by Jean Giono
Such is the state toward which our peasant farmers begin to slide upon hearing Gondran’s visionary perception that everything around them is alive. Their disquiet deepens when the fountain—their sole source of water—suddenly stops flowing, as though its throat were plugged up. As their thirst grows and their fear intensifies, the relations between them get more jagged; things are coming unglued. All that the men can think of is to consult the foul-tempered Janet, who lies paralyzed and dying on his mattress, hallucinating snakes and rehearsing obscene memories. Jaume decides to brave the old man’s scorn. He lays out their situation for Janet—who after all is the only one among them who understood how to douse for water or to divine the weather, a gnarled tree of an old man who alone knew the arcane uses of all the plants thereabouts. Janet listens but only stalls at first, goading Jaume with insults, until, breathing hard, he slips into a treelike trance, and his earthen voice comes unblocked—as though the stopped-up waters of the fountain had found this new outlet. The torrent of speech tells of uncanny powers . . . of a strange landlord in a sheepskin coat whose voice is the sighing of the wind, a master of tenderness who speaks to foxes, hawks, and chestnut trees all in their own tongue.
Jaume listens, tries to take it all in. Yet he can no more integrate this weird knowledge than Gondran can his earlier vision. It’s too ambiguous, too complex, too difficult to reconcile. Old Janet must be tricking him. Something evil, he suspects, must be at work, and Janet—in cahoots with the rocks, the wild boars, and the surging mass of green life—is probably behind it.
•
For those reared in a Christian culture (even rustic and relatively impious peasants) the first contact with Pan stirs fear, brings panic. Vouched even a faint glimpse into the horned god’s polyerotic cosmos, wherein plants are sentient and the wind is alive, the immediate impulse is to try to assimilate that wild vision to one’s habitual sense of morality, which sorts things into those that are good and those that are bad. Yet the multiform and shadowed richness of the wild, wherein each being—trout, sycamore, mountain lion—enacts its own interplay with the local earth while being dependent upon all the others, can never be squared with such a black-and-white logic. The radical plurality of willful organisms and elements acting seemingly at cross-purposes within any mostly wild ecosystem necessarily confounds any simple polarity between a pure good and a pure evil. Faced with wild nature’s unruly refusal to sort itself into two camps, civilization cannot help but demonize it—construing nature as a malevolent realm that must be subdued, blunted, and brought under control.
Giono was too awake, and too savvy an artist, to present a bucolic view of nature shorn of its ferocity and bloodletting, stripped of its capricious moods and its manifest dangers. Yet he knew well the inner conflict that his nascent ecological stance would stir within his fellow citizens, the impossibility of reconciling such a stance with a collective worldview based upon the denigration of the senses by the intellect and the subjugation of nature by technology. He knew the instinctive recourse to conventional moral categories that the vision of an animate, breathing planet would provoke . . . because the same conflict was roiling in his own chest. It roils in us, too, as we keep reading: Is old Janet simply a scapegoat upon whom the other characters project their fears? Or is he an avatar of that other goat, the capricious goat god himself, able to rally the malevolence of nature with his witching language? By letting this unresolved tension unfurl among the several characters in Hill, Giono was clearing out his conscience and his creativity for the full espousal of the pagan, animist cosmos that his subsequent fiction would undertake—for the massively erotic, earthly faith that was soon to burst upon his readers.
•
Giono’s insights into the consequences of a way of life that elevates itself above the rest of nature, and his insights regarding the contours of a truly ecological culture, hold vital clues for our contemporary situation. His early novels call us toward the primacy of place, and the importance of bodily engagement with the creatures and the seasons of a place. They encourage a renewal of small-scale, face-to-face community, and stress that no human community can be healthy without honoring its thorough embedment within a wider, more-than-human community of animals, plants, and earthly elements. For Giono was convinced that our social bonds inevitably fray and falter if they’re not fed by interaction with the living land; that the best chance for a just society, and the only prospect for a meaningful peace, lies in renouncing the dream of mastery and dedicating ourselves—wherever we find ourselves—to the replenishment and flourishing of the local earth.*
More significantly, Giono realizes that we’ll continue to hold ourselves aloof from the rest of nature as long as we assume that subjectivity is an exclusively human possession, or even that the capacity for feelingful experience is reserved solely for those beings that are deemed “alive” by the natural sciences. Only by reconceiving life as a quality proper to the whole of this earthly cosmos do we free our bodily senses to engage, to participate, to resonate with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings. When we concede that mountains and rivers have their own forms of vitality, that the ground itself senses our weight, that the winds and the thunderclouds seethe with sensation and feeling—only then do we free our own sentience to find its place within the wider matrix.
With this notion, Giono taps into a logic much older than the literate intellect, with its capacity for detachment and abstraction. The deeply animistic way of speaking that he deploys in his novels of peasant life is common to nonliterate, oral cultures throughout the world and is especially pronounced among indigenous, place-based peoples. Such discourse is also preserved in a tradition closer to the author’s Mediterranean heritage, the Greek epics of Homer (who was himself an oral rhapsode, a nonliterate bard). Just as Homer draws steadily upon a stock of repeated epithets—“the wine-dark sea,” “rosy-fingered dawn”—so Giono has his own stock of similes and metaphoric phrases that return again and again in these novels, although always with a freshness that makes the phrase seem newly born: the wind speaks with a thousand green tongues; the rain walks across the land; one’s inward mood buzzes like a swarm of bees; the sun leaps into the sky neighing like a stallion (in Song of the World), or leaps into the sky bristling like a wrestler (in Hill).
Indeed, throughout his first ten novels Giono seems intent on celebrating and rejuvenating oral culture—the culture of convivial storytelling, of spontaneous oral eloquence, of musical speech and word magic. Not to the exclusion of literate culture (Giono was a prodigious lover of literature) but rather underneath the culture of books: He wanted to replenish this more ancient, visceral layer of language that holds our ears open to the speech of rivers and woodlands and the rain.
And it’s here, I believe, that we find Giono’s most remarkable contribution to the work of cultural metamorphosis, and to the prospect of an ecological future. In contrast to those who contend that verbal language, by its nature, necessarily breaks our direct, present-moment experience of the world around us—that the simple act of speaking inevitably tears the speaker out of her felt, sensorial participation with the sensuous surroundings—Giono shows that there exist ways of speaking that actually open our senses, ways of wielding words that can hold our speaking bodies in attentive rapport with the more-than-human terrain. He was the great pioneer of such a language, discovering an array of oral techniques that can be applied and put to use in our own time.
For example: Giono often elucidates human events by way of metaphors drawn directly from the local earth, while describing shifts in the surrounding landscape using metaphors drawn from the human body (or from the physical gestures of other animals). While today it has become a facile commonplace to say “the earth is alive,” the meaning becomes far more compelling when we speak of the visible terrain as flesh—as a living, breathing body. Moreover, it is one thing to be intellectually convinced of our human interdependence with other beings; Giono showed that by using corporeal and sensorial
turns of phrase that mingle the flesh of humans and other animals with that of plants and earthly elements; by wielding metaphors that merge weather phenomena with sensations that we feel in our torso or our limbs; by combining in one extended metaphor terms drawn from different sensory modalities (that is, by using audible terms to describe visual phenomena, or tactile terms to describe olfactory sensations)—such intellectual notions begin to be experienced as visceral, felt realities.
We will not likely mobilize others to act on behalf of a more-than-human earth if our everyday language holds us aloof from that earth—if even the discourse of environmentalism remains couched in mechanical and statistical terms that stifle any instinctive, animal empathy with the animate terrain. The American philosopher Richard Rorty held that it is not those persons who argue well who are likely to change the world, but rather those who speak differently. For all who work for ecological change, and for a societal swerve away from our currently calamitous trajectory, Jean Giono remains the great artist of such a way of speaking differently.
—DAVID ABRAM
*For those readers who wish to sample Giono’s ecological cosmology in its full wonder, I suggest reading, at minimum, Song of the World (1934), translated by Henri Fluchere and Geoffrey Myers, and Joy of Man’s Desiring (1935), translated by Katherine Allen Clarke, as well as Giono’s well-known fable, The Man Who Planted Trees (especially as brought to the screen by the artist Frédéric Back, whose animated film won an Oscar in 1988).
HILL
To the memory of my father.
—JEAN GIONO
To the memory of my father.
—P. E.
FOUR HOUSES, orchids flowering up to the eaves, emerge from a dense stand of grain.
Up there among the hills, where earth’s flesh folds in thick rolls.
Sainfoin in bloom bleeds red under the olive trees. Bees dance around birches sticky with sap.
A fountain murmurs and overflows in two streams that plunge from a ledge and scatter in the wind. Gurgling under the grass, they reunite and course through a bed of rushes.
The wind hums in the plane trees.
These are the Bastides Blanches, the White Houses.
The remnants of a hamlet perched halfway between the plain, where steam-powered threshers roar in tumult, and the vast, lavender wasteland, the wind’s domain, in the frigid shadow of the mountain range of Lure.
The land of wind.
And the land of the untamed too: the garter snake coils from a spray of lavender; the squirrel darts, canopied by its tail, clutching an acorn; the weasel jabs its snout into the wind, a bead of blood glistening on its whisker tip; the fox reads the tracks of the partridge through the grass.
The wild boar groans under the junipers. Her babies, milk trickling from their mouths, prick their ears at the tall, gesticulating trees.
Then the wind lets go of the trees, silence lulls the branches, and the litter of the grunting sow snort as they tug at her teats.
•
Wild things and people from the Bastides cross paths at the spring, this fluid running out of solid rock, so soothing to both tongue and coat.
After nightfall in the open country there’s a muffled migration toward anything that’s singing and fresh.
And by daylight too, when thirst becomes overwhelming.
The solitary wild boar sniffs his way toward the farmsteads.
He knows all about siesta time.
At a trot he makes a wide detour under cover of the shrubs. Then, from the nearest point, he leaps.
And now he’s in deep. He wallows in the water. Mud coats his belly.
Freshness envelops him head to tail, back to belly.
He bites at the mouth of the spring.
Sweet, liquid coolness laps against his skin.
•
All of a sudden he tears himself away from these transports of pleasure and gallops off toward the woods.
He’s heard a farmhouse shutter squeak.
He’s well aware that a shutter tends to squeak when someone tries to open it carefully.
Jaume fires a round of buckshot, blind.
A leaf drops from the linden.
“What did you fire at?”
“A boar. Look at it over there, the son of a whore.”
•
Calm, blue, Mount Lure dominates the landscape and blocks out the west with its huge, numb, mountain body.
Gray vultures haunt it.
They wheel all day in the watery sky like sage leaves.
Sometimes they take off on voyages.
Other times they sleep with their wings spread, breasting the steady force of the breeze.
Then Lure looms up between earth and sun, and long before nightfall its shadow plunges the Bastides into darkness.
•
Married couples live in two of the houses.
One belongs to Gondran le Médéric. He married Marguerite Ricard. Her father, Janet, lives with them.
One belongs to Aphrodis Arbaud. He married a woman from Pertuis.
They have two little daughters, one three, one five.
Then there are:
César Maurras, his mother, and their young welfare worker.
Alexandre Jaume, who lives with his daughter, Ulalie. And finally, Gagou.
So they’re an even dozen, plus Gagou, who throws off the reckoning.
•
The houses enclose a small square of bare ground—a shared space, and a place for playing at boules.
The wash house lies under the big oak.
You scrub your laundry in a sandstone sarcophagus carved on the inside to resemble a man in chain mail.
The cavity for the cadaver brims with green, brackish water that quivers with the etchings of aquatic insects.
The sides of this massive coffin hold images of women flagellating themselves with laurel boughs.
Aphrodis Arbaud unearthed this age-old stone one time when he was uprooting an olive tree.
•
The houses mirror their occupants.
A bushy Virginia creeper climbs all over Jaume’s place, and above the front door it looks just like the walrus moustache that hangs over his mouth.
And they’re all like that.
Arbaud’s: dolled up and painted with ochre twice a year; Gondran’s place, Maurras’s place, and Gagou’s.
Oh yes, Gagou’s place resembles its owner too.
•
He arrived at the Bastides on a summer’s evening three years ago, just when they were finished winnowing late-ripened wheat with the night wind.
A piece of string held up his britches; he was shirtless.
A drooping lip, a lifeless eye, but blue, blue . . . and two buck teeth sticking out through his lips.
He drooled.
People asked him questions. He answered only: “Gagou, ga . . . gou . . .” on two different notes, like some sort of animal.
Then he danced the way marmots do, swaying, and dangling his hands.
A simpleton.
They gave him a meal, and some straw to bed down on.
•
The Bastides had once been a market town, back in the days when the seigneurs of Aix liked to breathe the bracing air of the hills.
All of their fine houses have crumbled to dust. Only the peasants’ remain standing.
Even so, on the far side of the wash house two grass-covered pillars mark the entrance to a lane.
Pillars capped by globes with hoods of moss and Latin inscriptions.
Over there, an iron gate must have blocked the entrance to what they called a folly.
Balconies like the wombs of goddesses . . . terraces with the swish of a skirt and the click of high heels.
Right in the middle of the space between the pillars, and four yards back, Gagou has erected his shack, in the thick of the nettles.
He’s industrious, and surprisingly clever with his hands. He’s built his hut out of corrugated iron and flattened fuel cans.
Now that he’s cleared the grass from the feet of the pillars, you can make out a high-sounding name engraved inside a laurel-crowned cartouche.
It’s a long way to town, and the roads are rough.
When the wind blows from the south you can hear trains whistling and bells ringing down below.
Which, up here, means only that it’s going to rain.
When the heat haze disperses, from town you can spot the Bastides perched like doves on the hill’s shoulder.
•
Last year the postman came up a lot. Almost once a week. Young Maurras was doing his military service in the dragoons.
Now that he’s back he doesn’t have to write home anymore. He just has to shout from the square or from the fields, and his mother comes out and asks, “What do you want?”
So the postman has stopped coming.
Except for every once in a while at the end of the month, when the loans they’ve taken out with the notary fall due.
Which amounts to saying that they’d rather not see him at all.
Whatever comes from town is bad: the wind that brings rainy weather, and the postman.
Nobody would disagree.
They prefer the wind that blows from the wasteland of Lure. It cuts like a razor, but it scatters the magpies and it points the way, for those in the know, to where the hares hide.
•
Gondran’s house is the last one facing the plain. It’s called Les Monges—maybe because it’s on its own and robed in red like a monk; maybe because once upon a time it really was a hermitage. All in all, it has the look of a grand old priest’s house, with its stout buttresses and its low-set, curve-topped door; the house of one of those half-whoremonger priests who happily give a meal and a bed to lovers stealing away to make love in peace.
