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Eugène Ionesco Through the 20Th Century

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Eugène Ionesco Through the 20Th Century Cultural and Linguistic Communication HETEROTOPIAS DISTURB: EUGÈNE IONESCO THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY María Ángeles GRANDE ROSALES1 1. Prof., PhD, Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, Dept. of General Linguistics and Literary Theory, University of Granada, Spain Corresponding author: [email protected] Not only in the theatre, but there also, the 20th Rhinoceros (1959), A Stroll in the Air (1962), Exit century was the century of the disappearance of the King (1962), Hunger and Thirst (1966), Jack, or space and of time transfigured by massacre. The Submission (1970), Macbett (1972), Ce Scientific progress did not produce moral Formidable Bordel (1973), The Man with the Luggage progress. Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Nazism, the (1975), or Journey Among the Dead (1980), also the totalitarianisms, Vietnam present themselves as novel The Hermit (1973), the autobiographical the incontrovertible historical evidence. In the diaries Fragments of a Journal (1967) and Present words of Angelica Liddell: Past, Past Present (1968), and various collections El tiempo ya no ubica las acciones humanas of essays, aesthetic reflections, newspaper sino la descomposición. Un minuto no es articles, marginal notes etc. Born to a Rumanian tiempo, es espacio, espacio desmoronado. father and French mother, he moved to Paris Sería como decir este avión tarda en llegar aged one and lived in France until 1922, when he tres hospitales bombardeados. Sería como was reclaimed by his father and returned to decir un minuto son tres campos de Rumania, where he would continue his exterminio. La definición de sufrimiento secondary and higher education. Later he usurpa la definición del espacio y del tiempo achieved the post of cultural attaché of the (…) La realidad destruida hace que se recurra Rumanian delegation of Vichy, definitively a la metáfora como generadora de realidades establishing himself in France, where he nuevas. El tiempo y el espacio son sustitutos acquired French nationality in 1950. por tanto por la gran metáfora: LA NADA1 The success of his dramaturgy led to him In fact, the undifferentiated death, massive becoming a vital member of the French Academy annihilation, extermination camps and the from 1970. He died in Paris in 1994, having staging of horror presupposed a belligerent and obtained grand recognition, winning the strongly individualistic dramaturgy, an act of National Theatre Prize and the Grand Prize of resistance in the era of the failure of humanism. Monaco in 1969, and the Austrian Grand Prize As if it was the only possible way to survive the of European Literature in 1970. Honourable 20th century. Formulating an unconventional member of the French Union of Writers, his th language of anguish. Reasserting the biography practically encompasses the 20 contradiction of our time, that makes sarcasm century, inaugurating a drama that testifies to the condition of truth. its atrocities by means of the absurd and the If there is a common thread to the oeuvre of grotesque, for him mere extensions of the the Franco-Rumanian writer Eugène Ionesco it unusual. is that disturbing relation between biography To defend himself from catastrophe, the and history mediated by nihilism and death. author became ferociously individualist, he Dramatist, novelist, essayist and lecturer, born searched for intimate and quotidian truths in the in Slatina, Rumania, but of French nationality, expression of the incomprehensible. Writing for he constitutes one of the theatrical authors most him was a way to exorcise his anxiety about emblematic of the 20th century, with works of death and nothingness, the evidence for which such extraordinary relevance as The Bald Soprano is found in, for example, the noisy verbal excess (1950), The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), and empty spaces of his dialogues, in the empty 248 volume 1 • issue 3 July / September 2011 • p. 248-259 HETEROTOPIAS DISTURB: EUGÈNE IONESCO THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY chairs of an auditorium supposedly expectant questions that suddenly seemed to him as for a message that never arrives, in the words astonishing as they were jolting. It was then that suffocated under unending furnishings that the desire to learn English gave way to completely fill the apartment, bury the exhibitionism, showing to his contemporaries, inhabitant in its interior, and gradually invade without modesty, the true reach of the essential the staircase, entrance and the streets, in the truths discovered in his Franco-English phrase insidious soup of Sundays that inundate the city book. And something genuinely unsuspected or in the ceremonial recreation of ancestral took place, as the literal transcription of this rituals regarding the way in which a king dies. unexplored linguistic galaxy took on a life of its Death as living evidence. own; the simple and shining replicas were In this sense it would appear incidental that, denatured, skilfully distorted into new and on his personal return to Ítaca at 26 with a grant unthinkable predicaments. from the French government, his funded The later appearance of the Martins, friends research into the theme of death in French poetry of the Smiths, pushes this unedited vision of never became a reality as a thesis, as he was reality further. Their perplexity grows over never able to locate that sentiment in its pure time, as until now unnoticed certainties are state that so fascinated the French poets. He resurrected, not failing to surprise, therefore, chose for his obsession, by contrast, the theatrical when Mrs Martin, the woman stating these self route, a form that he hated in its natural-realist evident truths, lets her husband know aspect, but which had, through the staged image, information that he undoubtedly must know the potential to disturb and to move, insofar as already, such as that he works in a bank, and his post dramatic writing left aside the concept that they have two children and a maid. The of the stage as a mausoleum of literature to fiftieth lesson goes even further, widening the instead transform itself into a laboratory of social ambit of axiomatic truths with others more fantasy. In this way he created a theatre of complex, which allow us to observe the existence violence, violently comic, violently dramatic. in the same space of antagonistic truths (“the country is quieter than a populous city” exclaims I. THE EROSION OF LANGUAGE one character; “yes, but in the city the population is more dense, there are more businesses” comes the reply). Common expressions, stereotyped, The mid 20th century was stunned by the force trivial, become outlandish, the truisms invoke a of a mendacious work, the fortuitous result of a sort of nihilism, conscious of the inefficacy of desire on the part of the writer to familiarise language as a useful instrument for himself with a foreign language. It was when he communication. The verbal arabesque, sifted by obtained an example of the Assimil method of a word-for-word logic, literal meaning or an language learning, which was amazingly to play irrational logic, sustains an ominous an unthinkable role in respect to its original incommunicability that is genuinely unsettling. purpose: “en 1948, antes de escribir mi primera It is when he felt this profound unease that he pieza: La cantante calva, no quería convertirme became aware that he had staged for the first en un autor teatral. Ambicionaba simplemente time the tragedy of the language of his time, a aprender inglés. El aprendizaje del inglés no sort of decomposition of reality. He was fully conduce necesariamente a la dramaturgia. Al aware that to destroy language is to destroy the contrario, me convertí en un autor teatral porque world. And it is at this point that The Bald no logré aprender inglés” 2 . Soprano is born, the title of which comes from a In fact, the text did not so much enable him to casual linguistic lapse in one of the actors learn an alien language as to absorb a series of performing from a copy of the script, and is surprising enunciated truths that he must have totally alien to it, there is no soprano with or known already, such as the week has seven days, without hair, yet it was considered an excellent the ceiling is above and the floor is below, etc, International Journal of Communication Research 249 María Ángeles GRANDE ROSALES title by the author. The play describes a meeting shown uninterruptedly since 1957 on a double between two married couples from England – bill with The Lesson at the Théâtre de la Huchette, a the protagonists of his Assimil method, of course record only surpassed by The Mousetrap in – to eat dinner in one of their houses, as trivial an London. episode as on could find, but which soon takes According to the celebrated critical label on Kafkaesque proportions, as the hosts, the popularized by Martin Esslin in his eponymous Smiths, at the moment the play begins, have monograph of 1961, The Theatre of the Absurd, already eaten without waiting for their guests. that translates in a certain way, from an What is more, when these arrive they go away to existentialist approach, the European intellectual change their clothes, but later return without any climate after Auschwitz in the immediate post- visible changes, assuring their guests that they war period, Ionesco was considered, together had not eaten anything anticipating their visit with Beckett, Adamov, Genet, Tardieu, Pinter, that, in all other respects, has been totally Arrabal etc, one of the main representatives of unexpected. At the end of the play, everything the current in his Parisian dimension. starts again, but this time the Martins replace the Nevertheless, Ionesco did not consider himself Smiths, using identical linguistic registers. an existentialist - his antipathy towards Satre This minimalist plot constitutes a support for was notorious - but rather in the tradition of the a language that is broken up in ludic excitement, radical avant-garde that transformed dramatic where words lose their meaning and characters art at the beginning of the century into a new their personality a, divesting themselves of their textuality.
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