The Bald Soprano Language and Communication Quotes

So, why is Mrs. Smith telling her husband these things? What is she trying to communicate? Mr. Smith was around all evening. He ought to know what they've eaten. Well, it's widely recorded that Ionesco based The Bald Soprano on a language primer from which he was trying to learn English. He copied down lots of sentences like these in his studies. The book was filled with one obvious fact after another. Ionesco said that, "The very simple, luminously clear statements I had copied so diligently into my notebook, left to themselves, fermented after a while, lost their original identity, expanded and overflowed" (source). Perhaps, when these seemingly simple statements were repeated over and over again they began to take on new meanings. Perhaps, they began to mean nothing at all. Perhaps, it's both of these things at the same time.

This stage direction is repeated over and over again throughout the first couple pages of the play. All the time Mrs. Smith is babbling about the things that have happened earlier that evening, Mr. Smith only reads and makes noises with his mouth. Is he really listening to her? Does he ever? Could this opening scene be suggesting that nobody ever really listens to anybody else?

It some ways this is a pretty common day-to-day conversation. We've got two solid middle class couples and a friend, sitting around complaining about the bad economy and high taxes. Of course, in this case their friend is a Fire Chief, who is depressed because his business is doing poorly – there just aren't enough fires to put out. The whole situation is rendered totally absurd as the characters lump putting out fires into the same category as growing wheat and playing the stock market. We find the idea of "tariffs," or import taxes, on fire to be highly amusing. In any case, you see this kind of thing all through the play. Ionesco takes what would be a normal pretty cliché conversation and messes with our heads by giving it an Absurdist twist.

We talk about this fable in "Philosophical Viewpoints: The Absurd" as well as in "Versions of Reality," but we just want to take this opportunity to point out how deft Ionesco's use of language is here. Just by adding the word "another" before "cow" and "dog," he totally distorts reality. So, what is it – are the animals dogs or cows? Are they both at the same time? Does it matter? How do we know what anything is? Ahhhh, our brains hurt! It's amazing that Ionesco is able to make us think so much just by adding one tiny word.

"It was in all the papers," is a cliché. You hear people say that sort of thing all the time. However, Ionesco takes the cliché and turns it on its head. The story that the Fire Chief tells is obviously ridiculous. Why would eating glass cause a calf to give birth? And to a full-grown cow? Especially since the calf is male? Of course, the story makes no sense. It would be a pretty strange story for "all the papers" to print, don't you think? This is just another example of Ionesco using clichéd language to highlight the absurdity of the play's situations. It seems that, by placing something normal against something ridiculous, both things are somehow made absurd.

Towards the end, the play's language really goes haywire. It's been pretty nonsensical that whole time, but the characters' dialogue becomes completely random. Many of the lines in this section are taken directly from the language primer which inspired Ionesco to write the play. The line above is one example of this (source).

Notice how Ionesco pulls apart the familiar phrase, "it's a vicious circle" and rearranges it. Throughout this last section, he pulls this trick. Many clichés are deconstructed in some way. Some say that this robs them of meaning. Others think that by rearranging the context of these clichés Ionesco has reawakened the inherent meanings of the words.

Along with clichés and seemingly obvious statements of fact, the characters also start spewing mangled versions of well known aphorisms at the end of the play. An aphorism is a popular saying which usually has a moral attached to it. The mention of Benjamin Franklin is no accident here. He was the author of Poor Richard's Almanac, which is an extremely famous collection of aphorisms. Above we see a mutilated version of, "A bird in the hand is worth to in the bush." Just like with many of the clichés in this last section, the aphorism has been rearranged in such a way that it may now mean nothing or everything all at the same time.

If you're not aware, "caca" means poop…yes, poop. We find it quite interesting that Ionesco chooses to have Mrs. Smith and Mr. Martin repeat this word over and over again. Mr. Martin even goes so far as to say that there are "cascades," or waterfalls, of "caca." It some ways, the end of the play is very much like this – a water fall of poop, we mean. When we're bombarded with this random mix of mutilated clichés, facts, and aphorisms, it's almost like we're being showered with all the waste and debris of the English language.