Giono, Jean (1895-1970). Novelist, born in Manosque (Basses-Alpes) in 1895, the son of a shoemaker of Italian descent. He enjoyed a happy childhood and attended the local school, which he left at 16 to work in the town bank. He served in the infantry in World War I, married in 1920, and returned to the bank until the success of his first books enabled him to become a full-time writer.
Rooted but not regionalist, a born fabulator, Giono created, like Faulkner, an imaginary South. Even his autobiographical Jean le bleu (1932) is luxuriantly fictionalized. Throughout his work he invents landscapes with figures: individuals shaped by and collaborating or struggling with a physical locale. This is amply shown in his ‘Pan-trilogy’: Colline (1929), Un de Baumugnes (1929), Regain (1930). Against the traditionally hostile depiction of peasant life, Giono sets natural aristocrats, peasant thorough-breds. Meshed with the theme of natural living is that of the human capacity for gainsaying reality and fabricating an alternative. This theme propels Naissance de l'Odyssée (1930), an inverted epic where Ulysses becomes semi-accidentally the subject of a legend, which proliferates by oral transmission around his seedy person. The lie—panicky, self-defensive, or self-assertive—is central to Giono's imaginative strategy.
Though he had a native tendency to exalt and to denounce, his equally inborn anarchism prevented his preaching virtuous lessons. The sensual frankness of relationships between his individuals is not corseted by social conventions, established religion, or organized government, national or local. A recurrent figure is the ‘guérisseur’, or mid-husband, who rescues others in difficulties, but remains ultimately solitary.
Unabashed hyperbole is the commonest mode. Giono's war-novel, Le Grand Troupeau (1931), is his dystopia, in which the modern age bursts murderously into a previously atemporal realm. Even here, however, the life-force, memorably pictured in the rodents' fastidious feeding off the dead, counteracts the unnatural, man-made massacre. The constant shuttle between the country home and the front saves this novel from the claustrophobia of trench-confined war-fiction. Le Chant du monde (1934) brings battle on to a more human scale. Telling of a feud between families, conducted like a European Western, it is one of Giono's finest fictions, in which he succeeds in giving an insistent voice and life to natural phenomena alongside his human protagonists. The most poetical of French novelists, Giono expends cornucopian imagery to celebrate the joys of instinctual living. He once described his aim as being to batter the sensibilities of his readers. His people are all of a piece, and not mutilated by the demands of life in mass-society.
In 1935-9 Giono veered into rabidly pacifist pamphlets, urging the unlistening peasantry towards civil disobedience. The novel Que ma joie demeure (1935) coincided with an experiment in organized anarchy on the Contadour plateau. It depicts a, finally failed, attempt to install a small-scale working Utopia which also makes time for luxury pastimes. The idyll is wrecked by the ravages of selfish love, but even more by Giono's unreadiness to conceive of successful groups, however well-intentioned. The apocalyptic Batailles dans la montagne (1937) shows upland people coping heroically with a flood. Despite resisting annexation by Left or Right, Giono was imprisoned in 1939 for encouraging defeatism, and again in 1944 for collaboration; he was guilty on neither score. From 1940 onwards his fictional world grew darker, more violent, more beset by ennui, although his heroes continued to be select souls engaged in various artifices of self-preservation. The new mentors, replacing Homer and Virgil, were Machiavelli and Stendhal. Noé (1947) yields some clues and much mystification about his methods of composition. Subsequent ‘chroniques’ (Un roi sans divertissement, 1947; Les Âmes fortes, 1949; Les Grands Chemins, 1951; Le Moulin de Pologne, 1952) exploit fragmented viewpoints and a minimum of synthesis or explanation of motive. His adopted cynicism seems as hyperbolic as his earlier, more open-hearted pursuit and defence of happiness.
A different series (Mort d'un personnage, 1949; Le Hussard sur le toit, 1951; Le Bonheur fou, 1957; Angelo, 1958) relates the exhilarating adventures of Angelo Pardi, a 19th-c. individualist of great charm, generosity, and idealism, amid a cholera epidemic, in revolution, and in love. Deux cavaliers de l'orage (1965) and Ennemonde (1968) are family sagas, exalting physical prowess and passionate relationships. In all of these texts, and especially his last novel, L'Iris de Suse (1970), Giono writes with the apparently negligent ease of Picasso painting. He presents a baroque mixture of the ancient Greek (numinous landscapes, grandiose dramas), the Western (poker faces, sibylline dialogue), and the Gothic (horrors recounted deadpan). The post-war fictions of this great animator substitute skeleton and muscle for the earlier tendency to flabby opulence. Giono's ambiguous genius ensured that he could write principally only of strength. As a narrator of tales mostly beyond orthodox values of good and evil, he has very few equals.
[Walter Redfern]
Bibliography
- W. D. Redfern, The Private World of Jean Giono (1967)
- P. Citron, Giono (1990)
