The Absurdity of Language in Eugene Ionesco s The Bald Soprano

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1 ISSN: 2348 5833 Kaur, Harwinder / Academic Deliberations (August 2016) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Available online on www.academicdeliberations.

1 1 ISSN: Kaur, Harwinder / Academic Deliberations (August 2016) Available online on Abstract: The Absurdity of Language in Eugene Ionesco s The Bald Soprano By Harwinder Kaur Department of English Kurukshetra University Haryana, India Eugene Ionesco s contribution to 20 th century French theatre is of vital significance to mankind as he aims at re-establishing an awareness of the human- condition. He describes the theatre as a place where the antagonistic worlds of the real and the imaginary collide. The study aims to analyze how Eugene Ionesco uses language as an incapable means of expressing the reality in his play The Bald Soprano. According to him, Beckett destroys language with silence and he

2 2 himself does it with too much language. Ionesco uses clichés, commonplaces, disjointed, repetitious and meaningless dialogues, purposeless and confusing situations to express the absurdity and futility of language. The play is a tragedy of the language of his time. Introduction: Eugene Ionesco is considered to be a new playwright of avant- garde because he does not incorporate the traditional and naturalistic theatrical conventions, rationality and logic. His contribution to the 20 th century French theatre is of vital significance to mankind as he aims at re- establishing an awareness of the human condition. He describes the theatre as a place where two antagonistic worlds of the real and the imaginary collide. The post- war drama has various features of disillusionment which have found expression in it. The dominant mood is uncertainty, the French inquietude, where man has become isolated and disillusioned due to war consequences; where abnormality has become normality; where man is lost in the search of his existence. Eric Bentley in an article in Theatre Arts (March 1950) says that French high brow theatre which from Gaston Baty onwards becomes a theatre of dreams unfavorable to Naturalism and all realism favorable to magic and other worldly vision (qtd in Lumley 18). Like surrealists, Ionesco believes in the virtues of subconscious and dreaming mind because he thinks of inwardness as the counter to the purely social realm, viewed by him as the source of fraud, lies, violence and emptiness. He protested against the art forms of conventional theatre which can no longer be convincing in a meaningless and purposeless post war world. He viewed language as incapable of expressing the inner reality. The surrealists, the pataphysicians, Alfred Jerry and Antonin Artaud exerted a great influence on Ionesco to make him the leading playwright of The Theatre of the Absurd in the 1950s.

3 3 Ionesco s attitude toward the German Bertolt Brecht was contemptuous. Brecht endeavored by using expressionist techniques to force the audience to judge the play as a play rather than to participate emotionally in the action. For Ionesco, on the other hand, the essential was to compel the actor to act forcing the spectator, against his will and judgment to participate in an act of imagination which his reason told him was absurd (Coe 15). According to the celebrated critical label, The Theatre of the Absurd, popularizes by Martin Esslin in his eponymous monograph of 1961, The Theatre of the Absurd, Ionesco was considered, together with Beckett, Adamov, Genet, Pinter etc. one of the main representatives of Existentialism. Esslin considered these playwrights as giving artistic expression to Albert Camus s existential philosophy, illustrated by his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, according to which life is inherently absurd. In fact, Esslin believed that the plays of Ionesco and Beckett expressed a deeper sense of void, absurdity and purposelessness than those of Sartre and Camus. The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being that is, in terms of concrete stage images (E sslin 25). According to Ionesco, language is incapable of representing the reality. He says that Beckett destroys the language with silence as exemplified in Waiting for Godot and he himself does it with too much language with characters talking at random and by inventing words. Ionesco s The Bald Soprano (1950) is a tragedy of language of his time. He came to the theatre by way of platitude. The play was performed for the first time in 1950 at the Theatre des Noctambules, under the direction of Nicolas Bataille. Ionesco called it an

4 4 anti- play and insofar as anti- theatre is a meaningful category, it is equally valid for his early plays (Hayman 33). These anti- plays lack plot in the traditional or realistic sense, consistent characters and conventional use of language. As Ionesco puts it in his article, Notes on my Theatre : As for me, sometime I should like to be able to strip dramatic action of all that is particular to it: the plot, the accidental characteristics of the characters, their names, their social setting and historical background, the apparent reasons for the conflict and all the justification, explanations and logic of the conflict (53). Instead, Ionesco s plays use disjointed, repetitious and meaningless dialogues, purposeless and confusing situations, exaggerated cruelties, obsessions, scenes of horror and morbid imagination to express modern feelings of alienation, nothingness and futility of language. The play The Bald Soprano illustrates the basic premise of the absurd in human affairs. It was not written intentionally for the theatre at all. It was merely a nameless bit of fun and a parody making fun of other plays. Ionesco said that the play was intended as a parody of human behavior and therefore a parody of theatre too. It was inspired by his own attempts to learn English by using an English- French conversational manual. It consists mainly of clichés of a foreign- language phrase book, and a series of meaningless conversation between two couples. Ionesco became very interested in the clichés and the characters whose conversations they were meant to represent. He realizes for the first time that social communication depends upon repetition of clichés. The characters Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Mr. and Mrs. Martin in the play are the same Smiths and Martins who exchanged commonplaces in the Assimil Manual. Even one section of the play was produced directly out

5 5 of this textbook dialogue. Ionesco shows acute understanding of the grotesqueness of human life. Commenting up the pointlessness of existence, he says: People drawing in meaninglessness can only be grotesque; their suffering can only appear tragic by derision (qtd in Esslin 23). The play was the ground breaker for the current avantgarde tradition on the stage. Ionesco uses the device of nonsense speech as a means of showing one aspect of the absurdity of everyday life through the breakdown of semantics. His original artistic impulse was his discovery of the poetry of banality and cliché. By extension and exaggeration the discovery of the poetry of cliché led to the senselessness and meaninglessness. His discovery of the cliché means that he declined to see language as an instrument of communication or self- expression. He treated language as a palpable thing. Writing about the play, the playwright said, What had happened was a kind of collapse of reality. The words had turned into sounding shells devoid of meaning. (Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes 187). Man must be stripped of all illusions in order to consciously face the tragedy of the human condition. For Ionesco, objective reality does not help to formulate our understanding. For him, the conceptual structure of reality is on the point of collapse. And his plays help to exaggerate this process of disintegration by making the spectator aware so as to produce the essential reality. He describes this idea in his autobiography: Every nation, every reality was emptied of its content. After this emptiness it was as if I found myself at the centre of pure ineffable existence I became one with the essential reality [ ] to feel the absurdity

6 6 or improbability of everyday life and language is already to have transcended it in order to transcend it you must first saturate yourself in it (qtd in Innes 216). In The Bald Soprano, the emphasis is on creating the pre- condition for this transcendence and it is this that explains the breakdown of language and the reduction of these logical concepts like time, by which we structure our lives, to farcical absurdity. Ionesco believes that the first step lies in the renewal of language, like revolution which will revitalize our comprehension of the absurdity of commonplace. The play shows how his devaluation of language is a magnification of the existing state of affairs. Our anxieties and illusions of the absurd become recognizable by reducing language to its proper function. According to Ionesco, the use of language in traditional theatre was to create the perfect illusion of man s reality. He uses language as a tool to express the futility of human assistance and no longer to make the spectator think, but to provoke him, to force him by the sheer violence of sound in prelinguistic state to react (Coe 42). The essential achievement in this work is that language embodies a whole new expression of our victimization as living beings. Clichés and distorted proverbs accumulate like a dead language in the play but they do not simply imply the impoverishment of the moral and emotional lives of those interchangeable identities, the Smith and the Martins. They point also to language as the mask and instrument of aggression and to social man as an aggressive and lubricious animal. The violence of the play is verbal and apparently non- sensible formulas, puns etc are weapons of aggression, not means of rational communication. Ionesco uses language at different levels or forms to demonstrate the existential predicament of an individual. The Bald Soprano is, in Esslin s view, basically an attack against what Ionesco has called

7 7 the universal petty- bourgeoisie the personification of accepted ideas and slogans ( 115). The play opens in a middle class English interior, furnished with typically English furniture and a typically English couple, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, whose first names remain unknown. In fact, it is a satire on the superficial material satisfaction of the bourgeois world. The existence of man in this state of language stagnation is best expressed through the characterization of Mrs. Smith. Surrounded by her platitudes and readymade expression, she becomes an alienated individual, a simple element of bourgeois civilization. Mrs. Smith: Goodness! Nine o clock. This evening for supper we had soup, fish, cold ham and mashed potatoes and good English salad, and we had English water. We had every good meal this evening. And that s because we are English, because we live in a suburb of London and because our name is Smith (BS 86). Ionesco has revised language from the status of a secondary medium to the status of an object in itself. Language is not used by the characters bur it is a language which uses characters as the tools. It is an object, a proliferating, senseless object, like the coffee cups in Victims of Duty and the chairs in The Chairs. The conversation between characters is a pretext for spending time. By talking about the purposeless things they want to maintain their illusion that their relations are normal. Being dead, words can communicate nothing. The Smiths, the Martins the maid and the fireman are unable to achieve an intellectual and logical discussion as one speaks, the others listen, but do not comprehend. They speak secondly. As a result words become voided of intelligence through statements made simultaneously by people speaking at cross purposes because of the confrontation of mutually closed worlds (Grossvogel 56). The decision

8 8 of the dramatist was to throw away every language and with the help of platitude, pantomime and exaggerated and violent gestures to give an insight into reality. Ionesco concluded his views in The Point of Departure : To feel the absurdity of the common place and of languageits falseness, is already to have gone beyond. To go beyond it we must first of all bury ourselves in it. What is comical is the unusual in its pure state; nothing seems more surprising to me than that which is banal the surreal is here, within group of our hands, in our everyday conversation (qtd in Singh 63). Ionesco illustrates that man needs language to survive and exist as human beings. Silence, the one alternative to language, does not provide a concrete solution. In The Bald Soprano, a world of silence produces consternation to the point where the Smiths and Martins become agitated and make anxious sounds in order to fill the void. Mr. Smith: Hm! (Silence) Mrs. Smith: Hm! Hm! (Silence) Mrs. Martin: Hm! Hm! Hm! (Silence) Mr. Martin: Hm! Hm! Hm! Hm! (Silence) (BS 97). Ionesco introduces two other elements to convey the futility and absurdity of life: the nonsensical and the pseudo- logical. The endless use of the nonsense illustrates the low level of intellect. It reveals to the audience that mental development through language is impossible. At the end, we find that language breaks down altogether where it is used almost physically. At this point, the sounds of language gain uncontrollable growth and communication exists only of sense

9 9 voided sounds leaving the characters as a function of language. The tension between the characters turns into a fierce fight by standing and shouting at each other, raising then fists and ready to hurl themselves at each other s throats. Mrs. Martin: You Cacklegobblers! You gobblecacklers! Mr. Martin: Cat s lick and pot s luck! Mrs. Smith: Krishnawallop, krishnawallop, krishnawallop! (BS118). Thus, Ionesco s encounter with modern theatre becomes a turning point. With the presentation of The Bald Soprano, he openly illustrates the tragedy of human life being reduced to mere automation dictated by bourgeois conventionalism and the mechanization of language. Ionesco attacks the world of pettybourgeois by the personification of accepted slogans and the common phrases. He reveals the existential predicament of human beings by pointing out the senselessness, irrationality, futility, absurdity and anguish. By attempting to express authenticity, man can get freedom from the victimization of commonplace, and hence, gains a new sense of individuality.

10 10 Works Cited: Coe, Richard N. Ionesco. Edinburg: Oliver and Boyd, Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3 rd London: penguin, ed. Grossvogel, D. Four Playwrights and a Postscript: Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet. New York: Cornell UP, Hayman, Ronald. World Dramatists: Eugene Ionesco. New York: Fredrick Unger, Innes, Christopher. Avant Garde Theatre, London: Routledge, Ionesco, Eugene. Notes and Counter Notes: Writing on the Theatre.Trans. Donald Watson. New York: Grove Press, Notes on my Theatre. Twentieth Century Theatre: A Source Book. Ed. Richard Drain. New York: Routledge, The Bald Sporano. Trans. Donald Watson. London: John Calder, Lumely, Fredrick. Trends in 20 th Century Drama. London: Rockliff, Singh, Ram Sewak. Absurd Drama, Delhi: Hariyana Prakashan, 1973.

THEATRE OF THE ABSURD. 1950s-1960s Europe & U.S.

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