Making sense is not a cure
Or ... Eugène Ionesco, David Byrne, and Terry Gilliam walk into a bar
Before David Byrne wisely advised us all to stop making sense, Eugène Ionesco was convinced that nothing ever made any sense at all.
The playwright, whose Rhinoceros made absurdly good fodder for the stage and screen, was a stellar short-story writer, too. The Colonel’s Photograph and Other Stories1 features “Rhinoceros” (1954) as a 24-page whopper. It paints nonsense as the normal order of things from the very first sentence:
We were sitting just outside the café, my friend Jean and I, peacefully talking about one thing or another, when we caught sight of it on the opposite pavement, huge and powerful, panting noisily, charging straight ahead and brushing against market stalls—a rhinoceros.
It only gets better—meaning stranger—from there.
As good a dramatization of the Absurd as “Rhinoceros” is (into whatever shape it’s shifted), I’m mostly drawn to the collection’s titular work.
“The Colonel’s Photograph” (1955), which later morphed into the play The Killer (1958), is slightly shorter but equally punchy. The setup: a visitor to a “fine new [city] district” admires its beauty but wonders why the streets are mostly empty. His host says there’s a killer on the loose. Everyone is aware of how the killer lures his victims: by showing them a hypnotic picture of a colonel and then pushing them into a pool. The strange part? No one is bothered enough to stop the killings.
The district’s reluctance to catch a killer baffles the visitor, but his host calmly explains it all away:
“It’s not possible. Our detectives are overworked, they’ve plenty of other jobs to do. Besides, they want to see the Colonel’s photograph themselves. Five of them have already been drowned in the way.”
In the remaining romp, Ionesco reveals all sorts of reasons the killer should be caught. But he never will be because disorder governs Ionesco’s story-worlds. The will to impose order on a perpetually unstable reality—to understand what’s happening with logic or reason—is futile.
“The Colonel’s Photograph” suggests that, within the modern world, we are content to know what’s wrong yet are rarely moved to fix the problem. Knowing and not acting, it seems, is just enough to get by.
The many ways Ionesco maps out the conditions of the Absurd is profoundly funny. And that’s a real joy for a sad sack like me who enjoys slogging through the muck and sadness of Camus and Sartre.
As often as I drink my cup of French Existentialism without a trace of sugar, I recognize that, every now and again, comic relief adds a much needed sweetness to the dark drink we call life.
Ionesco and I aren’t alone in this view.
“Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was,” warns David Byrne like a human needle skipping unwillingly back from the pull of convention.
“Don’t fight it son … confess, quickly!” a policeman pleads as he straps a petrified rebellious everyman, Jonathan Pryce, into an torturer’s chair in Terry Gilliam’s masterwork Brazil (1985). “If you hold out too long you’ll jeopardize your credit rating.”
One of these things is not connected to the other, you protest? Ionesco was not a Talking Head? Byrne hailed from an entirely different radiant city?
Pish-posh.
Tell that to the masterfully stupid Beastie Boys who, as I write, are pounding out their deliriously catchy nonsense through the Bluetooth speakers floating high above the swimming pool where my daughter is practicing her butterfly.
If you try to knock me you’ll get mocked
I'll stir fry you in my wok
Your knees’ll start shakin’ and your fingers pop
Like a pinch on the neck of Mr. Spock
Experienced together—the story, the music, the swim practice all happening simultaneously in my mind—all of it only makes sense as associatively brilliant Ionescan poppycock.
Everything is always connected if we rightly accept that nothing makes sense, forever and always.
Humor, particularly stemming from a rebellious spirit, is the antidote to defeat in an Absurdist world. It cures us of our urge to understand the things that will not be understood. It empowers us to enjoy brief moments of happiness while we hurdle together through the long, dull journey of time and space toward that dark, unknowable pool waiting to swallow us at the end.
Remix my message in rhyme so Beasties can understand?
I’m not special, and neither are you
You would look at the photograph, too.
Eugene Ionesco’s The Colonel’s Photograph and Other Stories. New York: Grove Press, 1969.
Alex keeps getting better and better.