Running With Rhinoceroses

Running with Rhinoceroses Let me begin with a word in defense of a splendid animal― the rhinoceros. Rhinoceroses don't run in herds; they are either solitary or move in small groups. Typical herd animals are buffalo; you've seen old photos of them running on the American plains. The German novelist Heinrich Böll, in his Billiards at Half-past Nine, describing roughly the same social phenomenon, characterizes it as "partaking of the buffalo sacrament." Better. But I'm being silly: Ionesco wasn't writing for the Discovery Channel, he was engaging in theater, in literature, in metaphor. And what spectacular theater is achieved through transforming humans into rhinoceroses! I just wanted you to

know that real rhinos don't act that way.

Eugene Ionesco (1909―1994) is associated with the birth of the Theater of the Absurd, of which his play Rhinoceros is a prime example. The story you've read, "Rhinoceros," was written by Ionesco in order that the play might be read as well as seen. Like the play, the story version is designed to elicit laughter― it is Monty Python territory. And sure enough, audiences and readers over the decades have laughed (did you?). Yet the subject of the story is one of the most potentially deadly issues of our time. And this deadly issue centers on an intimate question: Who are you? The question of identity is a complex one, one with many layers, many degrees of commitment. It would be naive to pursue the question of identity through exclusions, we are in the last analysis "all of the above." That is, we have gender,

ethnicity, culture, religious background, sexual preferences― and all this within a unique and highly individual psychological morass of interconnected likes and dislikes, prejudices and distempers. But the story focuses on priorities: are you first an individual?― or are you first a group member? This question priorities can seem relatively trivial, a matter of fashion. But history has shown us that the priorities at issue can be momentous and devastating. One of the things reported in places like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda are claims about how fast the horrors that engulfed those cultures came about. "Why, only last year, we ate together, played sports together, our subcultures even intermarried." The point here is that, however else it happens, it happens fast. "It?" What is the "it" that happens so fast? This "it" is the subject of Ionesco's 1959

play, which he also presented as the shortstory you've read. Born in Romania in 1906, Ionesco emigrated to France and witnessed first hand the social transformations wrought by the Nazi occupation. What happens so fast is a psychological transformation of the individual. And this is something different from what we encountered in Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery," where the townsfolk remained faithful, however irrationally, to their established tradition. Where in that story, people abdicated themselves to tradition, in "Rhinoceros" people abdicate themselves from individuality. Where in "The Lottery" people seek psychological refuge in tradition, in "Rhinoceros" they seek psychological refuge in a group― in any group. Of course, to be human is to be a social animal, to be a member of a group. But how that group is established― the relation between the group and the people who belong

to the group― this is of decisive importance. Here's one way to think about it. Healthy societies are comprised by members that are in the last analysis "I"; unhealthy societies are comprised by members that are in the last analysis nothing more that "one of We." Unhealthy? How so? Groups comprised of "We" inoculate themselves from criticism and course-correction. Dissent is treated as disloyalty; personal uniqueness and individual diversity are branded as inauthentic. "We" is never wrong (the grammar here is intentional); "We" is typically the injured party; "We" is never driven by base motives. But we're pretty familiar with this critique of the totalitarian identity, right? Such things happen in police states, in societies in which conformity is enforced by thugs. Such things happen in settings that are somewhat, well, theatrical.

But nine months before the horrors began to unfold in Bosnia, the people didn't see themselves in a theatrical setting. Yes, they'd been encouraged to reawaken a sense of their tribal identities― as Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. But that was nothing serious. These were Europeans, after all. Indeed, we're now all-too-aware of what happened. But rather than catalog ghastly tales, let's catalog something else. We turn now to Ionesco's story, a story that may be read as a catalog of psychological strategies― strategies for evading individuality, strategies for taking dishonorable comfort in "We" rather than making one's priority a commitment to sustaining an "I" identity in the midst of frightening change. Ionesco had watched otherwise ordinary people become Nazis or Nazi collaborators. He had watched the world in which he lived, the world he loved, go mad. How had it happened? How had group-think emerged?

How had the transition from individual to rhinoceros― the transition from an "I" to the brutal herd mentality of "We"― taken place? His interest in the story "Rhinoceros" centers not so much on the fact that such transitions did happen. He is more interested in detailing the psychological antecedents, antecedents in the minds of individuals, to the emergence of the rhinoceros phenomenon. We can proceed by considering some of the more interesting characters we meet in the story, and noting what Ionesco shows us of them. Jean: After a loud public quarrel about the nature of the rhinoceros they'd just seen, Jean storms off. And our Narrator apologizes for the man he calls his friend: "The slightest objection made him foam at the mouth. This was his only fault, for he had a heart of gold and had done me a thousand good turns."

Yes: a real prince― so long as you don't disagree with him. An intolerance of rival points of view is typical of the totalitarian mind set, certainly. But there is something more at work here. It is through rage that we see Jean, later in the story, transform into a rhinoceros. There are folks― have you known any?― for whom anger is a primal disposition. They will be furious over one side or the other of the abortion issue, enraged about this or that ecological issue, incensed about animal rights (or about those who promote animal rights). One senses, after a time, that the specific issue under consideration does little more than serve as a hook on which such folks can hang their anger― that anger itself, not the issue of the moment, is their psychological reality. They may seem to be individuals because they are often so stridently assertive. Yet in times of crisis and change, their anger is easily directed against any who

serve as convenient targets; it is often their visceral force, their anger, that sets in motion mob action. To be an individual requires thinking for oneself; it requires thinking, reflection. And while anger is typically perceptive, and thus is quick to find justification for itself, it is at the same time unreflective. Thus the Jeans of the world are easy prey for the transition beyond individuality, the transition to rhinoceroses. The Logician: the intellectualism of the academic is portrayed as a sophisticated evasion of the crisis through a cleverly reasoned distraction. Look at his capers in discussing the fact that a rhinoceros has just killed a cat, and that the Narrator and Jean are disputing whether it was an Asian or an African rhinoceros: "You began by asking yourselves whether today's rhinoceros is the same as last Sunday's or whether it is a different one. That is what must be decided. You may have seen one and the same one-horned

rhinoceros on two occasions, or you may have seen one and the same two-horned rhinoceros on two occasions. Or again, you may have seen first one one-horned rhinoceros and then a second one horned rhinoceros. Or else, first one two-horned rhinoceros and then a second two-horned rhinoceros. If on the first occasion you had seen a two-horned rhinoceros, and on the second a one-horned rhinoceros, that would not be conclusive either. It might be that since last week the rhinoceros had lost one of his horns, and that the one you saw today was the same. Or it might be that two two-horned rhinoceroses had each lost one of their horns. If you could prove that on the first occasion you had seen a one-horned rhinoceros, whether it was Asian or African, and today a twohorned rhinoceros, whether it was African or Asian― that doesn't matter― then we might conclude that two different rhinoceroses were involved, for it is most unlikely that a second horn could grow in a few days, to any visible extent, on a

rhinoceros's nose; this would mean that all Asian, or African, rhinoceros had become an African, or Asian, rhinoceros, which is logically impossible, since the same creature cannot be born in two places at once or even successively."

An effusion of blather and prattle. And it is intended by Ionesco to be heard as such. Another way to avoid becoming an individual, then, is to take refuge in scholastic intellectualism: the question is analyzed to distraction, yet the issue is left unaddressed. Botard: for all his feigned disgust at the vulgarity of being a rhinoceros, Botard is at bottom a conformist: "One must keep up with one's times! were his last words as a man." In these words Botards's life is revealed for what it is, a protracted fashion statement. The point: most elitism is disguised conformism― it is rooted in insecurity, based on the suspicion that after all one is merely vulgar. And when the chips are down, in times

of crisis, one must be what one knows oneself to be, one of "We." Daisy: Like Botard, Daisy is possessed by a lack of self-esteem. This state of psychological disparagement (it was evident in Germany's Weimar period that led so directly to the Nazi era) can drive people to seek identity and authenticity in collective terms. Speaking of the things that set her and the Narrator off from those who'd becomes rhinoceroses, Daisy says: "Perhaps after all it's we who need saving. Perhaps we are the abnormal ones. Do you see anyone else like us?... It's the whole world that is right― not you or me." The inclination to find psychological well-being through belonging, no matter at the expense of one's individuality, is particularly attractive to those with low self-esteem. Confronted by the Narrator's declaration of love, Daisy says: "I'm rather ashamed of what you call love, that morbid thing...." This is

more than disaffection. Genuine love (we speak now not of sport sex or suchlike) enhances the sense of individuality on the part of the people in love. Love emphasizes uniqueness. Love subtly sets lovers off from the group; love is private, it speaks in whispers and says "I" and "you." And when love whispers "we" it is the "we of two" far more often than the "We" of the group. Perceptive literary critics of totalitarianism like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell have based their dystopian fictions on the premise that authentic human love is inherently subversive of the totalitarian agenda. The Narrator. A decent man, no doubt; a man who tries to see the best in people and situations. Another way of putting that is that the Narrator is someone who has come to an agreement with himself not to notice things that are distasteful. One example of this is his insistence that Jean is his friend― all this as Jean treats him with contempt at

every turn. Not only does he not see distasteful things in others, he is further blind to anything unseemly in himself. His unique susceptibility is expressed in his view that only other people can become rhinoceroses: "How can anybody be a rhinoceros? It's unthinkable!" And yet without his realizing it, the transformation is already at work in him: "In order for them to relearn my language (which moreover I was beginning to forget) I should first have to learn theirs." And from there he moves to trying to have it both ways― all in the name of reasonability and practicality: "It is obvious that one must not always drift blindly behind events and that it's a good thing to maintain one's own individuality. However, one must also make allowances for things; asserting one's own difference to be sure, but yet. . .remaining akin to one's fellows."

Yes, the story is about the seductiveness of totalitarian ideology. But it's also about the everyday foibles of the human psyche which― in times of crisis, in times that present accepting group identity as a social imperative― can facilitate the transition beyond individual reflection and responsibility. The story suggests that individualism is a very difficult state to attain, and equally difficult to maintain. For Ionesco, it's not what the townspeople became, it's what they didn't become: they didn't become individuals. Why? Because it's so much easier to run than to reflect; so much easier to become what Orwell called a "Goodthinker" than to define oneself as an outsider.