Swallowing the Sky: Eugene Ionesco and the Physiology of Happiness
by Jennie Rothenberg

Introduction

When Monsieur Bérenger rises into the air one Sunday afternoon, he tries to explain his behavior to dubious onlookers below: “Man has a crying need to fly. It’s like not keeping fit. If we don’t fly, we’re not healthy enough” (pp. 73-75).[i] Along with his amazed onlookers, three-and-a-half decades of scholars have puzzled over this sudden levitation in Eugéne Ionesco’s A Stroll in the Air. Allan Lewis, among others, sees Bérenger as an escapist, “flying into outer space to defy death and escape the anxiety of this world.”[ii] Leonard Pronko suggests that “Bérenger’s flight represents his inspiration, his writing.”[iii] Patricia Rigg champions the widely accepted view of Bérenger as “an embodiment of the Romantic imaginative impulse.”[iv]

While each of these interpretations is supportable, there is another, more literal explanation: Bérenger’s flight dramatizes a physical buoyancy that Ionesco felt to be very real, a happiness so complete that it transformed the human body itself. Ionesco enjoyed flashes of bodily lightness throughout his life, accompanied by moments of illuminated perception, overwhelming joy, and an epiphany that he could describe only as “a certainty of being.” Reading Bérenger’s airy stroll more literally, in the light of the playwright’s own experiences, reveals a profound significance beyond the mere symbolism of Ionesco’s extraordinary work.

A Real Life Stroll in the Air

Bérenger’s flight seems to have its origins in an event described in Ionesco’s autobiography, Present Past Past Present. Midway through his recollections, the playwright recalls a scene that would later be recreated on the set of A Stroll: a tiny village filled with bright sunshine and immaculately white houses under “a deep, dense sky.” Strolling through all this brilliance, Ionesco writes, “I felt a blow right in the heart, in the center of my being.” With the onset of this euphoria, his relationship to the physical environment began to change. The world around him no longer seemed dominated by solid matter; instead, he began to perceive the world in terms of space and light, as though an all-pervading radiance were “trying to escape from the forms that contained it.” As the solid objects around him appeared less and less material, the insubstantial sky seemed to take on physical characteristics:

[The sky] enveloped me, enveloped all the objects, the walls, and was almost palpable, almost velvet, blue; the deeper and denser the blue of the sky became, the more it could be perceived through the sense of touch. My euphoria became enormous, inhuman. I breathed the air and it was as if I were swallowing pieces of blue sky that replaced my lungs, my heart, my liver, my bones with this celestial substance, somewhere between water and air, and this made me so light, lighter and lighter, that I could no longer feel the effort of walking. It was as if I were not walking now, but leaping, dancing. I could have flown. I could have risen from the earth as in a dream or as once upon a time.[v]

This intimate encounter with the blue sky resonates throughout the entire body of Ionesco’s work. Its imagery is present in his “Third Tale for Children Less Than Three Years Old” as Daddy and Josette pretend they’re going for an airplane ride: “Now we’re in the clouds, and then above the clouds, and the sky gets bluer and bluer, and now there’s only blue sky.”[vi] It is similarly reflected in The Hermit when a crack above the rooftops reveals “a bluer blue” behind the everyday sky.[vii] And in A Hell of a Mess, Agnés dreams of a sky “newly washed and newly clean, as blue as blue can be.”[viii]

Richard Coe has explored Ionesco’s recurring sky imagery from a symbolist perspective, classifying sky-blue as the color “of the transcendental and the mystic, of that which lies before and after life.”[ix] While Ionesco’s sky may indeed embody mystical elements, it is important to recognize that the image itself has its roots not in philosophy but in direct sensory experience. With Ionesco’s autobiographical writings in hand, there can be no doubt that his fictional descriptions of sky, lightness, and flying are closely linked to his real life.

This is undoubtedly so in The Killer, where Bérenger actually recalls the whole of Ionesco’s experience as his own: the stroll through the country village, the sensation of inhaling sky with each breath. “I’m sure I could have flown away,” Bérenger concludes. “I’d lost so much weight, I was lighter than the blue sky I was breathing. If I didn’t do it, it’s because I was too happy, it didn’t enter my head.”[x]

This line from A Killer hints at the premise of A Stroll in the Air, for in this later of Ionesco’s plays, the idea of flying does enter Bérenger’s head.

The Anatomy of Weightlessness

In the course of A Stroll in the Air, Bérenger is overtaken by a series of physical symptoms that recall Ionesco’s own experience: “I’ve never felt so light, so weightless,” he marvels. “What’s happening to me?” (p. 59) As with Ionesco, space and light come to the foreground of Bérenger’s consciousness. A silver bridge he passes on his Sunday jaunt is transformed into a dazzling display of “those famous particles of light that scientists call ‘photons’“ (p. 64). When his wife, Josephine, views the same scenery through the lens of ordinary perception and frets that her husband’s description is “a bit abstract,” Bérenger corrects her. “No, on the contrary, it’s all very concrete. This happiness is something physical. I can feel it here. The air that fills my lungs is more rarefied than air. It gives off vapors that are going to my head” (p. 60). This detailed anatomical report would seem far removed from the realm of symbolism. Rather, it is Bérenger’s, and ultimately Ionesco’s, attempt to describe a unique state: the physiology of happiness.

This happiness, this all-encompassing joy, is both the impetus and the justification for Bérenger’s flight. To the onlookers, who fail to recognize Bérenger’s inner experience, his flight seems wholly irrational—circus entertainment at best and, at worst, a sheer waste of time. “Sitting’s good enough for me,” scoffs the character John Bull (p. 74). Says When Bérenger’s passionately declares man’s “need to fly,” the Journalist retorts, “Technology has adequately and brilliantly fulfilled that need already” (p. 75). The Second Man finds the flying Bérenger outright disgusting, not an exalted human being but “a wretched little cricket” (p. 77).

To the floating Bérenger, on the other hand, experience is everything. The “conviction” that sends his head reeling does not belong to his intellect; it is not a localized idea but a shattering of all thought-boundaries. As he tells the perplexed Josephine, “Once a conviction’s been limited by definition, it isn’t one anymore” (p. 61). This explanation appears to be utter nonsense until one considers, once again, Ionesco’s experience in the sky-enveloped village. In Present Past, Ionesco recalls feeling overwhelmed by a “stupefaction” that seemed to burst all boundaries and limits. As with Bérenger, all that remained for Ionesco was an indefinable conviction: “‘Nothing is true,’ I said, ‘outside of this’—a this that I was, of course, unable to define, since the this itself was what escaped definition, because it itself was the beyond. Perhaps I could translate this feeling and this this by ‘a certainty of being.’”[xi]

Physical Lightness and Spiritual Epiphany

Such passages in Ionesco’s writings have captured the attention of critics. According to Coe, Ionesco’s glimpse of a transcendental reality “is a mystical experience of the highest order.” He compares Ionesco’s indefinable state with the Buddhist Nirvana and speculates that, “in the final analysis, it is the transmitting of this experience … which has given Ionesco the status of one of the most influential dramatists of the present century.”[xii] Rosette Lamont also views Ionesco’s illuminations with the highest respect; in her introduction to The Two Faces of Ionesco, she likens the playwright to certain mystical rabbis, quoting a passage by Kabbalistic scholar Gershom Scholem. At advanced stages of spiritual development, says Scholem, the structures of nature seem to dissolve and “the mystic’s experience progresses towards the ultimate formlessness.”[xiii] Ionesco himself felt an affinity with the mystical traditions of the world, as he writes in Present Past: “The plenitude that I felt was perhaps a little like mystic plenitude. It began with the feeling that space was emptying itself of its material heaviness. It was as if my mind could move freely, as if there were no resistance to its movement.”[xiv]

While various critics have touched upon Ionesco’s “mystical” side, few, if any, have acknowledged the long-standing association between spiritual epiphany and human flight. Virtually every culture tells of instances where lightness of the mind or spirit culminated in actual levitation. The Catholic Church records the names of more than two hundred saints whose bodies were reported to have lifted into the air. The claims of St. Joseph’s levitations are perhaps the most substantial, accompanied by hundreds of eyewitness accounts: among others, the list of witnesses includes a princess, an admiral, two physicians, three cardinals, and a Pope. [xv] The Eastern Orthodox tradition contains similar stories: according to Russian nuns, the 18th century St. Seraphim of Sarov had a tendency to rise from the earth during his strolls:

We were walking through the meadow. The grass was long and green. Father Seraphim was in front of us. Suddenly he stopped and told us to go on ahead. We obeyed him but looked back in curiosity a few moments later. What was our astonishment to see Father Seraphim walking in the air, about two feet above the grass![xvi]

Ionesco may or may not have been aware of such accounts while writing A Stroll in the Air; in either case, his descriptions of Bérenger’s flight bear remarkable resemblance to some of these recorded testimonies. Initially, Bérenger hovers just above the ground, leading his daughter, Marthé, to exclaim, “Papa’s walking above the grass. He’s really walking over the top of the grass” (p. 68).

Along with the Vatican records, the ancient Vedic tradition of India offers a striking correlate to Bérenger’s flight. His full-blown ascent is preceded by a bouncing period, leading Josephine to reprimand him, “There’s no need to go hopping about like a child” (p. 59). According to the Yogatattva-Upanishad, the flight of Vedic yogis also begins with a phase of hopping: “As a frog moves by leaps, so the Yogi ... moves on the earth. With a (further) increased practice, he is able to rise from the ground.”[xvii] The Shiva Samhita also states that after first “hopping about like a frog ... the adept walks in the air.”[xviii]

The levitations of these yogic flyers and religious saints tend to be accompanied by sensations of physical bliss. One of the most prominent historical flyers, the eleventh century monk Milarepa of Tibet, was described as “one whose physical body was pervaded by the descending bliss down to his very toes, and by the ascending bliss up to the crown of his head. He was able to furnish demonstration thereof by flying through the sky.”[xx] This description is notably like an experience of Ionesco’s:

When I was an adolescent, I was sometimes overwhelmed by an intense, luminous joy: it was an inexplicable, irrational happiness that mounted from the earth, from my feet, and went up to my knees, to my belly, to my heart, to lay hold of all of me. I felt I was in harmony with everything. My heart beat faster and I had the impression that I was rising and getting bigger.[xxi]

Heaviness and Absurdity

As striking as these similarities are, there is, however, a key difference between Ionesco’s experiences and those of the aforementioned saints and yogis: Ionesco’s life had no spiritual framework outside of his euphoric moments. Because of this, Ionesco was something of a slave to the moment-to-moment changes of his body. When his body felt light, he rejoiced at every facet of his existence. When his body became heavy, he saw “within every fruit the inevitable kernel of anxiety, the idea of death.”[xxii] His shifts between lightness and lethargy were entirely mysterious to him, set off by some simple but hidden “interior mechanism” upon which he could stumble only by chance.[xxiii] In one instance, a clothesline hanging with wet diapers was enough to trigger an exalted experience. “It suddenly seemed to me that those nappies on the washing line had an unexpected beauty ... [revealing] a brilliant, virgin world. I had succeeded ... in seeing them in terms of light.”[xxiv] At other times, however, even the most radiant sunlight failed to reach him; he perceived darkness everywhere as though “seeing night mingled with day.”[xxv]

Ionesco’s inability to find his interior light switch was augmented by an ever-increasing tiredness. Instead of refining his physiology over time, Ionesco felt his body growing heavier with age, less and less capable of shifting into a state of weightless joy. Thus, instead of hope or faith, his illuminations left him feeling a profound despair. The playwright’s own lack of direction came to be shared by the men and women he created: “It is because they have not mapped out a road to follow,” he wrote, “that my characters wander in the dark, the absurd, in incomprehension and anguish.”[xxvi]

Unlike most of Ionesco’s characters, A Stroll’s Bérenger does attempt to create some sort of “road map” for himself. “This time,” he resolves, “I really won’t forget. I’ll be careful, I’ll remember, I’ll jot down all my movements in a notebook, then I can reproduce them whenever I like” (p. 80). Unfortunately, Bérenger is unable to preserve his internal lightness and this, ultimately, leads to his defeat. Only moments after Bérenger flies out of sight, a dialogue between The Child and The Fat Man foreshadows his heavy return:

CHILD: I’m very sorry, sir. I wanted to go for a walk in the light. I wanted lots of sky.

FAT MAN: Greedy child. Hooligan. You thought I couldn’t catch you, did you?

CHILD: Not the cell, sir, I won’t go back to that cell!

FAT MAN: Stupid brat, you’ve got to learn that the light’s a lot more beautiful when it’s seen from the bottom of a nice black hole. And a clear blue sky’s a lot purer when you look at it through a high barred window (p. 95).

While the child is robbed of his sky, Bérenger is brought down to earth by the horrors sees in space. The world that, only moments before, had seemed so glorious and expansive now becomes a prison cell. Bérenger is once again dominated by the fear he expressed at the start of the play: “I am paralyzed by the knowledge that I’m going to die” (p. 23). This dread of annihilation has been explained both philosophically and politically. Ultimately, however, the cause of Bérenger’s despair is no more logical than that of his earlier elation. As in Ionesco’s life, all that lies between Bérenger’s joyous “conviction” and his paralytic fear of death is a hidden interior mechanism. When this magic button is found, all existence is radiant and invincible. When it is lost again, no hope can be seen for personal or global redemption. The former of these states is characterized by physical buoyancy; the latter is inevitably linked to an exhausting heaviness. As Ionesco records in Fragments of a Journal, this weighted feeling dominated his later life: “My body had become a burden too heavy to bear. I would get up, and after a few minutes, weariness, like a leaden cloak, weighed me down.”[xxvii]

Remembering How to Fly

Those who are well versed in Ionesco’s work are all too familiar with the physical heaviness that dominates so many of his plays. In The Chairs, an elderly man and woman plummet to their deaths. In The New Tenant, a character becomes entombed within heaps of his own furniture. In Rhinoceros, Bérenger laments to Jean, “I’m so tired, I’ve been tired for years. ... I’m conscious of my body all the time as if it were made of lead, or as if I were carrying another man on my back.”[xxviii] Yet just as in Ionesco’s life, lightness can return to his theater at the most unexpected moments. At the end of Amédée, for example, the growing corpse that had burdened the principal character throughout the play suddenly “opens out like a sail or a huge parachute.” As Amédée rises into the Milky Way, he calls down these parting words: “Forgive me, Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry! Oh, dear! But I feel so frisky, so frisky!”[xxix]

Even as an older man, Ionesco enjoyed occasional resurgences of “friskiness.” In Fragments of a Journal he writes, “All of a sudden, lightheartedness and joy. For years and years I had not felt like this. Everything was a burden ... everything exhausted me. And then, suddenly, came this joy.” So complete was the transformation that Ionesco wondered, “Where had I been? Who had prevented me from looking and seeing?”[xxx] In A Stroll, Bérenger asks a similar rhetorical question upon taking to the air: “How could I have forgotten the way it’s done? It’s so simple, so clear, so childish. It would be better for us to starve than not to fly. I expect that’s why we all feel so unhappy” (p. 74).

For A Stroll in the Air is not, as some would have it, a mere parable for the defeat of the human spirit. Ionesco did not simply imagine a lighter, more glorious reality; he experienced it directly. According to Ionesco, “The internal mechanism that is able to set the world alight, to transfigure it, is able to function in the simplest, most natural way.”[xxxi] The loss of this mechanism, the return of gloom and gravity, was, to Ionesco, life’s great absurdity. Like Ionesco, Bérenger glimpses what life should be and, as a result, will never be satisfied with anything less. In his brief episode of lightness, he is able to identify that brand of palpable happiness as the birthright of all humankind: “It’s ... how can I explain it? Like some feeling of joy that’s been forgotten, forgotten yet still familiar, like something that’s belonged to me since the beginning of time. You lose it every day and yet it’s never really lost. And the proof is that you can find it again” (p. 59).

References

[i] All citations from A Stroll in the Air are trans. Donald Watson (New York, 1965). Page numbers are indicated in parenthesis within the text of this paper.

[ii] Allan Lewis, Ionesco (New York, 1972), p. 73.

[iii] Leonard Pronko, Eugéne Ionesco (New York, 1965), p. 38.

[iv] Patricia Rigg, “Ionesco’s Bérenger: Existential Philosopher or Philosophical Ironist?” Modern Drama, 7 (1992), p. 543.

[v] Eugéne Ionesco, Present Past Past Present, trans. Helen Lane (New York, 1971), pp. 154-56.

[vi] Eugéne Ionesco, Present Past Past Present, p. 87.

[vii] Eugéne Ionesco, The Hermit (New York, 1974), p. 154.

[viii] Eugéne Ionesco, A Hell of a Mess (New York, 1975), p. 105.

[ix] Richard N. Coe, “On Being Very, Very Surprised: Ionesco and the Vision of Childhood,” in The Dream and the Play: Ionesco’s Theatrical Quest, ed. Moshe Lazar (New York, 1978), p. 17.

[x] Eugéne Ionesco, The Killer, trans. Donald Watson (New York, 1960), pp. 20-26.

[xi] Eugéne Ionesco, Present Past Past Present, p. 154-55.

[xii] Richard Coe, “Ionesco and the Vision of Childhood,” p. 9.

[xiii] Rosette Lamont, “Introductory Remarks to Eugéne Ionesco’s ‘Why Do I Write?’“ in The Two Faces of Ionesco, ed. Rosette C. Lamont and Melvin J. Friedman (New York, 1978), p. 2.

[xiv] Eugéne Ionesco, Present Past Past Present, p. 154.

[xv] Craig Pearson, Flying Throughout the Ages (in press), pp. 7-8.

[xvi] Valentine Zander, Saint Seraphim of Sarov: His Life (London, 1968), pp. 39-40.

[xvii] Thirty Minor Upanishads, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1969),

pp. 195-197.

[xviii] The Siva Samhita, trans. Raj Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu (India, 1914), pp. 30-31.

[xix] Jason Orlovich, “Yogic Flyers Demonstrate Skills,” The Daily Illi, May 4, 1999.

[xx] Tibet’s Great Yogi Milarepa: A Biography from the Tibetan, ed. W.Y. Evans-Wentz (London, 1969), pp. 35-36.

[xxi] Eugéne Ionesco, Present Past Past Present, p. 160.

[xxii] Eugéne Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal (New York, 1968), p. 96.

[xxiii] Eugéne Ionesco, Present Past Past Present, p. 157.

[xxiv] Claude Bonnefoy, Conversations with Eugéne Ionesco (London, 1970), p. 30.

[xxv] Eugéne Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal, p. 96.

[xxvi] Eugéne Ionesco, “Why Do I write? A Summing Up,” in The Two Faces of Ionesco,  p. 7

[xxvii] .Eugéne Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal, p. 96.

[xxviii] Eugéne Ionesco, Rhinoceros, trans. Derek Prouse (New York, 1960), pp. 17-18.

[xxix] Eugéne Ionesco, Three Plays, trans. Donald Watson (New York, 1958), pp. 73-76.

[xxx] Eugéne Ionesco, Fragments of a Journal, pp. 95-96.

[xxxi] Eugéne Ionesco, Present Past Past Present, p. 157.

This article appeared in the University of Wales journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts.