"Dialogue is saturated with empty, worn-out clichés, platitudes, truisms, and nonsensical repetition" ❤️

Eugene Ionesco

#onhisbirthdaytoday

Language is broken, unreliable, and ultimately insufficient for meaningful human connection.

Words are “sounding shells devoid of meaning”.

Dialogue is saturated with empty, worn-out clichés, platitudes, truisms, and nonsensical repetition.

In the year 1950, Eugene Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano debuts in Paris, launching the theatrical move ment known as Theater of the Absurd.

In his play titled, Rhinoceros (1959), everyone except the main character is transformed into a rhinoceros; unable to join them, he decides to fight them. Set in a small French town in which every resident but the main character turns into a rhinoceros, this play is a meditation on conformity and the herd mentality.

Quite interestingly, we find that these ‘unstable identities’ were very much a rage back then during his time.

Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke features a protagonist who undergoes an unexplainable physical trans formation. In this respect, the novel is similar to other modernist masterworks such as Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (now streaming on OTT) and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

As his career progressed, Ionesco began to use multiplying objects as a metaphor for the absurdity of life. In one of his most acclaimed works, Les Chaises (1952; The Chairs), an elderly couple serves as hosts for an audience who assemble to hear a speaker deliver a message that will save the world. As the couple arranges seating for their guests, the stage becomes crowded with chairs. This image is symbolic of the irrational, foolish, or nonsensical.

With Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco is widely recognized as a defining play wright of the Theater of the Absurd. Ionesco’s originality largely consisted of his revolutionary rediscovery of language, which was influenced by his own rediscovery of language during his attempts to learn the English language.

While studying, Ionesco came to view modern perspectives on language as absurd, and his ridicule of this “language worship” would later become a common theme in his works. It is notable that one of Ionesco’s favorite authors was William Shakespeare, whom he considered to have been a precursor of the Theater of the Absurd.

Ionesco’s uniqueness lies in his innovative use of the stage to expose the inner world of anxiety, fear, and the profound feeling of being an isolated stranger in an incomprehensible universe, even while making his audience ‘laugh uncomfortably’!

Source: Gale’s Encylopedia of Literature