SOURCE: “Ionesco” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Anchor Books, 1966, pp. 115-23.

In the following essay, Sontag notes that Ionesco’s early work, in which he discovers and uses theatrically the poetry of clichés and language-as-thing, is interesting and original. However, she finds his later work infused with a crude, simplistic negativity that is extracted from his earlier artistic discovery, and considers his attitudes a “type of misanthropy covered over with fashionable clichés of cultural diagnosis.”

It is fitting that a playwright whose best works apotheosize the platitude has compiled a book on the theater crammed with platitudes.¹ I quote, at random:

Didacticism is above all an attitude of mind and an expression of the will to dominate.

A work of art really is above all an adventure of the mind.

Some have said that Boris Vian’s The Empire Builders was inspired by my own...