The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (Cambridge Introductions to Literature) by Michael Y. Bennett

Author:Michael Y. Bennett [Bennett, Michael Y.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-10-30T23:00:00+00:00

Eugene Ionesco

Born Eugen Ionescu in 1909 in Romania to an Orthodox Christian father and Protestant mother. Ionesco was raised primarily in France. After his parents divorced in 1925, he returned with them to Romania and eventually studied French literature at the University of Bucharest. He returned in 1938 to finish his doctoral thesis, after which he returned to Romania after the outbreak of WWII. In 1942 he returned to France, living first in Marseilles until he moved to Paris after the Liberation. Ionesco died in 1994 at the age of 84.

When I am casually asked, what is absurd literature, or I am teaching an introduction to absurd literature, I always begin by sharing the plot of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot: two men wait and engage in idle discourse for the entire play for someone named Godot, who never comes. First, this is the very play by the very writer who gave this organic “movement,” if you will, its wings. Second, it is considered one of the greatest plays ever written (though I would personally also include Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in that list along with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Hamlet, O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, and perhaps because of its influence on the shape of twentieth-century drama, Pirendello's Six Characters in Search of an Author). Third, if you took every absurd piece of literature and somehow morphed them together into a single work, Godot would probably most resemble that amalgamate piece of absurd literature. And fourth, Beckett and his Godot is the most likely writer and play (along with Virginia Woolf) to have been read, or at least heard of, by university-educated general readers. However, especially if my interlocutor(s) has not heard of Beckett or Godot, and if he or she (or they) has not read a good ten-plus examples of absurd literature, my natural follow-up to explaining a typical example of a plot of absurd literature is Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros: on an utterly normal day, out of the blue, a single rhinoceros runs through a small provincial French town; eventually more and more rhinoceroses run through town, and one by one, the townsfolk turn into rhinos, with only one man, the town's semi-drunk, left to save humanity.

Actually, there are many times when I question why I normally choose this play to serve as an example of the absurd, when Ionesco's use of the fantastical is, for the most part, a huge departure from other absurd writers. But I fall prey to giving (at least in a learned fashion) the general reader a simplified account of these plays and play somewhat into the semi-correct and semi-incorrect public imagination of the absurd by referring to Rhinoceros as a prime example of this genre of literature. What I mean, as I discussed at length in Chapter 1, is that so often the general educated reader thinks that the absurd is more or less the avant-garde, and some of the most notable works of avant-garde literature in the twentieth century are works that run counter to realism.

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