Eugene Ionesco : I have never succeeded
Eugene Ionesco
Notes On My Theatre
I HAVE NEVER SUCCEEDED
I have never succeeded in becoming completely used to existence, neither to that of the world, nor to that of others, nor above all to my own. I sometimes feel that forms are suddenly emptied of their content, reality is unreal, words are only noises stripped of all meaning. These houses, the sky, are only facades of nothingness; people seem to move automatically, without any reason; everything seems to evaporate, everything is threatened - including myself-by an imminent, silent sinking into I know not what abyss, beyond day and night. By what sorcery can all this still exist ? And what does all this mean, this appearance of movement, this appearance of light, these kinds of things, this kind of world ?
And yet, I am here, surrounded by the halo of creation, unable to grasp the smoke, understanding nothing, disoriented, torn away from I know not what which makes me feel that I have nothing. I contemplate myself, see myself attacked by incomprehensible suffering, nameless regrets, objectless remorse, a sort of love, a sort of hate, by a semblance of joy, by a strange pity (for what, for whom?). I see myself torn by blind forces, rising from the depths of me, struggling among themselves in a desperate conflict without issue; I am identifying with one or another of these forces, and yet I realize fully that I cannot belong entirely to one or the other (what do they want of me?), for obviously I cannot know who I am, nor why I am.
No happening, no particular magic can astonish me, no logical sequence of thought can convince me (no interest in culture), no one thing can seem more unusual than another, for all things are leveled, drowned in universal implausibility and strangeness. Existing and using a language seem inadmissible to me. Those who do not feel that existence is senseless can find, within existence, that this or that alone is sensible, logical, false, right. For me, existence seems unimaginable, but on the inside of existence anything is conceivable. No personal frontier can separate for me the real from the unreal, the true from the false; I have no criterion, no preferences. I feel that I am there, at the outermost limit of being, a stranger to historical development, not at all "in it," dazed, immobilized in that primordial stupefaction. All doors are closed to me, or perhaps they have all disappeared, as have all walls and all distinctions.
No doubt, what I have just said only represents the most extreme point of my state of mind, the truest. I am alive in spite of everything. And I sometimes write ... plays, for example. I have been asked to say what I think of the theatre. What precedes may appear to have no connection, therefore, with the subject. As a matter of fact, I have the impression that I have only spoken of the subject, that I have not stopped speaking of it for a moment. Yes and no, however. The theatre, as well as literature or any other manifestation of cultural life, only interests me moderately, does not touch me completely; I attach no great value to what is communicable, or rather to what is already communicated, exterior to the development of things, to actions, to action.
For me, the theatre-mine-is most often a confession; I only make avowals (incomprehensible to the deaf, but that can't be helped), for what else can I do? I try to project upon the stage an inner drama (incomprehensible to myself) telling myself, nevertheless, that since the microcosm is an image of the macrocosm, it may happen that this torn up, disarticulated inner world is in some way the mirror or the symbol of universal contradictions. No intrigue, then, no architecture, no enigmas to solve but the insoluble unknown, no personalities, but characters without identity (they become, at each moment, the opposite of themselves;
they take the place of others and vice-versa), simply a continuity without continuity, a fortuitous sequence without relation of cause to effect, inexplicable adventures or emotional states, or an indescribable but living tangle of intentions, of movements, of passions without unity, plunging into contradiction. It may appear tragic, it may appear comic, or both at once, for I am unable to distinguish the one from the other. I only wish to translate universal implausibility and strangeness, my universe.
All the same, perhaps I might establish certain differences; when I look attentively at something which seems to appear from the outside, and from which I am detached, then the precariousness of creation, the behavior of creatures, that of humans, their language which I seem to see, and which is hermetic for me, or empty, and somehow arbitrarily invented, their undertakings, everything falls apart, turns to nonsense, inevitably becomes laughable or burlesque, painful, and it is from this existential void that comedies may be born.
When, on the other hand, one lets his own phantoms grow, along with the remains of dark colors, of passions as violent as they are incoherent, which still cling to them, one knows that
these contradictions will destroy each other in their vehemence, giving birth to drama. I feel myself, then, carried away by the dramatic movement. But since stories are never interesting, I dream of finding theatrical projects in their pure state, and of reproducing them in pure scenic movements.