SOURCE: “Ionesco and Tradition,” in Nottingham French Studies, Vol. 35, No 1, Spring 1996, pp. 53-66.

In the following essay, Holland argues that Ionesco, the radical innovator, restored Tradition to theater with his discovery of the inherent theatricality of language, as he moved away from the defeatist and fatalist attitudes of other modernists and brought theater back to the stage in the form of original work.

In a lecture given in Helsinki in 1959 and subsequently published under the title ‘Discours sur l’avant-garde’, Eugène Ionesco claims that his theatre originates in ‘[un] refus du traditionnalisme pour retrouver la tradition’¹ Because an original author seeks to say something radically new, he might appear, by virtue of his originality, to be in conflict with tradition. But according to Ionesco the opposite is in fact the case:

dans la mesure où le poète a le sentiment que le language ne cerne plus...