[In the excerpt below, Lenski analyzes the philosophical dimension of three Anouilh plays, focusing especially on the "metaphyical rebellion" of the heroes.]

In Antigone and L'Alouette a new philosophical dimension makes itself felt in Anouilh's theatre. Parallel with the deepening of philosophical content, we find a change in the plays' settings to suggest an expansion from the local to the universal. The scene shifts from the stifling bourgeois interiors, maids' rooms, cheap hotel rooms, castle drawing rooms, refreshment counters in provincial stations and parks at health resorts. Anouilh's characters have exchanged mese shut-in private family worlds for the broader and more neutral settings of Antigone and L'Alouette and the historical backgrounds of the royal palaces of Becket and La Foire d'Empoigne. At the same time, Anouilh adds characters to each of his three fundamental groups: the mediocre race, the compromisers and the heroes.

In Antigone, mediocrity is incarnated in the guards Jonas, Boudousse, and Durand. Having delivered Antigone to Creon, the guards expect double pay and discuss raptuously the way they will spend it without their wives' knowledge. No tragedy can affect the Boudousses of this world who are here to do their work and draw their salaries. They serve the powers that be, and should the devil himself seize power one day, they will serve him faithfully. Boudousse may indeed be "immortal." Two millennia elapse between Antigone's rebellion in mythological Greece and the rebellion of Joan of Arc in medieval France, but Boudousse ironically reappears in L'Alouette.

In Antigone, L'Alouette and Pauvre Bitos, Anouilh applies the term mediocre to a much broader segment of humanity than, for example, in La Sauvage. Although the ugly parents are present in L'Alouette, they are not isolated units like the families in La Sauvage but archipelagos in the vast sea of mediocrity referred to in Antigone as the crowd, a conglomerate of everyday people, an indeterminate clay-like mass of human flesh. The characteristics of the crowd are extreme opportunism, short memory and an acute need to turn in the direction in which the wind is blowing. In her days of triumph the crowd followed Joan, only to turn away from her in her hours of defeat. On the day scheduled for Joan's execution the crowd starts gathering around the stake at early dawn, fighting for good seats to watch the burning. It is the same crowd that would have hailed Joan enthusiastically had she taken Rouen.

Anouilh has accentuated the non-thinking side of the members of the mediocre race in a number of individual characterizations. For instance Beaudricourt in L'Alouette never has had an idea of his own. When he is not sleeping, eating, playing games or making love, when he is not touching, seeing, smelling, tasting or hearing, it is as if he did not exist; he feels lost in a total void. Jonas, Boudousse and Durand secrete something inhuman. Their minds and feelings are not sufficiently developed to enable them to grasp the absurd. Like all other injustices from which they are free, the absurd does not interest them. Functioning on an almost vegetal level, the mediocre ones are not capable to arriving at a conclusion based on judgment; their actions are not the result of free choice. They are unaware that beyond the common everyday life lies the heroic domain, based on lucid vision and intelligence, which takes into account a vast amount of experience and suffering. However, between the "hell" of mediocrity and the artificial paradise of heroism stretches the vast territory of compromise.

Without exception, all the compromisers in Anouilh's theatre regard ideals as children's diseases which must be overcome early in life, like measles or smallpox. Life's veterans in Anouilh's plays watch the awkward heroes with amusement, tenderness and chagrin, referring to them as mon petit or mon enfant. From the heights of their experience they repeat that life is not what the heroes playing with knives, pistols, shovels or banners think it is. Creon urges Antigone to get plump, marry and have children. With babies crying in the house, according to the Inquisitor in L'Alouette, there will be no danger of Joan's hearing other voices, particularly those likely to cause disturbance to the state and church.

The compromisers constitute the world of "yes" sayers, a world referred to in Antigone as the kitchen, in which truth is no more than a lie repeated often enough; justice, a synonym for injustice; sincerity, a form of strategy like any other; and honor, an outdated proposition advanced only by a few troubled die-hards. Self-interest governs all human actions and a number of remarks uttered by Anouilh's compromisers sound as if taken directly from La Rochefoucauld's Maximes. Anouilh presents the political kitchen, in which his compromisers are cast as the chief cooks, as a frightening mechanism for organized murder in charge of tracking down the kitchen's worst enemy: the insolent man who says "no." It is a world in which every man is out for himself, where the winner takes all and where idealism is most definitely not the proper sort of luggage for life.

Certain compromisers in Anouilh's historical and mythological plays play parts from history's vast repertory; those who inspired their roles are dead: masks, statues, myths, life summaries in encyclopedias, pictures in school books. Anouilh has chosen some of these figures from the Grand Guignol of history and mythology, re-interpreted certain highlights from their lives and called upon professional actors to animate their masks. The compromisers are in varying degrees conscious that they are playing roles. Some of them play them with utter seriousness and conviction, as if God himself had let them in on the secret of his creation. They speak with disconcerting finality. Others show more awareness that they are playing parts, yet this cynical knowledge by no means detracts from their enjoyment of the game. Creon is an exception among Anouilh's compromisers. He understands the implications of his role to the extent that, at times, he seems reluctant to continue playing it. The role forces him to act against his heart's desire; he would like to save Antigone, yet he must send her to death; personally, he feels inclined to dispose of Polynices' body in the same decorous way as Eteocles', but the interests of state oblige him to act otherwise.

In Creon, the human being and the mask are more at odds than in any other compromiser. Creon is ill suited for his part—yet, his grandeur is due precisely to the disunity of the person and the persona. Anouilh shows us a Creon who has not been able to develop that certain liking for his role apparent in the characterization of Louis XVIII in La Foire d'Empoigne, without speaking of the total identification of the person with the role in the case of Anouilh's Napoleon. To point out how much of a character's spontaneous ego must be silenced for the sake of pretense, Anouilh has put into Creon's mouth the most tragic words pronounced by a compromiser on his stage: "Nothing is true except what one keeps to himself."

Creon favors the simple, everyday happiness of ordinary people to the sublime, half-demented happiness sometimes attained by those who seek absolutes, reached at the very end of a long road of suffering. A sweet home, a happy couple with children, surrounded by familiar objects to provide them with shelter from the mad, unpredictable face of the absurd—such is Creon's ideal of happiness elaborated through the course of years of experience and in the process of growing old. In Creon's world there exists only the reality understood by reason. To uphold and impose upon others a rational universe, Creon relies on the law, a police force established with the purpose of maintaining this law, and a social hierarchy expected to abide by it. The concern with seeming by far dominates the need for being. Creon may not believe in the formulae spoken by the Theban priests—yet he considers all such pretenses necessary in the public interest. Anouilh's compromisers are characters who have ceased to live their lives spontaneously. They incarnate in varying degrees the loss of a deeper humanity; they are human beings turned into conventional masks. The most despicable among them, like the Promoter and the Inquisitor in L'Alouette, are so thoroughly identified with their masks that they are no longer aware of playing roles.

Creon goes through the outer motions of his role, yet in doing so he suffers. He plays his role in the rational city of men yet he cannot dismiss the other side of the coin with a simple shrug. He feels a secret admiration for Antigone's attitude toward the absurd, a feeling mixed with a certain amount of envy. If only it were possible for childhood never to end, if only one could postpone indefinitely the time of choosing. Creon manifests a deep appreciation and nostalgia for the irresponsible days of childhood, but once embarked on the path away from the absurd he can no longer afford the luxury of giving in to his most private feelings. A step further and he too could wind up in denunciation of the universal order of things. Instead, he silences the voice of his heart and at the play's end he leaves to attend a committee meeting.

The heroic attitude toward the absurd presupposes a conception of reality split into the rational and the intuitive. Anouilh's Antigone alludes to this intuitive super-reality when telling Creon in the course of their debate that she speaks to him from a kingdom from which he with his wrinkles, his wisdom and big stomach stands excluded. She refuses to come to terms with Creon's common everyday reality, rejecting a priori Creon's reasonable arguments.

If it is impossible for reason to clarify everything and thereby attain absolute unity by abolishing the absurd walls, then all rational systems can be but relative. Thus, a step further after the realization of the mind's limitations, and there comes the revelation of the relativity of truth, an important discovery for Anouilh's hero who opposes his own truth to an old established one that takes itself all too seriously. Anouilh uses the relativity-of-truth conception as a powerful instrument of social critique, ridiculing through his heroes the blind, pretentious reason that claims that everything is clear. Antigone's voice in opposition to Creon's rational universe is that of a child boldly proclaiming that the king is naked.

In Antigone, Anouilh glorifies the childhood years, contrasting their purity and innocence with the compromises of age. Ideally, Antigone would like for childhood to go on indefinitely. Beyond childhood, she finds the certitude she demands of life only in total identification with the cause she has chosen to defend: the burial of her brother's uncovered body. In her rebellion, Antigone prolongs her childhood; in death, she crowns it with an aura of eternity.

A child's weapon stands out in the play as a touching symbol of the heroine's rebellion; to cover her brother's body with earth, Antigone uses the same shovel which she used when she was a little girl building sand castles on the beach. Another object that is suggestive of a child's universe is the paper flower Polynices once gave to her. She has kept it like a sacred relic, and on the morning of her fatal decision she sought in its sight the necessary courage to leave her room and go bury the uninterred body.

In L'Alouette, Anouilh likewise exalts childhood and early youth. Joan, the "Christian Antigone," wants the story of her life to begin with a scene in her father's house, when she was still a little girl, at the time she was tending sheep in the fields, when the Voices addressed her for the first time.

Both Joan and Antigone have sudden revelations concerning duties to be performed. Antigone must bury the uninterred body of Polynices which lies exposed to vultures; Joan must save the Kingdom of France from the exposure to the abuse of the English soldiers. Their heroic acts having been accomplished, both are being judged as enemies of the established order. They express identical views on courage, have the same horror of old age and, at about the same stage in the development of the two plays, experience a moment of doubt. Antigone agrees to repudiate her cause after Creon has shown her that Polynices was far from the ideal brother she thought he was. Joan signs the act of renunciation when she realizes that all her friends have deserted her. Ultimately, both heroines withdraw their renunciations and reaffirm their rebellions. They refuse to accept the trite everyday happiness described by Creon and Warwick as the only possible way of life.

The endings of both Antigone and L'Alouette are ironical as in both cases the stage is occupied by representatives of the mediocre race. In Antigone the last image seen by the spectator is that of the guards playing cards. The last words in L'Alouette are spoken by Joan's father, who used to break sticks on his daughter's back to teach her to be reasonable and who appears just before curtain fall to claim a share of Joan's posthumous glory for himself.

Antigone and Joan remain Anouilh's purest and most cherished heroines, in whom he glorifies intuition at the expense of reason and scientific investigation. Discussing Joan of Arc as a historical figure [in "Mystère de Jeanne," translated in The Genius of the French Theatre, ed. Albert Bermel, 1961], Anouilh ridicules the scholar intent on explaining the irrational aspects of Joan's rebellion in the light of the social and political forces in action in France at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

You cannot explain Joan, any more than you can explain the tiniest flower growing by the wayside. There's just a little living flower that has always known, ever since it was a microscopic seed, how many petals it would have and how big they would grow, exactly how blue its blue would be and how its delicate scent would be compounded. There's just the phenomenon of Joan, as there is the phenomenon of a daisy or of the sky or of a bird. What pretentious creatures men are, if that's not enough for them.

Books describe Joan as a big, healthy girl, but Anouilh cannot care less. He sees her skinny like Antigone, a strangely stubborn, undernourished little girl, who, at her trial, knew how to undermine the dialectics of seventy judges in their stiff robes with a single, simple little answer. He exalts the young girl's faith in her cause which proved stronger than the rational edifice of the military strategists and the political experts of her time.

The "shooting of the bird" in Antigone and L'Alouette is more spectacular than in Léocadia or La Répétition because it involves the larger community of men and not only private castle worlds. Antigone's and Joan's rebellions are based on exalted heroic will rather than private feelings. For Antigone and Joan freedom means above all the freedom to choose their own deaths. A true hero is his own father: he needs no one but himself to accomplish his design; he dies when he wants to, as he pleases, from the cause he wills. He can master his fate by obliging others to kill him when he so chooses rather than live at the mercy of an untimely death or in perpetual danger of the loss of a dream. Yet, the supreme stage manager, God, has distributed only a very limited number of such great heroic roles. Not all heroes have been honored like Antigone and Joan with trials and grandiose executions favoring their later day legends.

After Antigone and L'Alouette, Becket provided Anouilh with a new opportunity to exalt a person chosen for the fulfillment of a mission. In four acts and twenty-seven tableaux, Anouilh carries us through sixteen years of Becket's life, from the time that Becket became Henry's Chancellor at the age of thirty-six to the day of his murder in the cathedral at the age of fifty-two.

From the moment the curtain rises, Becket behaves like a man who is familiar with the extent of nature's and man's indifference toward man. For him, trees, flowers and blades of grass have long since lost the luster they have for Antigone and Joan at the outset of their rebellions. Becket is a person who has already experienced the moment of truth which, as Camus points out in Le Mythe de Sisyphe, is likely to steal into life at about the age of thirty, bringing with it the revelation of the absurd.

To counteract the absurd, Becket identifies with his role. He is willing to play whatever part he is given and to play it as best he can. "One has to gamble with one's life in order to feel alive," he says. As the king's companion in pleasure, he applies himself to his task so well that he succeeds in outwenching the king himself, who is fifteen years his junior. As Chancellor of England, he serves the state with utmost zeal. He accepts the honor bestowed upon him with the following words: "My Lord and King has given me his Seal with the Three Lions to keep. My mother is England now." And when the king finally makes him Archbishop of Canterbury he once again proves himself a most faithful servant, not the king's, however, but God's.

Anouilh traces Becket's evolution through his various roles. All the time—while brilliantly playing the role of Henry's companion and counselor, while saying the right words and making the proper gestures to conform to the political expedients of the moment—deep within himself, he preserves a firm sense of honor. In the absence of a noble cause with which to identify, Becket is obliged to improvise his honor for many years. And he would have never discovered it had not the role of archbishop suddenly been entrusted to him. Made into God's servant, Becket's honor becomes identical with the honor of God.

Becket is a more complex character than Antigone and Joan who play their roles with youthful fervor, feeling intuitively that somewhere, somehow they are right in doing what they do. More logical, Becket controls his feelings and does not permit himself the moments of weakness which make Joan and Antigone temporarily waver in their causes. Antigone and Joan, who die young, are spared the debasing effects of life, and, for them, as for the sixteen-year-old monk who dies in the cathedral at Becket's side, "this black world will have been in order to the end." To Antigone, the bitter truth about Polynices comes as a revelation, just as Joan is stunned to learn that her best friends have forsaken her. Having lived longer, Becket knows about the Polyniceses of this world. In him, Antigone's determination to fight for an ideal is combined with Creon's rich experience of life.

Like the ending of L'Alouette, the ending of Becket barely conceals bitter irony. The king, who has had Becket murdered, entrusts the inquiry into his murder to none other than one of Becket's assassins, and, moreover, forced to act in just that way for reasons of political expediency, he hastens to acknowledge publicly his total solidarity with his dead friend's views, vying before the Saxon crowd for a share in Becket's posthumous glory.

Becket, a "rebel at forty," represents Anouilh's last attempt to depict metaphysical rebellion in all its vainglorious splendor.

Antigone, Joan and Becket belong to the period of history prior to 1789 to which Camus in L'Homme révolté refers as the age of negation. In the history of rebellion, the age of negation is an age in which the rebel contents himself with bare pronouncement. This is the age of metaphysical rebellion, an often suicidal type of rebellion in the course of which an assertion is made and upheld for no other apparent reason than that of its own beauty, leaving behind perhaps no more than bewilderment and surprise on the part of those unable to comprehend acts that are seemingly gratuitous and futile. Metaphysical rebellion appears more concerned with the essence of truth than its ethical angle, and the rebels who espouse it firmly believe that there are essences which must be served and from time to time enriched by exemplary sacrifices.

The historical event which, according to Camus, consecrates the end of the age of negation and leads into the age of ideologies is the decapitation of Louis XVI in 1793, a regicide which was at the same time a deicide. The bynow classic sentence, which better than any other speaks for the sudden change in the quality of rebellion, is the warning given Louis XVI: "No, sire, this is not a rebel-lion, it is a revolution."

Elaborating upon the differences between rebellion and revolution, Camus, after questioning whether revolution characterizes or betrays the value of rebellion, comes to view revolution as the logical outcome of metaphysical rebellion. Revolution is an historical rebellion, a movement originating in the realm of ideas and consisting of the injection of ideas into historical experience, fostered by the use of brute force.

The historical personage leading the way into the age of ideologies, whom Anouilh has made into the hero of Pauvre Bitos ou Le Dîner de têtes, is Robespierre.