, or walk outside and be shot by a stray bullet left over from the revolution, or succumb to some random agent of destruction. But they survive, and here the two works diverge; the titles are explained by the final scene. In Le Solitaire, a miraculous tree sprouts from the mound of refuse in the inner courtyard (a figure of the protagonist's inner life)…. The tree is bathed in bright light and accompanied by other trees. A silver ladder leads into the clear blue sky. As this vision comes closer to Le Solitaire, it fades and disappears altogether. But, he says, "Quelque chose de cette lumière qui m'avait pénétré resta."… In Ce Formidable Bordel! a similar vision—the same tree, the same light, but no ladder—elicits a fit of wild rage from Le Personnage, who laughs maniacally, repeats "quelle bonne blague," and shouts directly at the spectators, "Quel bordel! Oh la la, quel formidable bordel!"… (p. 698)
From the novel to the play, either Ionesco had a change of heart or he decided to indulge in paradox once again. Le Solitaire … sees a sign of something beyond the present agony; Le Personnage sees more of what he has already seen, which is nothing…. [The] quiet watchfulness at the end of Le Solitaire is more satisfying than the gigantic joke which closes Ce Formidable Bordel! In each case, the passage of time has catapulted the protagonist into the judgment seat; the judgments passed by Le Solitaire and Le Personnage are, on the face of it, worlds apart. Yet they may be heads and tails of the same coin, of the ancient fact that the nature of death is unknowable.
There remains the chief structuring element in the two works, solitude itself, [which is],… one of Ionesco's major preoccupations. This claim is verifiable in almost all his plays, indeed in the very principle of metaphysical isolation which he illustrates at such harrowing lengths. A lesser known side of Ionesco's view of solitude, however, is revealed in his diaries, interviews, and occasional writings. It is this side of solitude, the "luminous" side, that informs Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! and helps explain the sudden visitation of light at the end.
Like Le Solitaire and Le Personnage, the varying personas who speak with the mouth of Eugène Ionesco seek solitude. They seek it as a means of combatting the pressures of collectivism, bureaucracy, social necessities, and noise. They seek it also as an asylum where they can study their own terminal illness and prepare themselves to die…. Is solitude the complement of non-communication? [No, for Ionesco maintains that solitude is essential, and that modern man suffers from lack of it.] (pp. 698-99)
In Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! are concentrated Ionesco's best efforts to date at sustaining a hero who does know how to be solitary, or at least one who is learning the art. (p. 700)
The divergent endings, and … the titles of the novel and the play, probably give us the clearest sign we may expect of whether or not Ionesco has made peace with his demon. The answer, of course, is first yes and then no…. Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! come closer than any of his previous works to dealing effectively with the obsessional subject of death; to my taste, the novel comes closest. A gathering of references to conversion of manners and transcendence in these sibling creatures would extend to some length and might suggest a pattern in Ionesco's conception of eschatology….
[In the closing scenes of both works,] the scene is theatrical in the extreme …, the reaction of the protagonist is clearly stated, if ambiguous in meaning. This ambiguity, or ambivalence, is true to what we know of Ionesco's [negative] way of seeing the world. (p. 701)
[The] configuration derived from light is a fascination of long standing with Ionesco. It returns to serve as a matrix for Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! Whether its positive or negative aspect prevails in the end will probably remain a moot point. For Le Solitaire, it is the positive, for Le Personnage, the negative. For Ionesco, the constant maintenance of the paradox is becoming a conclusion in itself. The dance with death executed by these lone figures traces, if not a conclusion, then a moving statement on life and death. (p. 702)
Judith D. Suther, "Ionesco's Symbiotic Pair: 'Le Solitaire' and 'Ce Formidable Bordel!'," in The French Review, (copyright 1976 by the American Association of Teachers of French), April, 1976, pp. 689-702.
Since Eugène Ionesco moved on from his first, more purely Absurdist phase to what might be called the Absurdist Symbolism of Tueur sans gages and Rhinocéros, he has tended to produce works which follow the same pattern. There is a central character—often called Bérenger—who is in some respects a projection of the playwright himself, and who undergoes a series of public and private experiences, either because they simply happen to him while he himself remains more or less passive (Le Roi se meurt), or because he bumps into them as he proceeds on a quest for truth, happiness or the transcendent (La Soif et la faim). These plays are Absurdist in that they present a beleaguered consciousness, on the verge of paranoia or even in the grip of paranoiac hysteria, struggling with unreliable and incomprehensible events; and they are symbolist in that they not only make use of overt symbols but also exploit the traditional symbolic polarities of religious sensibility; the light and the dark, the high and the low, the frightening and the reassuring.
The world and Ionesco's temperament being what they are, the conclusion is invariably sombre. In Rhinocéros, all the humans are animalized except Bérenger himself; in Le Roi se meurt, King Bérenger dies as his kingdom collapses about his ears; in La Soif et la faim, Jean Bérenger ends up as the frantic slave of sadistic monks. It is as if these plays were predominantly nightmares, interspersed with brief and inexplicable phases of euphoria, similar to the rare moments of relief that the author himself experiences in his general awareness of the pain of living….
These two latest plays [L'homme auxvalises and Ce formidable bordel!] run true to form in being examples of ambulatory and stationary paranoia, depending on nightmare effects. In L'homme aux valises, the anonymous hero, referred to simply as "le premier homme" and encumbered with two suitcases, is engaged on an unexplained journey, which is a sort of Absurdist pilgrim's progress. Railway stations turn into harbours. Paris does not seem to be where it should be, the members of the hero's family appear and disappear in a bewildering confusion of ages, civil war is apparently raging in various places and, above all, the traveller has to run the gauntlet of different oppressive authorities, such as policemen, doctors and consuls. In the end, "le premier homme" and a large cast of representative characters perform a circular ballet, symbolic no doubt of the meaningless repetitiveness of life's disturbing round.
The hero of Ce formidable bordel!, referred to simply as "le personnage", is a recessive, alienated character to whom things happen. He inherits a fortune, and this prompts his fellow office-workers to show various degrees of envy and spite. He has his meals every day in the same restaurant, and is taken over by an enterprising waitress who becomes his mistress. He buys a flat in a block, where various curious characters display their absurdity in lengthy monologues. An incomprehensible war breaks out, as if society beyond the end of the street were always seething with unreliability. The mistress of "le personnage" leaves him, and he experiences a sort of panoramic vision of life, in which generations of concierges and people he has known appear and disappear. In the last scene, breaking the silence that he has maintained throughout, he cries that nothing is comprehensible and laughs uproariously at the thought that life is "une bonne blague", a great joke, or "un formidable bordel", a colossal mess or mix-up. This is the Absurdist laughter which can alternate with tears of anguish as the fundamental response to existence.
It is interesting to see how Ionesco can ring the changes on the Absurdist/Symbolist obsession, but the admirer of his earlier works cannot help feeling that these later plays are perhaps rather fluid and shapeless in their development; they could be shorter or longer without their essential nature being changed. If the raw dream or nightmare is being used as material, perhaps it needs to be processed more rigorously into an aesthetic form for the waking state.
"Dreams of Absurdity," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd., 1976; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), July 16, 1976, p. 867.