Nature is a curious thing. It is always within our grasp and also just beyond it. If you have been shorn of religious or metaphysical predilections, then you too know we are natural beings. Yet nature is always just over there, outside my window, beyond the city limit, on some far away untouched island. It is also right here: it is the bugs that crawl through your home, the forest trails down which you wander, the cold blue ocean or emerald river into which you dive on a sweltering summer’s day. Despite our status as natural beings, there is some strange distance between nature and us, a division that should not be.
There is much that can be said of this separation, and much that has been said. The history of civilization is the history of diremption, of the division into two. Some prefer to say that modernity is marked by diremption: it is there and then that man becomes divided from himself, but also from absolute knowing, nature, etc etc . A quick and cheap lesson in the history of philosophy is necessary to make sense of this. Immanuel Kant, in resolving the opposed claims of rationalism and empiricism, divides us from pure knowledge, or more technically separates cognition from the thing-in-itself; Sigmund Freud tells us that civilization brings us peace at the cost of internal disharmony; Karl Marx thinks deeply about labor – everywhere and omnipresent in our society -and concludes in 1844 that man is alienated from his species-being, that capitalist society actively produces internal division. Yet this history need not be so modern. We’ve long assumed that man is not an animal – think of the soulless dogs of Rene Descartes or the political animals of Aristotle – and thus we’ve long assumed that there is a gap between nature and us. In Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer trace this gap all the way back to Odysseus. We’ve been doomed from the start.
French novelist Jean Giono died before the emerging climate catastrophe brought such questions of seperation sharply back into focus. Yet many of his novels take place in and amongst the border between humanity and nature, within the muddled mess between them. Curiously, Giono does this through a specific figure, the figure of the peasant of French rural life. Robert Rubsam, describing Giono’s prose said that it fuses the earthly with the epic, that it imbues the peasant landscape with high poetry. Another division: between the manicured nails of the aesthete and the dirt stained hands of the peasant. Two things that seem so distant and yet are not. If we wish to know what Giono has to say to us today, some fifty years after his death in 1970, it is worth keeping this in mind.
This brings us to the publication of Giono’s late novel Ennemonde (1968), deftly translated by Bill Johnston and published by Archipelago Books. In an 1959 interview with Maxwell Smith, Giono expressed his hopes that “at the age of seventy or seventy-five” he would pen a “novel of nature without incident”. 9 years later, when Giono was 73, he published Ennemonde. Ennemonde is a novel of nature, a novel that might tells us something about this gap between humanity and its environs. This is an odd claim to make, for Ennemonde is about a woman named, well, Ennemonde. The titular character is a peasant woman who lives in the High Country. She is obese, toothless, beautiful, cunning, murderous and respected. Ennemonde is the main character, and Ennemonde is a book about Ennemonde. Yet there is a gap that separates these two – Ennemonde the novel and Ennemonde the character – for Ennemonde is not just a novel about those who live over there, outside the window or city limits. The subject of Giono’s work is not merely the relating - and I mean this literally, Giono does tell his stories so that we might relate to his bien peasants - of peasant life. It is an attempt to write nature and humanity, person and land, together.
This feature is characteristic of Giono’s work. Yet Ennemonde is not like A King Alone - Giono’s 1947 novel about the mysterious and competent Langlois – wherein the remote alpine setting, vividly depicted, is the background for a human drama. No doubt Ennemonde is a human drama too, but we would too well to pay attention to how it is told, for therein lies what makes it a novel of nature.