Perfectly consistent in his “absurdist” metaphysic, Ionesco is resolved to retain his integrity as an artist and exercise his freedom of thought and expression as an apolitical writer. According to him, dreams and desires, not the tendentious stuff out of which socialist realism is compounded, are the generative and authentic medium of truth in art. What Ionesco wishes to release is the pure play of his imagination, without the intrusion of alien “realistic” elements. Consequently he is not as a dramatist drawn to problems that can be solved; what drives him to create is only the challenge of the insoluble. If the theater of his time has fallen on evil days, it is, he maintains, because it is too topical in its concerns. Predominantly political in aim and content, it echoes too faithfully the ideological slogans of the hour. In Ionesco’s critical judgment, thesis plays, problem plays, propaganda plays present only a thin doctrinaire slice of life and therefore falsify the total truth of reality. “Drama is not the idiom for ideas. When it tries to become a vehicle for ideologies, all it can do is vulgarize them. It dangerously oversimplifies.... All ideological drama runs the risk of being parochial.”1 Far from apologizing for his neglect of the social theme, Ionesco cogently defends the asocial aesthetic that governs the construction of his work. Why be forced to listen to political demagogy on the stage when such speeches can be read in the local newspaper or be heard daily on the radio or television?