Ionesco's Berenger: Existential Philosopher or Philosophical Ironist?

Ionesco's Berenger: Existential Philosopher or Philosophical Ironist? PATRICIA RIGG The four Berenger plays together present a central irony in the Berenger character- he enthusiastically imagines greatness for the human race while he is ironically skeptical that humanity, with all its finite limitations, can ever experience greatness to any degree. Sometimes Berenger's hopes take the form of social aesthetics, sometimes ideological and political reforms; sometimes he expresses faith in the transcendent powers of human love, sometimes in the ultimate spiritual worth of the human soul. Berenger endorses human potential, but this endorsement is always undermined by a subtle but pervasive undermining of potential, for although we do not see Berenger fail, we do not see him succeed either. We respond, thus, to the paradox which arises out of the ambiguity of success and failure, a paradox that demonstrates quite well the combination of Romanticism and irony which specifies Romantic or philosophical irony. To the Romantic Ironist, the universe is an infinitely changing chaos of growth and process to be embraced joyfully and wholeheartedly, but one's joy dissipates as it develops because one is always aware that one is, in the end, a finite creature with creative abilities limited by the very humanity one would celebrate. Awareness of these two simultaneous movements, one a creative process and one a de-creative or undermining process, compels the artist who is a Romantic lronist to create a fictional situation to reveal the complexity of such a universe. Friedrich Schlegel describes this universe as "organized chaos," because abundance and process exist for the sake of abundance and process. "Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.'" Berenger assumes a basically ironical stance because he is always in process, in a state of ontological "becoming" rather than "being." As a writer of the avant-garde theatre, Ionesco is often thought to have Existentialist leanings, which implies an emphasis on existence and an anxiety that arises out of awareness of a terrible nothingness to Modern Drama, 35 (1992) 538 Ionesco's Berenger 539 which all possibilities are linked. However, the Berenger plays show progressively greater emphasis on the transcendental powers of a lively creative imagination, a movement away from existence to essence. Berenger in The Killer, through Rhinoceros andA Stroll in the Air, until his death in Exit the Killg becomes increasingly more complex - more Romanticist in his belief in the creative potential of the imagination and more ironic in his awareness of the finite limitations of that imagination. In each play, Berenger strives to reconcile this basic contradiction, to rise above his world - literally, in A Stroll - to achieve a kind of spiritual growth which is ultimately stunted by his finitude. It is this striving which defmes Berenger as process, not product, and the four plays are the "process" of delineating process or becoming. Echoes of Schlegel abound in these plays which work as romantic fragments, each part of a whole which is also a fragment, indeterminate and resisting closure: "Think of something fmite molded into the infmite," suggests Schlegel, "and then you think of man.'" Representing process is an artistic paradox, a celebration of creativity and imaginative insights into infinity tempered by doubt that one can ever express what seems to be limitless in one sense and limited in another. The skepticism which pulls Ionesco back into this state of doubt seems to be linked to the social order or structure we try to impose on an everchanging universe and our willingness to perceive these structures as stable and permanent. To demonstrate the irony of these misconceptions, Ionesco presents. the figure of a man who is essentially realistic or mimetic in his anxieties and fears, but the playwright undermines this mimesis through theatrical devices which emphasize the fictional qualities of the situation. In fact, Ionesco delights in creating a world contrived, fantastical, and often terribly difficult to produce theatricaliy, a world limited only by the playwright 's imagination and not by any attempt to fall within the bounds of probability. Berenger is a victim of outrageous circumstances which offer as reality within the framework of the play principles governing the genre of romance - the hero facing...