DUMITRU TUCAN DIDACTICISM AND POETICS OF INDETERMINACY IN IONESCO S THEATRE. FROM ENGLISH WITHOUT A TEACHER TO THE BALD SOPRANO.

(Dumitru Tucan, Didacticism and Poetics of Indeterminacy. From English Without a Teacher to The Bald Soprano, Caiet de Semiotic, Ed. UVT, 2004, p. 241- 249)

The dramatic career of E. Ionesco finds its discrete origin (Hamdan, 1998: 120) in a play written in Romanian in 1948, English Without a Teacher (Englezete fr profesor), the early draft of the famous play The Bald Soprano. In fact, The Bald Soprano is nothing but a translation and a development of this early manifestation of the theatre of the absurd (Vartic, 1990: 235), a translation which allows us to pursue the dynamics of the birth and evolution of the theatrical consciousness with regard to Eugene Ionescos literary options. In one of her books, A. Hamdan (1998) tries to portray the intellectual image of the young artist, and also analyses the similarities and differences between the two plays. Focusing upon the dynamics of the translation at the level of the main elements of the theatrical discourse (paratext, fictional development, characters, structure, dynamics of the plot), the critic notices that the attenuation and the indeterminacy that E. Ionesco pursued while translating his own play allowed him to access a more abstract way of thinking which finally became a subtle didacticism due to the fact that when the discourse is tortured, it decomposes itself becoming a mere <<cluster of corpses of words1>> (Hamdan, 1988: 122). The critic is right for at least two reasons: while the first one is the story of the genesis of the play, told by the author himself (Ionesco, 1966: 243-255), in the second one the meanings of the Bald Soprano can be found, related to the entire dramatic work of E. Ionesco. Comparing the two twin2 plays one can see that the most important difference does not necessarily lie in their subtitles (original comedy in one act / anti-play), or in their degree of abstraction, but in their structure. Both of them are original (estranging) and both of them belong to the same paradigm of anti-literature, or anti-theatre. In a diary note from the 10th of April 1951, published later in Notes and Counter Notes (Ionesco, 1966: 250), the author states: To dismantle the theatre (or what is seen as theatre)3. Further on
These specific words belong to E. Ionesco himself, having been extracted by the critic from Notes and Counter Notes. 2 The word is used to suggest that the two plays have the same heredity, a strong resemblance but different destinies. 3 Dmontrer le thtre (ou ce quon apelle ainsi)
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he also states that both plays originate in the same astonishment towards the language, seen as a mere outline fitted for any meaning or substance. This could explain why both of the plays have a similar degree of abstraction that can be seen in the way in which the language and the fiction unveil themselves, stating their mimetic fallacy. From this point of view, the author is the most trusted witness:
Pour moi, il stait agi dune sorte des corces sonores ; dnues de sens; les personnages aussi, bien entendu stait vids de leur psychologie et le monde mapparaissait dans une lumire insolite, peuttre dans sa vritable lumire, au del des interprtations et dune causalit arbitraire. (Ionesco, 1966: 248)

English without a teacher has a bipolar structure and a logic adapted to this structure. The passage from one scene to another testifies to an accurate logic, showing a well functioning mechanism of theatrical action. It is true that the bourgeois episode (Scene I) outlines through its dialogue and stage directions two precarious characters (Mr. and Mrs. Smith), but this precariousness can be very easily recognised as a very old theatrical device: the satirical caricature. The explanations lie in the stage directions which create, alongside the dramatic dialogue, an atmosphere of triviality. Yet this is confined within the limits of a veracity that seems to be on the verge of collapsing:
Scene One Bourgeois interior with armchairs. It is evening, after dinner. Mr. Smith, wearing slippers, smokes a pipe and reads a newspaper. He is wearing glasses and has a grey English moustache. Next to him, in another armchair, Mrs. Smith mends some stockings. A long moment of silence. The clock strikes seventeen times.

The dialogue slowly advances, and the interaction between the characters is shallow. However the key characterisation of this dialogue, as in the case of the above scene, is precariousness. The interesting part is the way in which, towards the end of the scene, this entire precarious veracity seems to collapse:
MRS. SMITH: As far as I am concerned, I have nothing against it! But if you re saying this for me, in that caseI dont like that sort of jokes, you very well know! (She throws the stockings away and shows her teeth. She rises to her feet with her tousled hair and she takes a knife out of her bosom.) Ms. SMITH (he also rises to his feet, and draws near her lovingly): Oh, honey, dont get so mad! You know very well that Im joking! (He puts his arms around her waist and kisses her.)

The collapse is yet delayed by the appearance of the character Mary (Scene ll), who brings some coherence to the play. The self-presentation and the announcement of the Martins visit are details that maintain the action at the level

of the previous precarious framework. It is true that Mrs. Smiths reply with regard to the Martins visit ( Oh, yes. We have been waiting for them. We were hungry. We were even thinking that, if they werent coming, we could start eating without them. We havent eaten anything today because you were not here!), is related to the reply from the first scene, belonging to the same Mrs. Smith ( Its nine oclock. We had soup, fish, meat and potatoes, salad, and we drank beer. The children drank water. We had an excellent dinner this evening). This reply shows, by means of clear contradiction, a real forewarning against the unfolding dramatic fiction. The forewarning is itself peculiar as it takes place right in the moment of the restorative presence of the character Mary. The second episode (which may be named The Recognition) yet raises some other problems. Quite similar to the episode in The Bald Soprano, and impossible to be separated either from the previous episode, or from its veracity, however precarious, the episode could be analysed from a communicative perspective, as the semioticians have done (Revzina, Revzine, 1971: 240). From the viewpoint of this analysis, the critics can pursue in Ionesco s early plays a certain capacity of the text to lay bare the laws of the communicative act, Ionescos theatre being nothing but a semiotic experiment. Olga and Isak Revzine show that by contrast Ionesco implicitly introduces the idea of "normal" communication and investigates its conditions by highlighting the type of experiment he conducted in his first plays. Concerning this specific episode (The Recognition), the semioticians can analyse the violation of one of the most important postulates of normal communication, that of common memory. As husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. Smith should share a common model of the world and a certain common memory. Yet this is not the case in The Bald Soprano and, of course, not in English Without a Teacher. But focusing upon the theatrical mechanisms and trying to extrapolate beyond the specific fictional world of the play and its degree of veracity, one can see that the postulate of common memory is not necessarily violated. It is possible to identify a common memory which lies as a semiotic code between the text and the reader and, more importantly, a culturally determined code between the dramatic performance and the audience. This semiotic code is literarily determined because the main reference is not the veracity of the Martins but the specific literary reality of a theatrical device, the recognition:
Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune (Aristotle, Poetics, 1452 a, translated into English by S. H. Butcher). In classical dramaturgy, a character is frequently recognized by another which unties the conflict by defusing it (in comedy) or by concluding it tragically or by magic (deus ex machina). For Aristotle (Poetics), recognition or discovery (anagnorisis) is one of three possible itineraries of the plot; it follows the tragic error of the hero (hamartia). The most famous example is Sophocless Oedipus Rex (Pavis, 1998: 307).

This theatrical device can be thus pursued throughout the entire history of dramatic criticism and practice, from Aristotle to the fifties. One should not forget that a very popular form of dramatic performance that overuses this particular device, the boulevard theatre, dominated the French dramatic practice of the fifties. This detail is important because it is possible to analyse how the text of this play suddenly refuses to request from the reader a veracity identifying competence, enhancing at the same time the importance of a cultural memory. In this episode of the play what can be seen as communicative incoherence (named by the critics absurd) could be seen as a structural intertextuality. In fact the intertextuality is further strengthened by the reference to the detective novel of Arthur Conan Doyle and his main character, Sherlock Holmes. The precariousness of the theatrical construction in the previous episode was centred on a semantic contradiction and ambiguity, a precariousness that could have been put down to a certain awkwardness of the writer. Subsequently starting with this episode this precariousness becomes the main dramatic effect. The next episode (which can be emphatically named The Collapse of Language Scene lV) is delirious. The replies of the characters have initially a certain degree of semantic compatibility with each other. One may identify the same precariousness as in the first episode. But the rhetoric of this episode is one of a progressive deviancy. After the normal act of welcoming the guests, performed by Mrs. Smith, the rhetoric of the characters becomes saturated by truisms, thus limiting the semantic link between the replies, depriving the text of a global coherence, that of a linear logic. Moreover, this semantic of truism is shaped (and thus neglected) by a strong syntactic structure: Teachers teach children, but cats nurse kittens; Automobiles go fast, but female cooks cook better etc. What follows is a series of lexical repetitions that destroys the meanings normally attached to words and, consequently, makes the characters cry out (the verb is borrowed from the plays stage directions4) the alphabet, onomatopoeic sounds and, finally, all turns into a strange world with no meaning at all. It is interesting how this progressive collapse of the language is related to a theatrical behaviour imbued with anthropological implication (disorder): fury and, consequently, conflict. The return of the language to the normal coordinates, occurring at the same time as Marys reply (Dinner is ready), influences the theatrical behaviour of the characters, who return to their initial normality: they smile, they understand and, in the end, they are reduced to silence. The sudden change cannot be related to any semantic detail from the fictional world of the play, but it can only be related to its structure and dramatic syntax, this being the dramatic intention of the playwright. This intention will be confirmed in the last episode of the play, which can be named The War against the Spectator. The silence and repetition in The Bald Soprano has as a correspondent the silence of the fictional world in English

(All together, in the height of rage, they cry out loudly one to each others ears, while the clock strikes with a deafening noise and thunder and lightning can be heard).

Without a Teacher (The scene remains empty), which calls for the perplexity of the audience, as the stage directions suggest:
The director has to wait till the audience becomes angry and starts to whistle, to protest, to boo, to curse, to throw carrots, addled eggs etc.

So, in this moment the play confesses its aggressive intention towards the audience, displaying at the same time a peculiar structural coherence. This final episode from English Without a Teacher, missing from the structure of The Bald Soprano, is the major difference between the two plays. Unlike the previous episodes, where a precarious fictional world was being shaped, throughout this episode a clear fictionalisation of the main elements of the theatre is in the limelight. The Author, the Manager of the theatre and the Spectator become characters, the play itself thus becoming a metafiction. From this point of view Ionescos very first play resembles Pirandellos plays. The similarity to Six Characters in Search of an Author is quite obvious:
ACT I The spectators will find the curtain raised and the stage as it usually is during the daytime. It will be half dark, and empty, so that from the beginning the public may have the impression of an impromptu performance. Prompters box and a small table and chair for the manager. Two other small tables and several chairs scattered about as during rehearsals. The ACTORS and ACTRESSES of the company enter from the back of the stage: first one and another, then two together; nine or ten in all. They are about to rehearse a Pirandello play: Mixing it up. Some of the company move off towards their dressing rooms. The PROMPTER who has the <<book>> under his arm, is waiting for the manager in order to begin the rehearsal.

These are the first stage directions of this famous play. In most dramatic literature, stage directions have the role of giving basic indications regarding the theatrical representation. Therefore the abundance of terms (underlined above) should be explicitly motivated; at first sight these terms do not necessarily refer to what we call the fictional world, but rather to the manner of its realization on the stage. Most of the time, in the stage directions the author refers to the relationships between the fictional elements and either the space on the stage or the space of perception (addressing the audience). The authors simple purpose is to establish a minimal relationship between the audience and the theatrical space. In his stage directions, Pirandello organizes neither the scenic space nor its relationship with the fictional elements, but, first of all, he simply describes the basic framework of the fiction to make it possible to advance. This fiction was perceived as unusual and weird by the first series of spectators who watched the

play. We can imagine the amazement of Pirandellos first spectators who went to the theatre to see a play, but actually attended its rehearsal. They could not see the usual characters in action, but characters they had never seen before on the stage: a Manager, a Machinist, a Door-keeper, a Managers Secretary, some Characters, a Property Man, Scene-shifters, a Prompter, Technicians and auxiliary personnel of the theatre and even some dramatic characters. Hence Pirandellos play is a play about theatre, a metaplay. Yet it is not the type of metaplay Lionel Abel (Abel, 1963) has studied and defined, metaplay in which the conscious auto-dramatizing of the character is obvious, and in which the widely known metaphor of the world as a theatre plays a major role. Pirandellos play goes beyond the allegorical surface of the theatre, reaching its inner core and bringing to the foreground the mechanisms of the theatrical show, together with the instruments necessary for its fulfillment. When considered for the first time, Ionescos play does not raise the same encyclopedic questions. This is to be the reason why the play has been considered a polemic manifesto regarding the separation of the theatre from existential reality. The manifesto is gradually elaborated to come at last to a strong and penetrating conclusion. The last three lines of the play contain this conclusion, which actually represents a point of view to be developed later on by Ionesco in his theoretical writings, which deal with the autonomy of the theatrical art (see in particular the polemics between Ionesco and Kenneth Tynen in The Observer, rewritten in Notes and Counter Notes, Ionesco 1966). One of the final lines, uttered by the character-author, makes direct reference to the idea of the autonomy of the theatrical art, claiming an extreme separation of the two opposite spaces in the complex theatrical reality: the theatrical (fictional) space and the audience (the real space):
The Author: Why do you come here and bother us? Do I make boots in place of the shoemaker, do the laundry in place of the laundress, or bother the doctor at the hospital? No. Here I am a doctor and I mind my own business. Shoemakers at the shoemakers, actors at the theatre, everyone should mind his own business and the world would work better.

The other two lines make this separation clearer. The reply of a spectator from the back of the room, addressing the character-Author (And the spectators at the spectacle) calls for the commissioners speech. This one is meant to be an authoritative character who immediately shifts to verbal onslaughts (How do you dare speak when I am silent, you, imbecile.) and physical abuse (The constables drive the people out), all addressed to the audience. As a matter of fact this violent reaction of the theatrical elements, back stage elements, conveyed by means of those characters who openly refer to a theatrical analysis, comes as a reply to a previous violence of the audience. The turning point and the climax, the crisis of Ionescos texts which calls for a shift from fiction to theatrical metafiction, is represented by the moment when the dramatic characters in action disappear. The disappearance is firstly the

collapse of a fictional mechanism, which previously suggested the presence of a metafiction, and secondly the annihilation of the veracity of the characters world. The notion of veracity itself is ambiguous since it is related to a code, namely to an assembly of constraints which intertwine a system of signs in such a manner that the message can be received. (Ubersfeld, 1999: 18-19; 94). As regards reception, Ionescos theatre, along with Becketts, Genets and part of Adamovs - which basically the 50s and the 60s criticism named the theatre of the absurd - was shaped by the junction of the underground, avant-gardist manifestations of the French theatre, the ideological dimension of the Sartrian existentialism, and of Camus philosophy of the absurd. Taking this into account, one can state that the annihilated veracity in Ionescos play is chiefly the one built by the representational theatre, especially the representational techniques of the Boulevard Theatre. However, this poetics of opposition has in fact a much more general significance: the deconstruction of a cultural code. The dynamic of English Without a Teacher is that of the passage from fiction to metafiction, representing, thus, an insight within the anatomy of the theatrical language and, subsequently, an experimental analysis of any type of language. Starting from a possible world (the English, bourgeois world), the play creates by its accumulating precariousness an obvious separation of its inner elements. The character is separated from the language, the language from gestures, the gesture from movement and space; space is separated from time. The language is, as we have noted above, decomposed by the accumulating incoherence but also by direct emphasis (the characters are reciting the alphabet or onomatopoeic words) into its inner elements and structures: syntax, semantics, sound etc. This implied analysis of the fictional world has also the significance of a deconstruction (or rather a display of the constructed nature) of the theatrical institution. The final violence directed against the audience can be understood as the awareness of the reality within the theatrical machinery. Interestingly, the illusionism of the theatrical art is acknowledged, a process which propels the play beyond ambivalence. There is a clear meaning to the violence in the play, namely the total splitting apart of the audience from the performance. Most of the lines and the stage directions are coherently subordinated to an analytical mechanism and to a well-guided argumentation which create a dichotomy between the theatrical space and the audience. Finally these two spaces are missing their own double. If to Artaud the theatre of cruelty conceived the performance as a serious and violent event, which was searching for a new relationship with the spectators, in Ionescos play the violence ultimately spells skepticism. The violence in this play is one that conceptualises. In the long run, the separation is primarily between theatre and existence. By highlighting the theatrical mechanism, by pointing out the possibility that the spectator can become violent, and by finding an analogous response on the stage, Ionesco openly gives warning against confusing the two. Therefore Ionescos early play is, through its militant negativism and the polemics of its syntax (a syntax whose references can be only valued from a cultural perspective), the premise of his further creations, an early clarification of the planes. All in all, this play can surely stand for a direct metaliterary construction,

that is to say a true mise-en scne of the textual mechanism (or of the literary and theoretical patterns - Marino, 1998). Analysing the vast contemporary literature from the viewpoint of the analysis of representation, L. Hutcheon (1989) highlighted the fact that this literature is prone to produce a certain type of metaliterary construction, referred to above as direct, which would represent an analytical solution of compromise between the traditional representation, where the referent is transparent, and the modern self-reflection, which undermines the referent in favour of the autonomous dimension of the language. L. Hutcheon makes direct reference to the post-modern literature that lays bare not only the realistic transparency, but also the modern self-reflection, so claiming the historically proven strength of the two. Yet the evidence of this type of direct metaliterariness is rooted in earlier periods, dating back to Cervantes, Molire, L. Sterne, Pirandello, continuing to the present moment. From the vantage point of representation, the common background of this history of the metaliterary is the capacity of literature to turn itself into or expose itself as a performance, to achieve a better measurement of its involvement in the anthropological space and implicitly to revise the meaning of its specific theoretical bases. This type of metaliterariness is born of an oversaturation of the procedure, in addition to a highly suspicious questioning of the very idea of literature, while it is, at the same time, a major premise of the fundamental renewal of literature. Ionesco himself, before starting the dramatic career which would make him famous, expressed suspicion on literature, seen as sheer technique, exterior mechanics, mere dexterity (Ionesco,1992, I:24). As did all the writers of his generation, obsessed with the authenticity, whose legitimate manifestations appeared as subjective in the lyrical poetry and diary writing, the future playwright felt the need to fight a literary species accused of having been totally imbued with rhetoric. To the young Ionesco, theatre was equivalent to rhetoric, synonymous with ostentation and fakery. The subsequent result of this fight is the play English without a Teacher, where both the spectators need for transparency and the illusionist duplicity of the theatrical fiction are vehemently accused. However Ionescos most important result is his discovery of a new type of dramatic effect, namely a dissonant and completely anti-illusionist one, to be further developed through experiencing the creative process of the play The Bald Soprano.

REFERENCES: Aristotle, Poetics Hamdan, 1998 Hutcheon, 1989 Ionesco, 1966 Aristotle, Poetics, translated in English by S. H. Butcher, E-book version, EPUB. Alexandra Hamdan, Ionescu nainte de Ionesco. Portretul artistului tnr, Saeculum, Bucureti, 1998. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of postmodernism, Routledge, 1989. Eugen Ionesco, Notes et contre-notes (Note and Counter-Notes),

Ionesco,1992 Marino, 1998 Pavis, 1998 Revzina, Revzine, 1971 Ubersfeld, 1999 Vartic, 1990

Gallimard, Paris, 1966. Eugen Ionescu, Rzboi cu toat lumea, Humanitas, Bucureti, 1992, vol. I. Adrian Marino, Comparatism i teoria literaturii, Polirom, Iai, 1998 Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the theatre. Terms, Concepts, and Analysis (Translated by Christine Shantz), University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1998 Olga et Isak Revzine, Exprimentation smiotique chez Eugne Ionesco (La cantatrice chauve et la Leon), Semiotica, IV ( nr. 3), Mouton, The Hague, 1971. Anne Ubersfeld, Termenii cheie ai analizei teatrului, Institutul European, Iai, 1999 Ion Vartic, Epilog la ediia E. Ionescu, Eu, Echinox, Cluj Napoca, 1990