[In the following essay, Scott explores the theme of the healing power of language and music in the early novels of Giono.]

The first and most obvious manifestation of Giono's fascination with the power and potential of language—his own startlingly rich imagery—has rightly received the close attention of critics and scholars.¹ What has not been sufficiently explored is the way in which this fascination is expressed, especially in Giono's pre-war writings, in a second major way: namely, as a theme. 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.

To be more precise, the theme which this article sets out to study is that of spoken language. Giono's feeling for the force and mobility of human speech, which he as a writer strives to fix within the written dialogue of his characters, is revealed, for example, when he confesses:

La langue des hommes libres est comme une bête bondissante et là, j'ai seulement un peu écarté les barreaux de la cage.²

Elsewhere, this same admiration of the word-craftsman for the marvellous oral spontaneity of certain individuals is shown in his address to an imaginary fountain-keeper:

D'où te vient ce flux poétique qui coule de toi sans arrêt? Préparestu ce que tu me dis, calcules-tu, fais-tu des raies d'encre sur les lignes écrites? Tu n'inventes pas, voyons, ça ne te vient pas dans la bouche comme de la salive, tes chansons, tes contes, tes histoires, et tout ce sel que tu mets dans les mots c'est une provision que tu prépares quand je ne suis pas là, et que tu apprends par cœur? Dis-moi oui, pour que je sois consolé.³

This 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:

Le mouvement des langues dans la bouche [est] comme le mouvement des serpents aveugles au fond des cavernes de la terre.

(p. 207)

In Le Serpent d'étoiles, there occurs a similar telephoto view of the act of speaking:

… Il parlait en craquement sombre: sa bouche s'ouvrait dans sa barbe et la parole sortait d'entre des dents toutes saines et glacées malgré son âge.

(p. 34)

The same visual quality of speech is evident later in the same book:

Il dit des mots: je les vis. Je ne les entendis pas dans tout ce bruit; je les vis au blanc des dents et à ce retroussis de moustaches ….

(p. 52)

If spoken words are in this case visible, in other places they assume different properties under the transforming influence of Giono's imagery. They assume solid form, to be weighed in the palm or tossed from hand to hand like stones (Serpent, p. 59); they can become physical containers of memory (ibid., p. 56); they can make the throat rough with their sharpness (Naissance de l'Odyssée, p. 66), cause the mouth to glow red with their heat (Que ma joie demeure, pp. 416-17); or they can achieve an independence from the speaker, flow into his mouth of their own volition (Naissance, pp. 54, 61, 247).

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; the only mention of books in this rural world is of Jaume's Raspail in Colline, apart from a less modest reference, in Les Vraies Richesses (p. 86), to Giono's own books adorning the peasants' mantelpiece. 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’ (p. 42), compensating for his frustrated and neurotic character by creating in speech an image of himself that men will admire. The flimsy plot of the book centres on his fear of divine retribution for this lying. His anxiety, however, seems unfounded, for the gods are benevolent both to him and to his wife Penelope. And it is, significantly, by the medium of speech, in the form of mysterious ‘voices’, that they kindle in Penelope the hope that Ulysses is still alive: she hears ‘une voix anonyme, une grande voix issue de mille gosiers et elle parlait de lui’ (p. 157). Among the minor characters, too, verbal gifts abound. The donkeyman ‘streams with words’ (p. 52); the blind guitar-player casts spells with his voice (pp. 58, 100), as does the minstrel (p. 112); Contolavos is described as being ‘bonne langue’ (p. 90); Nausicaa rouses the jealousy of Penelope with her glib tongue (p. 122); and, most striking of all, Archias gives voice to a vision of the gods in words that terrify all who hear him (pp. 10-11). 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. La Mammèche in Regain and Bobi in Que ma joie demeure are among his successors in this respect, yet they both differ from him in that they attempt to use their privileged position for the good of others. Janet, on the other hand, refuses to do so. His 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;⁴ 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. ‘C'est toi qui as fait cela’, Jaume accuses him, looking back on the disasters that have befallen the community. ‘Pas avec tes mains, sûr, avec ta langue, ta pute de langue. T'as dans la bouche tout le jus sucré du mal’ (p. 132). Even after Janet's death, the hurt he has caused Jaume by his cruel words on Jaume's daughter Ulalie lives on:

Il y a deux mètres de terre sur Janet, et, dans la bouche de Janet il y a déjà de la pourriture, mais les paroles qu'elle a semées sont vivantes comme de mauvaises herbes.

(p. 185)

In Janet's case, speech is thus associated with evil. This too, like the general presentation of Nature in Colline, serves the particular purpose of the book yet is untypical of the role of speech in Giono's work. 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 (p. 13), while the life-denying gloom of the inhabitants of La Douloire is expressed in their non-speaking:

Après ça, tous les trois, ce fut comme si on leur avait coupé la langue.

Le train-train ordinaire de la Douloire, avec ses bruits de poules, mais, de voix d'homme … pas.

Ils allaient, ils venaient, sans rien dire.

(p. 132)

Contrasted to this is the marvellous rustic eloquence of the narrator Amédée, and also the semi-magical appeal of the voice of Albin. The narrator admits to the same difficulty as the narrator of Le Serpent d'étoiles in transcribing into written words the full effect of Albin's voice:

… Ce que je peux pas vous faire comprendre, c'est le ton de tout ça.

Ça avait commencé comme une voix de tout le monde, mais à mesure qu'il entrait dans le chaud-vif de son malheur elle devenait plus sienne, elle semblait faite exprès pour l'histoire. C'était parti du moment où le nom de son village lui était monté à la bouche. De ce coup, ce son de langue, ce ne fut plus la voix d'un homme … C'était grave, profond, de long souffle et de même verte force que le vent. Ça semblait comme le vent, la parole des arbres, des herbes, des montagnes et des ciels ….

(pp. 36-37)

This 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. The nature of Albin's vocal powers confirms what he has already said about his closeness to ‘les choses de la terre’ (p. 14).

It might be felt that too much is being interpreted here from one possibly arbitrary metaphorical phrase. Yet such comparisons abound in Giono's writings to such an extent as to rule out any chance of arbitrariness. For example, in the short story ‘Prélude de Pan’, a mysterious stranger speaks to a dove, and in his voice, as in Albin's, there are obscure echoes of the natural world:

Cette voix, dès entendue, on ne pouvait plus bouger ni bras ni jambes. On se disait: ‘Mais, j'ai déjà entendu ça?’ et on avait la tête pleine d'arbres et d'oiseaux, et de pluie, et de vent, et du tressautement de la terre.

(Solitude de la pitié, p. 43)

Again and again, the human voice is compared by Giono to natural phenomena. The wood cutters in Naissance de l'Odyssée ‘parlaient gravement comme des arbres’ (p. 55); Pan, in the same book, speaks ‘comme une forêt’ (p. 106); the voice of the rhapsodist who sings to Ulysses is compared to a lily (p. 98); Antonio's voice, in Le Chant du monde, resembles ‘le cri d'un gros oiseau’ (p. 15); that of a shepherd in Le Serpent d'étoiles is like a spring (p. 27). In more fantastical moments, human characters vocalize intelligibly to animals, like the master-shepherd speaking ‘la langue des moutons’ (Serpent, p. 52).

If Man, through Giono's imagery, is made to speak like Nature, then Nature even more frequently speaks like Man. Among the many examples of personification of natural phenomena that can be found in Giono's writings, images of speech stand out. Ulysses hears ‘le grand palabre des chênaies et de la mer’ (Naissance, p. 111); a wall, a well, trees, all utter words to him in ‘[des] voix familières’ (p. 133), ‘des voix imprécises’ (p. 136); a fountain ‘speaks’ to him to guide him home (p. 201); trees form sentences (p. 251); water is described as ‘clapotant avec un bruit de langue humaine’ (p. 245). In Regain too, trees talk (pp. 93, 156); in Colline, Gondran hears ‘la voix de l'aqueduc et le chant des arbres’ (p. 52); in Le Serpent d'étoiles, voices issue from ‘le grand gosier de la terre’ (p. 30) and the clouds ‘talk’ to the shepherd (p. 46); in Que ma joie demeure, Giono writes of the ‘language’ of the leaves (p. 237), of the ‘voice’ of the river (p. 287), of the voice of the wind with its ‘sonorités presque humaines’ (p. 381); in L'Eau vive, ‘cette terre parle d'une force qui charrie les montagnes’ (p. 209); the mountain speaks with its ‘grande voix grave’ (p. 228); the little girl listens in awe to the ‘parole confuse’ of the waterfall (p. 229). And, again in moments of high fantasy, animals and birds speak in human tongue (Un de Baumugnes, p. 62, Que ma joie demeure, pp. 110, 239, etc.)

Many of these 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.⁵ Giono's aim, to strike the reader with the sense of an animate and sentient Nature endowed with all the powers of Man, including mysterious human-like vocal powers, is summed up when he writes:

Il y a bien longtemps que je désire écrire un roman dans lequel on entendrait chanter le monde. Dans tous les livres actuels on donne à mon avis une trop grande place aux êtres mesquins et l'on néglige de nous faire percevoir le halètement des beaux habitants de l'univers. … Je sais bien qu'on ne peut guère concevoir un roman sans homme, puisqu'il y en a dans le monde. Ce qu'il faudrait, c'est le mettre à sa place, ne pas le faire le centre de tout, être assez humble pour s'apercevoir qu'une montagne existe non seulement comme hauteur et largeur mais comme poids, effluves, gestes, puissance d'envoûtement, paroles, sympathie.

(Solitude, pp. 215-16)

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:

—Tu sais où il faut faire des inventions? Dans l'appel, dans la voix, dans le son qui sort de ton cœur … Connais-tu la voix des lézards? … Et les courtilières la nuit! Et les oiseaux et tout. Tout se cherche. Tout s'appelle.

(pp. 195-6)

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; after his first sexual contact with Joséphine,

[Bobi] avait une voix spéciale, printanière et qui venait de la gorge; elle était faite pour l'appel. Avec cette voix … on pouvait seulement appeler.

(Que ma joie demeure, pp. 214-15)

This insistence on Man-produced sound, as Man's contribution to the sounds of the world, finds another extension in the theme of music, which is so closely linked to the theme of speech as to require some mention here. The obvious point of reference is the mythical village of Baumugnes, whose inhabitants, having had their tongues cut out, replace speech with music, through which they communicate with each other. Albin, the descendant of these people, ‘speaks’ with his monica. Angèle, on hearing it, remarks that it ‘speaks’ to her the same ‘words’ as on her first encounter with Albin (Un de Baumugnes, p. 144). 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. Music can conjure up precise mental pictures as vividly as words. One can compare, for example, the way in which Albin's music re-creates Baumugnes in Amédée's mind's eye (pp. 125-28) with the vivid word-depiction of unseen landscapes by the Piedmontese refugee in Jean le Bleu (p. 38); or else the visual images of Nature inspired by the music of the shepherds in Le Serpent d'étoiles—the aim of which is to ‘faire voir du pays’ (p. 115)—with the verbal outpourings of Janet in Colline and their creation in Gondran's head of ‘des images de la terre’ (p. 115). On countless occasions, speech and music are described in terms of each other.⁶ Also, analogies between music and the world of Nature are created through Giono's imagery;⁷ the many musical instruments described by Giono, some real, some invented,⁸ 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 … (Serpent, p. 108).

‘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.⁹ Giono's own delight in song leads him to reproduce, or rather invent, the lyrics of the songs sung by his characters.¹⁰ Song is another human contribution to the natural melodies of the universe; it is, as Amédée tells Angèle in Un de Baumugnes, the counterbalance to ‘les mauvais bruits, les bruits durs’ (p. 117). Sometimes, as when Barbe sings while working at the loom in Que ma joie demeure (p. 411), it barely leaves the realms of the wordless and inarticulate; it retains its echoes of the first rhythmic sounds of those prehistoric men at whom Giono's work so often hints. In L'Eau vive, in fact, Giono describes the development of song from the first vocal pronouncement to the finished, rhythmic product, all stemming from ‘un premier artisan aède planté au fond du temps’ (p. 34).

Song, like eloquent speech, is seen by Giono as an enrichment of men's lives, an invaluable gift. If Antonio in Le Chant du monde bears the nickname of ‘Bouche d'or’, it is not just for his golden moustache, but also because of his precious talent as speaker and singer. Song has the same healing properties as Albin's monica, which, he tells Amédée, is for ‘la guérison des hommes’ (p. 119); or as the flute in Que ma joie demeure ‘qui chante pour les lépreux’ (p. 78); or as the music of Nature in the following words:

On aimait cette musique de cyprès … Ce bruit sur les soucis dans la tête, ah! que c'est bon.

(Solitude, pp. 180-1)

Here the speech/music/song association is joined by another of Giono's central themes: that of healing—a theme developed in its literal medical sense in the post-war novel Le Hussard sur le toit and in a more figurative fashion in the peasant novels. As well as being linked with music, healing is also related to poetry in the words of the hero's father in Jean le Bleu, who tells his son:

—Si, quand tu seras un homme, tu connais ces deux choses: la poésie et la science d'éteindre les plaies, alors, tu seras un homme.

(p. 190)

Typically, there is no clear indication of what ‘poetry’ means in this context; but its representative in this section of Jean le Bleu is Odripano, who, it has been seen, is an apostle of the human voice. The poetry that can heal the world is not only poetry in its widest Gionese sense of a spirit of mind encouraging a cheerful openness to the physical world, but also the vocal and ultimately verbal expression of this spirit.

Poetry in this double sense forms the major theme of Que ma joie demeure, which, in this respect as in others, is the culmination of Giono's thinking during the 1930s. The hero Bobi wants to heal the spiritual leprosy of the plateau-dwellers not only by cultivating in them a response to their surroundings but also through the medium of speech. ‘Tu étais déjà un peu guéri’, he proudly tells Jourdan, looking back on their first verbal encounter (p. 201). Bobi's speech-acrobatics, parallel to his physical prowess as an acrobat, are summed up in the oft-repeated formula ‘Orion-fleur de carotte’. The initial declaration that ‘Orion ressemble à une fleur de carotte’ (p. 20) is an invitation to the peasants to make the analogy between the mightiest elements in the universe and the everyday objects around them, thus poeticizing the latter and with them their whole lives. It is also a prototype of the imagery that marks Bobi's speech.

The use of imagery by certain carefully selected characters in Giono's novels is noticeable, in fact, even as early as Colline. When Janet sees a whip lying on the floor and describes it as a snake (pp. 38-39), 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 it is also the difference between the poet and the ordinary man. Not that Gondran, compared to the other peasants, is particularly ordinary in this respect; more than anybody apart from Janet, he frequently thinks and speaks in images (pp. 29, 62-63). It is no coincidence that he is Janet's first target, as the most responsive to Janet's magical speech, and thus the most vulnerable point for the evil tongue to attack.

This same image-based responsiveness between two people is seen in a happier form between Bobi and Aurore in Que ma joie demeure (p. 434) and also, in Le Chant du monde, between Antonio and Clara, who are drawn together by their similar, subtly imaged speech (p. 72). Like Bobi, Antonio creates analogies with the stars (p. 77); and this same source of imagery—reflecting perhaps Giono's passion for astronomy¹¹—is tapped also by the poetic fountain-keeper of L'Eau vive. In describing this latter character, Giono reveals again the vital role that, for him, the speaker-poet fulfils in the world:

Il habite rue du Poète.

J'ai des amis qui vont rire parce qu'ils connaissent la rue du Poète à Manosque: c'est une impasse.

Mais mon homme aboutit quelque part …

… Il parle …

Et c'est de cette façon que l'impasse du poète aboutit en plein ciel, en plein pré de ciel, dans une immensité où le ciel est épais comme de l'herbe; et l'on se baisse et l'on dit: ‘Des pâquerettes.’ On avance la main: non, ce sont des étoiles.

(p. 35)

In Que ma joie demeure, as in Colline, some of the peasants are more susceptible than others to the poet's word-magic. Carle, largely incomprehensible to the other peasants, has a natural tendency to express himself in images that astonishes and attracts Bobi. In the following snippet of conversation, the simile used by Carle to describe his horse conveys precisely to Bobi the mental image required:

—Oui, dit [Carle], il est beau, comme vous dites. Et encore vous ne l'avez pas vu en plein jour. Il a un chanfrein pointu et long comme une feuille d'iris.

—Feuille d'iris? dit Bobi étonné.

—Oui, monsieur, dit Carle.

—Si j'entends bien, dit Bobi, il a le devant du visage allongé, plat, brillant et pointu avec la pointe placée juste entre les deux naseaux?

—Juste, dit Carle un peu haletant, vous êtes connaisseur?

—Non, dit Bobi.

(p. 52)

Jourdan too, early in the book, shows some talent for image-making (pp. 62-63), and he quickly follows Bobi's example of star-flower analogies (p. 88).

But before pursuing the deeper implications of the theme of language in this key novel, it would seem necessary at this stage to consider, on the basis of the material described so far, the sources and significance of Giono's insistence on the speech process. One need not look very far for a source, in fact: the initial inspiration of this theme 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,¹² 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’,¹³ as well as by other characters in the Odyssey, like Echeneus, ‘the most eloquent speaker among them’ (p. 116), or Antinous (p. 82) or Menelaus (p. 68). Speech, in Homer, is often abused too,—like Angèle, the original Penelope is lured by ‘seductive talk’ (p. 57), while Euryalis utters ‘an ugly speech’ (p. 126). But the gods are always on hand to accord their heavenly gift of song (p. 135); or else they intervene in a less direct way, in the ‘rumours from Heaven that so often spread the truth’ (pp. 32, 43, 56), and which foreshadow the mysterious informative voices of Giono's version.¹⁴

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’; ‘la pluie, le vent, l'orage chantent à leurs oreilles les enseignements sacrés’, Giono says of his peasants (L'Eau vive, p. 40). 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. Homer's many glowing references to eloquent, yarn-spinning bards would seem to reflect a certain self-advertisement on the part of the minstrels who originally sang the probably oral epic. In the same way, Giono's tribe of ‘bouches d'or’ are all created in his own image, for Giono too, as those who met him relate, and as television audiences all too infrequently discovered, was a marvellous oral artist. He knew it, too: he relates proudly in Les Vraies richesses his story-telling exploits at the ill-fated Contadour meetings of 1935:

Je racontais les histoires indoues des événements arrivés pendant le sommeil de Rama, le repos de l'armée de l'Indra sous les eaux du lac forestier, le barattement de la mer, la victoire de Vichnou sur les Asuras ….

(p. ii)¹⁵

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. There may also be more than a hint of the memory of Giono's own father and his gift for story-telling, as related in Jean le Bleu.

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. He writes:

Tous les outils qui servent à raconter une histoire m'intéressent. Et en premier lieu, naturellement, l'écriture ou la parole: il n'y a qu'une légère différence entre les deux …¹⁶

Given this proximity between the two forms of language, it would follow that, for Giono, the healing powers and world-role ascribed by him to spoken poetry are, or should be, the properties of literature also. This is confirmed through the mouth of the Swiss woman in Giono's short story ‘Vie de Mademoiselle Amandine’:

—Vous qui êtes Français [she says to the narrator], dites-moi pourquoi, dans tout votre trésor littéraire, vous n'avez pas de livres remèdes? Pourquoi vous ne pensez jamais aux désespérés? Tous vos livres disent non à la vie … N'aurez-vous jamais que le plus bas? Ne penserez-vous jamais à ceux qui ont besoin de comprendre le monde?

(L'Eau vive, p. 133)

She cites, as examples of healing writers, Whitman, Thoreau, Hamsun—apostles, like Giono, of Nature.

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. This special role justifies the poet's existence in a world where other men toil. ‘Le poète’, says Giono, ‘doit être un professeur d'espérance. A cette seule condition, il a sa place à côté des hommes qui travaillent, et il a droit au pain et au vin’ (L'Eau vive, p. 172). The poet's whole function consists in saying, in employing his special talent for the speech that is the birthright of all men:

Son travail à lui, c'est de dire. Il a été désigné pour ça. Les autres font. …

Si, devant des gens en pleine santé, l'on prononce les mots ordinaires de la nature: foin, herbe, prairie, saules, fleuves, sapins, montagnes, collines, on les voit comme touchés par un doigt magique …

Mais si l'on dit: fleuve! ah! nous voyons: le ruissellement sur les montagnes, l'effort des épaules d'eau à travers les forêts …

Voilà la mission du poète.

(L'Eau vive, pp. 172-73)

In thus describing the semi-magical effect of giving voice to the names of natural phenomena, Giono strangely recalls the famous text of Mallarmé:

Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l'oubli où ma voix relègue aucun contour, en tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l'absente de tous bouquets.¹⁷

But whereas Mallarmé's verbal pronouncement connives at the retention of the immaterial abstraction of the object in the mind of the reader, Giono seeks instead to refer us to the material world, to make us rediscover through his words the physical beauties of Nature. He has more in common with Claudel's conception of the poet, expressed as follows:

Ainsi quand tu parles, ô poëte, dans une énumération délectable
Proférant de chaque chose le nom,
Comme un père tu l'appelles mystérieusement dans son principe, et selon que jadis
Tu participas à sa création, tu coopères à son existence!(18)

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, and of his spokesman Bobi with his image-prototype ‘Orion-fleur de carotte’.

Que ma joie demeure, to which one can now return, 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. Bobi's imaged speech simply draws a bemused ‘Pardon?’ from Randoulet, and even from Jourdan. Even when he speaks more simply, he finds that, unless he uses precisely the same formulas as the peasants would use, he risks not being understood. Randoulet does not grasp the sense of ‘Ton blé, tu l'as semé dans quel endroit de la terre?’ and responds only to the more elementary and familiar ‘Où est ton champ?’ (p. 417)¹⁹ From the very start of the book, Bobi admits the perennial nature of this problem: ‘On m'a dit: “On ne voit jamais ce que vous voulez dire”’ (p. 21). ‘His Orion-fleur de carotte’ analogy is totally beyond the comprehension of Jacquou (p. 193); nor is it certain that Jourdan grasps it either: he merely translates Orion into a kind of talismanic symbol, to be carved on the hand-made loom (p. 405). However much the peasants appear to fall willingly in line with Bobi's plans for them, his linguistic adventure is something on which they cannot embark. When they try, they mislead themselves. Jourdan, for example, attempts to verbalize his vision of strange lights in the night as ‘Elleapostropheèffeo’ (p. 63), but finds he is looking at nothing more cosmically significant than the light in his own house, shining through the windows and the cracks in the door. Here the attempt to poeticize has led to a false and meaningless end. It has led away from reality instead of towards an enrichment of it.²⁰

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 mysterious farmer at Fra-Josépine adds to this problem his own doubts about poetry in his dialogues with Bobi:

—Cesse de profiter de ton avantage de poète. Ne me couvre plus d'images. Ne jette plus sur moi toutes ces images qui me lèchent avec leurs langues. Ne me parle plus de là-haut où ta voix fait écho avec les étoiles. Je t'ai dit qu'il fallait peu de mots. N'en dis pas tant. Dis-les justes.

(p. 268)

Poetry, he concedes, is a necessary initiating force. 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.

How much weight to attach to the words of this character is one of the more difficult problems of interpretation in Que ma joie demeure. W. D. Redfern argues that the man's standpoint is ‘as alien to Giono as it is to Bobi’ (p. 78). Yet there are visible attempts on Giono's part to paint a fair and even sympathetic portrait. The man not only acknowledges that the poet has some role to play (and even uses images in speaking), but he also shows a taste for singing—always a sign of Giono's favour—as well as kindness and practical sense after the death of Aurore. The fact that his reservations about poetry do not stand alone but are supported by the peasants' experiences, suggests that what he says should at least be taken seriously, and respected as Giono's tentative counter to Bobi's claims for poetry. We should not expect the novelist to make clear to us which way his preferences tend, to one character or another; his job is simply to present the alternatives. But even at the ending of the book, there is a further reference that is relevant to this problem. Bobi's anguished recollection of his past, as he leaves the plateau following the suicide of Aurore, reveals to us the origin of his mysterious Orion symbol. Orion, we learn, was the nickname of one of the children of Bobi's mentor, the showman Fabre, and of his wife La Voie lactée. This information, coming two pages before Bobi's death, is surely intended to cast more doubt on the magical, externally relevant nature of Bobi's vision. Bobi's favourite metaphor is no key to a great cosmic truth, born of a contemplation of the heavens. It stems instead from within Bobi, a reflexion of the inner man and his past life. No less interesting or authentic a source of Bobi's imagery, it is nevertheless hardly the vehicle of universal knowledge and joy that he wishes it to be.²¹ Bobi's poetry, with its resonant personal associations, cannot be as rich in significance to the others as it is to him. If through Orion he desires to communicate and share his joy, then he will, perhaps, fail. His joy will remain unshared and thus will die. As Giono himself says in Les vraies richesses: ‘Ma joie ne demeurera que si elle est la joie de tous … Ai-je trouvé la joie? Non … J'ai trouvé ma joie. Et c'est terriblement autre chose’ (pp. viii, iv). 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. Perhaps he felt that he had departed too far from reality in his poeticizing of the peasant life. He was soon to admit in L'Eau vive:

Le lyrisme des hommes de la terre, le lyrisme des artisans ne s'élève jamais bien haut. Il y a le boulet du métier …

Celui qui fait encore son travail au petit araire avec un vieux mulet, mais à celui-là le travail casse la poitrine. … Il lui faut toute sa voix pour commander au mulet. Il ne lui reste guère de pensées …

Quant j'ai vu ça, ç'a été une grande désillusion. Il me semble que je devais trouver là, la source lyrique de tout ce cosmique répandu goutte à goutte dans les inventions. Non, ça n'était pas là.

(p. 57)

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’.

Notes

1. v. C. Chonez, Giono par lui-même, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1956, pp. 80 ff, S. Ullmann, Style in the French Novel, Cambridge, University Press, 1957, pp. 217-31; W. D. Redfern, The Private World of Jean Giono, Oxford, Blackwell, 1967, pp. 118-42.

2. Le Serpent d'étoiles, Livre de poche, p. 118. All quotations from Giono's works are taken, unless otherwise indicated, from the current Livre de poche editions, with the following exceptions: for Naissance de l'Odyssée, Grasset, 1938; Jean le Bleu, Macmillan, 1968 (ed. M. G. Jones); Les vraies richesses, Grasset, 1936; Solitude de la pitié, Gallimard, 1932.

3. L'Eau vive, p. 40. The Livre de Poche edition of this work inexplicably bears the main title Rondeur des jours. While my references are to this edition, I have preferred to retain the original title.

4. Giono explains this peculiarity of Colline as follows: ‘Quand j'eus dessein de dire sur PAN ce que je savais, il me parut que cette douleur devait avoir la grande place, la première … je voulus, voyant déjà l'ensemble de l'œuvre, qu'on fût marqué comme moi, dès l'abord, du cachet du dieu’ (original edition, Grasset, 1929, preface).

5. As Professor Ullmann says, ‘The peculiar structure of his imagery is the stylistic counterpart of [his] pantheistic communion with nature’ (p. 225).

6. e.g. Naissance de l'Odyssée, pp. 114-15, 144-5; Jean le Bleu, p. 83; Que ma joie demeure, p. 133, etc. The close relationship Giono sees between music and language also accounts for his attempt to create in Batailles dans la montagne a literary parallel to Beethoven's Fourth Symphony.

7. e.g. Serpent, p. 50; L'Eau vive, p. 8, etc.

8. As well as the orthodox monica in Un de Baumugnes, the bugle of Carle's son in Que ma joie demeure, and the numerous flutes, there are the more fanciful tymphon and gargoulette of Le Serpent d'étoiles.

9. e.g. the singing fountain of Naissance, pp. 160-1, the cypress in Solitude, pp. 180-1, the tree in Serpent, p. 39, the meadows, the river and the cliffs in Que ma joie demeure, pp. 211, 287, 478, etc.

10. Naissance, p. 99; Jean le Bleu, p. 91; Que ma joie demeure, pp. 159, 303-4, as well as the chansons de métier of the artisans in L'Eau vive.

11. v. Le Poids du ciel.

12. Giono describes his first contact with Homer, through the Iliad, in Jean le Bleu, p. 138.

13. Homer, The Odyssey, translated by E. V. Rieu, Penguin Books, 1966, p. 126. All references to this edition.

14. Professor Ullmann also sees Homer's influence in Giono's preference for comparisons (pp. 218-19). One wonders whether Giono's much-loved narrative technique of recruiting a string of different characters to take over the narration from time to time, giving us a different ‘voice's’ version of the events, also has its source in the succession of related stories within Homer's epics.

15. Cf. Bobi: ‘Je vais vous raconter des histoires … sur les étoiles, ou bien sur les légendes …’ (p. 484).

16. ‘Une question d'écriture’ in Midi Libre, Montpellier, 26/10/1969.

17. Crise de vers.

18. ‘Les Muses’ in Cinq grandes odes.

19. In his notes on the Dominici trial, Giono also, significantly, remarks on the defendant's inability to grasp any question not framed in his own familiar vocabulary.

20. I am unable to agree here with W. D. Redfern's account of this episode, which presents it as something of a triumph for Jourdan (p. 75). In the text of the novel, Jourdan's great disappointment is patent: ‘Nous nous imaginons des mondes et ça n'est que la lumière autour de la porte’ (p. 65).

21. The change in application of the ‘Orion-fleur de carotte’ image offers an interesting parallel with the transition from Mallarmé's ‘windows on the ideal world’ (‘Les Fenêtres’) to the sterile, self-reflecting mirror of Hérodiade.