Edifying the Reader: Ionesco's "The Colonel's Photograph"

Abstract

Perverse as it may seem, it is, occasionally, more appropriate to rejoice at failure than at success. No one, for example, begrudges Proust's narrator the errors of his ways because without them their story would never have come into being. Even such an egregious failing as the original sin can offer advantages, as Milton's Adam reflects: ... full of doubt I stand, / Whether I should repent me now of sin / By mee done and occasioned, or rejoice / Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring (Paradise Lost XII 11. 473-476). Unfortunately, at the time of my initial encounter with Ionesco's The Colonel's Photograph, I had completely lost sight of the possible benefits of error and therefore could not appreciate as lucky breaks the paradoxes and irregularities that reduced the whole cloth of my interpretation to tatters. Instead of seeing them