The Perils of Authorship in Le voyageur sans bagage

The Perils of Authorship in Le voyageur sans bagage ANCA VLASOPOLOS Despite its respectable history in performance, Anouilh's Le voyageur salis bagage has received little critical attention.' Regarded as Anouilh's first mature play, Le voyageur sans bagage is seen as heralding the existential themes of Anouilh's greater theater.' 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 ofEurope. Yet in a film like Renoir's La grande illusion, which was released at the sarne time as the fITSt performance of Le voyageur sans bagage, World War I becomes an enduring and timely reflection on a past that presages, especially in the irony ofthe 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 playas "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 ofthe young for the sake of socio-economic and political stability. A crisis ofenormous 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 602 ANCA VLASOPOLOS particular its ending. Anouilh seems to have attempted to obviate questions of genre by classifying his own theater according to the idiosyncratic categories of pieces roses, pieces noires. pieces grin~antes, pieces brillantes, etc. But this refusal ofgeneric 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 - ofthe text. Anouilh categorizes Le voyageur sails bagage as a piece 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 oftwentieth-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 twentiethcentury theater. Moreover, the theme ofLe 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...