L’Homme aux valises: Ionesco’s Absolute Stranger

L'Homme aux valises: Tonesco's Absolute Stranger Rosette Lamont On Saturday, November 29. 1975, the day of the opening of his new play, L'Homme aux valises, Eugene Ionesco granted an interview to Francoise Varenne of Le Figaro.In the course of a meandering, allusive, if not elusive, conversation, the playwright declared: "It is one of my pleasures to toy with what is most serious, even awesome." Nothing could define more clearly lonesco's recent dramatic work, and in particular this play, his most tragic and, at the same time, most anarchically comic creation. L'Homme aux valises is a dream play. As such it is projected out of linearity onto the vertiginous spiral of the time/space continuum. This does not mean, however, that the atmosphere is unreal, vaguely symbolist ; on the contrary, it is characterized by that peculiar sharpness and vividness of detail which is inherent to the dream state. In the latter, we are not surprised to meet our ancestors and talk with them as though they were contemporaries, and we can be at the same instant in Paris and Venice simply because Paris is Venice and Venice Paris. As Jung explains : "Dreams . . . are the facts from which we must proceed."' lonesco, who is deeply indebted to Jungian analysis, is aware that he is working with archetypes. In this play, however, he is conscious of dealing with what he calls "cultural archetypes." Jung defines the archetype as a pre-existent form that is part of an inherited structure of the psyche. He compares the form of a primordial image to the axial system of a crystal. The archetype is a facultas praeformandi,a form which can be filled with content only when the conscious mind brings the material of experience to bear upon the psyche. Jung states that, although "the self is the principle and archetype of orientation and meaning," 2 it is essential for the individual to emerge out of personal myth, and rejoin the collec21 tive unconscious on the deeper levels of the psychic life, that is in those regions that can be considered "the world." The way both into the outer and the inner unknown is perilous and slow. To go beyond the personathe mask worn by the actors we pose as in our confrontations with society -requires the assistance of the mandala, the magic circle which appears before us, or rather arises out of us, whenever we find ourselves in situations of psychic confusion. In Lamism and Tantric Yoga, the mandala is an instrument of contemplation , as Jung found out when, after drawing a strangely Chineselooking design which he called "Window on Eternity," he received from a friend the manuscript of a Taoist-alchemical treatise entitled The Secret of the Golden Flowerwhich was so close to his own cryptogram that he welcomed it as a confirmation of synchronicity. In both drawings, the psychiatrist recognized a center, a golden castle, marked by a cross radiating into four parts. It is in these parts that we find constellations of archetypes which represent a pattern of order. The archetypal image which is not ourselves appears to us to instruct the self in objectivity, in psychic reality. Jung stresses that the archetype is not "an inactive form, but a real force charged with a specific energy." 3 These mysterious figures cannot be disregarded for they are able to tell us things we do not know; they are psychagogues, ghostly gurus. The fact that the unconscious personifies itself may be uncomfortable for those who like to feel in control of themselves, but the very autonomy of unconscious contents allows us to differentiate ourselves from our subconscious. Above all, it is important to develop techniques of dealing with dream images, to become directly aware of the ideas they try to communicate. For the dramatist, lonesco tells us. the process ought to be a familiar one since dreams are a sort of dramatic enactment in which we play at one and the same time the roles of director, writer and actor. The flow from subconscious to conscious mind can also be reversed; a dream can be concretized upon the stage, and address the audience in a much more direct...