Mack Grenfell - ISIS Application

mack grenfell isis application A piece of fiction about a man who, while lying in bed, begins a conversation with his furniture that ends up with his bed eating him.

bed eats man T

hough best known as a playwright, plays were not his first chosen medium. He started writing poetry and criticism, publishing in several Romanian journals. Two early writings of note are Nu, a book criticizing many other writers, including prominent Romanian poets, and Hugoliade, or, The grotesque and tragic life of Victor Hugo a satirical biography mocking Victor Hugo’s status as a great figure in French literature. The Hugoliade includes exaggerated retellings of the most scandalous episodes in Hugo’s life and contains prototypes for many of Ionesco’s later themes: the ridiculous authoritarian character, the false worship of language.

Like Samuel Beckett, Ionesco began his theatre career late; he did not write his first play until 1948 (La Cantatrice chauve, first performed in 1950 with the English title The Bald Soprano). At the age of 40 he decided to learn English using the Assimil method, conscientiously copying whole sentences in order to memorize them. Re-reading them, he began to feel that he was not learning English, rather he was discovering some astonishing truths such as the fact that

there are seven days in a week, that the ceiling is up and the floor is down; things which he already knew. . To his astonishment, Mrs. Smith informed her husband that they had several children, that their name was Smith, that Mr. Smith was a clerk, and that they had a servant, Mary, who was English like themselves. What was remarkable about Mrs. Smith, he thought, was her eminently methodical procedure in her quest for truth.

For Ionesco, the clichés of the conversation primer disintegrated into wild caricature and parody with language itself disintegrating into disjointed fragments of words. Ionesco set about translating this experience into a play, La Cantatrice Chauve, which was performed for the first time in 1950. It was not a success and went unnoticed until a few established writers and critics, including Jean Anouilh and Raymond Queneau championed the play.

The Chairs, L’Avenir est dans les oeufs translated as The Future is in Eggs, Victimes du Devoir translated as Victims of Duty and, finally, Le Nouveau Locataire translated as The New Tenant . These absurdist sketches, to which he gave such descriptions as “anti-play” (anti-pièce in French) express modern feelings of alienation and the impossibility and futility of communication with surreal comic force, parodying the conformism of the bourgeoisie and conventional theatrical forms.

In them Ionesco rejects a conventional story-line as their basis, instead taking their dramatic structure from accelerating rhythms and/or cyclical repetitions. He disregards psychology and coherent dialogue, thereby depicting a dehumanized world. Language becomes rarefied, with words and material objects gaining a life of their own, increasingly overwhelming the characters and creating a sense of menace.

Death is our main problem and all others are less important. It is the wall and the limit.

It is the only inescapable alienation; it gives us a sense of our limits.

Ionesco’s earliest works, and his most innovative, were all oneact nonsense plays or extended sketches: La Cantatrice Chauve translated as The Bald Prima Donna, Jacques ou la soumission translated as Jack, or The Submission , La Leçon translated as The Lesson , Les Salutions translated as Salutations , Les Chaises translated as

Like Shaw and Brecht, Ionesco also contributed to the theatre with his theoretical writings. Ionesco wrote mainly in attempts to correct critics whom he felt misunderstood his work and therefore wrongly influenced his audience. In doing so, Ionesco articulated ways in which he thought contemporary theatre should be reformed . Notes and

Counter Notes is a collection of Ionesco’s writings, including musings on why he chose to write for the theatre and direct responses to his contemporary critics.

In the first section, titled “Experience of the Theatre”, Ionesco claimed to have hated going to the theatre as a child because it gave him “no pleasure or feeling of participation”. He wrote that the problem with realistic theatre is that it is less interesting than theatre that invokes an “imaginative truth”, which he found to be much more interesting and freeing than the “narrow” truth presented by strict realism. He claimed that “drama that relies on simple effects is not necessarily drama simplified”. Notes and Counter Notes also reprints a heated war of words between Ionesco and Kenneth Tynan based on Ionesco’s above stated beliefs and Ionesco’s hatred for Brecht and Brechtian theatre.

Ionesco is often considered a writer of the Theatre of the Absurd.

This is a label originally given to him by Martin Esslin in his book of the same name, placing Ionesco alongside such contemporary writers as Samuel Beckett. Esslin called them “absurd” based on Albert Camus’ concept of the absurd, claiming that Beckett and Ionesco better captured the meaninglessness of existence in their plays than in work by Camus or Sartre.

Because of this loose association, Ionesco is often mislabeled an existentialist. Ionesco claimed in Notes and Counter Notes.