Eugène Ionesco

Start Free Trial

An Interview with Ionesco

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: “An Interview with Ionesco,” in Tulane Drama Review, Volume 7, No. 3, Spring, 1963, pp. 163-68.

[In the following conversation, Ionesco is characteristically reluctant to classify his plays and ideas, and reveals his annoyance at the tendency for “literary specialists” to ask irrelevant questions about the artist’s work.]

Schechner: If there is a central theme to your work, it seems to be the search for the self. Your characters either don’t know who they are (the Smiths, the Martins), or they are forced to abandon their identity (Jack, the Pupil), or else they are tortured in their effort to find themselves (Choubert). Yet, with Berenger, you have created a character who is himself. Could you discuss this aspect of your theatre’s development?

Ionesco: That is only one of my themes. The others, it seems to me, are: death, evil, political and social ills, old age, nothingness or absence. If “Berenger is himself,” that’s fine. I, however, cannot discuss this “development,” nor the essential reality of the character. It’s up to you to do that. Forgetting, if you please, everything that the critics have said about it. Commentaries become oppressive. Or rather, they constitute a screen which is placed between the reader and the work itself. Act as though you had read none of what the critics, favorable or unfavorable, have said. It’s the work that we should read first; and it’s to the work itself that we must constantly return.

Schechner: What effect, if any, have Sartre and his analysis of the self in Being and Nothingness had upon your work? Has Nausea influenced your work?

Ionesco: Not at all. Besides, I don’t think much of Sartre. I believe also that my fundamental reaction is the very opposite of his. Consciousness, the awareness of existence provokes in me an astonishment which is a source of joy. This astonishment is like a state of grace. I am depressed when it forsakes me, when I am not astonished, when existence becomes routine because of exhaustion, lack of awareness, or distraction. This is what happens most of the time.

Schechner: You have stated that the archetype is hidden within the stereotype. Is this one of the reasons why you, while making fun of clichés, continue to use them? Does the cliché hide a vacuum in the individual at the same time that it reveals a universal truth, especially in The Killer and Rhinoceros?

Ionesco: An archetype is universal, of course. It is essential truth, a source. A stereotype is routine. Routine and cliché separate man from himself, hide him from himself, separate him from his deepest truth. In The Killer and Rhinoceros, Berenger destroys his own clichés as he speaks. And so, he sees beyond them. His questions no longer have easy answers. Perhaps he arrives in this way at fundamental questions which lie beyond false answers, that is to say ready-made answers (made by others, of course) which are not real answers. After all, to have no answer is better than to have a false one.

Schechner: Would you say that the Berenger plays are written in a more classical style than the plays which preceded them?

Ionesco: Perhaps. I don’t know. It’s a secondary problem, a problem of literary technique.

Schechner: Is Berenger an everyman, an archetype? Is he a bourgeois hero?

Ionesco: What is a hero? What is a bourgeois? What is a non-bourgeois hero? You’re falling into clichés. The Marxist double talk is lying in wait for you! Communist conformity is as bourgeois as bourgeois conformity.

Schechner: You write that the inner and outer worlds correspond just as do your personal world and the world of others. Is this identity the source of what you call classicism? What do you mean by “inner world” in such plays as Bald Soprano and The Maid to Marry?

Ionesco: You’re giving me a headache! Decidedly, you are a literary specialist. Let’s say that The Bald Soprano is the expression of my personal feeling of the astonishing (insolite). A state of astonishment that breaks through clichés, which bursts clichés, by stressing those very clichés. The universe surprises me. The universe of clichés surprises me also. In The Maid to Marry, it seems to me that I am dealing chiefly with the impersonal world of clichés. The two characters are lost in their clichés. Lost. The illogic of the ending should shake up the spectators.

Schechner: Was there a turning pont in your life, or in your idea of the theatre, between Amédée and The Killer? Your theatre seems to find a new existence with The Killer.

Ionesco: I have no ideas about the theatre. Or at the most, about technical problems. With each play, everytime I begin to write, I ask myself how I can best express what I want to say. May I repeat, this is of minor importance. A turning point? There are always turning points. Everything is transition. We turn, and turn. But what can my “life” matter to you? My life in the final analysis is only the time that I have been able to write my works, to see, to listen, to write. What is written counts. I’ve lived for my work. It is my work which expresses, it is my life, or life in general. It is in my works that you must look for my life.

Schechner: Also, you seem to abandon the theme of the couple in your Berenger plays. Before The Killer, your plays were constructed around the man-woman relationship, or about the family.

Ionesco: Woman, or the members of the family, are also others. As well as being another aspect of oneself. Others are everywhere, and oneself is also in others. I abandon the couple, I take it up again, I abandon it, I take it up again, I abandon it, and so on. Whether I speak of, or express, the reality of another, of one or of several, it’s about the same thing: the same “world” is manifested. A single person can represent others; a person alone also “bathes” in his epoch, speaks for others or for me.

Schechner: Are you concerned by the political situation in France? If such concern exists, does it find expression in your work?

Ionesco: Like all my countrymen, I feel concerned. But I don’t feel concerned alone by the immediate current events. Current events are always the reflection of something more profound. Today’s current events may or may not appear in my work. Perhaps they already do appear? I need distance to perceive it.

Schechner: What relationship is there between words and objects in your work? Are the disarticulation of language and the proliferation of objects two phases of the same phenomenon?

Ionesco: Perhaps. I believe so. What do you think? They aren’t phases; they are simultaneous processes.

Schechner: What influence, if any, has Artaud had on you?

Ionesco: I read him recently. It may be a case of the meeting of minds.

Schechner: What influence has the cinema had on you?

Ionesco: I think it must have had one, since I’ve been going to the movies for years and years. You figure it out. That’s your work.

Schechner: You’ve said yourself, that you are not a “man of the theatre.” Yet, your work is by far among the most theatrical of our day. How did you learn stage language without ever having worked on the stage?

Ionesco: That proves that I’m a man of the theatre anyway. How did you learn to breathe from the first second of your life without anyone ever teaching you? The theatre is a natural function also.

Schechner: What authors and directors are closest to you? What young writers do you prefer?

Ionesco: Shakespeare, Calderon, Kleist, Chekhov, and others. Dubillard, Weingarten, and others.

Schechner: You have said that once a form of art is accepted, it is outmoded. How do you look upon your early works today? Where is the avant-garde?

Ionesco: That’s true. Acceptance of an art form outmodes it. I don’t know what to think of my early works today. To find the avant-garde all you must do is look around you. Besides, the avant-garde doesn’t exist, or else it always exists. Everything is the avant-garde of something; there’s no stopping.

Schechner: Would you like to see your plays performed in a theatre like the TNP or on the Boulevard?

Ionesco: Why not? It’s all the same to me. But the TNP has already congealed into a set form of Masses, ceremonies; its politico-ideological inhibitions, its obsessions.

Schechner: Has Camus influenced you? Particularly his Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger? And Kafka?

Ionesco: Camus? Perhaps. I esteem him very highly. Kafka has certainly influenced me.

Ionesco’s P. S.—History and Literary Criticism. A man speaks to you. Instead of listening to the profound meaning of his words, instead of realizing what he wants to tell you, for he is speaking to you (or he is speaking alone, out loud, but his speech has a certain coherence; or else he is building a world, a structure appears), you do not receive this world, you only listen to the sounds. You say: how strangely he pronounces his “r,” his “e,” his “o”; say, where does that archaic expression come from? Or: where is his accent from? South of the Loire? Or: say, someone already told me the same thing he’s saying; I wonder if he agrees with the other fellow?

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Next

Why Do I Write? A Summing Up