Volume 17, Number 7 · November 4, 1971
The Family Man
By Robert Mazzocco
Present Past Past Present: A Personal Memoir
by Eugène Ionesco, translated by Helen R. Lane
Grove, 192 pp., $6.00
We all know Hegel's famous saying, 'When turning our gaze to the past, the first thing we observe is ruins.' That gaze, of course, is philosophic and Prussian. How many, though, would be perverse enough to observe clouds of dust settling not over the past, but over the present and the future? It took a Rumanian-born mal-content, a French-educated expatriate, a plump and soulful littérateur living and writing in Paris after the war to hit upon the thoroughly insulting idea that the true mise en scène of the contemporary world, the contemporary malaise, is rubble—in fact, bigger and better rubble day by day. Critics call these curious and rather vengeful works of Ionesco comedies—social or metaphysical comedies. Often they seem the horrendous whimsy of a hermit situated at the edges of Babylon.
Review, 3096 words
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