In 1996, the class at Bard no longer resembled that of seven years earlier. Soon after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the college had initiated a program of academic exchanges, and every year a number of East European students had come to Bard to study for two semesters.
During the 1996–97 academic year, I was teaching a course entitled “Danube — A Literary Journey.” This time Ionescu was accompanying his fellow writers Musil and Kafka, Koestler and Krleza, Ki
and Canetti. The literary journey along the Danube dealt with “Central European” authors; in their books, we were trying to discover the spirit of “Mitteleuropa” in relation to the everchanging reality of here and there.
The class was almost equally divided between American and East European students. From the very beginning, the seminar discussions benefited from the stimulating tension between the “subtlety” characteristic of the Old World and the open, realistic, efficient “practicality” of America.
Ionescu’s metaphor seemed shocking to the Americans and already partly “outdated” to the Europeans. The voluble student from Tbilisi argued that Beckett’s plays seem more radical to him than Ionescu’s because the Irish author accepted no compromise with the so-called humanism of hope, while the female Czech student saw in the Logician’s rhinocerization a necessary “liberation” from the monomaniacal idiocy of ignoring reality.
I promptly recalled the image of Ionescu as he appeared in 1979, when I first met him. It was the same image evoked more than half a century before by Mihail Sebastian, his friend and a friend of his friends, whose rhinocerizing delirium these two contemplated together in Bucharest in the 1930s and 1940s. “I can’t get used to life …” the playwright who found it even harder to get used to death seemed to say in 1979, just as in 1941. Then, listening in Cismigiu Park in Bucharest to a broadcast of a speech by the Great mustarchioed Rhinoceros from Berlin, Berenger had turned pale, then white, and fled in terror. “I can’t! I can’t,” he was whispering, terrified by the besieging barbarism around him.
I gave up my initial idea of discussing the significance of the rhinoceros in the imagery of antiquity with my class. I had been going to talk about Alexander’s apocryphal letter to Aristotle (quoted in Flusser’s memorable book Judaism and the Origins of Christianity, 1988), in which the unusual animal, larger than an elephant and with three horns, is evoked by the name the Indians gave it: “odontotyrannos.” The fabulous apparition is also mentioned in the writings of the neo-Pythagorean Philostratus and, even before him, in the Jewish apocalyptic literature and in the Book of Daniel 7:7 where the monstrous “odontotyrannos,” seen with the same eschatological horror and fear, embodies — in its “steel teeth and bronze claws”—the all-destructive force the modern tyrants would regenerate with renewed vitality. I was not at all sure that such pedantic clarifications would not bore my audience.
But the provocative, unconventional pages of the student of seven years earlier could be useful again, I believed. I therefore tried the “Nancy test” on the new class too. The grades she had received in 1989 from her fellow students were not very different from those given by their successors in 1996. Nor were the commentaries too different either:
Her arguments seem to be well-supported, her indulgence can be justified. The paradox she depicts coming from the hero’s fear of change which then also necessarily means a reabandonment from the society the same way as in the nonrhinoceros one, is very well posited.
Is the disregard for its historical context a conscious decision? The analysis of the main character (his inconsequence, therefore, weakness) seems even more satisfying than the traditional “humanistic” approach (what saves him is “humanity” i.e., weakness, thoughtlessness?) Surely this interpretation is far more optimistic, however, leaving out the bitterness and tragedy (for, after all, there is no victor). A brave, provoking attempt.
The paper is one-sided. In fact, becoming rhinoceros is not, according to the internal logic of the text, an improvement. But the originality and brilliancy of the paper is beyond any question.
Some valid points on the subject of Berenger’s about-face and his hypocrisy in defending the “civilization” he cannot believe in, but she gravely misreads “rhinoceritis” by interpreting it as “progress” of a liberating nature; also, she ignores the way language in the play functions as a rationalizing suprastructure, and accepts the characters’ statements at face value.
Awful. However, her assertion that the actions of a society rely completely upon the balance Rhinoceroses/Berengers at any given time for any given cause / extreme was clear.
This paper is a somewhat irresponsible piece of proto-fascist propaganda. It fails to provide a means of entering the text by neglecting: 1. the distinction between collective (in a noncoercive way) political/historical change and violent conformist suppressions of otherness, and 2. the actual psychological impact of the concrete historical situation that Ionesco is allegorizing.
We could even have discussed some of the theses of the students of 1996. A Polish female student focused on “the rhinocerization of language” in Ionescu’s play (“The Intransparency of Language in Rhinoceros”), analyzing language as a “dramatic object,” revealing its own absurdity and gradual loss of meaning, its capacity to convey ideas and sentiments, in the absence of an appropriate idiom. A crisis of human relationships, which are finally automated by clichés and redundancy.
What the thesis of seven years earlier brought, however, was the shock of turning the interpretation “inside out.” Was this turn in Ionescu’s spirit? “The right to stupidity?” How “stupid” was yesterday’s stupidity? And today’s? I would have liked to have taken up the question with the father of the absurd drama. The fundamental right to candor, doubt, challenge, failure? Forms of freedom, that is, of individuality? I suppose Ionescu would have had a lot to say.
I had seen him in passing during a visit to Paris at the beginning of the 1980s, on an evening that I would spend with Marie-France, his graceful and devoted daughter. He came into the hall for a few moments, lonely and vulnerable, just to meet me. We only exchanged a few unimportant words. There was an affectionate absence on the sad Charlot’s face, a sort of not necessarily alcoholic dizziness.
“Already drunk, after several cocktails (on a Saturday morning), he starts talking to me about his mother,” Sebastian wrote in 1941. Over forty years had passed, it was a Saturday evening, not morning, but the tormented inner self seemed to ask for relief this time too, “as if a burden would lie heavy on him, as if he would smother.” The burden, perhaps a secret rusted by time but still bleeding, was that “precious leper” who was born of a Jewish mother.
His face seemed to bear the trace of that absolute grief of understanding human reality. His “confidence” in man’s ability to save himself, despite the horrors he himself produces, clearly had been the result, not of naïvety or optimism, as the student from Tbilisi believed, but of the ultimate need to “force” the gods’ grace.
When we went into the street, Marie-France told me about Ionescu’s meeting with an important Romanian fiction writer. After skeptically inspecting the roomy apartment, located in the heart of Paris, at Boulevard Montparnasse 96A, the visitor from Bucharest expressed his disappointment that a writer of such standing and a member of the French Academy had not been given a villa with a garden and adequate atmosphere, as socialist Rhinoromania’s “classics” were. The member of the French Academy did not seem offended. He called Marie-France and asked her to show the guest her small room too, so that he could see that the apartment had one more room ….