Against Interpretation (17 page)

Ionesco’s discovery of the cliché meant that he declined to see language as an instrument of communication or self-expression, but rather as an exotic substance secreted—in a sort of trance—by interchangeable persons. His next discovery, also long familiar in modern poetry, was that he could treat language as a palpable thing. (Thus, the teacher kills the student in
The Lesson
with the word “knife.”) The key device for making language into a thing is repetition. This verbal repetition is dramatized further by another persistent motif of Ionesco’s plays: the cancerous, irrational multiplication of material things. (Thus: the egg in
The Future Is in Eggs;
the chairs in
The Chairs;
the furniture in
The New Tenant;
the boxes in
The Killer;
the cups in
Victims of Duty;
the noses and fingers of Roberta II in
Jack;
the corpse in
Amédée, or How to Get Rid of It.
) These repeating words, these demonically proliferating things, can only be exorcised as in a dream, by being obliterated. Logically, poetically—and not because of any “ideas” Ionesco has about the nature of individual and society—his plays must end either in a
da capo
repetition, or in incredible violence. Some typical endings are: massacre of the audience (the proposed end of
The Bald Soprano
), suicide (
The Chairs
), entombment and silence
(The New Tenant
), unintelligibly and animal moans
(Jack),
monstrous physical coercion (
Victims of Duty
), the collapse of the stage (
The Future Is in Eggs
). In Ionesco’s plays, the recurrent nightmare is of a wholly clogged, overrun world. (The nightmare is explicit with respect to the furniture in
The New Tenant,
the rhinoceroses in Rhinoceros.) The plays therefore must end in either chaos or non-being, destruction or silence.

These discoveries of the poetry of cliché and of language-as-thing gave Ionesco some remarkable theatrical material. But then ideas were born, a theory about the meaning of this theater of meaninglessness took up residence in Ionesco’s work. The most fashionable modern experiences were invoked. Ionesco and his defenders claimed that he had begun with his experience of the meaninglessness of contemporary existence, and developed his theater of cliché to express this. It seems more likely that he began with the discovery of the poetry of banality, and then, alas, called on a theory to bulwark it. This theory amounts to the hardiest clichés of the criticism of “mass society,” all scrambled together—alienation, standardization, dehumanization. To sum up this dreadfully familiar discontent, Ionesco’s favorite word of abuse is “bourgeois,” or sometimes “petty bourgeois.” Ionesco’s bourgeois has little in common with that favorite target of Leftist rhetoric, although perhaps he has adopted it from that source. For Ionesco, “bourgeois” means everything he doesn’t like: it means “realism” in the theater (something like the way Brecht used “Aristotelian”); it means ideology; it means conformism. Of course, none of this would have mattered were it merely a question of Ionesco’s pronouncements on his work. What mattered is that increasingly it began to infect his work. More and more, Ionesco tended to “indicate” shamelessly what he was doing. (One cringes when, at the end of
The Lesson,
the professor dons a swastika armband as he prepares to dispose of the corpse of his student.) Ionesco began with a fantasy, the vision of a world inhabited by language puppets. He was not criticizing anything, much less discovering what in an early essay he called “The Tragedy of Language.” He was just discovering one way in which language could be used. Only afterward was a set of crude, simplistic attitudes extracted from this artistic discovery—attitudes about the contemporary standardization and dehumanization of man, all laid at the feet of a stuffed ogre called the “bourgeois,” “Society,” etc. The time then came for the affirmation of individual man against this ogre. Thus Ionesco’s work passed through an unfortunate and familiar double phase: first, works of anti-theater, parody; then, the socially constructive plays. These later plays are thin stuff. And the weakest in all his oeuvre are the Bérenger plays—
The Killer
(1957),
Rhinoceros
(1960), and
The Pedestrian of the Air
(1962)—where Ionesco (as he said) created in Bérenger an alter ego, an Everyman, a beleaguered hero, a character “to rejoin humanity.” The difficulty is that affirmation of man cannot simply be willed, either in morals or in art. If it is merely willed, the result is always unconvincing, and usually pretentious.

In this, Ionesco’s development is just the reverse of Brecht’s. Brecht’s early works—
Baal, In the Jungle of Cities
—give way to the “positive” plays which are his masterpieces:
The Good Woman of Setzuan, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Mother Courage.
But then—quite apart from the theories they espouse—Brecht is simply a much greater writer than Ionesco. To Ionesco, of course, he represents the arch-villain, the arch-bourgeois. He is political. But Ionesco’s attacks on Brecht and the Brechtians—and on the idea of a politically committed art—are trivial. Brecht’s political attitudes are, at best, the occasion for his humanism. They allow him to focus and expand his drama. The choice Ionesco insists on, between political affirmation and affirmation of man, is spurious, and dangerous besides.

Compared with Brecht, Genet, and Beckett, Ionesco is a minor writer even at his best. His work does not have the same weight, the same full-bloodedness, the same grandeur and relevance. Ionesco’s plays, especially the shorter ones (the form for which his gifts are most suited), have their considerable virtues: charm, wit, a nice feeling for the macabre; above all, theatricality. But the recurrent themes—identities slipping out of gear, the monstrous proliferation of things, the gruesomeness of togetherness—are rarely so moving, so appalling, as they might be. Perhaps it is because—with the exception of
Jack,
where Ionesco lets his fantasy have its head—the terrible is always, somehow, circumscribed by the cute. Ionesco’s morbid farces are the boulevard comedies of the avant-garde sensibility; as one English critic has pointed out, little really separates Ionesco’s whimsy of conformity from Feydeau’s whimsy of adultery. Both are skillful, cold, self-referring.

To be sure, Ionesco’s plays—and writings about the theater—pay strenuous lip service to the emotions. Of
The Bald Soprano,
for instance, Ionesco says that it is about “talking and saying nothing because [of] the absence of any inner life.” The Smiths and the Martins represent man totally absorbed in his social context, they “have forgotten the meaning of emotion.” But what of the numerous descriptions which Ionesco gives in
Notes and Counter Notes
of his own inability to feel—an inability which he regards as rescuing him from being, rather than turning him into, a mass man? It is not protest against passionlessness which moves Ionesco, but a kind of misanthropy, which he has covered over with fashionable clichés of cultural diagnosis. The sensibility behind this theater is tight, defensive, and riddled with sexual disgust. Disgust is the powerful motor in Ionesco’s plays: out of disgust, he makes comedies of the distasteful.

Disgust with the human condition is perfectly valid material for art. But disgust for ideas, expressed by a man with little talent for ideas, is another matter. This is what mars many of Ionesco’s plays and makes his collection of writings on the theater irritating rather than amusing. Disgusted with ideas as one more foul human excrescence, Ionesco flails about in this repetitious book, at once assuming and disavowing all positions. The unifying theme of
Notes and Counter Notes
is his desire to maintain a position that is not a position, a view that is no view—in a word, to be intellectually invulnerable. But this is impossible, since initially he experiences an idea only as a cliché: “systems of thought on all sides are nothing more than alibis, something to hide reality (another cliché word) from us.” By a sickening glide in the argument, ideas somehow become identified with politics, and all politics identified with a fascistic nightmare world. When Ionesco says, “I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics,” he is expressing his anti-intellectualism rather than a position about politics. This can be seen with special clarity in the most interesting section in the book (pp. 87–108), the so-called London Controversy, an exchange of essays and letters with Kenneth Tynan, representing ostensibly a Brechtian point of view, which first appeared in the English weekly
The Observer
in 1958. The high moment of this controversy is a noble and eloquent letter from Orson Welles, who points out that the separation between art and politics cannot emerge, much less prosper, except in a certain kind of society. As Welles wrote, “Whatever is valuable is likely to have a rather shopsoiled name,” and all freedoms—including Ionesco’s privilege to shrug his shoulders at politics—“were, at one time or another, political achievements.” It is not “politics which is the arch-enemy of art; it is neutrality … [which is] a political position like any other.… If we are doomed indeed, let M. Ionesco go down fighting with the rest of us. He should have the courage of our platitudes.”

What is disconcerting about Ionesco’s work is, then, the intellectual complacency it sponsors. I have no quarrel with works of art that contain no ideas at all; on the contrary, much of the greatest art is of this kind. Think of the films of Ozu, Jarry’s
Ubu Roi, Nabokov’s Lolita,
Genet’s
Our Lady of the Flowers
—to take four modern examples. But the intellectual blankness is one (often very salutary) thing, intellectual surrender is another. In Ionesco’s case, the intellect that has surrendered is not interesting, relying as it does on a view of the world that sets up an opposition between the wholly monstrous and the wholly banal. At first we may take pleasure in the monstrousness of the monstrous, but finally we are left with the banality of banality.

[
1964
]

Reflections on
The Deputy

T
HE
supreme tragic event of modern times is the murder of the six million European Jews. In a time which has not lacked in tragedies, this event most merits that unenviable honor—by reason of its magnitude, unity of theme, historical meaningfulness, and sheer opaqueness. For no one understands this event. The murder of the six million Jews cannot be wholly accounted for either in terms of passions, private or public, or of error, or of madness, or of moral failure, or of overwhelming and irresistible social forces. Some twenty years after, there is more controversy about it than ever. What happened? How did it happen? How could it have been allowed to happen? Who are responsible? This great event is a wound that will not heal; even the balm of intelligibility is denied to us.

Yet, if we did know more, that would not suffice. In saying this event was “tragic,” we allow other demands than those for factual historical understanding. By tragic, I mean an event—piteous and terrifying in the extreme—whose causation is supercharged and overdetermined, and which is of an exemplary or edifying nature that imposes a solemn duty upon the survivors to confront and assimilate it. In calling the murder of the six million a tragedy, we acknowedge a motive beyond the intellectual (knowing what happened and how) or the moral (catching the criminals and bringing them to justice) for comprehending it. We acknowledge that the event is, in some sense, incomprehensible. Ultimately, the only response is to continue to hold the event in mind, to remember it. This capacity to assume the burden of memory is not always practical. Sometimes remembering alleviates grief or guilt; sometimes it makes it worse. Often, it may not do any good to remember. But we may feel that it is
right,
or fitting, or proper. This moral function of remembering is something that cuts across the different worlds of knowledge, action and art.

We live in a time in which tragedy is not an art form but a form of history. Dramatists no longer write tragedies. But we do possess works of art (not always recognized as such) which reflect or attempt to resolve the great historical tragedies of our time. Among the unacknowledged art forms which have been devised or perfected in the modern era for this purpose are the psychoanalytic session, the parliamentary debate, the political rally, and the political trial. And as the supreme tragic event of modern times is the murder of the six million European Jews, one of the most interesting and moving works of art of the past ten years is the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961.

As Hannah Arendt and others have pointed out, the juridical basis of the Eichmann trial, the relevance of all the evidence presented and the legitimacy of certain procedures, are open to question on strictly legal grounds. But the truth is that the Eichmann trial not only did not, but could not have conformed to legal standards only. It was not Eichmann alone who was on trial. He stood trial in a double role: as both the particular and the generic; both the man, laden with hideous specific guilt, and the cipher, standing for the whole history of anti-Semitism, which climaxed in this unimaginable martyrdom.

The trial was thus an occasion for attempting to make comprehensible the incomprehensible. To this end, while the impassive bespectacled Eichmann sat in his bullet-proof glass cage—tight-lipped, but for all that like one of the great shrieking but unheard creatures from the paintings of Francis Bacon—a great collective dirge was enacted in the courtroom. Masses of facts about the extermination of the Jews were piled into the record; a great outcry of historical agony was set down. There was, needless to say, no strictly legal way of justifying this. The function of the trial was like that of the tragic drama: above and beyond judgment and punishment, catharsis.

The very modern feeling for due process which the trial appealed to was no doubt genuine, but the ancient connections between the theater and the courtroom went deeper. The trial is preeminently a theatrical form (in fact, the very first account in history of a trial comes from the drama—it is in the third play,
The Eumenides,
of Aeschylus’ trilogy, the
Oresteia
). And as the trial is preeminently a theatrical form, the theater is a courtroom. The classical form of the drama is always a contest between protagonist and antagonist; the resolution of the play is the “verdict” on the action. All the great stage tragedies take this form of a trial of the protagonist—the peculiarity of the tragic form of judgment being that it is possible to lose the case (i.e., be condemned, suffer, die) and somehow triumph nonetheless.