Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

Attention grew keener, I felt that.

He is terrified to admit that the RHINOCEROS could be making a valid, self-satisfying decision of rejection … Could Jean, a model citizen — a pillar of social strength for Berenger himself — be choosing to betray the established code he so religiously upheld? To Berenger’s horror, the choice is imminent. He grasps at analytical solutions to a social crisis. He is responsible for making up his own mind, he will procure his destiny and suffer the repercussions: to become a Rhinoceros or to remain a human being. Suddenly, life before the commotion seems safe and logical to Berenger, as he watches Jean go stampeding through a brick wall. The fact that he had, for all intents and purposes, rejected society through his alcoholism is buried under the weight of his fear. He clings dearly to that same societal structure, as if to a rope over an abyss. Though he openly admits condemnation of his social stratosphere, Berenger isn’t strong enough to allow his own release. He holds on to the life he hated to avoid the wave that would wash him into the life he does not understand.

Curiosity and tension were rising in the class. The true surprise was not so much the reversal of an accepted interpretation as the rigor, the paradoxically reversed common sense and the logic of the demonstration.

Berenger maintains that his friend Jean “must have made a mistake” because he (Berenger) is unable to find a more valid reason to choose, and because he cannot comprehend his old friend’s desire for a “new life.” Whether or not the “mindless” life of the Rhinoceros is a more satisfying one or a (better) more stimulating one is irrelevant. Berenger choosing not to sacrifice his identity is unfounded because he makes it on the basis of fear. As he finds himself the last remaining human being, he retains his obstinate skepticism. “I’m the last man left, I’m staying that way to the end. I’m not capitulating.” Berenger’s refusal to “capitulate” is hardly an honorary one. Fear of change constrains our progression. To choose a life of bondage to certain misery — a life of constriction (as Berenger’s was): “I just can’t get used to life,” is a coward’s choice. Berenger cannot be credited with “maintaining his integrity or identity.” He maintains nothing but the pathetic life he so detests that for him is safe, and turns his back on an opportunity for revival.

The professor had hurried over the last few sentences in embarrassment. He already knew the text and was terrified that he would sink into his thoughts again, as when he first read it. “ I can’t get used to life. ” All too often he had himself whimpered such words back home as well as here, in the new World, and in the new life which he did not feel prepared for.

Preserving his identity? Out of fear? Really?

Yes, he hurried over the last sentences as if he hoped to shut out the dilemma, the thought that had been left behind, in the words that he had dragged after him from the other end of the world and that continued to crawl after him, with him, in him, endlessly.

How “European” the traditional interpretation of the play seemed all at once!

The reader had admitted his duplicity, his proposed aspirations, gradually perverted by the sinuous twists of prudence, but he knew how much the American sentences expressed the American mythology of renewal. The natural and the sudden surprises, the regeneration of the daily travesty, the complete changing of one’s appearance, personality, preferences, the need to “get ahead,” at any cost. Avoiding lament, accepting challenges, no matter how unfavorable, but not defeat. Assuming destiny individually, yes, one could say so, as his new fellow American countrymen were saying.

Throughout this crisis Berenger is concerned, not with the human condition, but with his own. The people of his village transforming into Rhinoceroses affect Berenger’s own life.

Yes, it was true, I knew how it was when Rhinoceroses multiply around the solitary man.

He maintains that, had it happened elsewhere (“if only it had happened somewhere else”), it could have been discussed logically and rationally. There was even the potential for it to become instructive and educational in its sensibilities.

Indeed, had it happened elsewhere. it would have been a logical, instructive discussion, but encircled, under siege, one barely has the strength to breathe.

However, because it involves Berenger on such an immediate level, he is unable to deal with the situation on any basis of integrity. His fear of the disruption of his own existence blocks out his ability to be rational.

Yes, it blocks it, perhaps. It would have been reasonable to give up everything, to run finally, to free himself from everything and from himself, to start all over again in a new world and in a new life. Integrity. integrity had existed, though! The isolation, the contraction in the narrow cell of the room preserved integrity — at least partly. One must not forget that! No, one cannot forget the sacrifices and risks of solitude, that’s what the professor was thinking.

His fear of the disruption of his own existence blocks out his ability to be rational … the concept of structural unity and of independent responsibility for choice, that lays the foundation for democracy, would be obsolete … again we are shown Berenger’s character to be one lacking the strength to sustain his own moral freedom. He is certainly no advocate who would sustain the freedom of society.

But he is, poor thing! He is, he certainly was, and he has remained a dreamer, a champion of freedom. That’s what he is, that poor bastard.

A eulogy for “the revolutionary” symbol, embodied by the cruel “renewing” disease of rhinoceritis? An indictment of the anti-hero Berenger? My student was overturning the premise that was so dear to the author, his admirers, and the reader, lost in that tumble and that American lecture room.

Although with difficulty, the professor was giving up — he had to admit it — this hero of non-abdication, non-giving-up, to the humanity of his ambiguities; he had discovered the vulnerability of the lost ones long ago and far away, not only in Ionescu’s tragicomedy but also in the comedy — not lacking in tragic aspects — of everyday life in socialist Rhinoromania.

Do ambiguities and vulnerability hinder us and put an end to our “progress?”

No, the professor did not voice his doubts. He continued to listen to the alien sentences that emerged from the clear handwriting, the black ink, the lined notebook, and evasively phrased in the adventurous phonetics of his new role.

Berenger shouts for his neighbors-turned-rhinoceros to maintain the laws established by humans. (“Stop it! … Noise is forbidden in these flats! Noise is forbidden!”) Berenger did not maintain these laws himself; he drank consistently, missed work, appeared socially delinquent, and yet, in this time of upheaval, Berenger grasps on to the “social code” for dear life. Lacking the ability to live up to the original social status, he is certainly not ready to adopt a new set of standards however revolutionary or progressive it may be. These weaker members (such as Berenger) will hold a society back in a time of revolutionary change.

“New set of standards,” “revolutionary change” “progressive”. the terms certainly had a different meaning for the young audience than the one perverted for so long in the Colony of Rhino that the improvised Eastern European professor kept thinking of.

He was smiling questioningly and aloofly and confusedly, looking down at the lined sheet of paper, preparing himself to pronounce the new-old words: “radicals,” “conservatives,” “conventionalism,” “duty”—barbarisms twisted and turned in the Dada confinement, with hammer and sickle, until they could no longer be pronounced, except in the Rhinoceros Circus.