GAËTAN PICON

A mainspring of Jean Anouilh's work has been a savage indictment of society, despite his belonging to the political right (although there is, to be sure, the phenomenon of right-wing anarchism). His work has had an abundance and diversity that puts it in the first rank. Anouilh was famous before the war for L'hermine (1931, The Ermine), Le voyageur sans bagage (1936, Traveler without Luggage), and La sauvage (1934, The Savage). In these, the Anouilh hero, obsessed by youthful idealism and rejecting the compromises of ordinary life, appeared in various guises. Antigone gave the Anouilh hero (or heroine, in this case) the prestige of an ancient myth. Creon, who accepts the demands society makes on the individual, is not an entirely contemptible figure, but the play is naturally dominated by Antigone herself, whose unreasonable behavior is seen as reasonable.

This conflict (close to the one we find in Montherlant) between personal purity and the demands of society tended, after the war, to disappear in Anouilh's work in favor of a savage pessimism that rejected any alternative. His early division of his plays into the pièces noires and the pièces roses gave way to a uniform atmosphere of sourness and asperity. Ardèle, ou la marguerite (1948, Ardèle, or the Daisy) was a pitiless debunking of all respectability and all enthusiasm. A sexuality of resentment, not unlike that found in Sartre's novels, was expressed in the harrowing scene in which two children parody their parents' dissolute behavior. In La valse des toréadors (1952, The Waltz of the Toreadors) and Le boulanger, la boulangère et le petit mitron (1968, The Baker, the Baker's Wife, and the Little Baker's Boy) Anouilh continued this picture of incurable degradation and disgust. This exaggerated pessimism seems to have been caused largely by the events of the Liberation of France, which Anouilh felt had involved excess and injustice, proving that evil inevitably results from the illusion of good.

Anouilh's attitude toward current events perhaps explains the temporal distancing he sought through his historical plays. (Did the break with the present drive Anouilh, like Giono, back toward the past? Or did the past serve Anouilh merely as a prudent disguise?) Becket, ou l'honneur de Dieu (1959, Becket, or the Honor of God) reasserted the absurdity of the noblest conflicts, and La foire d'empoigne (1960, Catch as Catch Can) put Louis XVIII in a better light than Napoleon. In L'alouette (1953, The Lark) the trial of Joan of Arc offered many analogies to the contemporary world. And in Pauvre Bitos (1958, Poor Bitos) a magistrate who has terrorized his town just after the Liberation is persuaded to adopt the role of Robespierre at a fancy dress party.

In his most recent plays—Cher Antoine (1969, Dear Antoine) and Les poissons rouges (1970, The Goldfish)—Anouilh adopted a more confidential, autobiographical form; but he obsessively continued to attack social hypocrisy, above all the vacillations of progress and progressivist optimism. Anouilh has experimented ingeniously, sometimes daringly, in almost all of his plays: plays within plays, liberties taken with time, and so forth. But he has remained traditional in that he links a quite explicit content, based usually upon a central problem, to a form that primarily seeks to effect a convincing illusion of reality. (pp. 173-75)