The Brooklyn Rail

Borrowing from Edmund White, in his introduction to Jean Giono's transitionary novel Melville, a new reader to Jean Giono should be ready for unrivaled mystical power and a non-anthropocentric foregrounding of nature. We're so accustomed to character-driven plot that it's hard to even conceive of character as background. But this is crucial to understanding the world Giono depicts. Far from static, stars swirl down to the biosphere, entering the eyes of sheep; humanity is lit by sun, floated by cloud and traveled-through by wind.

If a reader looks past the deep-ecological context and focuses on the human, The Serpent of Stars will surprisingly remind one most of a horror-free Blood Meridian, where shepherds are mythical heroes and approached with an apprentice's trepidation and deference. This is a work of great power and joy, important for understanding Giono's oeuvre and overall course.

*

I’ve been asked many times—every time I relate this shepherds’ play—if this ceremony was part of some esoteric tradition. I don’t know. I don’t believe that it was a ceremony. I’m the one who says “shepherds’ plays; ” they say, “We’re going to perform.” All the same, there are arguments for and against. To find out the truth, you would have to go stay with them through the long months in the high summer pastures, get on familiar terms with them, share their breadcrusts rubbed with garlic, and take part in those long tales of summer nights. If all goes well, by next year, I’ll have untangled the mystery. I now have a friend among the true masters of the beasts. It’s Vénérande, the head shepherd from the Saint-Trubat farm, and it’s agreed that next season, I’ll go up to spend the long months with him.

So, for me, and for the moment, I believe that it’s simply a game, a pastime, but the pastime of the masters of beasts. All the rest, every-thing that Barberousse could say about it, who’s getting old, who’s a dreamer, and who, I know, is capable of falling under the simple spell of a fountain, all the rest lies under the shadow of clouds. There is, of course, the Sardinian . . .

But, as for the Sardinian, let me explain. The Sardinian—that thin man in the red scarf from whom the whole game spatters like water shaken from a dog—the Sardinian, he’s the author. He’s the midwife of images. Moreover, he is, I know, a remarkable midwife for difficult ewes. He has long and nervous hands, as delicate as little fish, and if you had to give him all the lambs he brought to life in the furrow of his two hands, he would be richer than the richest proprietors. For the images, for the plays, it’s the same. They are all there around him, pregnant and heavy with dreams, with the beautiful coil of the serpent of stars, and, in the midst of them, he’s the midwife of the play. He’s the one who delivers the play and who makes sure it’s born completely new each time, because each time, it is born completely new, and year after year, the same words are never repeated, nor the same roles, and each time, the play has that odor of the blood and salt of newborn lambs, because everyone makes it up. The Sardinian, who is the narrator, may keep a narrative thread in his hand, always the same, that’s possible, but those around him, those shepherds who are like a seated shadow and whom you don’t see until the moment they move forward between the fires, those shepherds are never the same. Maybe you would say what Bar-berousse said to me.

“That one, it’s five years now that he’s been playing. That one, I’ve seen him twice. Those over there are new, but they help the Glaude master, and he speaks so well that he must have taught them their parts.”

No, Barberousse, the same shepherd never sits at the edge of the play twice. You tell me, “It’s five years for that one,” yes, but he’s five years older, five years richer. In that time, he has experienced things on the world’s wide back, he isn’t the same. He won’t say what he said five years ago, or what he said last year, but all that he’s learned in this new year. You know, Barberousse, dreams are the shepherd’s savings. And, very soon, he will spend this year’s savings like a boy on holiday.

Do you want me to tell you?

One fine day—one fine night, rather—the Sardinian will come again to raise his hand in greeting, and then maybe in the shadow’s wide circle there will be a young shepherd, yes, Barberousse, a young shepherd, full to bursting. And when someone calls, “the Sea,” or “the River” or “the Woods,” it’ll be that young shepherd who comes forward to speak. And you will all listen, because you are masters and you know what is beautiful. Because you are masters of the beasts and you know first of all how to be masters of yourselves when your self-love or your spitefulness want to take over. And the young shepherd will speak so well that he will become the future master. The Sardinian will give him the red woolen scarf and the great herd of your dreams will flow behind him, toward other pastures.

However, seeing this Mallefougasse plateau, these black lands clawed by the rain, these rocks that a sand plane has worn to flat tables, these trees in their homespun cloaks turning their backs on the sky’s anger, this solitude, this great voice, the spirit is immediately seized with the noble sadness and the memory of high places.

The grass is of a green gold and, when the wind ruffles it, it discovers its age underneath, as old as the earth. Blue schist, completely bare, creaks under the sun in fits and starts and suddenly cascades down to the road, making all the echoes ring. Then everything falls still. The torrent of stone stops. The schist creaks. Mallefougasse lives a life which is not vegetable. The trees there have learned to keep quiet. It freely lives the life of earth and stones. Under that light curtain of flesh, blue rocks, clay-pits, quivering eyelids of sand, throbs the interior of the world.

Everything here is religion. There, in the crushed grass, is the litter of the gods!

The little village is made up of four houses lying level with the ground and a barn called “the lookout” because it raises the sly vent of its pulley window over a bank. The other walls are flat and windowless. The stones, unplastered, are eaten away by the wind. The doors have thick bolts, all glistening with oil, which slip into their cylinders like fat black rats, silent and solid. The people from here have that long un-wavering look that goes to the core of things, through men, women, the hills, and the depths of the sky.

Thus, everything is ready on this high overhang of the earth to serve as altar and sacrificial stone, and yet, the shepherds have chosen it for other, more simple reasons.

In Crau, of course, the sheep have plenty of room, and then, there they are, in the worst of the heat along the narrow roads, squeezed together, running as one thick body, like water, with no air around them.

And so, they move through the areas where land is valuable, where, on plots the size of postage stamps, you can make money growing leeks, parsley, peaches, apricots, grapes. Just try letting them spread out there! You’ll find a shotgun exploding in your ear. Thus, you go along your flat way from one dust cloud to another, without ever stepping beyond the telegraph poles, with only one desire nevertheless, to reach the land, yes, the land! The land of leeks, parsley, peach trees, that isn’t land anymore. It’s so mixed with night soil, manure, droppings, and dung that it has become human rottenness, and they can have it! No, the land, the great land, our own, the land that remained after the flood, has dried itself off and there it is, the land where there’s room for everyone.

And Mallefougasse is it!

What’s more, when you’re there, you’re at a point where you’ve come more than a hundred kilometers along the way, and you have more than a hundred kilometers left to go. So you have the right to rest. Nothing screams in you if you lie down by the side of the road. It’s a stopping point, and it suits us just right. It’s like a great pool. The water of herds fills it at leisure, laps a bit, and then sleeps. But what is most beautiful is the great breadth of it. You don’t have to pay attention to this earth like a bit of the night, to the fearful trees, to the free movements of the wind, no, the sheep are at ease. They are there in the open, bathing in the air on all sides. The animals’ sweat smokes as if someone had just set fire to the hill. The bees who have been prisoners in their wool since the Châteauneuf hives set themselves free, flying awkwardly in this too pure air and falling into the fleece of thyme and wormwood. The ewes give birth. The males go off to push their snouts straight into the north wind, filling their brains with the fresh air until they shake off the sur-plus with a sneeze that leaves them trembling with drunkenness. All the bad folk are far off.

Here, everything is new, land and men. You have wine from Arnoulas and water in seven lovely springs. Springs as round-faced as girls, all gushing and plump. It’s true that this water is not welcoming and that it wells up without bindweed, without rushes, without peri- winkle, without moss, from between bare lips of rock. But so what, must you always have frills? Can’t you love cold water for being cold water and do you think you quibble over such things when you’ve just spent twenty days going through the dust rising from all of Provence? The water is all by itself in a stream of blue schist. It is the blue of the blue of cornflowers. When it lets out one of its braids, its white heart glistens. That’s why we choose to stop at Mallefougasse. We don’t have the same spans for measuring fear. For us, the country is wide, comfortable, flat. We have wine from Arnoulas and water in the little valley of seven springs, peace, the joy of feet. That’s why!

And then, too, it’s a kind of reunion. Sometimes you have things to say that you’ve saved for a whole year. You think, “I’ll tell him that at Mallefougasse.”

And so, it must have evolved quite naturally.

There, reunited on the sparseness of Mallefougasse, exhausted herds, heavy shepherds. Night came. They lit a fire. There was only the night full of stars, this land all alone under the sky, bordered all around by sky, and, as in the earliest times, an ocean of beasts surrounded a few men. They huddled close to the fire. The Sardinian was there that time. And he told stories about the stars above, about the earth below. He told them to make the night pass, and also because his heart was all reflections in which the soul of the world moved.