Ionescu on transforming conformity
We can become what we defend
The Romanian-French playwright Eugène Ionesco was a founder of the theatre of the absurd. Inttroducing their 1984 interview, the Paris Review explained “Over the past thirty years, Ionesco has been called a ‘tragic clown,’ the ‘Shakespeare of the Absurd,’ the Enfant Terrible of the Avant-Garde,’ and the ‘Inventor of the Metaphysical Farce’— epithets that point to his evolution from a young playwright at a tiny Left Bank theater to an esteemed member of the Académie Française.” This is taken from James Meek’s “Far-Right Wellness Product” in the London Review of Books.
The writer describes Ionescu’s play Rhinoceros.
In the play, a community of ordinary people, bourgeois and working class, shopkeepers and intellectuals, are transformed one by one into rhinoceroses, metonymic beasts representing dumb, wilful force: clumsy, violent, selfish, stupid, moving in herds, incapable of rational discourse.
What gives the play its power and contemporary relevance to Europe and the US isn’t so much the behaviour of the rhinos, which is mostly offstage, as the way a character’s defence of rhino behaviour — a defence that is always reasonable, whether it is reflective, generous or merely curious — is invariably a prelude to their turning into one.
When Daisy tells her lover Bérenger that a quarter of the population of the town have become rhinoceroses, he says: ‘We’re still in the majority. We must take advantage of that. We must do something before we’re inundated.’
But soon Daisy is showing the telltale sign of criticising the critics of the rhinos for their prejudice. “Those are the real people,” she tells Bérenger.
They look happy. They’re content to be what they are. They don’t look insane. They look very natural. They were right to do what they did. ... I feel a bit ashamed of what you call “love” — this morbid feeling, this male weakness. And female, too. It just doesn’t compare with the ardour and the tremendous energy emanating from all these creatures around us.
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