Transmettre la peste, de Defoe à Ionesco

ABSTRACT

This article questions the notion of literary transmission by focusing on the rewriting of Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) which inspired Eugène Ionesco's Jeux de massacre in 1970. Defoe's work was intended to be a warning to its readers, in the event of a resurgence of the plague. The contemporary playwright, in one of his darkest works, claims instead that it is impossible for the individual to prevent the epidemic, which has become a metaphor for the human condition. Why does Ionesco feel the need to rely on Defoe to carry out this cruel experiment? I will demonstrate that it is not just about parodying the message of his predecessor. A conscientious reader of the novel, Ionesco knew how to reveal its grey areas and speculate on the powerlessness of the original narrative to extract an exemplarity from the plague. This case of the rewriting calls for a rethinking of the aims of literary transmission.

KEYWORDS:

• Ionesco
• Defoe
• Camus
• Plague
• rewriting
• transmission

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Audrey Lemesle

Audrey Lemesle holds a doctorate in French literature from the University of Paris III – Sorbonne nouvelle, and is the author of a dissertation entitled Eugène Ionesco en ses réécritures. Le travail de la répétition. She specializes in the phenomena of rewriting and intertextuality in the theatre of the second half of the twentieth century and has published articles on Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Bernard-Marie-Koltès.