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Passive Suicide Monica Kelley IN HIS FIRST POST-WAR NOVEL, Un roi sans divertissement, Jean Giono obsessively returns to the physical act of writing. The novel tells the story of a murderer, M. V., and the gendarme, Langlois, who tracks him down. M.V. attacks only during the winter, when heavy snows repaint the world in black and white, and it is strongly suggested that he does so for diversion , to add a little color (namely red) to a dull life. I wish here to address three scenes of writing in this novel. Scene One—M.V. has just botched an attempt to strangle a villager. Everyone gathers to hear the story, and then they are drawn by a tumult in the pigpen, the same tumult which had brought the near-victim out of his house in the first place. One of the pigs is covered in blood: On l'avait entaillé de partout, de plus de cent entailles qui avaient dû être faites avec un couteau tranchant comme un rasoir. La plupart de ces entailles n'étaient pas franches, mais en zigzags, serpentines, en courbes, en arcs de cercle, sur toute la peau, très profondes. On les voyait faites avec plaisir. [...] Ravanel frottait la bête avec de la neige et, sur la peau un instant nettoyée, on voyait le suintement du sang réapparaître et dessiner comme les lettres d'un langage barbare, A simple cutting of the pig's throat would have been comprehensible, normal somehow, not particularly threatening. But this stuns the villagers, and they feel directly menaced by such an act, so menaced that one of them, Bergues, sets out to follow the man who did it. Dripping blood on the white snow (he had been shot by the father of the near-victim), M.V. is easy to follow, but Bergues is still unable to overtake him: "C'était du sang en gouttes, très frais, pur, sur la neige. [. . .] mais il ne put jamais apercevoir autre chose que cette piste bien tracée, ces belles taches de sang frais sur la neige vierge" (464). Twice in this scene M.V. writes in blood: first on the pig's skin with a knife, and then on the virgin snow. The first writing constitutes one of the most curious passages in the novel. An explanation for the act could come in the murderer 's need to draw a victim out of the house; if he had killed the pig right away, it could not have made enough noise to attract the attention of a potential victim and make him come out to see what was the matter. But what confuses this reasonable explanation is the pleasure: "On les voyait faites avec plaisir." Slashing at random would not have yielded zigzags, coils, and curves, would Vol. XL, No. 1 69 L'Esprit Créateur not have made such uniformly deep cuts. There was a purpose in addition to that of drawing a potential victim out of a warm house. The narrator calls it pleasure , and it must be noted that this pleasure can be described as aesthetic. M.V. takes pleasure in torturing the pig. His letters are described as belonging to a "barbaric" language. "Barbaric" refers first to those who are foreign, strange, not Greek or Roman, not "civilized." By extension, "barbaric " comes to mean cruel, from the cruelty of the barbaric invasions. Is M.V.'s cruelty linked to a foreignness, to practices as unknown to the village as the language in which he writes? M.V. comes from another town, but it is by no means foreign: "On va même loin dans des quantités d'endroits, mais on ne va pas à Chichihanne. On irait, on y ferait quoi? On ferait quoi à Chichilianne? Rien. C'est comme ici" (456). The explanation for writing in an unknown, barbarie language cannot thus come literally from his being a foreigner . The very sameness of Chichilianne, its similarity to the village in question , make M.V.'s actions extraordinary: why would he come 21 kilometers on foot through the snow to kill people he did not even know? Later in the story, when...

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