[In the following excerpt, della Fazia provides an overview of the recurring themes, situations, and concepts of Anouilh's plays.]

The majority of Jean Anouilh's dramatic works have been grouped under adjectives descriptive of the dominant tone or the distinguishing characteristic of the plays in each category. In plays classified as "black," "pink," "brilliant," "jarring," and "costumed," Anouilh treats an assortment of themes that range from the soul of man to the world of men, from the heroism of the individual to the mediocrity of the masses. Some of the plays are heavy and dismal, some are light and fanciful, but all reveal the author's profound and often painful insight into the human condition.

I The Impurity of Happiness

The "black" and "new black" plays are pessimistic, bitter, and permeated with gloom; they display most clearly Anouilh's lack of faith in humanity and its institutions. His pessimism stems from the realization that neither the so-called joys and comforts of life reserved for the "happy few," nor the invitations to unsavory adventures, promiscuity, and immorality extended to all men, lead to happiness. At the same time, resignation to abject poverty, rigid acceptance of one's role in life, strict morality, and punctilious observance of a code of honor can lead only to tragedy and death.

Purity and love cannot prevail on this earth because of the intrinsic impurity of happiness. Anouilh's heroes and heroines, seeking a happiness known only to themselves, a "purity" of self and an "absolute" love, are faithful in their search even though they know that none is attainable in life. Heroes cannot be "happy"; because they reject le sale petit bonheur reserved for the mediocre, they are condemned to a solitude which admits of neither love nor friendship. Their task of finding or creating the ambiance in which their truth can thrive is limited to the realms of illusion and death, where real love and purity do exist.

God as well as man forbids the realization of true love on this earth. A cynic in one of the "new black" plays describes a sleeping God who does not disturb lovers, provided that they do not make too much noise: "… but what a nose he has, what an extraordinary sense of smell, how he smells the odor of love! And he doesn't like love at all. So then he wakes up and begins to focus on you. And then everything starts jumping, army-style."

The Count in La Répétition describes love as putting everything around you into its proper place, causing everything to be peaceful and simple, but, at the same time, as being the most elusive of man's blessings. Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre's friend in Pauvre Bitos, begs the revolutionary leader to mitigate his pride and to open his heart: "I admire and still love you, Robespierre. Do you want me to get on my knees to you? Open your heart. Do not remain locked up and snarling in your rigorous prison of logic where we cannot reach you." Camille is the champion of love; Robespierre has him killed.

Becket had inspired the love of the downtrodden masses of Canterbury by continually championing them against the power of the Crown, the rich, and the Normans. Becket and the disciplined, humble men of Sandwich (as opposed to the riotous mobs) are a microcosm of an "ordered world," just as are Joan of Arc and her world of the poor, the ill, the aged, and the wounded. King Henry, although mad with love for Becket, knows only how to buy affection and refuses to love in the way that will allow him to be part of Becket's world.

With Becket, as with all of Anouilh's heroes, offerings of worldly gain are meaningless. In their search for the realization of an ideal far beyond the horizon of the masses, the temptations of the so-called good things in life do not sway the heroic from their perpetual task of refusing mediocrity. Love and happiness that are not pure and absolute are to be avoided at all costs. Antigone's retort to her family's assurances that happiness awaits her because she is young, beautiful, and engaged to be married, is: "You all disgust me with your happiness. With your life that has to be lived at any cost. And that daily ration of good fortune, which suffices as long as you're not too demanding." In words which echo Joan's "I don't want to have a happy ending … an ending that never ends," she rejects Creon's image of a marriage that will permit her to live happily ever after.

The hero's rejection of a love that is less than perfect is incomprehensible to the mediocre masses, for whom "love and marriage" are an integral part of life. Joan of Arc's disappearance from her father's farm to keep her divine appointment provokes her mother's prodding for explanations of the long absence and her father's "Ah! you're losing track of time, now! I hope to God you haven't lost something else that you don't dare mention!" It would be inconceivable for Joan to answer "Saint Michael" to parents such as these. In Antigone the uncomprehending Nurse immediately assumes that her charge's absence from the palace in the middle of the night can only be explained by a tryst with a common boy. Again, it would be absurd for Antigone to answer that she had gone to cover the body of her dead brother.

Joan might avoid her father's violent thrashings and be "happier" if only she would try to appear attractive to a village boy who will marry her and thereby ease her father's mind and his blows. She recognizes her father's right to destroy her physically, but maintains her spiritual rights: "Beat me hard; you have the right to. But it's my right to continue to believe and to say no to you." After an especially hard paternal drubbing, she refuses her mother's consolatory offer of an embroidered scarf: "I don't want to look pretty, mommy. … I don't want to get married, mother." Later in the play her words express even more clearly her renunciation of happiness and her desire for nonconformity: "I don't want things to turn out all right. … I don't want to live your time."

Medea has already experienced marriage: the short, happy union which is soon followed by the inevitable period of noncommunication and which eventually culminates in silence and hatred. Medea's Nurse tells her mistress that "the earth is still full of good things: the sun on the bench at the resting-place, hot soup at noon, the coins you have earned in your hand, the drop of booze that warms your heart before you doze off." Medea, nauseated by her Nurse's mediocrity, banishes her to unheroic realms: "You have said too much, with your carcass, your drop of booze, and your sun shining on your rotten flesh. Get back to your dishes, your broom, your peelings, you and the rest of your race."

Turning toward Corinth, where the people are celebrating boisterously, Medea says: "Something in me is stirring … and it says no to happiness." Her own children disgust her, for she already sees them as sly, deceitful men who are, worst of all, anxious to live and to be happy. Nowhere in Anouilh's plays does a heroine seek to satisfy her maternal instinct. Children are never portrayed as a delight or a comfort, but rather as tiring, vociferous miniadults. In one play (La Répétition) the author is unsparing: his characters find deaf-mute children perhaps tolerable, but rose bushes preferable.

The acceptance of "happiness" means, for Anouilh's heroes, submersion into the eternal oblivion of conformity, which is the equivalent of vegetation. Jason had formerly been the ideal for whom Medea had sacrificed all. After their marriage his love was lost and that love now repels her. When he tries to save her from the many enemies she has made because of him, she protests: "What are you trying to save? This worn-out skin, this carcass Medea, good for nothing except to drag around in its boredom and its hatred? A little bread and a house somewhere, and she'll grow old in silence until nobody mentions her name any more, right?" In the same way Electra, describing Aegisthus' and Clytemnestra's marriage as a slow process of watching the approach of old age, the onset of coldness, lack of desire and ultimately hatred, exclaims sardonically: "Oh, indissoluble sanctity of marriage!"

It is in the "jarring" plays that Anouilh expounds most discordantly upon the subjects of life and love, marriage and children. The plays end on a displeasing, disconcerting note, expressing a total cynicism regarding the possibility of love existing between a man and a woman. Although based upon the solid foundation of money, even the marriages of the wealthy are no happier. What the poor heroes fear as the influence of money on love, the rich know and live as a daily routine: boredom, hostility, hatred, deception, hypocrisies of all kinds. Everything that Frantz (the hero of Anouilh's first play, L'Hermine) predicted if he were to marry, is illustrated in the later plays, where the ugliness and sordidness of married life become a self-fulfilling prophecy. No truly happy couple is portrayed in any of the plays, and whatever pleasure might have existed in the premarital state is soon destroyed by marriage.

Anouilh has described marriage as a chemical experiment in which "a mixture at first bubbles and sparkles; then happiness volatilizes, leaving in the retort nothing but a big gray lump of [marital] obligations." The grotesque Madame Alexandra (in Colombe) reveals what the excitement over marriage is all about: she has had seven marital experiences, with husbands ranging from a neo-Nero to a devourer of live rats, and has even married one of her husbands twice—once after his mother's and once after his father's death—not to console him, but to help him squander his millions. Anouilh's "Jezabel" is described by her husband as the "sweetest, frailest young bride imaginable, for whom two years sufficed to become a shrew." The stock figure of General Saint-Pé (in Ardète, La Valse des Toréadors, and L'Hurluberlu) is the symbol of the pathetic, disillusioned, humiliated, and unheroic married man.

II Friendship-Love

If, for Anouilh, marriage is not the ideal relationship between two human beings, friendship-love can be. As long as Colombe and Julien, a young couple in love, are "allies," as long as Jason and Medea are "brother and sister," as long as Becket and King Henry are "companions," the basis for happy union exists. The moment that conformity to social patterns is introduced, however, the ideal friendship-love dies.

This friendship-love is a "pure" relationship and, as such, can only thrive among "pure" individuals. According to Anouilh, however, every individual is escorted by his past, his family, his education, and his habits, all of which superimpose their traits upon the original pure being. If persons were left alone, then isolated purity and love could exist, but in the world as we know it antagonisms constantly arise between memories of past formation and present conditions. Tragedy is linked with the impossibility of shedding one's sordid past and with the quandary caused by the visualization of an identity that will endear the hero to a society which at the same time victimizes him by smearing his sacred countenance. "Rosiness" and "brilliance" are linked with the ability of the hero to defy society and to create absolute standards for himself despite the relativity of "truth."

III Sincerity

Although the hero strives constantly to remain true to himself and to act accordingly, Anouilh views sincerity as impracticable in a world which seeks either to use honesty as a stratagem or to destroy it. In many plays the hero is subjected to anti-sincerity brainwashings that range from starvation diets to hard labor and thrashings, yet the hero refuses to assume the artificial airs that society tries to impose upon him.

In the nineteenth century Thomas Carlyle prophesied that the world would once more become a sincere, believing world with many heroes in it, and that it would then (and only then) be a victorious world. His thought is the credo of Anouilh's heroic figures who are true to themselves, convinced that sincerity is their only salvation. They are isolated in their contemporary world, a world which is divided and convulsed with insincerity, which employs tactics stronger than its beliefs, has no heroes, and is consumed with self-doubt. Nevertheless, the heroes persist in their sincerity and fidelity, for that is their way of loving. The impossibility of their fulfilling their love in an uncomprehending and insincere world is their challenge.

The hero remains his true self within himself, but the futility of his challenge, the conflict between his ideal and the hypocrisy of a sordid reality, leads him quite logically to a decision to escape his milieu. In the pièces noires the antagonism between the "pure" hero and perverted society results in either actual or symbolic death or in insanity as a form of escape. In the piéces roses and the pièces brillantes escape takes the form of either the creation of an illusion that triumphs over reality or a refuge in one's multiple personalities.

Anouilh is deeply concerned with this idea of the multiplicity and mutability of the human personality, and with the realization that man cannot be reduced to a unity that will afford him inner peace and contentment. He is aware of the relativity of human sentiments and emotions to social, sociological, and economic conditions, and the disturbing feelings of disunity that result from the conflict between them. Perhaps the most forceful example the author has given us of a heroine for whom changing human opinions have no significance is Joan of Arc, who, in the face of the relative truths of her parents, the people of France, and her executioners, remains a symbol of absolute truth.

IV The Race of the Rich and the Race of the Poor

Another predominant theme in Anouilh's plays is that of the implacable opposition and eternal irreconcilability of the "race" of the rich and the "race" of the poor, and the necessity for both races to accept segregation. The poor heroes are fully aware of the reality of their poverty. While the rich antagonists are oblivious to the "unreal" world of the poor, they fear at the same time an invasion from lower space.

In an early play (L'Hermine), the hero, believing that money could secure love, was driven to committing murder before discovering that wealth and happiness are unrelated. In a later play (La Sauvage) the impoverished heroine understands that it is not lack of money that prevents the lasting union of herself and her wealthy lover, but rather the fact that their two worlds can never coalesce. She speaks of a "lost dog wandering about somewhere, which prevents me from ever being happy." The lost dog (symbolic of her poverty and her sordid past) has taken the place of money in preventing happiness.

The vile "luggage" of their past prevents the poor from ever making a transition into the race of the rich. The impenetrable barrier between the two races is vividly illustrated by the two-level stage décor of La Grotte: on the lower kitchen level writhes the poor domestic help; on the upper level revel the rich Count and Countess. All of Anouilh's characters line up on one level or the other: commoners bearing the names of Isabelle, Amanda, Frantz, Thérèse, Lucile, Jeannette, etc. are all of the poor race; the stock Princes, Duchesses, Counts, Countesses and Ladies are their rich counterparts. The poor suffer abuse, the physical hardships of immorality, disease, unwanted children, etc.; the rich condone sexual promiscuity with members of their own class, but not with members of the lower class because, according to Anouilh, bastard sons of noblemen turn sour later in life and foment revolutions.

In Le Songe du critique Anouilh has described (through the character Tartuffe) his typical hero of the "poor race":

There he is—the poor man, always quick and on his
  guard,
The poor, unhappy man, the cheating bastard,
  spurned and scarred,
Tired of the rich, with all their barriers and
  boulders.
He lives to take his vengeance, for in order to be
  fed
He must conceal his bitterness and scorn, and smile
  instead—
The poor man, with his clumsiness to weigh upon
  his shoulders.

Although the members of the poor race refer to themselves as stupid, dirty, tactless, cuckolded and cynical, they insist upon remaining true to themselves and their concept of honor. They cannot afford to do otherwise. Rather than prostrate themselves hypocritically to earn enough to "graze twice a day like donkeys," impoverished heroes choose to behave in a way judged as stupid by society's standards. Heroines, refusing orchids, champagne, and furs, will request baser beverages and seek instead the warmth of a hand in their revolt against hypocrisy.

Anouilh's distinction between the heroic and the mediocre is also explained in terms of the "poor" and the "rich" races. Of the two, it is the poor race that fathers heroes, not the wealthy or the nobility. The lower class produces geniuses, while the upper class spends its life taking futility seriously. By the very rottenness of family life among the wealthy, with its inanity, its ménages àtrois or àquatre, its hypocrisy, and its alcoholism, the growth of heroism and genius is stunted.

Within the poor race itself, Anouilh distinguishes between the happy and the unhappy, the mediocre and the heroic. He describes the former as "an exploding, fertile race, a flabby mass of dough that eats its sausage, bears children, uses its tools, counts its sous, year after year, in spite of epidemics and wars, until old age catches up with it; people living life, everyday people, people it's hard to imagine as dead." The latter he describes as "the noble ones, the heroes. Those whom you can easily imagine stretched out dead, pale, with a bullet hole in the head—… the cream of the crop."

Anouilh conceives of the "flabby masses of dough" throughout the centuries as Hobbes's homo lupus hominem—wolves against wolves. They take the form of the Rouen mob awaiting the spectacle of the burning of Joan of Arc; the Paris mob howling at the foot of the guillotine during the Revolution; the spitting, stenching Thebes mob described in Antigone, with its thousand arms and its thousand faces, but with its one indistinguishable expression of mockery and laughter.

The heroes look disdainfully upon the mediocrity of those who inhabit the realms of superficiality, conformity, and weakness; this majority is analogous with the "rich race" in that it masks truths and is afraid to face absolutes. Rather than daring to dream of something better, the mediocre take refuge in their petty maladies, their banalities, and their stomachs. The members of the heroic race seek answers to metaphysical questions and are eternally dissatisfied with themselves, for they know what they could have become had the circumstances been different; they scorn society's masks and hypocrisies and life itself, refusing to make any compromise which might prevent the realization of their true selves. Their conscience and concept of order, clearly conceived and stated, form the sharp dividing line between the rigorous demands of honor and the mediocre satisfactions of the masses.

V Honor

Anouilh's heroes love honor not for honor's sake, but for the sake of an idea of honor which they have created for themselves. When, for example, King Henry asks for Becket's mistress, Becket offers her with the words, "My honor leaves much to be desired," revealing that Becket has not yet found the idea of honor for which he will die; he has not chosen the defense of woman's honor as his ennobling task, nor the soldier's honor, which would require him to conquer, nor English honor, which would demand that he defend the honor of the King. It is only later in the play that he will choose to defend the concept of God's honor invoked by the title that will be bestowed upon him, that of Archbishop. The pursuit of honor is strengthened not by God, but by Becket's esthetic sense of how an Archbishop should defend God's honor. While honor, for Anouilh's anti-heroes, is something to be remembered and forgotten at will, to be bought and sold, soiled and washed, the hero's idea of honor can be neither improvised nor defiled by compromise.

The concept of an honor to be defended unto death is basic to Anouilh's plays. The theme, which recurs clearly and frequently, is linked to the playwright's championing of nonconformity, purity, and refusal to compromise. For Anouilh, those who defend wealth and material possessions cannot defend a concept of honor. A truly sorry figure, for example, is King Charles of France in L'Alouette, who has neither wealth, nor courage, nor anyone to defend his person, much less his title. For this pusillanimous king, the concept of honor is nonexistent.

VI Absurd Duty

The hero's refusal to betray his intransigent race and his search for a purity that transcends any relationship of compromise are best illustrated in the "costumed" plays, which present heroic, historic, or legendary figures. Their duty is to remain loyal to their race, regardless of how absurd or grotesque their role may be.

The sole commandment of Anouilh's "insolent breed" of heroes is to do what has to be done, when it has to be done, and to do it wholeheartedly and completely even though it is unpleasant and difficult; this maxim would allow them to create an historically ordered world were it not for the mediocre race. Morality may be for external use only, but once a role in life is assigned it cannot be doffed. Stated negatively, in Becket's words, "the only thing that is immoral, is … not doing what is necessary when it is necessary." To Henry's pleas for logic, Becket retorts: "That's not necessary, my King. The only thing necessary is to do, absurdly, what has been assigned to you, and carry it through to the end." Cauchon, the churchman who is somewhat more humane than the Inquisitor in L'Alouette, pleads with Joan of Arc: "Joan, try to understand that there is something absurd about your refusal." Antigone persistently tells Creon that she must return to her brother's grave to replace the earth that the guards have removed. Creon replies: "You will return to perform such an absurd gesture again? … Even if you should succeed in covering the grave again, you know very well that we will uncover the cadaver. So what are you accomplishing except covering your fingernails with blood and getting yourself hanged?" Antigone answers: "Nothing but that, I know. But at least I can do that. And everyone must do whatever he can do."

The "insolent ones" are confident that God or the gods favor them and will grant them sufficient time in which to accomplish with appropriate dignity their absurd duty. Antigone will have performed the funeral rites for her dead brother with her tiny, rusty spade, and Becket will go to his death with every little hook and eye in his intricate robe properly attached. It is all a matter of esthetics—not fear of worldly punishment or fear of God. Anouilh's heroes find lies repugnant, deception indecent, compromise inelegant; they insist upon being esthetically "pure," upon playing their role down to the last detail. Becket achieves an absolute triumph when he proclaims that "the honor of God … has permitted that I be killed in my Primatial Church. That is the only decent place for me."

Anouilh's hero is willing to adopt the commandment to do what has to be done even though it may be absurd because he has been unable to find a solid truth in society, one upon which he can base his definition of self and his actions. The roots of his tragedy lie in the disjointed relations between himself and other men: Becket is unable to see King Henry as his true prince; Antigone cannot accept Creon as her true authority; Frenchmen kill their heroes and then seek to destroy each other in blood.

Medea could be happy in a world without Jason (who symbolizes compromise), but she knows that the world contains both Jason and herself, and, therefore, the seeds of conflict. She will have to oppose him unarmed in a losing battle, because he is of the "rich" race. She cries out to him: "Race of Abel, race of the just, race of the rich, how calmly you speak. It must be good to have the gods on your side and the police, too." The serenity of the mediocre race is denied the frenzied heroes and heroines who obstreperously reject the maxim that physical, political, and military might makes right.

Antigone's position, vis-à-vis a king who demands compromise, is identical to that of Medea. Antigone loves both life and her fiancé Haemon, but will nevertheless perform the burial rites for her brother in the face of certain death. Becket, as soon as he is named Archbishop of Canterbury, begins defending God's honor against the honor of the kingdom, although bitterly reproaching God with the words: "How difficult you make everything and how heavy is your honor!"

Anouilh's heroes reject all concepts of compromise and conformity. In the hero's world every action or sentiment of honor is starkly delineated and labeled; there is no gray area offering refuge and the opportunity to avoid justification of one's life. While the heroic refuse to accept the definition of happiness proffered by the mediocre, the mediocre, in turn, can understand neither what it is that the heroes are seeking, nor why they absent themselves both physically and mentally from the routine and accepted way of life.

The life span of the mediocre man is, for Anouilh's heroes and heroines, nothing but an endless and ugly vegetation. So powerful is their scorn of life's sale espoir that, just as Joan of Arc is about to recant and Antigone about to accede to her uncle's reasoning, the reminders of War-wick and Creon, respectively, are enough for the heroines once again to prefer death to an act of compromise.

The vicarious experience of "living" makes the heroic even more determined, at the crucial and decisive moment, to refuse to understand, to refuse to be "reasonable." "Moi, je ne veux comprendre," is Antigone's rejoinder throughout the play, and it is echoed in other plays by heroines who refuse to be "reasonable" by conforming to society's norms. Refusal to "live," to "grow up and understand," is a dominant theme in Anouilh's theater, but the desire to remain childlike, contrary to the suggestion of one critic, is not a form of desire for regression. It is, rather, a reasoned and deliberate decision not to conform when an ideal or a concept of honor is threatened.

Because of the paucity of nonconformists who refuse to understand, the world will never be saved. As the General in L'Hurluberlu states: "We must give up trying to understand. … People have been trying too long to understand. That's why nothing is going right any more. If the world is to be saved, it will be saved by imbeciles!" Although the ridiculous character Ledadu responds with "Present, General," thus making the scene comic, Anouilh's basic idea is nevertheless maintained. Ledadu is not an "imbecile" by Anouilh's definition, because he really is one. Anouilh's imbeciles are heroes who have accepted a concept of duty that is seemingly absurd; imbecility is synonymous with acceptance of absurdity.

Persons in power attempt unsuccessfully to dissuade extremists from their nonconformity by demonstrating the absurdity of their ideal. Creon tries to destroy Antigone's illusions by smearing the image in her mind of her brother Polynices and revealing that it may even be Eteocles' body that she has buried instead. Her sister Ismene tries to dissuade her from covering the body, arguing that he was not a good brother. Antigone, however, stands firm: "What do I care about your politics, your necessities, your miserable stories. I can still say 'no' … and I am sole judge." The concept of an absurd duty to be fulfilled can be judged only by a superior race of "imbeciles."

Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, in an attempt to destroy the will of the imprisoned Joan of Arc, tells her that all of her good soldiers have abandoned her and, weary of war, have fled Rouen. Even La Hire, her closest companion in battle, has hired himself out as a mercenary, she is told, but higher voices also speak to Joan, and she persists in her heroism. The Count in La Répétition is defamed by a drunken noble who, in league with the Countess, attempts to disabuse Lucile, who cherishes the Count and her own illusions about him. The heroine obstinately refuses to leave the Château, where she has found the ideal that she had been seeking, and persists in believing in the superiority of the Count despite most convincing evidence of his flightiness.

The dialogue in Pauvre Bitos between the Jesuit Schoolmaster and the young, nonconforming Robespierre illustrates a similar confrontation: "(Schoolmaster:) Your mind is not sufficiently respectful. There is something rigid in your mind that disturbs me. … (Robespierre:) Yes, Father. (Schoolmaster:) You say yes, and there is something in your mind that says no. We shall punish you until your mind says yes." The Schoolmaster's whippings succeed only in strengthening Robespierre's will to resist and ultimately to realize his personal ambitions.

VII Acceptance of Death

Although Anouilh's heroes will accept death, if necessary, in order to fulfill their concept of duty, they nevertheless love life and cling to it humbly and sentimentally. Unabashed in seeking ways to lessen their fear, they are not at all like Corneille's classical protagonists, who die without openly expressing their innermost feelings. The Prologue in Antigone tells us that, as the heroine sits silently on the stage, she thinks about the fact that she is going to die, that she is young and that she would have liked to live, but that there is no changing the role that she must play. Later in the play the following exchange takes place between Antigone and her sister: "(Ismene:) I don't want to die. (Antigone:) I too would have liked not to die. … (Ismene:) I'm not very courageous, you know. (Antigone:) Neither am I. But what difference does it make?" An almost identical scene is to be found in Médée: "(Nurse:) I am old, I don't want to die. (Medea:) I too … would have liked to live."

Joan of Arc, when asked by Cauchon whether she is afraid to die, admits that she is afraid but that it makes no difference. Orestes is asked by Electra whether he is afraid to die. His answer is "Do it quickly," even though he is perfectly calm when he is called out of his palace to die. Antigone and Medea also seek a swift death. Medea pours out her emotions to her Nurse, expressing her dread of physical pain; for her, as for Antigone, physical contact with her Nurse (despite her mediocrity) will help to calm her fears. Joan of Arc shares with King Charles her method for eliminating fear: have a tremendously big fear all at once, and then cast off all traces of it as you plunge into battle.

Frantz (in L'Hermine) personifies fear as a dog about to attack, explaining that it is necessary to grip it until it falls to the ground, then take it and hold it against your own body, mouth to mouth, until your hair stands up straight and your teeth chatter; then you will have entered into the realm of silence and shadow, where you can sleep with a corpse without fear. For Jeannette (in Roméo et Jeannette) and for General Saint-Pé, a little piece of red blotting paper baptized "mininistatfia, " chewed at the appropriate moment, gives strength and conquers all fears.

Invariably, the heroes must ultimately bear their emotions and fears alone. They stand firm in the full knowledge that they have been abandoned by all and that, in the end, society will destroy them. Antigone, after Ismene's renunciation of her part in the burial of Polynices, realizes that it is up to her alone to defy Creon's edict. Creon, as the author of that edict, is also alone, but he can never reach the stature of the heroine who has made no compromise with life. Electra and Medea are solitary, inaccessible heroines, abandoned by gods and men.

Anouilh's description of Joan of Arc is suited also to his other heroes and heroines: "Joan continues … with that curious mixture of humility and insolence, of grandeur and common sense, even up to the stake; … it is in this solitude, in this silence of an absent God, in this deprivation and this bestial misery, that the man who continues to hold his head high is great. Great and alone." Heroic defenders of honor create discomfort in others. King Louis, although regretful that a man as extraordinary as Becket was not born on his side of the Channel, nevertheless reveals his awareness that Becket might have caused him trouble, and is relieved that the hero will return to England to meet his doom.

Like Joan of Arc, Anouilh's heroes are "little skylark[s] immobile against the sun, being shot at"—an image which greatly disturbs those who have power but not glory. The Inquisitor in L'Alouette, for example, explains that the smaller, the frailer, the more tender, the purer the enemy, the more formidable he is. When Creon is told that it was a child who covered the grave of Polynices, he muses over the dialogue which he anticipates between himself and the pale, defiant rebel, knowing well that haughty contempt awaits him.

Describing George Bernard Shaw's Joan of Arc, Harold Clurman has written [in The Naked Image: Observations on the Modern Theatre, 1966]: "She has to be stopped, done away with, because like all fanatically persistent moralists, she is a pest, a threat, unbearable to the ordinary. … Though she wins in history, she must lose in her person. She herself recognizes this, but cannot and does not wish to curb her force and fail her fate." Only when the fragile little "enemies" of the Church or of the State are removed from the scene does stability again reign, but only temporarily, until the next hero arises. After each new hero falls under the Inquisition, or the guillotine, or, more recently, firing squads, silent calm descends upon the State, until the next gunshots fired at a skylark are heard.

VIII The Pseudo-Hero

In some of his later plays, Anouilh seems to have conceived of a modified hero, less rigid in his refusal to compromise. This "pseudo-hero" type acts out his part in a gray area between duty and compromise. He is seen in King Henry Plantagenet (Becket, 1959) and in the Count (La Grotte, 1961), but is best embodied in the character of General Saint-Pé (Ardèle, 1949; La Valse des Toréadors, 1952; L'Hurluberlu, 1959), who seems to represent a stage of Anouilh's own life and conscience.

The pseudo-hero is a réactionnaire amoureux (the subtitle of L'Hurluberlu), a two-faced marionette thirsting for love, pining for "the good old days," playing out his hatred, his desire for vengeance, his fear of the world, his awareness of his own ugliness, and his embarrassment in the presence of women. Although this type seems to retain in his conscience the concept of absolute standards, in his actions he suppresses conscience and vacillates between rigidity and compromise. When he is rigid, he is ridiculous; when he compromises, he is unhappy.

The earlier heroes were faced with this same dilemma, and their decision was to avenge themselves. Electra had learned hatred all by herself, and, together with Orestes, she enacted it unflinchingly. Their unhappiness stemmed from their mother's infidelity and the assassination of their father, who had to be avenged, just as Antigone had to avenge her brother and Medea had to avenge herself. The difference between these heroes and the pseudo-heroes, however, is that they themselves are the sole judge of their actions. Their concept of duty and honor is inflexible, and involves the sacrifice of life itself; none of the other characters in the plays inspire pity for them or excuse them.

These early heroes are literally extracted from the mediocre masses, while the later hero is pitifully manipulated and victimized; the greatest weakness of his personality has been found and exploited by society. The middle-aged Saint-Pé, the congenial Count in Ardèle and La Répétition, the conscience-ridden but otherwise revolting Ornifle and the cruel Bitos, redeemed only by his pitifulness, are humanity's whipping boys. If they momentarily rise to great heights, it is only to intensify their groveling.

The pseudo-hero has no absolute standards; he simply has a conscience that bothers him whenever he strays from his duty, as he frequently enjoys doing. Conscience stirs and fills a void in the heart of poor old Saint-Pé, who refuses to abandon his demented wife even though he cherishes and desires another woman; that conscience, however, is not sufficiently strong to permit him to discontinue his trysts with his true love. The conscience in the Count's household is Ardèle, his hunchbacked sister, to whose reasoning and logic he is highly susceptible, but conscience loses at the end of the tragic play.

Conscience in Ornifle is embodied in a blatantly conspicuous character, Mademoiselle Supo. Ornifle is constantly made aware of her presence, even though he tries to banish her from his sight and to deny the reality of her person. He tells Supo: "Don't keep comparing yourself with my conscience. My conscience is a charming, well-behaved young lady. I have trained her not to eavesdrop. My conscience never asks me what I'm doing."

As in the early plays, the world of some of Anouilh's later plays is one for men—not heroes. The pseudo-hero, like the hero, is resigned to the fact that his own life, as well as the lives of others, is meaningless. The author appears to have momentarily settled for the relativity of truth and seems less determined to abide by absolutes alone. With his mellower philosophy Anouilh depicts "little" men struggling to maintain a place in the sun—nothing more noble or heroic or grandiose than that. Even historical giants such as Napoleon and Louis XVIII are doing nothing more in La Foire d'empoigne (1962) than playing a petty game of grab, catching as catch can, unmindful of their unheroic demeanor.

Whether Anouilh's change of heart is due to his chagrin at the performance of an uncompromising and rigid leader of the French government remains problematical. Former Premier Georges Pompidou, in a 1967 broadcast, said that the choice for France was between Gaullist stability and "disorder and confusion," claiming that only the Gaullists could make the era perfect "because we are united." Pompidou's phrases sound curiously like the scenario of an Anouilh play. Perhaps the present-day situation in France will provide the dramatist with a Hegelian synthesis that will resolve the conflict between his thesis of the rigid hero and his antithesis of the compromising hero.

The scope of Anouilh's work is vast. His thoughts, many in the form of maxims, are on a variety of subjects too sweeping to catalog. Most important to remember is his vision of a hero—usually rigid, sometimes plastic—against the backdrop of a corrupt society. Through his heroes, the solitary Anouilh satisfies his pressing need to express and reveal himself; it is as though he himself were standing on the stage before us, speaking harshly and impulsively, seeking not pity, but recognition of ourselves as the cause of his torment. We are the ones who perpetrate society's corruption and injustices; we are the ones who stifle the pure instincts of youth and idealism; we are the ones who debase professions and careers by our venality and our brutality. We have created the horror that surrounds us and that makes us grow old without having understood the symbolism of the immobile skylark.