CHAPTER 4

Berenger, The Sisyphean Hero

T
he plot of Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros is as simple as can be: one
by one, the townspeople of a small French village turn into rhi-
nos and only one man, Berenger, remains human at the end of the
play. Maybe because of the simplicity of the plot, scholars have, generally,
equally understood the play in the terms of a simple parable condemning
totalitarian regimes and trumpeting the individual. Martin Esslin, to his
credit, complicated this reading by discussing the absurd stalemate that
plagues humanity—the contrasting desires between individuality and
conformity—by highlighting Berenger’s ambivalence at the end of the play
about whether he wants to turn into a rhino or remain a human.1 I think
Esslin was on to something in his idea of ambivalence, but his understand-
ing of absurdity limited all meaning-making readings. Rather than ambiva-
lence, I think the idea of ambiguity (which I discuss in detail in dealing with
the title) complicates the play in a much more profound way.
Rhinoceros has a history of being read as a parable. In his article “New
Plays of Ionesco and Genet” in 1960, a year after the play was first produced,
Wallace Fowlie begins by saying, “The parable of Eugene Ionesco’s new play,
Le Rhinoceros, is simple and obvious.”2 Complicating this notion slightly,
Fowlie discusses Berenger’s refusal to submit to collective mania: “The par-
able is on the sacred individuality of man.”3 Defining a parable as “a story
which teaches,” he claims that this play will have a far wider public than
previous plays. Fowlie captures the mostly agreed-upon meaning of the play
and, interestingly enough, prophetically predicts the play’s success based on
its parabolic nature. True, it does teach, but by its nature, the lessons in a
parable are not “simple and obvious.” The parable makes the audience work
at finding meaning.

M. Y. Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd

© Michael Y. Bennett 2011
90 ● Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd

In “Ionesco’s Political Itinerary,” Emmanuel Jaquart describes some early

writings of Ionesco before he gets into his analysis of Rhinoceros, which ulti-
mately concludes, also, that the play is a parable. Writing in “Expérience
du théâtre” in 1958, Ionesco says that “plays that illustrate [some particular
political attitudes] will die with the ideology that inspired them.”4 Jacquart
argues that instead of working off of the temporariness of political themes,
Ionesco had a belief in transhistoricism and the universal nature of humans.
Ionesco, Jacquart contends, does not believe that theatre is an adequate form
for conveying ideology.5 Ionesco wrote, “Problem plays, piéces à thèse, are
rough-hewn pieces of approximation. Drama in not the idiom for ideas.
When it tries to become a vehicle for ideologies, all it can do is vulgarize
them.”6 Because the theatre is bound to “formal laws,” Jacquart explains, it
can only simplify “systemic thinking.”7
These words only intensified during a controversy that began on June
22, 1958. British critic Kenneth Tynan, who introduced Ionesco to the
English public, changed his opinion and warned that the success of The
Chairs was leading to a cult. Tynan argued that Ionesco only represented
an escape from the likes of Osborne, Chekhov, Brecht, and Miller. Ionesco,
Tynan observed, was regarded “as the gateway to the theater of the future,
that bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic
and belief in man will forever be banished.8 Upset at being even mentioned
with the likes of the above dramatists, for they represented propaganda and
théâtre à thèse, Ionesco shot back: “A work of art has nothing to do with
doctrine.”9 The controversy continued until it ended with an unpublished
letter from Ionesco to the paper where Tynan’s comments first appeared.
Jacquart explains how Ionesco thought society and art’s purpose “is not
equated with improving man’s lot.”10
Jacquart describes the whole situation as “puzzling” given that, at about
the same time, Ionesco wrote Rhinoceros, a play with a “definite social
content.”11 Jacquart argues that Rhinoceros and Ionesco’s philosophy do not
just support individualism, but serve “as a counterpoint to the preposterous
remarks of the brainwashed villains and puppets”12:

Jean flouts ethics: “La morale! Parlons-en elle est belle la morale! Il faut
épasser la morale.”Yet, the founding of a code of ethics was no luxury
in the history of mankind, but the very cornerstone of society . . . In this
context, Jean’s contempt for man and the past, and his will to break
boundaries, are based on ignorance as much as on irrationality.13

Jacquart argues that Ionesco stands in stark contrast to this. Ionesco “holds
on to time-honored values”: democracy, “civilization,” and the need for