Colline (review)

First, a reprise for potentially new or actually forgetful readers. Published in 1929, Colline is a cautionary tale about the reluctant reawakening of a small peasant community to an awareness that humans and Nature are reciprocally cruel. In a semi-ruined hamlet, an old man, Janet, lies paralysed but rambling incessantly. When the local spring dries up, he withholds his water-divining skills. He becomes the focus of his neighbours' attention, which veers from fear to hatred. Could there be a connection between his flow of apparently crazy words and the loss of their water-supply? He is a Cassandra bellowing in the remote reaches of Upper Provence. Giono's pacifism, soon to be given full rein in his Le Grand Troupeau (1931), is active already in this pagan sermon on the mountain. Janet dies before Jaume and Gondran can kill him off as the fount of evil, which embraces his semi-magic knowledge. The spring restarts to flow. Forgetting what they have learnt — the need to live in respectful partnership with nature — Jaume shoots a boar. The novel ends with its corpse leaking tears of blood on to the grass. Perhaps, like Melville's Ahab, in pursuing evil, the villagers have become evil themselves.

Janet is the sinister, ambiguous first in a long line of Giono's guérisseurs, the odd ones out who somehow save the majority. Colline was Giono's breakthrough into literature. Gide for one felt the nip in the air, and in his hothouse backside. The editor, Michel Gramain, has carefully and sensitively exploited a previously unvisited manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale. He concludes that, in the various drafts, Giono worked to prune and make more implicit what had been diffuse and over-explicit. The result is 'une poétique de la litote', whereas the stock image of Giono is of a writer taking off in another sense: leaving realism floundering, a born escalater. Colline is the first of the so-called 'Pan-trilogy' (to be followed by Un de Baumugnes and Regain). Despite Giono's pollarding, Gramain usefully compares Colline to Zola's luxuriantly pantheistic La Faute de l'abbé Mouret. Pan is the least Olympian of the pagan deities, down to earth but as dangerous as he is seductive. Colline's Green credentials (people cannot thoughtlessly help themselves to nature's products) cannot obscure the fact Janet is so much pro-nature that he ends up anti-human. This novel's plenteous imagery, its use of the present tense to give both immediacy and a strongly timeless quality, its elemental simplicity (drought, fire, water), its eschewing of self-deprecation (compare Henry James on Zola's 'plentiful lack of doubt') turn it into a dark, potent brew, and closer to a prose-poem, with its stanza-like composition, than an orthodox novel. Is Gramain's deluge of genetic detective-work all that helpful in understanding a short but largely self-explanatory fiction? Was the journey really necessary, especially for an 'ecological' text? Gramain makes no mention of the real-time exodus from and dechristianization of large tracts of the French countryside in the era of Colline (the 'revenge' of the Oklahoma Dust Bowl was building up contemporaneously). Giono was indeed a force of nature, but he was never immune to his times.