Throughout his long, prolific career, Giono had a very complicated relationship with how—and whether—he chose to portray time. In his early work, a young and shell-shocked Giono was determined to strip all his stories of reference to historic time. Works like Colline (1929) and Song of the World (1934) revolve around the mythic, the struggle of man and nature laid bare. By the time he wrote Ennemonde in 1968, he had long since abandoned that effort and allowed cars, carnivals, and black-market dealings to pervade his rural landscape. More importantly, the narrative voice is neither the omniscient, animistic voice of his early work, nor does it follow his characters into their more historically proscribed lives like his mid-period works. The narrator is at an uncomfortable, sardonic remove from his characters, one that insists on geological time, on natural time, even as his characters accelerate and adapt.
The work was published in France as Emmemonde et autres caractères, but its translator Bill Johnston makes the call to remove that subtitle, leaving the name of the grotesque yet queenly Ennemonde to carry the weight of the whole book. At first it seems like a strange choice, because Ennemonde, the matriarch of a sheepherding family in Haute Provence, comes and goes from the narration of the book’s first part, fixing the narrrator’s wide gaze just long enough to murder her husband and settle again with a traveling wrestler. In the second section of the book, which reads more like an eclogue than a novel, she disappears altogether. But the change in title brings out the fact that her stamp is everywhere in the book, even in her absence, to the point that the text almost reads like Ennemonde from two elevations; all the metaphorical significance that she takes on in the Haut Pays is dispersed and examined later in the shallow delta of the Camargue. Ennemonde is no starry-eyed Gaia, though the butt end of her name means “world.” She is no doe-eyed, ruffled “bergère,” though her small but formidable wealth and power come from keeping sheep, and sharing a violent, dirty life with them. “The eye of the sheep,” Giono writes, “is an opening through which you can sneak a look at the voluptuous antics of stupidity.” The copiousness of Ennemonde’s fat body, which on its deathbed is compared at length to dough, comes from the prolific stink of fermentation—physical and intellectual.
Why does Giono hate Ennemonde and see her as “Queen” at once? Reading Giono run the gamut between abuse and apotheosis feels almost dirty. On the simplest level, his approach to portraying the rustic world is perhaps even more fraught than his conflict with time. He is dealing, after all, with representing a place that had long had an epically romanticized image and which, during his lifetime, became mythologized anew through film. Giono’s contemporary Marcel Pagnol created a South of France that was charming, funny, personal, and beloved by all; in his film work, he often looked to Giono’s work as a source for adaptations. It is strange to think of a cynic like Giono treading so much of the same territory as a folk hero like Pagnol, and I wonder if it left him feeling complicit in the exportation of the region’s tropes. So he rails against the way his land is seen as an attraction—whether by those reading about it or by those tourists who visit its bucolic scenery. Even the cowboys and basket weavers of the Camargue, whom he describes in the second book, become characters who pose for visitors and lose their connection to their environment: “The place had changed a lot; the land continued its tragic life, but it was no longer used for anything but scenery.”
So, even when it feels like the narrator is insulting, criticizing, belittling his rural characters, he is actually breaking them loose from the virtuous and the picturesque. Characters pull the sleight of hand of disappearing into their own environment, knowing nature for something other than scenery, impulse for something other than joyrides. The deepest respect is reserved for those closest to instincts—even the ugly ones—and somehow just the distance inherent in describing, in recounting, renders the narrator’s voice deeply sad. It is almost as though the poetic lenses he brings to it grate on his eyeballs like some Victorian viewing device he cannot rip off. In spite of being a highly poetic and literary writer, full of classical references, Giono emphatically insisted that he was a regionalist and anti-intellectual, someone who, like Ennemonde, has no use for “the spring of poets” with its “flower-strewn meadows, birdsong, and suchlike twaddle.” Perhaps it grates on him so much not just because he is attuned to his own distancing poetics, to historical myths of the land, but also because he cannot unsee the environmental degradation that lies on the horizon. Aldo Leopold once wrote that “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” It feels as though every time Giono sees something beautiful, he falls into a wound.
I suppose the bitter tone of the book, mixed with the transcendently lovely descriptions that are so typical of Giono, has me wanting more than ever to situate the author in his past, present, future. I want to know if a birthdate coinciding with the beneficent saint incubator might have elicited a curse or a chuckle. I want to know how he truly got on with Pagnol and how much his big, doughy, formidable Ennemonde was a reaction to the coquettish, canonical, ultimately manageable “Baker’s Wife” they formed together. I want to know what Giono would have thought about a book called How Everything Must Collapse—a pop-philosophy text about the emerging field of “collapsology”—making it to the top of France’s bestseller list. Truth, for him, like for the collapsologists, lies in leaving systems by the wayside, and is the knowledge that a return to a peasantry is not utopian but a stark necessity, when “one day true men will come up from the river and down from the mountain, more improbable and more bitter than the grass of the apocalypse.” Anyhow, I love Giono’s early work better, but Ennemonde interests me deeply inasmuch as it feels like the culmination of several lifelong struggles. Not a resolution, mind you, just a culmination in which “the grass of the apocalypse” is a thing; the lowliest hope, in the most verdant color.
