Books: The Forgetful Dreamer

FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL by Eugéne Ionesco. 149 pages. Grove. $5.

Most people readily exchange their nightly dreams for what passes as reality in the morning papers. Not Eugéne Ionesco. The celebrated playwright of the absurd prefers to dwell on his own private late late shows.

This collection of Ionesco's memories, thoughts and recollected dreams is strongly reminiscent of his play Rhinoceros, which suggests that there is nothing as real as a dream. Ionesco hangs on to his own dreams with desperate tenacity. He confides the matter of them but resists having their concreteness undermined by explanations. They are what they are, and, most important, they are his.

Lamentations. Even his childhood memories as the son of a Rumanian couple living in France are rendered as scattered images rather than timebound incidents. Chronology, he implies, is untrustworthy; it has a way of running out. There is comfort in his childhood impressions, but they are inadequate protection against the despair that swamps him now at 55. His uneasiness spills forth in tuneless lamentations.

Yet what defeats the man often enhances the artist. Using the banalities of daily conversation, Ionesco successfully captures an illusive sense of life's strangeness. It is when he tries to examine his own estrangement that he becomes a confused prisoner of himself. He calls this book a search for himself, yet adds with equal earnestness that "the more I explain myself, the less I understand myself." The closest he comes to that understanding is when he describes himself as "someone who hopes to win first prize in a lottery without having bought a ticket."

Solipsist. Such statements suggest that Ionesco has turned his malaise into an esthetic principle. "Pain, grief, failure, have always seemed to me truer than success or pleasure," he says. It is this principle that leads him to so much disjointed and self-pitying maundering. As a devout solipsist, he feels that the answer to his despair must come from within himself. As an obsessed truth seeker, however, he will be satisfied with nothing less than some externally produced revelation. Alcohol and Martin Buber's transcendant optimism provide only temporary relief.

It is no surprise that Ionesco returns to the security and integrity of his dreams. "I am told, in a dream," he says, "you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream." But when he awakens, he can't remember what it was.

On the stage, with the forgetful dreamer shaped by Ionesco's sharp sense of the absurd, the predicament might be painfully funny. But on the page, with the writer as a troubled man snarled in the neurotic roots of his art, the situation is painfully embarrassing. It would be convenient if Ionesco were not such a compelling case of what Nietzsche, that specialist in soul diseases, diagnosed as an allergy to oneself.