The Bald Soprano (Criticism)

Criticism

John W. Fiero

Fiero is a professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, where he teaches drama and play writing. In this essay he discusses the interrelationship of Ionesco’s anti-play elements in The Bald Soprano, including character, language, and structure.

The Bald Soprano (1950) is Eugene Ionesco’s first “anti-play,” conceived and created as a deliberate spoof or parody of the plays then in vogue in Paris. Ionesco was attempting to create “a new free theatre,” one devoid of theme, ideology, social realism, philosophy, and the thin “boulevard” psychology then pervading French drama. His targets were the complacent bourgeoisie and intellectual drones who went to see plays that fed them nothing to challenge their smug certainty that such matters as social injustice could be ameliorated through political convictions and rational discourse. For Ionesco, the very efficacy of language was in question, something far more fundamental and troubling than the passing concerns of political ideologies, no matter what their flavor.

Ionesco’s method was to weave together trite expressions pilfered from an English-language primer that he had used while learning English. He translated these for his trenchant caricature of the bourgeoisie, whom he saw as prattlers of an endless stream of mindless expressions and hackneyed slogans. As he confides in Notes and Counter Notes, the process proved unsettling. While writing the work, he “felt genuinely uneasy, sick and dizzy,” because, perhaps, he glimpsed from the outset that what he was writing “was something like the tragedy of language!”

The Bald Soprano may have tragic implications, but on the surface it is pure comedy, almost farce. In fact, Ionesco was aware of the seeming contradiction, for he also dubbed his anti-play a “comedy of comedies.” He set out in artistic defiance of the Aristotelian notions of plot, character, diction, and thought — the elements of the “well-made” play — designing a new drama as free of such conventional elements as he could make it. His main characters, the Martins and Smiths, are robotic ninnies, so much alike as to be indistinguishable, either in language or function. Their diction is largely pre-masticated cant, made up of self-evident observations and the various insincere pleasantries that polite but empty civility requires. The Martins and Smiths are middle-class English couples, though they could just as well be of any nationality in Europe or North America.

Hemmed in by their hollow platitudes, these anti-characters never seem to progress much beyond a pre-cognitive ritual of acknowledging the existence of each other. Even that much is resisted by Mr. Smith when, at the play’s opening, he reads and clicks his tongue while Mrs. Smith jabbers incoherently. Empty niceties and insincere expressions of awe lock out any understanding or insight, resulting, for example, in the ludicrous discovery by the Martins that they are actually husband and wife. Or so they agree to believe.

These are characters who either cannot think for themselves because they have no selves or have no selves because they cannot think. That is the ironic implication of Mrs. Martin’s farewell thanks to the Fire Chief, with whom she says she has “passed a truly Cartesian quarter of an hour.” In essence, the Smiths and Martins have provided the negative corollary to Descartes’ famous principle, cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”). They do not think; therefore they are not. They have no discreet identities, thus it is no wonder that Mr. and Mrs. Martin cannot recognize each other when they first enter the Smiths’ home. The amnesia they suffer is a condition of non-being.

When a real thought threatens to invade the consciousness of these anti-characters, it is usually too evanescent to have any sticking power. It comes and is immediately lost, forcing discourse into a crazy-quilt pattern of incongruous observations, many of which are self-evident or indisputable truisms, like the fact that a week consists of seven days or that the ceiling lies above and the floor below, snippets of inane conversation that Ionesco took from his English phrase book. Still, throughout the first half of The Bald Soprano, there are a few occasions in which a sense of anxiety breaks through the barriers erected by the polite platitudes. Angst is revealed in the characters’ inability to endure silence and in a few hostile remarks that disclose, at least in the Smiths, fears of sexual inadequacy and the resulting threat to any last remnants of a meaningful identity. It is only at such points that characters, however crudely, use language creatively rather than merely mechanically. There is, for example, Mrs. Smith’s early quip that although the soup of the evening meal “was perhaps a little too salty,” it was “saltier” than Mr. Smith.

For the most part, as George Wellwarth remarks in “Beyond Realism: Ionesco’s Theory of the Drama,” the Smiths and Martins use language “as decorative verbiage to cover over the subconsciously felt fear of being in a reasonless void, of being an effect without a cause.” Such isolated wordplay as Mrs. Smith’s, indicative of an echo of an intuitive ability, is both faint and rare. In fact, in the final moments, just before the play starts over again, the hostile anger that emerges as the play’s strongest emotion grows in potency as any semblance of meaning expressed in language breaks down. Discourse simply implodes into babble, word fragments strung together by sounds, not by the association of ideas. Words lose their symbolic value altogether, thus language utterly fails, leaving the Smiths and Martins in frustrated rage. The basis of that rage is completely lost in a torrent of nonsense. At that point, as Richard Coe says in Ionesco: A Study of His Plays, “language is used almost physically, as a kind of bludgeon or blunt instrument” and the audience is “physically assaulted by the barrage of quasi-meaningless sounds emitted by the characters on stage.”

Formal logic and inductive reasoning, tools of rational discourse, are also assaulted in the playwright’s scathing parody. Like the surrealists, Ionesco had a distrust of rational thought, widely regarded by Western thinkers from Aristotle forward as the principal means to human understanding. Ionesco mimics the rational process even as he mocks it, clearly defying it with highly improbable or random occurrences and contradictions. For example, the Smiths, masking sexual fears, engage in futile arguments built on ever-shifting premises. Like the clock, which finally strikes whatever it wants, the characters say whatever does or does not move them.

As in dreams, in Ionesco’s world a ringing doorbell might announce the presence of someone at the door; then again, it might not. It is a random and arbitrary world, in which causal reasoning is at best unreliable. There can be no certainty. The Martins, having determined through their lengthy and comically tedious deductive process that they are married to each other, are actually deceived, if Mary can be trusted as accurate. Moreover, it makes no difference, for like the proliferated Bobby Watsons, one Mr. Martin or Mrs. Martin is basically the same as the next.

For Ionesco, causal argument badly misrepresents reality by putting too much faith in artificially ordered and focused conscious thought. He targeted the plays of the social realists because they told stories with events chained together in a logical, interlocking pattern that falsified true experience through drastic oversimplification and distortion. To reveal the deficiencies of such a causal pattern, he has the Smiths and Martins attempt to apply its principles to the more chaotic and less predictable world of the inner being. He does it, as Richard Schechner says in “The Bald Soprano and The Lesson: An Inquiry into Play Structure,” by “stripping away” the usual order, “the causative world,” and thereby revealing the true “rhythms” of the theater. These more faithfully reflect that same inner being.

The basic structural paradigm for the linear, causally-developed, well-made play is an isosceles triangle, sometimes referred to as “Freytag’s pyramid,” after the nineteenth-century German writer who devised its schema. It reflects a unified structural pattern in which action rises from a stasis or equilibrium to a climax, then falls in denouement to an end. Theoretically, that sequence describes not only the entire structure but each dramatic “moment” or “beat.”

Scrapping this artificial structure, Ionesco had to find a way to bring The Bald Soprano to closure. His first working solution, arrived at in rehearsal, was to end the action abruptly, using a sort of deus ex machina device in which the performance was closed down by “the Superintendent of Police and his men, who open fire at the rebellious audience” and simply order the theater vacated. The actors and playwright considered other possibilities but rejected them as too problematic. Then they came up with the clever idea of simply letting the play begin again, giving the work its cyclical structure. The play was already up and running when, as a final structural refinement, Ionesco substituted the Martins for the Smiths in the repeated opening.

Perhaps the Ouroboros, a snake devouring its own tail, can serve as the new structural paradigm. It suggests an endless, tedious, and futile cycle. It is, therefore, an appropriate structural symbol for much of the avant-garde drama influenced by Existentialism, representing the absurd condition of man explored by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. With variations, it would be used again by Ionesco, in, for example, his very next play, The Lesson (1951). Sensing that tedious and pointless labor was appropriate to the absurd condition, Samuel Beckett used a parallel structure in the two acts of Waiting for Godot (1952).

As a complement to the infolding or collapsing structure, Ionesco employs a centripetal design in which language seems to go berserk. Everything speeds up. Words proliferate, then break into mere cacophonous fragments just prior to the blackout that divides round one from round two in the interminable main event. That pattern of acceleration and proliferation, whether of words or objects, characterizes most of Ionesco’s anti-plays. It remains his indelible artistic signature and a hallmark by which his plays are easily recognized.

Source: John W. Fiero, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• Waiting for Godot (1952) is Samuel Beckett’s best known play and shares top billing with Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano as the most important works in the theater of the absurd. It was written at about the same time but not produced until 1953.
• The Chairs (1952), Ionesco’s third staged anti-play, which many consider his best, also depicts a collapse into nothingness, partly through words but also through the crowding of the stage with empty chairs and invisible characters.
• 1984 (1949), George Orwell’s dystopian study of Oceana, depicts a futuristic society gone amok. Mind control is partly achieved through Newspeak, a diminished version of English which attempts to limit proletariat thinking to government-sanctioned ideas.
• Fahrenheit 541 (1953) is Ray Bradbury’s science fiction novel of future society in which books, including the great classics of literature, are banned and people are spoon fed verbal and visual images by the government.
• The American Dream (1960), by Edward Albee, is the first real foray into the absurdist technique by a major American playwright. It shares Ionesco’s concern with the debasement of language.
• The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) is Albert Camus’s inquiry into the value of life in an absurd world — one devoid of purpose or meaning. A major proponent of existentialism, Camus provides insight into the philosophical basis of absurdist drama.