Avant-garde, Rearguard and Apocalyptic Aesthetics in Ionesco

Abstract

The study centres upon what I call the apocalyptic or rather post-apocalyptic aesthetics of Ionesco’s theatre, focused on an experience of weariness, of obsolescence, and of the reiterated dramatic (and existential) end. The theatre-making techniques, the various (anti)aesthetics of the avant-garde, the different artistic fashions and ideologies that impregnate the literary and the dramatic writing follow, in Eugène Ionesco’ vision, a kind of spectacular-agonistic, catastrophic route. The tragicomic, dramatic, or even melodramatic tension emerges, in Ionesco's work, from an avalanche of post-conflictual moments, in which every intrigue contradicts or even deconstructs the previous one. The catastrophic vision of the cavalcade of miraculous and inexplicable ends (or beginnings) is a symptom of an exacerbated type of “pure”, self-reflexive theatricality. The theatrical machinery therefore functions under the sign of an eternal aesthetic epilogue: it is emphatically post-linguistic, post-psychological, post-ideological, non- or rather post-figurative. A symptomatic aesthetic paradox is that the rearguard makes the avant-garde experiments visible and archivable.

Keywords

• apocalyptic aesthetics
• experience of obsolescence
• theatrical machinery
• post-figurative
• the avant-garde/rearguard paradox