I was given the gold key to my lodging that very same day. As in a fairy tale where the wizardly benefactor imposes a deadline, I was offered refuge for an entire year. Everything seemed to have come together under a lucky star. Time was eminently hospitable, as in my distant or more recent youth. That spectacular summer, with its sun that had turned solemn and imperial, heralded the beginning of a new era.
Exile is also an initiation into simulacrum, an exercise in inventive theatricality. This is what interior exile is about, the solitary man’s alienation within the ubiquitous totalitarian masquerade. But what of exile proper? On the new stage, the newcomer had been cast in a role he had never played before. Professor! … In a foreign world and a foreign language, in front of a foreign audience.
The idyllic academic enclave could not dispel the exile’s doubts; it only rebuked them, every day, through the majestic peaceful woods and the perfect sky. With every dusk, the hospitable summer months were bringing the debut closer, the meeting with the public, scheduled for that fall.
He had many doubts. He wondered how he could avoid the old role that had made him famous. “The Lost One” … Not yet at home with life? With its confused forces? Lost, any way, anywhere, any time?
When I opened the door to the classroom, I was amazed by the casual, typically American look of my young audience. Quite a few of them were barefoot …. The relaxing effect of the superb September afternoon or the pleasure of annoying the Martian who had been trained on his bizarre native planet according to strict rules.
The dialogue with the students became natural quite soon. Despite a certain cultural deficit, most of them were bright and open to anything new. They had been educated in and for freedom; they were accustomed to the critical spirit and defied preconceived ideas, even the most honored. Gradually, my new position was moderating into its own routine.
Toward the end of the semester, around November, when in Eastern Europe the Berlin Wall and the walls within ourselves were being broken to pieces from one day to another, something out of the ordinary happened in my class.
Among the midterm papers, I had received one on Eugen Ionescu’s Rhinoceros. Hesitating to evaluate it, I decided to read it to the class, without disclosing the author’s name, then to ask them to comment on it and suggest a grade.
There was nothing spectacular in the beginning:
Berenger cannot believe his eyes when his close friend, Jean, joins the epidemic sweeping their village and transforms himself into a rhinoceros. As the horn swells on his forehead and guttural moaning bulges from his thickening throat, the frantic Jean sings the blessing of freedom to a bewildered Berenger. “Morals! I’m sick of morals! We must go beyond moral standards. Nature has its own laws. Morals is [sic] against nature!” From a responsible obedient citizen who ostracized Berenger for his senseless rebellion, Jean has become a raving reactionary. He gradually turns green as he denounces the societal structure he so vehemently protected as a human. Along with the release of his human form, Jean is released from the laws and the rules he had been conditioned (forced) to uphold. Berenger is terrorized. Before him stands the man who had always symbolized order — a man he had felt too weak to imitate. Berenger cannot get beyond the absurdity of this revolution against the human condition. He is terrified to admit that the RHINOCEROS could be making a valid, self-satisfying decision of rejection.”
However natural and acceptable it seemed, the last sentence was somehow already announcing the novelty.
The class sensed the potential turn; the silence was complete. I read the last sentences again, before going on. “Berenger cannot get beyond the absurdity of this revolution against the human condition. He is terrified to admit that the RHINOCEROS could be making a valid, self-satisfying decision of rejection.”
Attention grew keener, I felt that.
He is terrified to admit that the RHINOCEROS could be making a valid, self-satisfying decision of rejection … Could Jean, a model citizen — a pillar of social strength for Berenger himself — be choosing to betray the established code he so religiously upheld? To Berenger’s horror, the choice is imminent. He grasps at analytical solutions to a social crisis. He is responsible for making up his own mind, he will procure his destiny and suffer the repercussions: to become a Rhinoceros or to remain a human being. Suddenly, life before the commotion seems safe and logical to Berenger, as he watches Jean go stampeding through a brick wall. The fact that he had, for all intents and purposes, rejected society through his alcoholism is buried under the weight of his fear. He clings dearly to that same societal structure, as if to a rope over an abyss. Though he openly admits condemnation of his social stratosphere, Berenger isn’t strong enough to allow his own release. He holds on to the life he hated to avoid the wave that would wash him into the life he does not understand.
Curiosity and tension were rising in the class. The true surprise was not so much the reversal of an accepted interpretation as the rigor, the paradoxically reversed common sense and the logic of the demonstration.
Berenger maintains that his friend Jean “must have made a mistake” because he (Berenger) is unable to find a more valid reason to choose, and because he cannot comprehend his old friend’s desire for a “new life.” Whether or not the “mindless” life of the Rhinoceros is a more satisfying one or a (better) more stimulating one is irrelevant. Berenger choosing not to sacrifice his identity is unfounded because he makes it on the basis of fear. As he finds himself the last remaining human being, he retains his obstinate skepticism. “I’m the last man left, I’m staying that way to the end. I’m not capitulating.” Berenger’s refusal to “capitulate” is hardly an honorary one. Fear of change constrains our progression. To choose a life of bondage to certain misery — a life of constriction (as Berenger’s was): “I just can’t get used to life,” is a coward’s choice. Berenger cannot be credited with “maintaining his integrity or identity.” He maintains nothing but the pathetic life he so detests that for him is safe, and turns his back on an opportunity for revival.
The professor had hurried over the last few sentences in embarrassment. He already knew the text and was terrified that he would sink into his thoughts again, as when he first read it. “I can’t get used to life.” All too often he had himself whimpered such words back home as well as here, in the new World, and in the new life which he did not feel prepared for.
Preserving his identity? Out of fear? Really?
Yes, he hurried over the last sentences as if he hoped to shut out the dilemma, the thought that had been left behind, in the words that he had dragged after him from the other end of the world and that continued to crawl after him, with him, in him, endlessly.
How “European” the traditional interpretation of the play seemed all at once!
The reader had admitted his duplicity, his proposed aspirations, gradually perverted by the sinuous twists of prudence, but he knew how much the American sentences expressed the American mythology of renewal. The natural and the sudden surprises, the regeneration of the daily travesty, the complete changing of one’s appearance, personality, preferences, the need to “get ahead,” at any cost. Avoiding lament, accepting challenges, no matter how unfavorable, but not defeat. Assuming destiny individually, yes, one could say so, as his new fellow American countrymen were saying.
Throughout this crisis Berenger is concerned, not with the human condition, but with his own. The people of his village transforming into Rhinoceroses affect Berenger’s own life.