A Reading Of Ionesco's The Killer

Abstract

.IN 1963 IONESCO GAVE A SERIES OF ANSWERS to the question, "Why does a writer write?" One of them was, "[I write] because I wish to understand the world; because I would place, at least for myself, a little order in that immense chaos." Strange words to the ears of those who have come to believe that Ionesco shows us the chaos of the world by putting chaos onstage, who would agree, for instance, with the Dictionnaire de litterature contemporaine, which states that the theater of Ionesco is "the most perfect antithesis one could imagine to the theater of Sartre, where the thought always precedes the theatrical expression," and concludes, "Each play of Ionesco defies critical explication . . . to apply it . . . is to risk making oneself into one of Ionesco's own comic characters." This is quite false; Ionesco is not practising Dada, even in The Bald Soprano; his plays are just as well constructed to transmit ideas as Sartre's, but in a more sophisticated way. The way varies—in Rhinoceros it is very close to allegory; in The Killer, a much more complex work, it is a group of symbolic correspondences. Several of these have been identified in critical articles, generally within a comparative study of several plays, but there has not yet been an attempt to bring them all together and show that they make sense, or "order," together. With mild defiance of Ionesco's remarks about critics, I should like to make such an attempt.