Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Interpretation
Drama amplifies emotions to the point of distortion, making ordinary life seem extraordinary.
Eugene Ionesco emphasizes that drama operates by taking everyday feelings and amplifying them to such an extent that they become detached from normal reality. This exaggeration serves to enhance the audience's emotional experience and reveals deeper truths about the human condition, contrasting mundane life with the intensity of dramatic expression.
In practice
In a theater class discussing the role of exaggeration in drama.
Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.
On the whole, dialogue is the most difficult thing, without any doubt. It's very difficult, unfortunately. You have to detach yourself from the notion of a lifelike quality. You see, actually lifelike, tape-recorded dialogue like this has very little to do with good novel dialogue. It's a matter of getting that awful tyranny of mimesis out of your mind, which is difficult.
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
The pain passes, but the beauty remains.
The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.
Is the cinema more important than life?
There is no room in music for the second-rate - it might just as well be the nineteenth-rate.
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