The generic difference between [Le Solitaire, a novel, and Ce Formidable Bordel!, a play,] is actually slight, beyond obvious and superficial differences in form. Whether or not the generic question be judged a fruitful subject for debate aǵain matters little. The novel is full of "dramatic" techniques and over half the play is built on "non-dramatic" chunks of prose appropriate to a novel…. What I find compelling about this symbiotic pair, however, is not the havoc they play with generic labels, but the images they project of our struggle with the demons of existence. The demons have not changed appreciably since the plays of the '50s, indeed since long before that. What has changed in Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! is the intensity, I would even say the authenticity, of the struggle. Le Solitaire and Le Personnage, Ionesco's unnamed protagonists, try very hard to understand what is happening to them as the hated but protective routine of daily life dissolves into an amorphous disponibilité, time passes, revolutions come and go, and still the awaited event, the ordering agent, does not make itself known. (p. 689)
With some minor divergences and a major one at the end, [the two works] follow the same narrative line, include most of the same characters portrayed similarly, and even share numerous phrases, snatches of dialogue, and techniques of sceneic development. Without presenting my remarks as an "argument" or a "case," I will simply record some reasons why Le Solitaire and Ce Formidable Bordel! speak to me of a solid, increasingly convincing artistry in Ionesco.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Ionesco, Eugène 1912–: Critical Essay by Judith D. Suther Access Pass.
