SOURCE: “ Eugène Ionesco and the Dialectic of Space,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 3, September 1972, pp. 312-26.

In the following essay, Witt discusses the polar states such as evanescence and heaviness, lightness and darkness, open space and restriction, that are evident in Ionesco’s plays; notes his use of the arrangement of spatial images; and asserts that Ionesco’s characters are hemmed in, lonely creatures longing for liberation.

Throughout his journals and in his notes on the theater, Eugène Ionesco refers to the two basic states of consciousness which, he claims, are at the origin of all his plays. One is represented as a sensation of levity, evanescence, luminosity: “Chacun de nous a pu sentir, à certains moments, que le monde a une substance de rêve, que les murs n’ont plus d’épaisseur, qu’il nous semble voir à travers tout, dans un univers sans espace...