Human Condition Between the Fantastic and the Absurd in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros
Human Condition Between the Fantastic and the Absurd in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros

Summary/Abstract: Eugene Ionesco’s preference for Kafka’s Metamorphosis gives an important key in understanding his own Rhinoceros, a complex play, based on a sophisticated structure of allegorical, multileveled meaning strata. Although the playwright insisted on his indifference to any kind of ideologies, it seems that it was this very ideological core that explained the unprecedented success of this play, and made it understandable to critics and public. The French political and cultural context, more inclined to denounce the rightist excesses, especially the Fascist ones, favored this unilateral reading of the play and emphasized its possible autobiographical implications. In this essay, I am trying to go beyond this reading and see the play as an illustration of human condition caught between the twin pillars of the fantastic and the absurd. While everybody else transforms into rhinoceroses and humanism itself is menaced by the new philosophy and the new axiology of the dominant pachyderms, the main character Berenger remains allergic to the epidemic rhinoceritis and refuses to give up human morale and “the irreplaceable set of values, which it’s taken centuries of human civilization to build up values”. But finally, both conformism and defiance are equally absurd and the play illuminates “the artist’s feelings as an outcast” – as Martin Esslin suggested.

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