Modern Mind

obvious. Science had produced a cold, empty, dark world in which, as more details were grasped, the bigger picture drained away, if only because words were no longer enough to account for what we know, or think we know. Dignity has almost disappeared in
Godot,
and humour survives ironically only by grim effort, and uncertainly at best. Comforting though it is, Beckett can see no point to dignity. As for humour … well, the best that can be said is – it helps the waiting.
    Beckett and Genet both came from outside the French mainland, but it was Paris that provided the stage for their triumphs. The position of the third great playwright of those years, Eugène Ionesco, was slightly different. Ionesco was of Romanian background, grew up in France, spent several years in Romania, during the Soviet occupation, and then returned to Paris, where his first play,
The Bald Prima Donna,
was produced in 1950. Others followed in rapid succession, including
The Chairs
(1955),
The Stroller in the Air
(1956),
How toGet Rid of It
(1958),
The Killer
(1959) and
Rhinoceros
(1959). One of the biographies of Beckett was given the subtitle ‘The Last Modernist,’ but the title could have applied equally to Ionesco, for he was in some ways the perfect amalgam of Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Freud, Alfred Jarry, Kafka, Heidegger, and the Dada/surrealists. Ionesco admitted that many of his ideas for plays came from his dreams. 60 His main aim, he said, certainly in his earlier plays, was to convey the astonishment he felt simply at existing, at why there is something rather than nothing. Not far behind came his concern with language, his dissatisfaction at our reliance on cliché and, more profoundly, the sheer inadequacy of language when portraying reality. Not far behind this came his obsession with psychology, in particular the new group psychology of the modern world of mass civilisation in great cities, how that affected our ideas of solitude and what separated humanity from animality.
    In
The Bald Prima Donna
it is as if the figures in a de Chirico landscape are speaking, virtual automatons who show no emotion, whose words come out in a monotone. 61 Ionesco’s purpose here is to show the magic of genuine language, to draw our attention to what it is and how it is produced. In
The Stroller in the Air,
one of his plays based on a dream (of flying), the main character can see, from his vantage point, into the lives of others. This oneway sharing, however, which offers great comic possibilities, is in the end tragic, for as a result of his unique vantage point the stroller experiences a greater solitude than anyone else. In
The Chairs,
chairs are brought on to the stage at a rapid pace, to create a situation that words simply fad to describe, and the audience therefore has to work out the situation for itself, find its own words. Finally, in
Rhinoceros,
the characters gradually metamorphose into animals, exchanging an individual human psychology for something more ‘primitive,’ more group-centred, all the time provoking us to ask how great this divide really is. 62
    Ionesco was very attuned to the achievements of science, the psychology of Freud and Jung in particular, but biology too. It instilled in him his own brand of pessimism. ‘I wonder if art hasn’t reached a dead-end,’ he said in 1970. ‘If indeed in its present form, it hasn’t already reached its end. Once, writers and poets were venerated as seers and prophets. They had a certain intuition, a sharper sensitivity than their contemporaries, better still, they discovered things and their imaginations went beyond the discoveries even of science itself, to things science would only establish twenty-five or fifty years later. In the relation to the psychology in his time, Proust was a precursor…. But for some time now, science and the psychology of the subconscious have been making enormous progress, whereas the empirical revelations of writers have been making very little. In these conditions, can literature still be considered as a means to knowledge?’ And he added, ‘Telstar [the television satellite] in itself is an amazing achievement. But it’s used to bring us a play by Terence Rattigan. Similarly, the cinema is more interesting as an achievement than the films that are shown in its theatres.’ 63
    These observations by Ionesco were no less timely than his plays. Paris in the 1950s saw the last great throw of modernism, the last time high culturecould be