Eugène Ionesco

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Escape and Fulfillment in the Theatre of Eugène Ionesco

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SOURCE: “Escape and Fulfillment in the Theatre of Eugène Ionesco,” in The Southern Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 1, October 1971, pp. 15-22.

[In the following essay, Craddock argues that a major concern in Ionesco’s work is the breaking out of confining social structures and awakening of the individual to the full potentialities of existence. According to Ionesco this can be done through exercising the imagination and creativity, those innate capacities that are best developed in solitude, which is where humans find their true selves.]

In Ionesco’s theatre two major themes stand out: alienation and fulfillment. The first of these is one which Ionesco has in common with the other major playwrights of the theatre of the absurd. The theme of fulfillment, however, is less typical of the works of the other contemporary playwrights, but it is a vital part of Ionesco’s theatre.

Ionesco’s major concern about the human condition revolves around his belief that the important goals of life are lost in the maze of routine daily actions. Social living channels the individual’s physical and mental activities to such an extent that he becomes a kind of conditioned human being. By giving most of his attention to the exterior world, the individual fails to give sufficient attention to his inner life. Thus he starves his higher self of artistic or creative activity, and he loses an important dimension of his identity.

In an article in Notes et contre-notes Ionesco states that people who have become prisoners of social reality are “appauvris, aliénés, vidés.”1 Their ability to marvel at the many facets of existence has been killed, and in its place they find fatigue and boredom. This is the sickness which Ionesco feels is prevalent in modern society and which is caused by the opposition of man’s nature and his condition. A symptom of this sickness is a malaise, a sensation of being weighted down by the forces of life, of being without energy or enthusiasm. This gives the individual the feeling of not belonging to the world and of longing to be elsewhere.

In expressing such a mental state in his theatre, Ionesco frankly admits that he is using his own feelings and that his plays are exorcisms of his own anxieties. He writes of two basic states which he goes through: heaviness and lightness. The latter state gives him a feeling of euphoria and of refound liberty, but this happy state is very rare. More often he feels crushed by the universe and longs for something to take him away from what he calls his “prison quotidienne.”2 He has a vague nostalgia of some other world (“un ailleurs”), from which he feels separated and which he misses. This state of being ill at ease in life he has expressed as follows:

Je ne me sens pas tout à fait appartenir au monde. … J’ai plutôt l’impression que je suis d’ailleurs. Si je savais quel est cet ailleurs, ça irait bien mieux. … Le fait d’être habité par une nostalgie incompréhensible serait tout de même le signe qu’il y a un ailleurs. Cet ailleurs est, peut-être, si je puis dire, un “ici” que je ne retrouve pas; peut-être ce que je cherche n’est pas ici. … Je constate donc tout simplement que je suis là, ce “je” difficile à définir, et c’est bien pour exprimer, pour faire part de mon étonnement et de ma nostalgie que j’écris.3

Ionesco endows some of his characters with his own malaise. These are the exceptional ones, however, for he sees most people as being too insensitive to be aware of any malaise. Most of his characters are resigned to the world as it is. They make no complaint; they are, like the Smiths and the Martins, quite at home in their routine world, where they believe themselves fulfilled. Not all, however. There are some who realize that there is a lost dimension to their lives, and they look for it in their memories, dreams, and imagination.

The earliest appearance of such a character is the protagonist of Jacques ou la soumission,4 who reveals in a long expressive monologue how disappointed he is with life and why he would like to escape: He was more perceptive than most people, and he realized early in life what the world was all about. He did not like the things he saw and he complained about them openly. Whenever he complained, people told him that everything would be remedied. To make up for all this, they promised him decorations, awards, and other trivialities. But he was not pleased with these, for they did not touch upon the real problem. He insisted that the situation be changed. Everyone swore to give him satisfaction, even gave him official promises with many legal seals. To pacify him, as well as to divert his mind to other things, they took him on voyages, and at first he let himself fall into this trap. But eventually he realized that all this was faked, that they had changed nothing, that the world was as bad as ever. He wanted to protest, but there was no one who would hear him. He wanted to escape, but all the exits were blocked. He was told that there were exits, but he could not find them. But there was still the cellar door of sensual pleasure. If he could not escape from above, he could at least escape from below. His baser instincts win out, as he lets himself be lured into marriage; and he is trapped into the restricted and limited atmosphere of domestic life.

Jacques reappears in a sequel, L’Avenir est dans les oeufs,5 in which he is controlled further by the family and by society—so much so, that he is not even consulted when the family decides on the careers for his many offspring. When he does try to offer his views, they call him down. They claim that he has lost his faith, and they ask him what he really wants. He replies in a poetic outburst: “Je veux une fontaine de lumière, de l’eau incandescente, un feu de glace, des neiges de feu.”6 This sudden outburst represents his real nature trying to break out of his bondage to middle-class life—the heart of the poet, longing for beauty, but stifled by the chores of daily life. He is brought back to reality, as his family insists that he must do his social duty. If he needs any beauty in his life, he can always go to displays of fireworks, or perhaps take in a chateau from time to time.

In Amédée ou Comment s’en débarrasser7 we again see the killing effect upon the individual as a result of domestic life. Amédée is a writer, but he cannot get past the first line of his work. His wife constantly ridicules and criticizes him. In the next room a body keeps growing until it crowds out both Amédée and his wife. This body could be taken to represent Amédée’s own higher self, killed by the cares and duties of domestic and social life. The more Amédée settles down into bourgeois routine, the bigger the body grows. It is his lost dimension—that part of his life representing his individuality and creativity.

Ionesco’s most famous treatment of social duty as a killing force on the individual is Victimes du devoir,8 in which he shows that society’s control over the individual is so thorough that even his inner life is in danger of being controlled by exterior forces. Choubert, the protagonist of the play, tries to escape his social identity and look for his true self. He does this by means of going back into his memory and his imagination, where the outer world cannot penetrate, but where—in this instance—there is a detective who tries to enter even into that most private domain of one’s life. In the most famous scene of the play, Choubert—in his imagination—climbs a mountain and attempts to fly away. The detective and the wife, in collaboration, do all they can to call him back to his social life. Finally, his wife ridicules him until he loses his confidence and falls. He has failed to escape; he is then watched even more closely, as he is ordered to fulfill his social duty.

Jacques, Amédée, and Choubert are all embryonic forms of Bérenger, a later creation, who has been called Ionesco’s finest. Ionesco uses Bérenger in three of his major plays: Tueur sans gages, Le Rhinocéros, and Le Piéton de l’air.9 Bérenger is essentially an Everyman, and might also be taken to represent Ionesco’s own views. He has learned from experience that we are not living in a golden age. He has given up his illusions and has done his best to adjust to his mediocre existence. But he is dissatisfied with his life, and he yearns for another. He speaks of a warmth which once pervaded his life—an “élan vital,” which he has lost through the years. He is aware that something is wrong, even though he cannot grasp exactly what it is. The character Jean in La Soif et la Faim10 is of the same race as Bérenger. He longs for a world of beauty even though he lives in the midst of ugliness, and he tries to attain it, to struggle against the forces which try to hold him down.

It is through such protagonists that Ionesco shows us the major symptoms of that most discussed modern malady, alienation. But Ionesco not only exposes the malady, he also proposes a cure: to recapture that part of one’s nature from which he has been alienated. This idea he expresses in his theatre, on the metaphorical level, and in his articles, on the polemical level. Even as early as Amédée, Ionesco has presented this form of fulfillment, as Amédée recaptures the lost dimension of his basic self. This happens in a very strange way, but one which is perfectly comprehensible, if one understands the dead body as representing Amédée’s lost self. Amédée takes the body from his apartment (where the atmosphere is so stifling and dead that there are mushrooms growing) and drags it out into the street, where a surprising thing happens. The body becomes very light and goes upward, carrying Amédée with it. He becomes intoxicated with joy; he has become reunited with his lost self, and he goes off into outer space, completely happy, as the play ends.

This same idea Ionesco develops more fully in Le Piéton de l’air, in which he shows us a Bérenger who has a rare moment of lightness which frees him from the heaviness of life. He is filled with such joy that he first walks above the ground, then really flies, saying that he has found again the forgotten means to do this. The onlookers—the conditioned human beings—tell him that this is not natural. He assures them that it is, claiming that flying is an indispensable need and an innate faculty which everyone has forgotten. When we do not fly, he says, it is worse than when we have been deprived of nourishment. He is told that it is too late to relearn it, but he replies that one must try if he is to become a more complete being. After all, he warns, if we are not careful, we might even forget how to walk. Bérenger insists that he will remain a pedestrian, both of the earth and of the air.

Ionesco uses the act of flying in Le Piéton de l’air to express a breaking out of the confines of one’s limited social existence into the limitless opportunity which life offers. He wishes to awaken people’s minds to the full potentialities of life, and he calls for total liberty of thought and a new awareness of reality. In Le Piéton de l’air he implies that one refinds his basic self—this lost dimension—on exercising his full capabilities.

This idea is also expressed in Ionesco’s articles, in which he suggests creation (especially artistic creation), dreaming, and imagination as some of the means of breaking away from life’s limitations. He sees imagination as more important than “la réalité concrète, matérielle, appauvrie, vidée, limitée.”11 He believes that it is not by a limited notion of reality that the authentic nature of things is discovered: “La nature authentique des choses, la vérité ne peut nous être révélée que par la fantaisie plus réaliste que tous les réalismes.”12 Dreaming, likewise, can reveal to the mind many things which are not noticed when one is awake. Ionesco writes: “Lorsque je rêve je n’ai pas le sentiment d’abdiquer la pensée. J’ai au contraire l’impression que je vois, en rêvant, des vérités, qui m’apparaissent, des évidences, dans une lumière plus éclatante, avec une acuité plus impitoyable qu’à l’état de veille.”13

Ionesco sees imagination as a kind of power; it is “la force vivante et créatrice de l’esprit humain.”14 Imagination is a source of the joy of existence; it is part of man’s true nature. The world that is within needs further exploration: “L’espace est immense à l’intérieur de nous-mêmes. Qui ose s’y aventurer? Il nous faut des explorateurs, des découvreurs de mondes inconnus qui sont en nous, qui sont à découvrir en nous.”15 Using our power to think is one way to deliver ourselves from our condition. Ionesco wonders if art might not be the means to this deliverance:

Je me demande si l’art ne pourrait pas être la libération, le réapprentissage d’une liberté dont nous sommes déshabitués, que nous avons oubliée, dont l’absence fait souffrir aussi bien ceux qui se croient libres que ceux qui pensent ne pas pouvoir l’être; mais un apprentissage ‘indirect.’16

Ionesco writes that there is innate in man a creative instinct, which must be given an outlet: “La création est une nécessité instinctive, extra-consciente; parce que imaginer, inventer, découvrir, créer, est une fonction aussi naturelle que la respiration.”17 This need to invent, to express oneself by creating, is what raises man above the animals. He observes that all of us, at one time or another, have written, or at least tried to write, or else have tried to paint, to act, to compose music, or to build something, if only a rabbit cage. There is not always any practical utility to this, or, if so, it is only a pretext to let our creative nature express itself.18 The act of creating is for Ionesco this “passage vers autre chose” which man longs for. It is an attempt to satisfy what he calls “notre soif de l’absolu.” It is a way to call into play the undeveloped faculties which have been given up to the demands of social life.

This type of fulfillment requires solitude, which Ionesco defends against those who think of it as anti-social behavior: “La solitude n’est pas séparation mais recueillement, alors que les groupements, les sociétés ne sont, le plus souvent, comme on l’a déjà dit, que des solitaires réunis.”19 It is in our solitude, he claims, that we find our real selves. He feels that he is more truly himself when he is alone and that often society alienates him from himself and from others. His social self does not fully reveal him: “Lorsque je suis à la surface sociale de moi-même je suis impersonnel. Ou je suis très peu moi-même.”20

Ionesco claims that his plays try to show that man is more than just a social animal who is a prisoner of his time. He refers to a “communauté extra-historique,” which he says is a more fundamental one than the society of any one time.

Si je peux m’exprimer en paradoxe, je dirai que la société véritable, l’authentique communauté humaine, est extra-sociale,—c’est une société plus vaste et plus profonde, celle qui se révèle par des angoisses communes, des désirs, des nostalgies secrètes qui sont le fait de tous.21

He wonders what the term “social” really means, and he believes that there are many misunderstandings in connection with this word. Too often, he feels, things which are said to have a social interest in reality have more of a political or practical value. He finds that man in general is truer to himself than the man who is limited to his own epoch, and he tries in his plays to penetrate the complex structure of society to rediscover the basic man. Man’s nature is not to be found entirely in his social self, but also in his inner life, which can be as rich as the exterior one: “Le monde intérieur peut être aussi riche que le monde du dehors. L’un et l’autre ne sont, d’ailleurs, que les deux aspects d’une même réalité.”22 It is by returning to the interior life that man in society can recapture his equilibrium and find his fulfillment.

Notes

  1. Notes et contre-notes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 74.

  2. Ibid., 140-41.

  3. “L’auteur et ses problèmes,” Revue de Métaphysique et de morale, LXVIII (October-December, 1963), 411.

  4. Théâtre (Paris: Gallimard, 1954-1966), I, 95-127.

  5. Ibid., II, 203-29.

  6. Ibid., 228.

  7. Ibid., I, 237-333.

  8. Ibid., 181-235.

  9. Ibid., II, 59-172; III, 7-117; III, 119-98.

  10. Ibid., IV, 75-180.

  11. Notes et contre-notes, 4-5.

  12. Ibid., 123.

  13. Ibid., 93.

  14. Ibid., 130.

  15. Ibid., 207.

  16. “Depuis dix ans je me bats contre l’esprit bourgeois et les tyrannies politiques,” Arts, No. 758 (January, 1960), 26.

  17. “L’auteur et ses problèmes,” 409.

  18. Notes et contre-notes, 103-04.

  19. Ibid., 129.

  20. Ibid., 95.

  21. Ibid., 73.

  22. Ibid., 111.

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