STAGE : Ionesco: The Shallowness of a Writer’s Fame

Saturday at 8 p.m., an “Evening With Eugene Ionesco” will take place at the James A. Doolittle Theatre to honor the playwright who was one of the prime players in the evolution of the Theater of the Absurd (as labeled by critic Martin Esslin). Ionesco is expected to be in attendance, and examples from his works (which include “The Bald Soprano,” “Exit the King” and “Jack or the Submission”) will be read by Rene Auberjonois, Bud Cort, Patty Duke, Fionnula Flanagan, Joe Frank, Arye Gross, Salome Jens, Tom Waits and Grace Zabriskie. (Information: (213) 462-3176 or (213) 465-1010.)

Ionesco has just published a new work of nonfiction, “La Quete Intermittente” (“The Intermittent Quest”). The following is a reprint of an exchange between him and French reporter Bruno De Cessole that appeared in the Paris Figaro Litteraire on Jan. 11.

Bruno De Cessole: You’re an internationally acclaimed writer whose plays are already part of the classic repertoire, yet after reading your (new) book, one has the impression that literary notoriety, which you once valued, means absolutely nothing anymore.

Eugene Ionesco: It means nothing. Well, to be exact, it’s a bit more complicated than that. On the one hand, I hate what is known as celebrity or notoriety, but on the other I’ve acquired some bad habits. If it were to disappear, if my name were forgotten, I’d be saddened. But it’s true that literature doesn’t mean much to me anymore. As a believer might say, it has not saved my soul. . . .

A lot of writers, however, even--or especially--agnostic ones, justify literature as a form of or substitute for immortality, not to say eternity.

It’s a bad substitute. In the first place, immortality is not eternity, and I’m in search of eternity--absurdly perhaps, but tirelessly. As you suggested, for a long time, literature was for me a substitute for the absolute that was missing from my life. It no longer serves.

I then tried to find serenity in painting and, to a degree, I found it. What I miss is the absolute, what Mircea Eliade called the sacred, that is, the real. For me, realism is not reality. Besides, what is reality? No one can say, not irrefutably.

We haven’t yet determined what is at the base of all matter, and realism is merely a literary school, much more false than the world of the imagination. The realistic writer is serving a cause, a circumstance that makes him tendentious and dishonest. Imagination doesn’t cheat. The poet doesn’t lie. He invents. Imagination dredges things up from the depths of the unconscious--images, symbols, signs that, in my view, come closest to what’s real.

In the last few years, I’ve tried to conceive of the inconceivable, cross the limits of the limitless. I’m storming heaven, which is stupid when one has no spiritual direction, which is patience. I’m calling the heavens’ bluff. I’m even trying to call God’s.

Years ago, when I began to write, I was gripped by great doubt. I remember saying to a critic, God exists or not. If he does, what’s the point of creating literature? If he doesn’t, what’s the point of writing? To put it differently, I should like to be anchored in the absolute. Throughout my life, I wrote play after play because I didn’t know how to do anything else, yet I always did so with the feeling that I might have done something else, might have become a monk, a Trappist monk, or a painter. . . .

Like your friend (E.M.) Cioran, you’re a mystic without idols, but, unlike him, you are desperately waiting for a sign from on high . ...

Yes, but Cioran says it with a lot more reserve, and more literature as well. He has the good fortune of clinging to something that shields him from the void: the (satisfying) sense of the well-written, the absoluteness of the semi-colon.

An absoluteness in which you no longer believe?

Precisely. Let me explain the title of my book, “The Intermittent Quest.” By “quest” I mean a spiritual quest, “intermittent” because I very often fall back into the swamp of literary vanities. For instance, in this book I rebel against those who attribute to others (Arthur Adamov, Samuel Beckett) the paternity of the theater of derision. It’s characteristic of my moments of weakness, when I revert to my anguish, which is more painful and acute in me than in others perhaps, and makes me forget the search for divinity.

Has literature been a diversion that momentarily distracted you from that anguish?

Yes, for a long time it was a diversion that provided a measure of contentment and with which I co-existed. Today, I try to extricate myself from it in order to return to my anguish. Because I’m under the impression that if I reach the depths of dereliction I may perhaps achieve some knowledge of God. . . .

Would you like to believe in predestination?

I’d like to believe in it, but I don’t know if I’m more of an Augustinian than a Jansenist. That’s my problem. On the other hand, I’m quite certain I have little time left for enlightenment of any sort. Without it, I settle for the small glimmers obtained from reading the Western mystics: (Johann) Eckart, John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila.

I sometimes wonder if the absurd, the irrationality of the world, are not justified--if they’re not a divine trial. Ever since “The Bald Soprano,” I’ve been aware of the reign of the absurd. I think I am a true son and heir to that English writer who said, “(Life) is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare and to a lesser degree Sophocles are the godfathers of the Theater of the Absurd. Like theirs, my vision of the world is tragic. I often think of a German philosopher’s phrase: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” How, from that starting point, can we accept existence? And once we do accept it, why does Evil triumph over Good? This battle has been raging since the beginning of history and it’s not over yet. The only hope is the Last Judgment. . . .

A constant in your discourse is this hope of divine encounter, but there’s also a yearning for roots, for childhood, for a time before the loss of innocence.

It’s true. I yearn for childhood. Mine was very happy. I’ll always remember the Romanian countryside, its roads edged with primrose in the spring--that April springtime when the world seems newborn, moist like a baby fresh out of its mother’s womb. I had the feeling that if I found the world beautiful it was because I was comparing it to some other place that it resembled, namely Paradise. I have this absurd idea that childhood retains a confused memory of a heavenly world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up for all children--not today’s children who suffer misery, disease and war. I was privileged.

With the onset of age, don’t you feel that you might be recapturing this childhood state?

I only have the feeling that, through writing (despite my distaste for it) and especially through painting, one can recapture something of the grace and innocence of childhood.

Since childhood, though, the world has always seemed abnormal to you--an object of continual amazement.

What I find most abnormal is the normal, the banal. All existence seems unbelievable, beginning with my own. That’s what’s anguishing--to ask myself: “Who put me here?” At the same time, I’m afraid to get out. I don’t know if I’ll find anything on the other side. . . .

Love will have been the one irrefutable constant in your life.

Yes, there are two irrefutable constants: mystical experience, such as that of St. John of the Cross--but who can follow in his footsteps? One can only follow him from afar, at his peaks. And then there is something that serves as a consolation (prize) for living this life of anguish and terror, and that’s love. Affection. Without them, without the persons I cherish, I could not have lived. I would have been dead long ago. Having said that, I cling to one hope in my despair: If this kind of love is possible, then it must be that divinity is possible too. Profane love is a sign of divine love. I still have what (the poet Charles) Peguy called “that little girl Hope” to sustain me.

As a child, I wanted to be a saint, but having realized that sainthood was not within my reach, I wanted to be a writer, to become Victor Hugo, whom I (now) despise as the archetype of the Man of Letters.

I then clung to this paltry ambition, to the literary glory that I coveted, not knowing what to cling to but aware that this illusion would dissipate like the others and that I’d find myself back in the throes of anguish and the void.

Sometimes I tell myself that the world is a huge practical joke God has played on humanity and that the only solution is to join in the game, to play and to laugh no matter what, in spite of mounting catastrophes and cadavers. I am, alas, not able to laugh all the time and I very quickly slump back into what constitutes the average of my days: sadness, anxiety, the emptiness of this world where only love and art will have allowed me to survive.

Translated by Sylvie Drake.