Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceroses: Their Romanian Origins and Western Fortunes
When speaking of his dramatic writings, Ionesco has always insisted on their obsessional nature and … before the first performance of Rhinocéros in Paris, he described as his starting-point a particularly haunting obsession, the mutation of people into dangerous monsters once they have succumbed to some new fanaticism or ideology. Had not the preceding 25 years proved that they not only looked like rhinoceroses, but had really been turned into these ferocious beasts? That was as far as Ionesco was prepared to go at that moment in explaining his play. In February 1961, in a private conversation, that is to say after he had read the various interpretations offered of his play, Ionesco said that Rhinocéros was not a play against Nazism but against any fanaticism which makes of men killer-animals, and in his personal experience this fanaticism was Nazism. Throughout the play Ionesco insists on the thickening and greening skin of those undergoing the metamorphosis. For the French, during the last war, green was the symbol of the German soldier and thus of the Nazi brute. (p. 296)
Strangely enough, to turn a 'herd' into a 'society' used to be the preoccupation of political philosophers, whereas Ionesco now seemed to be suggesting that the 'herd' is already over-socialized. It was not socialization that made the Nazis so terrible, but their dehumanization. By replacing 'nazification' by 'massification' Ionesco was either underlining a subsidiary theme, or else he was deliberately side-stepping the main issue. There is a further subsidiary theme which accounts for the universal success of [Rhinocéros], that is to say the theme of depersonalization. Ionesco has claimed that by treating this theme he had put his finger more or less subconsciously on a burning problem of the day, common to all countries whether in the East or in the West. It is, of course, one of his favourite themes, witness La Cantatrice chauve and Jacques ou la soumission, in which people are presented as empty shells. (pp. 303-04)
Time and time again in his writings since 1961, [Ionesco] has returned to his obsessive idea that every new system of expression, once generally adopted, becomes another convention, another ideology and thereby loses its essential truth, that every revolution when successful becomes in its turn just another established régime—Ionesco conveniently passes over the matter of the character of the revolution or régime. Such an attitude is clearly apolitical…. Yet the fact remains that with Tueur sans gages, his first Bérenger play, and Rhinocéros, Ionesco, yielding apparently to the Brechtian vogue, had ventured outside the four walls in which the actions of the personal dramas of his earlier plays had been confined, into the political and social arena. His withdrawal therefrom was, however, immediate, and is made clear by Bérenger's final speech which gives no lead as to how to combat the rhinoceritic disease, but is turned instead inward on the self…. Indeed any form of commitment in art is anathema to him, as he believes that no political system can 'free man from the pain of living'. Shall we, on the other hand, look for an aesthetic explanation of this opposition? Political commitment in writing is incompatible with his particular notion of art, which he sees as the transcription of a sudden and intuitive experience, a direct vision of the world divorced from conceptual thought. (p. 305)
Ionesco's dramatic work as a whole is expressive of his defence against the world, against the invasion of his personality by the common language and ordinary customs. Ionesco is always 'Jacques' striving desperately to avoid soumission. Ionesco-Bérenger is incapable of uniting with others in active resistance; only a passive, isolated resistance is implied in Rhinocéros. It is here that the real ambiguity of the inspiration—rather than the 'meaning'—of Rhinocéros is to be found. It may be argued that a play has no 'meaning' outside itself, even a play of ideas, but it has an intention and a direction. On the one hand the play expresses a precise political experience; on the other it expresses a timid man's retreat into himself and final stand against a frightening outside world, referred to by Ionesco's own expression 'naturellement allergique à la contagion'…. Neither the personal nor the political experience produced a positive response in the dramatist, whose work depends for its artistic unity, which is very real, on a negation. (p. 306)
Dorothy Knowles, "Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceroses: Their Romanian Origins and Western Fortunes," in French Studies, July, 1974, pp. 294-307.
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