This year marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France. Amid the deepening cultural exchanges between China and France, there is a playwright whose works have increasingly received favor and attention from domestic artists in recent years, and that is Ionescu. As a representative figure of absurd drama,
's works, from "The Bald Showgirl" to "The Chair", have been put on the Chinese stage again and again. In recent years, the Shanghai Kun Opera Troupe has tried to create a wonderful collision between Kun Opera, China's oldest opera, and this avant-garde drama.
However, although Ionescu's works are performed increasingly frequently on the domestic stage, there are only a few translations, or they are English translations, so there is a certain gap in the deep understanding of absurd drama. This year marks the 30th anniversary of Ionescu's death. The "Complete Works of Ionescu's Dramas" recently published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House makes it the first time that Ionesco's plays have a complete text version in China. You might as well take this as an opportunity to re-understand Ionescu and his absurd drama, and read the shock and thinking brought by French absurd drama.
——Editor
On May 11, 1950, Eugène Ionescu's first play "The Bald Showgirl" premiered at the Theater Nocturne in Paris by Nicolas Bataille's troupe. At this time, the playwright was already in his late teens and could be described as a late bloomer. Born to a Romanian father and a French mother, Ionescu seemed to lack a sense of belonging to either culture. In the first half of his life, he experienced a broken life, a tight economy, a cruel war, unstable politics and an uncertain cultural identity. Although it is deeply infiltrated by French culture and is very fluent in French, it retains the historical memory of Romania. He is outside the circle of typical French bourgeoisie, staring at the funny and unaware society with an outsider's eye, and has a sensitivity beyond ordinary people to the tragic situation of mankind.
"The Bald Showgirl" used a pretentiously serious performance method when it premiered. The sanctimonious style formed a strong contrast with the absurd core. Ionescu himself highly recognized this method of interpretation, but the audience found it difficult to understand its beauty. Although attendance was initially dismal, the performance attracted the attention of many avant-garde artists. Surrealist Breton claimed that "this is the drama we want, the drama we should have created." On September 4 of that year, "The Bald Showgirl" was published by the avant-garde Pata Academy, and the script was subtitled "Anti-Drama."
The Complete Works of Ionescu's Dramas Published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House
Literary history usually regards "The Bald Showgirl" as the first absurd play. In fact, in terms of historical timing alone, Ionesco may not be the real originator: 1950 was a fertile year for French avant-garde drama. In February of that year, there was Tardieu's "Word for Word", and in April there was Bao Rhys Vian's "Dismemberment," and in November there will be Adamov's "Big and Small Exercises" and "Violation," and "The Bald Showgirl" are just one of the family of new dramas that have emerged. The reason why it received special attention may be that Ionescu's "anti-theatrical" attitude was particularly fierce and his creative techniques were extremely unconventional. Three years later, the playwright once again subtitled his new play "Victims of Duty" as "pseudo-drama", which shows his persistent and clear rebellious attitude. His creations highlight the commonality of avant-garde art in the first half of the 20th century, which is to find another way to speak and another way to present.
"Abolition of Discourse"
The primary characteristic of absurdist drama is to subvert existing language and find another discourse. Regarding this point, Ionescu was already creatively conscious when writing his first script, and clearly stated that he wanted to "empty the meaning of words and make the words lose their meaning, that is, to abolish the words."
An interesting phenomenon: Ionescu is originally from Romania, Beckett is from Ireland, and Adamov is from the Russian Caucasus. The three masters of French absurdist drama all have the status of "outsiders", and there must be some commonalities among them. As foreign language learners, they naturally have the perspective of observers and outsiders. The defamiliarization of language makes them instinctively develop a sense of distance and critical attitude towards the meaning carried by language, and they are more keenly aware of the absurdity of their inherent thinking.As we all know, Ionescu's creation of "The Bald Showgirl" was influenced by the textbook "English Quick and Easy" (1929) compiled by the French linguist Cherer. Scherer is the founder of the Asimir language learning method, which is a set of language teaching methods for adults based on the children's learning process. It is divided into "immersion stage" and "active stage". The former involves repeated listening. The mechanical connection between recitation and recitation, while the latter is an imitative performance of sentence patterns. If language is a complex of signifiers and signifieds, and its function is to convey meaning through symbols, then the simple and blunt simulation and repetition of real-life scenes in this kind of language textbook for beginners often strips away syntactic structure and semantics, giving learners It creates a sense of absurdity in which language only retains form and has no direction. Therefore, in plays such as "The Bald Showgirl" (1950), "Lesson" (1950), and "French Phonetic and Conversational Exercises for American College Students" (1964), we can without exception see the following typical language teaching material features: Mechanical repetition, superposition and repetition of sentences, correspondence between positive and negative sentence patterns, superposition of synonyms... Lines have become a parody of daily conversations. The syntactic structure and vocabulary are simple and correct but incomprehensible. Each sentence is a deconstruction and meaning of the previous sentence. Dissertation:
"She has regular features, but she cannot be said to be beautiful. She has big shoulders and a round waist. She has irregular features, but she is pretty, but she is too thin."
- The first scene of Ionescu's "The Bald Showgirl"
For Ionescu , language learning provides him with endless sources of inspiration. In addition to this, the proliferation of dialogue out of control and the fragmentation of discourse are also common techniques in Ionescu's plays. For example, in "Lesson", the old professor talks endless nonsense about the so-called "linguistic knowledge":
"Look, that's it: 'Butterfly' 'Eureka' 'Trafalgar' 'Grandpa, Dad'. Like this" , sounds filled with hot air lighter than air, they float here and there without risk of falling into deaf ears. Deaf ears, that is the real abyss, the tomb of sound... Only those Words that carry meaning will fall, they are burdened by meaning, they fall under the weight..."
- "Lesson" by Ionescu
On the one hand, the endless redundant sentences make the language lose its meaning, when "speaking" When it turns into nonsense", "the words wear out and destroy the thought"; on the other hand, it provides some possibility for constructing another set of sound ideographic systems.
"The mechanism is idle"
Of course, Ionescu wants to deny not only language. In his plays, all dramatic elements such as characters, character, environment, action, plot, etc. have become invalid, and are replaced by things that are contrary to common sense logic. Broken scenes: the couple does not know each other ("The Bald Showgirl"), the speaker he hopes for is mute ("The Chair"), the dead are growing infinitely ("Amadi or the Escape Technique"), and they can only mechanically reproduce each other's words and The identity of Dupont and Dupont ("A Play for Four Persons")...the playwright completely got rid of the mission of literary "representation" and created an upside-down art world like "Alice in Wonderland". Everything is going in the opposite direction, the contrast method is used to the extreme, and then self-dissolves through overuse, and all meaning becomes meaningless.
still takes "The Bald Showgirl" as an example. Ionescu calls it an attempt to "idle the dramatic mechanism" and an experiment in "abstract or non-representational drama". The world of the drama is isolated from the laws of reality, time collapses (the pendulum strikes randomly), identity fails (everyone is Bobbi Watson), logic is missing (the couple does not know each other), and even the bald showgirl in the title does not exist. If the term "bald showgirl" ever pops up in conversation, it is only to emphasize that it is an empty symbol with no direction - the meaning of the symbol is completely emptied, communication loses its frame of reference, and all promises are abolished. In the bold and uninhibited imagination, the logic, common sense, morality and order that are regarded as the norms of real society are eliminated one by one.
Ionescu believes that his script contains metaphysical thinking behind its anti-logical form. "The Bald Showgirl" is about people's panic in the face of an unreasonable, absurd and stupid world; the characters in "The Chair" are marionettes who have lost all spiritual support. It becomes ridiculous because of the loss of all rules.Compared with the tragic Oedipus, modern man is nothing more than a comic puppet. In the former era, there were still rules that could be followed or broken, and the human spirit was still strong. However, modern people are deeply panicked and at a loss in the face of a world where old rules have collapsed and new rules are not yet clear. If in terms of the collapse of faith, the sense of absurdity is the foundation of post-war European literature, then for Ionescu personally, the sense of absurdity also comes from his obsession with individual experience, from a cultural traveler and a historical spanner A unique sense of rootlessness. He could only protest through writing against this world that "should have been different" and against all the old habits and disciplines of postwar European capitalist society.
Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe created a small theater Kunqu Opera of the same name based on "The Chair"
While traditional discourse and logic are devalued, "things" are coming in like waves. We see women with three noses and nine fingers (Jacques or Obedience, 1950), empty chairs filling the stage (The Chair, 1952), and mushrooms growing on the floor (Amadi or Escape Artist) , 1954), more and more rhinos are rolling in the city ("Rhino", 1959)...Human bodies, furniture, plants, animals, materials are everywhere, the number and volume are huge and continue to expand, several times or even They emerge dozens or hundreds of times, filling the visible stage space and invisible imagination space. The overflowing material that is full of oppression constantly attacks the city, forming an aggressive sense of oppression, giving the drama a huge uneasiness and tension, so "the invisible in the drama becomes visible, the thoughts become concrete and realistic, the problems become flesh and blood, and anxiety Become a living, huge visible object."
uses objects as concrete objects to convey human fears, worries, hallucinations and obsessions. On this point, Ionesco and Aalto coincide with each other, making the latter use physical objects to convey human fears, worries, illusions and obsessions. The idea of alternative discourses was partially realized. Facing the rapidly spreading alien form in "Rhinoceros" and listening to the rolling sound of rhinoceros outside the stage, the audience naturally felt the horror of being trapped by spiritual alienation without any explanation.
"Comedy"
Even if it brings a huge sense of oppression, most of Ionescu's dramas still appear as comedies. Comedy is another creative consciousness of Ionescu. Whether clearly labeled "tragicomedy" ("The Class"), "naturalistic comedy" ("Jacques or Obedience"), "tragic farce" ("The Chair"), "comedy" ("Amadi or Escape Artist") , a "burlesque skit" ("Portrait") or an immediately recognizable parody ("Macbeth"), all of them consciously adopt a humorous approach. From another perspective, this follows the parody tradition of French literature, and its works are all exaggerated, comic-like satirical imitations of social phenomena, literary paradigms or specific texts.
For example, "The Bald Showgirl" is first of all a parody drama. It imitates the form of boulevard drama, but in fact it scorns the popular bourgeois living room drama and achieves subversive humor through exaggeration, pile-up, distortion and other means. Imitation, and ultimately leading to ridicule. Ionescu didn't like to look serious, because a serious attitude would trap thoughts from escaping. He believed what Aristotle said: Man is the only animal that can laugh. Everyone has a sense of humor, so there is no need to be harsh, just mocking. This is not a condescending mockery filled with a sense of superiority, but rather a mockery of physical characters, a society that has not changed from the past, and absurd rules. It also mocks the playwright himself ("Amadi or the Art of Escape") and even the absurdity itself. While laughing at the scenes of unreasonable and bizarre words and deeds, the audience will gradually understand the truth contained in the absurd scenes, and all their superficial opinions and self-righteousness will be turned into powder in the laughter.
As the playwright wrote in "Portrait": "Only through an extreme, crude, childish simplification can the meaning of this farce be highlighted and made credible in a way that intensifies the incredible and stupid. . Stupidity can be a means of revealing and simplifying.”
Is the theater of the absurd still a niche theater today? Apparently not. The absurd theater that emerged in the 1950s has already exceeded the audience of avant-garde art.As Roland Barthes said: "The avant-garde is a phenomenon that occurs every once in a while. It may not exist forever, nor may it last." The special historical environment creates special needs for artistic expression, and the emergence of new art must encounter tradition. Art resists, and once it gains legal status, it gradually settles into a part of tradition.
"Theatre of the Absurd" is a concept proposed by British scholar Martin Aisling in the 1960s. The name is borrowed from Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus". The French prefer to call it new drama. Together with new novels, new wave films and even the twelve-tone system, it constitutes the overall artistic trend in the first half of the 20th century. After more than seventy years of historical sifting, absurd drama is no longer a new thing. It has entered history and turned into a classic. In 1970, Ionescu was elected as an academician of the French Academy, which seemed to indicate that the society he mocked had completed the "acquisition" of his creations.
As of the end of 2021, "The Bald Showgirl" has performed more than 20,000 times, with millions of audiences, and holds the world record for the most consecutive performances in the same theater. Success at the box office is actually a paradox faced by absurd dramas: of course, the more performances, the better, but too many performances will inevitably blunt the edge of the script. Ionescu had a clear understanding of this, so he said that "success is often due to misunderstanding and is failure in disguise." However, in his view, even if some things in art are constantly changing, some things will never change. It is the latter that constitutes the charm of Sophocles and Shakespeare, making their dramas exist beyond the limitations of time and space. For Ionescu, this is the artist's perception of humankind's eternal anxiety and its free and creative expression.
People in the romantic era were tortured by love, and people during World War II were tortured by the fear of death. Human anxieties are real, complex and profound. Artists do not need to pursue avant-garde, as long as they truly express their current feelings, imagination and creation. As he said, "The vanguard is destined to become the vanguard." Only through endless rupture, subversion and renewal can art maintain its vitality.
Author: Luo Chan
Text: Luo Chan (Associate Professor at the School of Foreign Languages, Peking University, PhD in French Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Paris IV) Editor: Xu Luming Editor: Shao Ling
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