Background

Eugène lonesco was born on November 26, 1912, in Slatina, Romania, to a French mother and a Romanian father. The following year the family moved to Paris, but soon after he was 12, they returned to Romania.

Education

Eugène Ionesco completed all of his secondary education in Romania and specialized in French at the University of Bucharest. From 1936 to 1938 Ionesco taught French in a secondary school in Bucharest.

Career

In 1938 Eugène Ionesco received a grant from the French government to study in France and write a thesis on Sin and Death in French Poetry Since Baudelaire. During the war, he worked as a proofreader for a Paris publishing house.

Ionesco became a playwright in a roundabout way. While learning English, he was struck by the emptiness of the clichéd language that kept appearing in his phrasebook and decided to write a play using nonsensical sentences. The Bald Soprano (1948) was a comic parody of a play, an "antiplay" as he called it, portraying human life as automatism and language as a senseless fragmentation of sentences. Mr. and Mrs. Smith uttered cliches, while the couple visiting them, the Martins, spoke to each other as though they were strangers until they realized that they shared the same home and child. The dialogue amongst the four eventually disintegrates into meaningless sounds. The idea was that a new vision of reality might occur to audiences if habitual patterns of rational thought were overthrown and presented, not just with arguments about the irrationality (or absurdity) of human existence, but with demonstrations of it. The language theme continued in Ionesco's second play, The Lesson (1951), with a professor tutoring a female student in subjects ranging from the logical constructs of mathematics to the less rigorous rules of language. As the language tutoring progresses, the professor became increasingly agitated, and in the end stabbed his student during a discussion of the word "knife." Critics, never at a loss for words, found that the circular structure of these two plays suggested Ionesco's pessimism.

In later plays, Ionesco used multiplying objects as his metaphor for the absurdity of life. In The Chairs (1952), an elderly couple served as hosts for an audience which would assemble to hear a speaker deliver a message that will save the world. The couple arranged seating for their never-to-arrive guests, and the stage became crowded with chairs. Convinced that their audience had arrived and was seated, the hosts killed themselves, leaving them to hear the speaker who turned out to be a mentally-impaired deaf-mute. In The Victims of Duty (1953), coffee cups multiplied, and in The New Tenant (1957), the protagonist's apartment became progressively filled with furniture.

Later in the 1950's, Ionesco wrote several plays featuring a modern-day Everyman named Berenger (Ionesco's self-image). The most famous of these and the one that wrote his name large in English-speaking theater was Rhinoceros (1959). In this play, totalitarianism transformed everyone into a savage rhinoceros except Berenger, who thinks about joining them but in the end decided to fight them. The inspiration for the play was Ionesco's reaction to a friend having joined the Nazi party, but its significance was in its denunciation of mindless conformity to a mob mentality. In winning the Jerusalem Prize in 1973 for his entire oeuvre, Rhinoceros was singled out as "one of the great demonstrations against totalitarianism." Berenger also appeared in The Killer (1958), Exit the King (1962), and A Stroll in the Air (1963).

During the next 20 years, Ionesco's predominant theme was the subject of death, in such plays as Hunger and Thirst (1964), in which the protagonist (Berenger again) tried to escape death as represented by his wife and child; in The Killing Game (1970) an epidemic has taken away the inhabitants of a village. According to one critic, for Ionesco death represented the threat of nothingness, the "quintessence of the Absurd."

Many of Ionesco's plays had a dream-like quality. People can be transformed into animals or change their identity; they walked in the air or continued to grow after death. Ionesco preferred a series of states of consciousness over traditional plots. These dream-like qualities became more prominent in later plays, such as L'Homme aux Valises (1975) and Journey Among the Dead (1980).

In all, Ionesco wrote 28 plays, some of which have been in constant performance since 1955. He also wrote several volumes of essays, criticism and he created illustrations for some of his works as well. During the last 10 years of his life, he devoted himself to painting and exhibiting his works.

Achievements

• Eugene Ionesco and his wildly innovative plays, among them "Rhinoceros," "The Bald Soprano" and "The Chairs," overturned conventions of contemporary theater and had a profound effect on a new generation of playwrights. He has been called the founder of the Theater of the Absurd.
  
  Elected to the Académie Française in 1970, Ionesco remains among the most important dramatists of the 20th century.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Amedee, The New Tenant, Victims of Duty

    (This crucial collection combines The New Tenant with Améd...)

  • Exit the King

    (First produced in 1963 starring Alec Guinness and success...)

    1973
  • The Bald Soprano and Other Plays

    (The leading figure of absurdist theater and one of the gr...)

    1982
  • Rhinoceros

    (The sublime is confused with the ridiculous in this savag...)

    1959
  • Exit the King, The Killer, and Macbett

    (Exit the King is a highly stylized, ritualized death rite...)

    1962
  • Fragments of a Journal 1987

Views

The popular plays of the Franco-Romanian author Eugène Ionesco protested the dehumanizing effects of modern civilization and depicted the despair of the individual who vainly seeks meaning for his or her existence.

Ionesco’s achievement lies in having popularized a wide variety of nonrepresentational and surrealistic techniques and in having made them acceptable to audiences conditioned to a naturalistic convention in the theatre. His tragicomic farces dramatize the absurdity of bourgeois life, the meaninglessness of social conventions, and the futile and mechanical nature of modern civilization. His plays build on bizarrely illogical or fantastic situations using such devices as the humorous multiplication of objects on stage until they overwhelm the actors. The clichés and tedious maxims of polite conversation surface in improbable or inappropriate contexts to expose the deadening futility of most human communication. Ionesco’s later works show less concern with witty intellectual paradox and more with dreams, visions, and exploration of the subconscious.

Quotations: "A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind."

"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."

"It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question."

"A man with a soul is not like every other man."

"A civil servant doesn't make jokes."

"I've always been suspicious of collective truths."

Membership

Ionesco was made a member of the Académie française in 1970.

• 

  Académie française

  1970

Personality

Eugène Ionesco visited Israel and made declarations in favor of the state on the eve of the Six-Day War. After it was over he wrote about his family history for the first time in the second volume of his memoirs, Présent Passé, Passé Présent (1968), a sequel to Le Journal en Miettes (1957, Fragments of a Journal, 1968), expressing a new awareness of his Jewish origin.

Interests

• theater

• Writers

  Ion Luca Caragiale

• Artists

  Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara

Connections

In 1936 Eugène Ionesco married Rodica Burileano. They had a daughter, Marie-France Ionesco, for whom he wrote a number of unconventional children's stories.

Father:

Eugen Ionesco Sr.

Eugen Ionesco was a non-Jewish lawyer.

Mother:

Marie-Thérèse Ipcar

Wife:

Rodica Burileano

Daughter:

Marie-France Ionesco

Friend:

Emil Cioran

Friend:

Mircea Eliade

References

• Eugene Ionesco
  2004
• Eugène Ionesco - Website