The Anti-Spiritual Victory in the Theater of Ionesco

THE ANTI-SPIRITUAL VICTORY IN THE THEATER OF IONESCO THE FRENCH DRA..'\IATISTS who began writing about 1950, baptized by M. Jean Duvignaud the "School of Paris," have sometimes been called "anti-theatrical," for they employ dramatic methods which are frequently opposed to those of the conventional theater. Writers like lonesco, Beckett, and the early Adamov wish to return to what might be called "pure theater," that is to say a type of theater employing means which are strictly theatrical and do not belong to the realms of philosophy , psychology, sociology or politics. One of the favorite devices of such a theater is the presentation of the author's views in a visual way, using space and movement rather than language. In Waiting for Godat, for example, the moral suffering of mankind is depicted physically by shoes which do not fit, hats which scratch, servants visibly attached to masters, and watches which do not run. In a play like Adamov's The Parody, the solitude and bewilderment of modem man are represented by a decor (including a clock without hands) which remains the same, but is constantly foreign because seen from different angles. In The Big and the Little Manoeuvre, a man's destruction by incomprehensible and impersonal forces is made more palpable by his loss of one limb after the other. The theater of lonesco is rich in examples of this phenomenon. In the essays he has published in various French periodicals, lonesco has described quite explicitly the feeling he is attempting to evoke by giving such undue importance to the physical aspects of his theater. There are two fundamental states of consciousness at the root of his plays, he ,tells us in "The Point of Departure" (Cahier des Quatre Saisons, August, 1955). One is that of evanescence, and the other that of heaviness or opacity. The latter feeling most often dominates, and we feel the universe crushing in upon us: Matter fills everything, takes up all space, annihilates all liberty under its weight; the horizon shrinks, and the world becomes a stifling dungeon. Speech crumbles, but in another way, words fall like stones, like corpses; I feel myself overcome by heavy forces against which I wage a losing battle. Such a "victory of anti-spiritual forces," of the dead thing over that which is alive, is expressed on many levels in the theater of lonesco. Setting and properties, language, characters, and structure, each contributes in a slightly different way to the impression of heaviness or opacity. 29 30 MODERN DRAMA May The first and most obvious level, that of physical objects, plays a particularly large role in the later comedies. In the earlier plays, The Bald Soprano (195O?), The Lesson (1950), and Jack or the Submission (1950), the stage is encumbered not with an oppressive amount of matter, but with fantastic characters and what one might call solidified language. In The Chairs (1951) the characters are more realistic, the language less absurd, and the accumulation of objects as a means of expressing solitude, uselessness and loss of liberty makes its appearance. The Old Man and the Old Woman, living in a dilapidated apartment on a lonely island, await the arrival of their guests to whom the Man will reveal his "Message" before the two leap to their deaths. The guests arrive and a chair is brought for each. The guests are, however, invisible , and soon the stage is cluttered with chairs, suggesting that even when people are present there is an absence of humanity and an overabundance of the object. The physical universe and society, in the form of the chairs, gradually accumulate between the two old people so that at the end of the play, as they leap from their respective windows at either side of the stage, there is no opportunity for them to meet again. The last guest to arrive is "His Majesty," and in spite of strenuous efforts to reach him, neither of the characters is able to get through the mass of chairs. The setting of the play also suggests the futility of life, and a lack of meaning, for there are ten doors in this small apartment , and the characters go in...