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Eugène Ionesco (1909-1994) |
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Romanian-born French dramatist, whose one-act antiplay, La Cantatrice chauve (1950; The Bald Soprano), inspired the Theater of the Absurd (see also Samuel Beckett, Alfred Jarry). Eugene Ionesco's later, full-length plays centre around a constant, semiautobiographical figure, Bérenger. Since the 1970s, his writing were mainly non-theatrical. Ionesco's earlier works were characterized by the logic of nightmare, but then he began to prefer a more straightforward plot line. "The non-metaphysical world of today has destroyed all mystery; and the so-called "scientific" theatre of the period, the theatre of politics and propaganda, anti-poetic and academic, has flattened mankind out, alienating the unfathomable third dimension which makes a whole man. The theatre of ideologies and theses, proposing political solutions and presuming to save humanity, actually saves no one. I have no wish to save humanity—to wish to save it is to kill it—and there are no solutions. To realize that is the only healthy solution. " ('Eugene Ionesco,' in Playwrights on Playwriting: The Meaning and Making of Modern Drama from Ibsen to Ionesco, edited by Toby Cole, introduction by John Glassner, New York: Hill and Wang, nineteeth printing, 1982, p. 283) Eugène
Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania, of a French
mother and Romanian father. His father, Eugène Ionesco Sr. was a
lawyer. Shortly after his birth, his mother,
Thérèse Ipcar, brought him to Paris, where he spent the years 1914-25.
Ionesco's younger brother, Mircea, died of meningitis at the age of 18
months. The marriage was not a happy one, and Ionesco's father, who
became a professor of Law in Paris, went back to his home country on
the outbreak of World War I. There he turned into a supporter of the
communistst and Nazi ideology At the age of nine, Ionesco spent with his younger sister Mariline some time in the village of La Chapelle-Anthenaise in Mayenne, which later became an archetypal image of Eden in his plays. Thérèse returned to Romania with her children in 1925. There she found out that her husband had managed to divorce her and retain custody of the children. Ionesco hated Bucharest and its mores, its anti-Semitism, but
perfected his knowledge of his father's language and began to write
essays and poems. He pronounced his r's as the French do and
was often taken as a Jew. Ionesco's father remarried and his new wife's
family was very right-wing. Ionesco's mother died of a stroke in 1936. Ionesco studied literature in Paris and in Romania and
eventually took a degree in French at the University of Bucharest. Ionesto stayed in Bucharest teaching French and writing
poetry and literary criticism. In 1936 he married Rodica Burileano, a student of law and
philosophy. Two years later he received a scholarship that enabled him
to return to France. "I
had behind me a proper literary career: tens and tens of articles
published in Romanian periodicals, a small collection of poems which
were not good, and most notably a book, Nu, in which I was trying to blow up literary criticism." (Absurd Romania: Revisiting Tristan Tzara and Eugène Ionesco
by Adela Nicoleta Beiu Papanastasiou, University of East Anglia; Ghent
University, 2017, p. 2; https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/63136/.
Accessed 1 July 2025) Plans to write a thesis on "The Themes
of Death and Sin in French Poetry" were not realized. Ionesco did research at the
National Library but came to the conclusion that the French – Pascal,
Péguy, and others – had no feeling for death and never felt guilty. But he got involved with the Collège de 'Pataphysique' and
became friends with Raymond Queneau and Boria
Vian, who were its most active members. The Collège was dedicated to
nihilist irony, practical jokes, and the demolition of culture. It had
a commission which was preparing a thesis on the history of latrines.
Ionesco was raised to the rank of "Transcendent Satrap." His physical appearance gave the impression of a sad clown – he
had protuberant eyes, overgrown ears, potato like nose, and stomach
hanging over the belt. Life is a farce, he used to say. During World
War II Ionesco lived with his wife in Marseilles. Their daughter,
Marie-France, was born in 1944. They returned to Paris after its
liberation from the Germans. Ionesco worked as a proofreader and in
1945 he was awarded a doctorate. Between the years of 1945-1949 he
spent much of his time translation the surrealist poet Urmoz
(1883-1923). While learning English in 1948, Ionesco conceived the idea for his first play, La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano), produced in 1950 under the direction of Nicolas Bataille. At the premiere, twenty to thirty members of Collège turned up wearing their gidouilles on their lapels. The Bald Soprano was inspired by the repetitive and nonsensical phrases of his Lingaphone record. It consists mainly of clichés of a foreign-language phrase book, and a series of meaningless conversations between two couples that eventually deteriorate into babbling. This the play went first unnoticed but arose attention when such writers as Jean Anouilh and Raymond Queneau started to campaign for it. In rapid succession Ionesco wrote a number of dramas,
including La Leçon (1951), a
picture of the erotic thrust of tyrannical power, Les Chaises (1952), in which the
real and the world of make-believe collide on a stage filled with
dozens chairs with invisible guests, and Victimes du devoir (1954), a
detective-story parody, in which his characters search for "Mallot with
a t." Amédée ou Comment s'en
débarrasser (1954) portrayed a couple, Amédée and his wife
Madeleine, who share their apartment with a slowly growing corpse,
possibly killed by them years ago. Bérenger, a little Everyman, was
featured first in Tueur sans gages
(1958). Intriguingly, these early works were labelled as "anti-plays,"
"comic
dramas," "pseudo-dramas," "naturalistic comedies," and "tragic farces"
which only added to their success. By 1955 Ionesco's reputation was
established in France. Gradually he was acclaimed as one of the leading
exponents of the theatre of absurd. The central character of his plays
was many times named Berenger, a free man in a dehumanized world where
everybody try to be like all the others. Among Ionesco's other well-known plays are Le roi se meurt (1963) and Les Rhinocéros (1959), first produced in Paris by Jean-Louis Barrault at the Odéon.
"When Rhinoceros was produced in Germany, it had
fifty curtain calls. The next day the papers wrote, "Ionesco shows us
how we became Nazis." But in Moscow, they wanted me to rewrite it and
make sure that it dealt with Nazism and not with their kind of
totalitarianism. In Buenos Aires, the military government thought it
was an attack on Peronism. And in England they accused me of being a
petit bourgeois." ('Eugène Ionesco,' in Playwrights
at Work: The Paris Review, edited by George Plimpton, New York: The Modern Library, 2000, p. 138) Rhinoceros, set in a small provincial town, was described by Ionesco as "an anti-Nazi play". In the background of the story was Ionesco's disgust when he saw how his friend slowly accepted Nazism. Bérenger, an average middle-class citizen, shows little interest in the fact that a rhinoceros has appeared in the town, he is bored and drinking too much, but other people are willingly transform themselves into rhinoceroses. He quarrels with his friend Jean and Daisy, his pretty secretary. In the office Bérenger witnesses that also the staff is gradually joining the rhinoceroses. Finally Daisy and he are the only human beings. When Daisy leaves him to turn into a rhinoceros, Bérenger decides to defend himself with a gun. Just before the curtain falls, he says: "People who try to hang on to their individuality always come to a bad end! [He suddenly snaps out of it.] Oh well, too bad! I'll take on the whole of them! I'll put up a fight against the lot of them, the whole lot of them! I'm the last man left, and I'm staying that way until the end. I'm not capitulating!" (Rhinoceros and Other Plays, translated by Derek Prouse, New York: Grove Press, 1960, p. 107) Rhinoceros was received with enthusiasm. A few months after the Paris premiere, the play was produced at the Royal Court Thearte, in London. The director was Orson Welles. Most of Ionesco's dramas are long one-act-pieces, or
untraditional three-act plays. He has also written essays, published in
Notes et contre-notes
(1962), textbooks for children, and a novel, Le Solitaire (1973). Its anonymous
narrator is a clerk. He has lived for twenty years in a dingy hotel and
worked in a small-time business. After inheriting a small fortune he
can start a new life. "Now I was able to stroll at will along the main
thoroughfares, the broad avenues of the big jail. It was a world
comparable to a zoo in which the animals enjoyed a kind of
semi-freedom, with man-made mountains, artificial woods, and imitation
lakes, but at the far reaches there were still the same old fences."
(The Hermit: A Novel, translated from the French by Richard Seaver, London: John Calder, 1983, p. 20)
The protagonist wants to see "what is behind the walls" but the years
pass and his memory begings to fail him. Eventually the walls turn into
transparent curtains. "Where the wall had been, images began to form
and slowly reform. It grew very bright. A tree crowned with flowers and
leaves appeared. Then another. Several. A long pathway. At the end, a
light brighter than daylight. The light came nearer, encompassing
everything." (Ibid. p. 169) From the beginning,
Surrealism and Dadaism influenced Ionesco's work, especially Antonin Artaud's
Theater of Cruelty concept and the black humor of André Breton, Robert
Desnos, and Tristan Tzara. Also Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Beckett were
important writers for him. Often Ionesco's characters seem like robots, enslaved by the
dictatorial will of an unseen manipulator. Central
themes deal with the search for the self, death, evil, political
and social ills, old age, nothingness or absence. But Ionesco didn't
think much of Sartre. "I believe also that my fundamental reaction is
the very oppoaitew of his," he pointed out in an interview in 1963.
"Consciousness, the awareness of existence provokes in me an
astonishment which is a source of joy." ('An Interview with Ionesco' by Richard Schechner, Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, Spring, 1963, p. 163; https://www.jstor.org/stable/1125091. Accessed 1 July 2025) "There are no alternatives; if man is not tragic, he is ridiculous and painful, "comic" in fact, and by revealing his absurdity one can achieve a sort of tragedy," Ionesco once said. "In fact I think that man must either be unhappy (metaphysically unhappy) or stupid." ('World of Eugene Ionesco; Playwright Reveals His Comic-Tragic Theory Of Life and Drama' by Eugene Ionesco, The New York Times, June 1, 1958) In The Killer (1960), which has been compared with
Kafka's The Trial, Bérenger tracks down an elusive murderer who
destroys for the sake of destroying in a perfect neighborhood. At the
end, Bérenger is unable to escape the menace that has taken over the
town. Ionesco has admitted that often got ideas from dreams. Language,
with its clichés, is inadequate medium when portraying reality and many
things in his plays are left unexplained. His pessimism about the work
of writers he expressed in 1970: "But for some time now, science and
the psychology of the subconscious have been making enormous progress,
whereas the empirical revelations of writers have been making very
little. In these conditions, can literature still be considered as a
means to knowledge?" Ionesco was elected in 1970 to the Académie
Française; he took over the seat of Jean Paulhan. His seventieth birthday was celebrated in 1982 worldwide. Hugoliades, his satirical portrait
of Victor Hugo, which he wrote at
the age of twenty, was published decades later by Gallimard. During his
last years
Ionesco abandoned writing and devoted himself to painting and
exhibiting his works. Eugene Ionesco died on March 28, 1994, in his residence in Paris. He is buried in the Cemetery of Montparnasse. For further reading: The Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature, edited by Michael Y. Bennett (2024); Eugène Ionesco tra storia e memoria: le radici storiche e ideologiche del suo teatro by Irma Carannante (2020); Absurd Romania: Revisiting Tristan Tzara and Eugène Ionesco by Adela Nicoleta Beiu Papanastasiou (2017); The Existential and Its Exits: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives on the Works of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, & Pinter by L.A.C. Dobrez (2013); Politics and Theatre in Twentieth-Century Europe: Imagination and Resistance by Margot Morgan (2013); Dictionnaire Eugène Ionesco, edited by Jeanyves Guérin (2012); Re-envisioning the Theatre of the Absurd: the Lacanian Spectator and the Work of Fernando Arrabal, Arthur Adamov and Eugène Ionesco by Lara Alexandra Cox (2011); Indian Responses to Western 'Theatre of the Absurd' by Tapu Biswas (2010-2011); Eugene Ionesco, edited by Harold Bloom (2003); The Clown in the Agora: Conversations About Eugene Ionesco by William Kluback, Michael Finkenthal (1998); Eugene Ionesco Revisited by Deborah B. Gaensbauer (1996); Ionesco's Imperatives: The Politics of Culture by Rosette C. Lamont (1993); Eugène Ionesco: A Bibliography by Griffith Rees Hughes and Ruth Bury (1974); Ionesco by Robert Frickx (1974); Le théâtre de dérision: Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov by Emmanuel Jacquart (1974); Eugène Ionesco; ou, À la recherche du paradis perdu by Tobi Saint (1973); La dynamique théatrale d'Eugene Ionesco by Paul Vernois (1972); Ionesco: A Study of His Plays by Richard Coe (1971); Brecht and Ionesco: Commitment in Context by Julian H. Wulbern (1971); The Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin (1961) Selected works:
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