A Reading of Ionesco's The Killer

A READING OF IONESCO'S THE KILLER .IN 1963 IONESCO GAVE A SERIES OF ANSWERS to the question, "Why does a writer write?" One of them was, "[I write] because I wish to understand the world; because I would place, at least for myself, a little order in that immense chaos."! Strange words to the ears of those who have come to believe that Ionesco shows us the chaos of the world by putting chaos onstage, who would agree, for instance, with the Dictionnaire de litterature contemporaine, which states that the theater of Ionesco is "the most perfect antithesis one could imagine to the theater of Sartre, where the thought always precedes the theatrical expression," and concludes, "Each play of Ionesco defies critical explication . . . to apply it . . . is to risk making oneself into one of Ionesco's own comic characters."2 This is quite false; Ionesco is not practising Dada, even in The Bald Soprano; his plays are just as well constructed to transmit ideas as Sartre's, but in a more sophisticated way. The way varies-in Rhinoceros it is very close to allegory; in The Killer, a much more complex work, it is a group of symbolic correspondences. Several of these have been identified in critical articles , generally within a comparative study of several plays, but there has not yet been an attempt to bring them all together and show that they make sense, or "order," together. With mild defiance of Ionesco's remarks about critics, I should like to make such an attempt. Ionesco insists that the audience see and understand for themselves, in the theater. Unfortunately, when audiences see The Killer, they tend to see a murder mystery, Agatha Christie somehow gone wrong, in which Berenger's best friend turns out to be the killer when he is found with the killer's tools and the police are in on the plot. All else, of course, must be abandoned to confusion-Berenger's Utopian dreams and loneliness in the role of crime fighter; the architect's multiple roles and intimate knowledge of Berenger; the fact that all tram lines end at the Radiant City, and so forth. So it becomes necessary to prove that characters and acts in the play carry symbolic overtones, to point out that while it is possible to see the killer as an individual criminal because he appears as such onstage, it must be noted that, first, he speaks no word, and second, the stage directions read, "Or 1 "L'auteur et ses problemes," Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, Oct.Dec . 1963, pp. 407-426. Translation mine. 2 Ed. Pierre de Boisdeffre (Paris, 1962), s.v. "Ionesco." Translation mine. 416 1968 READING The Killer 417 possibly there is no killer at all."3 He is Tueur sans Gages (the original title of the play), "killer without pay," and therefore, it is suggested, without purpose. He can be called insane, since that is the way we explain motiveless killing in 'Society, but then we force the play again into the form of beserk Agatha Christie. But Berenger's speeches are the main source for the symbolic enlargement of the action: Berenger sees himself, at least by the final scene, in combat not with a man but with a principle. His cry that a murderer has turned the Radiant City "into hell" (p. 63) can be taken as excited exaggeration if you want, but as he goes to the police station he says, "Once he's arrested ... the spring will come back for ever, and every city will be radiant" (p. 96), and in the finalcon~ {rontation he tells the killer, "You want to destroy the world" (p. 99). .Most clearly symbolic, and most provoking to a literal view of the action, are the briefcases.4 Why does the architect have a briefcase that is "like" the one Edouard has, and the drunkard, the old man, and Mother Peep each another "like" it-identical in appearance, so that Berenger mistakes one for the other? Every main character but Berenger,5 in fact, has a matching briefcase-why then doesn't he have one? The answer to these and other questions lie in the...