EUGENE IONESCO
47
that one cannot say of a thing that it is absurd without having a
model of that which is not absurd . But I could say that the characters
of
The Dead
were searching for a sense they didn't find, a law,
supreme conduct, for what one cannot call anything other than
divinity. For me , the theater of the absurd was also a theater of bat–
de against the bourgeois theater it sometimes parodied and against
realist theater.
J
held and I still hold that reality is not realistic, and
it is realist theater, socialist realism, the Brechtian theater that I
fought against and criticized . Realism is not reality; I said realism is
a school of theater which has a certain way of envisaging the real,
just as romanticism and surrealism do. What I disliked in bourgeois
thooter was that it was preoccupied with futilities: business, econ–
omy, politics , adultery, diversion in the Pascalian sense. One could
even say the theater of adultery of the nineteenth century and the
beginning of the twentieth century may have come down from
Racine , with the enormous difference that adultery in Racine led to
death.
It
was no more than a futile game for many of the post-Racin–
ian writers. Another fault of realism is that it was an ideological
theater, thus in some ways a theater of lies, a dishonest theater. It is
so not only because one does not know what reality is and because
no man of science can say what reality is , but also because the realist
writer sullied himself to prove something, to engage the people, the
spectators , the readers, in the name of an ideology of which the
writer wanted to convince us but which was not legitimate for that
reason . All realist theater is a theater of cheating, even, and espe–
cially, if the author is sincere. True sincerity comes from further
away; it comes from the depths of the irrational, the unconscious.
To speak of oneself is more convincing and more truthful than to
speak of others , to engage people in an always debatable political
cause .
I speak of myself in order to speak of everyone . The true poet
does not lie, does not cheat, wants to engage no one, simply because
the authentic poet does not lie, does not invent; he is totally dif–
ferent. In effect, imagination comes forth with images, with symbols
that come from the depths , and it is for that reason that these images
are significant and full of sense . Pirandello also had an ideology,
psychological theories that, since the advent of depth psychology, no
longer have truth or value : but the characters are alive, and one can
always go to see Pirandello because his characters live with passion
and live this passion dramatically.
To speak again of myself, and I excuse myself for it, I and some
