One hundred years ago, the playwright and author Eugène Ionesco returned from France to his home country of Romania. But the Romania he returned to is not the one he left as an infant; running around the streets of Bucharest are rhinoceroses, his neighbours are half-green and sprouting horns, and pedestrians on the street step out of the way of the occasional stampede. He identified this strange new condition as “Rhinoceritis”, outlining its causes and its symptoms in his 1959 play Rhinocéros. One of its most evident symptoms is a propensity for fascism, which ran amok in Romania during the interwar period. Despite a firm course of treatment doled out in the early 1940s, Rhinoceritis never fully disappeared. Now, after a few particularly warm summers, we find ourselves facing a virulent strain of Rhinoceritis. Ionesco can teach us about this strain, the dangers that it poses to our society, and the opportunities that can arise from tackling it.
Rhinocéros centers around the figure of Bérenger, a dishevelled alcoholic, as he navigates an outbreak of people spontaneously transforming into rhinoceroses. Bérenger is the pale and interesting existentialist, always ‘pondering’ life and reality. He says that he drinks because he doesn’t feel “comfortable in existence”. By contrast, everyone else in the play is more sensible. Bérenger’s best friend Jean encourages Bérenger to forget the vast questions that pre-occupy him, and to focus on his “duty”, the practicalities of everyday life. The Logician is similarly dismissive of broad philosophical questions – one need only apply logic, and the world will unlock its meaning. Mr. Butterfly, Bérenger’s boss, cares exclusively about his business, to the point that it blinds him to the world around him.
In order to understand the significance of these characters, we first need to understand a bit about Ionesco himself. As a playwright, he was famous for nonsensical dialogue, and farcical action, attacking theatrical norms and rendering them ridiculous on stage. As a result, his plays like The Bald Soprano are hilariously silly. Rhinocéros marks a departure from these earlier plays, since it is less focussed on attacking theatrical norms. Compared to his earlier plays, the barrier between stage and audience is more concrete, its world less “meta” and artificial – the stage refers to a world.
At this point, I want to bring up a philosophical concept that I’m sure we’re all familiar with: Plato’s Cave. Basically, there are prisoners tied up, facing a wall in a cave. Behind them is a fire, which the prisoners can’t see. Their captors use the fire to project shadows on the wall that the prisoners can see. Having lived their whole lives there, all the prisoners know are the shadows on the wall – not the things outside the cave which the shadows represent. Since they had never left the cave, the prisoners would mistake representation for reality. With his earlier plays, Ionesco wanted to push his audience outside of the cave and foreground the artificiality of the theatre.
So Ionesco had previously been attacking representation, showing its limitations and highlighting the fact that it isn’t the real world, but something like a shadow on the wall. By the time he writes Rhinocéros, however, Ionesco wants to go further; he wants us to bear in mind the limitations of representation and, through this awareness, to overcome them. Remember this as we talk about the characters in the play, because each of the characters is like the prisoners in the cave.
Mr. Butterfly is literally blind to everything beyond his business; he can’t see Bérenger, standing right next to him, until he sees his name written on the attendance sheet. Until he’s clocked in, Bérenger exists outside of Mr. Butterfly’s cave. The Logician, too, can’t think about anything outside of his system of logic; when demonstrating a syllogism, he declares that since all cats have four legs, and dogs have four legs, all dogs must logically be cats. What could, through perverse logic, be true, ends up having no relation to reality, only to the system of logic in which it is encased.
Jean offers a more complex view, which we can see when he advises Bérenger on what to make of his existential angst. Rather than worrying about questions he can’t answer, Jean encourages Bérenger to be better read, more cultured, even to go and see the Ionesco play that’s “on right now”. He makes reference to our “duty” as members of society, to be good employees for instance. In a very broad sense, Jean is in the cave of society – what society tells Jean to pursue, to see as ‘real’, he accepts as such. While Bérenger is asking the big why of existence, Jean accepts the answers provided by society.
By Ionesco’s time, however, philosophers were looking at our relationship to reality differently to Plato’s allegory of the cave. People like Kant had come along and proposed that we aren’t like prisoners in a cave, cut off from reality. Instead, our experience of shadows on the wall, what Kant calls Phenomena, can tell us things about the real world, referred to as Noumena. For Kant, the Noumena was inaccessible – because our experience is always partial, be that sensory or mental, we can’t know objective reality. But we can get close.
It’s a bit like scientific theories: we start with certain evidence, like the fossil record, and then construct models that make sense of this information, like the theory of evolution. As more evidence emerges, our models change to accommodate it. We can’t see or touch gravity: it’s a model for understanding observable phenomena. This means we get flat-earthers who come along and say “Well, gravity’s just a theory!” and they’re sort of right. Sort of.
When models don’t correlate to the evidence, like the logician declaring that logically all dogs must be cats, we put our models back to the drawing board and try to make them better. Unfortunately, we don’t go about treating all our models with the scientific right-mindedness that scientists treat evolution. While the limited perspectives of characters like the Logician and Mr. Butterfly are pushed to absurdity, more horrifying still is their inability to confront their limitations.
If we don’t recognise that models are not reality itself, but impositions onto reality, we can get carried away. Think of our current economic models that posit GDP growth as the single most important thing, and anyone who questions it as fiscally irresponsible. New economic theories, like Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, point to the fact that infinite growth can’t happen on a finite planet, and to the numerous ways of restructuring economies to become fair and equitable. But the ideology of economic growth has become so prevalent that, for most people, arguing against economic growth is as unthinkable as arguing to legalise murder. As a model of reality, it has been mistaken for reality – and this mistake has transformed it into a cave in which we are trapped. Like the logician, we’ve accepted the law that tells us that all dogs are cats, and forgotten to question the assumption underneath.
What Ionesco’s play forces us to consider is the danger of naturalising arbitrary cultural choices, which was a danger he knew all too well. Soon after Ionesco returned to Romania in 1925, he witnessed the rise of the Iron Guard, an offshoot of the far-right nationalist party the National-Christian Defense League. The uniform of their paramilitary wing was a green shirt, often cited as the inspiration for the green skin of the rhinoceroses in Rhinoceros. These parties claimed that allowing Jewish people into their society, from recently annexed territories, was a threat to their christian culture, and played on concerns about the falling quality of life and lack of opportunity for Romanians to justify their antisemitic rhetoric. By 1941, these fascist parties and their ideology had infiltrated the government, and the Romanian pogroms and Holocaust were beginning.
This holocaust, however, wasn’t a historical inevitability. Ionesco saw it developing, and watched as people he knew naturalised the assumptions and beliefs that would enable the atrocities that were to come. Kant outlines the difference between Phenomena and Noumena, and for Ionesco the danger arose when we equated the two. When we look at the world as it presents itself to us, we are often only looking at a partial picture. Worse still, when we don’t question the underlying assumptions that we use to interpret these phenomena, we don’t only risk some kind of philosophical malpractice – we risk the descent into Rhinoceritis.
Bérenger’s coworker Botard is a prime example of the danger of uncritical engagement with the world. He claims to understand everything about the rhinoceroses, saying “I’ve got the key to understanding these events, an infallible method of interpretation.” Botard doesn’t listen to anyone, neither journalists who are all liars, nor eye-witnesses to the rhinoceroses, who are all idlers with nothing better to do with their lives, nor academics, nor priests. He’s a school of hard knocks type, only trusts what he sees with his own two eyes. Botard’s scepticism, while posed as rational, is actually a refusal to admit any alternative information. Botard questions everyone else, but never himself.
So clearly Botard is critical towards the world, to the extent that he shuts it out. But there’s more going on here, because if Botard was truly shutting out all outside influence, he surely wouldn’t know anything at all. Unless, of course, there were gaps in his experience, through which beliefs were filtering in without his knowledge. For the philosopher Jacques Lacan, this is something that very few people actually come to realise. Not only are we split from the world as consciousness, a brain that relies on limited sensory data to construct a partial image of reality, but for Lacan we are also split in consciousness itself. This is because of language.
Lacan tells us that language is the first thing we use to understand phenomena. It is the level on which all thought happens, and is in some ways primary to it. But something funny happens when we think about ourselves, which he called fragmenting. Think of a sentence like “I love Jazz music”. The “I” in that sentence splits from the “I” that thinks it. It tells a story about me, as though I were a character in a book. Lacan called the “I” of that sentence the Grammatical Subject, and the one that speaks it the Enunciating Subject. As we speak about ourselves, we construct a character, and most of the time we identify ourselves with this character. Yet the enunciating subject is nebulous and shifting, often at odds with the grammatical subject.
Jack Forshew suggests in his article Damnatio Memoria that equating this Grammatical Subject with the Enunciating Subject can be dangerous, because it fixes people in their identity, disallowing change and growth. If a mood strikes and I can’t stomach any more Miles Davis, has my love of Jazz become a lie, or was it always only a partial truth? A similar danger arises in Rhinocéros, as characters identify themselves with their own grammatical subjects.
As Botard denies the split between enunciating and grammatical subject, he refuses to admit that there are gaps in his experience which might be filled by other things; things like subconscious desires, propaganda in media, or even the naturalized ‘laws’ of the economic structure. By refusing to see himself as fragmented and limited, Botard ironically makes himself more open to manipulation than a truly self-conscious person would.
Cast your minds back to the pale and interesting Bérenger at the start. Pretentious and aloof? Possibly. But Bérenger is the only character who never transforms into a rhinoceros, and he is unique in the play for his uncertainty. He doesn’t identify with his grammatical self, but feels uncomfortable in his own skin. The arbitrary conventions that constitute society cannot be naturalised in him, because he feels their unjustifiability too strongly. Ultimately, in the uncomfortable situation of existence, he has the courage to question, where others seek only answers.
The point of this article is not to change the rhinoceroses’ minds. The point is to warn of the danger of certainty. Certainty relies on common sense, on pragmatism, and on naturalised beliefs and values in order to appeal to the uncritical. As a result, far-right groups appealing to naturalised beliefs have presented themselves as a voice for the voiceless, and are increasingly popular among the misinformed. But this also presents an opportunity: as they grow more certain, they expose the concealed beliefs that have long underpinned our society. Far from radical opposition to the status quo, they are extremist defenders of the same-old. The same private interests, the same racist ideology, the same undemocratic attitudes. Only by questioning these ideas that they themselves expose, asking not only what is being said, but why it is being said, is the first stage in treating the rhinoceros.
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