Jean Giono: le corps à l'œuvre (review)

Giono was not a regional novelist, nor even principally a nature or countryside one. Although, like his pathfinder Walt Whitman, whom Giono called the 'American Pan', he sang the body electric, he also lived and learned enough to slim down that corporeal estate which had sustained his writing for so long. Afflicted by heart trouble in later life, Giono was allowed only a daily speck of salt. He made, typically, a creative meal out of his medico's veto. Above all, he was a natural hyperbolist: so many of his fictions are sublime codology. In his lengthy, monothematic analysis, Alain Romestaing has to go one or several better. Like other amateur psychoanalysts, he cannot mention a topic such as absence without immediately transmuting this state into castration; and a stress on plenitude signifies (what else?) a desire to snuggle back into the womb. Such critical angels harp endlessly. Like most agelastic critics, Romestaing does not pick up on Giono's own brand of vigorous humour. He is, however, alert to the later comic sense as it veers into the drier, more disenchanted mode of irony. He does spot, of course, that (with 1938-ish as the watershed), Giono's earlier characters possessed bodies largely permeable to the outer world in all its richness, whereas the later breed, in Giono's wicked avatar as a narrative allumeuse withholding information as well as favours, tease the reader but remain mainly impenetrable. In a seismic revelation, a goodly number of academic critics have recently discovered that we all, fictional or otherwise, have bodies. Giono's are in the main imagined but are infused with great presence: young, ripe or ageing bodies; super-healthy or desperately sick bodies; (as in Le Hussard sur le toit) self-gratifying or postponing bodies. All are in the superlative mode. Giono wrote with lavish plausibility of physical activities or conditions he had no experience of: swimming (Le Chant du monde), horse-riding, fencing, wrestling (Deux Cavaliers de l'orage),–even blindness. This book is a kind of catalogue raisonné, as its author slaves to conjugate Giono in his umpteen takes on the body, human or animal. At times, Romestaing seems to regret Giono's failure to be systematic, which makes life hard for us critics, whom Giono called fleas on a lion. It takes a French exponent to compose so abstract a gloss about the body, which Giono for his part always deeply respected as a major part of personality, even to the extent of celebrating its potential, when dead, as humus for new life. This study is a good example of critical overkill. Romestaing has turned the most delectable of subjects into doctoral sludge. He does, it is true, and this is the real role of the critic, send the reader back to Giono, but principally out of sheer relief. His book is far more useful to others by reason of its prolific quotations from Giono's works than by Romestaing's copious glosses on them. Of course, Giono himself coined images so plentifully that he made readers punch-drunk.