Ionesco: Recherches identitaires (review)

More than half a century after the first production of Eugène Ionesco's Bald Soprano at the Théâtre des Noctambules in Paris (1950), when one might have thought that all had been said about Ionesco and his theater, Matei Calinescu's Ionesco: Recherches identitaires proves us wrong. The book's distinctive angle of examination, based on the writer's French and Romanian double identity, not only brings new information about Ionesco's biography but also proposes a fresh reading of his plays. By reweaving these two strands of Ionesco's life—his personal history, and his work—Calinescu provides a new and important evaluation of the writer's work and legacy.

The trajectory from the essayist and journalist Eugen Ionescu, born in Slatina, Romania in 1909, to Eugène Ionesco, the avant-garde playwright who became a French citizen in 1957 and entered the French Academy in 1970, is filled with tensions and confrontations that are deeply rooted in the fabric of the epoch and in that of the author's work. This was not the typical spiritual journey to Paris that Romanians used to undertake, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, as a ticket to Europe and a sign of membership in a highly discriminating cultural club. In Ionesco's case, as Calinescu's book convincingly proves it, the journey was a struggle for identity.

Developed in the first, theoretical chapter, "Eugen Ionescu/Eugène Ionesco: Entre deux mythes identitaires," the double-identity concept is examined through its psychoanalytical and mythical dimensions. What started as an aspect of a dysfunctional relationship between father (Romanian) and mother (of French and Jewish origin) becomes an incompatibility between the land of the father (Romania, where Ionesco was born) and that of the mother (France, his spiritual country) and translates to a series of myths and phantasms that underline the writer's creativity. But, as Calinescu argues throughout, the poles of Romanian and French identity are never uniquely positive or negative—and if one can make, for instance, a connection between the absurdism of Ionesco's first plays and the revolt against the country of the father, it is also true that the relationship with Romania continues spiritually, and at different degrees, all his life.

Taking the identity dilemma as the book's leading concept, Calinescu rereads most of Ionesco's work—a very familiar method for the author of a poetics of reading (Rereading, Yale University Press, 1993). Plays, diary entries, articles, essays, and memoirs are closely scrutinized in relation to the author's personal history and also to his status as a writer in the history of the twentieth century. The shifting angle of examination from history to politics and from linguistics to religion and ethnicity parallels the spiritual blend of Romanian and French that underlines Ionesco's creation. What adds even more depth to the present investigation is the fact that its author is also a Romanian-born intellectual who, like Ionesco but some thirty years later, was forced into exile, in his case by the Communist regime: both are witnesses and victims of "rhinoceritis" (the transformation of people into rhinoceros in Ionesco's Rhinoceros, 1960) as fascist and Communist diseases.

The rest of the book closely examines, in chronological order, a series of plays that make up key moments of Ionesco's confrontation of his double identity. In many cases, history plays a central role. For instance, in chapter 2, "Eugen Ionescu: Avant La Cantatrice chauve (1950)," Calinescu examines Ionesco's activity together with that of his generation. The political confusion of some of his colleagues is exemplified by the cases of Mircea Eliade and Émile Cioran and their involvement in the Romanian fascist movement. Yet, the sentimental ideological stance of Ionesco's friend Mihail Sebastian, whose Journal (published for the first time only in 1996) is also discussed in this book, sets the record straight about the turbulent events they were both subjected to and about Ionesco's ambiguous attitude toward his Jewishness.

Both Tueur sans gages (chapter 8) and...