Excess and Identity: The Franco-Romanian Ionesco Combats Rhinoceritis

Eugène Ionesco's play Rhinocéros has been read by many as a general satire of totalitarianism, the police state, and demagogy as well as a moral call to question the rise of these phenomena in the twentieth century. This article explores the extent to which the play represents more specifically Ionesco's own struggles with his identity as Romanian and Jewish in the era of the Iron Guard. The author argues that Ionesco's staging of this drama is in fact a strategy to bear witness to both political and social realities that marked his youth. Often considered a French writer—since French was his literary language—contemporary readers may not be familiar with Ionesco's ties to Romania. Born to a French mother and Romanian father, Ionesco spent the critical years of young adulthood, from ages thirteen to thirty, in Romania at a time when that country's aggressive racism and widespread anti-Semitism led to the creation and popularization of the radical nationalist political party of the Iron Guard. In the years between 1925 and 1933, Ionesco saw many of his close friends become increasingly fascinated by the Iron Guard with its mystical, anti-Western, and anti-Semitic rhetoric. He saw all around him "men metamorphosed into beasts, rhinoceros…You would run into an old friend, and all of a sudden, under your very eyes, he would begin to change. It was as if his gloves became paws, his shoes hoofs. You could no longer talk intelligently with him for he was not a rational human being." In this intellectual milieu and atmosphere of mass ideology of the 1930s, Ionesco's ambivalence toward being partly Jewish turned into horror. Ionesco was astounded and disgusted to learn of the literary politics of those he counted as friends and this, in his mind, constituted a betrayal. Ionesco's reasons for leaving Romania in the 1930s when everyone he knew was embracing an ideology caustic to his own future explain the terror of the process of 'rhinocerization' in his play. Therefore, to call Ionesco a "French" writer occludes the very real national identifications and the struggles of those national identities that his fictions literally animate. That Rhinocéros can be read as an allegory for the Nazi Occupation of France, the cold war communist attitude of the Leftists in Paris, the French persecution of Algerians, and the incursions of Romanian youth into fascism in the 1930s underscores the centrality of the resistance to anti-Semitic ideology in the expression of Ionesco's double identity as Romanian and French.