[In the following essay, O'Brien presents a feminist, deconstructive reading of Giono's Le chant du monde, countering Giono's own self-criticism that the book did not have a sufficiently pacifist message.]

As Pierre Citron reveals in his 1990 biography, Jean Giono was never pleased with his best-selling, critically acclaimed novel Le chant du monde. Giono's own words, in a letter to a friend, attest to his dissatisfaction with this 1934 novel, his sixth, which he called “un livre raté”: “Le chant du monde a un petit côté imbécile et couillon en réalité” (qtd in Citron 195). Perhaps the novel's resemblance to a Hollywood western seemed, upon reflection, too frivolous for such serious times, or its “happy ending” too facile to the increasingly cynical and disillusioned Giono. As Europe marched ever closer to World War II, Giono's faith in “civilized” Western society to lead humans out of what he considered to be the morass of capitalism, exploitative technology, and their inevitable consequence—war—was eroding beyond salvation. Even his ardent and committed efforts as a pacifist were ultimately powerless to prevent the onslaught of armed conflict and its attendant slaughter—something the author had himself experienced as a soldier on the front in World War I, both victim of and witness to horrific violence and brutality. As he became more outspoken and direct in his indictment of the exploitative nature and conflict-prone agendas of fascism and capitalism alike—and later even of communism—he turned away for a time from writing novels with pacifist subtexts and increasingly to composing more polemical manifestos, hoping his words, along with those of his pacifist compatriots in the Association des écrivains et artistes révolutionnaires (AEAR), and later in Les amis du Contadour, would have the power to turn the tide of encroaching hostilities, to countervail those forces Giono believed to be antinaturelles—contrary to human nature. He was, in the end, profoundly disappointed that his words—so powerful in his pre-war novels that they were translated time and again, especially, and ironically, into German—held so little sway in the barbarous world of political aggression.

I would suggest that part of Giono's discontent with Le chant du monde arose from a retrospective realization that this novel's centerpiece of clan conflict and violent revenge clashed with the author's evolving pacifist inclinations. Possibly compounding Giono's perception is the fact that, as Citron points out, the novel's protagonist, Antonio, is in many ways a novelistic incarnation of the author himself. In his retrospective consideration of his novels, Giono was likely unable to avoid comparing Antonio with a later protagonist, Bobi in Que ma joie demeure, who becomes a true—albeit oblique—porte-parole for Giono's pacifist, anti-capitalist message. Moreover, Giono recognizes that Bobi bears an even greater resemblance to the author than does Antonio; as Giono himself remarks in a journal entry, “plus que les autres, [Bobi] est plein de moi cette fois” (qtd in Citron 214). Like the author, Bobi has an agenda, actively seeking to “changer les choses par son discours,” in Citron's words (214)—which was, arguably, Giono's overarching motivation as a novelist in the pre-war years of the 1930s. In fact, Que ma joie demeure has been called Giono's first truly pacifist novel, one that fulfilled his need at the time to express his pacifist message indirectly. Was Giono, then, in his retrospective assessment of the earlier novel—Le chant du monde—being excessively hard on himself, slighting the novel—and, by extension, its protagonist—for failing, even implicitly, adequately to address serious social and political realities? My answer to this question is resoundingly affirmative, since Le chant du monde, whose publication precedes that of Que ma joie demeure by only one year, does indeed harbor a subtle pacifist message to his readers, one that is timely, universal and all the more provocative for its poetic vehicle, for its refusal of the polemical directness characteristic of his manifestos. In fact, what Giono has achieved in Le chant du monde—a sort of cross-gendering of both his hero and his readers—is infinitely more interesting for modern critics since such an approach allows us to revisit Giono's work in light of what John Shawcross calls “those cultural substructs that define gender” (1)—elements that recent scholarship has foregrounded in an effort to come to terms with gender stereotypes in literature and their consequences. My reexamination of this novel will show how Giono, through the images he creates and the characters he animates, explodes gender(ed) expectations by dint of this (arguably subconscious) cross-gendering enterprise, allowing us, as Shawcross might put it, to recognize and deconstruct conventional received notions about both the author's and the reader's logocentrisms (3).

As Elsie Mayer has observed, the notion of “cross-gendering” in the feminist lexicon gained currency and legitimacy during the decade of the 1980s, surfacing in a variety of discussions (4), including especially treatments of literary transvestism and investigations of cross-gender reading practices. Conventional discussions of cross-gender writing typically regard the practice as a sort of imaginative gymnastic displacement, wherein one gender assumes the persona or writes in the guise or from the perspective of the other gender. In terms of reading across gender boundaries, Mayer emphasizes especially models where: 1. men read and interpret female texts and vice-versa; 2. thematically similar texts—one by a man and one by a woman—are compared; 3. a single text serves as the basis for masculinist and feminist interpretations (5). My reading of Le chant du monde takes this third model as its point of departure and enriches it by elaborating cross-gendering as both a compositional and a reading strategy, that is, as one in which the author's conscious or unconscious narrative techniques and strategies activate certain cross-gendered responses in the reader.

At first glance, Giono's novel appears to be firmly inscribed in a readily recognizable masculinist genre, that of the action-adventure tale; it has been called both “un roman d'action violent” (Citron 252) and “un western rustique” (Alluin 189). It is simultaneously a modern-day rendering of Greek mythology; critics have drawn parallels between Antonio and Odysseus and Antonio and Jason, and in many ways the story parallels the conventional quest myth.¹ Moreover, Giono's protagonist, Antonio, is portrayed as the quintessential male hero, an admirable specimen of masculinity: powerfully built, blond, golden-skinned, in the prime of life (not unlike Giono himself at the moment of composition). In the course of his adventures, in addition to fierce human adversaries, Antonio must contend with topographical antagonists: imposing, challenging mountains (less prominent are the more evocatively feminine “collines” of an earlier eponymous novel) and a wild, unruly, virile “fleuve”: “cette eau violente, musclée et bondissante, [qui] se jette où elle voudra,” as Giono describes it (qtd in Citron 192). As readers, we fall easily into a mode of textual encounter marked by androcentricity, one that foregrounds the stereotypical male hero and his feats, and, reading on this level, we are satisfied at his ability to prevail over hostile forces and emerge from the fray sober but victorious. Perhaps Giono too, in retrospectively assessing his novel and finding it lacking, was mired in such stereotypes, unable consciously to apprehend the amazing cross-gendering tour de force he had accomplished.

Gender stereotypes seem to operate effectively to direct our experience with this text: Giono is writing “as a man,” that is, producing a discourse that falls squarely into the stereotypical range of texts that a male writer might be expected to produce. Similarly, reading according to gender(ed) conventions, we read as we have been conditioned to read, that is, men read as men, and women, too, read as men.² In fact, in order to accomplish my rereading of Giono's novel and to resist the text's overt imperatives that impel me to identify with the masculine experience and perspective that seemingly dominate the work, I must hypothesize myself as a female reader in order to activate and sanction women's experience as an orientation from which to read. Adopting such a stance allows readers of both genders to become cognizant of, in Elaine Showalter's words, “the significance of [a given text's] sexual codes” (25) and to partake in a new reading experience, one in which both men and women “question the literary and political assumptions on which their reading experience has been based” (Culler 534).

When we hypothesize ourselves as women readers, we inevitably attend to aspects of a given text that may have previously escaped our attention. Reading Le chant du monde from this perspective, we are able to perceive how Giono's narration deconstructs the grid of androcentricity that we initially encounter. Thus it is that, in spite of Antonio's very masculine qualities, attitudes, and behaviors and the overtly “masculine” genre or mode that is evoked upon initial perusal of Le chant du monde, the reader—at least subconsciously—cannot help but be affected by the overwhelmingly female, surprisingly maternal, tenor of the work. Giono has, in fact, created a world imbued with female attributes from whose influence even his prototypically masculine hero Antonio cannot escape. Nature, which Giono endows with major-character status, is redolent with female sexuality and maternal potency. Her sexuality is generally portrayed as teasing and gentle rather than aggressively insistent: Giono describes, for example, the movement of a willow branch against Antonio's face as a “petite caresse” (213). Her maternal side is more imposing; during nearly the entire duration of their ascent to the high country of Rébeillard, Antonio and his friend Matelot are encircled either by a penetrating rain or a dense, viscous fog, evoking unmistakably the enveloping, enfolding solitude of the womb. This female quality is not lost on Antonio, who, seeming to fear the loss of his masculine identity, remarks: “Tout est trop mou. Tout est trop femme” (259). In addition, although Giono spares no words in depicting Antonio's masculine attributes—highlighting especially his supple muscularity and robust force—he subtly suggests that Antonio harbors a latent feminine element. We learn, for example, that “[l]a caresse […] de l'eau étai[…]t dans cette carrure d'homme” (201) and that even the stalwart Antonio is capable of tremulous, “female” vibrations: “Antonio sentit un grand tremblement qui montait dans lui et il ne pouvait pas l'arrêter. Il tremblait comme le chêne battu par les eaux à la pointe de son île” (228). In other words, Giono inflects his novelistic world, including his protagonist, with elements of the female to such a degree that he effectively undercuts the apparent masculinity of his protagonist, and, by extension, of the entire phallocentric, patriarchal cultural and political hegemony that conditions both the author's and the reader's experience. In so doing, Giono complicates his supposed stereotypically gender- and genre-derived inclinations in writing the novel as well as our gendered responses as readers.

Our initial encounters with Antonio the river-man underscore his masculinity and direct us to read according to gender stereotypes. Like the fleuve Giono describes—that body of water in which his protagonist feels most at home—Antonio is virile and commanding. Solitary, intent on setting his own course, he has avoided participation in the human community. Rather, in the fashion of any good stereotypical male loner, he has been content to live alone on his island, making only occasional forays into a neighboring village when, responding to the elemental pull of testosterone, he manages to steal a night with some man's wife. Given that Antonio is the product of an author immersed in Western cultural practices, Antonio's extreme individualism perhaps comes as no surprise. In fact, he initially appears as the adult outcome of what Nancy Chodorow would see as a male child who has severed all connection with the mother figure so as to solidify his masculine identity—a male for whom “phallic-masculine issues [have] become intertwined with supposedly nongender-differentiated object-relational and ego issues concerning a sense of separate self” (Chodorow 145). To his credit, Antonio seems to be an individual completely in sync with his natural surroundings and lives harmoniously among the flora and fauna that comprise his world, in many ways undifferentiated from nature. In fact, in the opening pages, Giono emphasizes Antonio's beast-like instincts almost to the exclusion of his affective or rational human attributes. Frequently, his appreciation of the feminized natural world is rendered as equally instinctive—respectful yet physical, palpably sexual rather than æsthetic or emotional. Thus when Antonio inspects a beech tree, in search of indications regarding some natural disturbance he senses is astir, his probing caress reads almost as a type of foreplay, prelude to an act of heterosexual love:

Antonio s'adossa à un fayard. Près de son oreille il entendit un petit sifflement. Il toucha avec son doigt. C'était la sève qui gouttait d'une fente de l'écorce. Ça venait de s'ouvrir. Il sentait sous son doigt la lèvre du bois vert qui s'élargissait doucement.

(194)

At the outset, Giono depicts Antonio as instinctively aware of the power inherent in this feminized nature but ignorant of its significance for his own maturation. This is particularly true at moments when the author emphasizes nature's maternal traits; frequently, he portrays her physical dominion as absolute and unmistakably uterine, evocative of some viscous, amniotic fluid that surrounds Antonio. However, prior to Antonio's emotional maturation, he can only equate its qualities with his own phallic experience of diving into the river for fish:

Une vie épaisse coulait doucement sur les vallons et les collines de la terre. Antonio la sentait qui passait contre lui; elle lui tapait dans les jambes, elle passait entre ses jambes, entre ses bras et sa poitrine, contre ses joues, dans ses cheveux, comme quand on plonge dans un trou plein de poissons.

(195; emphasis added)

Antonio generally responds to the powerful challenges of these ubiquitous “female” elements in stereotypically “male” fashion. This behavior is especially noticeable in Antonio's encounters with the river, deep water being, perhaps, the most compelling archetypal symbol of the female,³ in spite of the aforementioned masculine qualities that Giono attributes to the river. In the following example, he attempts with brute force to assert his will and, by dint of sheer physical effort, to have his way. This passage so suggestively illustrates Antonio's situation that the reader is not at all surprised at his resemblance to a glistening penis as he withdraws, spent, from the water:

Antonio lançait son bras loin là-bas devant, sa main saisissait la force de l'eau. Il la poussait en bas sous lui cependant qu'il cisaillait le courant avec ses fortes cuisses […]. Il essayait de couper le courant. Il fut roulé bord sur bord comme un tronc d'arbre. Il plongea […]. Le courant était partout dur et serré […].

Enfin il trouva une petite faille dans le courant. Il s'y jeta dans un grand coup de ses deux cuisses. L'eau emporta ses jambes. Il lutta des épaules et des bras, son dur visage tourné vers l'amont. Il piochait de ses grandes mains; enfin, il sentit que l'eau glissait sous son ventre dans la bonne direction. Il avançait. Au bout de son effort […] il sortit de l'eau […] ruisselant, reluisant.

(204-05)

These images, among others, function as directives to the reader, who, if he or she is reading along stereotypical gender(ed) lines, accepts the novel as a conventional action-adventure text and its protagonist as yet another example of raw, inevitable, indomitable manhood.

However, Antonio's one-sided physical relationship with the feminized natural world points up a similar lack in his emotional life. Flesh-and-blood women, like the ubiquitous female presence in nature, have remained Other for Antonio. Like his friend Matelot's surviving twin son, Antonio fears those changes that would bring balance to his life. When Matelot's son fails to return from a trip into the mountains, Antonio, accompanied by the aging Matelot, sets off to seek the missing twin and return him to his mother. More than merely paralleling the mythic quest, however, Antonio's journey leads him to a new understanding and acceptance of this omnipresent female principle—a force that, at its most basic, embraces change. During the course of his journey, his encounters with women will awaken him to the meaning of this female energy, culminating in his psychological and emotional rebirth to an existence that must needs abandon androcentrism and incorporate the gynocentric as its organizing principle. His eventual acceptance of and acquiescence to this force, especially in its maternal embodiments, not only corrects his emotional misalignment but also reveals to him—and to the reader—the powerful corrective inherent in the female mode of being.

Just as Giono's feminized nature incorporates elements of both female sexuality and maternality, so too do his human female characters represent the many faces—and protean forces—of womanhood. Giono, well read in mythology,⁴ may have been subconsciously drawing on the Fates, frequently represented as Virgin (creator), Mother (preserver), and Crone (destroyer). Antonio, uninitiated to the powerful meanings of female energies, behaves, at the outset, with stunning naiveté; his early encounters with women reflect this lack of emotional maturity. For example, before the journey proper begins, he encounters Charlotte, Matelot's daughter-in-law, widow of the deceased twin and a nursing mother, who makes her carnal desire for Antonio clearly known. Antonio—normally somewhat of a womanizer—curiously avoids her advances, in spite of his acknowledged attraction to her physical endowments. Perhaps, in her dual depiction as both mother and sexual being, she quite simply overwhelms Antonio, as if he is incapable in his present state of reconciling these two female states. Indeed, the meaning of the maternal is, at this point, alien to Antonio's comprehension; his incomprehension gives rise, quite understandably, to his apprehensiveness toward the female Other, underscoring the fear of change that has, up to this point, dominated his existence. Thus he fails to recognize in the aging Junie, Matelot's wife, the positive qualities of the Crone, seeing Junie instead as some indecorous profanation of motherhood, as nothing more than “cette vieille femme toute en ventre et en seins, cette faiseuse d'enfants morts, ce visage en chair éteinte” (202). He is blind to her role in the great world-cycle and thus to the positive aspects of change that she signifies. As Jane Caputi reminds us, “[f]ear of change is the same as fear of age, maturation, and death” (246)—all of which the Crone represents.

The turning point in Antonio's journey toward emotional equilibrium and psychological integration comes during the ascent to the high country of Rébeillard when Antonio and Matelot discover a woman on her back near a bush, thrashing about in painful effort, her legs and belly arching above the ground, moving in some secret incomprehensible ritual, exposed to the night. Antonio, seemingly discomfited by such naked force in the obviously unfamiliar context of a woman in labor, tries to cover these signs of maternal Otherness, only to be shocked by the life force he encounters when he inadvertently touches her: “Antonio essaya de rabattre les jupes. Il sentit que là-dessous le ventre de la femme était vivant d'une vie houleuse comme la mer. Il se recula comme s'il avait touché du feu” (216). Nonetheless, it is precisely this raw confrontation with maternal energic forces that initiates Antonio's awakening to his human destiny.

Antonio next encounters another Crone-figure, who lives in a nearby cabin and whose aid he solicits for the unknown woman, newly delivered of a son. This time, however, he defers to the older woman—known only as “la mère de la route”—addressing her respectfully as “Mère.” In true Crone fashion, she proves wise in ways beyond the scope of Antonio's experience; she correctly interprets his reluctance to minister to the physical needs of the newly delivered woman—whose name is Clara—as a sign that he fears further contact with this aspect of female existence. Exhibiting apprehension at her instructions, Antonio is apparently awestruck by the arcane nature of the experience:

Elle dégrafa le caraco.

« Tire. Elle aura du lait. Regarde ».

Il avait un peu honte de regarder cette chair sans défense. Il y avait une énorme vie dans ces seins. Il n'en avait jamais vu d'aussi beaux.

« Ça sera une grande nourrice. Il faut lui enlever sa chemise. On dirait que tu as peur d'elle. Touche-la carrément […] ».

(220)

Antonio finally acquiesces to her maternal authority and begins to bathe the unconscious woman. This physical encounter with female nudity will be, however, like no other in his vast sexual experience with human women. While the following passage seems upon initial perusal to recall Antonio's earlier sexually determined relationship with nature, the descriptive parallel drawn between the woman's body and the earth suggests his growing awareness of the unifying omnipresence of the female principle—a recognition which borders on epiphany:

Il y versait de l'eau-de-vie chaude et il frottait les flancs de la femme […]. Il touchait le dessous des seins […]. Il frotta doucement le globe en remontant vers le dessous des bras. Toutes les vallées, tous les plis, toutes les douces collines de ce corps, il les sentait dans sa main, elles entraient dans lui, elles se marquaient dans sa chair à lui à mesure qu'il les touchait avec leurs profondeurs et leurs gonflements et ça faisait un tout petit peu mal, puis ça éclatait dans lui comme une gerbe trop grosse qui écarte son lien et qui s'étale.

(220)

Later, unable to sleep, Antonio encounters a cowherd beyond the cabin who, mindful of Antonio's reputation as a “beau parleur,” induces him to name the constellations resplendent above them in the night sky. Antonio's descriptive appellations evidence how deeply his psyche has been inflected with the female mystery incarnated in Clara; they mirror simultaneously the stages of his evolving comprehension of the extra-sexual role of the female force in the universe, as his metaphors move from a purely sexual reference, to an earth-centered analogy to, ultimately, a potentially spiritual image, wherein the eyes, the proverbial “mirror of the soul,” suggest Antonio's growing understanding of the female as a source of spiritual power:

Celles-là, dit Antonio, moi je vais les appeler « la blessure de la femme » […] parce qu'elles font comme un trou dans la nuit. Elles luisent sur la bordure. Dedans c'est la nuit noire et on ne sait pas ce qui va sortir […]. Celles-là, moi je vais les appeler « les seins de la femme » parce qu'elles sont entassées comme des collines […]. Et celles-là, là-bas vers l'est […]. Je vais les appeler « les yeux ». Parce que moi, je crois qu'elles sont comme le regard de celle qui dort et qui n'a pas encore ouvert les paupières.

(222)

When the new mother finally does awaken, we learn that she is blind, and that her name—Clara—is somewhat ironic, since she proves capable of “seeing”—of penetrating, with Crone-like wisdom—to the core of those around her in ways beyond ordinary human capability. Giono further highlights Clara's uniqueness by hinting at the possibility of a virgin birth, thus calling into focus the third of the Fates:

[L'enfant] n'était pas rouge comme les nouveau-nés ordinaires mais déjà sa peau blanchissait […]. [Il] lui ressemblait, il n'avait rien d'étranger. C'était exactement la même bouche, le même nez, la même paupière […] le même front, les mêmes joues […] on voyait qu'il portait la graine du visage de la femme et que tout allait fleurir et s'épanouir dans la forme exacte de ce visage de femme, là, sur l'oreiller. Elle semblait l'avoir fait seule.

(226; emphasis added)

Antonio has indeed been marked by Clara, by her obvious divergence—physical and otherwise—from other females of his acquaintance. However, it is her identity as mother that affects him most profoundly, leading him to recognize his affection for her. One night, en route once again to Rébeillard, Antonio bundles himself up in his greatcoat and mimics the sound of a mother kissing her baby, wondering at the mystery such maternal affection entails:

Alors il fit doucement avec sa bouche le bruit d'une caresse. Il n'avait jamais entendu de baisers comme ça, avant cette nuit là-bas dans la maison de la mère de la route. Clara avait embrassé le bras du petit. Il avait entendu ce même baiser tout à l'heure quand la paysanne installée dans son coin avait caressé l'enfant malade.

Il revoyait Clara avec son enfant chaud à côté d'elle […].

Il aurait voulu être désignée seul par la vie pour conduire Clara à travers tout ce qui a une forme et une couleur.

(257-58)

Indeed, it is precisely this woman's physical infirmity—her blindness—that will be crucial to Antonio's spiritual and emotional growth, since it inspires him to abandon his egoistic existence and assume responsibility for another's well-being. From this point on, although his quest has only just begun, Antonio will no longer view the world through his eyes only; his experiences will reflect his efforts increasingly to apprehend the world from her perspective and to find a way to share his view of the world with her. He has taken his first step toward integrating elements of what Sally Kitch calls the “female gender ethos”—which emphasizes, in general, selfless behavior and human relational imperatives (94)—into his personality.

As Antonio and Matelot continue their ascent, they twice encounter embodiments of the maternal: young mothers tending to their sick infants, one of whom seems capable of conjuring up images out of the fire. Female power is not limited to young mothers, however. Rumors of a formidable matriarchy in the high country—ruled by “Gina la vieille”—reach their ears; apparently, all the women of the ruling clan are born powerful, strong and beautiful, while the men have the misfortune to be “faits avec les restes” (270). Significantly, all the women Antonio and Matelot encounter en route are mothers of some sort—the Crone-like Junie, an aging mother; Charlotte, a nursing mother; the Crone-like mère de la route; Clara, “virgin”/mother/Crone; the aforementioned young mothers with sick children—underscoring the potency of the maternal in Antonio's and Matelot's evolution.

The significance of the female element is driven home with finality once the pair arrives at Villevieille—the city at the heart of Rébeillard where Antonio and Matelot seek out Junie's dwarf-like, humpbacked brother Jérome, a wise, medical proficient known as Toussaint, whose reputation as a healer has earned him the respect of friend and foe alike. He is, as we discover, even more gifted at emotional healing; with sagacious intuitiveness, he penetrates immediately to the core of Antonio's déséquilibre. One winter evening, Antonio feels compelled to discuss his growing attraction to Clara with Toussaint, then, suddenly apologetic, tries to dismiss having broached the subject: “Oh, c'est seulement une femme, dit Antonio. Ne t'inquiète pas” (306). Toussaint advises him regarding the folly of belittling the role of the female, intimating that Antonio has not yet learned life's great lesson: that all must come to believe in and submit to the great procreative pull of the world-song and the nurturing love that drives it (312).

Soon after this lesson, signs of Antonio's maturation begin to accrue. He verbally bears witness to his commitment to Clara, the human embodiment of all aspects of the female principle inscribed in the world-matrix—a covenant that, once freely admitted, overpowers his lust, allowing him to resist the enticements of a nubile young woman who lures him through the streets of Villevieille. More importantly, Antonio's now more mature appreciation of the spiritual, emotional power inherent in the female gender ethos has truly effected significant political change in him: in the heat of battle against the adversary, Antonio restrains Matelot's son from further gratuitous violence and revenge. It is as if Antonio has incorporated into his formerly nearly unilaterally androcentric self sufficient elements of the female gender ethos to move him, at least partially, from aggression to pacifism—a trait with which the female gender ethos has traditionally been associated, as Caputi, Margaret Homans, Judith Wishnia, and many others confirm. In Kitch's parlance, we might say that Antonio, who at the outset evidences a solidly male gender ethos—which shares a “well-defined sense of self, individual autonomy […] self-reliance […] superiority and dominance” with the war ethos (94)—comes to embody elements of the female gender ethos, which, in addition to nurturing, privileges “self-sacrifice, putting others' needs before one's own, the maintenance of human relationships, and the preservation of fragile life in a hostile world” (Kitch 94).

It is during Antonio's return downriver to the island that Giono's cross-gendering of his hero is fully realized. Through Clara, Antonio overcomes his fear of Otherness—of female mystery and power. He learns that Clara, like himself, enjoys a special relationship with the natural world—that, indeed, Clara and the earth are linked in some mysterious corporeal symbiosis, as her words suggest: “Toutes les choses du monde arrivent à des endroits de mon corps—elle toucha ses cuisses, ses seins, son cou, ses joues, son front, ses cheveux—c'est attaché à moi par des petites ficelles tremblantes. Je suis le printemps” (400). Most important, though, Antonio learns the joy that ensues when one embraces the altruistic, nurturing imperatives of the female gender ethos. Once this threshold has been traversed, the female is no longer Other for Antonio but represents instead a unifying energy capable of enriching him emotionally, of bringing his life into balance. In his text, Giono makes clear that what the transformed Antonio knows and senses is gleaned purely from his newborn sensitivity—from his openness to the experiences of the (female) Other, from the capacity for intimacy which incorporation of the female gender ethos has given him—rather than from direct questioning or carnal knowledge:

Il savait si Clara voulait l'ombre […]. Il savait si Clara voulait la lumière […]. Il savait si Clara voulait des branches. Il sentit qu'elle avait besoin, grand besoin tout de suite de fleurs, de cette odeur de bête chaude et il tirait la barre de toutes ses forces […]. Il était dans Clara. Il savait ce qu'elle voulait mieux qu'elle. Il voulait ce qu'elle voulait. Sa joie était sa joie […]. Il était entouré d'elle.

(410)

With this recognition, Antonio accedes to a higher level of being, no longer the quintessential patriarchal man, mired in what Leslie Marmon Silko has referred to as the patriarchal “customs” of opposition, hierarchy, inequality and enmity (qtd. in Caputi 277).

In cross-gendering his hero, Giono surreptitiously pleads for patriarchal man to embrace the creative energies of the Virgin, the nurturing, life-giving, preserving powers of the Mother, the capacity for change and natural destruction of the Crone. Giono's cross-gendering of Antonio comprises, moreover, an attempt to sensitize the reader to a more egalitarian ethic, to incite us as readers to cross gender boundaries in order to examine our own gender-derived expectations and behaviors and thus to appreciate the balance that the female gender ethos—that of the Other—can bring to human existence, gently coercing us to examine the sanity of a world dominated by the male gender/war ethos. Giono's cross-gendered hero can thus be read as a reflection of his (arguably) subconscious recognition that the male ethic, carried to extremes, results in war, and thus carries a powerful pacifist message. In other words, Giono deconstructs the hegemonic masculinist thought system that underlies his experience as a writer and ours as readers, inviting us to read Antonio as a parable for pre-war European society and its hopelessly imbalanced course of action. Through his cross-gendering enterprise in Le chant du monde, Giono powerfully sanctions what Caputi calls “a radical transmutation—a qualitative change in human identity and our sense of self and species in the cosmos” (248)—one that will lead to a true revolution requiring “male renunciations of power and privilege, and cultural acknowledgment of a non-human female primacy in which both women and men participate” (Caputi 278). Only when we succeed, Giono seems to suggest, at embracing the female gender ethos—which in the public arena tends to “support non-violence, conciliation, and attention to issues concerning the quality of human life” (Kitch 94)—will all humans come to participate fully in le chant du monde—the great world-song of Giono's title.

Notes

1. Walker's exploration of myth in Le chant du monde notes substantial parallels with traditional myth, including the elements of “required departure, prolonged adventures, and triumphant return” as well as seasonal changes which provide the context for the appearance of the themes of withdrawal and reemergence (141-42).

2. For a discussion of the evolution of gender and reading in the context of feminist criticism, see Culler.

3. See especially Jung, Symbols of Transformation.

4. Citron notes that from the age of 16, Giono had been reading Homer; that during his adolescence Giono “se dit hanté par les héros des Perses, d'Agamemnon, de Prométhée enchaîné” (56); and that “il se laissa envahir par Virgile” (56), whose poems he will later emulate. Moreover, Giono's first long narrative production—Naissance de l'Odyssée—was initially conceived, in Giono's words, as an attempt to “refai[re] pas à pas […] sur une vieille carte les errances d'Odysseus le divin menteur” (qtd in Citron 108), with whom he felt a sort of intimate kinship (Citron 108).

Works Cited

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Chodorow, Nancy. “Gender Differences in the Pre-Oedipal Period.” The Women and Language Debate: A Sourcebook. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. 134-52.

Citron, Pierre. Giono. Paris: Seuil, 1990.

Culler, Jonathan. “Reading as a Woman.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. 509-24.

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Showalter, Elaine. “Towards a Feminist Poetics.” Women Writing and Writing about Women. Ed. Mary Jacobus. London: Croon Helm, 1979. 22-41.

Walker, Hallam. “Myth in Giono's Le chant du monde.” Symposium 15.2 (Summer 1961):140-50.

Wishnia, Judith. “Pacifism and Feminism in Historical Perspective.” Genes and Gender VI: On Peace, War, and Gender. Ed. Anne E. Hunter. New York: The Feminist Press, 1991. 84-91.