Scenic Metaphors: A Study of Ionesco’s Geometrical Vision of Human Relationships in the Bérenger Plays
[In the following essay, Tener treats the use of d&eacaute;cor and other visual and aural theatrical metaphors as the dramatic expression of internal and external forces that surround the protagonist in Ionesco’s Bérenger plays.]
An important characteristic of drama closely related to characters and plot is the scenic space wherein the actions take place. For Anne Ubersfeld, “l’espace scénique peut aussi apparaître comme un vaste champ psychique où s’affrontent des forces qui sont les forces psychiques du moi. La scène est alors assimilable à un champ clos où s’affrontent les éléments du moi divisé, clivé” [the scenic space may also appear like a broad, psychic field where forces face each other which are the psychic forces of the self. The stage is then similar to a medieval list where the elements of the divided, cloven self face each other].1 While some playwrights seem unaware of the importance of the scenic space (most seem to view drama not as an art form but as a representational slice of life), others, such as Eugene O’Neill, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Eugène Ionesco tie the psychological implications of inside and outside, up and down, closed or open, repetitive or non-repetitive, circular or linear actions closely to the themes of their plays. Scenic space for Nancy Lane appears to be part of the semiotic system Ionesco uses, evident especially in the décors which she says are not “servile accessories.” Playing down the poetic importance of visual as well as aural images, she finds in Ionesco’s early plays that the non-human characters are hostile to the human ones.2 Other critics interpret décor or scenic space in metaphorical, psychological, or even oneiric terms. For Paul Vernois, for example, the basis of Ionesco’s work is oneiric, drawing on images and symbols associated with personal and archetypal myths. His book-length study, indebted to Leo Spitzer’s principles of linguistic criticism and illustrated with various schemata, discusses the elements of polarization and modalities of knowledge. Closely linked to such analyses is the work of Mary A. Witt. More restricted than my own approach, despite some overlapping, she narrows her study to a primary discussion of evanescence and heaviness, light and darkness, the feeling of being closed in and that of flying through space. In this study I treat the décor and other theatrical metaphors (both visual and aural—taking metaphor to mean the implicit and explicit images suggested by what one sees and hears) as the dramatic expression of forces both external and internal that surround or affect Bérenger. At the heart of the Bérenger plays the scenic metaphors suggest Ionesco’s mistrust of rational models of reality as solutions or approaches to life’s problems. Vernois sees the source of these metaphors in Ionesco’s oneiric vision; I see it in his habit of viewing the world through images much as a poet perceives experiences. For Ionesco especially the dramatic vision of life manifests itself through spatial metaphors, geometrical patterns as it were, that lend themselves to analogic descriptions of life processes and forces in which human beings are involved, much as the sine wave can be used to describe the variations in a writer’s career.
One of the earliest critics to see this characteristic in Ionesco’s plays, Georges Matoré, asserts
Fréquemment, dans son théâtre, l’espace scénique se rétrećit suivant un tracé qu’on pourrait assimiler à une spirale ou à des cercles concentriques:les objects envahissant peu à peu la scène (les Chaises, la Nouveau locataire) de manière à ne plus laisser au personnage principal que l’espace exiger d’une cellule de condamné à mort. Ce lent rétrécissement physique est lié à un encerclement moral, à un ensevelissement. L’espace de Ionesco est une peau de chagrin.3
[Frequently, in his theater, the scenic space shrinks according to a pattern that one might liken to a spiral or to concentric circles: little by little objects invade the scene (Les Chaises, La Nouveau locataire) so as to allow the main character no more than the space demands of a cell for those condemned to death. This slow material shrinking is bound to a moral encircling, to a shrounding. Ionesco’s space is a wild animal’s skin that expands or contracts according to passion expended.]
This geometrical vision of human relationships and processes, while evident in all of Ionesco’s plays, appears as a dominant element in the dramas written from 1952 through 1959 when he was exploring the dramatic and artistic possibilities of space and language. As Paul Vernois has pointed out, the plays written between those years have a to-and-fro or an up-and-down movement, a “mouvement scénique primordial destiné à être repris et orchestré dans les grandes pièces” [a primordial scenic movement intended to be revived and orchestrated in the major plays].4 In addition most of the plays written during this period, which includes the Bérenger series, have a visual and aural contracting action moving from a wide, loose perspective to a small, private world. Each also presents an intimate living area as an entrapping spatial form polarized in terms of the oneiric house opposed by an apartment or throne room. And each reveals that life or its representations tend to invade or contaminate not only the rational models but also the intuitive or idealized dreams mankind creates in an attempt to give life meaning by stopping its chaotic movement. Nancy Lane finds that the role of the “non-human domain,” which involves the décor, in the Bérenger cycle translates “into dramatic signs man’s ambiguous relationship to his environment and even to himself.”5
Not only the to-and-fro but also the up-and-down movements are realized metaphorically in Tueur sans gages.6 Within its three-act form, Ionesco places Bérenger at the center of visual and aural images which suggest forces of harmony and content or those of logic and rationality. In other instances they reflect Bérenger’s internal state. The connotations of the stage images are then altered through a falling or descending action as in Les Chaises and Amédée. The total effect suggests the generalized destructive impact of life on dreams of harmony or rationality. As a consequence Bérenger cannot remain in the scenic center and be restored to his emotional, intellectual, and physical well being. The action begins in the first act with the description of the radiant city as an architectural utopia. Logically it is the ideal city. But logic is not life in Ionesco’s dramatic world. Because it models an abstraction, like the ideal group gathering to hear the ideal speech, we cannot see it directly, being told about it by Bérenger, who intrudes by chance into this ideal region. The radiant city is characterized by a cluster of images which suggest its rationality and obsessive systemization rather than any organic fullness of a garden of paradise. Unlike a harmonizing image poised between physical reality and the abstract cultural world, it stands neither as a place for life nor as a work of art. According to Nancy Lane, Bérenger tries to make the city his accomplice to end conflict between him and the environment.7
Once Ionesco has established these characteristics, however, he informs us that Dany, the architect’s secretary, wants to resign from the civil service and that stones are often thrown in the city although the inhabitants are not injured by them. The first event suggests a movement out from the city’s center, the second a downward pattern. The psychological nature of the scene changes with the sound of a falling stone, acquiring negative and destructive overtones. To emphasize this new direction, Ionesco informs us that the inhabitants are leaving this city, which fragments man just as it has its designer, who had divided his two ears and eyes between Bérenger and the borough. The images suggest that the city has fallen morally, acquired a defect, as though its life-supporting qualities have been contaminated by intruders with no feeling for logic and order.
The second act presents Bérenger’s apartment as a closed area cut off from harmonious relationships with the physical reality around it. Although as his home it is supposed to be a source of strength, a variety of intrusions have actually contaminated its power. Just before Bérenger reaches his apartment, Ionesco provides a scene filled with loud, clichéd talk from a variety of people about the cost of living, sickness, and their dog’s life. In the background are heard the intrusive metallic sounds of hammers, motorcycles, sirens. The entire scene forms a cluster of contaminating sense impressions engulfing the apartment. Every element suggests that the apartment is isolated from the social world and that its door helps shut out what Bérenger dislikes, the emotional chaos of a society that does not function logically.
Bérenger’s apartment offers no place of repose to reorganize his thoughts and to integrate his experience with his childhood memories. Instead the place seems to hold ugly, old, and comically askew elements which lack a warm revitalizing touch. Nor can it keep out all of the exterior comic ugliness. The scenic image focuses on Édouard sitting in the middle of the room, a position that dominates the scene visually. His description suggests that he is a contaminating intruder. He has a thin body, a withered right arm, lung trouble, a bad cough, a temperature, and a pale face. The scenic image of Bérenger’s apartment-home is conceived as a repository of qualities that could constrict or destroy him, presenting an aura of tense irony and fragmented existence. What once reinforced life now seems not only old fashioned but also slightly dangerous.
A new action is precipitated by a falling movement indirectly associated with the killer. As Édouard picks up the briefcase which contains the killer’s plans, its contents spill out onto the table. Feeling now that he has evidence of the killer’s timetable and pattern of operation, Bérenger wants Édouard to accompany him to report the matter to the police.
The action of the last act starts with a conceptual image, adds intruders, then changes through a falling movement, and ends with an enclosing metaphor. The visual image is conceived in terms of surrealistic elements associated with a public bench, a street in far perspective, a setting sun, and a raised pavement section like a wall in back hiding a street leading far in the distance toward the buildings of the Préfecture, the symbol of law and order. Thus two separate visual areas are immediately established by the presence of the wall. The drift of the psychological action is to move from one area (a rational or ideal place contaminated by chaos) through or past a barrier to another area (a place of logic or order), a movement reflected in Bérenger’s unsuccessful attempts to persuade others to adopt his views or to let him pass. Mother Peep’s campaign actions, Édouard’s need to rest, the discovery that the briefcase had been forgotten, and the appearance of the unusually tall policeman function as barriers preventing Bérenger from reaching the Préfecture. Soon other barriers fill the scene. A second policeman on stilts and army trucks appear. Then a traffic jam develops. In comparison with the barriers which seem gigantic or overpowering, Bérenger (the symbol of confused life?) appears quite small. Inexplicably, politics, physical tiredness, the ineffectual bureaucracy of the police and the army, metallic and mechanical objects, and ordinary things like a bench seem to exert a force that prevents or inhibits the horizontal movement of the action.
Suddenly the scenic image alters in preparation for the dominant downward flow of the psychological action. Its negative elements suggest visually the gradual loss of vitality in Bérenger. The stage becomes empty; the avenue is deserted. The stage directions emphasize Bérenger’s isolation. So far in the distance rises the Préfecture toward which Bérenger moves, that the perspective creates the impression of a long passageway leading into “un guet-apens” (159) [a trap]. All at once the killer appears, standing on the bench or wall. His description reinforces the sense of loneliness as well as the absence of harmonious and restorative qualities. He jumps down to ground level, not in an act of submission to Bérenger (though he is quite small), but in a manner visually echoing the falling stones, the dropped photographs, the movement down from the abstract regions of thought to earth, the pattern by which chaos and the irrational conquer life’s idealism and energy.
Similarly at the end, Bérenger repeats the dominant visual image of the play when he kneels to beg the killer. The image is re-emphasized when he lowers his “deux vieux pistolets démodés” (172) [two, old, outmoded pistols], bends his head, and waits. From this final event there exists no exit. The blazing fire in Bérenger, his source of light, wells of joy and enormous energy have been overcome. Ironically the irrational and inexplicable, man’s primal fear, remain uninfluenced by the rational and the dream, both of which are impotent in the end.
In his analysis of Rhinocéros8 Paul Vernois commented that,
La hantise de la verticalité diminue apparemment dans Rhinocéros mais elle n’est pas tout à fait éliminée de la structure de la pièce. Pendant la moitié de l’action, à l’acte II en particulier, l’intrigue se déroule sur deux plans: le bureau de Bérenger après la destruction de l’escalier est devenu une sorte de mirador pour la chasse aux fauves. … Rejoindre les rhinocéros, c’est faire une chute jusqu’au moment où ceux-ci ont envahi. Le mythe est si bien ourdi que la notion même de culpabilité ou de valeurs (esthétiques en particulier) disparaît quand la dénivellation des humains et des rhinocéros est abolie.9
[The haunting sense of verticality diminishes apparently in Rhinocéros but it is not entirely eliminated from the structure of the play. During half of the action, in act 2 particularly, the plot unwinds in two schemes: the office of Bérenger after the destruction of the stairs has become a kind of watch tower for the hunting of wild animals. … To join the rhinoceroses is to fall until only those predominate. The myth is so well woven that the very notion of guilt or values (aesthetic in particular) vanishes when the difference in kind between human beings and rhinoceroses is abolished.]
Despite Paul Vernois’s response, the verticality of Rhinocéros does not seem diminished to me. Rather, it seems emphasized more as the general direction of the scenic images, unlike that in Tueur sans gages, is gradually upward. The action moves from an exterior, public, ground-level social center in a small French village through an area of rationality located visually on the upper levels in a printing office, into two interior, private, intimate second-floor apartments. In the first meeting between Jean and Bérenger, set on a Sunday in the center of a small village, Jean is identified with a sense of logic, order, self-discipline, and present time, while Bérenger is associated with disorder, feeling, irrationality, and past time. Into this innocuously pleasant setting comes a series of intrusions or invasions which contaminate the effect and expand the natural oppositions between order and disorder, public and private, already evident. The first invasion is the sound of a rhinoceros. Next Le Logicien and his friend intrude on the scene; soon Daisy comes by; and sounds of a rhinoceros are repeated.
But the cluster of social images with its impressions of pleasant soporific order and little physical activity has altered with many characters entering and leaving the area. Their frenzied activities provide a horizontal thrust to the general stage image. At the end of the act, all the characters except Bérenger leave so that in effect he remains isolated. Instead of feeling refreshed and given a new view on life, he is quite upset and drinks brandy to escape reality. For him the center of socializing influences has changed into a place of isolation.
Emphasizing verticality, Ionesco moves the scenic image from ground level into the upper regions suggestive of abstract activities as in Le Piéton de L’air or Les Chaises.10 The setting is the second-floor legal printing offices of M. Papillon, an obvious ironical focus of order, logic, rationality as the repository of mankind’s rules for governing. Again there is a series of intrusions and invasions. The impact of the rhinoceros is felt through the highly disorganized and often irrational discussion taking place about the cause and nature of the happening. Bérenger’s coming to work late revives the disordered argument. Other intrusions follow: Madame Boeuf comes with mistruths; a trumpeting rhinoceros is heard; and the stairs collapse.
With the destruction of the stairs, the major physical link between this center of rationality and the outside lower world has been removed. But the exterior ground world, rapidly being inhabited by giant animals, has ceased to have any positive correlation with the inner models Bérenger has of his known world. The public, social area has turned into a center of animality removed from the power of rationality to invest it with meaning. There is apparently no escape for these characters from the centers of rationality except through some other rational model such as a metaphor (an ironical, even satirical, escape). Thus with the aid of the firemen, the employees leave through the window, an ironical action suggesting metaphorically that they float out on their own line of sight. Their sanctuary of rationality and order has been turned into a trap, the first major visual image to suggest the play’s dominant state of consciousness, the “sensation of being closed in” as in Amédée.11
The location of the action continues on the upper level for the remainder of the play, emphasizing its negative relationships to mental models and especially to personal, intimate space. The last scene of act 2 focuses on Jean’s apartment; all of act 3 occurs in Bérenger’s place. What is important spatially is that in Jean’s home there are two centers of action, the bedroom where Jean talks with Bérenger and the bathroom where he becomes a rhinoceros. In the sequence developed through these two areas, the thrust of the action is horizontal in a to-and-fro manner, reflecting the rhythm of the first act. Paul Vernois suggests encirclement.12 Jean goes back and forth between the two rooms, each time becoming more rhinoceros-like. Thus, in his home, supposed to have a stabilizing effect through its associations with logic and rationality, Jean metamorphoses into a rhinoceros.
From this area of metamorphosis which has trapped Jean, as though rationality and logic are the real enemy from which mankind cannot flee, Bérenger has no immediate escape. At each of the exits, doors and window, he sees only the huge animals. Finally he throws himself against the back wall, as though to deny physical reality, and as it crashes down, flees from the horror of a home that has failed its inhabitant. Beyond a logical reality, the scene is surrealistic. Ionesco does not explain how Bérenger keeps from falling down to ground level.
In exploring his idea of encirclement, Paul Vernois provides a valuable comment in understanding what has happened to Jean and Bérenger:
À l’encerclement par la matière répond l’encerclement par l’idéologie dans Rhinocéros. … Bien vite les occupants, de moins en moins nombreux, vont comprendre leur situation critique car les rhinocéros qui se sont rendus maîtres de la ville vont tout envahir. … Les têtes des rhinocéros encombreront non seulement la coulisse, mais les fenêtres, côté cour et côté jardin et la fosse d’orchestre. La salle sera malicieusement assimilée au troupeau d’animaux et de ce fait l’encerclement du plateau deviendra complet et provocant.13
[The encircling by the ideology in Rhinocéros corresponds to the encircling by the material. … Quite quickly the inhabitants, less and less numerous, will understand their critical situation because the rhinoceroses which have made themselves masters of the city are going to spread everywhere. … The heads of the rhinoceroses will congest not only the wings, but the windows, the court side and the garden side and the orchestra pit. The room will be slyly likened to a herd of animals and for that reason the encirclement of the stage will become complete and provocative.]
The major focus, however, has always been on Bérenger, the center of disorder, feeling, irrationality, and nostalgia. As all places identified with the power of the mind to impose order have become areas of animality, Ionesco shows that Bérenger’s home, which is supposed to help him keep his human shape and identity, no longer functions as an emotionally unifying source.14 Despite intrusions from the lower world—rhinoceros’s sounds, Dudard, and Daisy—Bérenger remains isolated, as at the end of act 1, in the midst of what cannot restore him to harmonious feelings and from which he cannot escape. He is like a fixture in the human past, trapped in an intimate space without even a surrealistic exit and isolated from physical reality by a matrix of fear.
Indeed the play seems to show that the basic models of man’s rationality have failed to give Bérenger meaning. All that is left is the irrational dream. Pictures of old men and a huge worm have become ugly in contrast to all the beautiful rhinoceroses’ heads lining the walls, door, and footlights. His room has become a gallery. Uncertain of himself and his human condition, he finds the rhinoceroses beautiful, dull green colors wonderful, and their song charming. The characteristics that define the human condition seem meaningless. Smooth brows are now ugly.
Fixed conceptually in time and space and artistically in the play, he alone represents immobility and loss of relationships (an ambivalent stubbornness of the human will?), becoming, as he says, “un monstre” (117) [a monster]. G. Richard Danner finds little in Bérenger’s life “worth defending.”15 Ironically the only way Bérenger can resist rhinoceritis is by denying a fundamental characteristic of life, the ability to change and adapt. His behavior illustrates the dilemma of modern man, who is often blinded to the pattern of life by his species’s centeredness. While on one level he clearly represents the solitary individual who resists the power of political movements, on another level the events of the play suggest that rational as well as emotional and intuitive models of reality are just that, models. Before the Pirandellian flux and irrationality of life, such models during crisis periods offer little help and direction to human beings. G. Richard Danner suggests that rhinoceritis is “an alternate life-style well worth trying.”16
The irrationality of life and its chaotic power seem also to be the theme of Le Roi se meurt.17 But in this play, instead of establishing a physical symbol like the oneiric house to stand in a harmonizing relationship with King Bérenger, Ionesco has created a cluster of metaphors and spiraling movements which seem to constrict and delimit King Bérenger until he is squeezed into nothingness. Mary A. Witt finds this play has the quality of imprisonment suggested by its language, revealing the “eventual closing of doors around the king.”18 For Paul Vernois, the central characteristic is reflected in a circle image:
Cette impression angoissante de cercle qui se referme commande la dramaturgie du Roi se Meurt ou l’on retrouve à tout instant l’image obsédante de la peau de chagrin. Sans doute le royaume rapetisse de jour en jour comme l’entourage des familiers du roi, mais il y a plus grave: le domane qu’embrassent les sens du mourant rétrécit lui aussi.19
[This distressing impression of a circle which closes again orders the dramaturgy of Le Roi se Meurt where one rediscovers at the same instant the haunting image of the wild animal’s skin that expands or contracts according to passion expended. Without a doubt the kingdom shrinks from day to day like the king’s intimate entourage, but there is something more serious: the domain which feels the senses of dying shrinks also.]
At the most obvious level, the metaphor is theatrical space and time, that is, King Bérenger’s world is the play in which he appears as a character. Because the entire play takes only an hour and a half to produce, Marguerite says to Bérenger, “Tu vas mourir dans une heure et demie, tu vas mourir à la fin du spectacle” (22). [You are going to die in a hour and a half, you are going to die at the end of the play.] Every event in Bérenger’s kingdom has a cyclical external life limited by this fact (as though Life is limited by Art), to be repeated at every performance. While the play is an abstract fictive work, having been written and printed, it has also become a part of the physical world to be experienced. Thus it has a line of action carefully programmed for the activities of its characters and other elements, like a map providing the exact coordinates for the lineal and temporal progress of a journey. Marguerite even says that Bérenger is like a man on a journey. Nor can this plot or journey be reversed. It runs with its own entropy downward in one direction to the fall of the curtain, its theatrical end. As if to emphasize this point, Ionesco has Marguerite say that “Elle est irréversible” (11) [It is irreversible].
Embedded within this old theatrical metaphor that all the world’s a stage is the metaphor that the King is the universe; the universe is the King. Because the movement is from a general to a more specific metaphor, the action of the play starts to spiral down and inward. He apparently has had the power of gods in whom all things reside and take their being. He has been able to command the sun, to cause trees to germinate, to make rain fall and thunderbolts to occur. He even has the power to decide when he wants to die, providing that he has the time and can make up his mind. King Bérenger and the universe form a closed system limited, however, by the duration of the primary metaphor, the play’s production. But he is aging rapidly and losing power; his universe has clouded over, has cracks in the walls, and its mountains are sinking.
Indeed everything is quickly shrinking to a third metaphorical level wherein the King is the state and the state the King, all implying that the state of the King is that of his country. In this metaphorical relationship his palace is falling down, his country’s boundaries are diminishing, and his people are aging. Even his army, like his guard, cannot move. His crown drops off, his scepter falls down, and the law for the first time seems to limit him. Everywhere one looks, the sources of life and experience are losing their vitality.
The action now moves to a fourth metaphor: Bérenger presented as an ordinary person with memories, loves, and other personal relationships, qualities needed to help him stand and be himself. As his desire for Marie rapidly weakens, his recollections fade. In the midst of these delimiting events a minor vertical pattern temporarily emerges: when Bérenger stands there is a sense of life, and when he falls there is a suggestion of death. But like the other concepts and feelings, love finally goes as Marie vanishes. All the other people continue to disappear until only Bérenger and Marguerite are left. Perhaps she is the last to remain because she is the projection of his power of habit or will-to-be, which has provided heretofore a core of meaning for Bérenger, like the stubborn resistance of Bérenger in Rhinocéros. But she goes too. Everything now collapses into the final center of nothingness as even Bérenger and his throne disappear, leaving only a “lumière grise” (74) [gray light] in the neutral space of the stage.
The metaphorical movement in the play is downward with a simultaneous inward horizontal thrust. Both of these suggest that the playing area is a crossing where some quality of mankind’s perceptions of reality stops. Thus King Bérenger enters and immediately leaves, his action capturing the essence of the play. Before long all the characters cross the audience’s visual and aural fields and exit. Then the play settles down and Ionesco allows us to see the spiraling collapse of this theatrical metaphor. Nancy Lane says that the play “presents collaboration between character and environment in its most extreme form,” finding “no boundaries separating ‘monde interieur’ from ‘monde exterieur’ in King Bérenger’s solipsistic world.”20 All the time, however, Ionesco keeps us aware that the entire play as a dramatic construction is set within the real world of the audience and that the mysterious “they” which Bérenger insists had promised him that he could choose the time when he would die is, in the audience’s world, Ionesco the playwright and the audience. If they like the play, it will repeat itself in every performance; if they do not, it will die on the boards.
While the metaphorical movement in Le Roi se meurt is a descending spiral, the dynamics of Le Piéton de l’air shifts from horizontal to dominant vertical scenic images with an overpowering sense of enclosure. It is as though Ionesco creates a landscape suggestive of a container from which there is no exit for its dramatis personae, just as an element of a painting cannot escape from its frame, or a character in a novel from its pages (both forms of art being, like language, ways to fix and delimit events). In this play Mary A. Witt finds a concentration on the open space image related to the “dream of transcending human limits,” the latter being expressed metaphorically as a flight that “follows a kind of curve.” But because “the experiment with liberation has failed … Bérenger remains as if dangling between finitude and infinity.”21 On the other hand Paul Vernois sees the play’s quality as a spiral:
Le Piéton de l’Air matérialise sur scène l’hélice géométrique d’une façon spectaculaire si l’on s’en rapporte à la disposition des praticables décrite par l’auteur dans son texte de l’édition Gallimard. … Si le mouvement hélicoidal est un jeu scénique de cirque, il peut prendre la forme beaucoup plus angoissante d’un maelström, d’un tourbillon, c’est-à-dire d’une spirale dans l’espace qui engendre vertige et désarroi.22
[Le Piéton de l’Air objectifies on stage the geometrical spiral in a spectacular manner if one relies on the arrangement of the moveable stage props described by the author in his text from the Gallimard edition. … If the helical movement is a scenic circus game, it can take the more distressing form of a maelstrom, of a whirlwind, that is to say of a spiral space which creates vertigo and confusion.]
The scenic image presents an artistic stereotype of spring, one probably based on Ionesco’s memories of his transcendental childhood experiences.23 But it is also an abstract utopia-like world whose surrealism is constantly emphasized through the sudden appearance of flowers, a ladder, John Bull, dead people, a German war bomber, and a visitor from an anti-world. What we see, instead of the traditional form of a play, is Ionesco’s dramatic model of a fictive reality with its own qualities and laws; it is not a reflection or a map of the spectator’s reality in any one to one sense.
The quality that is finally achieved, or the statement the play seems to make, is that the spatial condition seen on the stage is a trap. Life itself is a dead end. But the limits which define the cul-de-sac are not part of the scene. As with a framed picture, the inhabitants cannot escape the confines of the art form. The act of inclusion restricts the definition of life and its qualities. Even though Bérenger can fly, he cannot soar out of the scenic image.
The spatial sense of the plot as a container that traps rather than unifies is closely associated with verticality. Seeing nothing but walls around her, the First Lady feels like a prisoner. When the visitor from the anti-world appears, Bérenger explains that it is as if the man had fallen from the blue, “est passé du l’autre côté du mur” (145) [has passed to the other side of the wall]. The image becomes obvious when Bérenger says that the cosmos is “une sorte de boîte” (152) [a kind of box] and that when he flies he reaches the ridge of a “toit invisible” (196) [invisible roof]. The scenic image depresses and delimits the self instead of restoring it to harmonious relationships; nor does it present an account of reality. Indeed, as we have seen in the other plays, reality for Ionesco cannot be grasped either by fictional, that is artistic, models or by other paradigms of the conscious mind.
Not even language can reveal reality. Rather, as Loren Eiseley has noted, “language implies boundaries.” Through language man “has created an unnatural world of his own, which he calls the cultural world, and in which he feels at home. It defines his needs and allows him to lay a small immobilizing spell upon the nearer portions of his universe.” But “it transforms that universe into a cosmic prison house which is no sooner mapped than man feels its inadequacy and his own.”24 In effect what Bérenger seems to be implying in the interview with the journalist, when he says that literature cannot account fully for reality, is that his mental models have no correspondence with reality, are no longer positive unifying forms like the oneiric house poised between reality and the world of the mind able to fix memories and dreams into a satisfying whole.
After the interview scene Ionesco subtly changes the scenic image to suggest a model of the brain’s memory and thought. Dead and fictional characters appear and behave like real people. Madame Joséphine is surprised to learn that her father is as young looking as he was at twenty-five. The entire sequence represents an intrusive and ironic projection of Joséphine’s memory and thoughts which, instead of creating harmonizing relationships, can only continue to fragment meaning. The quality repeatedly revealed through these scenic images is that everything is a terrible trap: setting, characters, language, thought, memory. Even the sounds of music seem to come from “les sirènes” (141) [the sirens].
Having established the visual and aural impression of an overpowering enclosure, Ionesco presents a different sensory cluster. A visitor from the anti-world appears and a flowered column rises. The new scenic image suggests that this sequence occurs at the boundary between two worlds of abstraction: the play which is a form of art consciously visualized and the anti-world, a form of the Ideal not consciously seen but which the mind wishes could transcend rational limitations. Rosette C. Lamont has much the same interpretation in her view that “Bérenger’s apocalyptic vision reveals that the green meadow of Gloucestershire provides a kind of truce between the uncreated void and Non-Being.”25 While elements from the anti-world can appear in both universes, the inhabitants of the world of the landscape play cannot leave theirs. Because their world is a metaphorical conception, it can only fragment them.
With this much established, Ionesco begins the dominant vertical images. Bérenger says that he feels “si léger” (155) [so light]. Other things occur to suggest that the anti-world has some effect on Bérenger’s universe. A bridge appears, and time seems to Bérenger as if the years were empty sacks. Amidst this fusion of time and entrapment, Bérenger loses corporality and floats or flies away. He is able to move into the far reaches of the sky paralleling metaphorically those of the imagination. As he explains, to fly is to recover an innate but long lost ability. But he cannot ascend to a harmonizing center able to integrate experience for him, despite his transcendental efforts to unify space and time.
The confining characteristic of the play, which suggests that the processes of the brain, its concepts, memories, and dreams are cul-de-sacs, is now more clearly determined by the scenic images. Joséphine says that her friends are “des objects vides dans le désert … enfermés dans leur carapace” (180) [empty objects in the desert … enclosed in their shell]. She herself feels “minuscule dans ce monde énorme” (180) [tiny in this enormous world]. John Bull appears as a fat man chasing a little boy who does not want to be put back in his cell, and a hangman dressed in white appears with a gibbet. Everything seems to reflect metaphorically the nothingness of the mind that, box-like, encloses one. To reinforce this effect, Ionesco has the stage darken as though it too were a container. Then it is filled with “lueurs rouges et sanglantes; grands bruits de tonnerre ou de bombardements” (190) [red and bloody flashes; loud noises of thunder or of shellings]. As the voice of the descending Bérenger is heard, stage, lighting, and sounds theatrically reflect the delimiting aspects of man’s imagination.
Such scenic images reveal the loss of home and other basic concepts which relate man harmoniously to reality.26 Berenger’s description of what he saw on his flight is like a series of details from a Hieronymous Bosch painting, filled with overlapping and inconsistent naturalized images causing fear: “des hommes qui avaient des têtes d’oies,” “des hommes qui léchaient les culs des guenons, buvaient la pisse des truies,” “des colonnes de guillotinés marchant sans têtes,” and “des sauterelles géantes, des anges déchus, des archanges vaincus” (195) [some men who had heads of geese, some who licked the asses of monkeys, drank the piss of sows, several columns of guillotined people marching without heads, some giant grasshoppers, some fallen angels, some defeated archangels]. None of these images acts as a model of reality with any unifying and restorative power. Instead they create further impressions of the delimitation of life and the threat of being confronted by a continual enclosing process. For example, Bérenger says that he reached “l’arête du toit invisible … où se rejoignent l’espace et le temps” [ridge of the invisible roof … where space and time are joined together] and gives a prophetic vision of the destruction of everything, of infinite pits and millions of universes “qui s’évanouissent” (196-7) [which vanish]. His description suggests that the concept of space as a product of the mind has limits or boundaries that can be touched but not penetrated.
The movement of the play has been affected by the horizontal and vertical qualities in the scenic images, which have emphasized the nature of the limitations implicit in the mind’s concepts. Although Ionesco places his dramatic projections and images at the boundary between the outer and inner worlds as Pinter did in No Man’s Land, he suggests that ideas have lost their harmonizing and imaginative power to fix memory, dream, and experience into a satisfying whole. In one sense Ionesco has developed his Bérenger plays through a dialectic of images to communicate more vividly than words his feeling for man’s inability to escape the concepts which the brain by necessity has to create and which often turn out to be alienating or fragmenting models of reality. Thus the oneiric home and its related representations of thought have lost their humanistic function in Ionesco’s plays and remain as part of his personal nostalgic investment in his boyhood past.
For Ionesco the mind apparently creates its own worlds, transcends them, and then annihilates everything, reducing thought to an empty neutral grey. Yet ironically the Bérenger plays, as plays per se, artistic products of Ionesco’s mind, tend to deny the conclusion that all thought is reductive or that Ionesco preaches a personal form of nihilism, as Kenneth Tynan fears.27 As dramas they survive for others to discuss and provide subtle ideological models which tend to act as limited oneiric forms for Ionesco. They enable him to externalize his thoughts and feelings. Clearly they are not mental traps for him, as literature seems to be for Bérenger. Instead they offer the possibility that Ionesco’s stage has its own concrete language and that the dramatic world of his plays is its own organization, a thing as separate from those who occupy it as it is from being a map of physical reality. Indeed, for Ionesco the play appears to replace the oneiric house.
Notes
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Anne Ubersfeld, Lire Le Théâtre (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1977) 170. See also the following: Robert L. Tener, “ ‘These Places, This Private Landscape’: First Suggestions for a Topological Approach to Ionesco’s Bérenger Plays,” Papers on Language and Literature 13 (1977): 391-400; Paul Vernois, La Dynamique Théâtrale D’Eugène Ionesco (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1972) 5, 26-8; Mary A. Witt, “Eugène Ionesco and the Dialectic of Space,” Modern Language Quarterly 33 (1972): 312-26; Eugène Ionesco, Présent passé Passé présent (Paris: Mercure de France, 1968) 43-4, 80-1, 210-11. For an excellent discussion of space and drama see the following: Etienne Souriau, “Le Cube et La Sphere,” Architecture et Dramaturgie, ed. Ernest Flammarion (Paris: Bibliotheque D’Esthetique, 1950) 63-83; Yi-Fu Yuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1977); Diana Agrest, “Design versus Non-Design,” Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976): 45-68. Note: I am responsible for all translations.
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Nancy Lane, “Human/Non-human Relationship in Ionesco’s Theatre: Conflict and Collaboration,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 30.3 (1983): 240-41. For further comments on this idea see the following: Rosette C. Lamont, “Air and Matter: Ionesco’s ‘Le Piéton de l’air’ and ‘Victimes du devoir,’ ” French Review 38.3 (1965): 349-61; Eugène Ionesco, “Experience du théâtre,” Le Nouvelle Revue Française 62 (1958): 247-70. In “Experience du théâtre,” Ionesco says ‘Le théâtre est autant visuel qu’auditif. Il n’est pas une suite d’images, comme le cinéma, mais une construction, une architecture mouvante d’images scénique. … Il est donc non seulment permis, mais recommandé de faire jouer les accessoires, vivre les objects, d’animer les décors, de concrétiser les symboles” (262). [The theater is as much visual as auditory. It is not a sequence of images, like the cinema, but an edifice, a moving architecture of scenic images. … It is then not only permissible, but adviseable to set the properties into action, to cause things to come alive, to animate the scenery, to make the symbols concrete.]
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George Matoré, L’Espace Humain, Sciences et Techniques humanies 2 (Paris: La Colombe, 1962) 210.
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Vernois 60. His comment applies to the plays between 1952 and 1959.
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Lane 241-42.
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All references to Tueur sans gages are from Eugène Ionesco, Théâtre (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1958) 2: 59-172, and are cited parenthetically by page number in the text.
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Lane 243-44.
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All references to Rhinocéros are from Eugène Ionesco, Théâtre (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1963) 3: 7-117, and are cited parenthetically by page number in the text. See also Vernois 60.
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Vernois 65.
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All references to Le Piéton de l’air are from Eugène Ionesco, Théâtre (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1963) 3:119-98, and are cited parenthetically by page number in the text.
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Witt 312.
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Vernois 79.
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Vernois 79-80.
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In her discussion of Ionesco’s use of space, Mary A. Witt says that “imprisonment is both a personal experience and a universal situation” and suggests it is the quality of the petty bourgeois living room for Ionesco (313).
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G. Richard Danner, “Bérenger’s Dubious Defense of Humanity in Rhinocéros,” French Review 53.2 (1979): 210.
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Danner 213.
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All references to Le Roi se meurt are from Eugène Ionesco, Théâtre (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1963) 4: 7-74, and are cited parenthetically by page number in the text.
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Witt 317.
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Vernois 80.
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Lane 246-47.
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Witt 320.
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Vernois 96-7.
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See Ionesco, Présent passé Passé présent 35-6, 218-19, 269-70.
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Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pyramid (New York: Scribners, 1970) 31-32.
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Lamont 358.
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See Pat Burnett, “Behavior Geography and the Philosophy of Mind,” Spatial Choice and Spatial Behavior, ed. Reginald G. Golledge and Gerard Rushton (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1976) 25. Burnett indicates that it is generally “held that human beings employ mental models of the world to organize their spatial behavior, that is, ‘the mind mediates between the environment and behavior in it.”’ Ionesco has interesting ideas about this in Notes et contre-notes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1962) 32, 33, 85.
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Kenneth Tynan, “Ionesco: homme du destin?,” in Eugène Ionesco, Notes et contre-notes 70-71.
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