The exile had not forgotten the words of a poet who returned to socialist Romania after spending a year in America and who, when asked what seemed to him unique, unrivaled, one single thing, just one, finally answered, overwhelmed: “The status of the ugly woman. It is the only place in the world where this does not seem to be a handicap, where it does not become a reason for being excluded or frustrated or made fun of ….”
Such digressions went through the exile’s mind as he waited for a student to comment on the paper he had just read to the class.
They were so quiet, the vast silence was difficult to break. I insisted, however, that I wanted to hear their opinions. I finally received several brief and cutting criticisms of the troublesome thesis.
I then passed out small slips of paper, asking the students to give the paper a grade and explain their reasoning. They did not have to sign the slips, their opinions would remain anonymous.
At the end of class, as the students were heading out the door, the author approached me with a pale face. I had guiltily watched how she stood the trial, stoic but also hurt. I apologized for not having asked her permission to read her paper in public and not warning her of the referendum.
She did not seem bothered about such formalities. Her discontent was about something else. “How can they say I’m a fascist? You may not know, but I’m Jewish!”
No, I did not know and it did not seem very important to me. This is not what it is all about, I said, this is not about ethnicity or even about “fascism.”
She had indeed ignored the antifascist or anti-communist meaning of the play, as well as the numerous historical, not just ideological, connotations. The real question remained, however, whether the reasoning was sound. That is what I tried to explain to the slight and silent young woman in front of me. I was hesitant to tell her that in fascist legionary Rhinoromania, as well as in the socialist one, her point of view had been validated not only by the party propaganda but also by certain famous thinkers and artists.
Back home, I started looking at the students’ slips of paper. Despite the harsh criticism expressed in class, the grades given to the paper were good, even very good: B+, A, A—, B.
The comments were also worth paying attention to:
Well-written, provocative, well-defended, and plausible — if it weren’t for the mindless uniformity of the Rhinoceroses. This poses the problem of “good” totalitarianism. I can’t present a contradiction to the views here, even though I can’t agree with them, and in total I give an A for entertaining and disturbing provocativeness.
Well written, but sounds like it was written by a Rhinoceros. A convincing argument but something tells me she missed the point.
This slip of paper indicated that the author of the paper had been identified (“she”) and added a hesitant B/B—.
A/B+ was not accompanied by a commentary. One slip of paper did not have a grade but, in beautiful handwriting, asked:
Transgression or transcendence? The student could either be a Stalinist or a fascist, but not a revolutionary. Yes, there are reasons to make noise in a stifling society, but the “transgressions” are neither progressions, or revolutions. Fascist character is partly rebellious, of course; the question is that the (justified, I suppose) rebellious impulses are manipulated by reactionary social groups. Change for the sake of change is not praiseworthy.
Another A/B+ was justified as follows:
Fear is not the only reason for which he doesn’t become a Rhino. But a good point.
Finally, an A included a brief note that seemed addressed to the East European professor:
Although I had a different interpretation I find this one to be very interesting, subversive, and not unfounded.
Obviously, the class had not been apathetic at all. Nor was it lacking in suppleness of perception.
The East European also had something to learn, as it were, from his students’ spirit of fair play.
I kept in touch with Nancy after she was no longer my student and even later when, having received a master’s degree in fine arts from Bard, she went to Japan, where she taught English for a while.
I also kept in touch with her paper. In 1996, I had the opportunity to subject her thesis to a re-evaluation.
Many things have changed with regard to Ionescu over the years. An open adversary of Romanian nationalism, he was condemned immediately after the war, before communists took complete power, for “insults” against the state and the nation. He had indeed expressed his disgust for the Army, the Church, the Law, demagogy, immorality, the tyranny of the parvenu, and yet again, the “angellike figures of Romanian nationalism.” But also for the “refined” intellectuals, fascinated with the base nature of the Beast.
He did everything to escape his rhinocerized homeland:
Anything could have happened. I could have died; I could have been convicted; I could have become a dog too; I could have been possessed by the Legionaries’ devil. When I left the country, I had the feeling I had saved myself from fire, earthquake, ocean waves, whirlpools …. It seems to me I had not seen people for a long time. I was awakening from a nightmare; I was escaping from hell …. Everything is fine when the nationalistic homeland is far away.
His work, which was banned under Stalinism, was briefly recovered during the interval of “liberalization” in the mid-1960s, due to his “humanism” and “antifascism.” Later on, it was exiled again because of its antitotalitarian subversiveness and the author’s intransigence toward the Carpathian Clown’s dictatorship. Published again in their entirety after 1989, his writings have remained a source of perplexity and suspicion for any “national” institution and also for some consumers of pop-cultural products.
Ionescu’s death, in 1994, sanctioned not his return to his native country, but his separation from a whole world that was no longer his.
To the very end he had been a fierce enemy of death in all its forms. He kept dreaming of avoiding the unavoidable. “The truth is to be found in the imaginary,” he repeated. While constantly reasserting his Christian faith, he never failed to add that “I could never believe enough …. I am like the one who prays daily: Lord, make me believe …. The truth is in the imaginary.” In the end, he resigned himself, as revealed by his will, which Le Figaro published the very day he died: “Perhaps there will be joy afterwards ….”
In the years following the collapse of the Wall between the two Europes and the two worlds, Rhinoceros had garnered not only the well-known antitotalitarian meaning but also a “democratic” and “American” connotation — in the light of the new wars between sexes and minorities of all kinds, each group fighting for a distinguished and privileged identity.
Class and race struggles had been replaced by other conflicts and slogans …. This was no longer about absolute, totalitarian oppression, it was about militant simplifications, not reflecting greater tolerance of insecurity, vulnerability, imprecision, ambiguity, and skepticism. The horn of rhinoceritis can be recognized today in the party membership card or badge, in the fundamentalists’ cross, star or crescent, but also in the extreme ideologization of difference.
Seven years had passed, as in the stories of prophecy. The lost one, the wanderer, was still at Bard. The green and the red Rhinos had gradually moved on, and his homeland, still not immune to old and new types of rhinoceritis, had receded farther and farther into the distance. Yes, the exile was in the same place, but less exiled than before. Moving away from his former biography proved beneficial more than once; the exile Eugen Ionescu had been right.