Yes, it was true, I knew how it was when Rhinoceroses multiply around the solitary man.
He maintains that, had it happened elsewhere (“if only it had happened somewhere else”), it could have been discussed logically and rationally. There was even the potential for it to become instructive and educational in its sensibilities.
Indeed, had it happened elsewhere. it would have been a logical, instructive discussion, but encircled, under siege, one barely has the strength to breathe.
However, because it involves Berenger on such an immediate level, he is unable to deal with the situation on any basis of integrity. His fear of the disruption of his own existence blocks out his ability to be rational.
Yes, it blocks it, perhaps. It would have been reasonable to give up everything, to run finally, to free himself from everything and from himself, to start all over again in a new world and in a new life. Integrity. integrity had existed, though! The isolation, the contraction in the narrow cell of the room preserved integrity — at least partly. One must not forget that! No, one cannot forget the sacrifices and risks of solitude, that’s what the professor was thinking.
His fear of the disruption of his own existence blocks out his ability to be rational … the concept of structural unity and of independent responsibility for choice, that lays the foundation for democracy, would be obsolete … again we are shown Berenger’s character to be one lacking the strength to sustain his own moral freedom. He is certainly no advocate who would sustain the freedom of society.
But he is, poor thing! He is, he certainly was, and he has remained a dreamer, a champion of freedom. That’s what he is, that poor bastard.
A eulogy for “the revolutionary” symbol, embodied by the cruel “renewing” disease of rhinoceritis? An indictment of the anti-hero Berenger? My student was overturning the premise that was so dear to the author, his admirers, and the reader, lost in that tumble and that American lecture room.
Although with difficulty, the professor was giving up — he had to admit it — this hero of non-abdication, non-giving-up, to the humanity of his ambiguities; he had discovered the vulnerability of the lost ones long ago and far away, not only in Ionescu’s tragicomedy but also in the comedy — not lacking in tragic aspects — of everyday life in socialist Rhinoromania.
Do ambiguities and vulnerability hinder us and put an end to our “progress?”
No, the professor did not voice his doubts. He continued to listen to the alien sentences that emerged from the clear handwriting, the black ink, the lined notebook, and evasively phrased in the adventurous phonetics of his new role.
Berenger shouts for his neighbors-turned-rhinoceros to maintain the laws established by humans. (“Stop it! … Noise is forbidden in these flats! Noise is forbidden!”) Berenger did not maintain these laws himself; he drank consistently, missed work, appeared socially delinquent, and yet, in this time of upheaval, Berenger grasps on to the “social code” for dear life. Lacking the ability to live up to the original social status, he is certainly not ready to adopt a new set of standards however revolutionary or progressive it may be. These weaker members (such as Berenger) will hold a society back in a time of revolutionary change.
“New set of standards,” “revolutionary change” “progressive”. the terms certainly had a different meaning for the young audience than the one perverted for so long in the Colony of Rhino that the improvised Eastern European professor kept thinking of.
He was smiling questioningly and aloofly and confusedly, looking down at the lined sheet of paper, preparing himself to pronounce the new-old words: “radicals,” “conservatives,” “conventionalism,” “duty”—barbarisms twisted and turned in the Dada confinement, with hammer and sickle, until they could no longer be pronounced, except in the Rhinoceros Circus.
After being an outcast himself from a society with strict standards, those same conservatives take Berenger’s place as radicals and he, in turn, clings to their conventionalism. With the breakdown of society, Berenger’s former social stance is disqualified. Berenger seems to have adopted the ultraconservative views expressed earlier by Jean. (“A superior man is the one who does his duty.”) Suddenly, he is obsessed with man’s obligation to society — a notion he previously acted against.
The iconoclastic commentary on the iconoclastic literary work ended with a verdict to match:
The utter absurdity of Ionescu’s plot that a town full of respectable citizens turns, one by one, into a herd of stampeding Rhinoceroses, lends itself well to the simplicity of its message. Ionescu uses the character of Berenger to illustrate man’s tragic incapacity to accept change and the growth and improvement that inevitably accompany it.
The professor stopped. He seemed amazed by the words “growth and improvement,” as if he had heard them for the first time. In fact, he heard a series of muted words in another language. Berenger was then called Eugen Ionescu, a terrified witness of the rhinocerization of too many of his friends. To him, the fascist legionaries in their rhino-green shirts were “enchained beasts,” embodying “the bestiality and endless stupidity of mankind and cosmos,” while their songs were “an iron roar, with iron and gall, spitting gall and iron.”
He nevertheless regained the blank tone that the text preserved for the conclusion:
Berenger, seemingly the most dissatisfied, is the first (and the last) to refute the new ideology. By fear, human beings are held back from progression.
Fear? Yes, certainly there had been fear too. But not only that. Not just fear, he could swear, swear — not just fear!
He was ready to swear in front of the youthful audience in the New World that disgust and lucidity and integrity too, yes, yes, integrity too, yes, yes, ambiguities and vulnerability too had kept the poor outlaw far from the “progress” of the New Man, the New Life, and the New Ideology.
The reading had stopped. The political actualization of the famous play had been realized in the very last sentences of the text:
For twenty years a wall stood blocking change in East Germany. Not until this year was the last “Berenger” overrun by the Rhinoceroses, and the wall removed, opening up space for growth.
Perplexity should finally have burst out. Did the Rhinos remove the wall? Didn’t they actually build it? … What kind of “growth” did they want? asked the cricket buzzing imperceptibly in the East European’s thoughts and in the American sentences read to the American youngsters.
No one seemed in a hurry to comment. I remembered the school of long ago, in the homeland of long ago and far away. “Get back to your seat, moron,” the Teacher Rhino would roar at the silent class. The iron roar and the iron words of gall had made me shrink in my desk, ashamed at the shame of the classmate standing at the blackboard, and terrified that the same thing would somehow happen to me all too soon.
One of the rights the exiled had discovered in America was exactly this: the right to … “stupidity.” Stupidity, ignorance, candor, and innocence — cultural, political, social, and other. The nerve with which aberrant beliefs, feelings, and experiences are being proclaimed! And the sacrosanct justification: “This is my opinion!” The void full of “self-esteem,” in which landmarks, comparisons, and inhibitions are annulled; any admonition becomes “paternalistic,” and therefore unacceptable. Certainly the show is not necessarily funny. And yet, the uninhibited display of qualities and defects is quite rich in revelations (even that “stupidity” is not always as foolish as it seems).
The inexhaustible energy of self-achievement is the hallmark of American democracy. A people’s democracy (how could it be otherwise?), therefore also “vulgar” and “stupid,” but impetuous in its renewing vitality.