Mémoires en débris et temps immobile dans le théâtre d’Eugène Ionesco et Samuel Beckett
Ruined Memories and Still Time in the Theatre of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett

Summary/Abstract: This article addresses the question of forgetting and shattered memory in the theatrical poetics of Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. La cantatrice chauve and Waiting for Godot announce themselves through dialogues that showcase prototypes of characters stuck in a temporal process of diminishment and cognitive degradation: they ignore their past, their present and their future. The temporality appears so stretched that any progression forward, or backward, becomes impossible. The body of these extras is no longer the place of all consciousness of existence, but the symbol of an absurd life without precise landmarks. The analysis of the textual elements of coherence and cohesion, against the background of the theory of the receptivity of the theatrical fact by the recipient (Umberto Eco, 1992), makes it possible to understand that theatrical language, beyond the deceptive appearance of the question of memory in debris and forgetting is fraught with ambiguities; and all this elaborates a theatrical poetics which brings a denial to any referential illusion

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