The Gothic-Absurd Hybrid and the Limits of Representation
The Gothic-Absurd Hybrid and the Limits of Representation

Summary/Abstract: The construction and the almost concurrent deconstruction of Ionesco’s often self-reflexive dramatic texts occur through a parodic undermining of various intertextual references and contradictory aesthetic conventions. Structured as thematic palimpsests that rest on a poetics of cruelty and macabre sensationalism, Ionesco’s plays amount, at the same time, to uninterrupted essays, or to meta-theatrical essayistic journals. Ionesco’s self-referential and self-parodic frame-play undergoes a decostruction at the level of dramatic plot and of the characters, in the sense that it conceals a textual trap. The second play, of mise-en-abyme type, is meant to expose the non-representability and, often, the non-interpretability of the first play.

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