"Be obscure clearly"--E. B. White

"Be obscure clearly." I would definitely recommend it to Mr. Eugene Ionesco while he was writing The Future is in Eggs, or It Takes All Sorts to Make a World. Who is the PROTAGONIST and ANTAGONIST of this play? To be honest, I was thinking about it at least last 15 minutes!

Firstly, I was thinking what are Ionesco's characters trying to achieve? Obviously, the purpose of their existence is to reproduce. In fact, Father-Jacques claims it himself, "We must assure the continuity of our race."(pg. 131) While evaluating this purpose, I´ve realised that if this piece has antagonists it cannot be any of the characters but it is their dialogues.

The book is overfilled by incomprehension and useless exclamations.The only thing they are fighting against is the COMMUNICATION.

Actually, this is one the key points that Ionesco tried to highlight in his works. Communication is  the crucial step how to achieve something in a group. And if it doesn´t work...just look at the nice example listed below. God punished us by confusing the languages at the tower of Babel because he knew that if we couldn´t communicate we would find it more difficult to unify on a huge tasks. He was/is the smart one!

"A major theatrician but a decidedly minor writer" = Eugene Ionesco

While “googling” some article that would be useful for task 6 I´ve found a long one on enotes.com that perfectly suits task 8 as well. So, I decided to combine those two together. It takes all information from some publication Contemporary Literary Criticism published in 1975. This article is composed of several reviews written by different critics. I have to say that sometimes it took me long time to understand what are they trying to say about Ionesco´s plays. I had to “google up" meanings of several words because I did not even know them in my native language (sometimes they are using more French than English). However, some of their opinions are really interesting and I hope it would give you a different perspective on Ionesco and his amazing plays as those critics gave to me.

For example, Harold Clurman nicely notices that in plays like Jack  (or in Future is in Eggs as well), Eugene Ionesco remodels the classical "bourgeois" drama with traditional scenes into grotesque by "stylized dialogue". Mr. Clurman gives examples of family members and their roles as "the mother entreats, the sister reasons, the father moralizes..." In Future is in Eggs as far as I can remember it is one of the mothers who claims that someone should stop Jacques and Roberta from kissing and Jacqueline tries to sustain their behavior. Ionesco is keeping those convectional bourgeois behavior in his special preposterous way. And finally, what else than a grotesque would be the way that Roberta and Jacques reproduce. 

Another reviewer called John Gassner wrote that Ionesco is "a formidable parodist". This argument is a simple paraphrase of the previous critic. Mr. Gassner also claims that Eugene Ionesco is "a major theatrician but a decidedly minor writer" and he completes his thought by a statement that Ionesco once said; " theatre is what cannot be expressed by writing literature.'" I can do nothing else than confirm this statement and I think that those who tried to read any of Ionesco´s plays would confirm it too. 

The last review that I´m going to mention is little bit more difficult to comprehend. A man called George Wellwarth summarizes a whole philosophy created by Ionesco. This paragraph is important for task 6 because this theory concerns Ionesco´s background for writing his early plays where Future is in Eggs belongs. 

"Since everyday life, whether absurd or not, depends for its coherence entirely on the coherence of speech patterns, it follows that if our speech patterns are absurd, everyday life in general is absurd as far as we are concerned (it is possible that to an individual the world does not appear absurd, but since he has no means of communication with other people except through intrinsically senseless speech patterns, it follows that his view is actually nonexistent in practice). Even if the world appears ordered and coherent to everyone, Ionesco is saying, it is still absurd because each person is trapped inside his own individual cell by the inadequacies of his means of communication."

What I´ve noticed after reading Ionesco´s play is that sometimes I am more aware of the nonsense situations and dialogues that are created during casual conversations. However, if I live in a community that uses those senseless speech patterns described above, who is the one that finally awakes and says WE LIVE AN ABSURD LIFE with nonexistent views? Ionesco´s theory is a bit depressing, isn´t it? 

Based on this philosophy the reviewer divided Ionesco´s early plays (1950-1953) into two groups. The first where the main theme of his plays is "the paradox of the isolation of the individual in the midst of his fellows" and the second group that concerns "the paradox of the ultimate meaninglessness of actions, which, taken together, constitute the sum of human existence."

Honestly, I can´t decide to which group Future is in Eggs should be put in. First of all, Jacques and Roberta are literally isolated between their families that make all of the important decision instead of them. However, whole family (together with Jacques and Roberta) throughout the play create an entirety of nonsense action that "constitute the sum of [their] existence" which is actually the reproduction. I believe that this piece is an absurd combination of those two themes. 

I´m about to finish, I just want to quote the last critic that has an interesting point of view about Ionesco´s plays--Susan Sontag. 

"Disgust is the powerful motor in Ionesco's plays: out of disgust, he makes comedies of the distasteful."

All quotes and information are taken  from  

the article published on www.enotes.com--link.