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Eugen Ionescu
Eugène
Ionesco,
born
Eugen Ionescu (November
26, 1909 – March 28, 1994),
was a Romanian and French
playwright and dramatist, one
of the foremost playwrights of
the Theatre of the Absurd.
Beyond ridiculing the most
banal situations, Ionesco's
plays depict in a tangible way
the solitude and insignificance
of human existence.
Biographical information
Ionesco was born in Slatina,
Olt County, to a Romanian
father of the Orthodox religion
and a mother of French and
Greek-Romanian
heritage,
whose religion was Protestant
(the religion into which her
father was born and to which
her originally Greek Orthodox
mother
had
converted).
Eugène himself was baptized
into the Romanian Orthodox
religion. Many sources cite his
birthdate as 1912, this error
being due to vanity on the part
of Ionesco himself. He spent
most of his childhood in
France, and, while there.

Had an experience he
claimed
affected
his
perception of the world more
significantly than any other.
As Deborah B. Gaensbauer
describes in Eugene Ionesco
Revisited,
“Walking
in
summer sunshine in a whitewashed provincial village
under an intense blue sky,
[Ionesco] was profoundly
altered by the light.” He was
struck very suddenly with a
feeling of intense luminosity,
the feeling of floating off the
ground
and
an
overwhelming feeling of wellbeing.
When he “floated” back to the
ground and the “light” left him,
he saw that the real world in
comparison was full of decay,
corruption and meaningless
repetitive action. This also
coincided with the revelation
that death takes everyone in
the end. Much of his later
work, reflecting this new
perception, demonstrates a
disgust for the tangible world,
a distrust of communication,
and the subtle sense that a
better world lies just beyond
our reach. . Echoes of this
experience can also be seen in
references and themes in
many of his important works:
characters pining for an
unattainable "city of lights"
(The Killer, The Chairs) or
perceiving a world beyond (A
Stroll in the Air); characters
granted the ability to fly (A
Stroll in the Air, Amédée); the
banality of the world which
often leads to depression (the
Bérenger character); ecstatic
revelations of beauty within a
pessimistic
framework
(Amédée, The Chairs, the
Bérenger character); and the
inevitability of death (Exit the
King).
He returned to Romania with
his father in 1925 after his
parents divorced. There he
attended Saint Sava National
College, after which he studied
French Literature at the
University of Bucharest from
1928 to 1933 and qualified as
a teacher of French. While
there he met Emil Cioran and
Mircea Eliade, and the three
became lifelong friends.
In 1936 Ionesco married
Rodica Burileanu. Together
they had one daughter for
whom he wrote a number of
unconventional
children's
stories. He and his family
returned to France in 1938 for
him to complete his doctoral
thesis. Caught by the outbreak
of World War II in 1939, he
remained there, living in
Marseille during the war before
moving with his family to Paris
after its liberation in 1944.
Ionesco was made a member
of the Académie française in
1970 . He also received
numerous awards including
Tours Festival Prize for film,
1959; Prix Italia, 1963; Society
of Authors Theatre Prize,
1966; Grand Prix National for
theatre, 1969 ;
Monaco Grand Prix, 1969;
Austrian State Prize for
European Literature, 1970;
Jerusalem Prize, 1973; and
honorary doctorates from
New York University and the
universities
of
Leuven,
Warwick and Tel Aviv.
Eugène Ionesco died at age
84 on March 29, 1994, and is
buried in the Cimetière du
Montparnasse,
in
Paris.
Although
Ionesco
wrote
almost entirely in French, he
is one of Romania's most
honored artists.
Writing in Romania
Though best known as a playwright, plays
were not his first chosen medium. He started
writing poetry and criticism, publishing in
several Romanian journals. Two early writings
of note are Nu, a book criticizing many other
writers including prominent Romanian poets,
and Hugoliade, or, The grotesque and tragic
life of Victor Hugo a satirical biography
mocking Victor Hugo's status as a great figure
in French literature. . The Hugoliade includes
exaggerated retellings of the most scandalous
episodes in Hugo's life and contains
prototypes for many of Ionesco's later
themes: the ridiculous authoritarian character,
the false worship of language.
The origins of his first play
Like Samuel Beckett, Ionesco
came to the theatre late: he
did not write his first play until
1948 (La Cantatrice chauve,
first performed in 1950 with
the English title The Bald
Soprano). At the age of 40 he
decided to learn English using
the
Assimil
method,
conscientiously copying whole
sentences
in
order
to
memorize
them.Re-reading
them,he began to feel that he
was not learning English,rather
he was discovering some
astonishing truths such as the
fact that there are 7 days in a
week, that the ceiling is up
and the floor is down;
things which he already knew,
but which suddenly struck him
as being as stupefying as they
were indisputably true.
This feeling only intensified
with the introduction in later
lessons of the characters
known as "Mr. and Mrs.
Smith". To his astonishment,
Mrs. Smith informed her
husband that they had several
children, that they lived in the
vicinity of London, that their
name was Smith, that Mr.
Smith was a clerk, that they
had a servant, Mary, who was
English like themselves.
What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, he thought, was
her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for
truth. For Ionesco, the clichés and truisms of the
conversation primer disintegrated into wild caricature
and parody with language itself disintegrating into
disjointed fragments of words. Ionesco set about
translating this experience into a play, La Cantatrice
Chauve, which was performed for the first time in 1950
under the direction of Nicolas Bataille. It was far from a
success and went unnoticed until a few established
writers and critics, among them Jean Anouilh and
Raymond Queneau, championed the play.
Early plays
Ionesco's earliest works, and his most innovative, were one-act
nonsense plays: La Cantatrice chauve (1950), La Leçon translated
as The Lesson (1951), Les Chaises translated as The Chairs (1952),
and Jacques ou la Soumission translated as Jack, or: The
Submission (1955). These absurdist sketches, to which he gave
such descriptions as "anti-play" (anti-pièce in French) express
modern feelings of alienation and the impossibility and futility of
communication with surreal comic force, parodying the conformism
of the bourgeoisie and conventional theatrical forms. In them
Ionesco rejects a conventional story-line as their basis, instead
taking their dramatic structure from accelerating rhythms and/or
cyclical repetitions. . He disregards psychology and coherent
dialogue, thereby depicting a dehumanized world with mechanical,
puppet-like characters who speak in non-sequiturs. Language
becomes rarefied, with words and material objects gaining a life of
their own, increasingly overwhelming the characters and creating a
sense of menace.
The full-length plays
With Tueur sans gages translated as The Killer (1959; his second
full-length play, the first being Amédée, ou Comment s'en
débarrasser in 1954), Ionesco began to explore more sustained
dramatic situations featuring more humanized characters. Notably
this includes Bérenger, a central character in a number of Ionesco's
plays, the last of which is Le Piéton de l'air translated as A Stroll in
the Air.
Bérenger is a semi-autobiographical figure expressing Ionesco's
wonderment and anguish at the strangeness of reality. He is
comically naïve, engaging the audience's sympathy. In The Killer he
encounters death in the figure of a serial killer. In Rhinocéros he
watches his friends turning into rhinoceroses one by one until he
alone stands unchanged against this tide of conformism. It is in this
play that Ionesco most forcefully expresses his horror of ideological
conformism, inspired by the rise of the fascist Iron Guard in
Romania in the 1930s. Le Roi se meurt translated as Exit the King
(1962) shows him as King Bérenger 1st, an everyman figure who
struggles to come to terms with his own death.
Later works
Ionesco's later work has generally
received less attention. This includes La
Soif et la faim translated as Hunger and
Thirst (1966), Jeux de massacre (1971),
Macbett (1972, a free adaptation of
Shakespeare's
Macbeth) and Ce
formidable bordel (1973).
Apart from the libretto for the opera
Maximilien Kolbe (music by Dominique
Probst) which has been performed in
five countries, filmed for television and
recorded on CD, Ionesco did not write
for the stage after Voyage chez les
morts in 1981. However, La Cantatrice
chauve is still playing at the Théâtre de
la Huchette today, having moved there
in 1952.
Theoretical writings
Like Shaw and Brecht, Ionesco also contributed to the theatre
with his theoretical writings (Wellwarth, 33). Ionesco wrote
mainly in attempts to correct critics who he felt misunderstood his
work and therefore wrongly influenced his audience. In doing so,
Ionesco articulated ways in which he thought contemporary
theatre should be reformed (Wellwarth, 33). Notes and Counter
Notes is a collection of Ionesco's writings, including musings on
why he chose to write for the theatre and direct responses to his
contemporary critics.
In the first section, titled "Experience of the Theatre," Ionesco
claimed to have hated going to the theatre as a child because it
gave him "no pleasure or feeling of participation" (Ionesco, 15).
He wrote that the problem with realistic theatre is that it is less
interesting than theatre that invokes an "imaginative truth," which
he found to be much more interesting and freeing than the
"narrow" truth presented by strict realism (Ionesco, 15).
He claimed that "drama
that relies on simple
effects is not necessarily
drama
simplified"
(Ionesco, 28). Notes and
Counter
Notes
also
reprints a heated war of
words between Ionesco
and
Kenneth
Tynan
based
on
Ionesco's
above stated beliefs and
Ionesco's hatred for
Brecht and Brechtian
theatre.
Literary context
Ionesco is often considered a writer of the Theatre of the Absurd.
This is a label originally given to him by Martin Esslin in his book of
the same name, placing Ionesco along side such contemporary
writers as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov. Esslin
called them "absurd" based on Albert Camus' concept of the absurd,
claiming that Beckett and Ionesco better captured the
meaninglessness of existence in their plays than in work by Camus
or Sartre. Because of this loose association, Ionesco is often
mislabeled an existentialist. Ionesco claimed in Notes and Counter
Notes that he was not an existentialist and often criticized
existentialist figurehead Jean-Paul Sartre. Although Ionesco knew
Beckett and honored his work, the French group of playwrights was
far from an organized movement.
Ionesco claimed instead an affinity for Pataphysics and its creator
Alfred Jarry. He was also a great admirer of the Dadaists and
Surrealists, especially his fellow countryman Tristan Tzara. Ionesco
became friends with the founder of Surrealism, Andre Breton, whom
he revered. In Present Past, Past Present, Ionesco wrote, "Breton
taught us to destroy the walls of the real that separate us from
reality, to participate in being so as to live as if it were the first day
of creation, a day that would every day be the first day of new
creations." Raymond Queneau, a former associate of Breton and a
champion of Ionesco's work, was a member of the Collège de
’Pataphysique and a founder of Oulipo, two groups with which
Ionesco was associated.