546
PARTISAN REVIEW
IN THE YEARS following the collapse of the Wall between the two Europes
and the two worlds,
Rhinoceros
had garnered not only the well-known
antitotalitarian meaning but also a "democratic" and "American" con–
notation-in the light of the new wars between sexes and minorities of all
kinds, each group militating for a distinguished and privileged identity.
Class and race struggles had been replaced by other conflicts and slo–
gans....This was no longer about absolute, totalitarian oppression, it
was about militant simplifications, not reflecting greater tolerance for
insecurity, vulnerability, imprecision, ambiguity, and skepticism. The
horn of rhinoceritis can be recognized today not just in the party mem–
bership card or badge, in the fundamentalists' cross, star or crescent,
but also in the extreme ideologization of difference.
SEVEN YEARS HAD PASSED, as in the stories of prophecy. The lost one,
the wanderer, was still at Bard. The green and the red Rhinos had grad–
ually moved on, and his homeland, still not immune to old and new
types of rhinoceritis, had receded farther and farther into the distance.
Yes, the exile was in the same place, but less exiled than before. Mov–
ing away from his former biography proved beneficial more than once;
the exile Eugene lonesco had been right.
In
1996,
the class at Bard no longer resembled that of seven years ear–
lier. Soon after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, the college had
initiated a program of academic exchanges, and every year a number of
East European students had come to Bard to study for two semesters.
During the
1996-97
academic year, I was teaching a course entitled
"Danube-A Literary Journey." This time lonesco was accompanying
his fellow writers Musil and Kafka, Koestler and Krleza, Kis and Canetti.
The literary journey along the Danube dealt with "Central European"
authors; in their books, we were trying to discover the spirit of "Mit–
teleuropa" in relation to the ever-changing reality of here and there.
The class was almost equally divided between American and Eastern
European students. From the very beginning, the seminar discussions
benefited from the stimulating tension between the "subtlety" charac–
teristic of the Old World and the open, realistic, efficient "practicality"
of America.
lonesco's metaphor seemed shocking to the Americans and already
partly "outdated" to the Europeans. The voluble student from Tbilisi
