Jean Anouilh - Critical Discussion

Critical Discussion

By the end of his career, Anouilh's reputation would outstrip all his contemporaries. Interestingly, though, his repertoire remained unusually confined to theatre and film. Most French dramatists of the 1930s and 1940s, including Anouilh's most significant contemporary influence, Giraudoux, not only wrote for the stage but also composed poetry, novels, or essays. Nevertheless, he remained prolific, consistently producing and publishing performance works for more than fifty years.

Anouilh's early works were "naturalistic studies of a sordid and corrupt world." Many of these plays present the reader with the striking and inescapable dichotomy between pragmatism and a sort of transcendent idealism. There is little to no "middle ground of ambiguity" that exists where this conflict asserts itself. This is evidenced in Le Voyageur Sans Bagage. The main character Gaston, a World War I veteran who suffers from amnesia, cannot remember the moral depravity of his youth (he slept with his brother's wife and severely injured his best friend). This checkered past is invariably at odds with the near-angelic behavior that he now exhibits, and recognition of this truth forces him to leave his former identity behind, unable to reconcile the two sides of himself. In denouncing his past, Gaston reclasses his freedom as an illusion, but one of his own making. He befriends a young English boy and shows him his identifying scar; this gesture allows the boy to descripe Gaston to the authorities, thereby claiming him as kin. With a new life and a new family, Gaston has a fresh start. David I. Grossvogel, describes this situation as the "restoration of a childhood paradise lost," attributing Le Voyageur Sans Bagage as the beginning of Anouilh's search to justify his the unhappiness of his youth. Theatre historian Marvin Carlson agrees, noting that this play epitomizes the "complex tonality and deft dramatic technique" that remained throughout his work, though, he asserts, it was only as the playwright matured that his "dark view of the human condition its final expression."

Anouilh disagreed with these somber readings of his best works, however, arguing that, like all great French literature, his plays had found ways to laugh at misfortune. "Thanks to Molière," Anouilh said, "the true French theatre is the only one that is not gloomy, in which we laugh like men at war with out misery and our horror. This humor is one of France's messages to the world."

Disclosing his thoughts on French theatre and his personal perspective as a playwright, he said that the perception of his work was often misguided:

I am played in private theaters, so I write for the bourgeoisie. One has to rely on the people who pay for their places; the people who support the theater are bourgeois. But this public has changed: They have such a terror of not being in touch, of missing out on a fashionable event that they no longer exist as a decisive force. I think the public has lost its head. They now say that a play can't be that good if they can understand it. My plays are not hermetic enough. It's rather Molièresque, don't you think?

In the 1950s, Anouilh examined his antagonism with General de Gaulle in L'Hurluberlu, ou Le Reactionnaire amoureux (1958) and La Songe du critique (1960). He began to lose the favor of audiences and critics alike, however, with the emergence of such playwrights as Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Though he shared with these authors a "similar desperate vision of human existence," these new absurdist theatres' pursuit of alternative dramaturgies made Anouilh's semi-realistic plays seem dull and old-fashioned. In the 1980s Anouilh reinvented himself as a director, staging his own plays as well as those of other authors. He died of a heart attack in Lausanne, Switzerland on October 3, 1987. Divorced from Monelle Valentin, he was survived by his second wife, Nicole Lançon, and four children.