Jean Giono

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Jean Giono
Born(1895-03-30)30 March 1895
Manosque, France
Died8 October 1970(1970-10-08) (aged 75)
Manosque, France
OccupationWriter
NationalityFrench
Literary movementPopular culture
Notable works
Website
www.centrejeangiono.com

Jean Giono (30 March 1895 – 8 October 1970) was a French writer who wrote works of fiction mostly set in the Provence region of France.

First period

Jean Giono was born to a family of modest means, his father a cobbler of

pacifist. In 1919, he returned to the bank, and a year later, married a childhood friend with whom he had two children. Following the success of his first published novel, Colline (1929) (which won him the Prix Brentano earned $1,000, and drew an English translation of the book[2]), he left the bank in 1930 to devote himself to writing on a full-time basis.[3]

Colline was followed by two more novels heavily influenced by Virgil and Homer,

Honegger; Angèle, and La Femme du boulanger, with the actor Raimu.[4]

Throughout the nineteen-thirties, Giono expressed the pacifism he had adopted as a result of his experiences during World War I in novels such as Le grand troupeau (1931), and pamphlets such as Refus d’obéissance (1937), and the Lettre aux paysans sur la pauvreté et la paix (1938).

Contadour, and whose pacifist writings were published as the Cahiers du Contadour.[5]

In 1937, he famously asked, "What is the worst that can happen if Germany invades France?"[6]

Transition

The end of the nineteen-thirties brought a crisis in Giono's life. As far as his writing was concerned, he had come to feel that it was time to stop “doing Giono” (faire du Giono), and to take his work in a new direction.

Nazi sympathiser before the proceedings were dropped without any charges being laid.[3]

The subsequent period of renewal saw the self-educated Giono now turn to

omniscient narrator.[8]

He similarly formed the ambition of writing a sequence of ten novels inspired by

Balzac’s Comédie humaine, in which he would depict characters from all strata of society rather than peasants, and compare and contrast different moments in history by depicting the experiences of members of the same family in times a hundred years apart. This project was never realised, with only the four Hussard novels, (Angelo (1958), Le Hussard sur le Toit (1951), Le Bonheur fou (1957), Mort d’un personnage (1948)) actually completed according to plan, but it is echoed in Giono's postwar work in the dichotomy between historical novels set in the mid-nineteenth century, and contemporary novels set in the mid-twentieth.[9]
His newfound interest in history even led to his writing an actual history book, Le Désastre de Pavie (1963).

As he began to focus on the human being rather than the natural world, his understanding of psychology and motivation was also influenced by the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose analysis helped him to articulate a much darker view of human nature in his later years, and about whom he wrote the article "Monsieur Machiavel, ou le coeur humain dévoilé" (1951).

In 1944, when

France was liberated, Giono was again accused of collaboration with the Nazis, and was again imprisoned for five months before he was freed without charges ever being made.[8] This led to his being blacklisted, so that for three years he was barred from publication. It was during this period of ostracism that he began in 1945 to write Angelo, metaphorically the laboratory in which he experimented, tested and attempted to integrate his new approach to his work. It contains not only a first version of the story of Angélo Pardi that took its final form in Le Hussard sur le toit and Le Bonheur fou, but also the nucleus of many other works of his second period, and makes use of new narrative techniques he developed further in other novels. He ultimately set it aside, no doubt considering it too derivative, and moved on to the other projects it gave rise to.[4]

Second period

The first major novel of his second period to be published was

Un roi sans divertissement (published in 1947, and made into a successful film for which Giono himself wrote the screenplay, in 1963). It takes the form of a detective story set in Haute Provence in the early nineteenth century, and reveals Giono's new pessimism about human nature in that the policeman is forced to the realisation that he himself is capable of being as evil as the murderer he is tracking. Stylistically brilliant, it consists of the juxtaposed accounts of events as told by the different people affected, devoid of explanation, from which the reader must piece together the meaning.[4]

The most famous novel of his second period is Le Hussard sur le toit, the first part of the definitive version of the story of Angélo Pardi he had sketched in Angelo. It was published in 1951, and made into a film by

1848 revolution
.

Les Ames fortes (1950), filmed by

Raoul Ruiz in 2001, is another of the masterpieces of this period. As dark as Un Roi sans divertissement, it examines the depths a person can sink to in greed, grasping self-interest and the exploitation of others. Also as in Un Roi sans divertissement, the story is again told purely in the words of the protagonists, without the intervention of a narrator or comment from the author, thus forcing readers to reach their own conclusions. Les Grands chemins (1951), considerably less dark, deals with the nature of the road, gambling, the lie, and friendship, again in a first-person narration entirely in the voice of the protagonist and devoid of explanation or elucidation from the author.[8]

Also worthy of mention is his Voyage en Italie (1953). Neither a travel guide nor a straightforward account of a trip as the name suggests, this is a highly personal account of Giono's experiences and of the people he meets and sees that tells the reader more about Giono than about Italy.

Outside France, Giono's best-known work is probably the short story

ecological movement. He thus declined to receive any royalties from this text, and granted free use to anyone who wanted to distribute or translate it.[10]

In his later years, Giono was honoured with the

Prince Rainier of Monaco literary prize in 1953, awarded for his lifetime achievements, was elected to the Académie Goncourt in 1954, and became a member of the Conseil Littéraire of Monaco in 1963.[8]

Giono died of a heart attack in 1970.[11]

The Collège Jean Giono in

Nice is named after him, as are streets in Cannes and Fréjus
.

Works

Main article: Jean Giono bibliography

References

  1. ISBN 9782842913182
    .
  2. JSTOR 380090
    .
  3. ^ a b "Jean Giono (Biographie)". aLaLettre. Retrieved 2010-05-17.
  4. ^ a b c d e "Jean Giono: bibliographie". Pages.infinit.net. Archived from the original on 2018-01-21. Retrieved 2010-05-17.
  5. ^ Bibliographie des ouvrages de Jean GIONO[permanent dead link] (in French)
  6. ^ Forczyk, Robert (30 November 2017). Case Red: The Collapse of France. 6169: Osprey Publishing.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  7. ^ Giono. Pierre Citron, 1990
  8. ^ a b c d "Jean Giono" (in French). Republique-des-lettres.fr. Archived from the original on 2011-02-02. Retrieved 2010-05-17.
  9. ^ Giono, Jean. Oeuvres romanesques complètes. 6 vols. Edition de la Pléiade établie par Robert Ricatte. Paris: Gallimard, 1971-1983 Postface à Angelo. IV 1163-1182
  10. ^ "Jean Giono - L'homme qui plantait des arbres". Home.infomaniak.ch. Retrieved 2010-05-17.
  11. ^ "Jean Giono, le Voyageur immobile". Pages.videotron.com. Archived from the original on 2010-05-28. Retrieved 2010-05-17.

Further reading

  • "Jean Giono: From Pacifism to Collaboration". Telos 139 (Summer 2007). New York: Telos Press
  • Giono. Pierre Citron, 1990
  • Jean Giono et les techniques du roman. Pierre R. Robert, 1961

External links

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Jean Giono
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean_Giono&oldid=1174277944"