Berenger and Jean in Jean’s Apartment, Act II, Scene 1. Photo: Otterbein University Theater and Dance.
[This is part 2 of a 4 part interview. To see the other parts, see the links at the bottom of this page.]
TS: In this part of our conversation, let’s just talk through the play for a bit, not a close reading or anything; but just enough to give readers who haven’t seen it or read it the flavor of the thing.
MC: If you look at the opening scene, Jean and his good friend Berenger are meeting in a café. They’re meeting at the time when the rhinoceroses are first starting to appear. If you look back, after you finish the play, you realize that almost everything you need to know is already in this exchange, and why it is that Berenger is the last person in the town to turn into a rhinoceros. In fact, he may never turn into a rhinoceros. It’s not clear at the end. Whereas Jean goes pretty quickly.
Berenger does not fit very well into the expectations of the society. He doesn’t comb his hair. He doesn’t show up on time. He doesn’t have a tie–
TS: Whereas Jean appears to be the representative of civilization, at least in his own mind.
MC: Yes, exactly. But his proper behavior is conformist behavior. And ultimately, the more conformist you are in the play, the more quickly you’ll turn into a rhinoceros.
TS: Rhinoceros is a play in three acts, and the action takes place in three locations, the town square, the office, and in Jean’s and Berenger’s apartments. This means something—the different realms—
MC: Right. The public, the professional, and the private.
TS: The couplings and juxtapositions of the characters flow from this—Jean/Berenger in the first act, along with various people on the street–what Giligan’s Island would call “and the rest;” then Berenger, Dudard, and Papillon (the boss) at the office in the first scene of the second act; Berenger and Jean at Jean’s place in scene two, and then in the third act, at Berenger’s apartment, there’s this sort of love triangle, Berenger, Daisy and Dudard, and then Berenger and Daisy alone, and finally Berenger alone.
MC: Yes. Berenger completely surrounded by rhinoceroses.
TS: It must be fun, when you’re staging it, to get all that trumpeting and stomping right.
MC: Yes, great fun. I’ve seen it done in many different ways. I was in a production of this myself and I played Jean, and transforming into a rhinoceros was one of the most joyful things I’ve ever done on stage; and we did it with very cheap makeup effects. So for instance I went into the bathroom and came out with a green face while I was ranting and raving at him and then I sat down on the couch and opened up a newspaper while he was talking to me, and when I put down the newspaper I had a big horn on my nose.
TS: This reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to ask you: I’m aware that Salvador Dali had a fascination with rhinos and rhino horns in particular. In fact, I’m using a photo of Dali painting a rhino at the zoo for the intro to this piece. Since they are both avant-gardes, is there any connection that here that you know about?
MC: I wish I did, but I don’t know anything about it. Of course, lots of people have been fascinated with rhinos. You’ve got that Durer woodcut on your site, and Pliny the Elder called them African unicorns. They’re massive, and stupid, and really violent—
TS: Yes, and living dinosaurs, really.
Ok, looping back to the play. There’s this dynamic that runs especially through the first act and also the second act that has to do with people applying their various mental faculties, individually and collectively, in all sorts of ways that are not quite appropriate because they don’t actually address the phenomena at hand. It almost seemed like some of the secondary characters are like personifications of various misuses of cognitive faculties in the sense described in Kantian critique.
MC: Absolutely. You know, there’s a character in the first act called “the logician” whose response to a rhinoceros stampeding through the scene is to scold the various people reacting to it by telling them that fear is an irrational thing and that it must yield to reason. And it doesn’t make any sense.
TS: Yeah, you get a clear indication of the uselessness of what Kant called the “sensus communis logicus” to deal with problems occurring in this domain, right? We share a common understanding, and logic is universal because we collectively inhabit language and its rules in the same way, etc. But this is not the sort of common sense we are looking for to solve this problem.
MC: Yes, fear is a perfectly rational response to a rhinoceros running down the street. For me, this brings me back to Harker, in Dracula’s castle, when he realizes that he is not there to help Dracula solve his legal troubles; he’s actually there as a hostage and as a tool, right? And eventually, as food. So whenever he sees Dracula climbing upside down right on the outer wall, he goes, “well I guess that’s just how they are in Carpathia.” He ignores these things because he’s not listening to the part of his brain that tells him that he should be afraid.
TS: Wow. You know, this also really comes through in the Willem Dafoe portrayal of Max Shreck in Shadow of the Vampire. John Malkovich as F.W. Murnau is making a Dracula movie, and in the film within the film the actor Max Schreck is convincing in the role because he turns out to be an actual vampire. So in order to get his film completed, Murnau keeps telling everyone not to be afraid of him, even though they are on the verge of being eaten by him all the damn time.
MC: The betrayal of our basic instincts—such as fear—is a key way that rhinoceros-ism spreads.
There’s a very famous scene at the end of the play when Daisy and Berenger are hiding, and they’re the last two humans alive, and they’re listening to the rhinoceros’ noises, and Daisy says “listen, they’re singing” and Berenger says, they’re not singing, they’re roaring! And they continue to argue, and she turns to him and says “it’s no longer possible for us to live together.” And then she goes to the door saying “he isn’t very nice, really he isn’t very nice” and it’s clear that she’s talking to the rhinoceroses.
TS: This issue about who is susceptible and why, and how the spreading occurs, and what sorts of things people are saying as they transform is clearly central. It’s not as if these rhinos are invaders, coming from somewhere else, from outside. The members of the community are transforming.
This all reminds me of something astonishing I read this past week, an article by the Dutch social scientist Cas Mudde, who wrote that we needn’t be so overly alarmed about the hard right in Europe, because, you know, they’re really just a vocal minority—so we don’t need to fear the populists. Cold comfort the week I was rereading Rhinoceros.
MC: Yes. He should know better. Ionesco thinks we should know better.
TS: In act two, you get a bunch of dialogue around skepticism—whether what’s happening is really happening, or whether it’s a hoax, even whether it’s “fake news.”
MC: Yes, it’s all in there.
TS: Also found it interesting that because the scene is set in the office, it starts to get refracted through the office politics, finger pointing in a way that reflects management issues—someone says that the rhinoceros sightings should be reported to the union.
MC: This is a continuation of the sense that nothing is changed by what’s happening, it can be contained, it’s not really going to affect anything. I mean, “they’re not going to round us all up and kill us, right? And then they did.”
TS: I find it interesting that along with all of this downplaying and normalizing, you also get arguments like the one made by Dudard, that one should become a rhinoceros out of a sense of duty—
MC: Yes, it’s our obligation to become rhinoceroses!
TS: There’s obviously a lot more than can be said about the various groupings of characters in the different domains in which the play takes place—Berenger and Jean; Berenger, Dudard, Papillon at the office; the triangle of Berenger, Dudard, and Daisy; then Berenger and Daisy. But then, in the end, you get Berenger alone, and the question of whether you can be human all by yourself, which is the final question of the play.
MC: Exactly. How can you be human without somebody else. Human beings find their humanity in the face of another. Actors do that too. You find your character in the other actor’s face—you don’t just come on stage and say your line—you find the motivation for your line in what the other person is doing, and you say it in response to what they do, and then you have to give them something back.
TS: The ending seems rather non-redemptive, to say the least. Whether he ultimately transforms or does not transform, it appears that he is alone, and what does that really portend, right? How do you end it, from the point of view of stagecraft?
MC: The genius of the play is that the playwright leaves you some room to make your own decisions about things. Near the end of the play, Berenger is looking in the mirror, and then he turns, and there’s a point where he actually wants to become a rhinoceros, but he can’t do it. I’m the last man, and I’m staying that way to the end, I’m not capitulating! And then the curtain drops right there.
[To read the third part of this interview, click on the link below for part 3: “Interview part 3, Rhinoceros & Theatrical Horror.”]
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