Those of you who are familiar with “The Theatre of the Absurd” have probably heard of (or if you’re lucky have seen) Eugéne Ionesco’s absurdist play “Rhinoceros”. We here in Houston are fortunate to have a small local theatre company, The Catastrophic Theatre, that specializes in putting on modern/avant-garde/absurdist plays by the likes of Ionesco, Beckett, Mickle Maher, Sam Shepard, etc. In fact last year The Catastrophic Theatre put on a very timely production of “Rhinoceros”, which came to my mind when thinking about Trump, his base, the Republican Party and these times. So a big personal Thank You to the Catastrophic for a memorable production of “Rhinoceros”.
Ionesco wrote “Rhinoceros” in 1959 which was inspired in part by the Jewish persecution and violent antisemitism in his birth country of Romania and then to the ultimate Jewish persecution by the Nazis during WWII. Briefly the play is about Bérenger, a drunkard, in a small village in France where its residents argue amongst themselves and with Bérenger and then one-by-one all turn into actual rampaging rhinoceroses, save for Bérenger, the drunkard, who is the only one in the end to withstand the “rhinoceroization” of the village and remain his true self. This play is a classic of “The Theatre of the Absurd” while also taking on the huge themes of tolerance, mindless bigotry and destruction, and how humans can transform into herds of mindless rampaging beasts.
The link above in the first paragraph is to the Wikipedia entry on “Rhinoceros” (the play) which I encourage you to read if you haven’t read about or seen “Rhinoceros” before. But a few quotes from this Wikipedia article seem in order:
At the same time antisemitism was rampant in Romania. Most Romanian Jews were descendants of Ashkenazi Jews who had moved to Romania in the 18th and 19th centuries from Poland. A recurring claim of the Romanian radical right was that most Romanian Jews were illegal immigrants or had obtained Romanian citizenship fraudulently. In the 19th century, the newly independent Romanian state proved very reluctant to grant citizenship to Romania's Jews, and a volatile atmosphere of antisemitism flourished with many intellectuals like A. C. Cuza claiming the Jews were a foreign and alien body in Romania that needed to be removed.[2][3][4]
Holy Moly, this sounds so much like the current Trump theme of “illegal immigrants” and the new restrictions Trump and Sessions want to introduce to deny citizenship to otherwise current eligible immigrants. Déjà vu all over again. Continuing:
In interwar Romania, the most virulent and violent antisemitic movement was the fascist Iron Guard founded in 1927 by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. As a university student, Ionesco saw one of his professors, Nae Ionescu, who taught philosophy at the University of Bucharest, use his lectures to recruit his students into the Legion. In an interview in 1970, Ionesco explained the play's message as an attack on those Romanians who become caught up in the "ideological contagion" of the Legion:[5]
“University professors, students, intellectuals were turning Nazi, becoming Iron Guards one after another. We were fifteen people who used to get together, to find arguments, to discuss, to try to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy ... From time to time, one of the group would come out and say 'I don't agree at all with them, to be sure, but on certain points, I must admit, for example the Jews ...' And that kind of comment was a symptom. Three weeks later, that person would become a Nazi. He was caught in a mechanism, he accepted everything, he became a Rhinoceros. Towards the end, it was only three or four of us who resisted.[6]”
Wow. And now a few points about Ionesco’s play itself:
In Rhinoceros, all of the characters except Bérenger talk in clichés: for example, when first encountering the rhinoceros, all of the characters apart from Bérenger insipidly exclaim "Well, of all things!", a phrase that occurs in the play twenty-six times. Ionesco was suggesting that by vacuously repeating clichés instead of meaningful communication, his characters had lost their ability to think critically, and were thus already partly rhinoceros. Likewise, once a character repeats a platitudinous expression such as "It's never too late!" (repeated twenty-two times in the play) or "Come on, exercise your mind. Concentrate!" (repeated twenty times), the other characters start to mindlessly repeat them, which further shows their herd mentality. In the first act, the character of the logician says: "I am going to explain to you what a syllogism is ... The syllogism consists of a main proposition, a secondary one and a conclusion". The logician gives the example of: "The cat has four paws. Isidore and Fricot have four paws. Therefore, Isidore and Fricot are cats". Quinney sums up the logician's thinking as: "The logic of this reasoning would allow any conclusion to be true based on two premises, the first of which contains the term that is the predicate of the conclusion and the second of which contains the term that is the subject of the conclusion". Based on this way of thinking as taught by the logician, the character of the old man is able to conclude that his dog is in fact a cat, leading him to proclaim: "Logic is a very beautiful thing", to which the logician replies as "As long as it is not absurd". It is at this moment that the first rhinoceros appears.
...
In the first act of the play, the characters spend much time debating whether the rhinoceroses that have mysteriously appeared in France are African or Asian rhinoceroses, and which of the two types were superior to the other - a debate that Ionesco meant to be a satire on racism. Regardless of whether the rhinoceros are African or Asian, the French characters comfortably assume their superiority to the rhinoceros; ironically the same people all become rhinoceroses themselves.
Holy Moly, a racist déjà vu strikes again. This sounds so much like the racist Trump base (and Trump) of today. This is why I was so struck by the resemblance of Ionesco’s prescient 1959 play to today’s political climate in America. I see Trump, Trump’s base, and many many Republicans turning into Ionescoesqe rhinoceroses, a process some literary critics have dubbed “rhinoceroization”.
I have now reached the hairy edge of fair use, so I will stop here. However I hope some here also recognize the similarity of this play to what is going on right here right now. And if you get a chance to see this too infrequently produced absurdist play (absurd only in plot, not in depth of content or ideas) please go. I am sure you will enjoy it. Especially when it starts with one rhinoceros off stage, then two, then more and more until they start to appear onstage with destruction and terror ensuing, all the while poor drunk Bérenger, the only one who retains his soul, wonders at what the hell is going on and why. We are living in absurd times, so an absurdist play seems only appropriate. Thank you for your kind indulgence. And if you can get the chance, see “Rhinoceros” performed live—it is an amazing play. And don’t become a rhinoceros!