PERFORMING IRONY: EUGÈNE IONESCO'S BATTLES WITH HIS CRITICS
PERFORMING IRONY: EUGÈNE IONESCO'S BATTLES WITH HIS CRITICS

Summary/Abstract: My article endeavours to investigate playwright Eugène Ionesco’s irony, following two critical debates: the first was mainly conducted by Roland Barthes and Bernard Dort, in the pages of the polemical journal Théâtre Populaire, which found Ionesco’s ironic response not only in numerous interviews and theoretical texts, but also in the play Improvisation or The Shepherd’s Chameleon, where Barthes and Dort feature as characters. The second, known as the London Controversy, consisted of a series of articles written by Kenneth Tynan and Ionesco in The Observer and Cahiers des Saisons. The rationale behind these two analyses is to prove that, like his compatriot Emil Cioran’s Pe culmile disperării [On the Heights of Despair], which was the stylistic matrix of his French texts, Ionesco’s first book, Nu [No] can be traced back as the origin of Ionesco’s irony. Ionesco’s irony has an Eastern European descent, and perhaps this is why Barthes, Dort and Tynan could not relate properly to Ionesco’s playful remarks.

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