Abstract
This chapter examines Eugene Ionesco’s The Killer (1957) in the context of the twentieth-century interpretation of imagination as both an intentional mode of consciousness and defined by an essential nothingness. The Killer is a play which places the multiple modes of perception and imagination of the spectator center stage. Kallenbach explores how the play’s features of, for instance, invisible spaces, offstage soundscapes, grotesque objects and metamorphosing characters continually demand that the spectator renegotiate that which is perceived and imagined on- and offstage. Kallenbach’s study provides an interpretation of how this scenic dramaturgy of the play, with its intricate interplay of presence and absence, engages and guides the spectator to continuously shift between several—and sometimes overlapping or even conflicting—modes of perceiving and imagining.
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Notes
- 1.
The play is based on Ionesco’s short story, The Photograph of the Colonel, “La Photo du Colonel,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, no. 35 (1955). The title is an intertextual reference to Jean Anouilh’s Le voyageur sans baggage (1937), in which the amnesiac soldier Gaston rediscovers his past character only to choose a different persona for his future. For Ionesco’s Bérenger there is conversely no future—nor a happy past—no dream.
- 2.
Comprising Rhinoceros (Rhinocéros, 1958), A Stroll in the Air and Exit the King (Le Piéton de l’air and Le Roi se meurt, both written 1962).
- 3.
Eugène Ionesco, Tueur Sans Gages, L’avant-Scène No. 510 (Paris, 1973).
- 4.
All references to the play refer to “The Killer,” in Plays (London: John Calder, 1960).
- 5.
Ionesco describes the beginning of the play and the effect of the lighting and sound as follows: “At first, while the stage is still empty, the light is grey, like a dull November day or afternoon in February. The faint sound of wind; perhaps you can see a dead leaf fluttering across the stage. In the distance the noise of a tram, vague outlines of houses; then, suddenly, the stage is brilliantly lit; a very bright, very white light; just this whiteness, and also the dense vivid blue of the sky” (9).
- 6.
Sartre, The Imaginary, 191. On the actor as analogon, see Sartre on Theater, 158–71. See also Chap. 8.
- 7.
Cf. p. 188f. on the characteristics of time and space, e.g., as described by Freud.
- 8.
I shall expand on the similarities of the playwrights’ strategies in the book’s conclusion.
- 9.
Based on a specific memory of Ionesco’s own memory of euphoria, see Nancy Lane, “Human/Non-Human Relationships in Ionesco’s Theatre: Conflict and Collaboration,” Critical essay, Kentucky Romance Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1983), http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|H1420031769&v=2.1&u=dkb&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w; and Understanding Eugène Ionesco, Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 103ff.
- 10.
Ionesco himself is aware of the close relationship between dream and nightmare, as the following interview by Rosette Lamont from 1969 illustrates: “I.: ‘Yes, all my plays are dreams’. R.L.: ‘Are they dreams, or nightmares?’ I.: ‘Both.’” In Rosette Lamont and Eugene Ionesco, “An Interview with Eugene Ionesco,” The Massachusetts Review 10, no. 1 (1969): 145.
- 11.
In the French text the gradual pace is stressed in capital letters so as to underline the slow pace of the transformation (65).
- 12.
Ionesco had little faith in the utopia. Here, in connection to a critique of Bertolt Brecht , he says: “In fact, I believe that it is precisely when we see the last of economic problems and class warfare (if I may avail myself of one of the most crashing clichés of our age) that we shall also see that this solves nothing, indeed that our problems are only beginning. We can no longer avoid asking ourselves what we are doing here on earth, and how, having no deep sense of our destiny, we can endure the crushing weight of the material world.” In “The World of Eugène Ionesco,” International Theatre Annual, no. 2 (1957): 171.
- 13.
Juan Eduardo C. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1983), s.v. “box.”
- 14.
The kaleidoscopic use of the stage could also be observed in the first part of Act III after the initial entrance of Bérenger and Édouard.
- 15.
Hence, it was also cut substantially in the revised version.
- 16.
Lane, “Human/Non-Human Relationships in Ionesco’s Theatre: Conflict and Collaboration.”
- 17.
Joseph Long, “From the Killer to the King: Representation of Space in the Bérenger Cycle,” Nottingham French Studies 35, no. 1 (1996): 99.
- 18.
In the author’s note accompanying A Dream Play (1901), August Strindberg does away with causal time and space. Rather, “on a slight groundwork of reality, imagination spins and weaves new patterns made up of memories, experiences, unfettered fancies, absurdities and improvisations.” Cited in Six Plays of Strindberg, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1955). Strindberg’s descriptions of his characters also recall those of The Killer: “The characters […] split, double and multiply; the evaporate, crystallise, scatter and converge,” as is notably the case with, e.g., the Architect (cf. Freudian condensation). In A Dream Play, it is the consciousness of the dreamer that is the overall subject. The dreamer of The Killer is the audience, whose point of view is ever transforming and transferring, doubling and splitting, traveling from one point of view to another.
References
Anouilh, Jean. Traveller without Baggage [Le voyageur sans baggage]. Translated by John Whiting. London: Methuen, 1959. 1937.
Cirlot, Juan Eduardo C. A Dictionary of Symbols. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1983.
Ionesco, Eugène. “The Killer.” Translated by Donald Watson. In Plays, 7–109. London: John Calder, 1960.
———. “La Photo Du Colonel.” La Nouvelle Revue Française, no. 35 (1955): 890–904.
———. Tueur Sans Gages. L’avant-Scène No. 510. Paris, 1973.
———. “The World of Eugène Ionesco.” International Theatre Annual, no. 2 (1957): 171–73.
Lamont, Rosette, and Eugene Ionesco. “An Interview with Eugene Ionesco.” The Massachusetts Review 10, no. 1 (1969): 128–48.
Lane, Nancy. “Human/Non-Human Relationships in Ionesco’s Theatre: Conflict and Collaboration.” Critical essay. Kentucky Romance Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1983): 240–50. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|H1420031769&v=2.1&u=dkb&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w
———. Understanding Eugène Ionesco. Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1994.
Long, Joseph. “From the Killer to the King: Representation of Space in the Bérenger Cycle.” Nottingham French studies 35, no. 1 (1996): 96–107.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination [L’imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination]. Translated by Jonathan Webber. London: Routledge, 2004. 1940.
———. Sartre on Theater. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.
Strindberg, August. Six Plays of Strindberg. Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1955.
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Kallenbach, U. (2018). The Killer: The Interplay of Absence and Presence. In: The Theatre of Imagining. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76303-3_9
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