Introduction to Jean Giono’s novel, Colline (Hill)
Originally written Jean Giono and published in 1928 in French as Colline (Hill). David Abram wrote the introduction to the translated 2016 release by the New York Review of Books Classics.
View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph, Paul Cézanne
All of man's mistakes arise because he imagines that he walks upon a lifeless thing, whereas his footsteps imprint themselves in a flesh full of vital power.
— Jean Giono (translated by D.A.)
This translation of Jean Giono’s Colline goes to press during a time of rapidly intensifying ecological disarray. More and more species find themselves shoved to the brink of the abyss by the steady surge of human progress, while seasonal cycles go haywire and the planet itself shivers into a bone-wrenching fever. Many persons find themselves bereft, astonished by the callousness of their own species and by the strange inability of modern civilization to correct its dire course. For those who recognize the animate earth as the source of all sustenance, the future—once anticipated with excitement –now looms as an inchoate shadow stirring only a vague dread. The disquiet that troubles their sleep stems less from a clear premonition than from the lack of clear images, from the difficulty of glimpsing any way toward a livable world from the place where we are now, at the end—it would seem—of a particular dream of progress.
Where are the fresh ideas, the new forms of perception, the new modes of association that might open us toward a viable future? Perhaps the quest for new ideas and new insights—the steady yearning for the new—holds us within the very same dream of progress that’s brought the whole of the biosphere to this uncanny impasse. Instead of always looking off toward the future, perhaps we should strive to become more deeply awake to the full depth of the present moment that surrounds us, opening our eyes and ears to notice the countless other-than-human shapes of sentience that were obscured by the sense-deadening assumptions undergirding the modern era. Assumptions regarding the inertness of matter and the mechanical character of material reality—it’s amenability to being analyzed and figured-out by a human mind, or intellect, that stands somehow aloof and apart from that reality, able to dissociate itself from the body and the bodily earth.
Further, a clear assessment of the current impasse, and the possibilities hidden within it, may best be served by a keen awareness of the many forms of human life that were shouldered aside by the march of progress, lifeways we thought to have left behind yet that still linger (and even flourish!) in pockets on the edge (and even in the midst!) of this surging civilization.
The characters in Hill inhabit just such a time out of time. High in the foothills of the French Alps, in the shadow of Mount Lure, the inhabitants of a tiny hamlet eke out a tenuous living from a land dense with forests of pine and oak and juniper, thick with rock outcroppings and brambles and the scent of wildflowers (clematis, wormwood, honeysuckle) but also stands of grain, and a few small orchards and olive groves carefully tended by the inhabitants. When, in what era? Well, sometime after the invention of the steam-powered threshers working the farms far down on the plain, and the advent of the distant railroad that crosses that plain, and yet a long while before the arrival of the
automobile: the journey up from the nearest town takes a full three hours by horse and buggy.
These peasants raise a few goats for milk and cheese, and the men-folk hunt whatever they can that’s good to eat. Gondran, his wife Marguerite, Jaume with his drooping mustache, his daughter Ulalie, the simpleton Gagou and the garrulous but inscrutable elder, Janet—if one said that these were the main characters in the novel, one would not be entirely wrong. But neither would one really be right. For in this work, as in the other early novels of Jean Giono, the primary actors are the elemental powers of the more-than-human earth that enable and necessarily influence all the human happenings. The wind gliding up from the valley and spilling down from the mountain passes is itself a character, as are the flocks of birds who ride the wind’s moods, carving their way through its turbulence and its calms, and the forest with its trees heaving and flexing as underground roots feel their way toward fresh moisture. Up above, needles and leaves slowly bask and imbibe the sun’s radiance. The shining sun, too, has its exuberant life: “In a single leap the sun clears the crest of the horizon. It enters the sky like a wrestler, atop its undulating arms of fire…”
Shaping the tale, too, are the creatures who slither and hum and bound within these wooded hills—the wild boar nuzzling among the stones for tubers, swarms of insects, snakes coiled in the shade, a feral cat, lizards, hares: all the many sentient lives whose earnest engagements sometimes intersect our human activities at oblique angles—intersections that often go unnoticed, yet now and then catalyze unexpected changes in the habits of a person or the equilibrium of a community. The waters, too, are alive, not just the streams that sometimes swell with fresh rain, but also those subterranean flows coursing through interstices in the geological strata, bubbling out of the ground as fresh springs or gushing up through an iron pipe into a carefully crafted fountain. For built things, as well, have their agency—are they not fashioned, after all, from materials birthed in the breathing earth? These whitewashed houses, for example, whose stone walls impart a sense of safety to those that dwell within them—do not these buildings have their own moods and expressions?
Maurras half-opens the door of his stable. He looks at the houses one after
the other. They’re still sleeping, soundlessly, like tired-out animals. Gondran’s place alone is making a soft, rattling sound, behind its hedge... The house has its eyes open—big, watery eyes that Marguerite’s plump shadow passes across, like a rolling pupil. The doorway drools a stream of dishwater.
Yet beneath the parched soils, underneath all these many lives, stirs the voluminous life of the hill itself—the brooding body that sustains, supports and perhaps feels all that happens upon its surface. And this hill is but a fold in the broad flesh of Mount Lure, the implacable power spreading its shadowed wings, every evening, over this tiny cluster of houses.
*
Jean Giono was born in 1895, in the rural town of Manosque, a thousand-year-old settlement in the valley of the Durance river, set among the rolling hills, plateaus, and mountains of Haute Provence. His mother was a laundress, his father a shoemaker of fiercely independent political and social views. Growing up among the smells of hot irons and steam and freshly washed linen, listening to the sounds of the cobbler’s craft making necessary things from simple materials, feeling the heft and clang of the artisan’s tools, young Jean gained a early appreciation for the sensuous and palpable textures of life. Yet it’s the youthful impressions gleaned when roaming outside the town walls, watching peasants working the fields around the small hamlets on the hillsides, listening to the speech of the scythe, and smelling the new-mown wheat as the long forks pitch the sheaves, or accompanying shepherds as they drive their flocks to the summer pastures high in the mountains—imbibing the rhythmic and singsong cries by which the herders guide the cloven-hooved hordes and signal their sheepdogs—all such visceral impressions of life lived in direct relation to the seasons settle deep into the young man’s memory.
At sixteen he quits school and begins working as a clerk in the local bank to help support his family. He reads Homer in the off hours. When war breaks out he is called up to serve in the infantry, which he does for five years. Posted to the north, he fights in the hellish battle of Verdun—the longest battle of the war. As the armies begin to deploy gas warfare, his eyelids are scorched by mustard gas in the fighting. He is one of only eleven members of his company to survive.
The gruesome horror of war, the anguish of watching so many comrades die, scarred Jean Giono’s soul. The sheer insanity of it, the inconceivable waste of life by the newly mechanized forms of warfare, each side racing to overcome the other with more effective killing machines—machine guns, armored tanks, tanks with rotating turrets, flamethrowers, poison gas, fighter airplanes and bombs—transformed Giono into an ardent pacifist, with a distaste verging on disgust for so-called progress. He made his way back home, passing forests now leveled to stumps, past long-cultivated fields turned to muck and farm animals starved and dying. In Manosque, with most of his generation dead or wounded, he took up again his job at the bank, married, started a family, and soon began to write, exploring with words the possibility of other ways of living, other ways of feeling and thinking that might draw humankind in a different direction—that might induce a swerve in our collective trajectory, away from the growing mechanization of life and the inevitability of further war. He began to write of the earth—of a living relation to the elemental, earthly cosmos as the necessary source of all human solidarity, as the inescapable (but easily overlooked) ground of all affection between persons and between cultures, as the very possibility of peace.
*
Hill was Giono’s very first published novel (he ultimately published over fifty books, the majority of which were works of fiction), and in this work we find him grappling and giving a first shape to themes that would remain central to all his early novels, and in some manner to all his life’s work. Giono’s vision is intensely—even overwhelmingly—ecological. I say overwhelming, because it is glimpsed by the human protagonists in Hill only in moments of epiphany and overwhelm, when it threatens to
swamp all their settled assumptions regarding the workings of the world. In part this is due to Giono’s greatness as a novelist: he will never spell everything out for his readers, but will afford us only partial and fragmentary glimpses of a mystery that resists any total or all-encompassing understanding. Yet it’s also a result of Giono’s own exploratory moves toward a stance that remains somewhat inchoate in this first work, but will gradually emerge as a full-blown animate cosmology (though again, never spelled out: a cosmos that can only be sensed from one’s limited position within it’s depths) in The Song of the World, published five years later. In that work, the human figures are themselves participants within that wild and darkly breathing cosmos (the two human protagonists seem to be walking expressions of the river and the forest, respectively), while in Hill the human characters are stumblingly negotiating their first, dawning awareness of their inherence within a world that is, itself, alive…and the prospect terrifies them.
Although the coarse and spiteful elder, Janet, carries something of this cosmological vision as a secret within his now-paralyzed body, in this book it’s first his son-in-law, Gondran, who stumbles upon this strange new angle of sight while hoeing in his olive grove. He’s feeling strong; it’s a fine day, and when his spade startles a lizard that darts out from under the grass, Gondran can’t resist the sudden intoxication of power: he slashes the reptile with his spade and watches its severed limbs writhe in the dirt. But then, upon noticing the creature’s blood, an unease quietly comes over him, stopping up his throat like a stone. Digging among the olive trees,
it occurs to him for the first time that there’s a kind of blood rising inside the bark, just like his own blood; that a fierce will to live makes the tree branches twist, and propels these sprays of grasses into the sky…
Sensing for the first time the life stirring all around him in plants, in animals, he begins to wonder at the suffering that he unleashes when he scythes, when he cuts down a tree. The epiphany grows: perhaps even the stones are alive, and the rocky ground where he stands. “This earth! … what if she really is a living being, what if she really is one body?”
The vision swells, intensifies, transforms everything around him:
An immense life-force, slow to move, but awesome in its naked power, rouses the stupendous body of earth, rolls over her valleys and knolls, folds her flatlands, bends her rivers, and builds up her thick coat of soil and vegetation.
Yet Gondran, the simple peasant, cannot contain this vision; what it straightaway stirs in him is fear, is terror. What if this living earth has bad intentions? What if it’s massive body is readying itself to destroy him, the way he slashed that lizard? “In no time, to avenge herself, she’ll haul me up to where the skylarks lose their breath.”
He rushes back to the houses to warn the others. Over a bottle of absinthe (a recipe perfected by old Janet) the other men ponder the ramifications, taking care not to alarm the women. The most reflective of them, Jaume, only amplifies Gondran’s concern, spreading his paranoia to the others. They arm themselves; they become watchful, on the lookout for…what? They do not know. Only that something in this folded land may be out to get them for the way they’ve been treating it. Perhaps the hill itself.
*
It might be worth pointing out that the author did not title his novel La Colline (The Hill), but rather Colline (Hill). Given that nouns, in French, are pretty much always preceded by a definite or indefinite article, the fact that here Hill stands on its own seems significant. Indeed atop Giono’s manuscript for this, his first published novel, he had written “Le Colline,” but then had crossed out the definite article. Perhaps the reason lies here: when we use a definite or indefinite article in front of any noun—“a bear,” “the bear”—it entails that we take some slight distance from that being, either to classify it (as one bear among many) or to ponder it from that distance (the bear, there). But when we dispense with any article, and just speak of this presence as “Bear,” there is no distance. The object involves us, totally. “The Hill” determines a particular hill that we may approach or envision from a distance. Hill names a power that absorbs us, and can even, perhaps, subsume us.
*
Giono spoke of this work, and the two novels that shortly followed it—Un de Baumugnes in 1929 (published in English as Lovers are Never Losers) and Regain in 1930 (published in English as Harvest)—as his Pan trilogy, although the three stories are not connected. Nor is the god Pan overtly mentioned in any of them. Yet in these first novels the author hoped to invoke the rich energies associated with this deity, and to impart something of that wild magic to those read the work. Half human in visage, but with the horns, hind quarters and legs of a goat, Pan is the god of untamed places, of woodlands and meadows and reedy swamps, the spirit of deep forests and high rocky slopes that only mountain goats can navigate. An ally of all things wild, the horned god is the hair-raising power that moves in the depths of nature; he’s the lilt in rustic music and the sexual abandon of springtime—the spontaneity and robust exuberance of renewal. For some, Pan is but one of several names of a horned personification of the wild that was honored in many parts of pre-Christian Europe, but was later demonized by the church, transformed into the cloven-hooved and horned image of the Devil.
As is evident from the eight or nine novels that followed after Hill, Giono was preparing to invoke the vitalizing aspect of Pan in his writings, the creative and regenerative exuberance that the god can instill in those who’ve learned to align themselves with the cycles of wild nature. But with this first novel he wanted to present the more unsettling and dangerous quality of this power, that which can unnerve persons who stumble inadvertently into wild terrain, inducing a headlong fear that’s come to be called “panic” since it’s provoked by Pan’s proximity.
Such is the state toward which our peasant farmers begin to slide upon hearing Gondran’s visionary perception that everything around them is alive. Their disquiet deepens when the fountain—their sole source of water—suddenly stops flowing, as though its throat were plugged up. As their thirst grows and their fear intensifies, the relations between them get more jagged; things are coming unglued. The only thing that the men can think of is to consult the foul-tempered Janet, where he lies paralyzed and dying on his mattress, hallucinating snakes and rehearsing obscene memories. Jaume decides to brave the old man’s scorn. He lays out their situation for Janet—who after all is the only one among them who knew how to douse for water and divine the weather, a gnarled tree of an old man who alone knew the arcane uses of all the plants thereabouts.
Janet listens but only stalls at first, goading Jaume with insults. Until, hard of breath, he slips into a tree-like trance, and his earthen voice comes unblocked—as though the stopped-up waters of the fountain had found this new outlet. The torrent of speech tells of uncanny powers… of a strange landlord in a sheepskin coat whose voice is the sighing of the wind, a master of tenderness who speaks to foxes, hawks and chestnut trees all in their own tongue.
Jaume listens, tries to take it all in. Yet he can no more integrate this weird knowledge than Gondran can his earlier vision. It’s too ambiguous, too complex, too difficult to reconcile. Old Janet must be tricking him. Something evil, he suspects, must be at work, and Janet—in cahoots with the rocks, the wild boars and the surging mass of green—is probably behind it.
*
For those reared in a Christian culture (even rustic and relatively impious peasants) the first contact with Pan stirs fear, brings panic. Vouched even a faint glimpse into the horned god’s polyerotic cosmos, wherein plants are sentient and the wind is alive, the immediate impulse is to try to assimilate that wild vision to one’s habitual sense of morality, which sorts things into those that are good and those that are bad. Yet the multiform and shadowed richness of the wild, wherein each being—trout, sycamore, mountain lion—enacts its own interplay with the local earth while being dependent upon all the others, can never be squared with such a black-and-white logic. The radical plurality of willful organisms and elements acting seemingly at cross purposes within any mostly-wild ecosystem necessarily confounds any simple polarity between a pure good and a pure evil. Faced with wild nature’s unruly refusal to sort itself into two camps, civilization cannot help but demonize it—construing nature as a malevolent realm that must be subdued, blunted, and brought under control.
Giono was too awake, and too savvy an artist, to present a bucolic view of nature shorn of its ferocity and bloodletting, stripped of its capricious moods and its manifest dangers. Yet he knew well the inner conflict that his nascent ecological stance would stir within his fellow citizens, the impossibility of reconciling such a stance with a collective worldview based on the denigration of the senses by the intellect, and the subjugation of nature by technology. He knew the instinctive recourse to conventional moral categories that the vision of an animate, breathing planet would provoke… because the same conflict was roiling in his own chest. It roils in us, too, as we keep reading: is old Janet simply a scapegoat upon whom the other characters project their fears? Or is he an avatar of that other goat, the capricious goat god himself, able to rally the malevolence of nature with his witching language? By letting this unresolved conflict unfurl among the several characters in Hill, Giono was clearing out his conscience and his creativity for the full espousal of the pagan, animist cosmos that his subsequent fiction would undertake. For the massively erotic, earthly faith that was soon to burst upon his readers.
*
Jean Giono’s insights into the human consequences of a way of living that elevates itself above the rest of nature, and his insights regarding the contours of a truly ecological culture, hold vital clues for our contemporary situation. His early novels call us toward the primacy of place, and the importance of bodily engagement with the soil and the seasons
of a place. They encourage a renewal of small-scale, face-to-face community, and stress that no human community can be healthy without honoring its thorough embedment within a wider, more-than-human community of animals, plants and earthly elements. For Giono was convinced that our social bonds inevitably fray and falter if they’re not fed by interaction with the living land; that the best chance for a just society, and the only prospect for a meaningful peace, lies in renouncing the dream of mastery and dedicating ourselves—wherever we find ourselves—to the replenishment and flourishing of the local earth.1
More significantly, Giono realizes that we’ll continue to hold ourselves aloof from the rest of nature as long as we assume that subjectivity is an exclusively human possession, or even that the capacity for feelingful experience is reserved solely for those beings that are deemed “alive” by the natural sciences. Only by reconceiving life as a quality proper to the whole of this earthly cosmos do we free our animal senses to engage, to participate, to resonate with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings. When we concede that mountains and rivers have their own forms of vitality, that the ground itself senses our weight, that the winds and the thunderclouds seethe with sensation and feeling—only then do we free our own sentience to find its place within the wider matrix.
With this, Giono taps into a logic much older than the literate intellect, with its capacity for detachment and abstraction. The deeply animistic way of speaking that he deploys in his novels of peasant life is common to non-literate, oral cultures throughout the world, and is especially pronounced among indigenous, place-based peoples. Closer to the author’s Mediterranean heritage, such discourse is also preserved in the Greek epics of Homer (who was himself an oral rhapsode, or bard). Just as the blind Homer draws steadily upon a stock of repeated epithets—“the wine-dark sea,” “rosy-finger dawn”—so Giono has his own stock of similes and metaphoric phrases that return again and again in these novels, although always with a freshness that makes the phrase seem newly-born: the wind speaks with a thousand green tongues; the rain walks across the land; one’s inward mood buzzes like a swarm of bees; the sun leaps into the sky neighing like a stallion (in The Song of the World), or leaps into the sky bristling like a wrestler (in Hill).
Indeed, throughout his first ten novels Giono seems intent on celebrating and rejuvenating oral culture—the culture of convivial storytelling, of spontaneous oral eloquence, of musical speech and word magic. Not to the exclusion of literate culture (Giono was a prodigious lover of literature), but rather underneath the culture of books: he wanted to replenish this more ancient, visceral layer of language that holds our ears open to the speech of rivers and woodlands and the rain.
And it’s here, I believe, that we find Giono’s most remarkable contribution to the work of cultural metamorphosis, and to the prospect of an ecological future. In contrast to those who contend that verbal language, by its nature, necessarily breaks our direct, present-moment experience of the world around us—that the simple act of speaking inevitably tears the speaker out of her felt, sensorial participation with the sensuous surroundings—Giono shows that there exist ways of speaking that actually open our senses, ways of wielding words that can hold our speaking bodies in attentive rapport with the more-than-human terrain. He was the great pioneer of such a language, discovering an array of oral techniques that can be applied and put to use in our own time.
For example: Giono often elucidates human events by way of metaphors drawn directly from the local earth, while describing shifts in the surrounding landscape using metaphors drawn from the human body (or from the physical gestures of other animals). While today it has become a facile commonplace say that “the earth is alive,” the meaning becomes far more compelling when we speak of the visible terrain as flesh—as a living, breathing body. Moreover, it is one thing to be intellectually convinced of our interdependence with other beings; Giono showed that by using corporeal and sensorial turns of phrase that mingle the flesh of humans and other animals with that of plants and earthly elements; by wielding metaphors that merge weather phenomena with sensations that we feel in our torso or our limbs; by combining in one extended metaphor terms drawn from different sensory modalities (that is, by using audible terms to describe visual phenomena, or tactile terms to describe olfactory sensations)—such intellectual notions begin to be experienced as visceral, felt realities.
We will not likely mobilize others to act on behalf of a more-than-human earth if our everyday language holds us aloof from that earth—if even the discourse of environmentalism remains couched in mechanical and statistical terms that stifle any instinctive, animal empathy with the animate terrain. The American philosopher Richard Rorty held that it is not those persons who argue well who are likely to change the world, but rather those who speak differently. For all who work for ecological change, and for a societal swerve away from our currently calamitous trajectory, Jean Giono remains the great artist of such a way of “speaking differently.”
In one fell swoop, earth has erupted in anger. The shrubs fought back for a moment, cursing, but then the flame reared up and crushed them under the soles of its bluish feet. It danced, the flame, crying with joy, but as it danced—the sly devil—it crept right down to the junipers, who were completely defenseless. In no time at all they were consumed, and they were still crying out while the flames, now out on flat, open ground, leapt across the grasses.
And now it’s no longer a dancer. It’s naked. Its reddened muscles are twisting. Its heavy breathing scorches a hole in the sky. You can hear the bones of the scrubland cracking under its feet.
(Hill, p. 177)
1. For those readers who wish to sample Giono’s ecological cosmology in its full wonder, I suggest reading, at minimum, The Song of the World (Le chant de monde, 1934), translated by Henri Fluchere and Geoffrey Myers, and Joy of Man’s Desiring (Que ma joie demeure, 1935), translated by Katherine Allen Clarke, as well as Giono’s well-known fable, The Man Who Planted Trees (especially as brought to the screen by the artist Frederick Back, whose animated film won an Oscar in 1987).