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We are born. We struggle for a while. We die. A post-holocaust rejection of God and, therefore, of any kind of an after-life, renders no alternative conclusion than that of the impossibility of meaning or significance that life carries: “[…] it is clear that I can never know […] why I am.” (Notes and Counternotes – Eugene Ionesco) . As a result, the day-to-day struggle of man becomes absurd and the significance of ‘nothingness’ emerges as a major theme for late 20th century and early 21st century art. “The subject of the play is […] the absence of people, the absence of the emperor, the absence of God, the absence of matter, the unreality of the world, metaphysical emptiness. The theme of the play is nothingness…” Ionesco on ‘The Chairs’ (Esslin, 1970:149) Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, “a play in which nothing happens, twice” (Mercier, 1956: 6), Cage’s 4 minutes, 22 seconds, and Fontana’s slashed canvases, are just a few examples of work, from a wide sphere of practices, that have attempted to address “the void at the centre of things” (Coe, 1961: 78). Ionesco is similarly obsessed by the vacuous nature of being. Ultimately, this is indicative of a fascination with the absolute and unifying nature of death that has taken the place that was once held by religion in art. If we are to believe that we come from the same nothingness that we return to, everything that takes place between our birth and death can be seen as nothing more than a self-inflicted joke and we are left with no reasonable alternative but to laugh: “I mean, what you got to lose? You know you’ve come from nothing. You’re going back to nothing. What you lost? Nothing!” Look on the Bright Side of Life – Monty Python This is the true nature of the absurd. The comedy in Ionesco’s work comes from an inability to take the tragedy of life seriously, and given that the end of all is annihilation and that any act is therefore meaningless , it would be a far greater tragedy to do so anyway: “I really have the feeling that life is nightmarish, that it is painful, unbearable as a bad dream. Just glance around you: wars, catastrophes and disasters, hatreds and persecutions, death awaiting us on every side […]. We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It’s horrible. It can’t be taken seriously.” Eugene Ionesco (Coe, 1961: 89) As Dudard warns, “If you start worrying about everything that happens, you’d never be able to go on living.”(Ionesco trans. Prouse, 1960:74) Ionesco reminds himself of his own advice - “[…] since all is devoid of importance, what else can we do but laugh at it?” (Coe, 1961: 80) – when Dudard tells Ionesco’s alter-ego, Berenger, to “[…] learn to be more detached, and try to see the funny side of things.” (Ionesco trans. Prouse, 1960:74) This detachment is to recognise the fundamental absurdity of existence, as Richard Coe puts it, “[…] the lucid perception of meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful – the only meaningful – act.” (Coe, 1961: 82) Coe goes on to say that “[…] where death is there can be no optimism.” (Coe, 1961:86) Indeed, Ionesco speaks bleakly at times of his ideology: “There are no alternatives; if man is not tragic, he is ridiculous and painful, “comic” in fact, and by revealing his absurdity one can achieve a sort of tragedy. In fact I think that man must either be unhappy […] or stupid.” Eugene Ionesco (New York Times, June 1, 1958) To suggest that the sole alternative of unhappiness is ignorance is a somewhat crushing statement and his near-misanthropic sentiments are echoed by Berenger’s “The world is sick. They’re all sick.” (Ionesco trans. Prouse, 1960:101) Here, Berenger’s comments are as irrational and dangerously fanatical as the rhinoceroses’ themselves and Ionesco seems to be describing a tendency within him towards such occasional over-reactions. Berenger’s detached awareness of man’s ‘stupidity’ can be read as a mirror for Ionesco’s observations of man’s foolishness, tragicly wastefull in light of the inevitability of death, what he might describe as “heaviness”: “Two fundamental roots of consciousness are at the root of all my plays. […] These two basic feelings are those of evanescence on the one hand and of heaviness on the other; of emptiness and of an overabundance of presence; of the unreal transparency of the world, and of its opaqueness; of light and of heavy shadow.” Eugene Ionesco (Coe, 1961: 79-80) Ionesco’s statement seems to address the simultaneous euphoric liberation and hopeless depression that a successful appreciation of the concept of meaninglessness in its entirety would offer.
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