Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002
_______________________________________________________________
Swallowing
the Sky:
Eugéne
Ionesco and the Physiology of Happiness
by
When
Monsieur Bérenger rises into the air one Sunday afternoon, he tries to explain
his behavior to dubious onlookers below: “Man has a crying need to fly. It’s
like not keeping fit. If we don’t fly, we’re not healthy enough” (pp.
73-75).[i]
Along with his amazed onlookers, three-and-a-half decades of scholars have
puzzled over this sudden levitation in Eugéne
Ionesco’s
A Stroll in the Air. Allan Lewis,
among others, sees Bérenger as an escapist, “flying into outer space to defy
death and escape the anxiety of this world.”[ii]
Leonard Pronko suggests that “Bérenger’s flight represents his
inspiration, his writing.”[iii]
Patricia Rigg champions the widely-accepted view of Bérenger as “an
embodiment of the Romantic imaginative impulse.”[iv]
While all of these interpretations are supportable, there is another, more
literal explanation: Bérenger’s flight dramatizes a physical buoyancy that
Ionesco felt to be very real, a happiness so complete that it transforms the
human body itself. Ionesco enjoyed flashes of bodily lightness throughout his
life, accompanied by moments of illuminated perception, overwhelming joy and an
epiphany that he could describe only as “a certainty of being.” Reading
Bérenger’s airy stroll more literally, in the light of the playwright’s own
experiences, reveals a profound significance beyond the mere symbolism of
Ionesco’s extraordinary work.
A
Real-Life Stroll in the Air
Bérenger’s
flight has its origins in an event described in Ionesco’s autobiography Present
Past Past Present. The playwright recalls a scene that would later be
recreated on the set of A Stroll:
bright sunshine, immaculately white houses and “a deep, dense sky.” In the
midst of this brilliance, Ionesco says, he felt “a blow right in the heart, in
the center of my being.” With the onset of this euphoria, his relationship to
the physical environment began to change. The world around him no longer seemed
dominated by solid matter; instead, he began to perceive the world in terms of
space and light, as though an all-pervading luminosity were “trying to escape
from the forms that contained it.” As the objects around him appeared less and
less material, the insubstantial sky seemed to descend and take on physical
qualities of its own:
[The
sky] enveloped me, enveloped all the objects, the walls, and was almost
palpable, almost velvet, blue; the deeper and denser the blue of the sky became,
the more it could be perceived through the sense of touch. My euphoria became
enormous, inhuman. I breathed the air and it was as if I were swallowing pieces
of blue sky that replaced my lungs, my heart, my liver, my bones with this
celestial substance, somewhere between water and air, and this made me so light,
lighter and lighter, that I could no longer feel the effort of walking. It was
as if I were not walking now, but leaping, dancing. I could have flown . I could
have risen from the earth as in a dream or as once upon a time.[v]
The
profound impact of this experience resonates throughout Ionesco’s prose and
theater. Its imagery is present in his “Third Tale for Children Less Than
Three Years Old” as Daddy and Josette pretend they’re going for an airplane
ride: “Now we’re in the clouds, and then above the clouds, and the sky gets
bluer and bluer, and now there’s only blue sky.”[vi]
This transformed perception is similarly reflected in The Hermit when a crack above the rooftops reveals “a bluer blue”
behind the everyday sky.[vii]
And in A Hell of a Mess, Agnés
dreams of a sky “newly washed and newly clean, as blue as blue can be.”[viii]
Richard
Coe has explored Ionesco’s recurring sky imagery from a symbolist perspective,
classifying the playwright’s sky-blue as the color “of the transcendental
and the mystic, of that which lies before and after life.”[ix]
While Ionesco’s sky may indeed embody mystical elements, it is important to
recognize that the image itself has its roots not in philosophy but in direct
sensory experience. With Ionesco’s autobiographical writings in hand, there
can be no doubt that his fictional descriptions of sky, lightness and flying are
closely linked to his real life. This is undoubtedly so in The Killer, where Bérenger actually recalls the whole of Ionesco’s
experience as his own: the stroll through the country village, the sensation of
inhaling sky with each breath. “I’m sure I could have flown away,”
Bérenger concludes, “I’d lost so much weight, I was lighter than the blue
sky I was breathing. If I didn’t do it, it’s because I was too happy, it
didn’t enter my head.”[x]
This
line from A Killer hints at the
premise of A Stroll in the Air for,
in this later of Ionesco’s plays, the idea of flying does enter Bérenger’s
head.
The
Anatomy of Weightlessness
The
symptoms of Bérenger’s transformation recall Ionesco’s own experience: “I’ve
never felt so light, so weightless,” he marvels. “What’s happening to me?”
(p. 59) As with Ionesco, space and light come to the foreground of Bérenger’s
consciousness, transforming a silver bridge into a dazzling display of “those
famous particles of light that scientists call ‘photons’“ (p. 64). When
Josephine, from her ordinary mode of perception, frets that her husband’s
euphoric state is “a bit abstract,” Bérenger corrects her. “No, on the
contrary, it’s all very concrete. This happiness is something physical. I can
feel it here. The air that fills my lungs is more rarefied than air. It gives
off vapors that are going to my head” (p. 60). This detailed anatomical report
contains no trace of metaphor or symbolism. It is Bérenger’s, and ultimately
Ionesco’s, attempt to describe a unique physical state: the physiology of
happiness.
This
happiness, this all-encompassing joy, is the motivation and justification for
Bérenger’s flight. To the onlookers, who fail to recognize this crucial
component, Bérenger’s flight seems wholly irrational, circus entertainment at
best and, at worst, a sheer waste of time. “Sitting’s good enough for me,”
scoffs John Bull (p. 74). Says The Journalist of Bérenger’s “need to fly,”
“Technology has adequately and brilliantly fulfilled that need already” (p.
75). The Second Man finds the flying Bérenger outright disgusting, not an
exalted human being but “a wretched little cricket” (p. 77). Nothing could
matter less to these earthbound citizens than subjective human experience; they
are concerned only with purposeful activity and technological advance.
To
the floating Bérenger, on the other hand, experience is everything. The “conviction”
that sends his head reeling does not belong to his intellect; it is not
localized to any thought or idea. His imprecision perplexes Josephine, as does
his declaration that “once a conviction’s been limited by definition, it isn’t
one anymore” (p. 61). This explanation appears to be utter nonsense until one
considers, once again, Ionesco’s experience in the sky-enveloped village. In Present Past,
Ionesco recalls feeling overwhelmed by a “stupefaction” that seemed to burst
all boundaries and limits. As with Bérenger, all that remained was an
indefinable conviction: “‘Nothing is true,’ I said, ‘outside of this’--a
this that I was, of course, unable to define, since the this itself was what
escaped definition, because it itself was the beyond. Perhaps I could translate
this feeling and this this by ‘a certainty of being.’”[xi]
Physical
Lightness and Spiritual Epiphany
Such
passages in Ionesco’s writings have captured the attention of critics.
According to Coe, Ionesco’s glimpse of a transcendental reality “is a
mystical experience of the highest order.” He compares Ionesco’s indefinable
state with the Buddhist Nirvana and speculates that, “in the final analysis,
it is the transmitting of this experience . which has given Ionesco the status
of one of the most influential dramatists of the present century.”[xii]
Rosette Lamont also views Ionesco’s illuminations with the highest respect;
in her introduction to The Two Faces of
Ionesco, she likens the playwright to certain mystical rabbis, quoting a
passage by Kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem. At advanced stages of spiritual
development, says Scholem, the structures of nature seem to dissolve and “the
mystic’s experience progresses towards the ultimate formlessness.”[xiii]
Ionesco himself felt an affinity to the mystical traditions of the world, as he
writes in Present Past: “The plenitude that I felt was perhaps a little like
mystic plenitude. It began with the feeling that space was emptying itself of
its material heaviness. It was as if my mind could move freely, as if there were
no resistance to its movement.”[xiv]
While
various critics have touched upon Ionesco’s “mystical” side, few, if any,
have acknowledged the long-standing association of spiritual epiphany with human
flight. Virtually every culture reports instances where lightness of the mind or
spirit has culminated in actual levitation. Some of the most well-documented of
these accounts can be found in the European tradition. The Catholic Church
records the names of more than two hundred saints whose bodies were reported to
have lifted into the air. While some of these records are difficult to verify,
others contain enough substantiating evidence to have gained acceptance by
historians. The claims of St. Joseph’s levitations are perhaps the most
convincing, having been reported on more than one hundred occasions by some of
the most reputable individuals in Europe at that time: among others, the list
includes a princess, an admiral, two physicians, three cardinals, and the Pope
himself. [xv]
Ionesco
may or may not have been aware of such accounts while writing A
Stroll in the Air; in either case, his descriptions of Bérenger’s flight
bear remarkable resemblance to some of these recorded testimonies. Initially,
Bérenger hovers just above the ground, leading Marthé to exclaim, “Papa’s
walking above the grass. He’s really walking over the top of the grass” (p.
68). Only a century before Ionesco penned these words, Russian nuns described
St. Seraphim in the same way:
We
were walking through the meadow. The grass was long and green. Father Seraphim
was in front of us. Suddenly he stopped and told us to go on ahead. We obeyed
him but looked back in curiosity a few moments later. What was our astonishment
to see Father Seraphim walking in the air, about two feet above the grass![xvi]
Along
with the Vatican records, the long Vedic tradition of India offers an impressive
correlate to Bérenger’s flight. His full-blown ascent is preceded by a
bouncing period, leading Josephine to reprimand him, “There’s no need to go
hopping about like a child” (p. 59). According to the Yogatattva-Upanishad,
the flight of Vedic yogis is also said to begin with a phase of hopping: “As a
frog moves by leaps, so the Yogi...moves on the earth. With a (further)
increased practice, he is able to rise from the ground.”[xvii]
The Shiva Samhita also states that after first “hopping about like a
frog...the adept walks in the air.”[xviii]
Even in our modern era there are reports of at least these early stages of
levitation. The technique of Yogic Flying, as described in the Vedic literature,
was recently revived by the Indian teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and its first
“hopping” stage has been publicly demonstrated around the world.[xix]
As
with Bérenger, the levitations of these yogic flyers and religious saints tend
to be accompanied by sensations of physical bliss. One of the most prominent
historical flyers, the eleventh century monk Milarepa of Tibet, was described as
“one whose physical body was pervaded by the descending bliss down to his very
toes, and by the ascending bliss up to the crown of his head. He was able to
furnish demonstration thereof by flying through the sky.”[xx]
This description bears a notable resemblance to an experience of Ionesco’s:
When
I was an adolescent, I was sometimes overwhelmed by an intense, luminous joy: it
was an inexplicable, irrational happiness that mounted from the earth, from my
feet, and went up to my knees, to my belly, to my heart, to lay hold of all of
me. I felt I was in harmony with everything. My heart beat faster and I had the
impression that I was rising and getting bigger.[xxi]
Heaviness
and Absurdity
As
striking as these similarities are, there is, however, a key difference between
Ionesco’s experiences and those of the aforementioned: Ionesco’s life had no
spiritual framework outside of his euphoric moments. Because of this, Ionesco
was something of a slave to the moment-to-moment changes of his body. When his
body felt light, he rejoiced at every facet of his existence. When his body
became heavy, he saw “within every fruit the inevitable kernel of anxiety, the
idea of death.”[xxii] His shifts between lightness and lethargy were
entirely mysterious to him, set off by some simple but hidden “interior
mechanism” upon which he could stumble only by chance.[xxiii] In one instance, a clothesline hanging with wet
diapers was enough to trigger an exalted experience. “It suddenly seemed to me
that those nappies on the washing line had an unexpected beauty . [revealing] a
brilliant, virgin world. I had succeeded . in seeing them in terms of light.”[xxiv]
At other times, however, even the most radiant sunlight failed to reach him; he
perceived darkness everywhere as though “seeing night mingled with day.”[xxv]
Ionesco’s
inability to find his interior light switch was augmented by an ever-increasing
tiredness. Instead of moving forward on a spiritual path, Ionesco knew only that
his body was growing heavier with age, less and less capable of shifting into a
state of weightless joy. Thus, instead of hope or faith, his illuminations left
behind a profound despair. The playwright’s own lack of direction came to be
shared by the men and women he created: “It is because they have not mapped
out a road to follow,” he wrote, “that my characters wander in the dark, the
absurd, in incomprehension and anguish.”[xxvi]
Unlike
most of Ionesco’s characters, Bérenger does attempt to create some sort of
“road map” for himself. “This time,” he resolves, “I really won’t
forget. I’ll be careful, I’ll remember, I’ll jot down all my movements in
a notebook, then I can reproduce them whenever I like” (p. 80). Unfortunately,
Bérenger is unable to preserve his internal lightness and this, ultimately,
leads to his defeat. Only moments after Bérenger flies out of sight, a dialogue
between The Child and The Fat Man foreshadows his heavy return:
CHILD:
I’m very sorry, sir. I wanted to go for a walk in the light. I wanted lots of
sky.
FAT
MAN: Greedy child. Hooligan. You thought I couldn’t catch you, did you?
CHILD:
Not the cell, sir, I won’t go back to that cell!
FAT
MAN: Stupid brat, you’ve got to learn that the light’s a lot more beautiful
when it’s seen from the bottom of a nice black hole. And a clear blue sky’s
a lot purer when you look at it through a high barred window (p. 95).
While
the child is robbed of his sky, Bérenger is brought down to earth by the
horrors sees in space. The world that, only moments before, had seemed so
glorious and expansive now becomes a prison cell. Bérenger is once again
dominated by the fear he expressed at the start of the play: “I am paralyzed
by the knowledge that I’m going to die” (p. 23). This dread of annihilation
has been explained both philosophically and politically. Ultimately, however,
the cause of Bérenger’s despair is no more logical than that of his earlier
elation. As in Ionesco’s life, all that lies between Bérenger’s joyous “conviction”
and his paralytic fear of death is a hidden interior mechanism. When this magic
button is found, all existence is radiant and invincible. When it is lost again,
no hope can be seen for personal or world survival. The former of these states
is characterized by physical buoyancy; the latter is inevitably linked to an
exhausting heaviness. As Ionesco records in Fragments of a Journal, this
weighted feeling dominated his later life: “My body had become a burden too
heavy to bear. I would get up, and after a few minutes, weariness, like a leaden
cloak, weighed me down.”[xxvii]
Remembering
How to Fly
It
is easy to see the relationship between this physical state and the mood that
dominates so many of Ionesco’s plays. In The
Chairs, an elderly man and woman plummet to their deaths. In The
New Tenant, a character becomes entombed within heaps of his own furniture.
In Rhinoceros, Bérenger laments to Jean, “I’m so tired, I’ve
been tired for years.... I’m conscious of my body all the time as if it were
made of lead, or as if I were carrying another man on my back.”[xxviii]
Yet just as in Ionesco’s life, lightness can return to his theater at the
most unexpected moments. At the end of Amédée,
for example, the growing corpse that had burdened the principal character
throughout the play suddenly “opens out like a sail or a huge parachute.” As
Amédée rises into the Milky Way, he calls down these parting words: “Forgive
me, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry! Oh, dear! But I feel so frisky,
so frisky!”[xxix]
Even
as an older man, Ionesco enjoyed occasional resurgences of “friskiness.” In Fragments
of a Journal he writes, “All of a sudden, lightheartedness and joy. For
years and years I had not felt like this. Everything was a burden...everything
exhausted me. And then, suddenly, came this joy.” So complete was the
transformation that Ionesco wondered, “Where had I been? Who had prevented me
from looking and seeing?”[xxx]
Bérenger asks a similar rhetorical question upon taking to the air: “How
could I have forgotten the way it’s done? It’s so simple, so clear, so
childish. It would be better for us to starve than not to fly. I expect that’s
why we all feel so unhappy” (p. 74).
For
A Stroll in the Air is not, as some
would have it, a mere parable for the defeat of the human spirit. Ionesco did
not simply imagine a lighter, more glorious reality; he experienced it directly.
According to Ionesco, “The internal mechanism that is able to set the world
alight, to transfigure it, is able to function in the simplest, most natural
way.”[xxxi] The loss of this mechanism, the return of gloom and
gravity, was, to Ionesco, life’s great absurdity. Like Ionesco, Bérenger has
glimpsed what life should be and will never be satisfied with anything less. In
his brief flashes of wakefulness, he is able to recognize and proclaim the
birthright of all humankind: “It’s...how can I explain it? Like some feeling
of joy that’s been forgotten, forgotten yet still familiar, like something
that’s belonged to me since the beginning of time. You lose it every day and
yet it’s never really lost. And the proof is that you can find it again” (p.
59).
[i]
All
citations from A Stroll in the Air
are trans. Donald Watson (New York, 1965). Page numbers are indicated in
parenthesis within the text of this paper.
[ii]
Allan
Lewis, Ionesco (New York, 1972),
p. 73.
[iii]
Leonard
Pronko, Eugéne Ionesco (New York,
1965), p. 38.
[iv]
Patricia
Rigg, “Ionesco’s Bérenger: Existential Philosopher or Philosophical
Ironist?” Modern
Drama,
7 (1992), p. 543.
[v]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Present Past Past Present,
trans. Helen Lane (New York, 1971), pp. 154-56.
[vi]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Present Past Past Present,
p. 87.
[vii]
Eugéne
Ionesco, The Hermit (New York,
1974), p. 154.
[viii]
Eugéne
Ionesco, A Hell of a Mess (New
York, 1975), p. 105.
[ix]
Richard
N. Coe, “On Being Very, Very Surprised: Ionesco and the Vision of
Childhood,” in The Dream and the
Play: Ionesco’s Theatrical Quest, ed. Moshe Lazar (New York, 1978), p.
17.
[x]
Eugéne
Ionesco, The Killer, trans. Donald
Watson (New York, 1960), pp. 20-26.
[xi]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Present Past Past Present,
p. 154-55.
[xii]
Richard
Coe, “Ionesco and the Vision of Childhood,” p. 9.
[xiii]
Rosette
Lamont, “Introductory Remarks to Eugéne Ionesco’s ‘Why Do I Write?’“
in The Two Faces of
Ionesco, ed. Rosette C. Lamont and Melvin J. Friedman (New York, 1978),
p. 2.
[xiv]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Present Past Past Present,
p. 154.
[xv]
Craig
Pearson, Flying Throughout the Ages
(in press), pp. 7-8.
[xvi]
Valentine
Zander, Saint Seraphim of Sarov: His
Life (London, 1968), pp. 39-40.
[xvii]
Thirty
Minor Upanishads,
trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1969),
pp.
195-197.
[xviii]
The
Siva Samhita,
trans. Raj Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu (India, 1914), pp. 30-31.
[xix]
Jason
Orlovich, “Yogic Flyers Demonstrate Skills,” The
Daily Illi, May 4, 1999.
[xx]
Tibet’s
Great Yogi Milarepa: A Biography from the Tibetan,
ed. W.Y. Evans-Wentz (London, 1969), pp. 35-36.
[xxi]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Present Past Past Present,
p. 160.
[xxii]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal
(New York, 1968), p. 96.
[xxiii]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Present Past Past Present,
p. 157.
[xxiv]
Claude
Bonnefoy, Conversations with Eugéne
Ionesco (London, 1970), p. 30.
[xxv]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal,
p. 96.
[xxvi]
Eugéne
Ionesco, “Why Do I write? A Summing Up,” in The
Two Faces of Ionesco, p. 7
[xxvii]
.Eugéne
Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal,
p. 96.
[xxviii]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Rhinoceros, trans. Derek
Prouse (New York, 1960), pp. 17-18.
[xxix]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Three Plays, trans.
Donald Watson (New York, 1958), pp. 73-76.
[xxx]
Eugéne
Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal,
pp. 95-96.
[xxxi] Eugéne Ionesco, Present Past Past Present, p. 157.