As is evident from the eight or nine novels that followed 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. All that the men can think of is to consult the foul-tempered Janet, who 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 understood how to douse for water or to 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, breathing hard, he slips into a treelike 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 life — 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 upon 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 tension 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.
•
Giono’s insights into the consequences of a way of life 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 creatures 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.*
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 bodily 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 notion, 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 nonliterate, oral cultures throughout the world and is especially pronounced among indigenous, place-based peoples. Such discourse is also preserved in a tradition closer to the author’s Mediterranean heritage, the Greek epics of Homer (who was himself an oral rhapsode, a nonliterate bard). Just as Homer draws steadily upon a stock of repeated epithets—“the wine-dark sea,” “rosy-fingered 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 Song of the World), or leaps into the sky bristling like a wrestler (in Hill).