SOURCE: Kelley, Monica. “Passive Suicide.” Esprit Createur 40 (spring 2000): 69-78.

[In the following essay, Kelley presents a close textual reading of Giono's novel Un roi sans divertissement, pointing out semiotic similarities between the processes of murder or suicide and the act of writing.]

In his first post-war novel, Un roi sans divertissement, Jean Giono obsessively returns to the physical act of writing. The novel tells the story of a murderer, M.V., and the gendarme, Langlois, who tracks him down. M.V. attacks only during the winter, when heavy snows repaint the world in black and white, and it is strongly suggested that he does so for diversion, to add a little color (namely red) to a dull life. I wish here to address three scenes of writing in this novel.

Scene One—M.V. has just botched an attempt to strangle a villager. Everyone gathers to hear the story, and then they are drawn by a tumult in the pigpen, the same tumult which had brought the near-victim out of his house in the first place. One of the pigs is covered in blood:

On l'avait entaillé de partout, de plus de cent entailles qui avaient dû être faites avec un couteau tranchant comme un rasoir. La plupart de ces entailles n'étaient pas franches, mais en zigzags, serpentines, en courbes, en arcs de cercle, sur toute la peau, très profondes. On les voyait faites avec plaisir. […] Ravanel frottait la bête avec de la neige et, sur la peau un instant nettoyée, on voyait le suintement du sang réapparaître et dessiner comme les lettres d'un langage barbare, inconnu.¹

A simple cutting of the pig's throat would have been comprehensible, normal somehow, not particularly threatening. But this stuns the villagers, and they feel directly menaced by such an act, so menaced that one of them, Bergues, sets out to follow the man who did it. Dripping blood on the white snow (he had been shot by the father of the near-victim), M.V. is easy to follow, but Bergues is still unable to overtake him: “C'était du sang en gouttes, très frais, pur, sur la neige. […] mais il ne put jamais apercevoir autre chose que cette piste bien tracée, ces belles taches de sang frais sur la neige vierge” (464).

Twice in this scene M.V. writes in blood: first on the pig's skin with a knife, and then on the virgin snow. The first writing constitutes one of the most curious passages in the novel. An explanation for the act could come in the murderer's need to draw a victim out of the house; if he had killed the pig right away, it could not have made enough noise to attract the attention of a potential victim and make him come out to see what was the matter. But what confuses this reasonable explanation is the pleasure: “On les voyait faites avec plaisir.” Slashing at random would not have yielded zigzags, coils, and curves, would not have made such uniformly deep cuts. There was a purpose in addition to that of drawing a potential victim out of a warm house. The narrator calls it pleasure, and it must be noted that this pleasure can be described as aesthetic.

M.V. takes pleasure in torturing the pig. His letters are described as belonging to a “barbaric” language. “Barbaric” refers first to those who are foreign, strange, not Greek or Roman, not “civilized.” By extension, “barbaric” comes to mean cruel, from the cruelty of the barbaric invasions. Is M.V.'s cruelty linked to a foreignness, to practices as unknown to the village as the language in which he writes? M.V. comes from another town, but it is by no means foreign: “On va même loin dans des quantités d'endroits, mais on ne va pas à Chichilianne. On irait, on y ferait quoi? On ferait quoi à Chichilianne? Rien. C'est comme ici” (456). The explanation for writing in an unknown, barbaric language cannot thus come literally from his being a foreigner. The very sameness of Chichilianne, its similarity to the village in question, make M.V.'s actions extraordinary: why would he come 21 kilometers on foot through the snow to kill people he did not even know? Later in the story, when M.V. is seen going home, he does not seem like the monster one might have imagined: “sur le seuil, il a dénoué de son cou un cache-nez, très humain” (496). “Je m'attendais à voir ce que je n'avais jamais vu. C'était un homme comme les autres!” (503). It is the juxtaposition of this very human normality with the cruelty of his acts that renders M.V. strange. The juxtaposition is itself somehow barbaric. M.V.'s writing is barbaric first because there is something incomprehensible in writing on a pig at all. Second, there is no message transmitted in the writing; it attempts no communication; except for the pleasure procured, it is useless writing.

M.V.'s second writing in this scene closely follows the first: shot by the father of the near-victim, he drips beautiful drops of fresh blood, writing on the blank page of the virgin snow, a trail which Bergues follows until it disappears into the clouds. Once again, this is writing which leads to nothing, which communicates no message. Bergues, returning from his fruitless pursuit, says that “le sang, le sang sur la neige, très propre, rouge et blanc, c'était très beau” (465). This very ordinary, placid villager is fascinated by what M.V. has done on the snow. Giono writes in parentheses after this declaration (judged “bizarre” by the narrator) the following cryptic interjection: “Je pense à Perceval hypnotisé, endormi; opium? Quoi? Tabac? aspirine du siècle de l'aviateur-bourgeois hypnotisé par le sang des oies sauvages sur la neige” (465). The reference is to Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval, and particularly to a scene in which Perceval is fascinated by drops of blood which a wild goose has left on the snow. The red blood on white snow recalls to him the face of Blanchefleur, and, in a dreamlike state, he knocks down the members of Arthur's court who try to awaken him.² What I want to note in this reference, which I find at least as bizarre as Bergue's statement, is that blood on the snow can hypnotize, calm, or put to sleep, as do opium, tobacco, or aspirin. In other words, the same red blood on white snow which procures aesthetic pleasure can also anaesthetize; the aesthetic, the beautiful, from the Greek “to feel,” can put to sleep, can calm a pain, can help not to feel.³ Asked about this passage, Giono responded: “Est-ce que le phénomène de Perceval hypnotisé par le sang des oies sur la neige n'était pas une façon moyenâgeuse de calmer une douleur (physique ou métaphysique)?” (notes to Un roi 1328). M.V., it is strongly suggested, as I have already said, kills for diversion, out of “ennui.” In killing, he writes or draws on the pig, on the snow, procuring a strong aesthetic pleasure. It would be difficult to imagine a pleasure, an aesthetic experience without feeling. The aesthetic experience, while giving M.V. (and Langlois) strong feelings, must then at the same time calm, anaesthetize, render less painful that metaphysical malady of “ennui.” How can writing be at the same time aesthetic and anaesthetic?

Scene Two—Frédéric, one of the villagers, sees an unknown man climb down a large beech one morning and walk away, leaving the body of his latest victim. He follows the man's tracks, which are “nettes, toutes seules, fraîches,” made in snow which is “entièrement vierge” (Un roi 491). The trace left on this snow, blank like an unfilled page, is, furthermore, “nette, comme gravée au couteau” (492). The man, M.V., leaving these tracks in the snow writing on this blank page with his feet, does so very calmly, with unhurried, peaceful, even steps: “En bas dessous, et toujours avec la même précision, l'homme suivait l'emplacement du sentier; c'est-à-dire qu'il descendait en zigzag, de son pas de promenade” (493). Frédéric sees the man enter his home in Chichilianne, and returns to alert Langlois. The next day, Langlois goes to that home, quickly comes to an agreement with the murderer, and shoots him in the belly with two pistols at the same time.

There is no blood in this scene, even at the moment of M.V.'s death; it is simply said that “il y eut une grosse détonation et l'homme tomba” (504). No puddle of blood, no spattering of blood, no dripping of red blood on the white snow. There is, however, a knife, or rather feet which carve traces in the snow as neatly as would a knife. These feet make zigzags in the snow, as the knife did on the pig's skin. The snow upon which they write is, like that upon which M.V. bled earlier, “vierge.” While there is no direct mention of pleasure taken in this writing/walking, M.V.'s appearance is repeatedly described as “paisible,” that of someone out for a leisurely walk, a “promenade.”

The writing which takes place in this scene is thus not unlike that of the first one. We can recognize the same hand here. But whereas the writing in Scene One was also a dramatic event—a torture and a chase—, this writing is peaceful, perfectly calm. We might say that M.V. has been calmed, anaesthetized, by the killing of his last victim. He writes in the moment of calm, after what we can imagine as the intense aesthetic pleasure of killing. This writing on the snow is in fact framed by two dramatic events: M.V.'s killing of his last victim and Langlois's killing of M.V. Indeed, this writing links the two events: from the first it brings about the second. It is the discovery of the victim which incited Frédéric to follow the strange man who was clearly her murderer. Had M.V. not left such clear tracks, as if engraved with a knife, had the snow not been otherwise perfectly undisturbed, had he not walked so calmly, Frédéric might have found it impossible to follow him all the way. Had Frédéric not followed the murderer, Langlois could not have killed M.V.

Which brings us to another point, or rather a suspicion. Given M.V.'s previously demonstrated ability to make villagers disappear without a trace (either of their bodies or of his passing), and the ease with which he managed to lose Bergues after the pig incident, it is very difficult to imagine that he does not know he is being followed. I would go so far as to say that he does everything to make sure that he is being followed. He goes slowly, leaving excellent tracks. Never does he look back, even when Frédéric makes noises which he has to hear, given that the whole countryside lies in a “silence si tendu qu'on entendait, très loin, la neige craquer sur des arbres qui s'étiraient” (494). M.V. wants to be followed. Frédéric does so at first without thinking. We might say that he is hypnotized by the crime whose results he has just witnessed, by the man whom he saw climbing down the tree, or perhaps by the tracks which he follows in the snow. Only well into the pursuit does he realize what he is doing. “À partir de là,” Giono writes, “il eut conscience des choses” (492). Which means that previously he was unconscious. Even when he realizes what he is doing, he continues to follow M.V., now enjoying the thrill of this slow-speed chase. Like a person under hypnosis who does things he would never dream of doing otherwise, Frédéric becomes “entièrement different du Frédéric […] de la scierie” (494). Why would M.V. want to hypnotize someone into following him?

Scene Three—The first snow of the year. Langlois goes to the home of one of the women in the village to buy a goose. He asks her to cut off its head. She describes what happened afterward:

Il m'a dit: “Donne.” J'y ai donné l'oie. Il l'a tenue par les pattes. Eh bien! il l'a regardée saigner dans la neige. Quand elle a eu saigné un moment, il me l'a rendue. […] Il était toujours au même endroit. Planté. Il regardait à ses pieds le sang de l'oie. […] Est venue cinq heures. La nuit tombait. […] Il était toujours là au même endroit. […] Il n'a pas bougé.

(Un roi 605)

That night, instead of smoking his usual cigar, Langlois smokes a stick of dynamite, and his head, Giono says, “prenait, enfin, les dimensions de l'univers” (606).

Once again, we have writing with blood on snow. Although there is no explicit mention of the snow as “vierge,” we are told that it was the first snow, and thus can imagine that it was still undisturbed. Once again, writing is associated with a sort of hypnosis; Langlois remains planted there in Anselmie's yard, staring at the blood of the goose on the snow. The reference to Perceval is again explicit. And once again, writing precedes a violent death. There is a second act of writing, just prior to Langlois's head blowing up. Normally, the smoking of the cigar in the garden could be seen from inside: “on voyait la forme des montagnes et la braise de cigare se déplacer lentement sur elle comme une lanterne de voiture qui se serait déplacée à travers les forêts, les vallons, les cimes et les crêtes” (602-03). On the night of the suicide, what looked like the usual cigar embers was “le grésillement de la mèche” (605). Waiting for the dynamite to explode (literally) in his face, Langlois walked up and down—walking and writing are also consistently linked—, the light of the fuse tracing against the night sky the path of his walking. This writing is perhaps more ephemeral than the others, but it is a matter of degree: all disappear.

The first question to come out of these three scenes is: What relation exists between writing and cruelty? According to the commonly accepted reading of this novel, cruelty answers a need for diversion. Scene One shows cruelty coming in the form of a very unusual kind of writing—that of a barbaric language on the skin of a pig. If we consult Giono's description of the first pleasure that he derived from writing, we will see that even very ordinary writing can respond to this need to escape boredom.⁴ Employed in a bank to write down and add up long columns of numerals, the young Giono found himself desperately bored:

Alors je découvris que l'écriture pouvait être un dessin. Elle ajoutait même à la joie du dessin un pouvoir de fascination, une sorte de volupté de jonglerie par la vitesse avec laquelle le dessin de l'écriture devait être tracé. […] les lignes de mon écriture me donnaient un plaisir esthétique après m'avoir donné une joie d'exécution. […] je regardais [la page] sous tous les angles pour faire jouer les masses noircies de volutes et d'arabesques.

(Virgile 1044)

These “volutes” and “arabesques” recall the “serpentines,” the “courbes,” and the “arcs de cercle” of M.V.'s designs on the pig. Both accentuate the physical act of writing to the exclusion of whatever the words written might mean; the signifier is densified to the point of opacity. As far as Giono and M.V. are concerned, it seems that there is no signified when pleasure is taken in writing. The figures are irrelevant to the young Giono; the letters on the pig belong to an unknown, barbaric language: in neither case is there any message to be communicated. In both cases there is a boredom to be alleviated.

The apparent difference between the writing of the young Giono and that of M.V. would be the cruelty inherent in the latter: M.V. tortures the pig. And yet Giono suggests elsewhere an identification of writer and murderer. Telling in Noé his experience of writing Un roi sans divertissement, he depicts his study filled with the landscapes and characters of the village: “Il m'a traversé, ou, plus exactement, moi qui ne bougeais pas (ou à peine ce qu'il faut pour écrire) j'ai traversé la forme vaporeuse de M.V. À un moment même, nous avons coïncidé exactement tous les deux; un instant très court parce qu'il continuait à marcher à son pas et que, moi, j'étais immobile. Néanmoins, pendant cet instant—pour court qu'il ait été—j'étais M.V.” (Noé 615).

M.V. is a writer, as we have seen in Scenes One and Two above. For an instant, Giono is also the murderer M.V. While many characters go through him, no other character ever coincides so exactly with the writer. Further on, Giono repeats the telling of this moment of coinciding: “M.V. m'a traversé (comme il le faisait chaque fois, aller et retour—c'était sa route), a coïncidé avec moi le temps d'un éclair (il n'y avait que le petit geste que j'étais obligé de faire pour écrire qui dépassait un peu)” (Noé 617-18). There is a strange vacillation between activity and passivity on the part of Giono: first it is M.V. who goes through him, then it is he who goes through M.V., then it is again M.V. who goes through him. This vacillation hinges on the identity of writer and murderer: in the moments in which M.V. and Giono are one, it is impossible to determine who traverses, who is traversed. Between writing and killing, which deserves the sign of activity and which that of passivity?

The most peculiar detail in this wavering between passivity and activity is that of Giono's immobility. To back up his activity, in support of his assertion that it is more exact to say that he went through M.V., he notes that he was not moving. Or rather, the only gesture which exceeds his immobility is that very small one which is made in writing. It is as if the very act of writing teetered on an invisible fence between activity and passivity. Both times the remark on the gesture of writing is to be found in parentheses. This putting into parentheses signals that the comment is an aside, perhaps even an afterthought, which really has no place in the text proper. At the same time, putting something in parentheses within the text draws attention to it, particularly when the gesture is doubled. This, in Noé, the novel which takes as its subject Giono's writing.

As we have seen in Scenes One and Two above, M.V. is a writer. For several instants, in Noé, Giono is also the murderer M.V. While many characters go through him, no other character ever coincides so exactly with the writer. Twice, the only gesture to exceed this perfect coincidence is that of writing. Could it be that this very small gesture is the only thing which makes the difference between writing and killing/torturing? One consideration must be taken into account before attempting to answer such a question: when M.V. and Giono coincide so exactly, the murderer is on his way to or from killing. The moment of coincidence occurs when M.V. is not in the process of killing, but when Giono is in the process of writing. Would the gesture of writing “exceed” if M.V. coincided with Giono exactly at the moment of killing? Impossible to know, but what we can notice is that Giono does not make the moment of killing coincide with that of writing. In fact, we never actually see, either in Un roi sans divertissement or in Noé, M.V. committing his crimes. They are known only by the traces they leave: the mutilated skin of the pig, the frozen pool of Bergues's blood, the bones and the body which Frédéric finds in the beech. There is something inherently secret about the moment of murder, something which it seems cannot be shown, cannot be told.

Writing, on the other hand, is repeatedly shown by Giono, particularly in the novel Noé. There he undertakes to describe what happened during the period of creation of Un roi sans divertissement. He describes his study in Manosque inundated with the characters and scenes of the novel. However, we know that he did not actually write the book entirely at home, but that a significant part of the work took place in his farmhouse, at La Margotte. In her “Notice” to the Pléiade edition of Un roi sans divertissement, Luce Ricatte signals this discrepancy, and suggests that writing is as secretive a process as I have said that murder is: “Les sources les plus vraies du roman ne sont-elles pas, ici comme ailleurs, celles que Giono garde les plus secrétes, les plus subconscientes?” (1298). Noé, in fact, while pretending to describe the writing process, takes that process as the subject for another fiction, fictionalizes it. “As soon as the text approaches its source,” writes Denis Hollier, reading Sartre's La Nausée, “it comes from nowhere.”⁵ The plethora of details which Giono provides in Noé should make us suspicious: such pointed indications that here we can see the writing taking place hide the very thing which they are supposed to be showing. Might they be attempts to gain a retroactive control over the uncontrollable, constantly escaping text which perpetually dispossesses its writer?

For the secret is perhaps that there is no secret, or rather that the secret cannot be revealed because nobody knows it. There is an irreducible unknown in writing, as there is in death: we can no more know what happens when we write than we can know what happens when we die. All we know are the traces left behind. This then is why in the moment of coincidence of writer and murderer, the small gesture necessary for writing “exceeds”: it is properly speaking superfluous. Described, it is not that which is necessary; necessary, it cannot be described. Writing takes place, yes, but not where Giono points to it, not in that small gesture.

Writer and murderer both accomplish a secret work. Part of the killer's cruelty is writing. The time has come to ask if part of the writer's writing is not also cruel. The apparent difference between the writing of the young Giono and that of M.V. is the cruelty immediately evident in the latter: M.V. tortures the pig. There is something more than the purpose which it serves, something more than the intention of drawing a victim out of the house. This something more is in the very act of writing, not in its results. The writing is itself a spilling of blood, a manner of torturing.

How is Giono's writing cruel like that of M.V.? Giono of course does not write in a barbaric, unknown language; he writes in French. But then, like M.V.'s barbaric writing on the pig, Giono's is not a matter of communication. Literature, unlike any immediately useful communication, has something of the strangeness of M.V.'s writing. Proust says in his Contre Sainte-Beuve that “Les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère.”⁶ If the strangeness of M.V.'s writing is like that of Giono's, if M.V. and Giono can, even for an instant, be one, should we not then consider whether the murderer's cruelty is also to be attributed to the writer? In other words, is there not something already barbaric, already cruel, in literature's making language strange, always foreign? Making language useless for communication, excommunicating us so to speak from our “own” language by making it “une sorte de langue étrangère,” twisting words away from their common, everyday meanings, the writer of literature is cruel.

This cruelty is also, and perhaps primarily, turned inward. Which brings us to a second question raised by these scenes: what relation exists between writing and suicide? Langlois's death in Scene Three is clearly enough a suicide, but what of M.V.'s? Although he does not actually pull the trigger on himself, I read his death also as a suicide, committed through an intermediary, but suicide nonetheless. I have already shown that M.V. wants to be followed. When Langlois comes to his home the next morning, he seems ready: “Il leur fallut très peu de temps pour être d'accord. […] Au bout de, mettons, deux minutes, pas plus, la porte s'ouvrit” (Un roi 502). M.V. makes no effort to escape Langlois, even though legally, since Frédéric has no witnesses, he could have fought the accusation.⁷ Just before Langlois fires, the two men are face to face for a moment, three steps apart: “Là, ils eurent l'air de se mettre d'accord, une fois de plus, l'homme et lui, sans paroles” (Un roi 504). Then, after another moment, unbearable to Frédéric watching from 50 meters away, the guns go off. Langlois has been used in the place of a weapon.

In the cases of both murderer and gendarme, a metaphor for writing precedes the death of the writer. Are we to conclude that writing is a preparation for suicide?

In the section of L'Espace littéraire entitled “La mort possible,” Maurice Blanchot, reading Kafka's journal, arrives at an intimate relation between writing and death.⁸ Death, however, is not so easy to achieve. We have an utter lack of experience of death, of what John Gregg calls the “other side of death,” the loss of consciousness (as opposed to the consciousness of loss of life).⁹ Blanchot takes the example of suicide as that death which should render the experience of death most accessible. By committing suicide, one presumes to take charge of this experience of death, to accede to it in full consciousness.

But, between committing suicide and dying there is an unexpected move from active to passive, as Gregg emphasizes in his reading of Blanchot. The suicide victim—Gregg notes the aptness of this peculiar phrase in English—goes toward his death with the will to die, but he cannot seize that death: “What begins as a concerted act of the will is transformed into fascination, indecision, passivity. […] he who resolves to kill himself ultimately becomes one who submits passively to death and awaits its approach” (Gregg 49). Giono's Langlois might provide the perfect example of this transformation. He has decided to commit suicide. He goes out to smoke his stick of dynamite. But there his activity stops, and he has passively to wait. Literally, he has to wait for the fuse to burn down before the explosion resulting in his death can take place. Death seizes him, rather than the opposite. Likewise, M.V. takes action to bring on his death through Langlois, but must wait passively for the guns to fire into his belly.

Gregg, following Blanchot, compares the writer's experience of writing to this dispossession: “The more he writes and the farther he advances into the literary space, the less clear his original project becomes” (49). M.V. and Langlois, once they start writing, or once they decide to seek out death, the two coinciding perfectly for both of them, are captured, captivated (shall we say hypnotized?) by their writing, by the prospect of their death. Indeed it is perhaps in this moment preceding death that the aesthetic, the strong feeling, the intense and ephemeral pleasure of approaching death, of writing (on a pig, on the snow, on a page), becomes confused with the anaesthetic. The same event fascinates or hypnotizes, at the very moment in which it offers aesthetic pleasure. As they move from deciding to die to waiting for death, M.V. and Langlois write. M.V. traces out a path in the snow; Langlois traces a path against the night sky. Writing is what happens in the space between the activity of deciding to die and the passivity of dying.

Notes

1. Jean Giono, Un roi sans divertissement in Œuvres romanesques complètes, vol. 3, ed. Robert Ricatte (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 463-64. All citations from Giono's works will be taken from this volume of the “Pléiade” edition. Further references will be indicated in the text by an abbreviated title and page number.

2. Chrétien de Troyes, Le Conte du Graal, ou, Le Roman de Perceval, trans. Charles Méla (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990).

3. See Susan Buck-Morss's excellent article, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October 62 (1992): 3-41.

4. It is Philippe Bonnefis who, during a seminar at Emory University in 1992, identified this primal scene of Giono's writing.

5. Denis Hollier, The Politics of Prose: Essay on Sartre, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986), 84.

6. Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 361.

7. Langlois explains to Frédéric why they do not go in to arrest M.V. as soon as they arrive in Chichilianne (in the middle of the night): “Je ne dois pas te le cacher, on n'est pas dans une très belle situation. Tu n'as pas de témoin. Il n'a qu'à dire que tu te trompes” (501).

8. He arrives at such a comparison by way of a phrase from Kafka's journal linking his capacity to write well to his ability to die well, to die content. Reading this association, Blanchot lends to Kafka the following simplified and circular formula: “Écrire pour pouvoir mourir—Mourir pour pouvoir écrire.” Maurice Blanchot, L'Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 111.

9. John Gregg, “Blanchot's Suicidal Artist: Writing and the (Im)Possibility of Death,” Sub-Stance 55 (1988): 49. Further references will be indicated in the text.

   The character Ferdinand, played by Belmondo, in Jean-Luc Godard's film Pierrot le fou also kills himself with dynamite. In the final scene of the film, he has tied himself up with the dynamite and lit the “mèche.” He, too must wait for the fuse to burn down. Just before the explosion, he shouts “Merde! Merde!” It would seem that he changed his mind, but it was too late: death seized him. Jean-Luc Godard, dir. Pierrot le fou, perf. Jean-Paul Belmondo (Rome-Paris Films, 1965).