Eugene Ionesco and the Theater Absurd
If there is one show which is always in season and to which tickets are always complimentary, it is the theater of the mind. Lower the lids of your eyes and let rise the black velvet curtain of your inner world; look at the images, scenes, memories, fantasies and dreams that play before you. Aren't they wild? Aren't they wonderful? Don't they make you question how such a flotsam and jetsam can be arranged in an artful order, an order that can support such a complex thing as human civilization? One possible answer is through tyranny – tyranny that is subtle, tyranny that is brutish, but tyranny nevertheless.
Eugene Ionesco seems to think so, anyway. But who is Eugene Ionesco to have formed such a hard opinion? He was, according to the back of his collection, Four Plays, born in Romania before the year 1950; was "one of the leading exponents of the experimental European theater"; and was in the company of Samual Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Jean Vauthier. For some of you these names will have meaning; for others, none. It doesn't matter.
Yesterday I finished reading these four plays: The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, Jack, or The Submission, and The Chairs. I would recommend them if you desire a challenge; they require attention and offer grim rewards in exchange for your efforts. The characters are unlikeable; the language borders on nonsense; the plots are threadbare and the philosophy dark.
However, for all these attributes we must call the plays invigorating, because honestly, aren't we all a little tired of the pap that flows so smoothly from the streaming services? Don't we want a piece of rugged literary terrain to struggle on? Don't we desire to understand how the rules that bring us together in a society are tedious and arbitrary? Don't we want the perspective of a mind World War II has scarred and possibly mutilated? No?
If an ironclad contract holds together the reins of a culture to keep it from running off in all directions, then it is the role of the artist (for good or ill) to help us imagine what's possible when it breaks apart. The artist, in their way, must exert their own kind of tyranny.
In The Bald Soprano we watch two middle-class couples debase words from their meaning; they seem to go mad. A couple of other characters join (a Fire Chief, a Maid) and they, too, go mad. The whole world is unhinged. And yet, when sounds are liberated from sense, strange and surprising accidents occur: "Don't smooch the brooch!" says one character (the names do not matter); "Groom the bridgeroom, groom the bridegroom" responds another. I'm quoting from the end of the play; in the beginning, the characters speak about banalities and trivialities, like the fish they ate for dinner, which is, from the poet's perspective, language's grosser abuse. Why force "fish" to have its literal sense only? Why force ourselves into attitudes that do damage to our own sense of self? Any social structure requires that, in exchange for its benefits, we agree to bind our actions to its rules. Remove the nails that hold the two together, says Ionesco, and see what plays out.
Sometimes the rules to which we must conform are terrible, especially if the benefits are great. The next two plays, The Lesson and Jack, or The Submission focus more tightly on the idea that brainwashing and suppression are the necessary evils that keep the shelves stocked at grocery stores and smooth music piping through the speakers. Whatever we find recognizable in these plays is distorted as if in a funhouse mirror; the dominant forces that connect the ample selection at the grocery store to the atrocities at, say, Guantanamo are shown to be ridiculous, though still powerful, because who doesn't like to eat?
Just as Ionesco renders language and power as silly and nonsensical, so too does he show how the old standards of beauty, truth, knowledge and dignity may be complicit in upholding dubious ideologies; the carnival of praise that attends any sports hero, for example, shows how much we yearn to be saved, which leaves us open to the possibility of a "saving" tyrant – a fascist. By breaking free of the audience's expectations for comfortability and ease, Ioensco is able to suggest that everything we believe to be true and sane, could, in fact, be a demented fiction we all agree to play along with.
"Much madness is divinest Sense – / To a discerning eye", to quote the great Emily Dickinson.
Question, he seems to say, all the motives and methods of policy makers and powerful people, for it is their will that shapes the entertainment we consume, the books to which we have access, the ideas that we cast in the daily drama of our thoughts. Be wary of the iron hand, no matter what the style of glove that may contain it.
But far be it from me to prejudice you: Read these plays and decide for yourself.