Literatura franceză despre absurd: un export estic? (E. Ionesco și literatura română de la hotarul secolelor XIX-XX)

Abstract

The conception about Absurd spread in Europe in the early and mid-twentieth century, through German philosophers studies, but especially through the artistic works of J.-P. Sartre and A. Camus (professional philosophers also), finds its plenary expression in the Theater of the Absurd, one of the most expressive forms of protest, a significant modality to say «No» to the values disappearance of a society that has demonstrated modern civilization bankruptcy. The undisputed leader of the Theater of the Absurd is the Romanian French-language writer Eugene Ionesco. If Camus has argued that the forerunners of literature about Absurd and Alienation are Dostoevsky and Kafka, then for Ionesco, including through the way of «working» the language (deconstruction of academic language), as models largely serve the work of Ion Luca Caragiale (who uses in his writings the «absurd dialogue», desemanticized from its traditional valences, when language ceases to be a messenger of information and falls into banality and disaggregation) and that of Urmuz, appreciated by literary critics as the forerunner and father of the Absurd, «one of the anticipators of universal art revolt» (E. Ionesco), whose artistic heritage has been assumed by T. Tzara in Dadaism, and then in Surrealism, performing an opening to European avant-garde literature.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the absurd is also found in Dadaism, which through the free associations «poetics» and the hazard supremacy, that eliminates any intervention of human reason, through scandalous shows, considered as a defiance of common sense, has paved the way for the Theater of the Absurd ones. In this manner, we can conclude that the Romanian writers work of the 19th – 20th centuries limit and of the beginning of the 20th century can also be attested as a reference and starting point for the French and universal literature about Absurd.