No Exit From the Kingdom
Eugène Ionesco confessed that he wrote “Exit the King” in order to learn how to die. I keep returning to that confession and to this play while watching Europe rehearse the same lesson without appearing to learn it, mistaking spectacle for revolt and resignation for peace.
In Ionesco’s play, King Bérenger moves through three stages once he learns his kingdom, and his body, are dissolving: refusal, revolt, and, finally, resignation. This sequence appears partially in Europe’s posture toward the far right. First, the refusal: the conviction, comfortable and slightly smug, that a union built on the ruins of fascism was and is structurally immune to its return. Then the revolt: the shock of election nights, the emergency editorials, the hurried invocation of the 1930s. And now, increasingly, resignation, a fatigue that dresses itself up as “realism” and calls extremism merely another point on a normal spectrum of opinion. It is known that Bérenger’s throne becomes a hospital bed by the end of the play. While watching the European Parliament in the last years, I have had the same sensation, but now in the sense of institutions with their shape of authority eroded while the substance of freedom and courage drains out of them in full view of the people.
Ionesco built his king’s decline around two women who represent the two faces of a single failing consciousness. Marguerite, the voice of reason, walks him toward lucidity and the acceptance of death as an unavoidable fact. Marie, on the other hand, the voice of feeling, offers him only the tenderness of small gestures, a hand on his forehead, while the walls are moments from falling away. Mainstream European politics has increasingly sounded like Marguerite without Marie: correct about the arithmetic of pensions, taxes, and deficits, and almost entirely unable to speak to anyone’s longing. The far right, by contrast, has learned to speak only as Marie. It never governs well and it also never fails to console the people. What it does is to sell a dream to a continent that has been offered too many spreadsheets, and lost promises on sheets of paper.
If Ionesco gives us the slow unraveling of a single sovereign consciousness, Jean-Paul Sartre gives us the room we now live in collectively. In the famous play “No Exit”, three dead souls, Garcin, Inès, and Estelle, are locked in a chamber without mirrors, condemned to know themselves only through the eyes of the others trapped there with them. Sartre’s most famous line, “hell is other people”, which is usually misread as simple misanthropy, is, from my point
of view, a diagnosis of ontological captivity: the horror of being reduced to an object seen, judged, and fixed by a consciousness that is not one’s own. I do not think there has ever been a more exact description of a social media feed as well. We have built, with considerable enthusiasm, a civilisation without mirrors, in which the self exists only as it is perceived and reflected back by the algorithm and the level of engagement, and in which no one in the room can look away long enough to see anything but everyone else’s gaze. Political identity, as all things, now forms inside that same locked chamber. Consequently, a candidate’s popularity is no longer measured by what he says but by how violently the room reacts to him or her as a celebrity instead of a worker of the state, and the room, like Sartre’s, has no exit.
Romania offered the clearest recent demonstration of finding itself in that room, with me, as a Romanian myself, trapped as well. In November 2024, a candidate with no declared campaign budget and almost no prior political profile rose from under one percent support to nearly twenty three percent of the first round vote, running an almost entirely digital campaign. Romanian authorities later documented coordinated manipulation, masked influencer networks, and the probable involvement of a foreign state actor. The Constitutional Court annulled the results in December and it was already the third such destabilisation of the European democratic process within a single year, after similar incidents in Georgia and Moldova. My grandparents lived through the rigged elections of 1946, when the outcome of the vote was written before the ballots were counted in favour of the communist regime. I grew up assuming that their stories, that particular “grammar” and structure of falsification belonged to a closed historical chapter for the entirety of Europe. I did not expect to watch not even five years later a new version of it unfold not through the suppression of information but through its false abundance, in this room with infinite mirrors and no honest reflection of any of us in any of them.
There is a painting by Evelyn de Morgan, “A Soul in Hell”, that I cannot stop thinking about in this context, while writing. A man sits on a bench in the middle of an almost unbearably lush landscape, surrounded by everything a soul could reasonably be asked to want, and his hands are pressed to his head in a gesture of pure despair. Beside him crouches a small creature with exaggerated ears, oriented entirely toward the material and the immediate. Evelyn De Morgan paints the paradox at the centre of prosperous, integrated Europe: a continent objectively richer and safer than at almost any point in its history, and simultaneously a continent producing, election after election, humans who feel that richness
as a kind of exile. This is not an argument that economic comfort causes extremism. The core of the argument is that comfort without meaning, without plenty without civic engagement and activism, produces exactly the disoriented, lost figure in that garden.
Which brings me, finally, to Caligula. Albert Camus specifically does not hand us a madman to watch, to feel pity for or to be enraged at. This writer gives us a man who, after the death of Drusilla, arrives at a radical idea: if the world is absurd and without inherent meaning, then every moral value built upon that meaning is illusory, and nothing forbids testing that illusion to its limit. Caligula stages an entire empire as an experiment in exposing everyone else’s comfortable pretending, demanding the impossible, “the moon itself”, precisely because it cannot be given. Unlike Sisyphus, who reaches lucidity and finds within it a strange freedom, Caligula reaches lucidity and detonates it outward, forcing an entire society to confront the absurdity of his reality, on his schedule. From my perspective, this incorrect and unjust way to view the clock of life is the shape of the far right’s most successful figures: never only simple liars, but men who have found a real fracture in the collective illusion, the failure of institutions, the hollowness of “technocratic” language, and who then insist, violently, for their own benefit, that because the illusion is false, nothing at all should be believed. Camus is unambiguous about how the story ends because the conspiracy that finally kills Caligula is a necessity, because no society, however absurd its condition, can indefinitely sustain that degree of twisted truth wrapped in lies and thorns without protecting itself. This literary ending underlines the people’s view over Europe’s reactions to protect itself against this vicious disease that separates and hurts people. These reactions are a sum of democracy’s last functioning reflexes, the conspiracy a society mounts against its own Caligula before the logic finishes consuming it entirely.
King Bérenger, in the end, does learn to die, and Ionesco insisted that learning it properly, “awake and without illusion”, was the only dignity left to offer. I believe Europe is being asked now to learn, or at least to learn again, now once and for all, something similar: how can we stop mistaking the performance of crisis for the crisis itself, how can we build together the empathetic architecture that freedom requires and that no algorithm will ever be able to supply.
John Steinbeck offered an instruction that has been a central piece in this essay: not thou shall, not thou will, but “thou mayest”. Humans have the permission to choose engraved in their bones, in the dust of the stars from which they are made. Breaking false mirror by
mirror, the conditions under which that choice can still mean something can be revived. The curtain has not fallen for our play and the king has yet to live. How he dies is still up to us all.
About the Author
Teodora-Ioana Spiridon is a sixteen year old Romanian writer and high school student. She is an active member of the European Youth Parliament Romania, a non partisan association that organises debate sessions for students on civic and political issues. She has read and written since the age of three, has qualified five times for the Romanian National Olympiad of Language and Literature, and has received the Distinction Award and the Excellence Award at the Lumiere Essay Competition for essays on politics. This is her first submission to The Literary Times.
