[By accentuating and accelerating the disjointedness of character, setting and situation] the theater of the absurd turned the professor into a central figure for the representation of man's condition in the modern world, in a way neither Mr. Chips nor his cousins, Molière's Docteurs, could have represented it.

Ionesco's Professor [in La Leçon is] … obviously steeped in the tradition of the stage professor, a tradition which for both its comic and tragic effects supposes a link with everyday life and reality. This link survives, though it has become extremely tenuous, and though the figures on stage now seem to re-enact everyday nightmare in patterns that are as unlife-like as possible, yet more compelling than ever for all involved. Overcoming the grotesque distortion of displacement and acceleration, this new professor holds the center of the stage and shows disturbing marks of kinship with the more heroic figures whose place he has usurped. (p. 138)

Ionesco has continued to be faithful to [the] conception of theater as a universe where the archetype has a privileged position and the intensely private blends with the commonplace…. The case of the professor in La Leçon is, in this respect, particularly interesting, for it recalls not only the mountebank, but, with him, the tradition of the Carnival contrasto; as a result, "la propre mythologie de l'oeuvre" emerges by contrast with the Dionysian myth, going against the grain of Western drama. (p. 141)

[La Leçon] is the first of Ionesco's paradoxical machines …, namely, presenting interaction of rather clearly distinguished "gear" and "pivot" figures (personnage-rouage and personnage-pivot) thoroughly undermined in their respective roles…. The main paradoxical effect of this play results from the dramatization of impotence: like all dead things, it becomes frightening when set in motion, especially at the infernal pace suggested here.

La Leçon is Ionesco's second play, still very much a part of the revolution he was bringing to the theater. La Cantatrice chauve, subtitled anti-pièce, has the function of clearing the stage of all the associations of pièce, all that passed for theater…. La Leçon, subtitled drame-comique, was to establish on the newly cleared stage something violent which would revert to the sources of drama: "violemment comique, violemment dramatique."… In the traditional theater, which Ionesco claims to have despised at the time, drama had relentlessly followed the Dionysian pattern, featuring the young man, hero or god, come to challenge an old order. Comedy, the full cycle, demanded a compromise: the old more or less graciously accepted the secondary role in a new order, allowing the young to mate and procreate—the happy ending…. La Leçon parodies all this: far from creating hope, the conjunction of young and old brings out the all-pervasive sterility of the established order as well as of its potential challenger, the young student…. La Leçon is governed by the cycle [of life/death, hope/despair] from the start. What had seemed to be just another bit of nonsense in the mouth of Mr. Smith …, has now become a technique of representation: take the natural cycle, the familiar figure with which we associate hope and continuity, accelerate its motion by means which need no disguise, and the comforting rhythm will cease. (pp. 142-43)

Obviously, Ionesco understands the doctors very well, since in every one of his plays after La Leçon, not excluding L'Impromptu, he dramatizes the refusal to yield to human and cosmic encirclement. (All circles are not vicious, but it is easy to become confused and claustrophobic.) When he launches into his diatribe against theatrologists, Ionesco tells the audience that, like him, Bartholoméus I, II and III hold some fundamental truths, but whereas they translate them into pedantry and systems, he creates visions and images in the theater which he will not subject to any ideological tyranny. This being his favorite topic for polemic, it is not surprising that he becomes professorially long-winded about it and merits the doctorate in the end. (p. 145)

In Ionesco's private mythology, the figure of the professor has obviously retained all its ambiguity and fascination. When it does reenter his literary world, however, it seems to have been tamed, reduced to the status of a mask (the doctor-astrologer-executioner in Le Roi se meurt), a reverberating image (the logician in Rhinocéros demonstrating basic arithmetic by deducting paws from cats), or a new breed of pedagogue with a new breed of students who do not flinch at the absurdities used to liven up their new lesson and, in fact, meet them tit for tat (Philippe, Dick and their élèves in Exercices de conversation et de diction françaises pour étudiants américains). (p. 146)