Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros: defiance vs. conformism / Eugene Ionesco'nun Rhinoceros adli eseri: muhalefet konformizme karsi

Interactions, Spring, 2008 by William S. Haney, II

Bauman argues that consumer society has created a new relation between Freud's reality and pleasure principles. The pleasure principle, in which pleasure has to adjust itself to the limitations of reality, has undergone a radical transformation. Today the pleasure principle has itself become the ultimate reality. In this scenario, the reality principle must now sustain pleasure by way of privileging instant as opposed to delayed gratification, which was previously held to be the basis of social reality. Bauman observes that "[c]onsumer life is a never-ending sequence of new beginnings. The joy of shopping is greater than any joy the purchased product, brought home, may bring. It is the shopping that counts. [...] Pleasures are at their best, most alluring and most exhilarating when encapsulated, as anticipations of joy, in the exhibits on display" (154, original emphasis). He concludes that capitalist market society, while originally based on the greed for possessions, has paradoxically "ended up denigrating material possessions and replacing the value of 'having' with that of living through a pleasurable (yet volatile and fast evaporating) experience" (155). Ionesco's rhinos live for the pleasurable experience of sheer bestiality, not for acquiring possessions. They represent a society, as Bauman puts it, in which pleasure has been "miraculously transmogrified into the mainstay of reality," and the search for pleasure has become "the major (and sufficient) instrument of pattern maintenance" (187). In other words, the fluidity of moving from one new pleasurable beginning to another has become the "ultimate solidity-the most stable of conceivable conditions" (187). On the basis of the substitution of the reality principle by pleasure, Ionesco's play suggests that the universal condition of rational thought and action is being replaced in today's market society by the free reign of irrational pleasure as represented by the rhinos.

Ionesco's Rhinoceros, however, does not wholeheartedly embrace the rational strategies of a solid modernist society, as evidenced by Berenger's dilemma when at the end of the play his will to save humanity weakens and he feels tempted to conform to the irrationality of the rhinos. Although he finds it impossible to renounce his humanity and become a rhino, Berenger realizes that he needs to respond sensibly to the conditions of an irrational society, that rational strategies may not always be the most effective in dealing with the irrational passions of consumerism and the pleasure principle. As Bauman notes, "under certain conditions irrational behavior may carry a trapping of rational strategy and even offer the most immediately obvious rational option among those available" (189). Ionesco's audience does not have a clear option in choosing one side of the equation or the other, but rather finds itself in a gap between them. As the play demonstrates, logical analysis does not help characters or spectators in coping with a situation of a growing number of people becoming rhinos. This gap arguably represents and indeed constitutes a taste of the void of conceptions, that qualityless state of pure consciousness beyond thought. Berenger as we shall see undergoes a transformation in the play from an aimless, alienated, apathetic Everyman who drinks too much and suspects life to be a dream to a morally strong individual who even in the face of absurdity refuses to surrender his human identity. Throughout the play he finds himself oscillating in and out of conceptual gaps as he grapples with the mystery of his friends and fellow citizens turning into beasts. The gaps occur at several points during the play: in the discussions on logic with his friend Jean and the Logician, in the debate with Jean and his colleague Dudard about the reasons for choosing rhinoceritis over humanity, and in Berenger's amorous relation with Daisy and their tentative decision to resist relinquishing their humanity.