Ionesco, Eugene

Ionesco was born on November 26, 1909 in Slatina (Romania). As a child, his parents took him to Paris, and French became his first language. The family returned to Romania when the son was already a teenager. He entered the University of Bucharest , preparing to become a teacher of French. At the beginning of his literary career, Ionesco wrote poetry in French and Romanian, and also composed a daring pamphlet entitled “No!” The pamphlet was sustained in the nihilistic spirit of the Dadaists and, demonstrating the unity of opposites, first condemned and then exalted the three Romanian writers.

In the “tragedy of language”, “The Bald Singer ” (La cantatrice chauve, 1950 ), the first play by Ionesco, depicts a world gone crazy, “the collapse of reality”. This play was followed by The Lesson (La leçon, 1951 ), The Chairs (Les chaises, 1952 ), The New Tenant (Le nouveau locataire, 1953 ), The Future in the Eggs (L'Avenir est dans les œufs, 1957 ), The Selfless Assassin (Tueur sans gages, 1959 ), The Rhino (Rhinocéros, 1959 ), The Air Pedestrian (Le pieton de l'air, 1962 ), The King Dies (Le roi se meurt, 1962 ), “Thirst and Hunger” (La soif et la faim, 1964 ), “Macbett” (Macbett, 1972 ), “The Man with the Suitcases” ( 1975 ), and “Traveling among the Dead” (Le voyage chez les morts, 1980 ). Ionesco also wrote the novel Lonely (Le solitaire, 1974 ) and several series of children's books.

Creed

Situations, characters and dialogues of his plays follow rather the images and associations of sleep than everyday reality. With the help of amusing paradoxes, clichés, sayings and other word games, language is freed from its usual meanings and associations. Ionesco plays come from street theater , commedia dell'arte , circus clownery , films by C. Chaplin , B. Keaton , Marx brothers , antique comedy and medieval farce - you can find the origins of his dramaturgy in many genres, and not only stage ones - they lie, for example, in limerics and “shanding” ^[7] , in Bruegel's “Proverbs” and Hogarth's paradoxical pictures. A typical technique is a pile of objects threatening to swallow actors; things gain life, and people turn into inanimate objects. "Ionesco Circus" is a term quite often applied to his early dramaturgy. Meanwhile, he recognized only the indirect connection of his art with surrealism ^[8] , more readily with dada .

Eugene Ionesco insists that with his work he expresses an extremely tragic worldview. His plays caution against the dangers of a society in which individuals run the risk of becoming members of an equidae family (Rhinoceros, 1965 ^[9] ), a society in which anonymous killers roam (Unselfish killer, 1960), when everyone is constantly surrounded by the dangers of the real and the transcendental world (Air Pedestrian, 1963 ^[10] ). The “ eschatology ” of the playwright is a characteristic feature in the worldview of “frightened Pentecostals” ^[11] , representatives of the intellectual, creative part of society, which has finally recovered from the hardships and upheavals of the world war. The feeling of bewilderment, disunity, surrounding well-fed indifference and following the dogmas of rational humanistic expediency was alarming, giving rise to the need to bring the average person out of this humble indifference, forced to predict new troubles. Such a worldview, says Schwab-Felich, is born in transitional periods, “when the feeling of life is shocked” ^[12] . The expression of anxiety, which was presented in the plays of E. Ionesco, was no more perceived as a fad, a game of delusional imagination and an extravagant, shocking puzzle, which fell into the reflective panic of the original. The works of Ionesco were removed from the repertoire. However, the first two comedies - “The Bald Singer” (1948, antiphys) and “Lesson” (1950) - were later resumed on the stage, and since 1957 they have been walking every night in one of the smallest halls in Paris - La Juchet. Over time, this genre found understanding, and not only in spite of its unusualness, but also through the convincing integrity of the stage metaphor.

E. Ionesco proclaims: “ Realism , socialist or not, remains outside of reality. It narrows, discolors, distorts it ... It depicts a person in the future reduced and alienated. The truth is in our dreams, in our imagination ... A true being only in myth ... ” ^[13]

He suggests addressing the origins of theatrical art. The most acceptable are the performances of the ancient puppet theater, which creates implausible, roughly caricatured images in order to emphasize the rudeness, grotesqueness of reality itself. The playwright sees the only possible way for the development of modern theater as a specific genre, different from literature, namely in the hypertrophied use of primitive grotesque means, in bringing the techniques of conditionally theatrical exaggeration to extreme, “cruel”, “intolerable” forms, in the “paroxysm” of comic and tragic. He seeks to create a “ferocious, unrestrained” theater - a “cry theater”, as some critics describe it. It should be noted at the same time that E. Ionesco immediately proved himself as a writer and expert on the scene of outstanding talent. He is endowed with the undoubted talent for making any theatrical situations “visible”, “tangible”, with an extraordinary power of imagination, now gloomy, sometimes capable of evoking homeric laughter with humor ^[11] .

The representative of the paradox theater Eugene Ionesco, like Becket , does not destroy the language - their experiment comes down to puns, they do not jeopardize the very structure of the language. Playing with words (“verbal balance”) is not the only goal. The speech in their plays is intelligible, “organically modulated,” but the thinking of the characters appears inconsistent (discrete). The logic of common sense is parodied through compositional means. These plays are full of allusions, associations that provide freedom of interpretation. The play broadcasts a multidimensional perception of the situation, allows its subjective interpretation. Some critics come to approximately such conclusions, but there are almost polar ones, which are reasoned by quite convincing arguments, in any case, what was said above clearly contradicts what was observed in the first play. It is no coincidence that Ionesco gives her the subtitle “tragedy of the tongue”, apparently hinting at an attempt to destroy all its norms here: abstruse phrases about dogs, fleas, eggs, wax, and glasses in the final scene are interrupted by muttering individual words, letters and meaningless phrases. “A, e, and, o, y, a, e, and, o, a, e, and, y,” shouts one hero; “B, s, d, f, f, l, m, n, p, p, s, t ...” the heroine echoes. This destructive function of the performance in relation to language is also seen by J.-P. Sartre (see below). But Ionesco himself is far from solving such narrow, particular problems - this is rather one of the tricks, a “starting” exception to the rule, as if demonstrating the “edge”, the boundary of the experiment, confirming the principle designed to facilitate the “dismantling” of the conservative theater. The playwright tries to create, in his words, “an abstract theater, pure drama. Anti-thematic, anti-ideological, anti-socialist, anti-bourgeois ... Find a new free theater. That is, a theater freed from preconceived thoughts, the only one capable of being sincere, to become an instrument of research, to discover the hidden meaning of phenomena ” ^{[11] [14]} .

Early Pieces

The heroes of the “Bald Singer” ( 1948 , first staged by the Noctambul Theater - 1950 ) are exemplary conformists . Their consciousness, caused by cliches, imitates the spontaneity of judgments, sometimes it is scientific, but internally it is disoriented, they are deprived of communication. The dogma, the standard phraseological set of their dialogues are meaningless. Their arguments are only formally subordinate to logic, a set of words makes their speech similar to the boring monotonous cramming of students studying a foreign language. Ionesco prompted the writing of the play, according to him, classes in English. “I faithfully copied phrases taken from my manual. After carefully reading them, I did not learn English, but amazing truths: that there are seven days in a week, for example. This is what I knew before. Or: “the floor below, the ceiling above”, which I also knew, but I probably never thought about it seriously or perhaps forgot, but it seemed to me as certain as the rest, and just as true ... ” These people are material for manipulation, they are ready for the resonance of an aggressive crowd, a herd. The Smiths and Martens are the rhinos of Ionesco's further dramatic experiences.

However, E. Ionesco himself rebels against the "learned critics" who see the "Bald Singer" as an ordinary "anti-bourgeois satire." His plan is more "universal." In his eyes, the "petty bourgeois" are all those who "dissolve in the social environment", "obey the mechanism of everyday life", "live with ready-made ideas." The heroes of the play are conformist humanity, regardless of which class and society it belongs to ^[14] .

The logic of the paradox in E. Ionesco is transformed into the logic of the absurd. Perceived initially as an amusing game, it could resemble the innocent play of M. Cervantes “Two Chatterboxes” if the action uncompromisingly, with all its development, did not involve the viewer in the deformed space of the Ultima Thule of the disturbed system of categories and the stream of conflicting judgments - a life completely devoid of a spiritual vector. Those who are facing the unfolding phantasmagoria can only, fenced by irony, keep in reserve the guidelines of "habitual self-awareness."

French critic Michelle Corvin writes:

Ionesco beats and destroys in order to measure what sounds empty, to make the language a theater subject, almost a character, to make him laugh, act as a mechanism, this means breathing madness into the most banal relationships, destroying the foundations of bourgeois society.

In “Victims of Duty” ( 1952 ), characters who humbly comply with any requirements of those in power, law enforcement systems are loyal, respectable citizens. By the will of the author, they undergo metamorphoses, their masks change; one of the heroes, with his relative, policeman and wife, is doomed to endless searches that make him a “victim of duty” - finding the right spelling of the name of the imaginary wanted ... Performing any duty to any “law” of social life, humiliates a person, kills his brain , primitivizes his feelings, turns a thinking creature into an automaton, into a robot, into a semi-animal.

Achieving the maximum effect, Eugene Ionesco “attacks” the usual logic of thinking, leads the viewer into a state of ecstasy by the absence of the expected development. Here, as if following the precepts of a street theater, he demands improvisation not only from the actors, but also makes the audience bewildered to look for developments in the scene and outside it. Problems that were once perceived as another non-figurative experiment begin to acquire qualities of relevance.

The concept of “Victims of debt” is not accidental. This play is a writer's manifesto. It covers both the early and late works of E. Ionesco, is confirmed by the whole course of the playwright's theoretical thought in the 50-60s ^[11] .

Reproducible characters, endowed with all the “realistic” qualities, are deliberately caricatured by the absence of any empirical certainty. Actors constantly transform images, unpredictably changing their manner, dynamics of performance, instantly moving from one state to another. Semiramis in the play "Chairs" (1951) now appears as the wife of an old man, then as his mother. “I am your wife, so your mom is now,” she tells her husband, and the old man (“man, soldier, marshal of this house”) climbs onto her lap, whimpering: “I am an orphan, an orphan ...”. “My baby, my orphan, orphan, orphan,” says Semiramis, caressing him. In the theatrical program for The Chairs, the author formulated the idea of ​​the play: “The world sometimes seems to me devoid of meaning, the reality is surreal. It was this feeling of unreality ... I wanted to convey with the help of my characters who wander in chaos, having nothing but fear, remorse ... and consciousness of the absolute emptiness of their life ... ” ^[15] .

Similar "transformations" are characteristic of the dramaturgy of E. Ionesco. Either Madeleine, the heroine of the “Debt of Duty” is perceived as an elderly woman walking along the street with a child, then she participates in the search for Mallot in the labyrinths of consciousness of her husband Schuber, introducing him as a guide and at the same time studying him as an outside spectator, crammed with reviews of Parisian theater critics scourging Ionesco.

A policeman who came to Schuber makes him look for Malo, since Schuber made it clear that he was familiar with this very (or other) Malo. The same policeman correlates with Schuber's father, personifying conscience. The hero “rises” in his memoirs, climbing the pyramid of chairs on the table, falls; in pantomime, he sinks into the depths of his memory, and in order to “close” the holes in it, he chews countless slices of bread ...

There are various interpretations of this outlandish clowning. Serge Dubrovsky , followed by Esslin, sees the play as a mixed formula of Freudianism and existentialism , and Schuber’s story as an abstracted “universal” thesis: man is nothing; forever in search of himself, undergoing endless transformations, he never reaches a true real existence. Others see “Victims of Duty” an evil parody of a realistic and psychological theater. Still others recommend that Ionesco not be taken seriously at all, since he may be parodying here both Freud , Sartre, and himself ^[11] .

Jean-Paul Sartre so characterizes the work of Eugene Ionesco:

Born outside France, Ionesco looks at our language as if from a distance. He reveals in him common places, routine. If we start from the “Bald Singer”, then there is a very sharp idea about the absurdity of the language, so much that I don’t want to talk anymore. His characters do not speak, but imitate in a grotesque manner the mechanism of jargon, Ionesco "from within" devastates the French language, leaving only exclamations, interjections, curses. His theater is a dream of language.

In one of the letters of 1957, the playwright talks about his path to fame: “Seven years have passed since the moment when my first play was played in Paris. It was a modest success, a mediocre scandal. In my second play, the failure was a little louder, the scandal is a bit bigger. And only in 1952, in connection with the “Chairs”, events began to take a wider spread. Every evening at the theater there were eight people, very dissatisfied with the play, but the noise caused by it was heard by a significantly larger number of people in Paris, throughout France, it reached the German border itself. And after the appearance of my third, fourth, fifth ... eighth plays, the rumor about their failures began to spread with gigantic steps. Outrage crossed the English Channel ... Passed to Spain, Italy, spread to Germany, moved by ship to England ... I think that if the failure spreads in this way, it will turn into a triumph ” ^[16]

Often the heroes of Eugene Ionesco are victims of generalized, illusory representations, prisoners of humble, law-abiding service of duty, a bureaucratic machine, executors of conformal functions. Their consciousness is disfigured by education, standard pedagogical ideas, mercantile spirit and prudish morality. They isolate themselves from reality by the ghostly well-being of the consumer standard ^[17] .

Can literature and theater really reflect the incredible complexity of real life ... We are experiencing a wild nightmare: literature has never been as powerful, sharp, intense as life; and today even more so ^[18] . To convey the cruelty of life, literature must be a thousand times more cruel, more terrible.

More than once in my life I was struck by a sharp change ... They begin to profess a new faith very often ... Philosophers and journalists ... begin to talk about the "truly historical moment." At the same time, you are present with a gradual mutation of thinking. When people cease to share your opinion, when it is no longer possible to agree with them, it seems that you are turning to monsters ... ^[19]

List of works

Pieces

• « Лысая певица » (La Cantatrice chauve), 1950
• Les Salutations, 1950
• «Урок» (La Leçon), 1951
• «Стулья» (Les Chaises), 1952
• Le Maître, 1953
• Victimes du devoir, 1953
• La Jeune Fille à marier, 1953
• Amédée ou Comment s'en débarrasser, 1954
• Jacques ou la Soumission, 1955
• «Новый жилец» (Le Nouveau Locataire), 1955
• Le Tableau, 1955
• L'Impromptu de l'Alma, 1956
• «Будущее в яйцах» (L'avenir est dans les Oeufs), 1957
• «Бескорыстный убийца» (Tueur sans gages), 1959
• «Этюд для четверых» (Scène à quatre), 1959
• Apprendre à marcher, 1960
• «Носорог» (Rhinocéros), 1960
• «Бред вдвоем» (Délire à deux), 1962
• «Король умирает» (Le roi se meurt), 1962
• «Воздушный пешеход» (Le Piéton de l'air), 1963
• «Жажда и голод» (La Soif et la Faim), 1965
• «Пробел» (La Lacune), 1966
• Jeux de massacre, 1970
• «Макбетт» (Macbett), 1972
• «Путешествие среди мертвых» (Le voyage chez les morts), 1980
• L'Homme aux valises, 1975
• Voyage chez les morts, 1980

Эссе, Дневник

• Nu, 1934
• Hugoliade, 1935
• La Tragédie du langage, 1958
• Expérience du théâtre, 1958
• Discours sur l'avant-garde, 1959
• Notes et contre-notes, 1962
• Journal en miettes, 1967
• Découvertes, 1969
• Antidotes, 1977

Лирика

• Elegii pentru fiinţe mici, 1931

Романы, рассказы и новеллы

• La Vase, 1956
• Les Rhinocéros, 1957
• Le Piéton de l'air, 1961
• «Фотография полковника» (La Photo du colonel), 1962
• Le Solitaire, 1973

Articles

• Есть ли будущее у театра абсурда? // Театр абсурда. Sat статей и публикаций. СПб., 2005. С. 191—195.

• Эсслин М. Эжен Ионеско. Театр и антитеатр // Эсслин М. Театр абсурда. Per. from English Г. Коваленко. — СПб.: Балтийские сезоны, 2010, с. 131—204
• Розовский М. Г. Изобретение театра. — М. : АСТ, 2010. — 565 с. — ISBN 978-5-17-064233-5 .

• Ленель-Лавастин А. Забытый фашизм: Ионеско, Элиаде , Чоран . — М.: Прогресс-Традиция, 2007.
• Сайт, посвящённый Ионеско
• Краткое содержание произведений Ионеско
• Eugene Ionesco
• Эжен Ионеско и Михаил Волохов
• Ilya Smirnov. "Forgotten Fascism." Theater of the absurd in the deck of the same suit
• Eugene Ionescu. Jerusalem Prize // Interview for L'Arche, March - April 1973
• Eugene Ionescu. Israel and Beyond // Figaro, October 29, 1973
• Eugene Ionescu. What I saw and heard in Israel // "Mond", February 1, 1975
• Eugene Ionescu. Abuse of the language // Figaro, August 31 - September 1, 1976