SOURCE: Vlasopolos, Anca. “The Perils of Authorship in Le voyageur sans bagage.” Modern Drama 29, no. 4 (December 1986): 601-12.

[In the following essay, Vlasopolos explores the reasons for the relative obscurity of Traveler without Luggage.]

Despite its respectable history in performance, Anouilh's Le voyageur sans bagage has received little critical attention.¹ Regarded as Anouilh's first mature play, Le voyageur sans bagage is seen as heralding the existential themes of Anouilh's greater theater.² Perhaps critical neglect of the play has had to do with the historical position of this between-wars drama. Focused on the restless specter of the First World War, the 1937 Voyageur sans bagage appeared too late, too close to the outbreak of the Second World War, to be relevant in an immediate political sense. Anouilh's later productions, particularly Antigone, were a more satisfactory response to the overwhelming turmoil of Europe. Yet in a film like Renoir's La grande illusion, which was released at the same time as the first performance of Le voyageur sans bagage, World War I becomes an enduring and timely reflection on a past that presages, especially in the irony of the title, the greater horrors to come. Thus, it might seem odd that this play has not attracted more critical notice, even after a brief revival of performances and study during the sixties in the United States.³

Critics who describe the play as “family” drama provide a clue to its relative obscurity; instead of the epic, if not heroic, scope and the nearly all-male universe of La grande illusion and other war stories, Le voyageur sans bagage brings the war into the salon.⁴ Without either glorifying the war or domesticating it, Anouilh makes it rage inside the nation, inside the very hearth. This subversive, dispiriting vision presents the Great War as a series of vicious, petty, family squabbles, which lead to the sacrifice of the young for the sake of socio-economic and political stability. A crisis of enormous proportions in European history appears in Le voyageur sans bagage as capable of being resolved only by yet another sacrifice of the essential being to a historically defined, contained entity.

As with other plays of any importance in the twentieth century, the most often-discussed aspect of Le voyageur sans bagage has been its genre, in particular its ending. Anouilh seems to have attempted to obviate questions of genre by classifying his own theater according to the idiosyncratic categories of pièces roses, pièces noires, pièces grinçantes, pièces brillantes, etc. But this refusal of generic boundaries by the author has in no way hampered critics from applying traditional generic distinctions to his plays. There is general consensus that Anouilh writes tragicomedies that verge on the rose or on the noir without taking on completely the coloring ascribed to them by the author.⁵ In this sense, at least, critics vie with the creator for the definition—a possession of sorts—of the text. Anouilh categorizes Le voyageur sans bagage as a pièce noire, and in my reading his color code goes unchallenged, despite the much-disputed ending, or rather because of it.

The ending, which for critics puts the play in the pink, has been variously labelled as prestidigitation, as self-conscious artificiality, and as self-reflexive play.⁶ The pervasive critical approaches, classifications according to traditional genre, and exegeses focused on the hero of the play, only partially make room for a play like Le voyageur sans bagage in the canon of twentieth-century theater; explaining the problematic genre of a play by defining it as “play” or as self-conscious artificiality is a circular argument. Nor does the preoccupation with the main character's purity, identity, and motives confront the rivalry for authorship of the entity Gaston-Jacques in which every character participates and which leaves no character, including the main one, unsullied.⁷

Is it important that Le voyageur sans bagage undergo a revaluation? Because the play raises unresolved issues of genre, and because, as I shall argue, its plot suggests a sacrificial ritual, it merits consideration as representative twentieth-century theater. Moreover, the theme of Le voyageur sans bagage, the desire to lay to rest a war whose memory will not be contained, deserves our fullest attention.

Almost every character and certainly every group of characters wish to possess Gaston by giving him a habitation and a name. This convergence of mimetic desire on to Gaston produces the violent rivalries that seek kudos without acknowledging that in this case the kudos is a human being.⁸ Why is the amnesiac the subject of such intense and dangerous desires? Both as Gaston and as Jacques Renaud, the man in question embodies the disquiet of a patriarchal order gone awry. Consequently, Le voyageur sans bagage displays a society anxious to recover its power and its authority over a history that has escaped its control. Gaston has never had the ahistorical existence of the “honest woman,” one that is always inscribed by the male possessor, not by the woman herself. Despite his amnesia, he is not a blank to be written on, but rather a text washed over, even whitewashed, whose underlying message must be uncovered. Psychiatry in this play serves not to judge the veracity, hence the authority, of the self in telling its own story so much as to unearth and re-cover that which psychiatry in the service of society determines as lost.

As early as Act 1, Anouilh outlines in bold strokes a plot surrounding Gaston that can be characterized as sacrificial. Representative of war-torn Europe as well as isolated from it, Gaston as a left-over from the Great War must be disposed of so that the social order can be re-established. Although he survives the war, he remains its victim, and as such he becomes the focus of postwar distress. His individuality consists of contradictory, rival narratives, and his existence is an unfinished plot that characters in the play engage in bringing to an end. The plot hinges on the rivalry for possession that develops around Gaston. He is the kudos that the Duchess Dupont-Dufort and her nephew have wrested away from psychiatric and class rivals. He is to be bestowed at the Duchess's pleasure on the Renauds rather than on the other five families claiming him, whose proofs “sont sensiblement égales,” because the Renauds are members of the haute bourgeoisie, the class closest to that of the Duchess herself.⁹ As early as the first act, the Duchess sums up the reasons both for exalting and for defiling Gaston, reasons which dehumanize him and turn him into the singularity that can be sacrificed.

That the entity Gaston-Jacques, the yet-unread text, is separate in the Duchess's perception from the individual so called becomes clear in her worship of the entity, and defilement of the individual:

Ainsi, vous êtes un des cas les plus troublants de la psychiatrie; une des énigmes les plus angoissantes de la Grande Guerre—et, si je traduis bien votre grossier langage, cela vous fait rire? Vous êtes, comme l'a dit très justement un journaliste de talent, le soldat inconnu vivant—et cela vous fait rire? Vous êtes donc incapable de respect, Gaston?

(p. 13)

Lack of respect toward, as she puts it, what he personifies and what he represents is the least of the accusations levelled at Gaston. He is guilty of having a heart of stone, then of marble as “la pierre la plus dure,” of being a child, and, worst of all crimes, of being an ingrate. Finally, after being chided for lacking respect for what he symbolizes, he is accused of growing conceited by taking the very same journalistic reports too seriously (p. 14). The absurdity of these accusations and of this misplaced worship gives the play its sardonic comedy, but it announces the more sinister accusations and worship that will attempt to capture Gaston and place him in a context that will obliterate his individuality.

Having intervened in Gaston's fate by bringing him first to the Renauds, the Duchess attempts to elevate her role to mythical stature. Her self-serving assertions contain ironic undertones: “J'ai l'impression d'entreprendre une lutte sans merci contre la fatalité, contre la mort, contre toutes les forces obscures du monde.” In effect, she has allied herself to those forces by reducing Gaston to a trophy of internecine war, as her next remark suggests: “Je me suis vêtue de noir, j'ai pensé que c'était le plus indiqué” (p. 24). Just how much of a trophy Gaston is, how much symbolic value society has invested in him, and what strictly economic factors are at work become revealed with the entrance of the first contenders, the Renauds. Huspar, the attorney, reminds them and the audience that Gaston is one of four hundred thousand missing soldiers, the one who has been found, but not placed. He thus serves as a reminder of those who remain suspended in the no-man's-land of a plot without closure. The war cannot be over while so many are neither dead nor alive, while their families refuse “de renoncer à l'espoir” of recovering them. Apart from his symbolic value, Gaston represents a windfall to the claimants through his accumulated war pension, which as a resident of an asylum he has been forbidden to use.

Gaston himself would have been among the returning, were it not for the erasure of memory that severs him from the society eager to take him back. And there is unanimity in the desire to take him back, to his past, to his accumulated debts toward the society that he has managed to evade, even to his death on the battlefront. Both as Jacques Renaud and as Gaston, the traveller has so far escaped the rules and obligations of a strict and classbound patriarchy and thereby gained, if not our respect, our envy.

Whereas generic indeterminacy combined with a strong main character often results in an ambiguity of response to that character, Anouilh manages to create a protagonist who captures the sympathy of the audience. Supposedly pitted against the values of the society that he rejects, Gaston struggles to remain free of the others' conception and even remembrance of him. Anouilh thus successfully disguises Gaston's active participation in the recovery of the former self, his complicity in the struggle to wrest from his opponents the authorship of the entity Gaston-Jacques. More damning than Gaston's understandable desire to define his past according to his lights is his fashioning of a self around the very same bourgeois values he protests against. As Gaston joins the crowd claiming Gaston-Jacques as a prize in a contest, he provides the unanimity necessary for the sacrifice of that rediscovered being. Class, sex, and age go to war in an attempt to occupy the empty territory of Gaston's past existence. Gaston's presence at the Renauds is a show of power on the Duchess's part. She declares herself ready to lay down her life to defend the claims of the upper classes to the amnesiac: “n'ayez crainte, moi vivante on ne donnera pas Gaston à un lampiste!” (p. 28). Madame Renaud expresses surprise that others have so much as a right to be considered before the Renauds, particularly since the Duchess is in charge of the case. The Duchess, however, does not wish an empty victory; she attributes power to her opponents: “Nous vivons à une époque inouïe! Ces gens-là ont toutes les prétentions” (p. 28). Seeming alarmed by the arrival of the lower-class pretenders, she throws herself into the good fight with gusto. She announces, “Ces gens-là se croient frustrés. Ils vont faire un scandale, nous accuser de Dieu sait quoi” (p. 87). She sets up the strategy of combat by assessing her opponents' forces: “Ils sont autant qu'hier? C'est bien une idée de paysans de venir en groupe pour mieux se défendre” (p. 94). And not only the lower classes engage in the challenge to her might, but the whole “presse de gauche,” against whom she employs her “espions” (p. 95), in the manner of world powers. Huspar's and Madame Renaud's responses to the Duchess's sounding the alarm show how specious her fears are. Huspar asserts, “Je suis sûr … que personne n'oserait vous suspecter” (p. 87), and Madame Renaud, exasperated, dismisses the danger of scandal. The Duchess herself, in the midst of preparing an offensive, is distracted from her urgent purpose by the sight of a stuffed squirrel, which makes her reflect on the possibility of making fur coats out of the creature. She is also quite sure of her position of unshakable strength, for she assures Madame Renaud that “L'épreuve a commencé par vous, il faudra, qu'ils le veuillent ou non, que nous la terminions régulièrement” (p. 95), despite the glaring irregularity of the beginning.

The aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie can claim disinterestedness in their desire that the recovered Gaston be one of them, that they win in the fortunes of war. Whereas the dairy vendor and the infamous “lampiste,” along with the other petty bourgeois and workers, can easily be seen as grasping for Gaston's two hundred and fifty thousand francs, surely the Renauds wish only to repossess their little Jacques. Madame Renaud puts the question in a way that brings out the difference in sensibility between classes: “Comment cette question d'argent peut-elle jouer dans une alternative aussi tragique?” (p. 29). The Duchess describes those near her class as “charmants” and “adorables” even before she has set eyes on them, through the class signature of their written communications (pp. 28, 94). While the lower-middle and working-class claimants are kept off stage, Anouilh creates a chorus of servants that comments on the doings of the masters. Thus, the class war is exposed in all its bitterness. With the exception of Juliette, young Jacques's mistress, the servants are united in their hatred of the returned master, whom they only imperfectly see, but whom they recognize, however indistinct he remains, as the enemy. In Act 2 a group of servants crowds before a keyhole: the chauffeur, looking at Gaston, recognizes the “sale gueule à ce petit salaud-là.” Each adds his or her memory to an account that sums up Jacques Renaud as an eighteen-year-old monster, whom all but Juliette would wish back in the grave.

The word “histoire” occurs with some regularity during Act 2, suggesting that the servants' comments have a choral function. Traditionally, the chorus's attempt to differentiate between heroic and ordinary life appears in the pious statements that try to sort out the story. Juliette says, “les morts, ils n'ont rien à voir avec les histoires des vivants,” and the butler, after telling a damning story about young Jacques, says, “Les histoires des maîtres sont les histoires des maîtres” (p. 36, 39). And in the manner of a Sophoclean chorus, they all agree that they would rather retain their humble station than suffer the troubles of the great: “les vies commencées comme ça ne se terminent jamais bien”; “J'aime mieux être à ma place qu'à la sienne” (p. 42). Yet the stories that the servants tell and Juliette's romanticized remembrance of her affair with Jacques are precisely the elements of discourse that level class differences and attempt even to bridge the gap between the living and the dead. Since the conditions that generated the servants' injuries continue, the rather cowed vue d'en bas that the chorus usually gives on the doings of kings and gods takes on a martial tone in Le voyageur sans bagage. The servants, in effect, would end the plot by writing out yet another master: “Vous voulez que je vous dise le fin mot de l'histoire, moi? C'est pas à souhaiter pour nous ni pour personne que ce petit salaud-là, il soit pas mort” (p. 42).

The servants' projected ending fares as well, or as badly, as that of their masters and of the other French families claiming Gaston, and in that sense it gains a measure of equality. The family that with Gaston's complicity wins the coveted prize, the Madensales, figure as prominently in the economy of alternatives as the French families and their retinues. Their motives in seeking Gaston are mercenary; they do not desire the pension, but they need Gaston's person in order to settle an inheritance snag and to continue living in grand style, with the “très belle maison dans le Sussex avec des poneys superbes” (p. 119). Whereas in the Renaud family Gaston would resume his place in the small-scale war between masters and servants, in the Madensale household Gaston will actively perpetuate the power-through-wealth of the upper-middle class.

Although the class conflict seems the most intense, especially since it provides the necessary motivation for the plot, namely the choice of the Renauds as Gaston's most probable family, other equally fierce wars are being waged simultaneously, and in each case the same tactics of accusing and adoring the would-be Jacques are deployed. The sex war in Le voyageur sans bagage rages with a bitterness that matches Anouilh's misogynistic La Valse des toréadors. The women fare very badly. The sexually active Valentine and Juliette are narcissistic and utterly immoral. The mother figures are split between the cold and detestable Madame Renaud and the mostly comic Duchess, who as a completely desexualized older woman (she does not even have a child of her own) functions more as a politician securing his sphere of influence than as a woman in her relationship with Gaston. The men no less than the women make claims upon Gaston, but these are presented as reasonable in Huspar's case, and as affectionate and noble in the case of Georges. It seems that males ultimately win Gaston to a pre-female Eden, for all traces of the union that created the young “oncle Madensale” have been swallowed up by the sea. Gaston himself participates fully in this war on the male side, whereas he explicitly takes sides in the class war only in his final alliance with the Madensales. The sex division manifests itself most clearly in the methods for Gaston's recovery envisioned by men and women. The Duchess dreams of Gaston meeting his love at the Renauds' and recovering his memory by exchanging a kiss with her, “le premier au sortir de cette tombe” (p. 31). Valentine improves upon the Duchess by disclosing to Gaston that, disguised as a laundress, she seduced him at the asylum in the hope “qu'en me prenant vous retrouveriez la mémoire” (p. 83). Gaston, on the other hand, has a conflicting hope: “Je vous avouerai même que c'est de cet ami imaginaire que j'espérais recevoir la mémoire—comme un service tout naturel” (p. 50). For Gaston the male friendship displaces erotic love as the natural bond that would bring him to himself.

This hope becomes the casualty of precisely the kind of love Gaston has avoided. Juliette tells him in agonizing stages about the fight that Jacques had with his best friend over the servant girl they both liked. Gaston denies the power of sexuality and negates the female presence in his life by finding the story incomprehensible. He asks, “pour quelle étrange folie ils se sont battus aussi sauvagement?” She answers, “c'est pour moi.” He asks twice, unbelieving, “C'est pour vous?” (pp. 61-2), attempting to reduce her significance and refuse her claim to his past. But whereas Juliette remains an episode of Jacques's youth, Valentine's claim to Gaston embraces his past, his present, and, she hopes, his future. Although Gaston never once wavers in his rejection of her, Valentine's claim and proof, like Juliette's, show Jacques as having betrayed another, even more potent, male bond—the fraternal one. This betrayal, of one male by another, over a woman who in the terms of orderly exchange belongs to the elder brother, becomes the most compelling reason for Gaston's rejection of the identity of Jacques.

Valentine serves as both the most effective mouthpiece for the social constraints that Gaston seeks to escape and the most easily defeated author of Gaston's story. She, as the agent of the recognition token, gives Gaston the irrefutable proof of his identity and at the same time the means of flight. What mars her authority over Gaston is that hers is a female discourse which can be stripped of power despite its knowledge. In his encounters with Valentine, the supposedly innocent Gaston seizes at once the prerogative of male discourse and uses it throughout to destroy Valentine's case without, however, being able to refute it. In claiming him, Valentine undermines the exchange of women on whose regularity patriarchal society depends. She uses the economy of this exchange for her own erotic gains. She explains:

Vous étiez un enfant. J'étais orpheline, mineure sans un sou, avec une tante bienfaitrice qui m'avait déjà fait payer très cher les premiers partis refusés. Devais-je me vendre à un autre plutôt qu'à lui qui me rapprochait de vous?

(p. 80)

Gaston's response dismisses the content of her claims to the surface form of an inferior discourse determined by gender: “Il y a une rubrique dans les magazines féminins où l'on répond à ce genre de questions” (p. 80).

The conflict between Valentine and Gaston escalates, but the power remains firmly within the province of male discourse. When Gaston declares to Valentine that regardless of proofs he has decided to reject his past, she asks, “Et si j'allais le crier, moi, partout, que je reconnais cette cicatrice?” Gaston's answer again demonstrates that despite his supposed isolation from the structures of power he not only knows of their workings but allies himself to the institutions that would dismiss the truth for the sake of social propriety:

Au point de vue légal: vous êtes ma belle-soeur, vous vous prétendez ma maîtresse … Quel tribunal accepterait de prendre une décision aussi grave sur ce louche imbroglio d'alcôve dont vous seule pouvez parler?

(p. 110)

Again, Valentine's proofs are reducible to the insignificant “parole” of a woman, and moreover of a tainted woman, which would not weigh in the “décision … grave” about a man's fate. Only in association with the order that she has been trying to subvert does Valentine regain power. Whereas her single voice does not signify, her voice as the “nous” of the Renauds and the haute bourgeoisie, as the “nous” of all of France, who desires to place Gaston and get the war over with, comes close to destroying him. But when she speaks for “toutes les femmes, tous les hommes” she is no longer a combatant in the sex war but a powerful representative of societal corruption, a corruption that Anouilh in this play ascribes in large part to the presence of women (pp. 113-4).

The rivalries that converge upon the entity Gaston-Jacques include the claims of age, this last yet another measure of degree, of power, in the patriarchal order. And once more Gaston allies himself with the trappings of power while seeming to struggle against them. Part of Jacques's monstrosity according to the servants' account had to do with his having raised his hand against his mother, threatening, but not committing, violence against her. Yet her position within the Renaud family relegates her to nothing more than titular rule. As an old woman she commands neither authority nor respect. As the surviving parent of Jacques, she stands condemned by both her sons as an incompetent head of the family. The patriarch has been absent, and this absence of the highest-ranking male typifies the havoc wrought on the social order by the Great War. It was, in fact, the absence of the next highest-ranking male, the eldest brother, that allowed Jacques's crimes of excess against society. Much of the play centers on Jacques's age—eighteen—at the time that his life as Jacques ended. The same teenager who is blamed as a monster by all but his two lovers is in part exculpated by both Georges and Gaston because of his age. The words “enfant” and “petit” recur in Georges's descriptions of Jacques, and the phrase “dix-huit ans” is charged with reproach in the exchange between Gaston and Madame Renaud; he concludes that to have let her young son go to war without having forgiven him renders her a detestable old woman.

Georges, whose claim to Gaston is the least articulated and the most ambiguous—after all, a recovered Jacques may renew his interest in Valentine—nevertheless comes closest to succeeding in winning Gaston for the Renauds. Unassuming and kindly, he is among the three most sympathetic characters in Le voyageur sans bagage. Yet he, too, speaks in the tones of a well-defined if somewhat shaky patriarchy that needs to repossess the prodigal son even at the cost of emasculating him. By reducing Jacques's potent destruction of social rules to the temper tantrums of a child, Georges attempts to annul the persistent memory of a society free from control, in which women, servants, and younger sons pleased themselves while the elders were at the front. In order to forgive Jacques, Georges needs to divide him from himself. He claims, “Cet orgueil, cette violence contre lesquels tu te débattais déjà à deux ans, c'étaient des monstres dont tu étais innocent et dont c'était à nous de te sauver” (p. 105). The monstrous Jacques is still there, but this time possessed by external forces about whose provenance Georges does not speculate. He concludes his reassessment of Jacques by reducing this figure of misrule to an impotent “pauvre petit” (p. 106). Gaston adopts precisely this prerogative of the mature male perspective to banish, even metaphorically to kill, the disturbing younger self. In his dialogue with the uncomprehending butler, Gaston announces, “pour être libre, il vous faut laisser ce petit cadavre innocent derrière vous … C'est fait” (pp. 107-8).

As Gaston vies with the others in their attempt to inscribe and thus gain authority over Jacques's story, he must distance himself not only from the corrupting claims of erotic love but also from the alliance offered him by Georges. Georges presents himself as the friend of the orphaned little Jacques, but his confession about Jacques's demons indicates that he sees himself very much as a surrogate father. The privileges of age would to some extent emasculate Gaston, making him once more the much younger son. To a prescribed position of limited power within the family and society Gaston opposes his dream of original, absolute authorship: “Je suis un homme et je peux être, si je veux, aussi neuf qu'un enfant” (p. 109). But in Le voyageur sans bagage we have a wise child who knows his own father, as well as a child who is indeed father to the man. Gaston's escape confirms his move toward power, achieved through his coup against the other authors of his past and through his use of the privileges of class, sex, and age. Far from travelling light on his way to England, Gaston takes with him the burden of a patriarchy whose rules he has learned to manipulate for his own use, in order to secure for himself a position that from a traditional viewpoint certainly seems enviable. We see him reject the part of a younger son with a seemingly monstrous past. Less justifiably, he rejects the working- and lower-middle-class families claiming him, solely on the basis of Valentine's and his own assumptions about the “têtes de petits bourgeois et de paysans” and the “passés de calculs et d'avarice” that they would bring him (pp. 111-2). And, finally, Gaston rejects the asylum, the island of safety from social corruption that reduces him to a role similar to the one to which he and Georges have reduced the memory of Jacques: “un petit garçon impuissant” (p. 114).

Gaston breaks definitively with the Jacques-construct of the Renauds when he decides to rewrite the very inscription of erotic and illicit passion on his flesh as a signifier without a signified. The cicatrice from a wound given Jacques by Valentine in a moment of jealousy becomes the rigged token of recognition that allows the little Madensale and his lawyer to claim Gaston and remove him to England. The scar has no other significance in Gaston's textual revision than to carry him, along with his infantile deus ex machina, away from all the women and men, even the dead, of France (p. 113), who want to put him in his place. In accepting the Madensales, Gaston not only trades his painful discovery for economic ease, but for a universe in which he possesses the kudos, the absolute authorship and authority over himself and, significantly, over the only other two beings in his new life. Both the young uncle and the attorney, “Oncle Job,” owe their economic security to Gaston. And Gaston becomes the surrogate father-older brother, which Georges threatened to become for him, for the little boy. The pastoral existence in the country house in Sussex excludes the erotic disturbances to bourgeois respectability that sexually active women represent.

The departures from sex, from the privileged Renaud family, and from the hierarchy of French society have almost unanimously been regarded as an assertion of purity on the part of Gaston. Even Anouilh regards his character's escape as a contrivance which maintains that purity.¹⁰ The textual performance, however, indicates that a sacrifice has occurred and that Gaston has participated fully in the demise of the entity Gaston-Jacques. Gaston discusses the metaphorical killing of Jacques in terms that throw the butler, who does not perceive the distinction between reality and tropes, into a veritable panic. His second attempt to destroy the unwanted identity leads him to shatter the mirror containing his reflection, and by extension that of Jacques. Le voyageur sans bagage eschews the overt sacrifice of its main character on the altar of history for a more subtle, but no less devastating, exorcism: the specter of a historical crisis that will not stay in the common grave of a past everyone wishes to bury.

What becomes of the Gaston who had been dubbed “le soldat inconnu vivant”? Both the symbolic and the individual characters of Gaston disappear by the end of the play. Neither brutally amoral like the young lord of misrule Jacques, nor washed clean like the initial asylum inmate, the Gaston ready to wing his way to England has become an abysmal “honnête bourgeois.” He has joined all those who had been trying to define and thus contain the disquieting past. He is the one who forever lays to rest the troublesome Jacques by relegating him to “une fosse commune en Allemagne” (p. 124). The “petit salaud” who broke the rules of bourgeois propriety and along with his uncensored peers threatened the fabric of the society that finally sent them to the front is ditched like unwanted luggage from the conscience of Gaston, of the Renauds, of war-bent Europe.

Because Anouilh installs Gaston into the ideal patriarchal dream of absolute control, Le voyageur sans bagage turns darkly against the issues it raises. The exacerbated rivalries for control, over relationships of class, sex, and age, over the plot of a story without closure, and finally over history, leads to households divided against themselves and ultimately to nations divided against each other. Anouilh brings up the unoriginal but telling point that in war killing means heroism while in peacetime it means murder (pp. 21-2), but the play comes short of connecting the desire for absolute authority over the self, implicitly a denial of others' rights of access, to the desire for martial conquest.

The convergence of desire for absolute authority that results in war appears in displaced and miniaturized form in Le voyageur sans bagage. The consequence of war, a shift of questionable authoritarian control from the home to the front, and the attendant undirected freedom of those released from such control, does figure prominently in the play. But the final dark submersion of Gaston's life into the history that Le voyageur sans bagage shows to be violently unresolved eschews the very questions about history-makers that the play raises. Despite his critics' rose-colored view of the dénouement, Anouilh was justified in classifying Le voyageur sans bagage as a pièce noire.

Notes

1. Theater reviews aside, critics use Le voyageur sans bagage as the turning point in Anouilh's career from insignificant early plays to his characteristic theater, but the play has generated no sustained critical study.

2. Bernard Beugnot in the introduction (pp. 7-15) to Les Critiques de notre temps et Anouilh (Paris, 1977) sees Le voyageur sans bagage as the origin of artifice in Anouilh's theater; Paul Ginestier discusses the existential questions of being in Anouilh (Paris, 1969, pp. 27-36); in “Tendresse et cruauté dans le théâtre de Jean Anouilh” [French Review, 25 (1952), 337-347], Jacques Poujol points to the existentialism avant la lettre in Le voyageur sans bagage.

3. See Harold Clurman's “Jean Anouilh” in The Naked Image: Observations on the Modern Theatre (New York, 1958), pp. 25-36.

4. Philip Thody in Anouilh (Edinburgh and London, 1968) classifies Le voyageur sans bagage as “family drama” and notes that the 1937 theater reviewers referred to Gaston as a version of Oedipus (p. 20); Jacques Vier in Le Théâtre de Jean Anouilh (Paris, 1976), also labels the play “family drama” (p. 29).

5. While emphasizing Anouilh's taste for Pirandellian artifice, Beugnot calls genre “l'écorce de l'oeuvre” hiding the unity of themes (p. 11); in Jean Anouilh (New York, 1977), Lewis W. Falb asserts that Anouilh's color categories were improvised at the time of publication and that the best play of each group is “precisely the one that least conforms to the category” (p. 19); Ginestier thinks the color categories have “distinct disadvantages” (pp. 5-6); Pol Vandromme in Un auteur et ses personnages (Paris, 1965) declares that nothing is either pink or black in Anouilh's theater, a pink play being one that finishes not happily but in time; Gabriel Marcel (quoted in Beugnot, 140-2) offers the same opinion that comedy in Anouilh's theater is strictly a matter of artificial solutions to insolubly tragic problems; both S. Benyon John in “Obsession and Technique in the Plays of Jean Anouilh” (Modern Drama: Essays in Criticism, eds. Travis Bogard and William I. Oliver [New York, 1965]) and H. G. McIntyre in The Theatre of Jean Anouilh (Totowa, 1981) analyze the melodramatic conventions in Anouilh's plays, which for John reveal the absurdity of the world (p. 37) and for McIntyre create “a comic and ironic framework between us and the action” (p. 35).

6. John Harvey in Anouilh: A Study in Theatrics (New Haven, 1964) describes the ending of Le voyageur sans bagage as “toying” and “pirouetting” away from truth (p. 174); John finds the ending “a perfectly gratuitous … fantasy” (p. 27); McIntyre asks that moral judgments be suspended since the play “is only a play” (p. 36); Falb refers to the ending as “obvious artificiality” (p. 30); in Jean Anouilh: Poet of Pierrot and Pantaloon (London, 1953) E. O. Marsh finds that the two verities of Anouilh's theater, innocence and experience, create a conflict resolved only by cheating (p. 81); Thody refers to the “artificiality of the ending” (p. 20); Vandromme writes that the play ends by prestidigitation (p. 56).

7. My view of Gaston differs from that of most critics, who apply the quest for purity of Anouilh's theater to Gaston's situation and who see Gaston as an embodiment of purity. For Gaston's purity, see John, pp. 20-21; Phillipe Jolivet, Le Théâtre de Jean Anouilh (Paris, 1963); p. 11; Harvey, p. 90; Hubert Gignoux, Jean Anouilh (Paris, 1946), p. 82; Marsh, p. 76; Poujol, p. 338. Two critics who dissent from the general reading of Gaston as pure are W. M. Gajewski (quoted in Beugnot, pp. 149-53) and Clurman, who respectively see Gaston's individuality as non-existent, having been appropriated by bourgeois society, and who condemn Anouilh's “rancid romanticism” (p. 32) as revealed in the opposition of individual and society.

8. For my analysis of Le voyageur sans bagage as ritual I depend on René Girard's Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977), and Victor Turner's From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York, 1982).

9. Jean Anouilh, Le voyageur sans bagage (Paris, 1958), p. 28. All further quotations of the play are from this edition.

10. See Anouilh about the ending of Le voyageur sans bagage as quoted in André François Rombout's La Pureté dans le théâtre de Jean Anouilh (Amsterdam, 1975), p. 283.