38 pages • 1 hour read
Eugène IonescoThe Lesson
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Knife
The knife, which the stage directions state can either be a real prop or imaginary, depending on the director’s choice, is a phallus. The moment he stabs her is an act of penetration, followed by a slashing, and “a noticeable convulsion shakes his whole body” (75). Panting, he mumbles, “Bitch…Oh, that’s good, that does me good…Ah! Ah! I’m exhausted…” (75). Her body is left flopped in a chair with her legs spread apart. It is intensely psychosexual, a rape that is presented as pure violence. This act of rape/murder, which has occurred 40 times, always reaches completion with the knife, which is why Marie refuses to help him find it. He searches for “the Spanish, neo-Spanish, Portuguese, French, Oriental, Romanian, Sardanapali, Latin and Spanish knives” (72), but he finds one knife, asserting, “[W]e’re going to try and make it serve for all the languages anyway!” (73) He forces her to pronounce “knife” over and over, as if each pronunciation of the same word is from a different language. He has narrowed her education from a total doctorate to a partial doctorate to the knife. The knife is imaginary, made of academic discourse. Alternately, it is academic discourse made real. For the professor, the knife is the cure for intellectual impotence (and perhaps literal impotence). His failure to dominate and penetrate her in the first two lessons, both of which end with flaccid statements about how the subject is something one just needs to already know, are vindicated by the erect knife. Repeating after the professor, she says weakly, “…the knife kills?” (75) She finally understands what he is teaching in that moment, and he stabs her.
The knife is a discursive object, an object that is always changing through language and discourse, representing academia in terms of academic thought and structures of hierarchy. In the professor’s hands, it is a weapon. He “rapes” and “kills” students (possibly all girls) and then puts them in identical boxes. Since the knife is metaphorical, the student’s death must be metaphorical. If the knife is invisible, the stabbing and slashing are also invisible. There is no blood and gore, but she is limp and lifeless, a huge contrast from the bright and lively girl who arrived for tutoring. As they carry her out, the professor tells Marie to be careful with the body, so they do not hurt her. On one level, her death is not literal. Perhaps the killing of her academic curiosity and thirst for knowledge forces her into the dull monotony of uninspired work that feels like death. But meaning is slippery in absurdism. Knives can be real knives or imaginary knives (or both). One aspect that is lost in translation is the sound of the word “couteau,” which is French for knife. As the professor forces the student to repeat the word, she moans in pain (or ecstasy) the names of her body parts. “Couteau” includes “cou,” or neck, setting off her chain of body parts. It also sounds like “coup,” the unspoken word for the fatal blow. This serves as an example of what Ionesco calls then “dislocation and disarticulation of language.” The stabbing is violent and visceral, as is disarticulating and dislocating language. The knife itself is a lesson, as he drives the point home that “the knife kills” (75) by stabbing her, exclaiming, “Aaah! That’ll teach you!” (75) What ought to have been an innocuous encounter between an educator and a pupil was, underneath, an aggressive fight to maintain dominance.
The Armband
When the professor worries vaguely about being caught, Marie first reassures him that no one will even notice or investigate if they just say that the coffins are empty. Then, she gives him an armband with a Nazi swastika (or another insignia) that she promises means that he need not worry at all. She says, “That’s good politics” (78). In return, he praises her, calling her “my little Marie, […] a good girl” (78), which is very different from his abusive language toward her earlier in the play. Language is powerful, and Marie is his accomplice, which is also “good politics.” The swastika is perhaps the clearest bit of language in the play. It symbolizes fascism and the forcible spread of totalitarianism across the European continent. It stands for the unspeakable cruelty of the murders of six million Jews in the Holocaust, and the vast majority of those murderers who were not held accountable. The singular act of violence in the play stands in for 40 unseen rape/murders, and presumably the 41st who appears at the door. The armband allows the professor to avoid accountability by claiming to be part of the atrocities. It also suggests that fascism provides a cover for violent men, rather than the belief that fascism gives one a reason to commit violence. As a linguist (if an absurd one) who uses language as violence, the professor slips easily into Nazism, a movement that built itself on language. Nazi propaganda is an example of language as violence, stripping away humanity from those who did not conform, scapegoating Jewish people and framing them as vermin, and inspiring violence in millions of followers.
In the professor’s wild philology lesson, he claims that all languages are essentially the same except for national identity: for instance, “‘My country is the new Spain’ becomes in Italian: ‘My country is […] Italy’” (69). During World War II, all countries that fell to the Nazis were, in a sense, the same country aside from national identity. Thus, “knife” is the same in every language, and in every language, “the knife kills” (75): Violence—a knife—transcends language. But his absurdly illogical teachings hint at the real fascism over language during the war, when Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy attempted to wipe out regional languages and enforce a unified national language. Fascism endeavors to destroy difference for, in this aspect, linguistic purity. Linguistic totalitarianism is, of course, connected to racism and nationalism. The maid says, “philology leads to calamity” (60), which in the literal sense, refers to the ritualistic sacrifice of the girl that philology has led to in the last 39 lessons. But in a sinister, nationalistic sense, it means violence enacted through language, and it is a reminder that language can be weaponized. The professor puts on the Nazi armband with no hesitation. He accepts the linguistic declaration of the armband, not for the sake of a strong belief in fascism, but because murder, even the murder of 40 people, is unremarkable and even allowed under Nazism.
If the Nazi symbol seems like a heavy-handed moment today, it would have been shocking for audiences in 1951. In fact, in the original production, the armband was cut, supposedly in service of the scene’s rhythm, which seems unlikely for such a significant and controversial statement. In France, between about 1944 and 1968, there was a national effort to suppress the memory of French cooperation with the Nazis during German occupation. A swastika would have been a stark reminder of the shameful recent past.
The Lesson
The Lesson seems like a straightforward title for a play in which a student comes to a professor for a lesson to prepare her for oral exams to earn a “total doctorate” (49) in three weeks. But the lesson, which begins pleasantly enough, quickly becomes more than a simple transfer of information from educator to pupil. With education is the presumption of truth, or at least the honest effort at presenting truth. But the play suggests that truth only exists as created by structures of power. This lesson extends from Ionesco’s experience of the totalitarian control of Romania and then France under the Nazis. He said,
When you’re twenty years old and you have teachers who offer you scientific or pseudoscientific theories and explanations, when you have newspapers, when you have a whole atmosphere, doctrines, a whole movement against you, it’s really very hard to resist, hard not to let yourself be convinced (Carl H. Klaus, et. al. Stages of Drama: Classical to Contemporary Theater, 3rd ed. New York, 1995).
In fascist education, the language of the oppressor taught to the oppressed, crushing individual thought until the oppressed reproduces the language of the oppressor. Postmodernism and absurdism are invested in deconstructing accepted narratives of truth. In the play, the student is not simply there to learn. She is there to qualify for a doctorate and join those with the power to produce knowledge. At 18, her parents have defined truth and power in her life up to this point. The truth that they have impressed upon her is that she is intelligent and prepared enough to pursue academia. She brings this confidence and energy into her lesson with the professor. But she is unprepared for what becomes a struggle for power, which is reflected in the professor’s shifting pedagogy. In the professor-student relationship, the professor has power. Training a future academic, however, is training his potential replacement. The student is young, bright, and eager, and the professor is weak and aging.
The student expresses basic truths in their initial conversation, and even corrects the professor’s implication that it might snow in summer. He says, “We can’t be sure of anything, young lady, in this world” (48), foreshadowing the way he will shortly destabilize truth. At first, the lesson is dialectical, placing the student and professor in a somewhat equal pedagogical relationship. Her voice is heard as much as his. When the student struggles with math, both professor and student apologize for their inability communicate with the other. Her inability to comprehend subtraction is a failure of his teaching, but he seizes on her weakness and takes away the possibility of a total doctorate. He shifts pedagogical techniques into lecturing, a mode in which she is expected to listen, take notes, and occasionally express agreement. When he stammers, and she offers the correct word, He directs, “Don’t parade your knowledge. You’d do better to listen” (62). He suppresses her voice and knowledge, which makes sense as his lecture spins into the nonsensical. The professor is creating truths, and he seems to be absorbing the student’s energy and health. Then, he begins to assault her with questions that she cannot answer, demanding that she simply repeat his words, replacing her voice with his. When she resists, he threatens violence. For the first time, she tries to defend herself. He threatens to “bash in [her] skull,” and she retorts, “Just try to! Skulldugger!” (70) Then he exerts violence, continuing to force his lecture on her. When he stabs her, he says, “That’ll teach you!” (75), delivering his final message to her that she cannot stand up against his patriarchal power to create knowledge. In the end, the Nazi armband is a method of covering and protecting his manufactured knowledge with the umbrella of fascism.
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By Eugène Ionesco
