EUGEN IONESCU AND THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY

Dascălu Mihaela
Şcoala de Arte şi Meserii Argetoaia, Jud. Dolj

“ I strive to cast on stage an inner drama (meaningless for me) , still telling myself that , inasmuch as
the microcosm is designed based on the image of the macrocosm , this inner world , hacked and disjointed ,
can happen to be the mirror or the symbol of universal contradictions.”
( Eugen Ionescu – Notes and counternotes 1962)
Born in 1909 in Romania , the son of a Romanian father and a mother of French origin , Eugen
Ionescu spent his childhood in France before returning to Romania at the age of thirteen, in order to attend
the secondary and university studies. A literary critic, poet, polemist, novelist and playwright, the young
writer , whose first language was French, experienced his double cultural identity in a conflictual manner ,
somehow feeling exiled in his native country.
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. 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 Ionescu 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.
Ionesco's characters seem like robots, often enslaved by the dictatorial will of an unseen
manipulator. From the beginning Surrealism and Dadaism influenced his work, especially Antonin Artaud's
Theater of Cruelty concept and the black humor of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Tristan Tzara. Also
Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and Beckett were important writers for him. His dramas deal with suffering, fear, and
destruction, the emptiness of polite conversation. "There are no alternatives; if man is not tragic, he is
ridiculous and painful, "comic" in fact, and by revealing his absurdity one can achieve a sort of tragedy,"
Ionesco once said. "In fact I think that man must either be unhappy (metaphysically unhappy) or stupid."
(Ionesco in the New York Times, June 1, 1958)
In The Killer (1960), which has been compared with Kafka's The Trial, Bérenger tracks down an
elusive murderer who destroys for the sake of destroying in a perfect neighborhood. At the end, Bérenger is
unable to escape the menace that has taken over the town. Ionesco has admitted that he often got ideas from
dreams. Language, with its clichés, is inadequate medium when portraying reality and many things in his
plays are left unexplained. His pessimism about the work of writers he expressed in 1970: "But for some
time now, science and the psychology of the subconscious have been making enormous progress, whereas
the empirical revelations of writers have been making very little. In these conditions, can literature still be
considered as a means to knowledge?" Ionesco was elected in 1970 to the Académie Française.
In terms of his linguistic identity , both Romanian and French (Eugen Ionescu was perfectly
bilingual) , this conflict bears comparison to that of Samuel Beckett (he himself perfectly bilingual). When
Samuel Beckett decided to write in French (in his condition of a self-exiled to France from his native
Ireland) he gave up a widespread language in favor of another widespread language , a language of
precision and great clarity , corresponding to a certain propensity for an intellectual ascesis of this writer
obsessed with the absurdity of the human condition. For Eugen Ionescu the passage to the French language
cannot only be a form of ascesis , as it is for Samuel Beckett, but on the contrary an enrichment at the level
of expression , the opening of new possibilities for his literary genius, a true creative bliss. From this point
of view Eugen Ionescu stands in opposition to Samuel Beckett.
His preference for drama, the most objective of literary genres, for expressing a restless subjectivity ,
continuously vacillating between the remembrance of a unique ecstasy and a desperate nihilism , doubled by
an intermittent search of God , confirms a seemingly paradoxical choice. Ionescu possessed what
Beaudelaire called “le gout passioné de l’obstacle”.
Eugen Ionescu’s vanguardism , so clear in his first French works, depends to a certain extent on his
Romanian identity or, rather on his desire to annihilate it, not in a pathetic manner , but through laughter,
through a destructive and at the same time purifying laughter , stemming from French cultural sources.
Therefore, in Ionescu’s psyche, Romania gave rise to a reaction of intolerance, of cultural rejection. This
kind of reaction can be the origin of his cultivating a Dadaistic absurd that makes use of hazard , but does
not generalize it. What had disappeared in Man With Bags (1977, L'Homme aux valises) and in Journeys
among the Dead (1980, Voyage chez les morts) is the vanguardist agresivity , the detachment from his
Romanian cultural identity. His last plays are characterized by a feeling of reconciliation – a difficult , even
impossible one. The unacceptable Romanian identity , that of his father , must also be integrated. The
vanguardist impluse that Eugen Ionescu experienced in his youth , directed against his Romanian identity
and agaiunst the negative myth of the Bourgeoisie (illustrated by his father) surrendered in front of the
awareness that ,after all, Romania is just like any other country.
The main idea of Eugen Ionescu’s view on literature has been reiterated, in similar ways , along the
years: the writer’s path towards the others, he believes, can only start with the search of the self, with the
investigation of the perplexities, the obsessions, of the most personal and profound dilemmas , used as a
means of communication and, in an ideal manner, of communion with the others.
Eugen Ionescu’s entire work reflects not only the identity conflict (cultural, linguistic, religious and
political) , but also the psychological conflict between the love for his mother and a profound ambivalence
towards his father and his native country. This complexity results in a work in which the comic and the
tragic, the skepticism and the spiritual quest constantly interweave into a work of incommensurate
originality.