Word: lonesco
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first read lonesco in the ninth grade. I particularly remember it because The Bald Soprano was the first piece of grown-up literature I ever got excited about. It is interesting that we should have gone beyond our pubescent skepticism to enthusiastically appreciate a play that strained even the breadth of adult tolerances. It certainly fit our attention spans much better than Dickens and, to be candid, we were not above its nihilism. But our liking for The Bald Soprano was not the product of our baser thirteen year old instincts. After a childhood of Dick and Jane and Landmark...
Present Past Past Present is the opposite of mirth. lonesco takes everything so seriously there is no room left for humor, and lonesco is so devastated by his existence all he can do is groan. Subtitled "A Personal Memoir", this book is the sequel to his autobiographical first volume Fragments of a Journal. It starts with flashes from lonesco's youth that run from a few lines to a few pages and then becomes a mix of his impressions at the beginning of World War Two, his thoughts about Israel and French intellectuals. lonesco not only sees what is hypocritical...
Perhaps one of the first and most important things we learn in life is the ability to shrug off that which is irremedial. On one extreme are the callous who can shrug off everything not in their game plan, and at the other extreme is Eugene lonesco, who seemingly can shrug off nothing at all. This quality is admirable as well as pathetic. Mass-murders, starvation, Marxists, Fascists and the followers of Sartre--I can gladly join lonesco in condemning them all. But his judgments become so obsessive and his attitude so hopeless that all he can end up doing...
Then there was a change. It will take another book to explain how it came about but the first hints of it come at the end of this one. On the last page of the book lonesco compares the world to a chessboard. The individual is "only a pawn on a chessboard. He has no value except in relation to the whole. The individual is thus said to be an illusion. He doesn't exist. He isn't anything." But lonesco will not tolerate this negation of individuality. He says that in the game he plays the part...
Humor was not just funny: it was seriously funny in those days. Tragedy was dean-everybody accepted that. But comedy was managing double duty, in plays like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Eugene lonesco's Rhinoceros, even Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Audiences laughed until quite literally they cried. In fiction, the selling phrase was "black humor." Some of the best books of the '60s came out ghastly-funny, as if novelists were facing nuclear-age madness, crossed eyeballs to crossed eyeballs: Terry Southern in his underrated little masterpiece...