INTERVIEWER
This sounds very pessimistic and hopeless and seems at variance with your mystical and religious tendencies.
IONESCO
Well, there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free—which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust—the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack. You know, the Cathars [a Christian sect of the later Middle Ages] believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world—which is why it doesn’t work. I don’t share this heresy. I’m too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn’t talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn’t understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, “You rogue! You little rogue!” and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God’s game and laugh about it. That is why I prefer the phrase “theater of derision,” which Emmanuel Jacquart used for the title of his book on Beckett, Adamov, and myself, to “theater of the absurd.”
Ionesco, interviewed
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INTERVIEWER
This sounds very pessimistic and hopeless and seems at variance with your mystical and religious tendencies.
IONESCO
Well, there is a higher order, but man can separate himself from it because he is free—which is what we have done. We have lost the sense of this higher order, and things will get worse and worse, culminating perhaps in a nuclear holocaust—the destruction predicted in the Apocalyptic texts. Only our apocalypse will be absurd and ridiculous because it will not be related to any transcendence. Modern man is a puppet, a jumping jack. You know, the Cathars [a Christian sect of the later Middle Ages] believed that the world was not created by God but by a demon who had stolen a few technological secrets from Him and made this world—which is why it doesn’t work. I don’t share this heresy. I’m too afraid! But I put it in a play called This Extraordinary Brothel, in which the protagonist doesn’t talk at all. There is a revolution, everybody kills everybody else, and he doesn’t understand. But at the very end, he speaks for the first time. He points his finger towards the sky and shakes it at God, saying, “You rogue! You little rogue!” and he bursts out laughing. He understands that the world is an enormous farce, a canular played by God against man, and that he has to play God’s game and laugh about it. That is why I prefer the phrase “theater of derision,” which Emmanuel Jacquart used for the title of his book on Beckett, Adamov, and myself, to “theater of the absurd.”
Ionesco, interviewed
One cannot emphasise enough just how crucial was the mass domestication of the car, ensuring the transition from what might be called 'traditional solidarities' to the unprecedented unleashing of modern individualism. What does it matter if the car kills, pollutes, and often makes people into total jerks, its proliferation destroying every urban space worthy of the name, when what is at stake is to ensure the domestication of gigantic human masses, the forging of thousands of psychologies of average men on wheels, 'highway mentalities', aping day and night the fluidities and competition of the Great market, etching it into the landscape ....?
Gilles Chatelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs
FAREWELL, FRIEND: Kerry Kennedy —
public administrator, family man, Shiny Bum Singer and Brumbies tragic,
1949-2019. Carmel McGregor pays tribute.
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