SOURCE: Bieber, Konrad. “Jean Giono's Greece: A Kinship Between Distant Ages.” In The Persistent Voice: Essays on Hellenism in French Literature Since the 18th Century in Honor of Professor Henri M. Peyre, edited by Walter G. Langlois, pp. 131-42. New York: New York University Press, 1971.

[In the following essay, Bieber notes the ways in which Giono's works evoke the ambience of ancient Greece and the style of its epic writers.]

Stripped of Greek influences and sources, much of Western tragedy would either collapse or be missing altogether. The same may not be true to the same extent in poetry, or in the field of the novel. To be sure, our time is witnessing an emancipation from tradition which, more often than not, takes the form of an outright rebellion against the past. It is not yet clear whether such revolts will lead to valid art or are merely the passing phenomena that accompany every revolution.

With varying degrees of faithfulness in understanding and interpretation, poets, playwrights, and even novelists have striven over the ages to revive the world of the Greeks. In so doing, writers have taken great liberties not only with style and expression, but also with the history and character of the people of ancient Greece. Each succeeding age has put Greek names on men and women of its own time and culture. Troilus has known medieval and Renaissance twins; for us, Timon of Athens bears Shakespeare's indelible seal. Eyebrows were raised and heads shaken when Jacques Offenbach brazenly undertook his charming travesty of Gods and heroes. A watercolor by Maurice Sand, the son of the famous novelist, painted around 1860, shows a Jupiter already pathetically close to the ungodly schemer portrayed by Sartre in his Flies (Les Mouches). Electra has suffered innumerable alterations of her personality to suit shifting moods and moral or philosophical contexts, and one may wonder which of her most recent recreations—by Giraudoux, Cocteau, O'Neill, or Sartre, to name only a few—has least betrayed her Greek image.

Perhaps our time has grown so callous or so blasé that such violences done to ancient Greece rarely perturb the modern reader or viewer. However, perhaps the ancient models may sometimes regain a part of their lost beauty and stature through the talent of the modern imitator, his skill, or his style, or in a word through his ability to truly recapture the spirit of Antiquity by a mixture of irony and poetry. Irony does not necessarily betray a lack of heart in a writer. If ancient characters come to life, and if the classical scenery does not remain a mere empty shell, anachronisms and other deficiencies in the modern reworking of classical materials will not detract from our enjoyment. True, it takes more than an accumulation of classical names, décor, and plots to produce a modern “classical” work; we must feel a breath of congeniality throughout the bold recreation, the glow of the Aegean sun and the majesty of pure lines, be it in marble or in verse. At various times in the literary history of the West, many writers have attempted to renovate the treatment of ancient subject matter. To the twentieth century, Pope's Homer may smack of anything but the real thing, yet Pope felt genuine kinship with the bard. The German adaptor, Voss, created a Rococo Homer; but even he was able to convey an idea of homeric greatness and beauty that remained valid for generations after him.

Naturally, each of those who sought to paraphrase classical inspiration brought his own standards of beauty, of taste, of style to his recreation. Psychologically, this endeavor created a logical dilemma that had to be resolved by a literary convention. As William Arrowsmith pointed out, “Hektor the Trojan speaks Greek, and we accept it; and then, in translation we also accept Hektor the Greek-speaking Trojan who speaks English.”¹ Leconte de Lisle's scrupulously “Greek” spelling of names does not make his Herakles or Hypatie any more authentic than uncounted less faithful variations on the old theme. To be sure, his translations of Greek tragedies are congenial and often felicitous; the atmosphere in his poems is an aesthetically fine approximation of the original and, of course, has a poetic color of its own.

However, in general, presentation of minutely accurate historical incidents, or psychological portraits conforming to what scholars have gleaned from ancient artifacts or art works are not enough to make a modern literary endeavor a true resurrection of a Greek type or model. Jules Lemaître even more frankly produced a disarmingly hybrid world of ancient types in the garb of his own period. Pierre Mille carefully sought out anecdotes placed in classical Greece. His psychology is a skillful blend of ancient and modern, even though his sensuality is less unbridled than Pierre Louÿs' truculent fantasies. The ancients recreated by Anatole France are often gracious phantoms permeated with nostalgic recollections and learned subtleties interspersed with semi-jocular words of wisdom. For Gide, as for many writers in many lands, Greece is the prétexte for philosophical and aesthetic developments unconcerned with authenticity, but even in our day, the spell cast by the Greece of Euripides and Aeschylus continues to capture readers and theater audiences everywhere.²

Most recently, during the summer of 1967, the new adaptation of Sophocles' Oedipus, by Vercors, presented in open air theatres at La Rochelle and Sète won great acclaim both because it was faithful to the essential message of the Greek original, and because the modern version's language was powerful in its beauty. However, Vercors took a few careful liberties with the ancient drama. Thus the choéphore is represented much like a peasant of our time; his language is direct and uninhibited, even though the lines he speaks are based on the text of Sophocles' chorus. In this way, the modern adaptor gained a new vitality and truth for the ancient play, elements not necessarily present in more traditional translations. Vercors' Greek peasant is one of us, a fellow human being whom we immediately understand; these are men and women of our time, akin to Greek people of all times through their concern for the forces of nature.

Although Vercors does not understand Greek, he has been uncannily successful in recapturing the spirit of ancient Greece; his adaptation of Sophocles—fusing both Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus—is highly satisfying artistically and aesthetically. This success is all the more amazing when compared with Leconte de Lisle's scrupulous but rather synthetic versions of Greek plays. These latter lack immediacy and thus have had a far less powerful impact on men in modern times. Leconte de Lisle, with his careful spelling of Greek names in the most scholarly fashion, was certainly eager to convey the depth of feeling he sensed in the Greek originals; unfortunately, he failed to create anything but a miniature of external circumstances. His lines rendering the Greek text into French remain beautiful, poetic, but strangely lifeless, whereas Vercors succeeded not only in retelling the old tale in one breath, but at the same time, he made credible the unbelievable horror of fate's dictum for mortals. He recaptured the Greeks' sense of human awe before the unknown, before the Gods and destiny.

Many were the seekers for the Greek truth, and many there have been who—in the search for that truth—have created works of beauty in their own right. It is not surprising that there is often little close resemblance between viable works of our era and classical models. In art as well as in literature, conditions have made it impossible to erase the gap between the ages, even though there is admittedly a great deal more general knowledge today about classical Greece and her arts and letters than ever before. What we may measure, however, is the depth of understanding that a modern creation may show if the artist happens—by temperament or formation—to feel truly close to the world that was Greece. This may occur in almost any medium. For example, a drawing by Jean Lurçat, entitled “Héraclès,” portrays a man of a strength and cunning rarely seen in one and the same individual, thus evoking a few traits of the hero that had gone unnoticed by generations of story-tellers.

Critics have often wondered how and why Jean Giono came to achieve so forceful and rounded a renewal of antiquity in his work. There is no need to recount here the story of Giono's initiation to Greek literature, a subject thoroughly dealt with by both Christian Michelfelder and Maxwell Smith.³ Suffice it to say that the young bank clerk in Manosque bought his copy of Homer through the mail; as he later admitted with rare candor, one of the reasons he preferred Homer to Anatole France was that the Greek poet's books were cheaper! As Henri Peyre has pointed out, this poor cobbler's son did not know Greek, “but he grew up in a land where peasants to this day winnow their grain, pluck their olives, and milk their goats much as their Mediterranean forefathers did in the time of Ulysses or Theocritus.”⁴ Thus when Giono was exposed to the classics, he responded to them spontaneously and vigorously. As he later recounted in his autobiographical novel, Jean le bleu, a farm laborer loaned him a copy of a translation of the Iliad, which he read during the rest periods of harvest time. It moved him deeply: “Into me was Antilochus throwing the spear. Into me was Achilles ramming the soil of his tent, trampling in the wrath of his heavy feet. In me was Patroclus shedding his blood.”⁵

This revelation of Greece not only struck a responsive chord in Giono, but it opened the wellsprings of his imagination. As Peyre put it, “dès lors, sa vocation était trouvée; il ressuscitera Pan dans les clairières et les labours des Basses-Alpes et, avec plus de démesure et parfois plus d'intempérance prophétique ou rhétorique, il refera en prose la tragédie, l'épopée et l'idylle antiques.”⁶ In 1937, Giono himself gave an interview⁷ in which he specifically underlined his desire to revive—or rather to make actual—the heroes of Homer and Sophocles whom he found about him in his native province, and thus to renew the Greek tragedies.

Although a writer must not always be held strictly responsible for declarations of this sort made in a moment of confidence and reminiscence, this statement is valuable because it clarifies Giono's literary aims in a general way. He has never shunned his responsibilities, and this rather proud claim should not arouse scepticism as to his sincerity. But did he succeed in his purpose? Has he indeed given us a kind of modern sequel to Homer or Sophocles? If such has really been his intention, it must be said that he has fallen short of the mark. To be sure, in setting out to tell the story of Haute Provence, his homeland, he did create a world often close to the Greek scene, and his characters bear a distinct resemblance to the Greeks of antiquity. This is all the more noteworthy since he was not actually reworking Greek materials. If the Pan novels have a flavor so definitely evocative and sometimes congenial to Greek models, it is primarily as a by-product of the author's art. These peasants, by being themselves—earthy, simple, suffering and loving people—at times vividly recall traits of epic dimensions. As Peyre points out, there are accents of a primitive bard in Giono's early work, and his protagonists are epic heroes in the most venerable Greek tradition, “not because they accumulate feats in violent battle but because they are the very forces of nature embodied in simple, strong creatures.”⁸ Although Giono's Provençaux speak in a manner unlike that of any living peasants, his art and vigor in portraying them has an authenticity that defies narrow-minded “realist” measurements.

It has been said that in those of his works in which Giono purposely sought to attain an atmosphere of Greek epic or dramatic proportions, he has been less successful, but this does not mean that these deliberate attempts were all futile. Naissance de l'Odyssée (first published 1930) has a charm of its own; it is a good literary sketch of life in ancient Greece, not unlike those of many other modern writers. Of course, there is an overabundance of local color; Giono tries to make up what he may lack in systematic learning by supplying correctly selected details of daily life in antiquity. Nevertheless, his Ulysses appears as a worried, ruined landowner rather than a man of royal gait and temper. The other characters, too, give an impression of bawdy small town life, immersed in petty scheming and quite unemotional sensuality. At times, there are real moments of grandeur, of epic dimensions, such as during the recital of Ulysses' deeds by the blind minstrel.

The quarrels and insults lavishly scattered throughout the pages of Naissance de l'Odyssée, a novel that was initially refused by the publisher, are distinctly non-homeric; yet they are endowed with a grace and fragrance of Giono's own mixing or making. Even the guitar player is not as anachronistic as we might have assumed. The author is very skillful in presenting the mule driver's account of Penelope's misbehavior, as well as the minstrel's song on Ulysses' “death”. Sometimes the trials of Ulysses in Giono's book recall certain of Jules Lemaître's all-too-clever fantasies. The latter's “Mariage de Télémaque” uses devices not unlike Giono's nimble irony. However, in Lemaître affection for his hero is missing, or at best veiled, while Giono showers love on a Ulysses so human that we may at times be shocked to see him act like a coward. (Ulysses the coward becomes, ironically, the avenger of his honor when, through a chain of events possibly borrowed from burlesque shows or the grotesque cinema, he conquers a brawny, conceited Antinous.) Lemaître's “Nausicaa”, admittedly inconsistent with his Télémaque, offers more of a parallel with Giono, because in it the deft humor of the modern writer includes a warm sympathy for the much-tried hero.

The psychology used in Naissance de l'Odyssée is a happy medium between what we know of the Homeric Penelope, Telemachus, and the legendary Ulysses, and what a fanciful modern could add to these characters. Penelope's hesitations, Telemachus' scorn for the prudent returning father, the pronouncements of a few minor figures are certainly in keeping with what an admirer of antiquity is allowed to embroider around the given tradition. It may even be advanced that it would be a hard test to ascribe authorship of the book; a graduate student would have to concentrate on the few typical Gionesque images to identify the author who was still discreet in this early work and did not allow his verve to entirely overcome the respectful elaboration of an old theme.

However, Ulysses—the central character of the book—is drawn with great precision and with an obvious effort to be faithful to known facts about Greek religion and superstitions. His flight through the thick brush after being awed by the presence of a vengeful god, is, I believe, one of the highlights of this charming, though uneven novel. Giono knew how to make Ulysses' anxiety believable because the hero was no longer sure of his erstwhile pact with Pallas Athena. Pursued by hostile gods whom he persists in defying, he takes flight through inhospitable countrysides, while the blind guitarist has hitched a mule ride and arrives in comfort at the same destination—an ironic sidelight to the dramatic buildup felicitously achieved by Giono.

Perhaps a little too much has been made of atavistic fears in this part of the story; Ulysses appears too urbane a man to yield to such utter despair and terror. Giono's solid paganism stood up well in the novels of the Pan cycle, where it was limited to such perennial human problems as struggles with the elements, but his Naissance de l'Odyssée at times sins by an over-eager reconstruction of the ancient Greek mentality; no wonder the manuscript had to await Giono's fame before a publisher would accept it.

Yet in this book there are many graceful moments, and pictures of great beauty and truth. Kalidassa the maid servant goes to the market, and Giono furnishes us a magnificent still-life of sea food, a verbal masterpiece of no mean proportions. His humor, too, proves both original and sound in more than one circumstance in this novel. Kalidassa's speech is rhythmic and musical, much in the vein of Homeric chants.

This feature and others like it prove a considerable advance over Giono's earliest published pieces, Accompagnés de la Flûte (1924) where the poet had already shown a happy disposition toward grace and style. These texts, full of bucolic descriptions, were often sketched out right in the middle of the fields where Giono was working and on any scrap of paper he happened to have handy. He used epigraphs drawn from the Aeneid or from Plato's Banquet. As one critic points out, “the slightly obsolete scent of these poems evokes a bucolic hellenism; its artifice recalls some pages in Anatole France or even Catulle Mendès … [these] Sunday poems, composed on returning from a walk in the country, are just a bit too well planned, are typically Mediterranean; mythology here offers less a theme than a prétexte.”⁹ Yet their images already suggest the power of the best Giono.

A revealing sample of this material from Accompagnés de la Flûte is the following passage: “Ma femme a fait une séquelle d'enfants aux larges bouches. Le blé, cette année, est léger; il n'a pas assez plu pour gonfler les fèves; mes oliviers n'ont pas grainé et, il est juste enfin et rare que, un métal ouvré pour la guerre entre, paisible et bienfaisant, dans la vie d'un homme.”¹⁰ The choice of subject and image denotes a faithful interpretation of Latin bucolic poetry; the epithets are Homeric, and yet this is a variation on a theme bringing antiquity right back to our daily life. Here, as in much of the later Giono, whenever he strove earnestly to “revive” ancient themes, an impression of “a Yankee at King Arthur's court” is inescapable. Again, it must be said that the very effort to “be authentic” was damaging to poetic inspiration, for, with the exception of certain chapters in Naissance de l'Odyssée, the best classical features in Giono occur when the author's mind is bent elsewhere, when his imagination is unbridled, and when he creates beauty without the minute concern for accuracy in things Greek.

Giono seems closest to Homer when, as in the novels of the Pan Trilogy, he sets out to tell the story of simple village people, for such a tale is also inextricably involved in the story of nature and its boundless forces. It is in these early stories that he seems most fully congenial to his Mediterranean heritage. He knew how to create an atmosphere of suspense, not so much about the people and their lives, as about the ominous presence of occult power in the elements that surrounded them on every side and constantly intruded into their existence. In the second novel of the Pan Trilogy, Un de Baumugnes, there are only a few clear indications of an outright debt to the Greeks. Clarius in his anger is a far cry from Ajax, and the little Durance, described with loving care and personified to a point, is too unimportant, here, to rival such river gods as the Simois. However, some images may distinctly recall the Greek model. Consciously or not, the image of the bee in the flower may have come to Giono through Sophocles' Antigone, where love is also likened to a bee.

Regain, the third part of the trilogy, is even less rewarding in reminiscences of things Greek. Yet, here too, we find images and expressions worthy of notice in this context of Greek influence. Even though we may be far removed from Greek elemental gods such as Zephyr or Aeolus, Giono still manages to convey a distant echo of those more powerful winds: “… le beau vent, large d'épaules … (…) celui-là, c'est un monsieur.”¹¹ Panturle's portrait is Pan-like as his name seems to suggest: “Le Panturle est un homme énorme. On dirait un morceau de bois qui marche. Au gros de l'été, quand il se fait un couvre-nuque avec des feuilles de figuier, qu'il a les mains pleines d'herbe et qu'il se redresse, les bras écartés, pour regarder la terre, c'est un arbre.” Panturle is no Cyclops, since he is slowly awaking to love. The end of the novel, less than subtle in its symbolism, shows Panturle “… solidement enfoncé dans la terre comme une colonne …”¹², reemphasizing the “return-to-the-soil” message typical of Giono in the thirties.

A faintly Greek note may be perceived when we are told of Mamèche's husband who had come from Italy to be a well-digger: “Ce qui l'avait tiré de là-bas (i.e. from Italy) ici, allez le chercher: le destin!”¹³ If such an explanation is not fully satisfactory, it is because readers are more sophisticated than the primitive people of Giono's novels in whose life fate, not unlike its Greek counterpart, comes to be so prominent a force. Stylistically, Regain would make a worthwhile study, for there are a number of strikingly beautiful lines of prose poetry, akin to anapaestic verse and indirectly reminiscent of Greek poetry as filtered through Hugo, such as the lines: “Vers leur pas la nuit s'avance; elle pousse devant elle les débris de la Trinité.”¹⁴

However it is in Colline, the first and perhaps most successful volume of this trilogy, that the Greek atmosphere is most evident. The people in this alternately poetic and harshly frugal story are dominated entirely by the forces of Nature. The central mystery consists in the struggle between man and that Nature which he believed to be his good neighbor, but which occasionally seemed to assert its independence, its wickedness. The crude and crafty farmers who had learned how to cling to this wild piece of land live under the terror of the unnamable, of an only too well-known unknown. Their attempt to conjure up a spell of protection against the elements is moving but unsuccessful. Their fight against the forest fire is obviously doomed to failure beforehand. In order to stress the deep meaning of such a conflict, Giono has arranged his themes by order of importance. The earth, the wind, the water, the fire—all the elements participate one by one. The use of images, metaphors, symbols (sometimes inspired by classical models) all seem to suggest that the book has a quasimusical structure. To support this hypothesis, one may note the extraordinary frequency of classical images at the very beginning of the text. However, this device is gradually abandoned, and such images are only sporadically employed in the latter part of the novel. Some pagan mysticism might be read into the character of old Janet. He seems to embody the mysterious forces of evil, but his death, a natural event, solves the apparent mystery. As Pierre de Boisdeffre has pointed out, water is the main feature of the book, because the drying up of the spring is the key event; all the other catastrophes are linked to this initial omen of bad things to come.

It would be erroneous to accuse the author of conscious or unconscious naïveté. The great simplicity of his plot is beautifully suited to a dramatic and psychologically satisfying working out of the story. The characters act from what they believe to be the dictates of their free wills, but the reader cannot rid himself of the impression that they are only tools in the hands of a higher power. Thus the naïveté is only on the surface; the people in Colline live right at the heart of Nature, but they cannot view her as their enemy.

A few stylistic devices enhance the impression of classical inspiration. A not unhomeric redundance is found a few times, as in this description, at the beginning of the text, of the wild boar wallowing in the cool marshy water: “La fraîcheur le traverse d'outre en outre, de son ventre à son échine.”¹⁵ Other pleonastic pictures are found in this novel as elsewhere; they are certainly always consciously employed. A more typically Homeric sequence may have come to Giono via the poetry of Hugo or Vigny: “Il boit; il s'essuie l'oseraie de ses moustaches.”¹⁶ There are a number of such similes, and they have a definitely Greek ring, even if we remember that the novelist had to consult translations, or rather precisely for that very reason.

As to the fundamental question of influence, of course one would have to examine the book as a whole. And on this point it is striking to see that its structure owes a good deal to models from antiquity. When we ask in just what ways Giono's characters are intrinsically like the Greeks, we are obliged to admit that they are not really comparable to the heroes of the Iliad. Old Janet does not have the scope of an Achilles in his wrath, not even that of a Diomedes. And yet, Giono's men do have a stature of their own: nourished with healthy, fresh sap they hold on to the earth with the fierce courage and love of wrestlers determined not to let go. Their chtonic strength ultimately succeeds in opposing the superior power of the elements and in conquering it. It is here that their Homeric dimension is to be found, and also in the rough and yet graceful voice with which they speak.

In general, the women in Giono's early novels are not women of classic grandeur, but they speak and laugh, love and jest in a natural way, very much akin to Greek women of old. Their problems are also often similar. Joséphine (Que Ma Joie demeure) may be no Helen of Troy, but she too is torn between her children and her family tasks on one hand, and her furious desire for the mysterious Bobi on the other. In the same novel, Madame Hélène's wild outbursts of mourning and moaning are not unlike the cries we hear in Aeschylus' play The Persians. Old men vent their anger or their joy much in the vein of Homeric Greeks, while men in the prime of life express their thoughts in action or through gesture more often than in words. Giono's silences, the loneliness pervading his characters, are different from the classical mentality as he could have learned about it from books on antiquity. But as soon as we are confronted with elemental forces at work, there is a striking similarity in imagery, in thought and expression: the modern author came quite close to his model in these respects, often without even trying to do so.

The sea is largely absent from Giono's work. When in one of the rare allusions, in Que Ma Joie demeure, the alpine site is compared to the sea, the picture is consistently drawn. Winds, rain, the earth—all are endowed with supernatural powers, much in the way of ancient divinities. Giono's streams may be only a trickle compared to the gushing fluvial gods of Homer. And yet, little Durance inspires genuine awe when she is swelled by torrential rains—a scene strongly reminiscent of one of Zola's early stories. (This coincidence is not surprising when we remember the friendship between Giono's and Zola's fathers, both of Italian extraction, both long time residents of the country on the banks of the Durance). All the elements exert a strange power over the human characters. Even though we know much of the dramatic storm is exaggerated, we may find the impact of Nature on humans to be quite believable: Giono's man lives according to Nature's dictates, he never really rebels against Nature but rather seeks to integrate himself in her framework. Pan-like creatures animate Giono's wilderness. Their strength is derived from their unique nearness to the sources of life; their chtonic, or if you will telluric force is renewed through contact with the ground.

In almost all of the other examples of Giono's work up to 1945, the imprint of classical Greece is undeniable; its presence often adds a refreshing note to the original modern work and underlines the nearness of man and the earth. Numerous examples of traces of classical inspiration could be pointed out in this portion of Giono's writings, but a few particularly compelling illustrations will suffice to show how closely the writer followed a model from the classical world.

In the volume of short stories entitled Solitude de la Pitié, there are several strong indications of Giono's affinity for the ancients. “Prélude à Pan” is a powerful bacchanale, overflowing with life and joy, suggestive of Giono's deep understanding of man and beast, of the beast in man, of what constitutes the majesty of sensuous rapture. The story is also alive with humor, illuminated by a sound and superior irony, especially when it comes to the fruits of the strange intermingling of man and beast.

In his outline of Le Chant du Monde, announcing the beautiful novel to come, (1934) the author noted: “Un fleuve est un personnage.”¹⁷ What more Greek concept could be enunciated? In fact, the ultimately finished novel well demonstrates that precept; in the book, we find a microcosm of pagans, living and loving or hating in ways that suggest the author's careful reading in Greek epics.

Even in a volume of polemic prose, Les Vraies Richesses, we may encounter occasional glances at beauty; buried in the floods of invective against the evils of culture, there are a few quiet words of admiration for Greek ideas, to offer respite from the heat of the battle. I am not thinking of the none too convincing invocation of Demeter, but rather of a quite simple and moving passage that is worth quoting: “La vie m'ensevelissait si profondément au milieu d'elle sans mort ni pitié que parfois, pareil au dieu, je sentais ma tête, mes cheveux, mes yeux remplis d'oiseaux, mes bras lourds de branches, ma poitrine gonflée de chèvres, de chevaux, de taureaux, mes pieds traînant des racines, et la terreur des premiers hommes me hérissait comme un soleil.”¹⁸

In Triomphe de la Vie, the sequel to Les Vraies Richesses—an equally violent book but not quite so edifying to read—after “un mississippi de jurons magnifiques et tendres”¹⁹ we encounter Médé who has “une voix de cuivre,”²⁰ like Menelaus. After that, should we be offended if Giono, in a slight betrayal of Homer's spirit, declares: “Tenons-nous-en à la vieille définition si on préfère: ‘Ce n'est pas de raconter les choses réellement arrivées qui est l'œuvre propre du poète, mais de bien raconter ce qui pourrait arriver’.”²¹

Giono's Hellenic vein lies in simplicity. It has frequently been said that his simplicity smacks of over-elaboration. That may well be. It is not, however, an argument against the power or the attractiveness of his style. Just as Homer was bound by convention—a metric law, prosody, and tradition—so Giono submits to certain laws, even if they are of his own making.

At times, Giono comes close to an image not seldom found in Homer, as in Que Ma Joie demeure: “Maintenant, du haut de son cheval, il voyait ses larges prés écumeux …”²² At other moments a description is truly Homeric in its breadth; we may frown on weaving looms when the painting of their portrait is done after Achilles' shield. But that is precisely Giono's strength—to transfer images from the extraordinary to the ordinary.

One final illustration of Giono's fine sense of language in its relation to the Greek model may be helpful in pointing up the poetic gifts of the author of Que Ma Joie demeure. We are apprised of young Aurore's suffering. Her heart is afflicted, and her mother is confronted with the boundless pain of the young girl: “Aurore ne parle plus. Aurore se colle le nez à la fenêtre. Aurore regarde la pluie et ne bouge plus. Aurore ne mange guère.”²³ Of course, honesty requires us to add the last sentence of the paragraph which somehow explodes the poetry by its desperate prosaic tone: “J'ai l'impression que cette petite ne dort pas.” But even if the poetic spell is broken, we have had enough of a chance to face the flow of Giono's prose in its natural ease. After all, Homer's heroes, too, had moments of everyday concern in their speech, and his Gods had frightful but all to human tempers.

Only one other writer in France today approaches this mysterious gift of Giono's. Henri Bosco, like Giono a son of the Mediterranean land, knows how to evoke the beauties of nature in a manner not too dissimilar from that of our author. Bosco's characters, too, have the gift of silence, of blending into the landscape, of knowing how to conjure nature's spells. His description of near-magic has a charm comparable to some of Giono's scenes. He is also fond of herbs, of simple pleasures close to the joys of ancient Greece. The basic difference is in the respective formation of both writers. Giono's knowledge of the ancient world was self-taught, while Bosco's was acquired through a life-time of study of the classics. If Giono's peasants often voice a bacchic joie de vivre, Bosco's are pure and somewhat ethereal, at least as far as their sensuality is concerned.

The fact that he discovered Greek beauty through translations, rather than via the original texts, has not impeded Giono's feeling of kinship with the ancient world. On the contrary, he has a freshness of touch that is rarely equalled, and it is tinged with an enthusiasm devoid of nostalgia. By contrast, consider for a moment a poet who, two centuries earlier, wrote many poems on “the Gods of Greece,” i.e., Friedrich Schiller. The German classical poet bitterly regretted that he was so far removed from Greece's eternally blue skies, and in a youthful poem, “Resignation”, he exclaimed: “Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren.” Thus he symbolized the modern era's stifling lack of freedom through his antithetical exaltation of Greece's realm of joyous liberty.

Peyre succinctly characterized Giono's forceful early work and underlined his special stature as a writer when he said that the author of the Pan cycle “Antaeus-like, seems to draw unto him the strength of the earth and Atlas-like carries the weight of the skies on his shoulders.”²⁴ As such he has obvious affinities with a Homer. His early novels in particular open up before our eyes a garden filled with living beings, with flowers and their scents, but also overshadowed by dark clouds and often beaten by strong winds. His is not an idyllic world, but a rough and beautiful one—a world of love and struggle quite like Homer's. Any specifically Hellenistic elements are largely incidental. When he consciously attempts to emulate the ancients, Giono is usually less successful. The strong impression left on us by his best novels stems from the unique combination of a strong and simple plot, fundamental characters, and an array of descriptions so suggestive in their totality that we can visualize the site, hear the ring of the bells, smell the acrid smoke rising from wet wood. If Giono is versatile—and his more recent novels prove that he is—he is also solidly steadfast; a modern, building on the platform of the best of antiquity with materials that will endure. But most interesting of all, critics would generally agree that he is most truly Greek when he least tries to be so. In that sense, he is profoundly a 20th century Hellene.

Notes

1. “The lively Convention of Translation,” in The Craft and Context of Translation ed. by William Arrowsmith and Roger Shattuck, New York, 1964.

2. If more important names are missing in such an enumeration of Hellenistic themes, it is mostly out of respect for Henri Peyre's exhaustive and very suggestive work on this question, L'Influence des littératures antiques sur la littérature française moderne, New Haven, 1941.

3. Christian Michelfelder, Jean Giono et les religions de la terre, Paris, 1938, and Maxwell A. Smith, Jean Giono, New York, 1966.

4. The Contemporary French Novel, New York, 1955, p. 129. (The text is identical in the 1967 ed. entitled Contemporary French Novelists.)

5. Quoted by Peyre, op. cit., p. 130 from a passage in Jean le bleu.

6. Peyre, L'Influence. …, p. 79.

7. Les Nouvelles Littéraires, March 13, 1937.

8. Peyre, Cont. French Novel, p. 138.

9. Pierre de Boisdeffre, Giono, Paris, 1965, p. 109.

10. Accompagnés de la Flûte, Paris, 1924, (1951 ed. p. 32).

11. Regain, Paris, 1930, p. 98.

12. Ibid., p. 236.

13. Ibid., p. 17.

14. Ibid., p. 80.

15. Colline, Paris, 1928, p. 11.

16. Ibid., p. 22.

17. Solitude de la Pitié, Paris, 1932, p. 215.

18. Les Vraies Richesses, Paris, 1937, p. 17.

19. Triomphe de la Vie, Paris, 1942, p. 135.

20. Ibid. Let us remember Homer called Menelaus “βοήν ἀγαθός”.

21. Ibid., p. 43.

22. Que Ma Joie demeure, Paris, 1935, p. 355.

23. Ibid., p. 328.

24. Peyre, Cont. French Novel, p. 136.