Jean Anouilh’s Thirst for the Absolute and His Formulation of the Ideal

Abstract

In pondering why a writer writes, we are fortunate in the case of Jean Anouilh to have the dramatist’s own definition of theater. He states that theater is the domain where reality is created by illusion. Theater presents, with all the artifices at its disposal, a truer form of the real than reality itself: “C’est très joli la vie, mais cela n’a pas de forme. L’art a pour objet de lui en donner une précisément et de faire par tous les artifices possibles — plus vrai que le vrai.” (Anouilh, 1951: 10)¹ Anouilh also makes clear what kind of reality he is interested in recreating. As with much of French theater of the Second World War and the subsequent period. Anouilh’s plays are concerned principally with human beings and their place in the universe. As Leonard Bacell Pronko so correctly remarks, Anouilh’s theater is the theater of the human predicament, couched in terms of “the relationship of individuals to themselves, to each other, to God or some indefinite omnipotence, and to this past” (Pronko, 1961: 3). Pronko further clarifies Anouilh’s major preoccupations — love, money and the social classes — pointing out that they are related to man’s fate, and are, to a degree, an illustration of it (Pronko, 1961: xiii).