On March 30, 1994, thirty years ago, Eugène Ionesco disappeared. The author of
The Bald Singer,
of
The Lesson,
of
Rhinocéros
knew how to “
undress the man
” in the words of Vladimir Jankélévitch. If his characters are rendered derisory, incapable of making connections, it is because language turns against them. Ionesco is betting on an unstructured language, defying all the rules of human logic, to “denounce the oppression of words and things”. Marie-Claude Hubert, professor emeritus of French literature at Aix-Marseille University, discusses
the exceptional style of this revolutionary playwright for
Le Figaro .
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LE FIGARO. - The playwright Claude Brulé wrote that he was
“like Beckett, one of those foreign brothers who had made French the other language of their genius”
. How did Ionesco go from Romanian to French?
Marie-Claude HUBERT. -
Eugène Ionesco straddles two cultures. To a Romanian father and a French mother, he was born in Romania in 1909, and was only one year old when his family came to settle in France. He spent his entire childhood there, imbued with the French language and culture. When the First World War broke out, his father was recalled to Romania and left alone. Throughout the war, he gave no sign of life. We think he is dead. He is actually still alive, divorced and remarried in Romania. When Ionesco was thirteen, his father called him back with his sister. Little Ionesco finds himself in a country that is completely foreign to him. His father is a harsh, cruel, authoritarian, and very pushy man. When Romania is on the side of the Nazis, the father is a fascist. When she switches to the communist side, he is a communist. In Ionesco's eyes, he is an odious man.
He is unhappy to have lost France, unhappy to live with this man. His relationship with the French language is very visceral. He learned Romanian as a foreign language, and turned to studying French once at university. He feels that he has lost his French a little. Of course, he continues to practice it with his mother, who has also returned to Romania and whom he sees quite regularly, but not enough. Only his first poems are in Romanian. After settling in France in 1942, he wrote absolutely everything in French. He never wanted to return to Romania.
How is this double belonging at the origin of his denunciation of the limits of language?
Ionesco has often said that this unlearning, then relearning, of French conditioned his relationship with the language. This constant back and forth between the two languages made him deeply question language and its communicative function. Hence the games on words, the misunderstandings, the parody of language that we find everywhere in his works, and in particular from the Bald Singer. In this 1950 play, his first play, it is his parody of the famous Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction that brings unity to a play apparently without unity. For Aristotle, the basis of logic is that we cannot affirm both A and not A. However, this is what Ionesco constantly does.
At every moment, at every rhetorical level of the text, we are in full contradiction. The words are incompatible, the sentences and scenes negate each other, the gestures deny the authenticity of the words... At the end of the play, the characters themselves are reversed, the Martin couple replacing the couple Smith. All this arises from his particular relationship to language. In Ionesco, the syntax itself is very disjointed, particularly in
“Voyage chez les mort”
, his last piece, and
“La Quête intermittente”
, his last autobiographical text. We very often have a destructuring of words, with neologisms and a destructuring of syntax.
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How does his thinking on language feed his vision of human relationships?
For Ionesco, men have a lot of difficulty communicating. A large number of his pieces show, for example, the incompleteness of the couple. In the
"Bald Singer"
, Mr. and Mrs. Martin arrive in the Smiths' living room, to which they are guests, and sit opposite each other without recognizing each other. Following a whole series of combinations of circumstances, where they constantly exclaim:
“How strange, how curious, and what a coincidence!”
...They suddenly come to recognize that they are husband and wife, after realizing that they live in the same city, the same street, the same apartment, that they sleep in the same bed, that They both have a daughter named Alice. It took them this long to recognize each other. The incompleteness of the couple is at the heart of his reflection on language.
If his writing seems to be a disordered machine, Ionesco said he also had
“the impression that the world itself can become disordered, like a machine”...
In Ionesco we feel the influence of Emile Cioran, also of Romanian origin, who wrote
“Le Mauvais demiurge”
in 1969 . The thesis of the book takes up the
“gnostic”
doctrines
of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, which explain that the world was made by an
“evil demiurge”
, not by God. This must explain the existence of permanent chaos in the world and the existence of evil. Indeed, as Ionesco says, how can we explain that God could have created a world in which evil exists? For the Gnostics, if the world is rotten by evil, it is because it was created by this evil demiurge. In Ionesco, there is this idea of a world corrupted by evil, a force as powerful in man as good. Hence a lot of pessimism, of course.
He defies the limits of human logic, so much so that he is said to be a master of the
“theatre of the absurd”
. Is he the author of this expression?
No not at all. The expression
“theater of the absurd”
is the title of an essay by Martin Esslin, published in 1961, which immediately became widely known. His book is devoted to Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Arthur Adamov, and to many playwrights who revolve around these four principals. This is how the term
“theater of the absurd”
is imposed in Anglo-Saxon countries. But in France, it is contested by writers. Ionesco replies:
“Life was not absurd, it was ridiculous”
. Beckett evades the question with a joke, stating that
"it is absurd to say that it is absurd"
, but strongly disagrees with the term.
Ionesco prefers the term
“avant-garde theater”,
or that of
“theater of derision”
, to that of
“theater of the absurd”
which deeply shocks him.
Everyone contests the label, notably because
“the absurd”
is too closely linked in France to the philosophy of Camus, and especially Sartre, which Ionesco constantly contests. For him, Sartre is a fanatical ideologue and a thought leader. During the Interviews in Helsinki in 1959, Ionesco spoke of
"avant-garde theater"
, saying ironically that the avant-garde very quickly became the rearguard. He prefers this term, or that of
“theater of derision”
, to that of
“theater of the absurd”
which deeply shocks him. Ionesco said he was overwhelmed by reading Sartre's Nausea, but the two men hated and criticized each other. They are on opposite political sides.
Ionesco, of Romanian origin, receives refugees from the East, Romanians but also Czechs, Russians... He knows everything that is happening in the Eastern countries, in the gulag etc., because he has concrete testimonies. Even though he is not a member of the Communist Party, which he sometimes criticizes, Sartre tries to stifle this, not wanting to weaken the left. Ionesco, for his part, has always rejected both Nazism and Communism. In his diaries, in the 1930s, while he was still in Romania, he wrote:
“I am alone, all my friends one after the other become rhinoceroses, they are all rhinoceroses”
. In his play
Rhinoceros
, in 1960, the metaphor became a metamorphosis. And he is therefore not only putting Nazism on trial. When it was a question of going to perform the play in the USSR, the Russians asked Ionesco to modify certain lines so that we understood that it was simply Nazism that was being denounced. Ionesco refuses, of course. The play will not be performed. Ionesco is therefore a committed author, even if the left criticizes him at the time for not being so, Roland Barthes for example.
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Beyond the different policies, it is above all his quest for transcendence which seems to radically distinguish him from the existentialism of Sartre...
Two things are at the heart of Ionesco’s thinking. First, his political commitment. Then, the quest for God, the quest for grace. He had a mystical experience in his youth that was never repeated. Until his death he hoped that one day or another this experience would be repeated. He talks about it many times, in his diaries, in
“Diary in crumbs”
and
“Present past, past present”
for example. He describes it as the sensation that the body becomes light, airy, that it can almost rise, an experience of light. This elevation of man is present in all his work. It makes Ionesco's universe less dark than Sartre's.