Eugène Ionesco

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Ritual and Poetry in Eugène Ionesco’s Theatre

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SOURCE: “Ritual and Poetry in Eugène Ionesco’s Theatre,” in The Texas Quarterly, Vol. V, No. 4, Winter 1962, pp. 149-58.

[In the following essay, Strem asserts that Ionesco creates a personal, poetical theater by using his inner voices rather than his rational faculties to produce his work, and says that by bringing the ritual of daily life onto his stage the playwright returns to the origins of dramatic expression.]

As a playwright Eugene Ionesco has a feeling of uneasiness, to say the least, about the contemporary theatre, especially about the contemporary French theatre. He accuses the latter of being too doctrinary. Too many writers are using the stage as a pulpit to expose and impose their philosophies.

His own convictions in the matter of theatrical art he summarized in his play Improvisation. Here Ionesco stages himself under his own name, demonstrating the way in which he works, or rather, how his works arise by spontaneous generation. The accent is on impromptu: in the beginning there is the creative urge. The playwright, vehicle of creation, patiently waits until the first impulse is followed by another, a first word evokes a sequence, a question its reply, until finally the dialogue falls into a pattern according to its own law. However, even while his play is still in gestation, philosophers of the market place urge him to elaborate a plot which should conform to their own individual and contradictory doctrines. One of them wants to convert him to the epic theatre à la Brecht, another to essentialism (existentialism), a third to another fashionable philosophy. For a while he endures the swell of pompous clichès, but he eventually manages to state his own profession of faith regarding the art of playwriting:

“Le théâtre est, pour moi, la projection sur scène du monde du dedans: c’est dans mes rêves, dans mes angoisses, dans mes désirs obscurs, dans mes contradictions intérieures que, pour ma part, je me réserve le droit de prendre cette matière thèâtrale.”1

These lines reveal the nature of the quarrel between Ionesco and the conventional theatre. Ionesco does not seek theatrical substance in dialectics brought in from the outside; rather, he finds the conflict within himself and uses the stage to exteriorize it. In the strict sense of the drama his theatre is therefore undramatic; nonetheless, it makes excellent theatre. Since he admits that his plays aim at self-expression, he must turn away from the conventional techniques of playwriting to achieve this aim. He rejects the categorical imperative of a plot—conceived as a prearranged concatenation of events—for he is not interested in telling a dramatized story. In Victims of Duty he takes issue with this conventional requirement of plotmaking. To think out a plot, he says, is not different from writing a suspense story; in fact, he contends, all playwriting has been since antiquity the writing of suspense stories. Where there is a plot, there is a solution found in advance; it is held in reserve to produce it at the right moment. It is the deus ex machina to save author and spectator from embarrassment; it is reassuring, its existence is known in advance, it therefore perverts the basic law of life which is unpredictability.

“On cherche, on trouve. Autant tout révéler dès le début.”

Essentially, the reproach Ionesco levels against the traditional theatre is that it does not take into account the powerful drive of modern art to enrich itself from nonrational sources that bathe all existence. Already Jean Cocteau had declared in 1936 in his preface to Renaud et Armide:

“L’epoque allait venir où, loin de contredire la sottise, il s’agirait de contredire l’intelligence. Mais on ne peut contredire l’intelligence que par l’emploi lyrique des sentiments.”

We shall see that Ionesco does just that: he creates a personal, that is to say poetical theatre in order to dispute the right of reason to serve as unique guide and mirror of man’s world. He relies on what he terms “le mecanisme createur,” to write his plays. We have already explained what this means as to the creative process; his work is not the product of his brain but the dictation of inner voices. His writing technique consists of resorting to sound effects, puns, and apparently nonsensical phrases to produce a certain magic like that of the witch doctors among primitive peoples. Thus, he creates an atmosphere charged with emotion; it appeals not to the reasoning faculties but to the feelings and sensitivity of the spectator. Moreover there is no “imitation of action” in Ionesco’s theater in the Aristotelian sense; his dialogues are no mere conversation to illustrate and explain the action, as it is the case in many of the so-called “well-made plays”; rather, they constitute the very tissue and fabric of the drama, forming what Francis Ferguson calls “the plot as the soul of the play.”2

In addition to harking back to his inner voices Ionesco also allows outside influences to shape his plays. The title of The Bald Soprano is due, for example, to a slip of the tongue of one of the tired actors during a rehearsal. Ionesco, present at the rehearsal, found the accidental encounter of the words “cantatrice” and “chauve” extremely propitious to express the satirical intent of his play; he therefore changed the original title “English without Tears,” which had in its turn been borrowed from an advertisement of a language-teaching method. Undoubtedly Ionesco believes that works of art are the concern of the entire universe, which brings them about through manifold influences as it would create a planet or a mountain. His theatre, as he puts it, is not written; it writes itself.

His medium, the words of the human language, fascinates him. This Rumanian-born author is a great master and juggler of the French language in which he writes. In this respect he is the direct heir and continuator of Rabelais, also a disciple of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, and others. Words he realizes, participate in the universal duality as much as anything else. They are valid as keys to conventional understanding but also in their own right as musical entities. As such they possess a certain evocative quality.

Deprived of their rational connotation, words in The Bald Soprano produce a sound-pattern characteristic of the social contacts of Western man, epitomized in the British middle class. The chatter of nonsensical or silly phrases symbolizes the inability of man to communicate with his fellow men. By giving up all pretense of meaning, the author shows that our conversations have no regard for true communication. He gets his point across by reproducing the ritual of daily family life in its innumerable manifestations. The comical effect achieved by the nonsense of the words, accompanied by that of the gestures, has deep tragic implications. The play conforms to Ionesco’s own definition of the theater, for it is the expression of his anguish about the nonsensical character of our daily lives, and on a higher plane also about the meaning of our existence. The same will hold for all of Ionesco’s productions; from one end to the other of his theatre he presents the manifold aspects of the Human Comedy, the force and satire of which surpass Balzac’s interpretation.

Let us take, for example, another of his popular plays, The Lesson. Gibberish produced in imitation of the sound pattern of modern life again constitutes its theme, this time between a professor and his pupil at their lesson. The rational being, the professor, is overcome by the power of words. The endless repetitions of certain formulae intoxicate him; their magic unleashes deep-seated, murderous instincts in him. The fact that such magic ceremonial always results in the same ritualistic sacrifice of a human being is announced in form of a warning, uttered by the maid: “La philologie mene au pire.” The student too begins to succumb to this word magic: through increasingly involved, increasingly nonsensical periods, circumlocutions, and repetitions, she is brought into a state of torpor, accompanied by a physical sensation that feels like toothache. Tension is on the rise, comparable to that produced by a savage beating of drums. Several times the professor repeats the word couteau—it refers to the glittering blade that he has taken out of its cache and is now holding in his hands. The word is decomposed: cou-teau. The first syllable alludes suggestively, alluringly, dangerously to the neck of the student that beacons to the frenzied man handling the glittering object; the second syllable “teau” is very close to “tue,” the lethal verb that brings the ritual to the culminating point. “Le couteau tue,” the knife strikes the girl with enormous force as the High Priest immolates the sacrificial victim. The result was not calculated, though it could be foreseen; the professor acted in an intoxicated state as if under the effect of a drug. The ritual has certain prescribed forms and gestures but it is never exactly the same—just as was the case at the Dionysian festivals.

Like The Bald Soprano, this second play transcends the individual plane and attains a collective meaning. The Lesson suggests that people are swayed not by reason but by their passions. The learned man who turns murderer when he is intoxicated by words is the so-called civilized man who has been brought into a state of frenzy in which he is capable of wholesale massacre of his fellow men. The magic of nonsensical phrases proclaims the inanity of our whole civilization, Ionesco’s condemnation of the misuse of erudition.

The creative mechanism that produced The Lesson is the unfolding of a ritual, comparable to the production of primitive dances and a ritualistic act in which they culminate. There is no dramatic conflict brought in from the outside; the play is a journey back into the jungle of the human soul. And again, as in Soprano, the end of the play shows that the same ritual is about to start all over again, that it will renew itself while repeating itself. The dead girl is carried out, a new student will take her place, the performers will perform, sinister forces will recommence their action; the deeply hidden sense or the shocking nonsense of human sacrifice, of life and death, of human striving and failure will be once more hinted at, the same ritual arriving at the same results—da capo al fine.

Magic and ritual produce the theme of a third play, Jack, or The Submission. As in Soprano, the characters are interchangeable. This is indicated by the ingenious artifice of calling all the relatives of the male protagonist Jack, all of those of his female counterpart Roberta. The various members of the same clan are differentiated by numbers only. Both tribes gang up on Jack No. 1, whose tragedy and crime is that he is an individual. The pathos of the play, underlining the futile struggle of the individual against the all-submerging forces of our mass civilization, the “submision” of the title, is enhanced by nonconventional techniques based once more upon the performance of certain ritualistic acts and the magic of sound effects. At first, Jack No. 1 boldly faces the hostile armies of his enemies. He proclaims that he dares dislike the universally adopted dish of potatoes with bacon. Then all the pressure, clamor, and hatred of public opinion weigh down upon him. He must conform; with the dish he must accept all the paraphernalia of the mass man, must choose a bride not according to his own taste but according to the needs of the community. Once defeated on the score of the insipid nourishment, our sad hero turns his former defiance into a negative one by going all the way on the road toward his debasement. Not only will he espouse an ugly bride but he will choose the most repulsive of the Robertas, the one with three noses and nine fingers on each of her hands. The ritual that consecrates this immolation of the individual on the altar of public opinion is most expressive and depressive. The bride is a sorceress who promises to Jack a one-syllable language. This syllable is “cha” which is, as pronounced in French, the sound of kissing, that is of sensual pleasure. The multiplication of this sound in the combinations of cha-armant, château, chameau, chaminadour, charrue, chagrin, chabot, chaloupe, chaland, chalet, chatouille, chapître, chahut, chamarré, chapeau, and finally chat (cat) represents the insistent, recurrent, irresistible lure of the Flesh to which Jack abandons himself. The verbal magic is further strengthened by the ritual of gestures. The members of the two tribes, witnessing the embrace of the defeated rebel and his cat of a bride, execute a savage dance around the lovers; they make all kinds of grotesque gestures, they utter animal cries. The obscurity of the night and the passion of their senses make the lovers unaware of the crawling, crouching, moaning, and heavy breathing around them, of the squatting teeming mankind that celebrates their downfall. Finally everything dissipates; only the Woman, with the nine long, grabbing fingers on her hands, agitating like snakes, remains visible.3

Ionesco is, like his contemporary and fellow playwright Jean Anouilh, an author of but a few basic themes which recur throughout his theatre. Thus we retrieve the theme of the impossibility of a breakthrough in human communication in The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, and Jack; and the question of the absurdity of the human condition in view of the inevitability of death in most of the plays. All these motives are intertwined in The Killer, one of Ionesco’s most forceful plays, a three-acter. In the first two acts the protagonist is faced with the brutal, sly, maliciously destructive work of a Killer who is out to deter man from creating, from persevering in the ways of Life. Our hero’s first reaction is that of indignation rather than of horror; it is the reaction of the social man who invokes the help of society against an enemy of society. He finds nothing but indifference and incomprehension; stupidity reigns supreme. Finally, in the last, magnificent monologues of the third act, the revolt of the protagonist against the Killer transcends society to rise to the metaphysical plane. Death is presented here in an actual exteriorization of the dreaded monster. The “monologue interieur” of the hero is converted into an imaginary dialogue, to make it perceptible on the stage.4 The grinning killer is the projection of the hero’s, that is of Man’s, inner vision. It is to this embodiment of his vision that he addresses his questions, but they are answered by the hero himself, for the Killer remains speechless though terribly present throughout the scene. The questions are those man eternally asks in the face of death. Man wants to understand the reason for his inevitable destruction. All he gets for an answer is a cynical grin from the Killer. The latter, represented as a puny fellow to make the dread he inspires all the more ridiculous, will nevertheless overwhelm and slaughter the human hero. Man implores but the other remains implacable. Man would like to combat the Killer and perhaps he has the means of doing it (Bérenger, our protagonist, has two guns which he once aims at his enemy), but he is so fascinated by him that he finally kneels down, disarmed, to receive the deathly blow. The ritual of killing is performed according to varying and yet eternally the same laws. Again, as in The Lesson, the knife of the High Priest is raised to immolate the victim. The inability of the hero to oppose the killer means perhaps that deep down man knows that death is good, death is wise, and that the living do not understand death. One almost has the impression that our hero has been at all times on the side of Death against Life which he finds senseless. If we apply the same conclusion to the author himself—for he admittedly expresses his own anguish and his own feelings in his theatre—we find that, indeed, death is an obsession with Ionesco. He fears and desires it at the same time; as he puts it, he fears his desire for Death.5

Death lurking upon Man, ambushing him in the midst of life’s preoccupations, is the subject of still another play, The New Tenant. The ritual of death is staged here through the moving-in and installation of the personified Death, the new tenant, into the house of life. All around us the paraphernalia of death encumber our horizon. The furniture of the new tenant keeps coming; it takes up all the space in the apartment, in the hall, in the street. The dark-clothed gentleman who sits down in his chair and puts out the light, to wait in the darkness, is a strong and obvious symbol. One is reminded of the ephemeral character of life, one becomes painfully aware of the ever present possibility of one’s own, sudden end. In the midst of this stern symphony, comic elements appear, the comic being produced, as usual, though reversal of the normal attitudes of people or the normal attributes of things. Heavy pieces of furniture are handled with the greatest ease by the movers while small vases weigh them down. One can interpret such theatrical tricks any way one wishes, but the light and graceful vases clearly seem to have more weight, that is more importance from the perspective of the play than the massive pieces of furniture.

Since Ionesco conceives of the theatre as the projection of his inner world, as we saw in his declaration of faith above, and since he is an artist, it follows that he endeavors to create a poetic theatre. That does not mean that he will write his plays in verse but, rather, he will give them poetical content. Of him can be said what had been asserted about the writers of the twenties and early thirties centered in Paris, namely that they “tried to substitute the poetry of the theatre for poetry in the theatre.” (Fergusson, Chapter Seven). It is in the name of poetic reality, which he holds superior to the materialistic representation of our universe, that he protests against the monopoly of the rational, Racinian tradition of the French stage. This poetic reality, he creates by the same sound effects that he employs to reproduce ritual on the stage, also by the settings and by leading us into the realm of the subconscious and superconscious. In The Killer, for example, the loneliness of man in the face of Death is suggested by the dazzling whiteness of the décor, while in The New Tenant the conventional black clothes of the New Tenant makes Death a respectable and acceptable figure. The final scene of the former play is a poem on the horror of death, the latter on the frailness of human life. The hero’s monologue in The Killer is a long lament, while the entire ritual of the moving in of Death in the second play forms an elegy.

Ionesco believes in the liberating action of poetry; he could say with Jean Cocteau that “the poet disintoxicates the world.” Indeed, this is the theme of his three-act play, Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It, also, indirectly, of Victims of Duty. The first two acts of Amédée make us participate in the hero’s growing anguish about his wasted life, his feeling of guilt, his desperate attempt to escape the prison of everyday reality by trying to create a work of art, his daily renewed failure; we also participate in his efforts to lead his wife back to the world of beauty and poetry which had been theirs at the beginning of their love. There is much telling symbolism in the play: a dead man whom Amédée might or might not have killed—that is, his own higher self—lives with him ever more demandingly, keeps growing, taking up an increasingly large part of his apartment; then there are the poisonous mushrooms, symbols of his gnawing, ever growing anguish. All this is extremely powerful. The tension in Amédée’s soul—the tension in the play—steadily increases; we witness the struggle between his humdrum preoccupations and his strong yearning to extricate himself, between his higher visions and the petty thoughts of his wife, until the situation matures to a point of explosion. The third act comes as détente, in contrast to the tense last act of The Killer. Now Amédée’s inner world is projected into the outer world through a street scene. With superhuman efforts our protagonist has succeeded in ejecting his phantoms; the dead man is dragged out into the open and so begins Amédée’s liberation. Finally he will soar above this material world and disappear into higher regions.

Poetry is very much present even in such a pessimistic play as Jack, or the Submission. For a second Jack retrieves something of his former self when he dreams aloud of a fountain of light, of glowing water, of a fire of ice, of fiery snows. Also the dialogue between him and his bride is a poem of great fantasy, reminiscent of the encounter between Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and the Green-Clad Woman; indeed the entire scene of their final union recalls the one in the Royal Hall of the King of the Dovre-Trolls. Jack, like Peer Gynt, succumbs to sensual temptation; he ceases to be himself, that is a human who aspires ever higher, but will become like a troll who is sufficient to himself. The hero of Victims of Duty is the negative counterpart of Amédée. With the same materials the author created two works, one with a positive, the other with a negative hero, as Ibsen did in Brandt and Peer Gynt or Sartre in The Flies and No Exit, respectively. The dead man becomes, in Victims of Duty, a detective, symbol of a self-searching spirit. Again a playwright reflects on his art and yearns to know himself better in order to be able to create. Once more his wife is called Madeleine, and once more she drags him down instead of helping him; she enslaves him by means of sensual temptation and persuades him to stay in this world of material reality. Thus the protagonist’s efforts to escape end with dismal failure; a modern Icarus, incapable of taking off, his wings drop and he ends up with his rear end in the wastepaper basket. From then on society takes him back with a vengeance. He is fed on insipid food; they make a child, that is a conventional man, of him.

Perhaps the most poetic, most moving of Ionesco’s plays is The Chairs, called by the author a “tragic farce.” The word “tragic” applies to man’s inability to communicate with his fellow men, a theme recurrent in Ionesco’s theatre. This theme is expressed here more emphatically, unmixed with other themes; it is the theme of man’s loneliness, which, according to Lemarchand, constitutes the key to Ionesco’s theatrical production.

The protagonist, again flanked by his wife, is this time Old Man who has arrived at the extreme limit of age allowed to humans. His horizon is limited by a waste of waters; he is on an island of hopelessness, of finality. On the threshold of his death his dead friends return to him. He and his wife scurry about to provide chairs, scores of chairs, for the guests. These invisible visitors are wonderfully alive. To them, through them, our pitiful hero tries to vindicate his wasted existence; his wife echoes his boastful words—she wants to believe him and wants him to believe what he cannot believe; both know that they are lying. Before the eyes of the dying man the theatre of life with its tragicomic and usual incidents, its chaotic sounds, its spectacle-like remoteness and unremoteness and unreality, is unfolding itself.

Each visitor is supposed to have come to honor him; each is a witness for the defense at this pre-trial of man’s soul, a soul ready to appear before the Eternal. In this world of make-believe, these ghosts are all that remain to him. And the visitors who have come to discharge our hero become more and more numerous; they must sit close to each other on their chairs. The most illustrious of them is the Emperor, who, by the splendor of his rank, has come to support the defense; he is Greatness for which Old Man has always aspired and which has always eluded him. This time our hero wants to shake hands with the Emperor, to thank him for the honor he has done him by coming; but the crowd is so dense that he is unable to push his way through to him. The Emperor is sitting on a rostrum where he is joined by the Orator, the only visitor of flesh and blood among the many invisible ones. The Orator’s role is to present all the world-shaking thoughts which had accumulated in the hero’s mind during his lifetime but which he himself had been incapable of expounding. Now, at this supreme hour, he will summarize them and redeem the world, redeem the author of the message at the same time.

All are waiting, intent upon the message. The cacophony of vulgar and trivial sounds in the theatre forms an ironic contrast between the lofty expectations of the audience on the stage and that in the auditorium. The Orator opens his mouth to speak but can only utter some inarticulate, guttural sounds. And so the great message of Man is lost forever.

In this atmosphere of dream, the Orator turns out to be the most hypothetical of all characters, though he be of actual flesh and blood.

By bringing the ritual of daily life into the theatre Ionesco returns to the origins of dramatic expression as it was done in pre-Aeschylean tragedy, also in Christian liturgy and liturgistic representations. In his use of symbolistic, impressionistic, and surrealistic techniques he was influenced by the early one-acters of Maurice Maeterlinck, also by the stage tricks of Jean Cocteau with whom he shares the belief that all truly artistic creation is poetry. He has learned some of the reversal techniques of Pirandello, also the simplifying and reducing methods of Beckett. Like Beckett, Ionesco strips man of his veneer of civilization to point to his savagery, his greed and selfishnes, his inability to love, also his helplessness in an uncomprehending and incomprehensible universe. Nevertheless in his criticism and portraying of man Ionesco never descends to the limit of utter despair which characterizes Beckett. One can say that Ionesco has not lost sympathy and solidarity with his heroes. This is natural, for he portrays his own solitude, he writes subjective theatre.

In addition to other forerunners, it is almost sure that Kafka has left his mark upon Ionesco, though this cannot be proven by any direct reference to that author in Ionesco’s writings. Indeed such plays as Jack, or The Submission and Victims of Duty strongly remind us of the hallucinating short stories of Kafka, The Hunger Artist and The Metamorphosis. Also, Ionesco’s repeated presentation of the woman who degrades man is reminiscent of some of the feminine figures around the hero of The Castle.

Ionesco’s revolt against the rational theatre is understandable. Too often the theatre is mistaken for a lecture hall in France. Racine, the omnipotence of logic, the well-coordinated play have not lost their prestige there. Yet France and the rest of the world no longer live in a powerful monarchy, in a universe where all stars revolve around a central Sun. Our present world is one of kaleidoscopic images which blend and change too fast to be fully intelligible. Modern man, especially the modern artist, tries to break out of the prison of man’s limited intelligence and aspires to grasp things that are outside the domain of his reason. The theatre should mirror this bewildering world of ours.

Ionesco’s revolt repeats, at a distance of about one hundred and thirty years, that of the French Romantics which began with the battle of Hermani. However, instead of a rebellious new poetry and unruly scenes he uses satire to signify his revolt. His mockery of our society never impairs the poetical content and spirit of his plays by which he affirms his belief in a new, higher reality. His word consciousness, his poetical spirit relate him in direct line to Shakespeare whom he considers his spiritual liege lord; at the same time, he recognizes Molière as one of his masters. He tries to continue Molière’s tradition by presenting human situations, the human frailness that prevails at all times, also by striving for some guiding light that will allow the individual to assert himself against the levelling and stultifying forces of our society, as he depicted them so vividly in the recent Rhinoceros. In view of Ionesco’s horror of mass civilization he naturally heaps scorn and sarcasm on all totalitarian ideologies which insult man’s reason, which resort to any means to inveigle or browbeat him into thoughtless obedience. It would be erroneous to believe that by revolting against the monopoly of reason in the presentation of human situations Ionesco abdicates reason. On the contrary, he believes that reason is man’s precious equipment to maintain his moral integrity.

Ionesco is an innovator in the best tradition of modern art, fighting the encroachment of reason on man’s emotional world, and at the same time fighting conformity, a force that threatens art itself. Essentially he frees the theatre from its many shackles, restores and enlarges its freedom.

Notes

  1. L’Impromptu de l’Alma, E. I. Theatre, Gallimard, 16-eme edition. I will refer to this edition in all of the following quotations from Ionesco’s works.

  2. The Idea of a Theatre. See the chapter “Two Aspects of the Plot: Form and Purpose.”

  3. The Woman, dragging Man down into the mire of sensuous pleasures occurs in other Ionesco plays.

  4. The stage instructions given by the author leave it up to the producer either to make the Killer invisible, in order to signify, as it were, that he exists only within the mind and soul of the protagonist, or—and this is the more theatrical solution—to make him appear as a frail man, an outcast who, by his very appearance, emphasizes his hostility to society. The appearance of the Killer on the stage is necessary to foster the illusion of a dialogue.

  5. “J’ai peur de mourir, sans doute, parce que, sans le savoir, je désire mourir. J’ai peur donc du désir que j’ai de mourir.”

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