Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 11 Number 3, December 2010

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Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros: Defiance vs. Conformism

by

William S. Haney II

American University of Sharjah, UAE

 

1.  Consumerism and the Anticipations of Joy

Critics have pointed out that Rhinoceros dramatizes Ionesco’s aversion for the Fascist movement in Rumania when he left in 1938 (Esslin 181).  From a 21st century perspective, however, the play not only demonstrates how public opinion can pressure an individual into conformism, it also suggests how present-day consumer society can transmogrify an individual into a monster with an insatiable appetite.  The play sets up a contrast between the necessity to consume in order to sustain biological existence within a certain standard of social decency, and the extravagant desire to consume as a means of wish fulfillment.  In this contrast between self-sufficiency and over-indulgence through gluttony and intemperance, the play impels the audience to experience a gap between the basic needs of human existence on the one hand and on the other the desire to gratify the appetites in a bestial, uninhibited manner as symbolized by the rhinoceros. 

In terms of conformity to public opinion, as in the case of Fascism, Ionesco says of Rhinoceros,

As usual, I went back to my personal obsessions.  I remembered that in the course of my life I have been very much struck by what one might call the current of opinion, by its rapid evolution, its power of contagion, which is that of a real epidemic.  People allow themselves suddenly to be invaded by a new religion, a doctrine, a fanaticism. . . .  At such moments we witness a veritable mental mutation.  I don’t know if you have noticed it, but when people no longer share your opinions, when you can no longer make yourself understood by them, one has the impression of being confronted with monsters—rhinos, for example.  They have that mixture of candour and ferocity.  They would kill you with the best of consciences.  And history has shown us during the last quarter of a century that people thus transformed not only resemble rhinos, but really become rhinoceroses. (Esslin 181-82; Sarrute 1960 interview)

Esslin notes that the characters in the play choose a pachydermatous existence because “they admire brute force and the simplicity that springs from the suppression of over-tender humanistic feelings” (182).   Some conform to the herd of rhinos because they feel it’s the only way to learn how rhinos think in order to persuade them to revert back to their humanity, while others like Mlle Daisy conform because they cannot resist conforming to the majority (182).  Berenger, a character who appears in several other Ionesco plays, watches as his friend Jean and then his colleague Dudard turn into rhinos, with more and more people converting until he and Daisy, a colleague he’s in love with, are the last remaining humans.  Everyone but Berenger and Daisy has been infected by rhinoceritis, a mysterious disease that makes them want to abandon their flabby, weak, pale humanity and become vigorous, hardy, thick-skinned pachyderms.  As Deborah Gaensbauer says, “Berenger is an anti-hero whose immunity to rhinoceritis, having begun as the cloud of a hangover, is an instinctive resistance to ideology and propaganda for which, according to Ionesco, ‘it is probably impossible to give any explanation’” (104; Ionesco 199). 

In the end, even Daisy cannot resist the temptation of joining the majority in their insensitive and aggressive lifestyle.  Left alone, Berenger rebelliously asserts that he will never capitulate.  To his friends Jean and Dudard, Berenger defends his desire to resist becoming a rhino and live on as a human being, but after everyone including Daisy has become non-human, he regrets being unable to change into a rhino himself.  Ultimately, though, he reasserts his defiant preference for the qualities of humanity, yet not as some critics believe without a strong hint of the fox’s scorn for unattainable grapes.  As Esslin puts it, “Far from being a heroic last stand, Berenger’s defiance is farcical and tragicomic, and the final meaning of the play is by no means as simple as some critics made it appear.  What the play conveys is the absurdity of defiance as much as the absurdity of conformism, the tragedy of the individualist who cannot join the happy throng of less sensitive people, the artist’s feelings as an outcast” (183).  Esslin goes on to compare Berenger to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis.

While Samsa finds himself transformed into a giant bug as everyone else remains normal, Berenger soon discovers that the definition of normalcy has undergone a radical modification: the innate qualities of a human are no longer considered to be as normal as the attributes of a rhino.  Ionesco both reacts against conformity and derides the individualist who flaunts his or her superiority as a sensitive human.  In addition to highlighting the absurdity of the human condition, however, Ionesco creates a gap between what the audience feels intuitively as the true nature of its own humanity and the conditions that consumer society has imposed upon humanity.  Although Berenger’s final stand emphasizes the ambivalence of our need to conform while simultaneously preserving our individuality, the play suggests that consumer society has artificially induced this ambivalence as a way to insure its success in the production of consumers.   Unlike the characters who transform into rhinos, the audience would generally resist identification with the rhinos because they would appreciate the gap between humans and beasts, which constitutes a gap between ordinary existential needs and extravagant desires based solely on the transitory nature of wish fulfillment—as if Freud’s “reality principle” were being replaced by the “pleasure principle.”  Rhinos are characterized by the lack of that dimension of cognitive reflection that would allow them to be spontaneously aware of their indulgence.  Humans, in contrast, may at times suffer from the sense of gluttony and bestial behavior found in rhinos, but the play induces a self-awareness in them of the excessive nature of this indulgence and the fact that they can manage without it.  Indeed, this indulgence becomes a factor of conformity, with the majority following their appetites because of an inability to resist the pressure from others to conform, not because of any inherent satisfaction or pleasure derived from their indulgence.

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 “Consumer 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” (ibid.).  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.

 

2.  The Will to Power

          In Act One, Berenger meets Jean at a café when suddenly a rhinoceros runs by through the town square (off-stage), shocking everybody but Berenger.  Jean begins to lecture Berenger on a list of failings—his being a semi-alcoholic with no will-power, no interest in culture and no sense of purpose—when a second rhinoceros runs through the square and tramples a woman’s cat.   As Jean harangues Berenger on will power, the Logician on a related note explains the concept of syllogisms to the Old Gentleman as he attempts to account logically for the rhinoceros and whether the two that ran through the square were the same or different, and whether they came from Asia or Africa.  Ionesco reveals that the Logician, who represents the rationalist characters of the play—namely Jean, Botard and Dudard—comically fails in his logical analysis, proving that logic can’t explain everything.  While berating Berenger, Jean comes across as hypocritical and full of contradictions like the Logician.  He accuses Berenger of being irresponsible yet arrives late for their meeting and refuses to take Berenger out for a day of culture because he want to snooze before going out drinking with his friends. Nevertheless, Jean claims, “I’m just as good as you are; I think with all due modesty I may say I’m better.  The superior man is the man who fulfils his duty” (13)  By emphasizing his rational intellect and strength of will, Jean symbolizes the “will to power” of  Nietzsche’s “super-man,” a powerful being standing beyond human morality, which foreshadows his metamorphosis into a savage rhinoceros that violently attacks Berenger when he tries to save him.  This will to power also prompts the other rationalists to transmogrify into rhinos, including the Logician, Dudard and Botard, Berenger’s skeptic colleague who dismisses the newspaper story about the rhinos as pure fantasy.  These men succumb to the fascist rhinos through an attraction to their strength and a primal state of nature beyond morality.  With the ineffectual logic of the Logician, Jean rationalizes his lapses in moral conduct to his lackadaisical friend and resists accepting that the universe is not logical but rather absurd, as recognized by Berenger. 

While Jean and the rationalist metamorphose into rhinos, however, their transformation is merely physical, for on the level of moral values they were already savage and vicious animals.  The rhinos thus symbolize a prior inner transformation of humans who believe that brute force can render them super-men and place them above the laws of nature, when in fact the only power they have is their strength in numbers.  Ionesco suggests that the collective consciousness of the rhino-men gives them a false sense of security through the illusion of power, considering that this power is only that of collective violence, reminiscent of the totalitarian governments of WW II.  This power, moreover, is also associated with pleasure, which derives not only from the pleasure principle but also from wielding control over others.  The world of rhinos therefore represents a reality in which the pleasure principle has usurped the reality principle by replacing logic, reason and delayed gratification with their polar opposites.  Instant gratification, however, comes in two forms: physical and metaphysical.  The rhinos achieve the former while Berenger and through him the audience achieve the latter by seeing beyond physical attachments.  Through the rhinos’ pseudo power and pleasure, then, Rhinoceros produces a conceptual gap that attenuates the audience’s attachment to any particular concept or thesis—namely, the gap between the physical power/pleasure of the rhinos based on personal desire and the spiritual power/bliss awakened within the audience and Berenger based on a transpersonal freedom from the bondage of desire.  Through a taste of the void of conceptions beyond cultural constructs as suggested by Berenger’s selfless support of the best interest and wellbeing of others, the audience glimpses a state of wholeness beyond duality by bridging the gap in ordinary waking consciousness between the three elements of knowledge: a separate object of experience, a process of experience and the experiencer.  The real freedom of a unified, transpersonal self approached by Berenger and the spectators thus derives from a sense of the connection between the local field of matter and action and an underlying nonlocal field of mind and consciousness.  As R. W. Boyer puts it, “Brain and mind are no longer just in the head, because brains, minds, and all material objects are no longer just localized physical matter, but rather are also more abstract but real nonlocal processes in a subtler underlying field of existence” (4).

   Only Berenger demonstrates a connection to this underlying field of existence through his sense of responsibility for humanity at large.  Although indecisive at times, his love for Daisy suggests not only an emotional desire for somebody, but a sense of responsibility for her wellbeing, a selfless kind of love that indicates an unconditional caring for all humanity.  Berenger feels guilty that he may have pushed his friends including Daisy out toward becoming rhinos, but as the play suggests they would have metamorphosed into savages even without him.  Jean and the others become rhinos not so much because they want to conform, given that rhinos are solitary creatures to begin with, but rather because of the desire for power and mindless pleasure.  Berenger on the other hand doubts his own existence, contradicting Descartes’ claim, “I think, therefore I am.”  Through statements such as “Life is a dream,” “I don’t even know if I am me,” and “I sometimes wonder if I exist myself” (20, 24, 26, original emphasis), Berenger not only questions the power of thought but also suggests a modification of the formula in existentialist philosophy, “existence precedes essence” (Sartre 101-103).  According to this principle, physical birth as a human being comes before acquiring a soul or any essential meaning in life.  Berenger’s search extends beyond both physical and mental existence toward that subtler underlying field of existence associated with his love for humanity.  As discussed below in terms of Samkhya Yoga, dualism does not consist of a mind/body opposition, which are both considered physical, but rather an opposition between mind/body and consciousness.  Berenger’s selfless love, as a field of unity consciousness, subsumes existence as well as essence. 

Through its nonlocality and interconnectedness, this unified field creates all the parts of human existence.  In other words, Berenger goes beyond thought to a level underlying both existence and essence.  As Boyer puts it: “From the holistic perspective of levels of phenomenal nature, gross is a limitation of subtle, and subtle is a limitation of the unified field.  With respect to the entire cosmos, the big bang thus could be considered not an explosion but an implosion or condensation—because everything resulting from the big bang remains inside the unified field”  (7, original emphasis).

Berenger remains the only character who plumbs the depths of the unified field of consciousness beyond essence and existence, ideology and materialism—or the collective life and power-mongering of the rhino fascists.  In conforming to fascism, the rationalists have all fallen for a rhino’s existence, even though in their pre-metamorphosed state, like Jean in his hypocrisy toward Berenger, they have already adopted the rhino’s essence in what Botard in Act Two refers to as “An example of collective psychosis” (54).

Love for humanity, moreover, does not comprise an essence in the existential sense of having a conceptual significance.  Berenger’s experience of selfless love, being a nonpluralistic state of interconnectedness that everyone would experience in the same way, constitutes a state beyond finite meanings and interpretations.  As Jonathan Shear says, “the experience of pure unboundedness is phenomenologically unique.  This is because two experiences of qualityless unboundedness cannot be phenomenologically different, since there is nothing in either to distinguish it from the other” (136).  He goes on to say that, given the overall correlation between accounts of a void of conceptions experienced through a phenomenon such as selfless love, “it appears reasonable, in the face of any reference to differentiating content, to think that the unbounded components of the various experiences are also the same, even where . . . such components are not explicitly identified as qualityless” (137).  Berenger’s role in Rhinoceros serves to take the audience beyond the realm of finite self-identity to a more subtle underlying human identity devoid of ego.  According to “logical fiction” theories, the notion of “I” often works as a linguistic fiction.  As Shear says,

Simply put, the fact that verbs such as “think” require a grammatical subject naturally suggests that there is some “I” (in the first person case) doing the thinking.  However, it is argued, it may well be that this “I” is merely a “schematic convenience,” required by ordinary grammar but not representing any real thing.  For example, when we say “It is raining,” we neither need nor want to postulate any separate “It” doing the raining.  Similarly, unless we have reason to think otherwise, it is quite possible that the “I” (in “I think,” etc.) is also superfluous, and that statements such as “Thoughts are occurring” may reflect facts of mind more accurately than those using the term “I.”  Thus, if despite careful introspection we cannot locate anything that could properly correspond to the term “I,” we should recognize that this “I” is nothing but a logical “place-holder” (a mere “schematic convenience”) and not be misled into improperly inferring the existence of any real thing corresponding to it. (108)

Berenger’s doubts about his existence, about the world being anything but a dream, and about the logical arguments of becoming a rhino all suggest that he has transcended the conceptual dimension of the finite “I” and taken his stand on the basis of the subtlest nonlocal level of human identity.  Human in this sense refers to the phenomenologically unbounded state of nonpluralistic being.  Throughout Rhinoceros, Ionesco dramatizes Berenger’s resistance to the self-interest of the part in favor of the selfless whole.

Evidence of Berenger’s penchant for wholeness emerges frequently in his non-logical remarks.  In conversation with Jean, he says, “Solitude seems to oppress me.  And so does the company of other people,” to which Jean replies, “You contradict yourself.  What oppresses you—solitude, or the company of others?  You consider yourself a thinker, yet you’re devoid of logic” (25).  In going beyond the logic of non-contradiction and either/or, Berenger assimilates to the wholeness of both/and.  To wonder if he exists implies that he both does and does not exist: his finite socially constructed self is a dream, while his infinite better Self as pure consciousness, even though devoid of qualities, exists as the ultimate real.  Most Western philosophers, particularly constructivists like Steven Katz (1978) and others, argue that consciousness always has an intentional object, and that even mystical experience is constructed by language and culture.  As Robert Forman argues in Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, however, mystical or sacred experiences “don’t result from a process of building or constructing mystical experiences . . . but rather from an un-constructing of language and belief . . . from something like a releasing of experience from language” (99, original emphasis).  By language he implies what the Rig-Veda and Indian grammarians such as Bhartrhari call the lower levels of language that involve space, time and the duality of subject and object.  As Bhartrhari notes, language consists of four levels corresponding to different levels of consciousness, ranging from the spoken word in ordinary waking consciousness to the subtlest form of thought in pure consciousness (Coward 1976).  As we move from the ordinary waking state toward pure consciousness (turiya), the unity of sound and meaning, name and form increases.  Of the four levels of language, the first two are vaikhari and madhyama, which belong to the ordinary waking state and in Saussurean terms correspond to the general field of parole and langue, which consist of a temporal/spatial gap between sound and meaning.  The two higher levels of language are pashyanti and para, which can only be experienced through non-intentional pure consciousness.  They are transverbal in the sense of being without a temporal sequence between sound and meaning.  In Derrida and Indian Philosophy, Harold Coward notes that the main difference between the two higher levels is that pashyanti consists of an impulse toward expression because it lies at the juncture between Brahman and maya (illusion or expressed form), while para, which has no impulse toward expression, lies within Brahman itself (90).  Both of these levels, however, are conveyed in theatre through the power of suggestion.

 The notion of intentionality in ordinary waking consciousness from which Berenger begins entails a subject being conscious of an object, event or other qualia. William James classifies this into two kinds of knowledge: “knowledge-about,” which we gain by thinking about something; and “knowledge-by-acquaintance,” which we gain through direct sensory experience (see Barnard 123-34; Forman, Mysticism 109-27).  Forman refers to the pure consciousness event suggested by Berenger’s experience as a non-intentional experience or “knowledge-by-identity,” in which there is no subject/object duality; “the subject knows something by virtue of being it. . . . It is a reflexive or self-referential form of knowing.  I know my consciousness and I know that I am and have been conscious simply because I am it” (Mysticism 118, original emphasis).  As a truly direct or immediate form of knowledge, non-intentional pure consciousness is devoid of the dualism of the subject-perceiving-object and subject-thinking-thought (Forman, Mysticism 125).   When Berenger transcends his socially constructed identity by doubting its existence, he intuits a nonlocal underlying real Self through knowledge-by-identity, and in the process induces a move toward the same experience in the spectator. 

Berenger’s reliance on alcohol, although detrimental to his health, is a form of escape that serves as a trope for his metamorphosis from a finite socially induced identity based on knowledge-about and knowledge-by-acquaintance to a knowledge-by-identity of the big Self liberated from the ennui of a deadening routine.  This knowledge-by-identity, as a field of all possibilities, is intimated by Botard who in Act Two says Berenger has “got such a vivid imagination!  Anything’s possible with him!” (53).  Jean and the other rationalists also try to escape their oppressive jobs through their metamorphosis into rhinos, but however powerful their new identities may appear on a physical dimension, Berenger alone becomes a true super-man by establishing his identity on a selfless love for his fellow humans.  Although the rhinos become more beautiful as the play progresses while humans become more ugly, their beauty derives only from brute physical strength, but as we know from modern physics, “matter doesn’t have a material basis. [. . .] the paradigmatic belief in materialism—a core feature of much of modern scientific history—is untenable at more fundamental levels of nature” (Boyer 3, original emphasis).  By the end of the play, Berenger demonstrates that true strength and beauty depend not on the material but rather on the immaterial essence of nonpluralistic being, the basis of all love and compassion.

 

3. The Source of Resolve and Responsibility

            The fact that Berenger exhibits willpower in the face of strong opposition from his friends and colleagues not only indicates that he has committed himself to a significant cause but also suggests that he acts spontaneously from a self-referral level of consciousness beyond the boundaries of conceptual meaning.  Working within the theatre of the absurd, Ionesco reflects this subjective self-referral through the structural self-referral of Rhinoceros being aware of itself as a play.   Throughout the production, for instance, the rhinoceros heads back-lit on stage produce an alienation effect among the spectators by making them conscious of the fact they’re watching an atypical drama.  More explicitly, Jean tries to reform Berenger by suggesting that, “Instead of squandering all your spare money on drink, isn’t it better to buy a ticket for an interesting play?  Do you know anything about the avant-garde theatre there’s so much to talk about?  Have you seen Ionesco’s plays?” (30).  This formal self-referral of the stage drama mirrors the self-referral of the characters themselves as they reflect upon their self-identity.  While the rationalists such as Jean, the Logician and Dudard examine themselves on the ordinary level of language and thought, Berenger operates from a more subtle self-referral level that goes beyond ordinary language and interpretation.  Self-referral here signifies the self knowing itself as pure consciousness through knowledge-by-identity, or as the Upanishadic text says, of knowing “That which is non-thought, [yet] which stands in the midst of thought.”  In the Advaitan tradition it also means that pure consciousness (Atman) is fully awake to itself, undifferentiated and self-shining, beyond space and time, “aware only of the Oneness of being” (Deutsch 48).  As we shall see, Berenger’s self-identity and social reactions are often trans-conceptual, based on a self-referral connectedness with deeper levels of the Self beyond the ideologies of socially induced identity or the thinking mind.

            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,

But 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.

   In Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive definition, the unsayable XE "unsayable"  (as well as the language used to convey it) has clear affinities with the Brahman XE "Brahman" -Atman XE "Atman"  of Advaita Vedanta XE "Advaita Vedanta" .  Shear (1990), Forman (1998), Deikman (1996) and others have explained the Advaitan XE "Advaitan"  definition of consciousness XE "consciousness"  and its derivative in perennial psychology in terms of higher states of consciousness.  As Charles Alexander XE "Alexander, Charles"  notes, Vedic psychology proposes “an architecture of increasingly abstract, functionally integrated faculties or levels of mind” (290).  Advaita and Samkhya-Yoga, moreover, XE "Samkhya-Yoga"  distinguish between mind and consciousness.  The term “mind,” as in the case of the Logician’s reasoning or Berenger’s humanitarian cause, derives from the latter of the two following uses in Vedic psychology: “It [mind] refers to the overall multilevel functioning of consciousness as well as to the specific level of thinking [buddhi XE "buddhi" ] (apprehending and comparing) within that overall structure” (Alexander XE "Alexander, Charles"  291).  The levels of the overall functioning of mind in Vedic psychology extend from the senses, desire, mind, intellect, feelings, and ego, to pure transcendental consciousness, or self as internal observer as suggested by Berenger’s self-referral experience XE "internal observer" .  Pure consciousness (turiya XE "turiya" ), which is physiologically distinct from the three ordinary states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, is immanent within yet transcendent to the individual ego and thinking mind.  During their arguments in Act One, Jean implies that Berenger transcends the logical boundaries of the mind:

Jean: If you think you’re being witty, you’re very much mistaken! You’re just being a bore with . . . with your stupid paradoxes.  You’re incapable of talking seriously! [. . .]

             Berenger: You really can be obstinate, sometimes.

             Jean: And now you’re calling me a mule into the bargain.

             Berenger:  It would never have entered my mind.

             Jean:  You have no mind!

             Berenger:  All the more reason why it would never enter it.

 Jean: There are certain things which enter the minds even of people without one. (21-22)

This accusation suggests that Berenger indeed responds to the world from a level deeper than the thinking mind, the faculty through which the rationalist are led to give up their humanity and metamorphose into rhinos.  Thus, as mentioned earlier in terms of the existentialist notion that existence (body) precedes essence (mind), Berenger exceeds both through a taste of the nonlocal, transrational self.   What enters Berenger’s mind enters from a more subtle level of consciousness within, not from the senses through which the rationalists are mesmerized into emulating the rhinos’ brute strength.

Like the subtext of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, then, the aim in Advaita Vedanta XE "Advaita Vedanta"  is to establish the oneness of reality XE "virtual reality"  and to lead us to a realization of it (Deutsch XE "Deutsch, Eliot"  47).  This realization comes through the "experience" of consciousness XE "consciousness"  as qualityless Being XE "Being"  or Atman XE "Atman"  (turiya XE "turiya" ).  As Shear XE "Shear, Jonathan"  notes, such an experience corresponds to what Plato XE "Plato"  intends by his fourth level, the “Forms,” as reached through the “dialectic,” a faculty which is “radically different from thinking and reasoning as we find them in mathematics and science” (14).  Arguably, this expansion of the mind toward an experience beyond duality is not unlike the way a deconstructive reader moves toward the unsayable XE "unsayable"  in literature, or the way Berenger and the spectator undergo the rites of passage in the transformation of identity XE "identity" .  Given that by definition the mind consists of thoughts, in dispensing with the thoughts that obsess the rationalists, Berenger moves toward attenuating thought and thereby in stages emptying the mind to produce a taste of consciousness in its pure form.  In Sanskrit Poetics, the spectator’s experience of this taste is known as rasa or aesthetic rapture.

 

4.  Riding on the Back of Rhinos

            The notion of suggestion (dhvani) in Sanskrit Poetics operates in connection with aesthetic rapture (rasa).  The theory of rasa is comparable to the notion of defamiliarization in Russian formalism and to the alienation effect in Bertolt Brecht, which Tony Bennett describes as a way “to dislocate our habitual perception of the real world so as to make it the object of renewed attentiveness” (20).  By remaining detached from any specific emotion through aesthetic rapture, a theatre audience will appreciate the whole range of possible responses to a play without being overshadowed by any one in particular.  As such, the taste of rasa involves an idealized flavor and not a specific transitory state of mind.  It invokes the emotional states latent within the mind through direct intuition and thus provides an experience of the subtler, more unified levels of the mind itself.  In terms of the connection between consciousness and language, rasa moves awareness from the temporal to the unified levels of language, from vaikhari and madhyama toward pashyanti and para.  As aesthetic experience, rasa culminates in a spiritual joy (santa) described by K. Krishnamoorthy as “wild tranquility” or “passionless passion” (26).  Rasa allows consciousness to experience the unbounded bliss inherent within itself, those levels of awareness associated with pashyanti and para.  As S. K. De says, “an ordinary emotion (bhava) may be pleasurable or painful; but a poetic sentiment (rasa), transcending the limitations of the personal attitude, is lifted above such pain and pleasure into pure joy, the essence of which is its relish itself” (13).  As described in Indian literary theory, this experience is the nearest realization through theatre and the other arts of the Absolute or moksa (liberation).  As Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe notes, “The spiritual aspect of the meaning of rasa is emphasized in Shankara’s commentary of the Upanishadic use of the term: ‘Rasa is here used to mean such bliss as is innate in oneself and manifests itself [. . .] even in the absence of external aids to happiness’” (Meyer-Dinkgräfe 95; Rhagavan).  In Rhinoceros, Berenger moves the audience from specific thoughts and emotions associated with conformity to a collective psychosis toward a release from specific emotional attachments in the self-referral experience of rasa.  We see this happening in his arguments with Jean, Dudard and Daisy as he tries to prevent them form changing into rhinos under the false pretext of enhancing their power and beauty.

            Aesthetic rapture as argued here can be induced in a manner unrelated to the notion of the sublime understood as a quality of conscious content.  Ultimately rasa emerges from the qualityless gap between thoughts as the awareness transcends mental content.   For instance, after the second rhino kills the Housewife’s cat in Act One, Jean and Berenger argue over whether it had one horn or two, with other characters interjecting their own observations between their insults.  Jean claims that the first one was an Asiatic rhino with two horns while the second was an African rhino with only one horn.  Bereger replies, “You’re talking nonsense . . . How could you possibly tell about the horns?  The animal flashed past at such speed, we hardly even saw it . . . (36).  Berenger later regrets his enraged verbal assault, which he suspects may have pushed Jean over into becoming a rhino himself.  For spectators, however, his quarrel has the opposite effect of directing them toward the essential nature of humanity through rasa as a taste of the void of conceptions.

   Jean: I don’t have to grope my way through a fog.  I can calculate quickly, my mind is clear! [. . .]

   Berenger:  But it had its head down. [. . .]

   Jean: Precisely, one could see all the better. [. . .]

   Berenger: Utter nonsense. [. . .]

   Jean:  What me?  You dare to accuse me of talking nonsense? [. . .]

   Berenger:  Yes, absolute, blithering nonsense! [. . .]

   Jean:  I’ve never talked nonsense in my life!  [. . .]

   Berenger:  You’re just a pretentious show-off—(Raising his voice.) a pedant! [. . .].  (37-38)

As they continue arguing, Jean says that if anyone has two horns it’s Berenger, who he calls an “Asiatic Mongol!”  Berenger replies: “I’ve got no horns.  And never will have,” to which Jean retorts, “Oh yes, you have!” (38).  What this dispute foreshadows and confirms in retrospect is that Jean is indeed full of nonsense and that Berenger is the only one who will remain hornless.  In addition, this argument like all the arguments of the play serves to shift the spectator’s awareness from the level of thought toward the void of conceptions in the manner of a Zen koan.  As Berenger and Jean argue about whether a rhino has one horn or two, the audience would no doubt finds this question absurd in light of the more critical issue of where the rhinos came from in the first place, what causes them to multiply in a small provincial French town, and how many more of them might appear to the risk of not only pet cats but the entire population.  Spectators may feel superior to the characters who engage in such an absurd argument, but they would also be hard-pressed to answer these questions for themselves.  The difficulty of solving an absurd paradox, one that becomes even more absurd as the characters begin changing into rhinos, would preclude not only a logical solution but also the possibility of the audience piecing together a meaningful life based on the intellect absorbed in the finite material values of daily life as opposed to the nonlocal experience of pure awareness.  Boyer, as mentioned earlier, says that “Brain and mind are no longer just in the head, because brains, minds, and all material objects are no longer just localized physical matter, but rather are also more abstract but real nonlocal processes in a subtler underlying field of existence” (4).   Ionesco’s play through the device of rasa allows the audience to swing from the thinking (apprehending and comparing) level of mind to a more subtle underlying field of existence where conventional logic no longer obtains.  In other words, the audience experiences aesthetic rapture (rasa) not through the sublime as a qualitative conscious content of the mind, but rather through a process that transports them beyond the mind toward a void in thought.  This void constitutes the source of Berenger’s intuition of the moral superiority of retaining his humanity in the face of pressure to conform to a collective psychosis.

In Act Two we first learn that humans are metamorphosing into rhinos when the wife of one of Berenger’s colleague, Mrs. Boeuf, arrives at the office to announce that her husband is ill.  She tells her husband’s office mates, including Berenger, that she was chased all the way to the office by a rhinoceros.  Suddenly she recognizes the rhino as her husband: “It’s my husband.  Oh Boeuf, my poor Boeuf, what’s happened to you?”  When questioned by Daisy, Mrs. Boeuf says, “I recognize him, I recognize him!” (61).  She exclaims that “He’s calling me,” and instead of abandoning him she jumps from the window landing to join him and by implication become a rhino herself.  Ionesco combines absurdity with humor when he has Papillon, their boss, say, “Well! That’s the last straw.  This time he’s fired for good!” (ibid.).  Later in Act Two, scene two, Berenger visits Jean, who is ill at home with a headache, and apologizes for their quarrel, explaining that “in our different ways we were both right” (71).  To his amazement, Berenger finds Jean undergoing a distinct transformation, with his breathing becoming boorishly heavy, a bump growing on his forehead and his skin turning green.  Obviously turning into a rhino, Jean accuses Berenger of “scrutinizing me as if I were some strange animal,” and then begins to distance himself from his friend psychologically; “There’s no such thing as friendship.  I don’t believe in your friendship” (74-75).  When Berenger comments on Jean’s “misanthropic mood,” Jean displays a change of attitude that indicates a transformation on the level of body that reflects a pre-existing state of mind: “It’s not that I hate people.  I’m just indifferent to them—or rather, they disgust me; and they’d better keep out of my way, or I’ll run them down” (75-76).  The play suggests that no matter how morally weak and disgusting the human race, how boring and empty the life of the bourgeois working world, and how susceptible the human race is to conforming to collective psychosis, when humans transform into rhinos they will take all these negative attributes and situations with them. 

In defending Boeuf’s transformation into a rhino against Berenger’s feeling that it won’t improve his life or enhance his pleasure, Jean says, “You always see the black side of everything. [. . .]  I tell you it’s not as bad as all that.  After all, rhinoceroses are living creatures the same as us; they’ve got as much right to life as we have!” (78-79).  Berenger goes back to the innate sense that “we have our own moral standards which I consider incompatible with the standards of these animals” (79).  Although in one sense Jean is right in wanting to replace morality with nature, his interpretation of nature, which does not extend beyond the ordinary levels of language and conceptuality, consists of no more than extending morality from mental to physical laws, which as we have seen belong to the same category.  As Berenger puts it, Jean goes for “the law of the jungle” (ibid.).  Berenger observes that unlike animals, human civilization has evolved a philosophy of life, but Jean rejects the value of this idea: “Humanism is all washed up!  You’re a ridiculous old sentimentalist” (80).  Again, on a purely conceptual level Jean has a point, but the alternative provided by a new philosophy based on a different set of laws associated with rhinoceritis proves ineffectual in lifting humanity out of the jungle, whether of the natural or concrete variety.

In terms of aesthetic response to this dramatic turn of events, the audience will find itself in a dilemma.  Ionesco suggests that any material change in life, which applies to both aspects of the formula “existence precedes essence,” would only leave humans in the same benighted condition.  Changing existence on a physical level does not differ from changing essence on a psychological level in the sense that both mind and body constitute a physical element as opposed to consciousness, which comprises the only nonphysical, nonlocal underlying dimension of the human condition. Through rasa, Ionesco’s play alters the level of consciousness of the audience through the change undergone by Berenger, the only character who transcends the physical mind/body component of life through a transformation based on knowledge-by-identity.  As mentioned earlier, Samkhya-Yoga (the third system of Indian philosophy), states “there are two irreducible, innate, and independent realities in our universe of experience: 1. consciousness itself (purusha); 2. primordial materiality (prakrti),” which includes the thinking mind (Pflueger 48).  Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya-Yoga elaborate on this distinction between mind and consciousness, with the mind including the intellect, emotions, and all the qualities (qualia) of phenomenal experience: perceptions, memories, sensations, moods, etc.  In contrast, consciousness (purusha) is distinct from primordial materiality (prakrti) with its twenty-three components, including mind (manas), intellect (buddhi, mahat), and ego (ahamkara) (Pflueger 48).  Intellect, mind, and ego along with thought, feeling and perception like those adhered to by the rhino/rationalists comprise different forms of nonconscious matter, all of which make up the content of witnessing consciousness (purusha).  This tradition underlies the model for theatrical experience presented in The Natyashastra.  The mind/consciousness distinction, in which both mind and body are unequivocally material, differs as mentioned earlier from the garden variety of mind/body dualism in Western thought (Pflueger 49).  The material content of experience related to the intellect, mind, and ego comprises only part of experience, which is made whole by the element of consciousness itself.  Ionesco's theatrical devices—the absurdity, humor, dis-identification, and unpredicatability—serve to heighten the sense of a distinction between mind and consciousness, if only subliminally.  Spectators are encouraged to leapfrog into a trans-conceptual space after language has run its course, to witness the mind reflexively as it plays with logical conundrums.  We find the sacredness of Ionesco's theater, then, in its pointing away from the agitated mind toward the joys of unbounded consciousness.

 

5.  Humanity’s Last Stand

In Act Three, Berenger has a similar confrontation with Dudard, who in the end also decides to metamorphose into a rhino.  Berenger calls this metamorphosis a nervous disease that one can avoid, but Dudard tells him he’s overreacting, over-nervous and has no sense of humor.  He also repeats Jean’s allegation that he can see only the dark side of things, accuses him of playing Don Quixote and tries to persuade him to be more detached.  But Berenger, who says he “can’t be indifferent” (92), is not attached in the conventional sense that derives from intellectual self reflection.  Having had a taste of pure consciousness through knowledge-by-identity, as the play suggests, he unlike the other characters can operate from a level beyond the division of mind, body and consciousness.  In this state of unity, as Meyer-Dinkgräfe says, “self-reflection is no longer needed and will automatically subside.  Mind and body are functioning together as a unit, without impediment; energies can flow freely” (89).  Never having studied, Berenger catches himself using the wrong word when he says, “I feel it instinctively—no, that’s not what I mean, it’s the rhinoceros which has instinct—I feel it intuitively, yes, that’s the word, intuitive” (99).  He knows that the rationalists can run circles around him, but on the basis of his intuition he still holds his ground against becoming a rhino. 

The main field of play in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, then, is not confined to the realm of ideas, but rather leads the audience beyond conceptuality toward a taste of the gap between socially constructed identities.  These identities consist of thoughts that hold us to the world of wish fulfilment and material desires.  Ionesco’s Rhinoceros induces in the audience an aesthetic experience (rasa) through devices such as absurdity, the dream-like nature of reality, illogical argumentation and duplicitous wrangling between friends that swing the awareness between ordinary day-to-day psychological consciousness, and a more highly developed spiritual consciousness.  On the one hand we have the rationalists who operate out of ordinary self-interested cravings, and on the other hand Berenger who exhibits an increased ethical discernment based on a greater purity of consciousness.  Through rasa, the audience shares in Berenger’s unconditional love, egolessness, purity of compassion and even in the taste of an experience beyond a knowledge-by-acquaintance of socially induced identities. 

                                   

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