NORMAN MANEA
547
argued that Beckett's plays seem more radical to him than Ionesco's
because the Irish author accepted no compromise with the so-called
humanism of hope, while the female Czech student saw in the Logician's
rhinocerization a necessary "liberation" from the monomaniacal idiocy
of ignoring reality.
I promptly recalled the image of Ionesco as he appeared in 1979,
when I first met him.
It
was the same image evoked more than half a
century before by Mihail Sebastian, his friend and a friend of his friends,
whose rhinocerizing delirium these two contemplated together in
Bucharest in the 1930S and 1940s. "/
can't get used to life.
.. "
the per–
son who found it even harder to get used to death seemed to say in
1979, just as in 1941. Then, listening in Cismigiu Park in Bucharest to
a broadcast of a speech by the Great Rhinoceros from Berlin, Berenger
had turned pale, then white, and fled in terror. "I can't! I can't," he was
whispering "with a sort of physical despair," terrified by the besieging
barbarism around him.
I gave up my initial idea of discussing the significance of the rhinoc–
eros in the imagery of antiquity with my class, Alexander's apocryphal
letter to Aristotle (quoted in Flusser's memorable book
Judaism and the
Origins of Christianity
[1988]), in which the unusual animal, larger
than an elephant and with three horns, is evoked by the name the Indi–
ans gave it: "odontotyrannos." The fabulous apparition is also men–
tioned in the writings of the neo-Pythagorean Philostratus and, even
before him, in the Jewish apocalyptic literature and in the Book of
Daniel 7.7, where the monstrous "odontotyrannos," seen with the same
eschatological horror and fear, embodies-through its "steel teeth and
bronze claws"-the all-destructive force the modern tyrants would
regenerate with renewed vitality. I was not at all sure that such pedan–
tic clarifications would not bore my audience.
But the provocative, unconventional pages of the student of seven
years earlier could be useful again, I believed. I therefore tried the
"Nancy test" on the new class too. The
gra~es
she had received in 1989
from her fellow students were not very different from those given by
their successors in 1996.
Nor were the commentaries too different from the previous ones:
Her arguments seem
to
be well-supported, her indulgence can be justified. The
paradox
~he
depicts coming from the hero's fear of change which then also nec–
essarily means a reabandonment from the society the same way as in the non–
rhinoceros one, is very well posited.
