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

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

In his book On Drama, Michael Goldman analyzes the Brechtian process of recognition and identification in theatre in terms of "making or doing identity" (18). Although Goldman defines identity as an aspect of mind, his model touches on my analysis of the self through its emphasis on the "most inward" part of mind (77)--or pure consciousness in Vedic psychology. Theatre, as the performance of Jean and the other rationalists demonstrate, portrays the confusions of self-identity. Berenger, on the other hand, displays a self-referral that establishes what Goldman calls "a self that in some way transcends the normal confusions of self" (18). Contrary to the popular poststructuralist view, Goldman defines "subtext", or the "mutual permeability of actor and script", as not reducible to text (49). An actor's performance can always be treated semiotically,

   [b]ut in drama one finds inevitably an element in excess of what
   can be semiotically extracted-something that is also neither
   irrelevant to nor ... completely independent of the text. No matter
   how exhaustively one tries to translate what an actor does with a
   script into a kind of writeable commentary on it, there will always
   also remain the doing of it-the bodily life of the actor moving
   into the world, at a specific moment in time, to set in motion
   these words, these gestures, these writeable ideas, this other
   identity. And, if the doing were itself to be reduced to a text,
   there would still remain the doing of the doing. The actor enters
   the text. (Goldman 50, original emphasis)

Berenger performs the script self-reflexively in excess of the text, while through him the spectator receives a taste of non-intentional consciousness in excess of the play's constructed identities. If the actor's physical entry into the text as subtext exceeds what can be extracted semiotically, then his entry as self-reflexive consciousness must exceed it to an even greater extent.

Not only does Berenger's entry into the text, moreover, exceed what can be extracted semiotically; the rationalists also exceed the text through their metamorphosis into rhinos. Although operating on a physical level, both the back-lit heads of the rhinos on stage and the actual transformation of the characters into rhinos exceed what the text can semiotically extract, just as Berenger's self-referral exceeds it by pointing toward the nonlocal level of the unified field of consciousness underlying material existence. This self-referentiality of the text, by highlighting the absence of a physical referent, causes the audience to experience a corresponding self-referral on the level of consciousness. This self-referral has the effect of swinging the spectator's attention from the concrete to the abstract, from referentiality to self-referral; that is, the spectator's vision moves from looking at the concrete dimensions of the stage drama toward looking into its abstract dimensions of a more subtle nonlocal level of reality behind the surface. This distinction between looking at stage drama as opposed to looking into its structural features corresponds to Colin McGinn's theory developed in The Power of Movies of looking into rather than at the images projected on a screen. McGinn argues that unlike cinema, theatre requires no more looking into than do people sitting in a room, except in terms of looking into the actor's eyes. Watching a film entails seeing an object embedded as a referent in the image, so that in seeing the image we actually look through it to the embedded object. Unlike the actors in a stage drama, the images in movies are transparent insofar that they invite us to look into them and not at them as in the case of actors on a stage. McGinn's argument holds for theatre in terms of physical sight, perhaps, but not necessarily in terms of the mind's eye, which focuses more on what is absent than what is present. Through the experience of self-referral, theatre can induce the spectator to look not merely at the stage drama but also into it, that is, through the actors on stage to an abstract nonlocal level of experience evoked through knowledge-by-identity. Ionesco employs this self-referral strategy of looking into rather than at because Berenger's experience of an underlying nonlocal truth, although describable as a commitment to a significant cause, is essentially unsayable. It belongs to a trans-conceptual level of knowledge that can be shared intersubjectively only by being it, not through ordinary language and interpretation.