Eugène Ionesco

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Why Do I Write? A Summing Up

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SOURCE: “Why Do I Write? A Summing Up,” in The Two Faces of Ionesco, The Whitson Publishing Company, 1978, pp. 5-19.

[In the following essay, Ionesco sums up his reasons for writing, which include trying to recapture the paradisiacal light of his childhood and reveal it to others; communicating what he considers to be the dazzling miracle of existence, complete with its joys and horrors; and affirming through the creative act his presence in the universe.]

I am still asking myself this question. I’ve been writing for a long time. When I was thirteen, I wrote my first play, at about eleven or twelve I was writing poems, and I was all of eleven when I started my memoirs: two pages of a school notebook. It isn’t as though there was a lack of things to say. I know that at that time I still had a clear recollection of my early childhood, when I was two or three years old, a time which has now become the memory of a memory of a memory. Seven or eight was the awakening of love; I was deeply attracted by a little girl of the same age. Then, when I was nine, there was another, Agnes. She lived eight kilometers from the Mill of the Chapelle-Anthenaise where I spent my childhood, a farm at St-Jean-sur-Mayenne. I made faces to make her laugh, and laugh she did, closing her eyes, revealing dimples, and tossing her blond hair. What has become of her? If she is still alive, she must be a fat peasant woman, perhaps a grandmother. There would also be other things to tell: the discovery of the cinema, or the magic lantern; my arrival in the country, the barn, the hearth, and old man Baptiste with his missing thumb on the right hand. Many other things: the school, the teacher, old man Guéné, the priest, Durand, the tippler, who returned dead drunk from his rounds of the farms of the commune. Everywhere he went they’d give him cider, or pear brandy.

Then there was my first confession when I said yes to all the priest’s questions because I couldn’t make out what he was saying—he was muttering under his breath—and it seemed better to take upon myself imaginary sins rather than to let any slip by. I could have spoken of my little friends, Raymond, Maurice, Simone, and of the games we played. But all this required training which one acquires later. We speak of our childhood when we’re no longer in it, when we no longer understand it very well. Of course, we also fail to understand what we are when we are children, but, at any rate, I was conscious of being alive when I lived in the Mayenne, I lived in happiness, joy, knowing somehow that each moment was fullness without knowing the word fullness. I lived in a kind of dazzlement. The first rift occured when I had to leave the Chapelle-Anthenaise. But with time the light dimmed, and now I realize I was not suited to being a farmer, ungifted as I am for manual labor. Some of my school pals from the école communale, Lucien, Auguste, have become wealthy farmers. To me, however, it seems that they lead quite a hard life, and that there’s little play left in their daily existence. They cast an indifferent eye on frolicking children. Perhaps I might have been the village teacher but my only vacations would have been school holidays which are not real holidays for adults.

One of the real reasons for which I write must be to find once again the marvellous element of childhood beyond daily life, joy beyond drama, freshness beyond hardship. Palm Sunday, when the tiny village streets were strewn with flowers and branches, was a transfiguration under the April sun. On religious feast days, I would climb the narrow, rocky path, guided by the church bells, and the church itself would appear little by little, first the top of the bell tower with its weathercock, then the whole steeple outlined against the blue sky. The world was beautiful, and I was conscious of it, everything was fresh and pure. I repeat: it is to find this beauty again, intact in the mud, that I write literary works. All my books, all my plays are a call, the expression of nostalgia, a search for a treasure buried in the ocean, lost in the tragedy of history. Or, if you prefer, what I am looking for and seem to find from time to time, is light. This is my basic reason for writing literature, and for having nourished myself by it. Always in search of this light, its presence beyond the shadows a certainty. I write in the night, in anguish, by the brief flicker of humor. But this is not the light I’m seeking, not that lighting. I want a play of intimate confession, or a novel to remain shadowy until one issues into the light. In my novel, Le Solitaire (The Loner), as one comes out of a long moral tunnel, one is greeted finally by a dazzling landscape with the morning sun shining on a flowering tree, a green bush. In Hunger and Thirst, Jean, the wanderer, sees a silver ladder rising from the earth into the azure of the heavens, and in Amédée or How to Get Rid of It, the hero flies up in the direction of the Milky Way. In The Chairs, however, the characters have but a dim recollection of a church standing in a luminous garden, then the light fades and the play opens into the void. And so on.

Most of the time these images of light, quickly fading, or, on the contrary seeming to arise naturally at the end of a lengthy journey, have not been willed into existence but found. Or, if they appear in the conscious mind, it is because they first came to me in dreams. I mean by this that in my plays, or my written meditations, I have the feeling of embarking on a voyage of exploration, of groping my way through a dark forest, in the middle of the night. I do not know whether I will ever reach my goal, or even if a goal exists. I proceed without a clear outline, and the end comes of its own accord. It can be an awareness of failure, as in my last play, L’Homme aux valises, or of success providing that the end resembles a new beginning.

I am in fact seeking a world which has recovered its virginity; I would like to repossess the paradisiacal light of my childhood, the glory of the first day, an untarnished glory, and of an intact universe which would appear before me as though it were new born. It is as though I wanted to witness the event of creation before the Fall, looking for it within myself, as if attempting to swim up the stream of History, or within my characters who are other incarnations of my self, or who are like those others who resemble me in their quest, conscious or not, of an absolute light. It is because they have not mapped out a road to follow that my characters wander in the dark, the absurd, in incomprehension and anguish. It has often been suggested that I speak a great deal of my anxieties. I rather think that I refer to those of human beings caught in the grayishness of daily existence, or in misfortune, people who mistakenly believe that they are prisoners of the impasses of history and politics, but who, as a result, become ready victims of exploitation, repression and wars. To return to what I way saying, I would like to stress that the state of childhood, and a certain intensity of light are indissolubly fused in my mind. All that is not light is anguish, sinister shadows. I write to find anew this light and communicate it to others. This light is at the outer edge of the absolute which I lose, and find again. It is also astonishment. I see myself in my childhood photos, eyes wide open, amazed by the very fact of existence. I haven’t changed. The primordial wonder is still part of me. I am here, I’ve been put here, surrounded with all of this and all of that. I still don’t know what happened to me. I’ve always been deeply touched by the beauty of the world. When I was eight, and then nine, I lived two months of April, and two months of May I will never forget. I ran along a path edged with primrose, gamboled through fresh green meadows, full of an indescribable joy of being. These colors, this dazzling light, haunt my mind so that when I say that the world is a prison I am not being truthful. In the Spring, I recognized the colors, the beauty, the light of a paradise whose memory I have kept. Even now, in order to escape from my anguish, I place myself marginally, peering with profound attention at the world, as though I were seeing it all for the first time, on the very first day of consciousness. Standing back, away from the world, I contemplate it as though I were not part of it. Then it may still happen that I will feel transports of joy. Wonder having reached its zenith, I no longer doubt anything. I feel certain that I was born for eternity, that death does not exist, that all is miraculous. A glorious presence. I am grateful then to witness this Manifestation and participate in it. And since I participate in this particular Manifestation, I will take part in all the Manifestations of the divinity, for all eternity. It is at such moments, beyond the tragedy and anguish of the world, that I am certain of being fully, truly conscious. I recover the age when I would walk, hazel stick in hand, among primroses and violets, and the sweet smells permeating the light of spring. The world and I were just beginning. Yes, it is to speak of my wonder that I write. But joy is not always part of wonder, or rather I am rarely sufficiently astonished to reach this kind of joy, this ecstasy. Most of the time the sky is dark, most of the time I live in anguish, used to feeling anguish, habituated to the habitual. The click which illumines everything happens with increasing rarity. I try to remember, I attempt to hold on to the miracle of light, and at times I succeed, but with age it becomes increasingly difficult. The passing years of personal history are like the stormy, tragic, demoniacal centuries of universal History. A tumultuous past, thick as memories, or as the collective memory of the world separates me, and all of us, from the beginning. We live inured to anguish and misfortune, and if on occasion I perceive that the world is a celebration, I also know, as all of you do, that it is misery.

There was to begin with the initial amazement: the conscious awareness of existence, an astonishment which I might call metaphysical, a pure surprise experienced in joy and light, free of any judgment brought to bear on the universe, the kind of astonishment which I recover only at moments of grace, in themselves extremely rare. Then a second type of amazement was grafted onto the first, the ascertainment that evil exists, or perhaps more simply that things are bad. This discovery that evil is among us, that at this moment it gnaws away at us, destroying us, preventing that we take cognizance of the miraculous, as though it were not part and parcel of the miracle of existence, is a frightful knowledge. Thus, the joy of being is strangled, submerged by misfortune which is as inexplicable as existence, tied to existence. Misfortune is a profound enigma. This theme has been debated by countless philosophers, theologians, sociologists. I myself will not dwell on this insoluble problem. I simply want to state that as a writer universal misfortune is my intimate, personal business. I must transcend evil in order to reach, beyond evil, not happiness, but a transient joy. In a naive, awkward way, my works are inspired by evil and anguish. Evil has squelched my joy. It is my circumambient atmosphere, and yet it continues to amaze me as does the light. It weighs more heavily than the light. I feel its weight upon my shoulders. In my plays I did not seek to discuss it, but to show it. The fact that it is inexplicable renders all our plans, all our acts absurd. This is what I feel as an artist. I found the existential enigma acceptable, but not the mystery of evil. And what is all the more unacceptable is the fact that evil is law, and that human beings are not responsible for its existence. But of course it suffices to look at a drop of water under a microscope to see that cells, that microscopic organisms, fight among themselves, kill and devour one another. What takes place on the level of the infinitely small, happens at every level of universal greatness. War is indeed the law of life. That’s all it is. All of us know this, but we no longer pay attention. If only we were to be conscious of it, to even give it some thought, we would realize that this is not the way things should be, that life is impossible. It is already puzzling to be squeezed between birth and death, but to be forced to kill and be killed is inadmissible. The existential condition is inadmissible. We live in a closed economy; nothing comes to us from outside, and we are forced to devour one another. Go in peace and eat each other. I have the feeling that creatures are not in complete agreement with this state of things. We make one small gesture and precipitate the catastrophic end of protozoan worlds, dig in our shovels and destroy a nation of ants. Every gesture, every movement, be they insignificant, provoke disasters, catastrophes. I walk through this meadow without thinking that all the plants in it struggle for vital space, and that the roots of these magnificent trees, by reaching deeper in the earth, bring about suffering, tragedies, kill. Every step I take also kills. And so I say to myself that the beauty of the world is a deception.

Later in life, at about fifteen or sixteen, when we are all disciples of Pascal, without necessarily having read Pascal, but simply by looking at the stars, I was seized by the vertigo of infinite spaces. The infinitely small is even more vertiginous than the infinitely large. To be unable to conceive a limitless world, to be unable to imagine the infinite, is our fundamental infirmity. Nor do we really understand what we are doing. We are made to do things we do not understand, of which we are not responsible. For a superior intelligence, we are all ridiculous wild beasts, tamed to perform meaningless acts in a circus, performing them with no understanding of what they are. We are being mocked; we are someone’s plaything. If at least we could know. we are plunged in darkest ignorance, doing the opposite of what we think we’re doing, not masters of ourselves. Everything eludes our control. We make revolutions to institute justice and freedom. We institute injustice and tyranny. We are dupes. Everything turns against us. I have no idea if there is meaning or not, if the world is absurd or not, for us it is absurd, we are absurd, we live in the absurd. We were born deceived.

Condemned to know nothing, except that tragedy is universal, we are now being told that death is a natural phenomenon, that suffering is natural, that we must accept it because it is natural. This is no solution. Why is it natural, and what does natural mean? The natural is the incurable, something I refuse to accept; it is a law I deny, but there is nothing one can do, and I am in the trap of what appears to be the beauty of this world. Still, there is one thing we can be conscious of: all is tragedy. To explain this by original sin is no explanation. Why was there original sin, and did such a thing really exist? What is far more extraordinary is that finally each and every one of us is conscious of universal tragedy. Also that each of us is the center of the universe, each human being lives in a state of anguish he cannot share with billions of other human beings who nevertheless experience the same anguish. Each one of us is like Atlas who bears alone the full weight of the world. And yet, they tell me, I can discuss this with a friend who will not necessarily murder me, I can go this evening to a concert, or a play. To hear what, see what? The same insoluble tragedy. I can go on to a good restaurant for a fine meal, and I will eat animals they have killed for it, and vegetables whose life span I interrupted. What I can do is not think of it. But let’s watch out, for the same menacing force weighs upon our lives. We will be killed by other men, or germs, or on account of a psychic imbalance. There are moments of respite, short recesses at the expense of others. I realize of course that I am proferring the most banal of statements. At least one calls them banalities, when they are fundamental truths which people try to push aside in order not to think of them and go on living. We are told that we musn’t be obsessed by things, that it is abnormal that things should obsess us. It seems to me that what is abnormal is that things should not obsess us, and that a thirst for life, a desire to live put our consciousness to sleep. We are all metaphysically alienated. Unconsciousness is added on to our alienation.

In these conditions, a man I call conscious, a man for whom these elementary truths are present, can he accept to go on living? I have a friend, a philosopher of despair, not at all insensitive, who lives in pessimism as in his natural element. He speaks a great deal, is a brilliant conversationalist and a jolly person. “Modern man,” he likes to state, “fiddles with the incurable.” That’s exactly what he does. Let’s do likewise. We live on various levels of consciousness. Since there is nothing we can do, since we are all doomed to die, let’s be merry. But let’s not be duped. We ought to keep, in the background of our consciousness, what we know. And we must also come out with it to set people on the right path. First, let’s try to kill as little as possible. Ideologies do nothing but prompt us to murder. Let’s demystify. It is now obvious that colonial empires have been erected, and massacres perpetrated in the name of Christianity and love. Other colonial empires are being formed at the price of even greater slaughter perpetrated in the name of justice and human fraternity. It is essential to come to the realization that so called ideologies are nothing but convenient masks used by those who yield to the explosion of the irrational or extrarational forces of crime inscribed in the very fibers of our nature. If there is a battle to wage, let it be against criminal instincts which find alibis in ideologies. If we cannot avoid massacring plants and animals, let us at least stop killing human beings. Neither philosophies, nor theology, nor Marxism have been able to solve the problem of evil, nor to explain its presence. No human society, above all not the communist one, has succeeded in averting or even diminishing it. Wrath is everywhere. Justice is not equity, it is vengeance and punishment. If the evil perpetrated by men upon one another undergoes a change of aspect, it remains fundamentally the same in its deepest nature.

Thus, I have written also to ask myself this particular question, to probe this mystery. It is the theme of my play, The Killer, in which the hero questions the assassin to ask him, in vain, what are the reasons for his hatred. Hatred must have excuses; it has no reasons. A murderer kills because he cannot help himself, without motive, with a kind of candor and purity. By killing others, we murder ourselves. To live beyond good and evil, to consider a thing to be beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche wished, is not possible. He himself went mad with pity when he saw an old horse slump down and die. There is pity then, not Eros but Agape. But charity is grace, a gift.

There is perhaps one way out still; it is contemplation, the wonder in the face of the existential fact as I said earlier. This might be, after all, a way of being beyond good and evil. I know it is difficult to live in the state of astonished wonder when one is serving a life sentence, undergoing forced labor with machine guns turned upon you, or simply having a toothache. Still, let us live in that state of wonder to the extent that it is possible. The richness of creation is infinite. No man resembles another, no signature is alike. One can never find two men with the same fingerprints; no one is anyone other than himself. This fact can also plunge you into amazement. It is also a miracle. In America, modern men of science have transcended atheism. Physicists, mathematicians, researchers in the natural sciences believe they know that creation has a finality, a plan, that it is the grand design of a conscience which directs it. No individual can be born for nothing. If there is a final plan to the universe, then there must also be some kind of plan for the individual, and for every particle of matter. We must keep faith. This too will pass. The world may be merely a gigantic joke played by God on man. That’s what the protagonist of my play, A Hell of a Mess, comes to realize at the end of it when he bursts out laughing; his whole life has been spent questioning himself and the mystery of creation, and all at once he sees that it’s all been a terrible gag. I have no doubt been inspired by the story of a Zen monk who, in old age, having spent his whole life in search of a key, the seed of an explanation as to the meaning of it all, receives an illumination. Looking about himself with new eyes, he exclaims: “What deception!” and cannot stop laughing. I’m also thinking of an Italian film whose title I have forgotten along with the name of the director. I saw the film long ago, right after the Second World War. It showed German soldiers occupying a convent. Italian partisans attack the convent and the Germans leave, except one, more absent minded. He wears glasses, must be an intellectual. Alone in the convent, he is chased by a knife-wielding partisan who pursues him into the very chapel. This place will not prove to be a sanctuary. In his precipitous flight, the German knocks down a statue of the Virgin, then a cross bearing a tormented, bloody Christ. The Italian catches up with the soldier, and knifes him in the back. He falls. He looks about him, as though seeing the world for the first time in all its horror, takes off his glasses, and asks out loud: “Why, but why?” and dies. Here also there’s a kind of illumination, and this ultimate question is in fact an ascertainment. This is the first and the last time that this man has thought about the world, and he has come to the realization of existential horror. Why this horror, why the absurdity of horror? This question can be posited from the very birth of consciousness, as it can also at the end of our existence. But throughout our life we are all plunged in horror as though it were the understood state of affairs, without ever questioning it. We are so used to things as they are that it is the act of questioning which seems absurd, when, in reality, what is senseless is not to question. Thus, to posit this fundamental question is already an illumination. It is at least the full realization of the basic problem: why horror?

I repeat that I don’t have the feeling that I have said things that are new, but rather that I experienced intensely two contradictory apprehensions: the world is at once marvelous and atrocious, a miracle and hell, and these antithetical feelings, these two obvious truths, constitute the backdrop of my personal existence and my oeuvre. I said at the beginning of this lecture that I was wondering why I wrote. When I analyze myself I come up with a temporary yet substantial answer. I write to give account of these fundamental truths, these absolute questions: why existence, or rather how, and also how is evil possible, and how does it fit in with the existential miracle. I write to remind people of these problems, to make them aware of them so that they watch out and never forget. It is enough if they remember it from time to time. Why not forget, but, on the other hand, why not remember? We must be conscious of our destiny in order to know how to situate ourselves in relation to others, and to ourselves. Our social awareness flows out of our metaphysical consciousness, out of our existential intuition. By not forgetting who we are, where we’re at, we will understand ourselves better. A human fraternity based on the metaphysical condition is more secure than one grounded in politics. A questioning without a metaphysical answer is far more authentic, and in the end useful than all the false and partial answers given by politics. Knowing that each individual among billions is a whole, a center, and that all the others are ourselves, we will be more accepting of ourselves, that is to say, for it is the same thing, of others. We must consider that each one of us, paradoxically, is the world’s navel. Thus, every individual will be able to acquire a greater importance, we, ourselves, a lesser one, with the greater one being accorded to the others. We are, at one and the same time, unimportant and very important, and our destiny is identical. New human relationships can spring from this awareness. It is the feeling of amazement and wonder in the face of the world we contemplate, tied to the intuition that everything is at the same time suffering, which can constitute the fundamental basis of human fraternity, and of a metaphysical humanism. As Jean Paul Sartre wrote in No Exit, hell is other people. The others are us, we could answer. If we cannot make our common existence a paradise, we can nevertheless transform it into a less thorny, disagreeable passage.

The theatre that some of us have written since 1950 is radically different from boulevard theatre. In fact, it is its opposite. Contrary to boulevard theatre which is free of problems and questions, and is entertainment, ours, despite its humor, its derisive snicker, is a theatre which puts in question the totality of human destiny, of our existential condition. Whereas popular theatre puts consciousness to sleep since it neither disturbs nor reassures, we have been told that we are disquieting, and that since there is good dose of disquiet in the world already, it would be nice not to increase our problems, at least for a time. But this time passes quickly and we find ourselves face to face with our anguish. Personally, boulevard theatre increases my anguish more than anguish. It is unbearable, so empty and useless does it seem. But as to us, we do not want to chase anguish away. We try to make it familiar so that it can be surmounted. The world can be comical, or derisory, it can also seem tragic, in any case it isn’t funny. Nothing is funny.

Nor do we write political theatre, or, at least, not purely political. Politics seem to me to be also entertainment, a horrifying kind of entertainment, but entertainment nevertheless. That is to say that politics cannot be detached from metaphysics. Without metaphysics, politics do not express a fundamental human problem. They constitute in such case a limited, secondary activity, stripped of ultimate implications. Two centuries of politics and revolutions have instituted neither liberty, nor justice, nor fraternity. Politics offer no answer to the fundamental questions: who are we, where do we come from, where are we going? They are maintained within strict limits, cut away from transcendental roots. Metaphysics have also been unable to offer definitive answers, and such is the case of science, and the philosophy of sciences. The only possible answer is the question itself. It reactualizes within our consciousness the certainty of our fraternity in ignorance, beyond social class, beyond the barriers of our fundamental identity, beyond the differences between human beings. This consciousness cannot cancel out anguish, but it is able, as politics are not, to stop provoking wars and massacres. Politics are alienation, and can be experienced only as the analyzable, or unanalyzable reflection of the passions which direct them, dominate them, making us into puppets. Political theatre can bring only a very limited illumination. Ideological theatre is inferior to the ideology it wishes to illustrate, and of which it is the tool. Since political theatre reflects ideologies familiar to us, it is tautological. For a century, and above all in the last fifty years, it has rehashed the same themes. Thus, political theatre makes us as unconscious metaphysically as boulevard theatre. We must depoliticize theatre. Political theatre can teach us nothing new.

I would not be telling the whole truth if I were to affirm that the reasons I have just given are the only ones which impelled me to write. Many of the latter came to me in stages, as I progressed in my career in the theatre and found myself confronted by the diverse theatre guides, masters of the mind, directors of human conscience who came forward to give me proper orientation. I also met along the way recruiters of committed art and theatre. Some twenty years ago, or more, Jean Vauthier and I were summoned by a Mr. Panigel whom we did not know. After slight hesitation, we accepted his invitation. Mr. Panigel was a member of the Communist party, at that time extremely pro-Stalin. He addressed us in the following terms: “Boys, you have a bit of talent, but no ideas. You can’t write theatre without ideas. I’ll instruct you. It is I who will provide you with ideas. We’ll meet periodically, and I will teach you how to write.” Obviously, we never returned to see this gentleman. At about the same time, or perhaps a year later, Bernard Dort wrote a lengthy article, a whole page in L’Express on Adamov and on me. Our two photographs illustrated the text in the paper. What did Dort say in his article? It appeared that, as he saw it, both of us had done until then good negative work: we had criticized bourgeois or petty bourgeois society, which was fine but not sufficient.—Of course, this sort of criticism was the least of my own concerns, but this was not clear from the piece.—The latter went on to say that Adamov and I had a good deal of talent, and that we could become the two greatest men of contemporary theatre. One condition had to be fulfilled. No more negative criticism, from now on we had to make positive statements or we would suffer the consequences of having nothing to say. To renew ourselves, to become adult writers who have reached their majority, there was only one possibility: become committed writers. One spoke a lot of commitment at that time. It was essential to take part in the social, political struggle. We had to create a revolutionary theatre, not only in form, but in content, and in underlying intent, for this was commitment. To become committed did not mean to opt for the cause you were interested in, but simply to become a card carrying, militant member of the Communist party. Only this was commitment and nothing else. Our theatre had to become one of Marxist instruction. Such was the new definition of popular theatre: to educate the masses in this particular way, not even solely in Marxism, but rather train them to follow the orders of the day. The latter, issued by the governments of the countries of Eastern Europe to the intellectuals of these countries, from which independent thinkers wish to escape, and do so, at the price of enormous personal sacrifice, are the very one the occidental ideologues wanted to impose on us. In France, as in England and Germany, the opposition, or rather the ideological fashion brought to bear, or attempted to exercise a veritable form of censorship. I felt that I belonged to a minority, crushed between bourgeois convention and the new ideological convention. I was alone, in disagreement with everyone, ill at ease, deprived of a spiritual family. Of course, I did not give in. Adamov did not resist; he accepted commitment, converted to an elementary kind of Marxism and Brechtianism and was applauded by the ideological critics. But he did not receive the plaudits of the public. A minority of bourgeois thinkers, who thought of themselves as revolutionary, people with no contacts with humanity at large, were his only supporters. Arthur Adamov denied his early plays and lost himself as a writer and an artist. I know that at the end of his life he regretted this action.

The young bourgeois, reactionary by nature, now no longer young but still intent on indulging in literary criticism, believed they were getting “close to the masses,” to the will of the masses, and that they would teach the proletariat what the proletariat is supposed to be. But we know that for them, “the masses” and “the proletariat” were nothing but abstract ideas. They never worked in factories, nor in the fields; all they knew were society’s salons.

I myself wrote committed plays. Such a one is Rhinoceros, as is The Killer, and a number of others, in spots. Only, I did not commit myself in the direction desired by the ideologues. I pointed out the existence of evil in a thousand different societies, in thousands of different aspects. The ideologues held this against me. From that time on they began to write both in newspapers and in literary reviews that my works were worthless, that I had been untrue to myself whereas in reality I was listening to myself alone. Because I was not in agreement with them, because I had not obeyed them, they decreed that I had no talent, and that they were bitterly sorry to have mistakenly attributed some to me earlier on. They went so far as to attempt to take back what they had published about me, declaring, as Bernard Dort did in the course of a lecture delivered on a trip through Europe, that I had been given “too much importance” when, in actual fact, it was he who had at first lavished this attention upon me. But let us leave for some other time these personal polemics despite their curious insight into what goes on behind the curtain not of a theatre, but of literary criticism in general, and dramatic criticism in particular, at least that of contemporary critics who are never objective being much too passionately involved. One can make mistakes when one is passionate about objectivity, but one makes conscious mistakes, or lies to oneself, when the passions have ideological orientation. Thus, it must be said that if one accords “too much importance” to anything these days, it is to contemporary criticism.

I would like to return to the first impulses which propelled me to write. I have said that I wanted to communicate my dazzlement by the very fact of existence, then, after the apprehension of the existential miracle, that of horror and evil, and finally, as I explored existence in detail, I had ideas to express. But, in order not to withhold anything, I must add the gratuitous joy of writing, of inventing, the delight of imagining, and telling things which never happened to me. In short, the joy of creation, that is to add to the universe things which were not there before, to add on a small universe, or universes, to the universe. Isn’t it true that each writer, each artist, each poet wishes to imitate God, doesn’t he wish to be a little God who can create gratuitously, without reason, in sport, because he is free and in a way that is totally free?

When I went to the école communale, the older children of the next class would tell me about the strange and difficult homework they had to do: composition. They had to write stories, or improvise upon a theme. I was impressed, and I decided that it must be very hard indeed, but very beautiful. I couldn’t wait to try it myself. For most of my school friends this was the worst of chores. For me it held a mystery. Finally, the following year, as I graduated from one class to the next, I was put to the test of composition. We had just had a village fair. We were asked to write about it. I described an imaginary fair, with bits of dialogue. I got the highest mark, and the teacher read my composition out loud in the classroom. What seemed to impress him most was that the story was in dialogue form, contrary to all the others. The teacher congratulated me for inventing dialogue, which, he said to me, had been invented long ago. I went on writing more compositions, always with the same sense of joy. Since we were not assigned enough compositions in class I began to write stories, just for myself. I can say that I’ve been a writer since the age of nine, that is to say since forever. A born writer. I’ve never been able to do anything but literature. Literature gave me great pleasure, my own and that of others. I also began to love paintings, those that tell stories, like Breughel for example where there are country fairs with lots of people, or Canaletto where you can see unreal looking people walking through the unreal town of Venice, a whole life, a universe taken from reality but become imaginary, and then Dutch interiors, ancient portraits where the quality of the art work is deepened by the documentary, human quality. Yes, there’s a whole world which may be real or not, a world which used to fill me with nostalgia for things which could have been, or had existed once but were no longer there, worlds offered yet defunct. And I wrote to offer worlds in turn, possible worlds, other possible worlds. So, it was in childhood that I experienced the purest pleasure of writing, and that my vocation came to the fore. The miracle of the world was such that I was not only dazzled by it, as I have just said, but that I wanted to imitate this miracle by making miracles of my own. Creation.

Thus, it is in this dazzlement before the world, in this astonishment at the thought of the marvel of the world, and in the joy of invention that I find the fundamental, conscious or semi-conscious, or subconscious reasons for writing, for artistic creation. The other reasons, more adult, therefore less pure, less naive, came later. When I entered the ring of polemics, I began to answer, to explain, to explain myself, to deliver messages and anti-messages, but always I went on questioning, for it is this interrogation above all things which is closest to the impulses of childhood.

There is one more reason which you must guess since it is not only that of artists but of each and everyone of us: to do everything so that the world I have seen, the people I have known, the landscape of my childhood and other landscapes I saw later, would never be forgotten, lost in nothingness. One writes to perpetuate all this, to perpetuate oneself, to triumph over death. We are here with our paintings, our music, our poems, our books, in search of a kind of immortality. One writes in order not to die completely, not to die at once, since everything perishes in the end. And I believe that among all these reasons, the two strongest are the following: to allow others to share in the astonishment, the dazzlement of existing, in the miracle of this world of ours, and to shout to God and to other men our anguish, letting it be known that we existed. All the rest is secondary.

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An Interview with Ionesco