Word: lonesco
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...RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE by PETER HANDKE It is difficult to say what this play means, but relatively easy to tell you how to write it. Rip out pages from lonesco, Pinter, Beckett, Kafka, the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein and Alice in Wonderland. Tear these into tiny fragments and scatter them on the stage. Austrian Playwright Peter Handke, 29, is a derivative word-vandal. He is currently quite the vogue in Europe, which suggests that the decline of the West is progressing more rapidly than Spengler envisioned...
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...
Soon after writing this declaration lonesco began what became his great life work. Present Past Past Present is the unattractive side of Ionesco's genius. His hate for the totalitarians of left and right, his loathing of fad and cliche, his nearly total despair, are monotonously gone into. Even his sentences are depressed. There is no humor and little hope. Perhaps the content of his plays is nearly as disillusioned. But in them his inability to make sense out of the world becomes scenes of brilliant nonsense. He turns the types of people he hates into grotesques and their cliches...