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 (1959), A Stroll in the Air (1962), Exit century was the century of the disappearance of the King (1962), (1966), Jack, or space and of time transfigured by massacre. The Submission (1970), (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 (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 is found in, for example, the noisy verbal excess (1950), (1951), (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 , 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. psychology. Talking machines, playful verbal In a time of weak codification, the new icons; above them an empty plot slips over, dramaturgies brought the antirealism of the shattering into multiple splinters when the visual avant-garde into the ambit of the theatre, incognito, the metaphysical absolute, emerges giving rise to a destruction of the sense of the from the nihilism of the every-day. Sometime real. In dramatic language, this caused the later, Heiner Müller would write The dynamiting of the discursive in favour of the Hamletmachine (1977), an anti-drama that figural, of direct expression, naked, the demonstrates the impossibility in our time of asemantic as a purpose, as a phantasm that returning to write Hamlet. In the same way, presents in itself a new, weightier feeling: “no se Ionesco writes an “anti-piece”, as he liked to say, habla de la mentira, la crueldad, la locura, etc, a stage performance of dramatic, rather than sino que la obra teatral es este absurdo, este epic, presence – strictly speaking there is no miedo. La literatura cede el paso a la fuerza narration, something more appropriate to the teatral”3 . novel or cinema – about the impossibility of Expressionism, for example, that projected meaningful language, about the efficacy of the the stage as a canvas for an interior landscape, a unusual, about the dislocation of reality with its product of the distorted perspective of the undeniable connotations: in his words: “un protagonist, lent said deformation to the anti- incommunicable que comunica” (p.87). pieces of Ionesco, where objects acquire the The play’s premiere, on the 11th May 1950, at appearance of dreams or are transformed to the the Théâtre de Noctambules, caused one of those point of taking on grotesque proportions. Kafka scandals so common in the Paris of the time. The resounds in the incommunicability, the anguish audience felt swindled by the absence of a and the peculiar metamorphosis of Rhinoceros, soprano, or even a bald character, and still less in the same way that Pirandello is projected in a any dramatic conflict. The support of authors spectator condemned to find himself exposed by such as Raymond Queneau, Boris Vian or a sarcastic version of himself, all that Saintmont would be fundamental in allowing overwhelmed with the sensuality of the 20th the play to receive greater recognition. In fact, century theatre of images, in which the discredit the piece has become a classic and has been brought on the word had tinged the scenic ambit

250 volume 1 • issue 3 July / September 2011 • p. 248-259 HETEROTOPIAS DISTURB: EUGÈNE IONESCO THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY of sensuality and diffuse atmospheres with evidencias ocultas (p. 152). direct expression of the mental, beyond the traps This has subsequently been widely projected, of reason, dramatic causality and discursive found even in stage directors as formalist and developments. iconoclastic as Robert Wilson, who met Ionesco Dislocation of reality, the resurrection of the at the Festival de Nancy in France in 1972 when he anodyne, enables its reintegration in a sort of staged Deafman Glance. There they showed their propitious distancing from ontological mutual admiration. In fact, Act III of A Letter perplexity – that is not social, contra Brecht – from Queen Victoria can be considered pure that removes mental laziness, of habit, the Ionesco, a satire on language among five couples everydayness of the working week, and returns suddenly silenced by a burst of gunfire heard to us a kind of “virginity of the spirit”. From the from offstage. point of view of Ionesco’s personal poetics, to In the same way, The Lesson (1951) illustrates write a work was to unleash a struggle to say this iconoclastic attitude towards language, if what others had not been able to and to translate even more virulently, as here it is used to new constellations of feeling, recreating in this manipulate and intimidate, to create and way a self-contained personal universe, the destroy. The work, delicious and disparate, projection of an interior world, a theatre without develops according to Ionesco’s habitual an audience, through which the true event of formula through which a trivial anecdote takes drama occurs not in the work, nor concerns the on dreamlike dimensions. The play depicts a characters, but fundamentally in the spectator: private class imparted by a professor to a student “espero fastidiar a mi público. No hay about diverse study materials. They begin with separación más perfecta que la que produce el arithmetic and then move on to languages, until fastidio. De esa manera habré realizado el the point at which the pedagogic realism of the distanciamiento de los espectadores en relación professor leads him to demonstrate the meaning al espectáculo. El fastidio es la lucidez” (p. 171). of “knife” by murdering the young boy, who is The crisis of thought brings with it a crisis of regrettably afflicted by toothache, and who will values and through this, of the capacity of constitute, as we discover from the maid, the language to tell the truth about the world or fortieth corpse that day. Meanwhile, another other forms of language. The author himself student awaits his class. affirms that The Bald Soprano and The Lesson are The professor teaches languages, all “tentativas de un funcionamiento en el vacío del languages, presumably, to his student. What is mecanismo teatral” (p. 159). In the same way surprising is the method with which it is taught, that the visual avant-garde had stripped the comparative linguistics, with which he traces an work of art bare of anecdotes and figurative incestuous genealogy encompassing all motives, the theatre of Ionesco, in its languages, past and present. According to him, intranscendency, its symbolism and speculative all languages come from Spanish, including play, in the outlandish, concerns the elaboration Latin, whose differences are, at the final analysis, of an abstract or non-realist theatre, where the “ineffable”. comic and tragic give way to the absurd and On the other hand, the accumulative grotesque as new aesthetic categories: irrationality of the dialogue admits other Teatro abstracto. Drama puro. Anti-temático, connotations: “it is not enough to know how to anti-ideológico, anti-realista-socialista, anti- add”, declares the professor during the maths filosófiico, anti-psicológico de boulevard, anti- lesson, frustrated by the inability of his student burgués, redescubrimiento de un nuevo to carry out the contrary mathematical operation teatro libre, Libre, es decir, liberado, es decir, of subtraction. In the work of Ionesco, the knife sin una posición adoptada de antemano, will represent both functions, unifying the instrumento de indagación: único en poder language while suppressing its differences. The ser sincero, exacto y en poder mostrar las knife may be seen as a phallic and fatal symbol

International Journal of Communication Research 251 María Ángeles GRANDE ROSALES of reductionist ideology and the universalisation II. IDENTITARY SPLIT of power. Semantic anarchy equals moral anarchy. That is why philology is the worst, as For his part, Calinescu5 has broached the the maid warns, because from the nationalist subject from the perspective of identitary connotations of language to its saturation point conflict, the legacy of an author who was the son as a founding myth, the cacophony of voices in of an extreme nationalist Romanian father and a conflict and of differences are silenced. In this French mother of probable Jewish ancestry. case, the knife is the weapon that translates the Ionesco frequently referred to the confessional censorship of totalitarianism to linguistic character of his theatre, centred on the search for heteroglossia and the bubbling multiplicity of answers about himself. This enabled him to language.4 process in an absolutely personal way, for Totally opposed to aesthetic realism or to example, the ascent of fascism and the ideological theatre, of a thesis of any nature, the consequent ideological atrocities and delirious work of art goes beyond any ideological chauvinism that surrounded his youth in proselytism, having its own rules, its own Romania. In this sense, we can analyze as content. This approach led to accusations of symptomatic one of his most emblematic solipsism from some quarters, for example from dramas, Rhinoceros (1959), recognising it as his Kenneth Tynan, initially a defender of his most social drama, as well as establishing the aesthetic but soon to become a polemical multilayered and open character of this opponent of the social irrelevance of his writing. incomparable allegory of denunciation. The controversy, quite heated for its time, which Rhinoceros dramatizes the stupefaction of took place on the pages of The Observer, had a Bérenger – an everyman citizen of a nameless wide impact, drawing in eminent participants French city – when he observes how its such as Philip Toynbee and John Berger. Over inhabitants are gradually being converted into the course of the debate he was accused of rhinoceros. In fact, he and Daisy, his lover, are formalism by such a colossus as Orson Welles, the only human beings that remain, although she who perspicaciously denounced the real will vanish, perhaps also transformed into a ideological affinity of neutrality, related to this rhinoceros. The powerful image of human artistic practice, with the concentration camp. beings being transformed into wild beasts, The celebrated auteur deduced in conclusion gigantic and prehistoric, brings us inevitably that his logic is ultimately dangerous, insofar as back to Gregor Samsa in La Metamorfosis. If in one cannot prove the failure of language without the Kafka story (1915) the metamorphosis of an also demonstrating at the same time the failure individual into a spider has a distressing and of man. asphyxiating character, experienced in the first It is possible that Ionesco would acknowledge person, in this work the monstrosity of the this hypothesis. In the final analysis, his theatre individuals is produced in a collective form, as lacks social significance in a way that benefits its the effect of a silent plague, and is transmitted in metaphysical operation, which directs itself at a caustic and hilarious form. Faced with this the guts of man, at his loneliness, the pain of prevailing irrationality, the rhinoceros and the living, the fear of death, at his existential angst, phenomenon of rhinocerisation, Bérenger will at the thirst for the absolute, at the constant resist, concluding the work with his cry of desire for meaning in all the things that do not defiance: “…I’m the last man left, and I’m have it, and ultimately to man staring into the staying that way until the end. I’m not abyss. In the end “las ideologías son falsas, y el capitulating!” A similar heroism, albeit of a arte y la ciencia, verdaderos” (p.191) or, in the different nature, to that of the martyr of other words, “en la neurosis reside la verdad” Auschwitz of one of his final works, who offers (p.211). to die voluntarily in place of another (Journey among the Dead, 1980).

252 volume 1 • issue 3 July / September 2011 • p. 248-259 HETEROTOPIAS DISTURB: EUGÈNE IONESCO THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY

There have been substantial hermeneutic Historians such as Leon Volovici have derivations from the allegory and the polysemy established that fascism in Romania was not, inherent in the symbol is present in its even from a strictly intellectual perspective, a multiplicity of interpretations, for example in the peripheral movement, underground, as has reading of the work as an allegory of the Nazi often been claimed. It not had only a occupation of France, communist activity in the considerable political influence, especially after Parisian left during the Cold War, the French 1930, but also an ideological and spiritual impact persecution of the Algerians, etc. When it was that would remain operative even after the performed on 22nd January 1960 at the Odeón Second World War. As a member of this with Jean-Louis Barrault as the director and intellectual ambit, Ionesco was sadly actor (Bérenger) fascism would unmistakably familiarized with the situation of friends form its backdrop. Still able to understand the suddenly transformed into filthy beasts, work as a tragedy, Ionesco praised the brainless and governed by slogans. The interpretation as “a terrible farce and a fantastic rhinoceros may well be compared to the fable.” Even the green skin of the beasts could dogmatic, racist and anti-Semitic members of the be considered an allusion to the Nazi uniforms cultural and political environment of Bucharest of the Vichy regime. The docile transformation in the thirties, where Ionesco was formed and of the humans into rhinoceros, almost passively, later defined as an intellectual. without violence, echoes the reaction of the Various facts point to this interpretation, Parisians in the first months of occupation. beyond the attack on fascist rhetoric. For Nevertheless, in accordance with the example, the character of the logician and the declarations of the author himself, it would be parodic nature of his syllogisms (which were useful to understand the play as an indication of however real, as in spite of this formula having the identitary split that resulted from the alleged been used profusely by philosophers and fascisisation of the Romanian intellectual theologians for its probative character, it was not environment in which he was formed. In this until the 20th century when Bertrand Russell way, Anna Quinney6 makes clear that the work discovered some formal errors in the doctrine), can be understood as a personal settling of who describes the epidemic of pachydermosis accounts with friendship, political idealism, and as a form of logic as false as it is incontrovertible. a literary community betrayed. To this can be Inevitably, the allusion to Emil Cioran, and his added an additional connotation to which we Syllogismes d’amertume (1952), published barely make reference above, that of the Jewish ancestry seven days before this work, would appear of his French mother, Thérèse Ipcar. In fact, this obligatory. question could not be irrelevant given the milieu In related fashion, the myth of racial of aggressive anti-Semitic fascism so well superiority is present in Rhinoceros in one way or established in the Romanian intellectual climate another throughout the play. In the first act, for in the twenties and thirties, at the time of the example, the form it takes is that of a debate Iron Guard. between the characters about whether the In any case, after his French infancy, the rhinoceros are Asiatic or African based on the return to his country of birth, aged thirteen, at number of horns they possess. As those who the request of his father, who had fraudulently lived the occupation can testify, a frequent obtained a divorce and custody of his children stereotype of Jews as horned men, an almost from his first wife, caused him an enormous demonic image, was a widely recognized as anti- setback. He hated Bucharest and its inhabitants. Semitic. On the other hand, the character most Without being Jewish, his French accent meant intimately reflective of fascist discourse, Jean, the that he was taken to be so, and he suffered civil servant friend of Bérenger, may be beatings until his accent changed. He felt considered a reference to Cioran and his anti- different and isolated, in a hostile environment. Semitic and xenophobic diatribes, such as those

International Journal of Communication Research 253 María Ángeles GRANDE ROSALES expounded upon in his book The Transfiguration Writings which moreover were hidden by an of Romania, never translated into French. implacable censorship until the implosion of the Marxist discourse is caricatured in its turn in system in December 1989, such as a volume of the most populist character of the group, Botard, essays titled No containing polemical articles and, of course, Dudard, the alter ego of Satre, as about reputed Romanian writers of the age, that the author himself had it. The rhinocerisation of did not see the light of day until 1990, or a society therefore constitutes a social allegory of compilation of journalistic articles from the infinite applicability; in Germany the allusion to period 1927-1946, En Guerra contra todo el mundo, the Nazis was inevitable, in Moscow they unedited until 1992. His unstable Romanian wanted to censor it, in Buenos Aires the military literary identity, strangely tied up in the hated government took it to be an attack on Peronism. figure of his father, whose infidelity, in a The plasticity of the word rhinoceros was traumatic episode, was the cause of a frustrated particularly fortunate, moreover. The word, in suicide attempt on the part of his mother, soon French as in English, refers to both the individual gave way to identification with his maternal and collective animal, its singular form is French identity. This was much more identical to the plural. In other words, one is comfortable and promising, and would finally indistinguishable from the herd, a suitable allow him to be recognized as a French breeding ground for totalitarianisms: dramaturge translated into multiple languages Rinoceronte es, sin duda, una pieza antinazi and shown in the great theatres of the world. It pero también, sobre todo, una pieza contra can be said, therefore, that Ionesco has two las histerias colectivas y las epidemias identities that, at least in the realm of fantasy, colectivas que se ocultan al amparo de la are opposed yet are overlaid by episodic razón y de las ideas, pero que no dejan de ser moments of reconciliation. Nevertheless, France por eso grandes enfermedades colectivas was always his spiritual homeland, the country cuyas ideologías no son sino coartadas (p.86) of his mother’s family and the place where he It is obvious that the reach of this process of found his rural paradise (the Chapelle- metamorphosis, of rhinocerisation, that has as Anthenaise), lost in an irrecoverable past but alive its counterpart the attitude of resistance of the in his memory, as he observes in his diaries.7 militant and conscious protagonist, in the words It is in the name of this France of his infancy of Ionesco, “el desasosiego del que naturalmente that he felt himself exiled in his native country, alérgico al contagio, asiste a la metamorfosis above all after it became a prisoner of a bloody mental de su colectividad” (p.17), which even ideological delirium, until he managed to return brought him adverse criticism from those who, to his longed for France as cultural attaché to the such as Pierre Macabru, considered this piece to Romanian delegation of Vichy. The atmosphere be an expression of reactionary individualism, he encountered was asphyxiating, but or for those who consider neutrality to be a bluff, nevertheless he attempted to detach himself as no clear alternative is defended. Ionesco opts insofar as his objective was to edit the principal for the vacuum and leaves the spectators to works of contemporary Romanian literature and resolve their questions themselves. thought. He would become an inescapable On another note, a further impulse to this reference in the historiography of modern identitary conflict resulted from his French French theatre, a member of the Academy from acclimatization. At the time of The Bald Soprano’s 1970, recognized and honoured throughout the premiere in 1950, Ionesco was totally unknown world. in literary Paris, in spite of being a mature writer. Nevertheless, his identity remained hybrid in He was approaching forty and had left behind in moments of lucidity, particularly until the fall of his country of birth, which had become a Soviet Ceau[escu, the last Eastern European Stalinist. satellite, a considerable literary body of work in Then he would discover his Romanian self and a hidden and strange language, Romanian. show signs of wanting to return, albeit from an

254 volume 1 • issue 3 July / September 2011 • p. 248-259 HETEROTOPIAS DISTURB: EUGÈNE IONESCO THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY idealized remembrance of Romanian society which he had the feeling – expressed in No (1924) from his youth that compares to the French, – of addressing himself to a public of three- postulating an ultimately indefensible hundred readers. The step to French could not anachronistic nostalgia for the constitutional be, for him, a form of asceticism, as it had been monarchy abolished by four decades of for Beckett, but the opposite, an enriching, a communism. In The Intermittent Searching, one broadening of his horizons of expression, an of his last writings, we find what can be opening to new possibilities for his literary considered a document of complete overcoming genius, a creative game. From this perspective, of his identitary-cultural conflict. In this piece of he was situated in the antipodes of Beckett. Nor voluntarily uncontrolled writing, we find that did he feel it necessary to translate himself into Romanian words and memories appear tinged Romanian because at the time in which he with nostalgia and affection for a fatherland produced his French work, Romania was an wounded by totalitarianism. occupied country, first militarily and then In a way, his identitary conflict, his Romanian ideologically, by Soviet and national and French linguistic identity – Ionesco was communism until 1989. The meaning of self- perfectly bilingual – reveals an unequivocal translation for Ionesco was precisely inverted in parallel, albeit with a diametrically different comparison to Beckett, as his Romanian writings approach, to the career of Samuel Beckett, an were the object of translation in this case. Irish man who chose French as his pet language Nevertheless, recognizing his literary of exploration and discovery, writing in France tradition impelled him to translate Urmuz to in self-exile from his native Ireland. He French and to champion Caragiale, adopting and consciously abandoned a strong language for translating him, together with Mónica another more minoritarian, although one indeed Lovinescu. Moreover, he would approve of the with added connotations of precision and publication of the Romanian version of The Bald rigorous clarity that corresponded to a certain Soprano in 1965 and, during the period of calling for intellectual asceticism in a writer relaxation of communist censorship in Romania, obsessed with writing as a process of progressive between 1964 and 1972, texts written in purification emanating from a Joycean stimulus. Romanian directly about colleagues such as In any case, he did not abandon English, Mihai Ralea and Tudor Vianev and, after the fall immersing himself in the difficult task of self of the Ceaucescu regime in 1989, he authorized translation, another form of asceticism, from a the publication of his until then banned writing vehicle, the English language, that was (En guerra contra todo el mundo and No). inevitably complicit, for the Irish Beckett, with scabrous colonial clutches. III. THE DISSECTION OF REALITY In the case of Ionesco, the situation seems to have formed itself in an inversely proportional In general, the Theatre of the Absurd, and that way. The French cultural colony that Romania of Ionesco in particular, contributes an unedited became in the 19th Century, maintained its neo- vision of reality, a way of looking differently at Latin language inundated with numerous Slavic, what we have never stopped seeing, and this Turkish and Greek elements, over which a new perspective provokes a sort of destruction French lexical gloss was simply applied to of the sense of the world, in the same way, we enrich, from a civilizing perspective and one of would suggest, as Picasso, Dali or Chagall. In assumed cultural superiority, specialized ambits the same way, the Theatre of the Absurd appeared such as politics, the judiciary, economics and as the anti-play to classical theatre, to the epic philosophy. Brechtian system and to the realism of popular The fact is that Ionesco had written until theatre. The recurring technique that clears this almost forty years of age in a delimited, marginal fabulous universe, beyond the rupture with the language that he manipulated perfectly but in Aristotelian principles, tends towards the

International Journal of Communication Research 255 María Ángeles GRANDE ROSALES constant reiteration of a situation, to a rupture in protagonist and this results in their blocking the the logical-rational functioning of events, to the stairs, the patio and the street, traffic and the temporal paralysis that impedes the normal metro are prevented from passing, the Seine is passing of chronological time, to the dreamlike stopped. At the end of the play, the tenant is atmosphere that envelops the succession of hidden beneath a gigantic accumulation of scenes and the endowment of symbols with furniture and we only hear his voice. By way of dynamism. Something that we may comparison, in (1953), nonetheless acknowledge from precise Madelaine, from whom a policeman has just references, since the avant-garde had brought ordered a cup of coffee, lays a huge quantity of about an aesthetic disorder proceeding from the cups on the table, although nobody comes to take subconscious, from angst, delirium, one, while in The Chairs (1952) two elderly incommunicability and nightmare in the protagonists bring numerous chairs for their dismantling of the presumed coherence of the invisible guests until the stage is full and real world, and under the form of distorted movement impeded, or in Anger, one of the staged images that project this interior episodes of the film Seven Deadly Sins, Ionesco landscape. shows us the absurdity and superfluity of a In the theatre of Ionesco the dramatic world that generates its own extinction. For approach is projected from antagonism as a example, the soup of Sundays that inundate the paradigm that instrumentalises the problem of a city, a symbol of the anger that drowns lack of meaning, as his theatre invokes tragedy humanity, the cholera of nations. and farce, the prosaic and the poetic, realism and Here we observe a characteristic of enormous fantasy, the quotidian and the unusual. The loss interest in the Ionesquian universe, proceeding of the semantic dimension is observed, for from the fact that his dramaturgy is closely tied example, in the structural plane, the use of to scenic plasticity, the importance of images. proliferation as an accumulative linguistic and Objects are not interesting for their use value or objectual value, while in the thematic plane it as an aid to action but rather seem to reach the signals rather an inquiry into the ego – a nihilism status of characters: the object is self-moving, it of otherness – that accentuates the introspective- metamorphosises, resists, inundates the space personal character of his more confessional and threatens the character embodied by the works, particularly those written in the Sixties. actor. In an inversely proportional way, the actor The proliferation of objects is a frequent can find himself degraded to the category of an technique in his plays. A minimalist set design, amorphous object or mannequin, a mere atemporal, is inundated with objects that acquire physical support of logos. life and suffocate the characters beneath their Regarding its representation of an inquiry unlimited growth. Invading everything, they into the ego, this autobiographical and concretise loneliness, abandonment, the confessional temptation, defined as a constant in hypertrophy of the material, the victory of anti- his oeuvre, is particularly relevant in those texts spiritual forces. This is what happens in Amadeo centred, not only on the conflict of the individual or How to Get out of Trouble (1954): the against society such as Jack, or The Submission protagonists have been unable to rid themselves (1955), The Assassin without Work (1958) or of a corpse that has grown little by little for Rhinoceros (1959), but also in those more fifteen years but which suddenly begins to suffer metaphysical and nihilistic, such as from “geometric progression”, threatening to (1962) or Hunger and Thirst (1964). In this way, break the furniture and the walls and force the the comical formula of going against the current inhabitants from their apartment. is highlighted in the dramatic surrealism of Jack, In a similar way, in (1955) the or The Submission where we find ourselves in the recently rented room does not have space for the company of a Bérenger-esque sort of alter ego of enormous quantity of furniture of the the author who appears recurrently in his plays

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– young and weak, unable to resist the pressure Escribí esa obra para aprender a morir. Debía of his family, and will end up surrendering to ser una lección, como una especie de ejercicio social convention, as ridiculous as it may be. espiritual, una marcha progresiva, etapa por Ultimately he bends his desire to be faithful to etapa, que intentaba que fuese accesible, hacia himself and exclaims “I adore hash brown el fin ineludible 10 potatoes”. In it we observe again the most characteristic The protagonist of Hunger and Thirst will also aspect of Ionesco’s art, the inflation of a situation feel disoriented, albeit for different reasons. until it achieves a dramatic effect. The dramatic Jean, in the same way as his friend Bérenger, is situation seen from all angles replaces the plot. unable to get used to life, he feels himself And so, for two and a half hours we are present different to the rest, does not know how to live. at the slow but tenacious disintegration of not In this he is different from his wife Marie- only the King Bérenger but also all that belongs Madelaine, who, similarly to all women in the to him, the palace, the kingdom, his subjects. We oeuvre of Ionesco, is jovial and affable, has could imagine that there are methods, some adapted herself to the conditions of her life, and subterfuge to avoid death, or that a powerful tries in vain to convince her husband that man would adopt an attitude more resigned or everything is going to change. In fact they end positive. This is not the case, however. up moving to a basement, and while his wife “Everyone dies for the first time”. attempts to make it bright and comfortable, he Men know that they are going to die, but they gives himself up to desperation, complaining forget. King Bérenger, instead of preparing constantly: he is “lucid” and “this is incurable”. himself for death, avoids the subject, and Jean finally leaves his home, just as a beautiful although Marguerite, his first wife, warns him garden appears on the back wall. Marie- that he has an hour and a half of life left, he does Madelaine regrets that Jean never saw it, not acknowledge this. He refuses to abdicate, he convinced that this would have dissuaded him ties himself to the vital sensuality embodied by from his intention to flee. In the end his nomadic his second wife Marie, he tries to give orders wandering makes him a prisoner of a kind of that will never be carried out, he implores the monastery-cum-inn, where he longs for the life sun, writes literature, invokes the dead, even he might have lived together with his wife and those who have committed suicide: “Vosotros, daughter, the only earthly paradise, that in his los suicidas, enseñadme lo que hay que hacer ignorance he scorned. para adquirir el asco de la existencia. Enseñadme Exit the King (1962)8 merits special mention: el cansancio. ¿Qué droga hay que tomar para one of Ionesco’s most obstinate testimonies on eso?”. his personal obsession with death and without The force of the drama derives from this step doubt the most intimate play of his entire legacy. from rebellion to acceptance, from unease to When the production of the author is examined impotence, from a feeling of tremendous pain from the point of view of the great myths of for his disappearance to total resignation. Only universal literature – Rhinoceros and Ulysses, A when a quarter of an hour of life remains for the Stroll in the Air with Icarus, Victims of Duty and king does he cease his sterile struggle. Bérenger, Oedipus, Hunger and Thirst and Faust etc – in the like Ionesco himself, does not have the case of Exit the King the character of Bérenger consolation of religion. Death is nothingness, has been assimilated to the mythological figure which makes the play an allegory of humanity of Prometheus.9 The peculiar universe of King and its ambiguous transcendental inquiry.11 The Bérenger would re-examine his attitude towards rite of preparation for death is brought about death as ceremonial fulfilment, following a under the spiritual guide of Queen Marguerite, sacralising initiation ritual that sublimates the a rite inspired, as the author himself makes clear, threat to mortality as a devastating and by the Tibetan book of the dead Bardo Thödol, incomprehensible existential disintegration: where as in the Christian rites of commentario

International Journal of Communication Research 257 María Ángeles GRANDE ROSALES mortis he is invited to divest himself of the toma en cuenta nuestras verdades y burdens of existence and of his clothing. obsesiones fundamentales: el amor, la muerte, Symbolically, he cleans his cloak of dust and el asombro. Presenta al hombre en una impurities, and is invited to take his seat on the perspectiva reducida, enajenada; nuestra only everlasting throne of death and of peace. A verdad está en nuestros sueños, en la confessional play, symptomatic, although imaginación; todo, a cada instante, confirma “insufficiently religious” in the words of the esta afirmación, La ficción ha precedido a la author, of the secularized ritual value of the ciencia. Todo lo que soñamos, es decir, todo word. Powerful in its problematic, its staging by lo que deseamos, es verdadero (…) todo lo the Teatro de la Abadía, directed by José Luis que soñamos es realizable (…) ha sido posible Gómez, in 2004, was highly praised and volar porque hemos soñado que volábamos followed in the footsteps of the staging brought (p.14) about by José Luis Alonso in 1969 in the María As Foucault put it in The Archeaology of Guerrero. Knowledge, an approach, in another context, that Provocative, satirical, dreamlike, theological, could be assimilated into the abrupt freezing of metaphysical, apolitical, multifaceted: the reality and to the inedited lucidity of the Franco- personality of Ionesco has characterized the Romanian playwright’s creations, “Utopias wide spectrum of his critical reception. His console. Heterotopias disturb.” Although we powerful individualism and free thinking have barely survived the long twentieth century. been cause, perhaps, of a greater ignorance of his oeuvre than that of kindred spirits. But his References legacy is unique. Because it is useless, as he affirmed, to offer a message that has already 1. Bermúdez, Dolores (1989) Análisis simbólico del teatro been given. Because any valuable work of art, in de Ionesco, University of Cádiz. his opinion, is the expression of a native and 2. Calinescu, Matei (2005) Ioneso. Recherches identitaires, unique intuition, as “al crear un mundo, al Paris, Oxus. inventarlo, el creador lo descubre” (p.66). 3. Glukman, Marta, Eugène Ionesco y su teatro, Santiago In the background, there is an attempt to de Chile, El espejo de papel. 4. Ionesco, Eugène (2007) Diarios, Páginas de espuma, restore a pristine vision of our universe, as Madrid. overwhelmed beings in the absence of feeling, 5. Ionesco, Eugène (1965) Notas y Contranotas. Estudios from the conviction that artistic truth is more sobre el teatro, Buenos Aires, Losada. profound, more full of meaning than 6. Jean-Blain, Marguerite (2005) Eugène Ionesco commonplace reality, given that realism goes Mystique ou mal-croyant?, Lessius, Bruxelles. beyond reality, insofar as it concerns the 7. Liddell, Angélica, “Un minuto dura tres campos de universal condition of man: love, exterminio: la desaparición del espacio y del tiempo”, en Dramaturgias femeninas de la segunda incommunication, fear, death, astonishment. In mitad del siglo XX. Espacio y tiempo, Madrid, Visor. this way alone, in the forensic dissection of the 8. Patterson, Jeannette, “Language, Violence and the real, might we realize the strangeness of the Totalitarian Ideology of Origins in Ionesco’s La world, the powerful antidote that must precede Leçon and Césaire’s Une tempête”, Au Pire, French innominate reintegration. This enables Ionesco Forum, Winter/Spreing, 2008, ½. to formulate in a unique way his intransferrable 9. Quinney, Anne, “Excess and Identity: The Franco poetics of amazement: Romanian Combats Rhinoceritis”, South Central Review, Autumn 2007. Siempre pensé que la verdad de la ficción es 10. Vilvandre de Sousa, Cécile (2001) “El rey se muere, más profunda, está más llena de significado de Eugène Ionesco: un rito iniciático sacralizador que la realidad cotidiana. El realismo, de la muerte”, in Francisco Torres Monreal (ed.) socialista o no, está del otro lado de la El teatro y lo sagrado. De M. de Ghelderode a F. realidad. La limita, la atenúa, la falsea, no Arrabal, University of Murcia.

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Endnotes 6 Anne Quinney “Excess and Identity: The Franco Romanian Combats Rhinoceritis”, South Central Review, Autumn 2007, pp.36-52 1 Angélica Liddell “Un minuto dura tres campos de 7 Fragments of a Journal (1967) and Past Present, Present exterminio: la desaparición del espacio y del Past (1968) published in Spanish as Diarios, Paginas tiempo”, en Dramaturgias femeninas de la segunda de espuma, Madrid, 2007. mitad del siglo XX. Espacio y tiempo, Madrid, Visor, 8 Cécile Vilvandre de Sousa “El rey se muere, de Eugène pp. 67-76, pp.67-68. Ionesco: un rito iniciático sacralizador de la muerte”, 2 Eugène Ionesco (1962) Notas y Contranotas. Estudios in Francisco Torres Monreal (ed.) El teatro y lo sobre el teatro, Buenos Aires, Losada, 1965, p.147. sagrado. De M. de Ghelderode a F. Arrabal, University 3 Marta Glukman , Eugène Ionesco y su teatro, Santiago of Murcia, 2001, pp. 581-589. de Chile, El espejo de papel, p. XX 9 Dolores Bermúdez, Análisis simbólico del teatro de 4 Jeannette Patterson “language, Violence and the Ionesco, University of Cádiz, 1989, p.116 Totalitarian Ideology of Origins in Ionesco’s La Leçon 10 Eugène Ionesco, Diarios, Páginas de espuma, Madrid, and Césaire’s Une tempête”, Au Pire, French Forum, 2007, p. Winter/Spreing, 2008, ½, pp. 195-213. 11 Marguerite Jean-Blain, Eugène Ionesco Mystique ou 5 Matei Calinescu, Ioneso. Recherches identitaires, Paris, mal-croyant?, Lessius, Bruxelles, 2005. Oxus, 2005.

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