Eugène Ionesco

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Ionesco: Paroxysm and Proliferation

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SOURCE: “Ionesco: Paroxysm and Proliferation,” in The Psychology of Tragic Drama, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 102-26.

[In the following essay, Roberts explores the intensification of plot, incongruity, and parodistic fantasy that are characteristic of Ionesco’s plays, and asserts that his dramas display “the insight of a veritable master of the irrational.”]

Eugene Ionesco, writing of his own theatrical ambitions, argues as follows:1

What was needed … was to go right down to the very basis of the grotesque, the realm of caricature … to push everything to paroxysm, to the point where the sources of the tragic lie. To create a theatre of violence—violently comic, violently dramatic.

The path to the ‘basis of the grotesque’ lay through introspection, an examination of the inner life: defending himself in the Observer against Kenneth Tynan’s attack on his subjectivism, he wrote:2

To discover the fundamental problem common to all mankind I must ask myself what my fundamental problem is, what my most ineradicable fear is. I am certain then to find the problems and fears of literally everyone. That is the true road into my own darkness, our darkness, which I try to bring to the light of day. …

This darkness lies in the common inheritance of the primitive and irrational, a perception of which conditions the structure as well as the meaning of Ionesco’s plays. Two aspects of the ‘fundamental problem’, as illustrated in his theatre, are of especial relevance to my theme. First, there is an element of paroxysm and intensification; the characteristic movement of the plays is one of acceleration, of instinctual urges ever more frenziedly and maniacally released. As Ionesco’s comment on the grotesque shows, this makes for comedy; in place of Pinter’s enigmatic slow-burning menace, Ionesco offers us a feverish dance of incongruity, in which the contrary elements of anarchic protest against order on the one hand, and the fear of chaos and nothingness on the other, are held in dramatic balance. Something that can properly be called comedy, in spite of powerful tragic overtones, is also ensured by a certain lightness of tone and temperament which distinguishes Ionesco from other major practitioners of ‘Absurd’ drama; the amiably helpless hero is in a well-established comic tradition, as is the taste for parodistic fantasy.

Intensification is of the essence of Ionesco’s plots. The Lesson develops feverishly from a conventional beginning—the small change of talk between hesitant Professor and eager pupil—to rape and murder; in The Chairs, more and more chairs fill the scene as the old couple welcome invisible guests; in Amédée, the corpse in the next room gets bigger and bigger as the play proceeds. In these two plays the second aspect of the ‘fundamental problem’ is even more prominent: proliferation. ‘The horror of proliferation’, in Esslin’s words, ‘is one of the most characteristic images we find in Ionesco’s plays.’3 Ionesco himself calls it ‘the point of departure’, along with its opposite and complement, a feeling of emptiness and unreality:4

Two fundamental states of consciousness are at the root of all my plays. These two basic feelings are those of … emptiness and of an overabundance of presence; of the unreal transparency of the world, and of its opaqueness. … The sensation of evanescence results in a feeling of anguish, a sort of dizziness. But all of this can just as well become euphoric; anguish is suddenly transformed into liberty. … This state of consciousness is very rare, to be sure. … I am most often under the dominion of the opposite feeling: lightness changes to heaviness, transparency to thickness; the world weighs heavily; the universe crushes me. … Matter fills everything, takes up all space. … Speech crumbles. …

This is a very revealing statement of Ionesco. We are certainly made more aware in the plays of the proliferating tyranny of matter than of any sense of liberation: the growing corpse in Amédée which is beginning to sprout mushrooms; the bread and coffee cups that fill the stage in Victims of Duty; the encirclement of Bérenger by rhinoceros heads in Rhinocéros; the ever-increasing flood of furniture which pours into the room of The New Tenant. Moreover, the persecutory threat represented by the oppressive density of matter is liable to be intensified, not relieved, by its alternating aspect of unreality; the sensation of the ‘unreal transparency’ of the world causes vertigo, dizziness. Ionesco describes his sensations while writing his first play, The Bald Prima Donna, apparently almost by accident while learning English by the Assimil method:5

While writing the play … I felt sick, dizzy, nauseated. I had to interrupt my work … and, wondering all the time what demon was prodding me on, lie down on my couch for fear of seeing my work sink into nothingness, and me with it.

However, ‘anguish is suddenly transformed into liberty’; it is important to see that the lightness and euphoria which this sense of evanescence occasionally induces may themselves be associated with proliferation. Thus the writing of The Bald Prima Donna was at first experienced by Ionesco as an unexpected and extraordinary proliferation of original words and characters out of the bare clichés of the Assimil primer. Words began to behave like the spreading objects that were to fill the plays:6

The very simple, luminously clear statements I had copied diligently into my … notebook, left to themselves, fermented after a while, lost their original identity, expanded and overflowed.

The experience, though disconcerting in the way described, was also stimulating; Ionesco conveys vividly the excitement he felt at seeing, for the first time, his word-creations coming to life through the interpretation of actors and the response of an audience:7

To incarnate phantasms, to give them life, is a prodigious irreplaceable adventure, to such an extent that I myself was overcome when, during rehearsals of my first play, I suddenly saw characters move on the stage who had come out of myself. I was frightened. By what right had I been able to do this? Was this allowed? … It was almost diabolical.

He seems to be describing here a kind of creative proliferation of the self, successful perhaps in counteracting the destructive proliferation of matter; its similarity to the persecutory experience makes it ambivalent, at once exciting and appalling. The end of Amédée, where the anonymous hero floats off into the air, drawn up out of reach of his oppressors by the oppressing corpse itself which now ‘seems to have opened out like a sail or huge parachute’ seems to symbolize this ambivalent feeling of the author; the source of persecution, the growing corpse, becomes itself the means of liberation. Though Amédée claims he is being carried off involuntarily, there is a lightness of spirit and euphoric excitement about the conclusion: ‘Forgive me, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry! Forgive me! Oh, dear! But I feel so frisky, so frisky. (He disappears.)’8 His disappearance is signalized by brilliant lights and flashes in the sky, ‘comets, shooting stars, etc.’; he is deaf to his wife’s plea that he can ‘come home, the mushrooms have bloomed’.9 The blooming mushrooms recall the grotesquely blossoming corpse (both travesties of true growth); in contrast to these oppressive presences, the lights in the sky are liberating, celebratory of Amédée’s triumphant release from earthbound matter. The contrasting images seem clearly to represent the opposite poles of Ionesco’s ‘fundamental states of consciousness’, of heaviness and lightness, overabundance and transparency.

Paroxysm, or intensification; fullness, with its inevitable complement of emptiness. These two aspects of Ionesco’s inner drama exemplify in a striking manner part of the basic structure of infantile fantasy as explored by psychoanalysis. Ionesco’s account, quoted above, of how he came to write his first play, shows clearly how close he has kept to unconscious sources of feeling; he emphasizes both the semi-voluntary nature of the activity—as though his conscious self were being taken over by something deeper—and the powerful physical reaction, of dizziness and nausea, that suggests an involvement of the personality at a deep level. Like Pinter, he does not write from an abstract idea, but because he is possessed by an image, the pictorial or fictional representation of a feeling:10

I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have written the play or while I am not writing at all. I believe that artistic creation is spontaneous. It certainly is so for me.

In discussing The Bacchae I sought to show how easily greed may produce anxiety in the infant. First, there is anxiety springing from the realization that the breast can be withdrawn; even though he may be receiving ample food, the greedy baby’s gratification may be so short-lived that this anxiety, basically a fear of starvation, is very readily activated. Second, there is anxiety over what his greed in its excess may do to the mother, in emptying her breast and so rendering her incapable of feeding him. The greed is itself likely to be stimulated by anxiety, so that a vicious circle is set up, the greed producing anxiety and the anxiety in its turn further increasing the greed. This situation may cause the baby to seek to get rid of the unwanted feelings by putting them into the mother, projecting his greed and anxiety into the person who represents to him, in the very earliest stage of life, the greater part if not the whole of the external world. The more successful this mechanism the more dangerous and disturbing it is likely to prove. Just as by introjection the outer world may be taken into the self, and so experienced as part of the inner life, so by projection that outer world may be experienced as actually endowed with those parts of the self that are put into it. Thus the mother is now felt to contain the baby’s greedy and anxious impulses; not only may she then be believed incapable of feeding him adequately, but through the identification or confusion of child with mother which is an essential part of the mechanism of projection she may now be experienced as a restless devouring creature who threatens to stifle the child with his own greed. If it be accepted that the mother represents, at this early stage, the greater part of the external world to the child, then the later fear of invasion by proliferating objects can be seen as an extension of this original experience.

Proliferation may thus be taken to represent, at one level, the invasiveness of the infantile self experienced, through projective identification, as a hostile external force attacking and persecuting its victims. Ionesco shows an intuitive understanding of the vital part played by identification in this process; the victims appear as in some way responsible for, or at any rate very closely related to, the proliferating objects. A stage direction in Amédée makes the point with peculiar precision. As Amédée succeeds, with a ‘superhuman effort’, in pulling the now vastly extended body up on to the window-sill, at the moment it yields to him ‘the impression should be given that … it is dragging the whole house with it and tugging at the entrails of the two principal characters’.11 A typical confusion of identity between mother and child, represented here by the corpse and the two characters, has occurred. Moreover, the intimate relationship of mother to child makes the situation profoundly claustrophobic. The child may attempt in fantasy to project the whole of himself into the mother in order to restore the prenatal organic unity between them and so put an end to the damaging attacks brought about by subsequent separation. Again, the more this fantasy succeeds the more dangerous it will prove to be; finally separate now, the child cannot re-enter the safe place without the risk of suffocation. It is thus right that we should have the impression that Ionesco’s characters are in danger of being actually swallowed up by the monstrous proliferation of matter that surrounds them. (‘Matter fills everything, takes up all space.’) The child’s greedy and invasive projections have already made of the mother a monster who will envelop, suffocate, and finally absorb him.

It will be recalled that Ionesco sees, as the contrasting and complementary ‘fundamental state of consciousness’ to over-abundance of presence, emptiness: a condition both agonizing and, more rarely, exhilarating. Emptiness again suggests greed: if the ‘overabundance of presence’ suggests the greedy child who projects his greed into the mother, the emptiness suggests the child who for the same reason is no longer able to receive nourishment from her. The painfulness of this very common experience of emptiness and unreality, in the self and the external world, is explicable in psychoanalytical terms as the result of a projection of too great a part of the self, leading inevitably to a sense of impoverishment. Unreality is experienced because a great part of the self has been temporarily lost; the anxiety over identity inherent in this condition (am I a real person?) may well be exacerbated by the suppressed awareness that the ‘real’ self that has been projected is hostile and invasive, a threat to peace. Ionesco gives a moving and penetrating account of having experienced this state of consciousness in childhood:12

When I was a child I lived near the Square de Vaugiraud. I remember—it was so long ago!—the badly lit street on an autumn or winter evening. My mother held me by the hand; I was afraid, as children are afraid; we were out shopping, for the evening meal. On the sidewalks sombre silhouettes in agitated movement … phantomlike, hallucinatory shadows. When that image of that street comes to life again in my memory, when I think that almost all those people are now dead, everything seems a shadow, evanescence. I am seized by a vertigo of anxiety. …

The contrasting state of exhilaration, in which ‘anguish is suddenly transformed into liberty’, may be thought to signalize a counteracting fantasy of omnipotence. In place of the experience of impoverishment and loss, the self, free of its hostile and invasive parts, enjoys an exhilarating if dangerous sense of liberation that may be felt to transcend normal physical limits. It will be recalled that in the third and final act of Amédée, matter, that had threatened to fill everything, is left behind altogether as the hero soars triumphantly into the upper air; that this is a child’s dream of freedom is emphasized by the language of the watching crowd:13

Madeleine (to the sky) Come along now, Amédée, won’t you ever be serious?


Second Policeman (looking up at the sky and wagging his finger at Amédée as one would at a child) You little rascal, you!


Soldier Why Junior, you bad boy!

Under the spell of this feeling happiness seems unqualified, absolute. In another play, The Killer, Bérenger, the typical Ionesco hero, describes it as ‘a blazing fire inside me … youthfulness, a spring no autumn could touch; a source of light, glowing wells of joy that seemed inexhaustible’.14 Later—he is describing a landscape so beautiful it makes him forget everything else—he speaks significantly of ‘that deep sky and that sun, which seemed to be coming nearer, within my grasp, in a world that was made for me’.15 Not only does the world exist for his gratification but he fills the world with himself: ‘My own peace and light spread in their turn throughout the world, I was filling the universe with a kind of ethereal energy.’16 The image is surely that of an identification with the mother as source of all goodness and nourishment. In place of emptiness and unreality, there is a superabundance of reality; all other experiences, and even existence, are validated by the fantasy fulfilment of this first and most profound wish: ‘I walked and ran and cried I am, I am, everything is, everything is. …’17 The experience is comparable to the ecstasy of union celebrated by the Bacchants; the reforging of the physical link with the mother that is so often described, as Bérenger describes it here, as both familiar and new. The description is apt, for it is the buried life that is being rediscovered: ‘Everything was virgin, purified, discovered anew. I had a feeling of inexpressible surprise, yet at the same time it was all quite familiar to me.’18 As these quotations show, the experience possesses a perhaps unique value as the rediscovery of the deepest and most real happiness known to the self; but it is the urge to maintain this happiness pure and undiluted that stimulates the omnipotence, the denial of pain and loss that is ultimately damaging. Death itself is denied—inevitably, for the magic reunion with the mother has been substituted for the separation and growing away from her that is the condition of health and maturity, but must end finally in death: ‘A song of triumph rose from the depths of my being: I was, I realized I had always been, that I was no longer going to die.’19 It is also worth noting that in the imagery expressive of this mood there is a sexual colouring; the triumphant union with the mother may be experienced, it is implied, as a sexual possession of her. The fireworks and shooting stars of Amédée which accompany the hero’s apotheosis suggest orgasm, while the language of The Killer, though still metaphorical, is more direct; Bérenger speaks of ‘glowing wells of joy’ and of ‘filling the Universe with an ethereal energy’.20 The sense of omnipotence is complete.

Alternating with liberty, anguish; an accurate recognition of the price to be paid for the fantasy of omnipotence is enacted in the plays. There is the Icarus-like fall into dizziness and emptiness, as the reality of the infant’s helplessness and hunger breaks through the fantasy. There is also the pain of separation, part of a recognition that in the process of rapturous identification with and possession of the mother in fantasy, the real mother is lost. Bérenger in The Killer describes both aspects of the feeling, in a passage that follows immediately the long evocation of ecstasy from which I have already quoted. There is a change of mood:21

And suddenly, or rather gradually … no, it was all at once, I don’t know, I only know that everything went grey and pale and neutral again. Not really, of course, the sky was still pure, but it wasn’t the same purity. … It was like a conjuring trick.

Fantasies of omnipotence do indeed partake of the nature of conjuring tricks. Bérenger continues:22

There was a kind of chaotic vacuum inside me, I was overcome with the immense sadness you feel at a moment of tragic and intolerable separation … I felt lost among all those people, all those things.

As soon as the sense of omnipotence fades, objects begin to threaten again. The play ends with Bérenger’s submission to the knife of the ‘Tueur sans Gages’,23 the gratuitous killer, in appearance a shambling one-eyed dwarf, giggling and imbecile; the murderous dwarf here suggests the death-dealing aspects of the omnipotent child. Movingly and tragically, the finale presents the inevitability of death, in contrast to the fantasy of freedom and happiness; in the words of the short story, ‘La Photo du Colonel’, from which the play was later elaborated:24

No words, friendly or authoritative, could have convinced him; all the promise of happiness, all the love in the world, could not have reached him; beauty would not have made him relent, nor irony have shamed him. …

Death is the more intolerable and absurd, not because the happiness had been so real, but because there had been a certain unreality about it. To argue, as Esslin does, that The Killer portrays not only the inevitability and unacceptability of death but the absurdity of human existence itself—‘No argument of morality or expediency can prevail against the half-witted, idiotic futility of the human condition. …’25 is surely to impose an alien philosophy of despair on Ionesco’s subtle, poetic presentation of experience. Esslin makes a similar point when he argues that even in the radiant city of the first act (seemingly a representation in objective terms of Bérenger’s private happiness) ‘the presence of death makes life futile and absurd’.26 It is rather the unreality of the radiant city that produces this effect—the unreality of a world where all human needs are catered for by perfect planning, where ‘it’s all calculated, all intentional. Nothing … left to chance’, not even the weather; the climate is of everlasting spring sunshine, ‘in this district it never rains at all’.27 It is appropriate that the killer should walk in this city whose inhabitants have deserted it or, if unable to leave, stay hidden within their beautiful flats (Bérenger is puzzled by the city’s abandoned air); in its unreal perfection it is already empty, a place of fantasy not reality, a place of the dead. Bérenger fails to see this, in his rapturous acclamation of the city in the first act, just as he fails to see the elements of omnipotent yearning and denial of loss in his own memories of transcendent happiness. Ionesco’s heroes are so sympathetic that the extent of their surrender to overmastering fantasy may well be missed; this surrender is surely the central preoccupation of a writer who has described his theatre as ‘the projection on to the stage of the world within—my dreams, my anguish, my dark desires, my inner contradictions. …’28The Killer is a more powerful play than Amédée not because it testifies to the supposed meaninglessness of existence but because it suggests a fuller recognition of the truth about fantasy. The dissatisfaction expressed by critics about the third act of Amédée—that there is a decline of tension, that the transition from heaviness to lightness cannot be adequately realized in dramatic terms—may be symptomatic of an uneasiness about the hero’s apotheosis at the end of the play, with its implications of an uninhibited triumph of fantasy. The ambivalence conveyed by Amédée’s guilt at abandoning his earth-bound companions, and by the crucial role played by the corpse in his escape, does little to offset the euphoria. The euphoria is very appealing, but it does not altogether ring true. However, if there is an element of indulgence in the finale of Amédée, for the most part Ionesco displays a penetrating and lucid understanding of the crucial role played by unconscious fantasy in normal life, as ‘an activity of the mind that accompanies every impulse …’;29 without such understanding he could not evoke so well the darker and more damaging aspects of its mastery over us. (The darkness is usually relieved by a certain instinctive human sympathy and, often, an infectious gaiety; love and affection always exist as a possibility, however remote, in the relationships of Ionesco’s characters.) He recognizes, notably in The Killer and The Chairs, how fantasy embodies our daydreams of happiness and our longing for peace and security as well as our invasive and destructive wishes; above all, he sees the tragic link that may be forged between the two.

It is in such ways as this that the feeling of emptiness and evanescence is experienced as profoundly ambivalent, Janus faced in its contrasting anguish and euphoria. It will be recalled that the act of artistic creation itself and its consequences are described by Ionesco as partaking of this ambivalence; to see ‘characters move on the stage who had come out of myself’ is both frightening and exhilarating, ‘a prodigious, irreplaceable adventure’.30 The adventure is rightly felt to be dangerous; polarized between fulfilment (fulfilled achievement) and omnipotence (omnipotent fantasy), what I have called the creative proliferation of writing seems to Ionesco to partake of a Faustian bargain—‘Was this allowed? … It was almost diabolical.’31 (Images of procreation often occur in Ionesco in the context of fantasies of proliferation: the corpse in Amédée which produces blossoming mushrooms, the unceasing basketsful of eggs hatched by Roberte at the end of another play, The Future is in Eggs.) In thus conceiving of art as an extension of the self, its material the artist’s own fantasies and conflicts, Ionesco is firmly in the Romantic tradition; he makes the large claim that, as Professor Sutherland notes, is implicit in the attitude of the early Romantic poets—‘This was important to me; it must therefore be so to all men.’32 At the same time, the justification of the claim lies in the Romantic artist’s perception of the universal revealed through the experience of a single consciousness:33

For me, the theatre is the projection on to the stage of the world within—it is in my dreams, my anguish, my dark desires, my inner contradictions that I reserve the right to find the stuff of my plays. As I am not alone in the world—as each one of us, in the depths of his being, is at the same time everyone else—my dreams and desires, my anguish and my obsessions do not belong to myself alone; they are part of the heritage of my ancestors, a very ancient deposit to which all mankind may lay claim.

The response to Ionesco’s plays shows that his judgment here is right; he speaks to us so effectively through his profound understanding of the inner life, supported by the ability to find compelling dramatic images in which to express it. In a defence of the free employment of fantastic or magical effects on the stage he writes:34

I personally would like to bring a tortoise on to the stage, turn it into a race horse, then into a hat, a song, a dragon, and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre. … Let the playwright be accused of being arbitrary. Yes, the theatre is the place where one can be arbitrary. As a matter of fact, it is not arbitrary. The imagination is not arbitrary, it is revealing. … [my italics]

The apparent chaos of the inner life of fantasy is found to possess an inner meaning and coherence. This discovery, the truth of which Ionesco expresses in the cogent final sentence of this passage, is central to psychoanalytical thinking; his own theatre bears it out.

One of Ionesco’s subtlest treatments of the ‘two fundamental states of consciousness’, of overabundance and emptiness, is The Chairs. Here the emptiness lies at the heart of the overabundance, for the ever increasing number of chairs are set out by the old couple for non-existent guests, while the stream of polite conversation is addressed to the ears of the audience alone. The central theme of the play, as Ionesco defines it, in a letter to the director of the first production, Sylvain Dhomme, is emptiness and unreality; it is unusually close to Beckett in mood:35

The subject of the play is not the message, nor the failure of life, nor the moral disaster of the two old people, but the chairs themselves; that is to say, the absence of people … the unreality of the world, metaphysical emptiness. The theme of the play is nothingness. …

Ionesco also calls it a ‘tragic farce’. It will be remembered that Bérenger in The Killer experiences a ‘chaotic vacuum’ of loss and unreality: ‘I felt lost among all those people, all those things’. In The Chairs the unreality that, in certain states of consciousness, seems to be a property of the external world as well as of the self, is conveyed through an image of great power—‘the chairs themselves’.36 By means of this image the experience of unreality is embodied directly in the drama; in place of the hero being unable to communicate his feelings and needs to other characters who exist independently of him, as in Amédée or The Killer—the normal way of expressing this situation—the two chief figures people the stage with characters with whom they communicate freely but who exist only in their imagination. In terms of psychological symbolism, it may be said that the external world has been reduced to their own projections into it. There is always a possibility that the infant through his projective and omnipotent fantasies may experience a loss both of self and real mother so complete that a sense of total isolation results, his need for love and understanding completely frustrated. Such an early situation seems to be represented in the predicament of the old couple, which Ionesco interestingly refers to in the passage quoted above as a ‘moral disaster’37 though they do retain a certain reality to each other. It is noteworthy that the maternal aspect of the old woman’s attitude to her husband is emphasized: ‘Mummy’s with you, what are you afraid of?’38 she declares when he is distressed at the thought of having wrecked his career. He for his part sobs for his mother ‘with his mouth wide open, like a baby’,39 in the accents of a child who has broken a toy; she rocks him backwards and forwards on her knee to comfort him, but at first he sulkily refuses to accept her in the maternal role—‘you’re not my real Mummy’.40 However, their relationship is very much that of spoiled child and indulgent mother, he looking to her for continuous consolation and support; towards the end of the play she echoes, exactly, his speeches, and he remarks to an old flame of his, a Mrs Lovely, one of the imaginary guests, ‘My worthy spouse, Semiramis, has taken the place of my mother.’41 The dialogue at various points impresses on us that the old man is also a child; thus, he describes how the revelation he is about to dispense to his guests came to him when, at the age of forty, he was sitting on his father’s lap before going to bed. (Some visitors laugh at him and tell him he’s a man, but he thinks ‘But I’m not married yet. So I must still be a child.’) In another passage, evocative of the tragedy of the parent/child relationship, the old woman informs one of the guests that they had had a child who abandoned his grief-stricken parents because ‘they killed all the birds’ and whom they never saw again; simultaneously, the old man tells another guest that they never had a child, but that he had abandoned his mother, leaving her to die in a ditch. The confusion of identities here suggests that it is the child part of the old man who is the hero of both these incidents: a child whose guilt over his fantasied cruelty to the parents is assuaged by a projection of that cruelty into them—‘Daddy, mummy, you’re wicked, wicked! … The streets are full of the birds you’ve killed and the little children dying.’42

A sense of frustrated omnipotence, again reminiscent of an early infantile situation, is also prominent in the old man’s talk. He feels that he is singled out from the mass of men by the achievements that might have been his ‘if he had had a little ambition in Life’, by the extent of his humiliation and sufferings—he describes himself as having been ‘a lightning conductor for catastrophe’—and above all by his role as a saviour:43

And then, no one ever took any notice of me … and yet it was I, I tell you, it was I and I alone who could have saved mankind, suffering, sick mankind … I haven’t given up hope of saving mankind, there is still time, and my plan is ready.

This conviction is actually responsible for the drama presented to us: the guests have been summoned in order that they may listen to the old man’s message, the fruit of a lifetime’s experience. He has hired a professional orator to deliver the message ‘who’ll answer for me, who’ll explain to you exactly how we feel about everything … he’ll make it all clear. … rsquo;44 The arrival of the Orator is the consummation of the old couple’s lives; he ‘really exists. In flesh and blood. … It’s not a dream.’45 As they now have nothing more to ask of life, they leap out of the window to their deaths in the sea. Their disappearance is the signal for the hitherto silent and impassive Orator to face the rows of empty chairs and attempt to speak. However, he is deaf and dumb; his desperate efforts to make himself understood only produce ‘moans and groans and the sort of guttural sounds made by deaf mutes’. The resourceful idea occurs to him of writing his message on the blackboard, but the result is likewise gibberish, along with the single word ‘Angepain’ (Angelbread). Thus the message the old man could not speak himself remains unspoken. There is a hint, in the fact that he disappears as soon as the Orator appears, that he is to recover his lost identity in the identity of the Orator; but the sense of unreality remains undimmed. Indeed, finally it is only the unreal that has reality; a magnificent final image conveys this to us when, at the Orator’s departure, ‘for the first time human noises seem to be coming from the invisible crowd; snatches of laughter, whisperings … little sarcastic coughs’.46 As Ionesco recognizes, it is a familiar theatrical paradox—the baseless fabric of the stage’s vision—presented in a new context:47

The invisible elements must be more and more clearly present, more and more real (to give unreality to reality one must give reality to the unreal) until the point is reached … when the unreal elements speak and move … and nothingness can be heard, is made concrete. …

The paradox is pushed to the point where the author succeeds in communicating to the audience his conviction of incommunicability and nothingness. The non-existent ‘human noises’, the stage direction continues, ‘should last just long enough for the real and visible public to go away with this ending firmly fixed in their minds’.48 The empty chairs, as has been pointed out, do of themselves suggest a theatre, and the Orator’s inability to deliver the precious message hints at the difficulties and discouragement the artist may experience in the effort to reach his public if, like Ionesco, he ‘projects on to the stage the world within’. There is no doubt that he has succeeded in reaching them in The Chairs.

In the opening paragraph of this section I suggested that there were two features of Ionesco’s drama of especial relevance to my subject: first, proliferation and all that is associated with it; second, intensification. The Lesson, the play of Ionesco which provides an exceptionally concentrated and powerful example of this second feature, also embodies in an unusually direct form the content of an infantile fantasy. There are three characters: The Professor, aged between fifty and sixty, the Girl Pupil of eighteen, and the Maid of forty-five to fifty. The pattern of the play is a reversal of roles by Professor and Pupil. At the outset the Professor is ‘excessively polite, very shy, a voice subdued by its timidity’, while the Pupil is described as ‘vivacious, dynamic, and of a cheerful disposition’. As the play proceeds, however, ‘[he] will grow more and more sure of himself, excitable, aggressive, domineering’, while ‘she will become more and more passive, until she is nothing more than object, limp and inert … in the hands of the Professor’. Ionesco explains carefully, in this long stage direction with which he introduces his characters to us, how every feature of appearance and behaviour is to correspond to this change; thus the Professor’s voice should change ‘from thin and piping at the start … to an extremely powerful, braying, sonorous instrument at the end; whereas the Pupil’s voice, after being very clear and resonant … will fade almost into inaudibility’. The ‘prurient gleam’ that at first ‘now and again … quickly dismissed, lights up his eyes … will end by blazing into an insistent, lecherous, devouring flame’.49

It is characteristic of infantile sadistic fantasies that while under their spell the infant should lose to a great extent his sense of the mother as a person and retain only the sense of her as an object, receptacle for the spoiling sadistic attacks. Indeed this sense of the woman as merely object, present for the gratification of own’s own needs but without needs of her own, remains the single most typical feature of adult male sadism. I have previously tried to show how sadism, in Melanie Klein’s view, has its origins in infantile envy.50 The envy is experienced as a result of the infant’s awareness of his own helplessness and dependence in contrast to the mother’s independence and freedom:51

whenever he is hungry or feels neglected, the child’s frustration leads to the phantasy that the milk and love are deliberately withheld from him, or kept by the mother for her own benefit.

Envy is essentially spoiling in nature; the urge to possess the loved object, normally the breast, is characterized by powerful feelings of frustration and resentment. I have already mentioned how the projection of bad parts of the child into the mother may lead to a persecutory situation. In a context of sadistic fantasy, projection is likely to play its part in the denigration of the coveted object, the mother’s body or breast. Containing the bad envious parts of the child, the breast is experienced as a bad as well as a good object and can thus be attacked with the less guilt. However, the sadistic fantasy at its most intense may try to avoid the persecutory consequences of projection by experiencing the mother’s body as exclusively object, to be freely used for the satisfaction and containment of envious impulses; the infant is thus defended against the potentially threatening and persecutory aspects of the mother as a person into whom such feelings have been projected.

It is this extreme situation, pathological if acted out but very common in fantasy, that Ionesco presents in The Lesson. The reversal of rules by which the vivacious and charming girl pupil is transformed into an inert and limp object suggests both the root of sadism in envy and the compulsive nature of the urge to spoil and destroy. The climax is of a simultaneous rape and murder, confirmation that the sadistic fantasy is at its purest and most intense; as the Professor ‘kills the Pupil with a spectacular thrust of the knife’ he first cries out in satisfaction, then52

She too cries out, then falls, crumpling into an immodest position on the chair … they both cry out, murderer and victim, at the same moment.

It is an accurately rendered parody of sexual intercourse, the woman’s body being used simply as receptacle for the knife, or penis. Even at the climax of a sadistic fantasy some sense of the real function of the woman’s body must be retained, as provider first of food and subsequently of mutual sexual satisfaction, if it is to continue to be desired and coveted. It is thus appropriate that the murderous act should be experienced as orgasm: ‘after the first blow, he gives the dead Pupil a second thrust of the knife, with an upward movement; and then he starts visibly and his whole body shudders’.53 His next words—the first he speaks after the act of rape—show the mechanism of projection at work; the projection has resulted in a denigration of the envied object, so that a retrospective justification is available for the sadistic attack and the welcome release of tension enjoyed, at first, without guilt:54

Professor (out of breath, stammering) Trollop. … She asked for it. … Now I feel better. … Ah! … I’m tired. …

I mentioned that sadistic fantasies at their most intense may lose sight of the woman as a person, as the Professor virtually loses sight of the Girl Pupil except as a vehicle for his sadism. However, The Lesson is greatly strengthened by the introduction of a different, and less pathological, relationship between the man and another woman. In the person of the Maid Ionesco has given us the kind of disapproving but indulgent mother figure who might be expected to support and encourage the child’s sadistic fantasies. The relationship between her and the Professor, deployed in the epilogue that, after the climax of the murder, closes the play, is demonstrably that of mother and child. At the climax itself there is a subtle anticipation of the Professor’s child self; as Professor and Pupil approach the moment of truth, he enjoins her to repeat after him the word ‘Knife’: ‘Say it again, watch it. (Like a child) Knifey … Knifey.’55 After the murder, the Professor, in a reaction of horror at finding the body of a pupil on his hands, calls in panic for the Maid. She is at first severe and unsympathetic: ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, at your age too!’56 Vexed at her reproaches, he defends himself by accusing the dead girl of being ‘a bad pupil’; Professor and Maid then enact with remarkable precision the parts of a nasty child turning on its mother and the mother responding with interest:57

Professor (approaching the maid slyly, his knife behind his back) It’s none of your business! (He tries to strike her a terrific blow, but she seizes his wrist and twists it; the Professor drops his knife). … Forgive me!


(The Maid strikes the Professor twice, forcibly and noisily, so that he falls to the ground on his behind, snivelling.)


Maid You little murderer! Revolting little swine! Wanted to do that to me, did you! I’m not one of your blessed pupils!


(She hauls him up by the back of his collar. … He is afraid of being hit again and protects himself with his elbow, like a child.)

Having thus established her ascendancy, she relents. It is already clear from an earlier scene that she has known all the time what is going to happen and has allowed it to happen; she warns the Professor not to go too far—‘Philology is the worst of all … you won’t say I didn’t warn you!58 Later, however, although she recognizes that with the toothache induced in the Pupil by the philology lesson ‘the worst symptom’59 has arrived, she leaves the two alone together. Now, with the body of the Pupil between them, she responds to the Professor’s sobs and protestations with something like sympathy, as soon as he has admitted he is sorry:

Maid At least you’re sorry you did it?


Professor Oh yes, Marie, I swear I am.


Maid I can’t help feeling for you. Come now! You’re not a bad boy after all! …

She exacts a promise that he won’t do it again, significantly because it might be bad for him (‘it would give you heart trouble …’); she then helps him to plan the funeral and advises him how best to protect himself, finally assisting him to carry the body off stage.60

This fine scene suggests in almost every particular the mother who overlooks the murderous pranks of the child because she is too big to be seriously threatened by them; the initial violence of her response combines with the absence of any real disapproval on her part to stimulate his sadism, which is effectively displaced on to the more vulnerable target of the girl pupil. Structurally the scene is integral to the meaning of the play, which presents us both with the roots of sadism in infantile fantasy and with a cogent example of a later, indirect manifestation of the impulse in the exploitation of language for the purposes of sadistic domination. The adult teacher who forces a parody of learning down the pupil’s throat and the child caught out by its mother in a nasty sadistic game are linked by the enacted fantasy of the rape cum murder. Ionesco is careful to preserve a sense of fantasy throughout the grotesque climax; the knife with which the Professor kills the Pupil, and with which he later threatens the Maid, is invisible. Moreover, when the Professor asks, of the coffins which the Maid is to order for him ‘What if anyone asks us what’s inside?’ she replies, ‘… We’ll say they’re empty. Besides, no one will ask any questions. They’re used to it61 [my italics].

We are, indeed, all used to it, although it is not often recognized for what it is. The Lesson is not a morality play, but none the less it embodies a valuable and neglected truth: that primitive sadistic instincts do not only, or indeed normally, find gross physical expression, but find effective release in many less obvious and more subtle ways. Ionesco’s choice of the teaching situation is an apt one for this purpose. The educative process can degenerate into an exercise of power at the expense of the pupil, a power that is sadistic in origin in that it reflects in displaced form an early sadistic impulse. The Lesson shows how the urge to dominate and control may at first take the milder form of a metaphorical seduction and if this proves unsuccessful develop into metaphorical rape. (It must be remembered that the design of the play requires that the seduction remain metaphorical while the rape is presented as literal and actual.) Both processes concern themselves with the needs of the teacher and not with those of the taught. The student may be seduced into believing that he is learning when he is really serving the teacher’s ego, whether by acting as willing receptacle for an exhibitionist display on the teacher’s part or by himself making such a display of prowess in response to flattery and encouragement by the teacher; both processes are a substitute for the mutual effort of learning. In terms of early experience, a narcissistic and exhibitionistic activity, involving masturbatory fantasies or at a later state fantasies of intercourse with the mother, has been substituted for feeding. Rape, in terms of the metaphor, suggests the bludgeoning of the pupil into an acceptance of what is arbitrarily prescribed by the teacher; it is a penetration by force—the psychological force at the disposal of superior age, experience, knowledge. Neither process can be regarded as uncommon in the teaching relationship.

Seduction is certainly present in The Lesson. At first the Professor flatters and conciliates his Pupil:62

Pupil One and one make two.


Professor (astonished by his pupil’s erudition) But that’s very good indeed! You’re extremely advanced in your studies. You’ll have very little difficulty in passing all your Doctorate examinations.

Later he displays his own prowess in the field of comparative philology, in a long nonsensical declamation about the neo-Spanish languages; the Pupil is at first delighted and fascinated. However, as the Professor becomes more insistent and aggressive in his self-display, refusing to permit any interruption, the Pupil suddenly announces that she has toothache. From this point onwards she defies the Professor by means of her toothache, rejecting and even mocking his instruction; he only succeeds in overcoming her defiance by an increasing, and increasingly violent, pressure. The toothache may perhaps indicate loss of the power of speech and so of language; the parody of the whole learning process is an important element in the play. Just as, positively speaking, language is seen as an instrument of power, so negatively the communication of knowledge is mocked in the nonsense games played by the pair in language and arithmetic:63

Pupil I can count up to … infinity.


Professor That’s impossible.


Pupil Up to sixteen, then.


Professor That’s quite far enough. We must all recognize our limitations.

It is worth noting here, in the context of the parody of learning, a comic device by which Ionesco reinforces the ‘progressive heightening and intensification’ he is seeking: the Pupil can do complex sums of addition with miraculous ease, but she cannot subtract, arguing, for example, that three from four makes seven.

The toothache has perhaps an additional significance: the persistent but feeble resistance to instruction offered by this means is seen to act as provocation to the Professor, whose tone and manner, already assertive, are transformed into open sadism:64

Professor … And so on and so on. …


Pupil That’s enough! That’s enough! I’ve got …


Professor The toothache! The toothache! … Teeth, teeth, teeth, teeth! … I’ll have them all out for you in a minute. …

There is even a hint, in the obsessive nature of the Pupil’s complaints of toothache, that to her teaching in itself is experienced as a violation, a painful penetration of her body by the voice of the Professor:65

Pupil That’s enough! I’ve had enough! Besides, my teeth ache and my feet ache and my head aches. … You make my ears ache, too. What a voice you’ve got! How piercing it is!


Professor Say Knife. … Kni … Fff. …

Her fantasies may be thought to play a part in the situation, operating in collusion with the Professor’s fantasies to bring about the fatal conclusion; this is certainly in keeping with the general impression made on us by the play. Admittedly, at this point the Professor is already threatening her with sadistic violence; as we know from the opening stage direction, by now his voice has grown more powerful and piercing. However, the passage is reminiscent of one in Amédée, where Amédée’s loving enthusiasm is experienced by Madeleine, his wife, as a sadistic attack: ‘Your voice is so piercing! You are deafening me! Hurting me! Don’t rend my darkness! S-a-dist! …’66 As Martin Esslin comments: ‘The situation is that of an ardent lover and a girl who regards all advances as acts of violence and rape.’67

I suggested earlier that Ionesco understands how ubiquitously a primitive, infantile sadism operates in normal adult human affairs in a concealed and displaced form. By a bold paradox, this point is made by a reversal—by the presentation of a normal activity, teaching, that develops rapidly into a grotesquely sadistic situation. A final touch reinforces our sense of the operation of a basic aggressive drive in a form unrecognized, and so socially and morally acceptable. We learn from the Maid—she is speaking of the Professor’s crime—that ‘it’s the fortieth time today! And every day it’s the same story! Every day! …’68 Clearly she is used to it, just as people in general are used to the sight of the coffins of his victims. The extravagance, by being pushed so far, succeeds brilliantly since ‘one can dare anything in the theatre’,69 in the author’s words. The Lesson points the moral, in its own essentially comic terms, that sadism is not merely a psychopathic perversion but a universal, even commonplace, illness, affecting respectable professors and their bright pupils. Ionesco calls The Lesson a comic drama; whatever the wider implications, it is certainly comic in its preoccupation with incongruity and also in a certain emotional detachment. There is none of the plangency of feeling or poetic suggestiveness to be found in The Killer or The Chairs; I suspect that for Ionesco there is little or no poetry in sadism. This is greatly to his credit—a refreshing contrast to writers whose only source of poetry seems to lie in the sadomasochistic areas of experience. If The Lesson has less depth for this reason, it has a compensating concentration of effect. More importantly, it displays, in common with the other plays of Ionesco I have discussed, the power and insight of a veritable master of the irrational, one who follows ‘the true road into my own darkness, our darkness, which I try to bring to the light of day’.70

Notes

  1. E. Ionesco, ‘Expérience du Théâtre’, Nouvelle Revue Française, (Paris, 1 February 1958), pp. 258-9. I owe this and other quotations from Ionesco’s writings on the drama to Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York, 1961), ch. 3.

  2. Ionesco, ‘The Playwright’s Role’, Observer (6 July 1958). Tynan’s criticism appeared in the previous number of the paper.

  3. Esslin, op. cit., ch. 3, p. 99.

  4. Ionesco, ‘The Point of Departure’, Cahiers des Quatre Saisons, no. 1 (Paris).

  5. Ionesco, ‘La Tragédie du Langage’, Spectacles, no. 2 (Paris, July 1958).

  6. Ibid.

  7. ‘Expérience du Théâtre’, p. 258.

  8. Ionesco, Amédée, trans. Donald Watson, Plays II (London, 1958), p. 226.

  9. Ibid.

  10. ‘Expérience du Théâtre’, p. 268.

  11. Amédée, ed. cit., p. 62.

  12. Ionesco, ‘Lorsque j’écris …’, Cahiers des Quatre Saisons, no. 15.

  13. Amédée, ed. cit., p. 227.

  14. Ionesco, The Killer, trans. Donald Watson (London, 1958), p. 77.

  15. Ibid., pp. 80-1.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid., p. 82.

  18. Ibid., p. 81.

  19. Ibid.

  20. See above.

  21. The Killer, ed. cit., p. 82.

  22. Ibid., p. 83.

  23. The French title of the play.

  24. Evergreen Review, March 1957 (trans. Stanley Reed).

  25. Esslin, op. cit., pp. 122-3.

  26. The Killer, ed. cit., pp. 68-9.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ionesco, Improvisation, trans. Donald Watson, Plays III (London: Calder; New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 112-13.

  29. Melanie Klein, Our Adult World and its Roots in Infancy (London, 1960), p.6.

  30. See above, p. 104.

  31. Ibid.

  32. J. R. Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (Oxford, 1948), p. 161.

  33. Improvisation, pp. 112-13.

  34. ‘Eugène Ionesco ouvre le feu’, World Theatre, VIII, 3, Autumn 1959.

  35. Letter from Ionesco to Sylvain Dhomme, quoted by F. Towarnicki, ‘Des Chaises vides … à Broadway’, Spectacles, no. 2 (Paris, July 1958).

  36. Letter from Ionesco to Dhomme.

  37. See above, p. 113.

  38. Ionesco, The Chairs, trans. Donald Watson (London, 1968), p. 13.

  39. Ibid., p. 13.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Ibid., p. 30.

  42. Ibid., pp. 31-2.

  43. Ibid., p. 50.

  44. Ibid., p. 44.

  45. Ibid., p. 53.

  46. Ibid., final stage directions, pp. 59-60.

  47. Letter from Ionesco to Dhomme.

  48. The Chairs, final stage directions, ed. cit., pp. 59-60.

  49. Ionesco, The Lesson, trans. Donald Watson (London, 1958), Penguin edition, pp. 182-83.

  50. See above, p. 17.

  51. Klein, op. cit., p. 8.

  52. The Lesson, ed. cit., p. 214.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Ibid., p. 213.

  56. Ibid., pp. 215-16.

  57. Ibid., p. 198.

  58. Ibid., p. 198.

  59. Ibid., p. 211.

  60. Ibid., pp. 216-17.

  61. Ibid., p. 217. I discuss the point of the plurality of coffins later in this chapter (see p. 123).

  62. Ibid., p. 189.

  63. Ibid., pp. 190-91.

  64. Ibid., p. 208.

  65. Ibid., p. 212.

  66. Amédée, ed. cit., p. 48.

  67. Esslin, op. cit., p. 108.

  68. The Lesson, ed. cit., p. 215.

  69. See above, p. 113.

  70. See above, p. 102.

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The Evolution of the Dramatic Technique of Eugène Ionesco

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Ionesco’s Later Plays: Experiments in Dramatic Form