Early Resistance to Fascism in Eugène Ionesco's Interwar Romanian Journalism Author(s): Maria Lupas Source: Journal of Modern Literature , Vol. 37, No. 3 (Spring 2014), pp. 74-91 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.37.3.74 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Modern Literature This content downloaded from 103.46.200.106 on Tue, 24 Mar 2020 09:16:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Early Resistance to Fascism in Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism Maria Lupas Aix-Marseille Université When in 1932 the young editors of a minor Bucharest newspaper, Axa, joined the fascist Legionary Movement — also known as the Iron Guard — and used the paper to attract other young intellectuals to their ranks, the young Eugène Ionesco who was writing the paper’s literary column became increasingly isolated in his literary and political views. Looking at Ionesco’s articles in the first issues ofAxa, we can see that the importance of the newspaper’s editorial shift to the Legionary Movement has been greatly overlooked, as has Ionesco’s resistance to fascism and his criticism of nationalism in literature. He left the paper as its contributors radicalized their positions, but this experience likely served as one of the earliest sources of the metamorphosis staged in his play Rhinoceros. Ionesco’s journalism both exemplifies the complexities of 1930s literature in Romania and those of reading Ionesco’s fiction and non-fiction. Keywords: Theater of the absurd / public intellectuals / history / Romanian Young Generation / Mircea Eliade INTRODUCTION n the 1950s, as Europe began emerging from the rubble and measuring the con- sequences of the Second World War, a new kind of theater was also emerging Ithat seemed to express the experience of this tragic twentieth century. It was dubbed “theater of the absurd;” Eugène Ionesco became one of its most prolific and emblematic playwrights, as its fame gradually spanned the globe. Ionesco also became a public intellectual writing for newspapers and serving as a member of the French Academy. In later interviews, Ionesco made no secret that one of his personal dramas was witnessing friends and family members succumb to the ideology of a fascist political movement in 1930s Romania. Furthermore, in evok- ing Romanian interwar fascism, it has now become common to make reference to Ionesco’s 1958 play Rhinoceros, which the playwright loosely based on this and other experiences. Just as there is more to Ionesco’s plays than simple farces (Esslin 84), so also Ionesco’s claim to be a simple witness to fascism should be critically examined. I This content downloaded from 103.46.200.106 on Tue, 24 Mar 2020 09:16:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Eugène Ionesco’s Interwar Romanian Journalism 75 argue that in his abundant interwar journalism, Ionesco both resisted one of the fascist Legionary Movement’s first attempts to gain influence among Romanian intellectuals and developed a posture of derision. During the Cold War, these newspaper texts were conserved only in special Romanian depository libraries difficult to access behind the Iron Curtain, and most have still not been translated from the Romanian. I analyze some of Ionesco’s stances when as a young literary critic he was grappling with tensions in Romanian literature between cosmopoli- tanism and nationalism, modernism and tradition. I demonstrate how in the face of the editorial shift of the newspaper Axa for which he was writing, Ionesco was obliged to develop his own literary positions and finally leave the paper. Texts from the Axa newspaper in particular were conserved in only one library, that of the Romanian Academy, and classified as extreme-right publications. The intriguing story of Ionesco’s articles in this paper has therefore not yet been told. Recent scholarship on Ionesco has taken divergent approaches to his life and his works. A first group of scholars has focused on Ionesco’s life, particularly in light of information becoming available with the fall of totalitarian regimes in East-Central Europe and the opening of archives. These scholars include social scientists, historians, and sometimes literary scholars. The Romanian poet Marta Petreu published Ionesco in His Father’s Country [Ionesco în ţara tatălui] in 2001, after the opening of the archives. She turned her critical attention to several sub- jects that had been censured in pre-1989 Romania: the 1927 Romanian “young generation,”1 the Legionary Movement, and Professor Nae Ionescu (no relation to the playwright) who mentored many young intellectuals in favor of the Legion- ary Movement. The image of Ionesco that emerges from her study is one of an exteriorly passive man who reserved his attacks for his diary-writing and never- published attacks on his friends even when they succumbed to extreme fascist ideologies (77). While she recognized a certain non-conformism in Ionesco, she attributed this to sophism and a spirit of negation on his part and she diminished any role of active resistance. According to Petreu, in 1933 Ionesco did take stock of a change and lamented the end of literature because of its politicization, but shortly thereafter “sees to his own needs, he publishes No (1934), becomes glo- rious and ‘disgusting’ etc. etc.” [« îşi vede de propriile sale preocupări, publică Nu (1934), devine glorios şi ‘greţos’ etc. etc. »]2 (48). In Petreu’s interpretation, Ionesco was indeed permanently scarred by what he had lived in Romania in the interwar and war years and needed to write the play Rhinoceros to exorcise some of those demons, but she localized the traumatic radicalization of Ionesco’s literary world only from 1933 onward and particularly between June 1940 and June 1942 (61). The French social scientist Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s 2002 book,Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco, discussed Ionesco in the context of two other expatriates from the Romanian “young generation” and particularly focused on the strategies by which Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran tried to dissimulate the fascist sympathies they had held in Romania. Laignel-Lavastine’s work — based on a solid body of docu- ments and primary texts — has often been unfairly denigrated in heated debates on the legacies of Eliade, Cioran and other figures of Romania’s wartime history. This content downloaded from 103.46.200.106 on Tue, 24 Mar 2020 09:16:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 76 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 37, Number 3 Given the study’s larger focus, Ionesco’s own interwar writings were largely neglected. Laignel-Lavastine relied instead on fragments of Ionesco’s Bucharest journal published in 1968 and on the play Rhinoceros, but less on texts published by Ionesco in the interwar years. The Romanian historian Lucian Boia’s 2011 book benefitted from previous research and took into consideration Ionesco’s publishing activities during the interwar years. The book focused broadly on Romanian intellectuals from the interwar years to the beginning of the post-war period. Boia pointed out with finesse some of the pitfalls of studying Romanian intellectuals in the years 1930 to 1950. He perspicaciously noted how Ionesco, a left-leaning writer in Romania, worked at several right-wing newspapers, but he argued, following Petreu, that Ionesco’s resistance in the 1930s was silent and interior and that his vociferous resistance in France was an effort to make amends for his previous cowardice (92). A second group of literary scholars has chosen to deal primarily with Iones- co’s interwar texts and their literary contexts. The Romanian scholar, not related to the playwright, Gelu Ionescu’s study first inventoried Ionesco’s articles in the Romanian interwar press, but since he prepared the manuscript during the time of the totalitarian censorship, he avoided discussions of the Romanian political context. Ecaterina Cleynen-Serghiev’s 1993 study on Ionesco’s literary youth offers ground-breaking readings of Ionesco’s 1934 book, No [Nu], and of Ionesco’s grap- pling with the limits of literary criticism. But while Cleynen-Serghiev frames the cultural life of the 1930s in the context of the politically vulnerable state of “Greater Romania,” she preferred to separate literary and political debates and to discuss only the literary ones. The Romanian Academician Eugen Simion also preferred in his book, The Young Eugène Ionesco [Tânărul Eugen Ionescu], to focus more on literary debates and happenings rather than on Ionesco’s life. He explic- itly refused to address larger political question concerning the appeal of fascism to certain prominent young intellectuals like Mircea Eliade, focusing rather on Ionesco’s seemingly contradictory literary tastes (176). Jeanine Teodorescu also focused on Ionesco’s 1934 volume of literary criti- cism, No, but limited her study to subjects treated in No, with few external docu- ments witnessing to the politics of the 1930s other than the point of view of No’s author. Her synopsis of No linked the work to Ionesco’s theater and she argued for the continuity between No and Ionesco’s later works. A third group of scholars has argued for taking a mixed approach and study both Ionesco’s life and his texts.