Barbara Kraft - Light Between the Shadows: A Conversation with Eugene Ionesco

The Light Between the Shadows:

A Conversation with Eugene Ionesco

By

Barbara Kraft

TWO BIRDS PRESS

Mammoth Lakes, California

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE SHADOWS: A CONVERSATION WITH EUGENE IONESCO, Copyright 2012 by Barbara Kraft. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the author.

An excerpt of this interview was first published in the Canadian Theatre Review, 1981

AISN number: A1UV9BTC927AFP

Book design by Laurie Collins
Editing by Diane Eagle Kataoka for Two Birds Press

Two-Birds-Press.com

PO Box 7274

Mammoth Lakes, CA 93546

Public Domain Text illustrations: Paul Klee, from the-athenaeum.org/art/ and commons.wikimedia.org, in chronological order:

Actors Mask (1924) Page 6

Ghost of a Genius (1922) Page 11

Three Gentle Words of a Fool (1925) Page 16

Adam and little Eve (1921) Page 19

Wild animal Under a Spell (1939) Page 23

Listening Angel (1939) Page 28

The Virtue Wagon (1922) Page 33

The Future (1933) Page 38

Intoxication (1939) Page 43

Child playing (1938) Page 47

The Light Between the Shadows:

A Conversation with Eugene Ionesco

Introduction

Staged all over the world during the 1960s and 1970s, Ionescos plays were once among the most performed works in the theatrical repertoire. With his plays The Bald Soprano , The Lesson and The Chair , he helped inaugurate a new type of theatre, which came to be known as theatre of the absurd. Ionescos theatre, which included Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Arthur Adamov, was a theatre that posed a problem; it was not a theatre of entertainment. The problem they dealt with was the existential condition of man, his despair, the tragedy of his destiny, the ridiculousness of his destiny, the absurdity of his destiny, the existence of God.

When asked by a New York Times journalist in 1988 to list his compatriots in the Theatre of the Absurd, Ionesco named Beckett, Genet, Adamov and Shakespeare. Shakespeare? Shakespeare is the King of the Theatre of the Absurd, Ionesco stated. Macbeth, for example, says that the world is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That is the pure definition of the Theatre of the Absurd and perhaps of the world. Shakespeare was the great one before us.

His place was between God and despair. Another interesting problem is the existence of a God, a divinity, as Beckett writes about in Waiting for Godot. Man without God, without the metaphysical, without transcendence is lost. Not surprisingly, he went on to criticize American realistic and naturalistic theatre as nave and simpleminded.

Ionescos work characteristically combines a dream or nightmare atmosphere with grotesque, bizarre and whimsical humor. His first play, Bald Soprano (1950), satirizes the deadliness of bourgeois society frozen in meaningless formalities. Ionesco referred to his plays as anti-plays; it was Martin Esslin who dubbed the work Theatre of the Absurd.

Ionescos first three-act play was Amde (1954), which portrays the lonely, bitter life of a couple that share their apartment with a corpse, a symbol of the duos dead love. As the play progresses, the corpse grows to gigantic proportions.

Ionesco subsequently created a character named Berenger, a simple sort of Everyman, who is also an image of himself; Berenger appears in five of his plays, including the classic Rhinoceros (1959) and Exit the King (1962). In Rhinoceros , his breakthrough play in English, totalitarianism (Nazism and fascism) is depicted as a disease that turns human beings into savage rhinoceroses. The hero Berenger stands alone watching his friends turn into horned beasts. In Exit the King , the four-hundred-year-old King Berenger confronts and comes to terms with his death. Some of the dialogue includes various characters observing that at the beginning of his reign the population was nine thousand million, but now there are only a thousand old people and they are dying as we speak.

On the occasion of the 1980 international symposium and celebration of his work held at the University of Southern California, Ionesco gave an opening talk. He also wrote an article for the USC Chronicle. The following are a few excerpts:

Culture cannot be separated from politics. The arts, philosophy, and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationships to allow for the development of life in society. But, in our time, politics have overtaken all other manifestations of the human spirit Developing as they have by trampling on mans other activities, they have made men mad. Politics have become nothing more than a senseless struggle for power that mobilizes and monopolizes all the energies of modern man.

We know very well that Western humanism is bankrupt. We also know very well that the leaders of the Eastern countries no longer believe in Marxism. Absolute cynicism and a great biological vitality are all that remain of the Easts revolutionary faith and all that keeps its leaders in power active in the struggle

for power and world supremacy . Life has become, then, a deadly combat without scruple, since all ideologies and moralities have vanished; a combat for the conquest of the planet and its material riches.

At the end of his talk, he refers to one of Dostoevskys characters, who says that if God does not exist, then all is permissible. Therefore, Ionesco writes, we are now in search of permanent foundations of behavior that will once again moralize politics. The crisis is fundamental. Its a quest of human survival and humanity survives only through culture and culture is the expression of our continuity and of our multi-secular identity across time and space. He continues saying that culture is learned behavior and is transmitted by members of a given society to its offspring through the medium of artistic, scientific, religious and philosophical traditions, political and technical customs and the thousand mores that characterize daily life.

For Ionesco, politics lie, while art, true art, cannot lie. Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysical community.

Interview

The following conversation took place in May 1980 at the University of Southern California where Monsieur Ionesco participated in a three-day symposium devoted to and in honor of his work.

B ARBARA KRAFT: There is an old saying that fame always comes for the wrong reasons. Do you think your audience understands your work and salutes you with knowledge of what youre really saying?

EUGENE IONESCO : Its a very complex problem. Commentators of writers works generally express their own problems and their own obsessions through analyzing the work of a writer. And what concerns my work my first plays were very favorably commented on by the leftist critics and strongly criticized by the rightist critics. The critics of the left, thinking that my plays were basically a criticism and satire of the bourgeois, therefore liked my works. And thats the basic reason why the critics of the right did not like them at all. When the critics from the left noted that my works dont deal at all with that particular satire of the little bourgeois, they also stopped liking my works. For that same reason the critics of the right started liking my works more and more. In reality, to say the truth, left and right are not any more points of view valid for any criticism. Theres no meaning at being at the extreme right or the extreme left.