Eugène Ionesco

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The Anti-Spiritual Victory in the Theater of Ionesco

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SOURCE: “The Anti-Spiritual Victory in the Theater of Ionesco,” in Modern Drama, Vol. 2, No. 2, May 1959, pp. 29-35.

[In the following essay, Pronko argues that in Ionesco’s theater impersonal, anti-spiritual forces, symbolized in physical objects, dominate and conquer humankind, and that dead things are victorious over that which is alive.]

The French Dramatists who began writing about 1950, baptized by M. Jean Duvignaud the “School of Paris,” have sometimes been called “anti-theatrical,” for they employ dramatic methods which are frequently opposed to those of the conventional theater. Writers like Ionesco, Beckett, and the early Adamov wish to return to what might be called “pure theater,” that is to say a type of theater employing means which are strictly theatrical and do not belong to the realms of philosophy, psychology, sociology or politics. One of the favorite devices of such a theater is the presentation of the author’s views in a visual way, using space and movement rather than language. In Waiting for Godot, for example, the moral suffering of mankind is depicted physically by shoes which do not fit, hats which scratch, servants visibly attached to masters, and watches which do not run. In a play like Adamov’s The Parody, the solitude and bewilderment of modern man are represented by a decor (including a clock without hands) which remains the same, but is constantly foreign because seen from different angles. In The Big and the Little Manoeuvre, a man’s destruction by incomprehensible and impersonal forces is made more palpable by his loss of one limb after the other.

The theater of Ionesco is rich in examples of this phenomenon. In the essays he has published in various French periodicals, Ionesco has described quite explicitly the feeling he is attempting to evoke by giving such undue importance to the physical aspects of his theater. There are two fundamental states of consciousness at the root of his plays, he tells us in “The Point of Departure” (Cahier des Quatre Saisons, August, 1955). One is that of evanescence, and the other that of heaviness or opacity. The latter feeling most often dominates, and we feel the universe crushing in upon us:

Matter fills everything, takes up all space, annihilates all liberty under its weight; the horizon shrinks, and the world becomes a stifling dungeon. Speech crumbles, but in another way, words fall like stones, like corpses; I feel myself overcome by heavy forces against which I wage a losing battle.

Such a “victory of anti-spiritual forces,” of the dead thing over that which is alive, is expressed on many levels in the theater of Ionesco. Setting and properties, language, characters, and structure, each contributes in a slightly different way to the impression of heaviness or opacity.

The first and most obvious level, that of physical objects, plays a particularly large role in the later comedies. In the earlier plays, The Bald Soprano (1950?), The Lesson (1950), and Jack or the Submission (1950), the stage is encumbered not with an oppressive amount of matter, but with fantastic characters and what one might call solidified language. In The Chairs (1951) the characters are more realistic, the language less absurd, and the accumulation of objects as a means of expressing solitude, uselessness and loss of liberty makes its appearance. The Old Man and the Old Woman, living in a dilapidated apartment on a lonely island, await the arrival of their guests to whom the Man will reveal his “Message” before the two leap to their deaths. The guests arrive and a chair is brought for each. The guests are, however, invisible, and soon the stage is cluttered with chairs, suggesting that even when people are present there is an absence of humanity and an overabundance of the object. The physical universe and society, in the form of the chairs, gradually accumulate between the two old people so that at the end of the play, as they leap from their respective windows at either side of the stage, there is no opportunity for them to meet again. The last guest to arrive is “His Majesty,” and in spite of strenuous efforts to reach him, neither of the characters is able to get through the mass of chairs. The setting of the play also suggests the futility of life, and a lack of meaning, for there are ten doors in this small apartment, and the characters go in and out all and any, aware that they all lead to the same place.

In Victims of Duty (1952) the crushing force of life, and of an inimical world, is manifested by a huge crust of bread which the Inspector forces Choubert to chew and swallow with great difficulty. At the same time, Choubert’s wife is preparing coffee for her guest, and brings out dozens of teacups which she piles upon a buffet.

In Amédée or How to Get Rid of It (1953), the dead love of Amédée and Madeleine, their bitter and quarrelsome relationship, is represented by a cadaver which they discovered in their bedroom some fifteen years ago. It is stricken with “geometric progression,” and has been growing ever since. Moreover large mushrooms have been sprouting in the bedroom where the fascinating body is kept. Suddenly the body starts growing at a vertiginous rate, and huge toadstools spring up in the living room as well. By the end of the second act the corpse stretches across the entire stage, ready to knock a hole in the front door by the force of its ever-growing feet. Amédée and Madeleine have been forced to make space by piling the furniture in a corner of the room, and are scarcely visible any longer, so much are they dominated by the deadweight of their meaningless life together, crowded out of house and home by cabinets and corpses. Amédée finally succeeds in pulling the huge body out a window, and drags it through the streets down to the Seine, but he is discovered by the police, and escapes by simply flying into the air. The ending is weak and somewhat obscure, although Ionesco may wish to suggest by Amédée’s buoyancy the elation and complete liberation he experiences upon freeing himself from this burden.

The New Tenant (1954) reminds us of the second act of Amédée, but without the body. A man comes to take possession of his new apartment. The movers arrive with the furniture, and carry it into the room, until every inch of space is covered, the windows blocked, and the doors obstructed. The stairway, we learn, is still full of furniture, the streets are crowded, traffic has stopped, and the subway system is paralyzed. Here we are in a universe which has been overcome entirely by matter, and there is nothing to do but follow the example of the New Tenant who, invisible behind tall screens and cupboards, asks the movers to turn out the lights as they leave.

In the early plays, dead matter is suggested not so much by visible objects (although they are present too in the worn out clothing and shabby settings) as by language which is treated not as a living instrument of communication, but as something solidified and lifeless. Words are used for themselves, for their sounds rather than their meanings, and an order of suggestion rather than logic is frequently followed. Ionesco has called The Bald Soprano “the tragedy of language,” and it is in this play that we witness a total breakdown of communication on the linguistic level. Words are used which have apparent meaning, but in the context in which they are placed they lose their significance and appear absurd and empty. The process begins in the stage directions as the set is described: “English middle-class living room, with English armchairs. An English evening. Mr. Smith, an Englishman, in his English armchair and slippers, etc.” The adjective “English” is used to a point where it becomes empty of meaning, ending with the senseless seventeen English strokes on the English clock.

As the play opens Mr. and Mrs. Smith are spending a quiet evening at home. Mrs. Smith, in language strangely reminiscent of conversation manuals (which Ionesco has admittedly used in constructing the dialogue of this play), outlines the meal they have just had, describes the members of the family, and in general indulges in a delightful parody of the inane chit-chat which forms so large a part of daily conversation. Fatuous phrases, trite proverbs which are not at all à propos, and absurd word associations constantly crop up: Roumanian folklorique yogurt, which is good for appendicitis and apotheosis. Mr. Smith emerges from his newspaper to wonder why the ages of the deceased are always given, but never those of the newborn. In the discussion of Bobby Watson, who died two years ago, we see a complete confusion of time, character and meaning, and yet within each sentence there is sense. It is only when set side by side with the others that the absurdity is apparent. “He died two years ago,” says Mr. Smith. “You remember, we went to his funeral a year and a half ago.” And later he points out, “People were talking about his death already three years ago.” To which Mrs. Smith adds, “Poor Bobby, he had been dead for four years and his body was still warm.”

Bobby Watson’s wife, it turns out, is also called Bobby Watson, as are his son, daughter, and all the other people to whom he is related. Language has broken down completely, and we are lost in a world where there are no longer any distinguishing tags.

Guests arrive, the Martins and the Captain of the Fire Department. An argument ensues, followed by the usual chit-chat strewn with such original observations as, “The truth lies between the two,” “The heart is ageless,” “Truth is not found in books, but in life.” The guests begin to tell stories, each one more pointless than the other, ending up in the masterly tale told by the Fireman, entitled “The Cold”: “My brother-in-law had, on his father’s side, a blood cousin whose maternal uncle had a father-in-law whose paternal grandfather had married as a second wife a young native whose brother had met, on one of his voyages a girl with whom he fell in love and by whom he had a son who married … etc., etc.” This continues for a full page. It is the victory of language over logic, of empty conversation over meaningful discourse, of dead phrases over a living content.

The play ends at a high pitch as the language disintegrates into complete nonsense and unintelligible repetition of syllables, the characters shouting at one another in their anger at not understanding. And as the curtain falls we are back at the beginning of the play, with the Martins occupying the places originally occupied by the Smiths, and Mrs. Martin reciting the same empty phrases that Mrs. Smith had uttered.

In The Lesson a professor, at first humble and meek, gives a private lesson to a young girl eager to take her “Total Doctorate.” He so dominates her by his “learning” and personality that at the end she is reduced to a somnambulistic state, and he kills her. The knowledge of the young student is dead knowledge, so to speak, for it is not a thing which she really knows, but only something which she has memorized. There is a significant commentary on language in the professor’s lecture on philology, which is at the same time a parody of pedantry. In absurd terms, he discusses the “Neo-Spanish” tongues: Spanish, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Roumanian, Sardanapolous, Spanish and Neo-Spanish. The differences between these related languages, we learn, are imperceptible, since all the words of all the languages are the same. As an example he employs the sentence, “The roses of my grandmother are as yellow as my grandfather who was Asiatic.” In all languages it is identical, and yet when the girl repeats the sentence, it is never correct according to the professor. The only really safe words, it is suggested, are nonsense syllables, for words which are heavy with meaning, always end up succumbing, crumbling, or bursting like balloons.

In Jack a nonsense phrase, “I like potatoes with bacon,” stands for an acceptance of society and all that it imposes upon us. Jack at first refuses to utter a word, a rebel against his family who want to marry him to Roberte. The family overwhelms him with invective: he is a mononstre, vilenain, an actographe. His sister Jacqueline cries, “Je te déteste, de t’exertre,” while his mother reminds him how she taught him to “progresser, transgresser, grasseyer,” for she has been all things to him, “une amie, un mari, un marin.” As in The Bald Soprano, words are no longer used as counters, but simply stand for themselves, meaningless blobs, suggested by other words. Trite phrases are again thrown in for no apparent reason. Jacques finally gives in and accepts, not the original fiancée, but her sister, who has three noses, and nine fingers on one hand. She tells Jacques that in the basement of her chateau all things are called “cat.” Again language has broken down completely, and serves absolutely no meaningful purpose. Cats are called cats; insects, cats; chairs, cats; one, cat; two, cat; etc. So whether one wishes to say, “I’m tired, let’s go to sleep,” or “Bring me some cold noodles, warm lemonade and no coffee,” one says, “Cat, cat, cat, cat, cat, etc.” “Oh,” concludes Jacques, “how easy it is to speak! It’s not even worth the trouble.” This is also the conclusion of the New Tenant, who, expressing himself in terms of light and dark, simply says good night, turns out the light, and remains in his wordless solitude.

The same techniques are employed in The Chairs where “Drink your tea, Semiramis,” and “You might have been a general chief, etc.,” return with the monotony of a hey-nonny-nonny refrain, and with just about as much meaning. Words suggest other words because of sound, regardless of meaning, and the absurd physical presence of the word is before us once again rather than any reality of which it is a symbol. “Were you sure to invite everyone,” asks the Old Woman, “Le Pape, les papillons, et les papiers?” (The Pope, the butterflies and the papers). Several times words are repeated so frequently that they become only a sound, totally emptied of their meaning, as when one repeats one’s own name so long that it becomes simply an object in itself. Will the Orator come to reveal the Old Man’s message? “Il viendra,” (he will come) says the Old Man confidently. And the word is repeated ten times, then changed to the present tense, and repeated five more times.

The ultimate irony is that life itself, even a rich and successful life which contributes something to society (which is certainly not the case with the two old ruins on the stage before us), is finally reduced to nothing but a word, to a street name. “Let’s die and enter into legend,” says the Old Woman, “At least we’ll have our street.” And the old couple plunge to their death repeating ecstatically, “Nous aurons notre rue!”

The Chairs seems to be a transitional play in the career of Ionesco. In it we may see the gross exaggeration of language, and the grotesque characters so typical of the first plays. At the same time, these elements are not so prominent, and there is a certain realism in the presentation of the Old Man and Woman. This realistic presentation of the characters is seen again in Victims of Duty, Amédée and The New Tenant, however fantastic the situations may be. It is in these more “realistic” plays that the visible objects play an important role, and one suspects that this is a sort of compensation for the lack of dead language presented as such and the lack of puppet-like characters who are exaggeratedly mechanical, and therefore representative, once again, of that which is dead and cumbersome rather than vital and potentially spiritual.

For Ionesco’s characters are dead, all of them entombed within his restricting universe with walls closing in upon them, and buried also within their own solitude, each one separated from all others in a world where communication is absolutely impossible. The huge cadaver on stage in Amédée is not the only dead body in the play, and Amédée is fortunate if he is resurrected at the end, for he is the only resurrected character in Ionesco’s theater, the only one to escape from this world. He does so only at his wife’s expense, for as he ascends he drops upon her head the gigantic hat and beard belonging to the body he has finally gotten rid of.

Even the more realistic characters in the later plays perform meaningless and mechanical activities. Amédée is caught up in the senseless repetition of the play he is writing, and of which he never gets beyond the third speech. Madeleine is tangled in the wires of her job as telephone receptionist. And both of them have accepted mechanically, without thinking, the presence of the body in their apartment. In fact, they no longer can remember who it is, or where it came from. The mechanical rhythm of the movers in The New Tenant is obvious, as they bring in the furniture. The concierge in the same play speaks in a vacuum, never waits for the answers, but gives them herself.

The Old Woman in The Chairs becomes a grotesque automaton as she rushes from door to door bringing in chairs, and when the room is crowded she automatically takes on the role of usher and begins selling programs and candy.

The lack of any individual existence of the characters in Jack is underlined by the fact that all the members of one family are called Jacques, and all those of the other, Robert. The same technique is used in The Bald Soprano when Bobby Watson is mentioned. The Martins, in the same play, are so lost in their individual solitude that after years of married life they do not recognize each other. Their life together has been one of mechanical repetition. People are so interchangeable, so anonymous, that at the end of the play the Martins may take the roles assumed at the beginning by the Smiths.

The structure of these plays is frequently circular, and we find ourselves at the end at exactly the same point from which we started out. This is true of The Bald Soprano; of The Lesson, where the professor kills his student, the bell rings and another student is about to enter as the curtain falls; and of Victims of Duty, where everyone is conquered by the inhuman force of duty and the curtain falls on all the characters masticating the hard crust of bread imposed by society, and seeing to it that all the others are doing the same.

Those plays which are not constructed along these lines, usually follow a descending line, beginning with something resembling life, and ending, after absurd repetitions of one kind or another, in absolute silence. The Chairs and The New Tenant both end on a note of silence and emptiness. The world, dominated by substance, has become a graveyard.

This unhappy outlook on life is, surprisingly enough, presented by Ionesco in a way that is extremely amusing. One reason for this is that he employs the very technique of comedy—reduction of the living to the mechanical, exaggerated repetition—to express his particular view. The heaviness and opacity of life’s atmosphere, the overabundance of matter is at least partially relieved by the element of humor, which Ionesco considers a “happy symptom of the other presence,” evanescence or lightness. There is a profound unity, then, in this theater, where the very humor which is a symptom of lightness, at the same time makes patent the victory of the anti-spiritual forces in life.

One might be tempted to argue with the author over the paradox which lies at the base of his theatrical conception. But Ionesco is after all a dramatist, and makes (even less than other playwrights) no claims as a thinker. He stands for “pure theater,” and we can only be grateful that this paradox has produced plays which are amusing, suggestive, and refreshingly original.

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The Theater of Ionesco: A Union of Form and Substance