Ionesco's 'The Lesson'

Anxiety is always a bad sign: murder tape wrapped around a black hole, the black hole the victim’s just gone down, having disappeared after being hectored by someone he believed actually loved him, first becoming deeply disappointed in himself for his transgression, to the point of volunteering an apology for the crime he did not commit, and then being forgiven by the village evangelical.

Anxiety is often brought on by some sort of expectation, often technological in which the technology doesn’t match-up with reality, the technology often overwhelming reality, or vice versa, until a tragic/comic imbalance has been achieved and the crime of having left the toilet seat up inside of down is finally solved to both the perp and the victim ‘s relief, if not satisfaction.

Anxiety then goes both up and down the food chain, a sliding scale of wants and needs measured in kilowatt hours , the price of a gallon of gas, and the latest news bulletin. The Media, the last institution to be trusted, now makes us all jumpy, having bought in to the notion of the 24-hour news cycle in which nothing of any real value or importance is ever spoken, only alluded to by an attractive teleprompter posing as a knowledgeable expert.

The purists who pull corks from bottles of good red wine, some of them who still read books, are now convinced that young people in college no longer read much of anything, that even students of literature are being weaned away from reading, that the texts are too difficult, that the reliance on social media is debilitating; that language, weaned away from literature, as if being taken off a bottle…

I’ve just finished reading Ionesco’s short play, ‘The Lesson”. It’s quite compact—3 characters, (the Professor, the Student, and the Maid) , 34 pages in all. The Ionesco play seethes with tension, hilarity, wordplay, inanity, mordant social commentary. The phrase ‘philology leads to calamity’ is repeated several times by all 3 characters, a deft subversion of language, as if language has real meaning.

Toward the end of Ionesco’s play the Professor kills his Student. Then the doorbell rings and it is revealed that the Professor has killed 39 students prior to the latest victim and that his Maid, a woman named Marie, has just ordered 40 coffins and 40 wreaths. The doorbell rings one last time and a new Student is greeted at the door.