Eugène Ionesco

Eugène Ionesco: The Man Who Heard the Phrasebook

At forty, Eugène Ionesco set out to learn English from an Assimil textbook. Copying out its dialogues, he found himself, as he put it, "discovering some astonishing truths such as the fact that there are seven days in a week, that the ceiling is up and the floor is down." The couple exchanging these certainties in the book were called Mr. and Mrs. Smith. He kept them, put them on a stage, and accidentally started a revolution in European theatre.

Slatina, and the Light in the Village

He was born Eugen Ionescu on 26 November 1909 in Slatina, Romania, to an Orthodox Christian father and a mother of French and Romanian background whose ancestry was later disputed. Much of his childhood was spent in France, and one afternoon there supplied the emotional engine for everything he wrote. Walking through a sunlit village, he experienced an overwhelming luminosity and a sensation of floating — followed by the crash: the recognition that the real world, by comparison, was full of decay, corruption and meaningless repetitive action. That sentence is the whole of his theatre in miniature. His parents divorced and he returned to Romania in 1925.

Bucharest and *Nu*

He attended Saint Sava National College and then read French literature at the University of Bucharest from 1928 to 1933, qualifying to teach French. The friendships he made there — with Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade — lasted the rest of his life. He began as a critic and poet in Romanian, and his first book, *Nu* ("No," 1934), was an attack on the reigning Romanian poets; *Hugoliade* (1935) was a satirical demolition of Victor Hugo. Even at twenty-five, the instinct was to puncture. He married Rodica Burileanu in 1936 and had a daughter, Marie-France. He returned to France in 1938, was caught out by the war, and resettled permanently in France in 1942, sitting out the rest of it in Marseille and then Paris.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

*La Cantatrice chauve* was written in 1948 and staged in 1950. It has no plot, no psychology and no soprano, bald or otherwise; it consists of English suburbanites exchanging phrasebook platitudes until language itself comes apart in their mouths. Britannica's term for it is the one that stuck: an "antiplay." The premiere failed. What saved it was advocacy from Jean Anouilh and Raymond Queneau, who understood that the joke was not a joke about the English but about everyone. Since 1952 the play has run continuously at the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris, which gives it the world record for uninterrupted staging — a piece about the meaninglessness of repetition, repeated nightly for over seventy years.

The Short Violent Plays

He worked fast in the early 1950s and mostly in one act. *The Lesson* and *The Chairs* both came in 1951, *Victims of Duty* in 1952, *The New Tenant* in 1953. They are compact, escalating machines. In each, an ordinary situation is taken at face value and pushed until it detonates: language turns to gravel, and something quietly savage happens at the end. This is the sequence that made his name and established the form critics would soon be calling absurdist.

Bérenger

The full-length plays brought a recurring figure. Bérenger — semi-autobiographical, baffled, decent — carries what Ionesco described as wonderment and anguish at the strangeness of reality. He meets death in *The Killer* (1958); he watches everyone he knows turn into a rhinoceros in *Rhinoceros* (1959); he is dethroned by his own mortality as King Bérenger I in *Exit the King* (1962). *Rhinoceros* is the play that made him internationally famous and it is not abstract at all: it is his horror of ideological conformism, drawn directly from watching the fascist Iron Guard sweep through Romania in the 1930s and seeing intelligent friends convert. The cycle continued through *A Stroll in the Air* (1962), *Hunger and Thirst* (1966) and *Macbett* (1972).

The Academician

The outsider became an institution. He was elected to the Académie française in 1970, took the Austrian State Prize for European Literature the same year and the Jerusalem Prize in 1973, and was nominated eight times for the Nobel Prize in Literature without ever winning it. He wrote a novel, *The Hermit*, in 1975, and an opera libretto, *Maximilien Kolbe*, in 1987; after *Voyage chez les morts* in 1981 the plays effectively stopped. He resisted the philosophical apparatus that critics attached to him, rejecting the existentialist label and claiming kinship instead with 'Pataphysics and Surrealism, revering André Breton. On his real subject he was blunt: "Death is our main problem and all others are less important... the only inescapable alienation; it gives us a sense of our limits." He died on 28 March 1994, aged eighty-four, and is buried at Montparnasse. The Romanian Academy, which he had needled as a young man, made him a member posthumously in 2009.

Why Eugène Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a perceptual discovery rather than an intellectual system, and it is worth being exact about what he noticed. Ionesco realised that ordinary language, transcribed faithfully and left alone, is already deranged — that the platitudes people exchange to reassure each other are, on inspection, terrifying. Nobody had built a theatrical form on that before. Britannica's assessment is that his work "inspired a revolution in dramatic techniques and helped inaugurate the Theatre of the Absurd," and Martin Esslin's naming of that movement put him with Beckett, Genet and Adamov as its founders. The craft underneath is comic: pacing, repetition, the escalating gag, an ear for cliché so exact that audiences laugh before they understand why. *Rhinoceros* then proved the method could carry real political weight, turning the memory of the Iron Guard into an image no argument could match.

The counter-case is substantial. Ionesco produced no theory of consequence and actively rejected the philosophy critics hung on him; the intellectual scaffolding of the Theatre of the Absurd was Esslin's construction, built on Camus, not his. His gift was closer to a comedian's than a thinker's — timing, an ear, and one childhood sensation of luminous emptiness that he restaged for forty years. He was passed over for the Nobel eight times. And a fair reader will note that the central device of his most famous play is a single sustained joke, however brilliant. What answers all of this is durability: the joke has been running at the Huchette since 1952, and *Rhinoceros* still explains, better than most political science, how decent people join a mob.

Legacy

Ionesco changed what a play was permitted to be. After him, a dramatist no longer needed plot, coherent character or consistent language to hold a theatre, and the licence he took has been drawn on by dramatists ever since. His plays are still staged constantly, in part because the diagnosis has not dated: the small talk is still meaningless, the objects still multiply, and people still turn into rhinoceroses in groups. He arrived from Romania as a provincial critic who wrote a book called *No*, and ended under the dome of the Académie française — a career that was itself faintly absurd, which he would have appreciated.

Achievements

• Commander of the National Order of Merit
• Jerusalem Prize — 1973
• Austrian State Prize for European Literature — 1971
• Officer of the Legion of Honour
• Notable work: The Chairs
• Notable work: Rhinoceros
• Notable work: The Killer
• Notable work: The New Tenant