Eugène Ionesco

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Ionesco’s Later Plays: Experiments in Dramatic Form

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SOURCE: “Ionesco’s Later Plays: Experiments in Dramatic Form,” in The Two Faces of Ionesco, edited by Rosette C. Lamont and Melvin J. Friedman, The Whitson Publishing Company, 1978, pp. 101-18.

[In the following essay, Brée studies three Ionesco plays from the 1960s, A Stroll in the Air, Exit the King, and Hunger and Thirst, in relation to his essays of the same period, and argues that the dramas constitute an effort on the part of the playwright to communicate, via the state, a view of life as “provisional, sincere, problematic, yet positive. ”]

Découvertes (Discoveries), one of Ionesco’s more recent essays, came out in 1969 in the semi-de-luxe series entitled “The paths of creation” published by Skira. The over-all title of the series is self-explanatory. Writers—Aragon, Butor, Prévert—and critics—Barthes, Caillois, Starobinski, Picon—approach the topic from various, personal angles. Ionesco’s contribution is disarming, partly because it is unpretentious and obviously genuine and partly because it is vividly illustrated by Ionesco himself.

A dozen brightly colored plates, full page or spread over a double page, and a few small marginal sketches, cherry-trees or childishly simplified figures—accompany the text. Dominant is the figure of “the king,” plastic in shape and diversely colored, a humorous, appealing and something disturbing projection of his creator’s self-image in various situations and moods. Then there is the eye, detached and immobile, contemplating with obvious stupefaction brightly colored shapes moving across the page; or sometimes carried along in their flow. There are, besides a couple of picture stories done in a child-like—but vigorous—idiom: a walk in the country for example, one of Ionesco’s familiar methaphors for happiness.

A double of Ionesco is present in these illustrations, a self-projection, whether as king, eye, or participating figure, a visual record of the manner in which Ionesco perceives himself in what he calls his “encounters with the world.” That these illustrations are closely connected with both Ionesco’s personal and his stage world it is easy to see at a glance; they are proof of how visual, spatial, and idiosyncratic are the forms of expression that come naturally to him. The self-images of Découvertes, the verbal images Ionesco uses to describe his “paths” to creation, are related to his sense of the stage. Ionesco perceives himself as situated in space; and it is in spatial terms that he defines a range of intense emotions through which he responds to the world. Let me give just one example, linked to the initial perception of the self as “eye.”1 In Découvertes Ionesco describes the child in the pram as enthralled spectator to the flow of shapes and colors flowing past him in the light. These are analogous to the brightly colored shapes moving across the page of the book and they recall the “apparitions,” Ionesco describes in Notes … “fruits of the void, flowers of nothingness … ovements, configurations, colors” that float before his eyes at those moments of exhilaration when he happens to “love the world” and in it “discovers beauty.”2 But a gigantic unknown object moves across the space—the shadow of a tree sensed by the child as a personal menace and deliberate aggression, causing an inner shrinkage of his world, and terror. The incident is revealing and fundamental and its patterning of a shrinking space as the shape of fear is a constant in Ionesco’s stage world. The “I-eye” watches a world that deploys its changing colors and configurations harmlessly “like a carpet,” harmlessly and boundlessly. “The seasons seemed to spread out in space. The world was a decorative background, with its colors now dark and now bright with its flowers and grass appearing, then disappearing, coming towards us, moving away from us, unfolding before our eyes, while we ourselves stayed in the same place, watching time pass, ourselves being out of time … rdquo;3 The image denotes a contemplative state of non-involvement and delight, which one might call aesthetic. Disturbance comes when the “monstrous shadow” invades the space of both contemplator and contemplated, veiling the light. The darkening is a threat, an aggression, a terrifying “apparition,” accompanied by the contraction of the spectacle, the shrinkage of the boundless space.Fear as we have seen is a contraction of free space and the disruption of the spectacle. It is a premonition of the “fall” which Ionesco describes again in spatial terms: “Then all of a sudden there came a kind of terrible reversal; it was as though a centrifugal force had projected me out of my immutability into the midst of things that go and come back and go away for good … At sixteen it was all over. I was in time, in flight, in finiteness.”4 The monstrous shadow then is death. Ionesco’s perception of himself, as he describes it in these very early schemas, contains one highly dramatic element: his sense of discomfort in a closed or contracting space. For him the “room” or “house” will never be the habitual intimate self-contained space in which the self is at home in a protective shell. It cuts the “I-eye” out of its rightful realm. Nothing in Ionesco’s language refers us to a “place within,” and the hastily improvised refuges in which Ionesco withdraws are always flimsy and temporary: “I settle down in the moment, I surround myself with the walls of the moment. I shelter under the roof of the moment … rdquo; but the moment passes.5

Subjective, emotionally charged, and spatially organized, Ionesco’s world is not introverted. And when Ionesco speaks of his stage-world as an “architecture” he certainly refers to something other than the merely verbal patternings of the plays themselves. The stage, after all, is the locus of a spectacle and it is closely akin too to the limiting, self-defensive, temporary room, thereby to the two basic though antithetical images Ionesco has of his relation to the outer world, his “encounters with the world.” It is not surprising then that when in Découvertes he goes back to his childhood, what he refers to first of all are his perceptions of that world. In their freshness they seem singularly absent from the greater number of his plays, at least until the sixties. The child Ionesco moves in the vast space of a countryside that furnishes the elements of a privileged spatial imagery, a language of the emotions, quite simple in its elements: delight is a “fête,” a spectacle of “changing perspectives” where sky, color, fruits, fields deploy ever fascinating configurations under the play of light; boredom is a dreary sky over a vast grey endless steppe; mystery is a threhold, when, stepping through a breach in the ramparts the boy saw a field of corn, golden in the sun, the emblem of a world “beyond the gates.” Fear is the giant shadow of a tree thrown across the sunlit path. The visual and spatial elements are strong, and the emotions intense. But not the conflicts. In fact conflicts are singularly absent from these images. One could readily surmise wha Ionesco suggests that it is as a protest against the absence of that world that he created its obverse: the enclosed Ionesco stage. It is form of exorcism.

Ionesco’s essays Notes and Counter-notes, Fragments of a Journal and Découvertes show the simplicity of the metaphors that underly Ionesco’s stage worlds, and how closely connected they are to his own modes of perception. Abstraction is not his forte. He is temporamentally adverse to theoretical reasoning as his polemical exchanges—with Kenneth Tynan for example—have shown. His violent dislike for ideologically “committed” writers among his contemporaries is visceral; his reactions to Brecht, Sartre and even Camus are notorious. Even in debate, his language, sometimes confusedly, tends to become visual and spatialized: “Les Sartrismes nous engluent, nous figent dans les cachots et fers de cet engagement.” (Sartrisms glue us, gell us into the prison cells and irons of commitment.) It matters little to Ionesco that the spatial metaphor of the prison cell and the solidity of the irons are incompatible with the borrowed Sartrean image of engulfment in a viscous substance like glue. What matters is the sense of fear and physical discomfort the words convey. On the whole, Ionesco is not sensitive to the full implications of the words he sets on the page but rather to their cumulative value as signs rather than expressions of his feeling. Thence a certain poverty and haphazardness in the linguistic texture of his plays, particularly striking if one compares it to the rich tonalities of a Beckett text. What compensates for the lack of resonance is the mobility of the verbal patternings—so often and so extensively analyzed—that give his theater its baroque flavor. Here again the language develops on a single plane, flatly.

The only work Ionesco recognizes as having influenced his approach to art is Croce’s Aesthetic. He often seems to be merely echoing the Aesthetic, to which he refers specifically in Découvertes, but here again in a rather haphazarad way. Art, as he conceives it, is “intuitive knowledge,” “lyrical intuition,” the objectification of subjective perceptions. An autonomous free activity, it transmits a concrete individual “vision,” born of emotion that freely shapes a “whole” imaginary situation. One can readily identify Croce’s language: “aesthetic intuition”; art as an “individual expressive fact”; “expression” as “free inspiration.”6 Ionesco has vehemently reiterated, too, Croce’s contention that “the search for the end of art is ridiculous” and his injunction to “leave the artist is peace.” In a rather broad sense one might say that Ionesco’s theater as a whole is a long and vehement injunction to the society of men to leave him in peace. But beyond this, there is nothing systematic about his ideas. Hence his frustration when his concept of art as “the expressive elaboration of impressions,” to use Croce’s words, is challenged. This aesthetic would hardly in itself, however, account for the stage-world he has set up, although as we have seen, it does correspond to his natural inclination. What remains unexplained is the connection of those impressions to the forms of drama he has elaborated.

It may come as a surprise that Ionesco considers “wonder” as the most fundamental of those emotions that opened up his way toward creation. In Découvertes he designates wonder as the “deepest reaction” of his consciousness. He describes it as the physical state, of elation or euphoria in the presence of light which he considers the fundamental experience of his childhood. “It is in order to speak of that light, to speak of that wonder, of a light, a sky, a wonder stronger than anguish, dominating anguish, that I turned to literature” (60). Wonder or, as Ionesco also notes “stupefaction” in the presence of the everyday spectacle of the world is connected to an immediacy of apprehension that can inform—as Gide would say—both the absurdist’s and the mystic’s illumination. Ionesco, in a recent interview, seemed to designate the first when he spoke of the “negative illuminating” of his childhood concerning death and annihilation.7 Their obsessive role in the shaping of his theatrical idiom has been abundantly discussed. But no one, to my knowledge, before Ionesco himself has stressed the “positive” illuminations which appears in Découvertes as dominant in his work. This is certainly paradoxical.

The assertion, it is true, has come late. Ionesco himself had heretofore stressed rather his state of “conflict with the universe” as the only “capital” faction in his psychic make-up. The more affirmative statement seems to coincide with a recent cast of mind and to have accompanied Ionesco’s desire, as play-wright, to transcend certain limitations in his work.

Since the sixties, notably, Ionesco has become an ever more active participant and in fact protagonist in his own plays. Whereas the Béranger of Rhinoceros is hardly more than a state of mind, King Bérenger I in Exit the King,8 Herbert Bérénger, the “stroller in the air” and Jean, the central character in Hunger and Thirst are far more obvious projections of the author. And in the last two plays he has included not only himself, but the family trio, himself, his wife and daughter. Ionesco has recently carried this development into film. He appears as actor, for the first time, in a film entitled La Vase (Slime); and as sole actor portraying his own disintegration and absorption into the slime of a river-bed.

In the three plays, all produced in the sixties, Ionesco does seem to me to have conceived his stage-space and sets in a new fashion although in some aspects it is anticipated in the early Chairs and The Killer. Herbert Bérenger may well be very close to his creator when he declares “literary activity is no longer a game, can no longer be a game for me. It should be a passage toward something else” and adds that he seeks “inner renewal.” One might suspect of course that Ionesco is mocking some “serious” theory of art; but in the light of Découvertes it does not seem so: he speaks in quiet earnestness. With all due caution passing from the ambiguous stage experience of Herbert Bérenger to the autobiographical Découvertes one notes that Ionesco, speaking of the “light” and “wonder” that flooded his childhood, also speaks of himself as moving at present, along “an upward slope”: “Perhaps even today, after tens of years, it is still that light which nourishes me, which keeps me alive, which has proved stronger than my bouts of distress and my depressions, has guided me through abysses and allowed me to find the path, if not to the top at least to the upward slope” (61).

In spite of the simplicity of its language, Découvertes presents rather startling assertions. Several times Ionesco refers to what he calls “the Manifestation,” capitalizing the word, relating it to those moments of wonder that are flooded by light: “We do not know the essence of things or of the Manifestation, but we can use things or compose with them” (28). “Thought expresses itself in or through language, language being the reflection of the universal Manifestation which expresses the pre-existent thought of God” (44). “In the immobility of the recaptured plenitude of awareness, I mean of an awareness in which I recover myself, it is the essential event only that I recover, the primordial event, the Manifestation, like a luminous veil through which I glimpse the shadow of what is manifested. In the immobility of my attentive gaze, it is not time that flows past, it is the Manifestation which unfolds as in a space outside time, without time” (83). And again, after describing moments of depression, Ionesco returns to his image: “There will be, there are new dawns, the fête. Yes all can change, suddenly. I can recover childhood.9 And the world can be made to fit me. Tomorrow, tomorrow there will perhaps be a different universal Manifestation, another Creation and I shall be dazzled by it once again, absorbed in contemplation, vainly trying to orient myself in it … Tomorrow, a completely new world, more astonishing than ever, with another or other suns, in another sky” (126). The illumination of the world from some unknown source unfolding before the immobile contemplative “I-eye” situated somewhere within it now as spectator sends us back to the child in the pram, to the child-spectator of the puppet-show, to God’s thought immanent in his creation.

Most individuals inclined, to contemplation have experienced comparable moments of stillness and harmony; but not perhaps with the same intensity of “illumination.” Clearly Ionesco here has borrowed the esoteric language of the initiates to transmit what he sees as a recurrent quasi-physical and essential relationship with the world, lost and found and lost again, but nonetheless always there “beyond the gates.” I am not suggesting that Ionesco ever immersed himself in Sufism for instance or other forms of oriental cults. But the vocabulary is indicative: path, light, immobility, plenitude, vision, veil, timelessness, strangeness, Manifestation. Whatever the origin of the vocabulary the experience it relates seems genuine enough and seems to be connected with Ionesco’s renewal of his dramatic idiom in the sixties. His attempt to express the transcendent on the stage does not seem to have proved satisfactory to Ionesco himself: “I have never been able to say this adequately,” he notes of those moments of recovery, “What I say is never true enough, the words are not right enough, I have not yet found the appropriate language for these thoughts, feelings, emotions, for the unsayable truth that I keep trying to express which is stronger than all anxiety” (75). Somewhat self-consciously, Ionesco seems here to be combatting the negative image of himself as the destructive playwright of the absurd. But Jean, the protagonist of Hunger and Thirst, when urged to give an account of his extensive travels, proves as inarticulate as his creator. “Illumination” is not easy to translate into words. There seems to be a further admission of defeat in Découvertes. Ionesco will, he says, henceforward “write no more dramas” remaining content to “construct small make-believe worlds” just to amuse himself. It is a fact of course that of those three plays of the sixties so intimately connected with his own tête-à-tête with himself, the only one to enjoy success was Exit the King (1962). French audiences and critics reacted coldly to the spectacular fantasy of A Stroll in the Air (1963), while the most ambitious of all Ionesco’s plays to date, Hunger and Thirst (1966), was an unmitigated failure.

The year 1972 opened with a production of Macbett,10 the first major Ionesco play since that failure. It could hardly be described as a success. Ionesco’s description of the play suggested that he was trying for something beyond parody, but yet more removed from his own universe. While still struggling with the theme of death, though in a more detached frame of mind, Ionesco proposed to dramatize the “problem of power, ambition and nefarious action.” Reversing a current cliché, as he so likes to do, Ionesco proposed as a solution to man’s inhumanity to man, a society governed by a computer, carefully programmed by a few sages whose distributive justice—social and economic—would be free from men’s propensity to exploit and enslave other men. From that standpoint what better remedy than the “dehumanization” of the computer? The play, whatever its merits or demerits, seems closer in type to Rhinoceros than to the three more subjective and introspective plays of the sixties. A phase perhaps in Ionesco’s development is over.

I propose to examine briefly the three plays of the sixties from the point of view of and in relation to the essays of the same period. The articles collected in Notes … (1962) go back to the fifties. Consequently, I shall refer primarily as I have already done to Fragments of a Journal (1967) and Découvertes which with the three plays comprise the bulk of Ionesco’s work between the popular Rhinoceros and the dubious Macbett.

The first and most striking feature of the three plays is the manner in which Ionesco makes use of the stage space. In the stage direction to Stroller in the air, Ionesco refers to “primitive” painting which he distinguishes from the “surrealistic.” He was pointing to the use medieval artists make of the flat space of the picture to suggest other dimensions of the story depicted. In his three plays, he clearly wanted to give the sense of different spheres of consciousness co-existing within the same space. The basic action in the three plays is that of “passage.” The departure, journey, or “stroll” are fundamental metaphors in all three and, in fact, constitute the action. In Exit the King the king must pass from his rapidly disintegrating habitat into a limitless space. In Stroller in the air, the “anti-world” impinges upon Herbert Bérenger’s given world, and a visible bridge entices him into the vast reaches of that world. In Hunger and Thirst each episode takes place in its own compartment, each connected to the other by Jean’s long journeying. At the end, beyond the walls and bars that hold him prisoner, Jean sees, as in a medieval painting, the idyllic garden with his wife and child, out of reach but co-existent and self-contained within its own space. Obviously Ionesco was attempting to overcome the spatial limitations of the stage. Ionesco has always used the stage, like the expressionists, as a metaphor to objectify an inner ambience. But in no sense did his stage suggest the presence of a quasi-metaphysical dimension in the character’s existence; this is surely what the new “architecture” of the three plays of the sixties conveys. Ionesco seems to have wanted to project his doubles onto a cosmic plane, “a space outside time,” suggestive of a destiny beyond. The new dimensions are awesome and inhuman, it is the “universal landscape” to which he alludes in Découvertes. Herbert Bérenger leaps light-heartedly into the world beyond, but he returns a sobered man bearing tales of devastation and a terrifying void. As to Jean, he measured his own solitude in the rarefied atomosphere and “pure light” of a terrace suspended in the void of the “kingdom of light.” The “grand route” and the circle are recurrent images, but the journey to the center of the circumference remains inconclusive. The necessary passage can be made only in solitude. King Béranger’s palace, like his kingdom, crumbles and decays; Jean runs away from the disintegrating basement apartment into which he has just moved with his wife and child and in A Stroll in the Air as the play starts, a bomb destroys Bérenger’s pleasant English house. What matters in a writer’s work, says Ionesco, are the questions he asks and he defines his work as an “architecture of question”—disposed as it were in three layers—“What is all this here?” “Who am I?” “Why am I here, surrounded by all that?” For Ionesco the metaphor of the voyage is linked to the metaphysical why: it is “only by travelling from one why to the next as far as the why that is unanswerable; that man attains the level of the creative principle.” (Fragments … 26) Thus the theme of the solitary journey seems intentionally connected with the attempt of the play-wright to transcend the former limits of his stage. And yet the “architecture of questions” is not quite clear. For Exit the King seems rather a statement on how to die than on “Why do I die?” and Bérenger’s adventures bear more on confrontation with the unanswerable than on the questioning of it. In these plays Ionesco attempted to situate his protagonist beyond the way and in relation to the unanswerable: death, the immense spaces of the “anti-world,” the solitary heights of Jean’s journey towards the light. If it is not always very clear on stage in what terms he is asking the why, it seems certain that it is not in rational terms. The three plays attempt to create moods, hence situations, in which the rational underpinning of everday life is no longer operative; the structure of the plays is thereby affected. This “leaving behind” of the world of the real and ordinary has always been characteristic of Ionesco’s stage. But not until the sixties did he attempt to do more, through the interplay of setting and the distortion of language, than use the stage in parodic fasion, somewhat like one of the Surrealists’ autodestructive machines.

It might be surmised that it was in part the growing success of Brecht in France, from 1954, when the Berliner ensemble took Paris by storm, into the sixties, that moved Ionesco both to the kind of self-analysis evident in the essays and to a deeper concern with the structure of his own stage-world. In this perspective Rhinoceros might well be considered as a transitional play, a ferocious attack upon the Brechtian ideological stage. Exit the King, A Stroll in the Air, Hunger and Thirst use and reverse Brechtian patterns: the insatiable appetite of Jean recalls the craving for food or drink of many Brechtian characters from Schweik’s friend Baloun on; as does King Bérenger’s obligation to consent to his own death. Above all, it is Jean’s confrontation with and his imprisonment by the burlesque and sinister monastic order which provide a bitter comment on Brecht’s call to the individual to accept social discipline in the interests of a higher cause. Ionesco seems furthermore to have confronted somewhat the same problems as a playwright: how to connect the inner world of feeling to outer reality so as to establish it concretely on stage. His problem, however, was the obverse of Brecht’s since the French dramatist’s theater has consistently been founded on feeling, on a visceral distrust of all formalized social compartments. His own sensibility then is the only ground he trusted for the foundation of his stage world. The shift from the negative and gleeful parodic destruction of everyday reality to the sense of the play as communication to the audience of the positive feeling for existence that justified the destruction of illusory reflections posed the question of a new theatrical language. How could a playwright project concretely on the stage the inarticulated and ambivalent perceptions which he describes in Découvertes? The statement could only be metaphoric and individual—thence the open use of the autobiographical “double” as protagonist.

In a quite different way from Brecht’s, Ionesco turned to a narrative form of drama, transferring feeling into fantasy. Whereas in his first plays he manipulated language itself to estrange the spectator while ruthlessly gearing him to the destructive mechanisms of the play, in these later plays the fantasy could come alive only through the emotional power of the character’s situation as revealed in his language. The main difficulty for Ionesco seems clearly to lie in the initial metaphor that establishes the character’s world, the stage world of the play. He had to turn his former stage world inside out and obtain the identification of his public with the protagonist—himself—rather than bring about a shared estrangement. Bérenger in Rhinoceros is a typical example of this turnabout, although it is already adumbrated in The Killer. But in both of these plays the protagonist’s posture is refusal. And, it may be inferred, useless refusal. He is destroyed along with the situation with which he enters into conflict.

There is no doubt at all that the Crocean conception of the intuited form seems to apply to Ionesco. He has amply documented the wholly emotional quasi-physiological origin of the basic, and complex, metaphors that put so personal a stamp upon his plays. His dilemma is that the strongest of these psychic moods or “climates” coincide with a loss of the sense of reality. The sense of reality for Ionesco coincides with immobility, with himself as “eye” and center to the world: “The earth and the stars moved around me who stood still at the center of everything. The earth and its fields and its snow and rain all moved around me.” (Fragments … 22) This creates a positive view of the world as spectacle, and is hardly dramatic. What is dramatic is a loss of the equilibrium. Ionesco has repeatedly described the two forms of disequilibrium that plague him: one is elation, that sense of “taking off” physically from an imponderable world, which furnished the end metaphor of How to get rid of it, (Amédée’s exit in a balloon) and the whole movement of A Stroll in the Air; the other, the sense of slow suffocation and dissolution in slowly rising mud, Ionesco’s metaphor for routine and habit.11 This is the more predominant of his stage building blocks.

For Ionesco, the room, peculiarly well suited for transferral to the stage-set, is no symbol of refuge; it is charged with a sinister metaphoric meaning. The house sinks “into the ground like a basement, with damp walls and slits for windows … always on the point of sinking in … of being flooded, of falling to pieces …” The earth on which it rests is not a refuge either: “For me, earth is not a foster mother, it means mud … decomposition … death which terrifies me … tombs.” But the dangerous and disquieting element is water: “Water for me does not mean abundance, nor calm, nor purity; it generally appears to me as dirty, anguish.” The primarily concrete terms in which Ionesco’s fears and obsessions beset him are clearly symbolic. “When I dream of the inside of a house, it is always sinking down into the damp earth.” And the house can be a transparent subterfuge to ward off the reality of time: “I settle down in the moment, I surround myself with the walls of the moment, I shelter under the roof of the moment.”12

The “good-evil” duality in this dramatic system is ambivalent both physically and conceptually. The stage world itself is a temporary structure set up in a spatialized, boundless continuity, within which outer and inner spaces operate, interpenetrate, exclude one another or coincide. These are the spheres out of which Ionesco has sought to fashion his plays, not out of events or ideas: “What I want to concretize,” he stated, “is the expression of origins. Not what comes to pass, but what does not come to pass or does not pass.” (89) The spatialization of mood and the synthesis into a single image are characteristic: the rising mud is both fear and time; the act of levitation is ecstasy and freedom to view a world “deployed” outside time. But it shuts Ionesco out of the world. “I could not hear nor see anything that took place. They no longer heard me from the world which had become for me a forbidden space … a closed world … wrinkled as it were, fissured, metallic, infinitely hostile … in a light without light.” (Découvertes, 104).

If the intimate, the familiar, the customary become potentially dangerous and disastrous, so does the alluring unknown, new and untried. A double movement animates Ionesco’s perception of himself in regard to reality and it fashions the spatial images through which he projects himself. His stage world is in fact a physical extension of that perception, an attempted exorcism of inner danger via the stage. Only occasionally does Ionesco “become again the spectator of the whole spectacle.” And, if he started to write plays, it was, in order to “surround himself with a world, to speak from out of that world, from that stage-world to the world.” (Découvertes 91).

The personal concerns of Ionesco are clearly stated through the metaphors that shaped the stage-world of the three later plays: the disintegrating palace and kingdom are correlatives for the decay of a body, and of the whole system of relations of which it is the center; Bérenger’s “Stroll in the air” leads him, via the magic bridge into hostile cold spaces where he is “shut out” from human warmth. Jean’s escape from the mud-invaded family basement lifts him to the exalted but solitary peaks, thence into a prison for those who hunger and thirst for certainty, an illusory refuge whose symbolism I shall explore later. Ionesco has taken pains to emphasize the personal and emotive source of the play: “I had written the work so that I might learn to die. It was to be a lesson, a sort of physical exercise, a gradual progress, stage by stage towards the ineluctable end, which I tried to make accessible to other people” (Fragments … 88), he says of Exit the King. When discovering A Stroll in the Air, he notes that it was born of a long-time dream of an English holiday and his biographical allusions to Hunger and Thirst are innumberable: “I have travelled in search of an intact world over which time would have no power. The food I hunger for, the drink for which I thirst are not an infant’s food or drink. Knowledge is what I hunger and thirst for. If I really knew what I hunger and thirst for I should feel easier … The man who gives everything becomes like someone dying of hunger and thirst, lying on the grond, pale, gasping, begging for a glass of water. It is going to be an endless business feeding him. The man who has given everything takes everything back. He is insatiable.” (Fragments 11, 60, 89) In this context, the pseudomonastery of the play, with its suave brainwashing techniques and ruthless apparatus of coercion and constraint, is Ionesco’s symbolisation of totalitarian attempts to control and exploit that inner craving, itself expressed in the vision of the garden just out of reach—the garden enclosing the loved wife and child, removed from the trivialities of everyday living.

These three plays unquestionably reveal an aspect of Ionesco which has heretofore remained elusive, but they are also a key to his limitations. They develop through initial metaphors that cannot evolve dramatically; it seems plausible to surmise that the cinema would prove a more satisfactory medium. The most successful of these plays is Exit the King, where the situation, the stage metaphor and the personal emotion at its source are particularly well integrated. But the difficulty with which Ionesco must contend is nonetheless obvious. Once the image of the disintegrating world has been posed in terms of the physical environment of the king, only through reports can its step-by-step progress be registered in the play until it actually reaches the body of the king. In other words, the metaphor can only be reiterated and diversified, not greatly extended. A baroque verbal inventiveness alone reflects the struggle between the king’s failing hold on life and the final relinquishment of life in death. The baroque and rather lugubriously comic visions of the king’s real decrepitude visible in the physical space around him function a surface diversions rather than as expressions of a growing inner awareness. Much in the same way the fantasy world of Stroller in the Air is presented visually rather than dramatically; it is episodic in structure. Although, in my eyes at least, the fairy-tale quality is real and both theme and techniques valid and innovative, the actual stage display overshadows the personal communication Ionesco intended: levitation in space, like physical disintegration, does not harbour many dramatic possibilities. In other words, since in these plays the essential theme is visually expressed, language is in fact accessory. This is disconcerting for the audience at a loss to relate the visual to the commentary it elicits. What Ionesco seems to have tried to do is paradoxical. An “inventive or creative” language, he notes in Découvertes, is the attempt to “seize, state, integrate and communicate something incommunicable to still uncommunicated”; and in order to make his statement the writer must “disarticulate” language, make it transparent so that the world can appear “through it in its original strangeness.” But in fact, as he “organizes his phantasms”—to use his terms—on stage in A Stroll in the Air, the actual language through which the “world,” Ionesco’s world, appears is largely hieroglyphic. The central theme is the physical “take off” of Bérenger into the spaces beyond, his disappearance and return and his unwelcome attempt to communicate the emptiness and void he has encountered. The idea is simple and the stage metaphor through which it is enacted is simple too, an adaptation to the stage of circus acrobatics. But the ambience within which Bérenger’s exploit takes place is intricate, involving criss-cross patterns of situation and mood, in pure Ionesco style, developing one out of the other through the interplay of language. One may fully enjoy the “fête” as Ionesco calls it of changing perspectives, as language effectively disrupts rigid patterns of behavior to display mood—a mood of delight in things, and harmony with them. It is possible too to follow the development of the situation as Bérenger’s elation turns into vision, and the “anti-world” begins to invade the real. But from there on any creative use of language is lost as the significance of the situation is polarized in the concrete image of Bérenger’s acrobatics in space. The stage image, is not strong enough or rich enough to give the play a continuing impetus, and it weakens what appears to be Ionesco’s intent: to communicate his own sense of a man’s immense curiosity for and confrontation with the unknowable. Hunger and Thirst seems to have been Ionesco’s attempt at a total objective statement of the contradictory inner experience born of his “encounters with the world.” He seems to have sensed the limitations put upon the development of the play by the metaphoric extension of mood to a physical outer stage space. Hunger and Thirst seems to evidence his desire to move out of the one-act single situation pattern prevalent in his theater. It certainly suggests a cyclical pattern: in the first act Jean’s sense of the familiar world of wife and child as intolerable routine and limitation is symbolized in the disintegrating basement of the stage set and the conflict between his love for his wife and his revolt ends with his disappearance; the emergence of Jean on the high mountain summit outside a museum in pure and dazzling light is the locus of the second act, a dead end where Jean’s expected rendez-vous with “her” does not take place. In the third act Jean, worn out and starved, arrives at the ambiguous innmonastery where he is held. Through the bars he glimpses his goal, the ideal garden in which the wife and child he left fourteen years before dwell in harmony. The metaphor of the voyage links the three main scenes. But again they themselves are static. And the drama seems to reside in their immutability, and one might infer, in their co-existence. It would of course be necessary to study in greater detail the play of language within each unit so established, but this would go well beyond the limits of this paper.

What I have attempted to establish is that the three plays in question constitute an earnest and deliberate effort on the part of Ionesco to communicate, via the stage, a view of life as provisional, sincere, problematic, yet positive. It is an attempt to transcend the closed world of the individual ego. If the dramatist did not fully succeed, I have suggested that it is largely because his initial awareness of existence is essentially contemplative and passive, embodied in the spatial metaphors by which his characters are bounded and which elicits their reactions. The drama in the three plays of the sixties arises from the central character’s obligation in Exit the King or, in the other two plays, his impulse to “pass beyond,” a passage only realized in death.

Ionesco has been reproached for his foray into metaphysics. Yet, in terms of the playwright himself it corresponded to a need; and though as a result, these plays except for Exit the King have been less successful than the earlier ones, they are undoubtedly far more interesting as a key to the man’s sensibility, and perhaps to his limitations. For Ionesco a play is essentially a “projection of the self into that substance which is the world … that is to say a pattern, a shape, an architecture.” (Fragments, 129) It would be idle to attempt to differentiate between the three words as applied to his work. But all three point to an overall static design rather than to any dynamics within the structure. In the last analysis one is tempted to conclude that, in a very real sense, Ionesco’s language was used in his first plays as a form of collage, a sonorous outer substance. The last plays are attempts at regaining conscious control of one’s emotions; they present mature forms of structuring that seem uneasily poised between the episodic fable, personal and didactic, and the lyrical quest with its episodes of departure, alienation, return and reconciliation. But in neither case is the basic “pattern”, “shape”, or “architecture” dramatic, except insofar as it is a spectacle wherein Ionesco as playwright re-establishes himself as “eye” confronting, first through the malleable stuff of language, then through his mythical doubles, his disturbing “encounters” with the world.

Notes

  1. “I was eyes, wide open in stupefaction and incomprehension.” Découvertes (Geneva: Editions Albert Skira, 1969), p. 28.

  2. Notes et Contre-notes, Gallimard. Collection “Idées” 1962 (295-96). I shall refer to the volume as Notes … “Apparitions” and disappearances whether of people and things have been a constant, sometimes refreshing, sometimes tiresome feature of Ionesco’s stage-craft. They are obviously connected with his perception of reality as gratuitous spectacle and transferred to his stage via the mediation of puppet show techniques; the puppet show in itself, as Ionesco has often said, was one of the most memorable “apparitions” in his childhood world.

  3. Fragments of a Journal (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p. 11.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid., p. 147.

  6. Croce’s clear-cut distinction of the intuitive-aesthetic and logical-demonstrative, his attack upon “historical intellectualism,” his insistence upon the “non-logical, non-historical character of the aesthetic fact” are all echoed in Ionesco’s essays. One might summarize Ionesco’s fundamental point of view by quoting Croce as follows: “The aesthetic fact is altogether completed in the expressive elaboration of impressions. When we have achieved the word within us, conceived definitely and vividly a figure or statue, or found a musical motive, expression is born and is complete; there is no need for anything else” (Aesthetic translated by Douglas Ainslee [New York, The Noonday Press, 1960]. p. 50).

  7. Le Figaro littéraire, January 7, 1972.

  8. He identifies himself as King, not only in his illustrations but in Fragments of a Journal: “I am the principal figure, the center of the cosmos (that developed over the years)” p. 109.

  9. Ionesco specifically connects the Manifestation with childhood, with a world from which “the shadows disappear” and in which “wonder” enlarges his eyes once more as the world opens up again.

  10. “Never have I written with so much pleasure on a theme or themes that are rather sinister,” said Ionesco of Macbett. “In spite of all that is going on around me I was seized as I progressed, in spite of Pakistan, Ireland, India, Africa, Asia, America, Europe, by a happiness I don’t understand myself.” Op. cit.

  11. He links it with his childhood terror at the flooding of his house by the rising water of the Seine.

  12. Fragments of a Journal, pp. 117, 134, 147.

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