Throughout the period from the publication of Colline in 1929 to that of L'Eau vive in 1943, there are constant references in Giono's writings to the power of language and its role in the world. Often these references develop into a major theme within particular works; even where they do not, they still help to form a leitmotiv that recurs persistently during some fifteen years of Giono's career, and which throws light in a hitherto unexplained way on his view of the role and significance of language….

[Giono's] fascination with speech is manifested, throughout the 'peasant' writings, by a constant stress on the physical utterance of words, even on the workings of the speech-organs themselves. In L'Eau vive, Giono recruits one of his favourite images—the snake—to describe the writhing of the tongue in the darkness of the mouth…. (p. 289)

This stress on the spoken word can be seen as appropriate to the settings and characters of Giono's pre-war writings. If he wanted to write of language at all, then, in these novels of peasant life, it had to be of the spoken tongue and not of the written language…. Yet this in itself clearly does not account for the emphasis laid on speech. For one thing, Giono's first fictional work, Naissance de l'Odyssée, written before he embarked on the cycle paysan, although published later than the early books of that series, already shows the same fixation. Giono retells the Ulysses myth in such a way as to bring his obsession with speech into the forefront of the action. His Ulysses is no longer Homer's conquering hero, but rather 'courageux par les seuls exploits de la langue' [courageous through the lone exploits of language] …, compensating for his frustrated and neurotic character by creating in speech an image of himself that men will admire…. It is, in fact, difficult to read for more than five or six pages without encountering some reference to the force of speech. Giono's insistence on the theme causes him to flood his first book with countless allusions to it, indiscriminately perhaps, until the impact is lost. It is not until the opening novels of the cycle paysan that we see him controlling his material fully, assigning a definite structural role to the theme of spoken language and gaining increased effect by doing so.

In Colline, extraordinary verbal powers are the property of only one character, Janet, and are brought into relief by the paucity of speech of the other inhabitants of the village. Janet's earthy eloquence and metaphor-packed delirium is crucial to his role in the novel. He is the first of a string of characters in Giono's fiction who enjoy, or are thought by other characters to enjoy, a special insight into Nature…. [Janet's] malice is in accordance with Giono's intention in Colline, namely to present the harsh and vindictive side of Nature rather than the benevolently smiling face of Mother Earth seen in many of the later books; Janet, as Nature's suspected accomplice, must thus use his knowledge against Man. In this, his weapon, and also the symbol of his malice, is his tongue. (pp. 290-91)

Just as Janet misuses his knowledge, so too does he misuse, in a sense, his power of speech. Very few of Giono's characters are guilty of this; and when they are, it is usually to achieve a contrast with the good effects of the speech of other, more important characters. This is seen in the second novel of the Pan Trilogy, Un de Baumugnes. Here, Louis misuses his glib tongue to seduce Angèle …, while the life-denying gloom of the inhabitants of La Douloire is expressed in their non-speaking….

Contrasted to this is the marvellous rustic eloquence of the narrator Amédée, and also the semi-magical appeal of the voice of Albin…. [The] final comparison of Albin's voice to the voice of Nature is obviously the highest compliment that the Nature-worshipping Giono can pay to its beauty. But the comparison has a further and more vital function. It serves to integrate the theme of speech with another of Giono's obsessively repeated themes: that of le mélange, in which the diverse elements of creation, animate and inanimate, human and non-human, take their place on an equal footing. Albin's echoing of the sounds of Nature in his voice symbolizes his assumption of his rightful place within le mélange, unlike the proud peasants of Colline who bring disaster down on themselves by wishing to remain outside and above the non-human world. (p. 292)

Again and again, the human voice is compared by Giono to natural phenomena. (p. 293)

Many … images may appear insignificant and commonplace unless they are seen in the overall pattern of Giono's work, in which case they assume a meaning that is crucial to his ideology. Those characters whose voices 'contain' Nature are those who are at one with it, and who represent Giono's positive standpoint in the pre-war period; while the description of natural sounds in terms of the human voice, like the other forms of personification of Nature in Giono's work, serves to reduce the gulf between Man and Nature by suggesting unsuspected similarities, and thus underlines the theme of le mélange….

In Jean le Bleu, Giono's fictionalized autobiography, it is finally affirmed, through the mouth of the poet Odripano, that Man can reintegrate himself with the rest of the animal kingdom through vocalization, by being absorbed into Nature's pattern of ritual calling….

It is noticeable that in ranging the human voice alongside the other sounds of the universe, Giono often envisages the voice merely as sound, and not as a verbal agent at all; or rather, words are seen as a later embellishment, a sophisticated human development, moulding precise meanings from the original instinctive utterance. Man's voice always retains the vestiges of this original animalic sound, which manifest themselves at moments when instinct speaks louder than intellect…. (p. 294)

This insistence on Man-produced sound, as Man's contribution to the sounds of the world, finds another extension in the theme of music…. Throughout Giono's pre-war work, in fact, the effect of music on a listener is described in the same terms as that of speech…. Also, analogies between music and the world of Nature are created through Giono's imagery the many musical instruments described by Giono, some real, some invented, and which assume something of the mythological importance of Pan's pipes, have as their primeval ancestor 'cet instrument premier d'où tout rejaillit, d'où toute musique a coulé, la libre, chanteuse terre qui est là tout autour avec son poids de bêtes … [this primeval instrument from which everything did spring, from which all music has flowed, the free, singing earth that is everywhere with its animal weight …]'….

'La libre, chanteuse terre', 'le chant du monde'—such images recur constantly in Giono's writings, and remind us that for him song, which occupies so large a place in his work, and where lies the fusion of speech and music, has its roots, like these two elements separately, in the melodious sounds of Nature. This is stressed time and again by his imagery, which accords the gift of song to so many diverse natural phenomena. (p. 295)

The use of imagery by certain carefully selected characters in Giono's novels is noticeable … as early as Colline. When Janet sees a whip lying on the floor and describes it as a snake … this is partly due to his delirium, and partly to his gift of metaphorical vision. Janet sees the whip as a snake; Gondran sees it as a whip. This is the difference between the sick mind and the healthy mind, but is is also the difference between the poet and the ordinary man. (p. 297)

[The] initial inspiration of [the theme of language] is probably the same as that which helped to create Giono's first fictional work, Naissance de l'Odyssée, namely Homer. The original Odyssey, read and loved by Giono since childhood, bristles with references to speech and song, both human and divine. The vocal accomplishments of Giono's characters are prefigured by those of Homer's Odysseus, a master of 'the graceful art of speech', as well as by other characters in the Odyssey…. (p. 298)

When Giono turned from his direct rewriting of Homer to his peasant novels, he simply transferred to the new context the same intense interest in speech, incorporating it into his new themes and characters. The voices of the gods become, in gradual stages, the voices of Nature, and hence the 'song of the world'…. The fusion of Giono's love of classical literature and his adoration of the Provençal countryside—the two dynamic impulses behind his work—is nowhere more interestingly achieved than within this theme of speech.

Like Homer, too, Giono was not afraid to celebrate in his works his own gifts as a story-teller. (pp. 298-99)

In addition to this element of self-celebration in Giono's work, there is also the romantic elevation to mythic status of the often pithy and picturesque speech of the peasant….

Furthermore, the insistence on spoken language that this article has traced does not prevent Giono's work from being also a celebration of his medium and his powers as a writer. In his unique stylistic world, where the colloquial and the poetic are fused, the borderline between the spoken and the written language is blurred…. [For] Giono, the healing powers and world-role ascribed by him to spoken poetry are, or should be, the properties of literature also. (p. 299)

There is a strong suggestion here that Giono's own ambition, in the pre-war days before his flight into historical fiction, was to be a healer through words. This helps to explain his position in inter-war literature: his re-affirmation, along with those otherwise vastly different writers Bernanos and Malraux, of the spiritually renovating values of heroism and stoicism; and, above all, his constantly reiterated stress on the world's natural beauty and its promise of a cure for modern ills.

Thus Giono's writings-refer frequently, albeit indirectly, to his own ambitions as a writer. In writing books about language and, obliquely, literature, he is contributing to that mass of self-reflective writing that looms large in the twentieth century. And in claiming for the poet a special role as a bringer of enlightenment to men, he allies himself to both the romantic and symbolist traditions of the nineteenth century. (p. 300)

Giono seeks … to refer us to the material world, to make us rediscover through his words the physical beauties of Nature….

Co-operation with Nature, its re-creation through words, and especially its rejuvenation through imagery—which unearths new aspects and encourages new angles of vision—this is the mission of Giono….

Que ma joie demeure,… is Giono's most important treatment of the impact of poetry, including the image, on men's lives. With great honesty, productive in part of the novel's pessimism, he describes Bobi's difficulties in communicating his message to the peasants of the plateau. The problem is primarily linguistic. (p. 301)

Poetry is seen here as something less than the universal panacea that Bobi hopes it will be—not because of any inherent limitations in poetry itself, but because of the lack of comprehension and misuse of poetry displayed by the peasants…. The poet can provide the first imaginative insight on a problem; but the true advancement of society demands that the poet must stand aside and be replaced by the more practical man. (p. 302)

The failure of Bobi's poetry may well reflect a feeling on Giono's part that he had failed, or would fail, to communicate his healing joy through the medium of his books….

Que ma joie demeure is in fact the last novel to present so romantic a vision of the peasant's world. The next novel, Batailles dans la montagne, stresses instead the hardships of a peasant community struggling against a hostile nature. Soon, too, Giono was to abandon his cycle paysan and embark on his chroniques and historical novels. He was largely to abandon also the rich imagery of his pre-war books, which seems to have been a conscious attempt on the part of this underrated artist to carry the reader with him into a joyful appreciation of Nature's vitality. His failure, or self-supposed failure, to convey his own joy in Nature, leading to a conscious under-playing of the poetry that had been the intended vehicle of that joy, may lie at the heart of Giono's switch to his post-war 'second manner'. (p. 303)

Malcolm Scott, "Giono's Song of the World: The Theme of Language and Its Associations in Giono's Pre-war Writings," in French Studies, July, 1972, pp. 289-303.