EXERCICES DE STYLE PUR OU COMMENT EXPRIMER L’INEXPRIMABLE CHEZ EUGENE IONESCO
PURE STYLE DRILLS OR HOW TO EXPRESS WHAT CANNOT BE EXPRESSED IN EUGÈNE IONESCO

Summary/Abstract: In all his plays, Eugène Ionesco has tried to demonstrate the spiritual alienation of his characters, whose verbal mechanisms could work until the language totally disintegrates. From the Bald singer to The Rhinoceros, all the pays bear coherence and continuity inspired from artistic and human ideals. With no radical opposition of the absurd theatre as shown in The Bald Singer or in The Lesson, to the ideological theatre as in The Rhinoceros or the Thirst and The Hunger in content, we have to admit that the language, the thought and their crisis denounced in The Bald Singer or in The Lesson represent the beginning of a process of dehumanisation launched in The Rhinoceros. All the characters, except for Bérenger-the only one with human traits- are phantoms without souls and personalities, suffering from the disease of wording and thinking and they show this in their behaviour and language stereotypes.

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