Joy of Man's Desiring by Jean Giono
"Joy of Man's Desiring" is a novel by Jean Giono that explores the profound relationship between humanity and nature through the experiences of Jourdan, a farmer, and a mysterious stranger named Bobi. Set in the rustic community of Gremone, the narrative begins with Jourdan feeling an inexplicable restlessness that draws him into the animated embrace of nature. Bobi, who enters Jourdan's life like a modern-day Pan, influences the community with his wisdom and a sense of joy, advocating for a deeper connection with the earth. His ideas inspire Jourdan and his wife Marthe to share a moment of mystical happiness with nature, particularly through acts of kindness toward the birds.
As the story unfolds, Bobi's presence fosters communal unity and collective joy, yet he remains a figure of profound loneliness and unfulfilled desire. The narrative weaves in themes of love, loss, and the tension between earthly pleasures and existential despair, culminating in a tragic event that underscores the complexities of human emotion. Giono's work is a rich exploration of the poetic nature of peasant life, challenging modernity's impact on the human spirit. This novel is significant in Giono's oeuvre, representing his reaction against mechanization and his celebration of the instinctual and emotional ties to the natural world.
Joy of Man's Desiring by Jean Giono
First published:Que ma joie demeure, 1935 (English translation, 1940)
Type of work: Mystical realism
Time of work: The 1930’s
Locale: The Gremone Plateau, a farming region in France
Principal Characters:
Bobi , the central character, whose mystical unity with his surroundings bonds all the other characters togetherJourdan , Bobi’s host, a farmerMarthe , his wifeAurore , the daughter of the widow, Madame HeleneJosephine , the wife of Honore
The Novel
The opening sequence of Joy of Man’s Desiring quickly establishes man’s relationship with the earth, a sense of being pervaded by all of nature. Jourdan, a farmer, finds himself inexplicably restless one late winter night: The night is virtually alive, pulsing with creation. Into this animate darkness Jourdan takes his horse and plow and begins to turn over the land. He is proceeding row by row when he sees a stranger standing on a hill, set against the stars.
Calling himself Bobi, the stranger strikes up a conversation with Jourdan as naturally as if the two men have known each other all of their lives. Strangely drawn to Bobi, Jourdan invites him back to the house, where Marthe, Jourdan’s wife, prepares breakfast; the three talk cryptically about happiness and the living earth. Bobi has already broached the idea of turning over part of Jourdan’s farm to wildflowers.
Later, Bobi and Jourdan set out on a visit to the neighboring farms. Like Jourdan, the farmers accept Bobi at once; though he is often laconic, strangely distant, he is at the same time as natural with them as are the members of their own family. He soon becomes part of the Gremone community, a sage, gentle man with an inexpressible fund of loneliness.
Bobi’s influence on the community, and on Jourdan and Marthe particularly, awakens a sense of joy among them. Bobi convinces Jourdan that the wheat Jourdan is storing could better be given to the birds—as a sort of first step in the cure of the leprosy of unhappiness which afflicts all men. In a major scene closing the first part of the novel, Jourdan and Marthe pile up a great amount of wheat, and birds flock to feed on it. Surrounded by birds, husband and wife share a moment of mystical joy.
Meanwhile, Bobi has gone into the Gremone forest, returning with a wild stag which he has named Antoine. The stag is wondrously tame, and Bobi admits that he has communed with the animal, showing it his love, trust, and understanding. The stag thus becomes not so much Bobi’s pet as a symbol of the mysteriousness of life and of the link between living things and the living earth. Antoine remains on Jourdan’s farm, though at complete liberty. Fascinated, the Gremone community visits the stag. He is of particular interest to Aurore, the beautiful daughter of the widow Helene. Aurore has seen the deer from her window and felt her kinship with it as it gamboled about her house.
The following Sunday, the community celebrates with a feast. Their joyful surrender to the innocent pleasures of food and drink and to one another’s company exhibits an almost pagan naturalness, an unaffected, spontaneous love for the things of earth. It is at this feast that Josephine, the wife of Honore, having fallen in love with Bobi, almost seduces him with the same pagan candor, which is as passionate as it is natural. Aurore, too, loves Bobi for his wholesomeness, but she becomes angry when he does not understand her attraction to him.
The following spring, the Gremone farmers, inspired by Bobi, set out to catch some does for Antoine. The hunt through the forest is one of joy and an odd peacefulness, the does almost allowing themselves to be captured in the nets.
The community united now as it had never been, Bobi proposes doing away with individual wheat fields and planting instead one communal field, uniting the labors of all in achieving the greatest joy. Gremone ignites to the idea and the climax sees all Gremone as one. In the end, the one field is plowed and Bobi senses that his purpose has been fulfilled. Sadness, even despair, closes in on him, however, when he learns that Aurore, having taken Jourdan’s revolver, has gone into the woods and killed herself. The people of Gremone bring her body home, and Bobi leaves in a thunderstorm. In the final scene, he is struck by lightning as he ponders the nature of desire and joy.
The Characters
Bobi’s first appearance in the novel is as beautiful as it is mysterious. Seen against the bright horizon of evening stars, he is a creature at home in the natural world, comfortable amid the elemental forces of wind and rain and the eternal round of seasons. He is a latter-day Pan, emerging in the late winter to pipe in for Gremone the mysterious joys of spring, the symbol of resurrection.
Yet Bobi is far from naive. Unlike Pan, he is also a twentieth century man, afflicted with a modern sadness, a loneliness that keeps him apart from those who love him. Though he can guide the farmers into a joyful search for meaning through submission to nature, he himself is enigmatically unhappy, unfulfilled, as if knowing the futility of such a search. Though he evokes passion in Josephine and deep love in Aurore, his love for them is peculiarly nonsensuous.
Jourdan is also a man of ambivalent moods. Himself restless, yearning for the mysterious peace that has eluded him, he is at heart the practical farmer and typifies the shrewd, successful peasant, a man in tune with the seasons primarily because such congruence means a better farm and a better physical existence. Yet Jourdan is ductile, mysteriously open to Bobi’s Pan-like influence. Sensing that his well-being has not made him any happier, he becomes a sort of first apostle for Bobi’s pagan evangelism.
Marthe is also in search of peace and joy, but she is content to follow her husband’s actions, to trust his decisions. Nevertheless, when the birds come to eat the wheat she has her private moment of joy and can relate with the other wives as a woman with her own ideas and intentions.
Just as Marthe remains a vital part of the Gremone community, Aurore maintains a privacy which keeps her at the virtual edge of the group. Like Bobi, Aurore has a special kinship with nature; she shares a stronger relationship with the deer of the forest than she does with her own family. She is a kind of nymph, a counterpart to Bobi’s Pan, and her attraction to him is thus easily explained as a confluence of kindred spirits.
Though characterization in the novel is really subservient to Jean Giono’s epic theme, Aurore is the most stereotypical and least successful character in the work. Her delicate beauty is all attenuated flesh and blood, not really physical but ideal. When Bobi spurns her, not fully realizing the intensity of her love, she reacts as a real woman would—in anger and perhaps in jealousy. Her suicide is melodramatic, however, emphasizing her character as a figure of romance and myth.
By contrast, Josephine is as corporeal as Aurore is ethereal. She is described in purely physical terms, a woman of full breasts and large passionate eyes. Josephine is unashamedly sensuous, but her refusal to give herself fully to Bobi illustrates her peasant morality, her strength and loyalty. Her refusal underscores, as well, the basically solitary nature of man.
Critical Context
Joy of Man’s Desiring is Giono’s fullest expression of the poetic nature of peasant life. Always a writer who glorified the natural human emotions, who chose the instinctual over the rational, Giono reacted against the more cerebral, psychological novels of his contemporaries and deliberately mined his own ground, the ruggedly beautiful region of Provence and its people. Le Chant du monde (1934; The Song of the World, 1937) was the final tale in a trilogy which protested the victimization of modern man by mechanized civilization. Joy of Man’s Desiring is the summation of that protest. Longer, richer in detail, more poetically realized than its predecessors, the book is nevertheless written in Giono’s most characteristic manner.
After World War II, he produced works in a new style: laconic, sparsely detailed, containing less poetry and more story. Some of these later works, such as Le Hussard sur le toit (1951; The Hussar on the Roof, 1953; better known as The Horseman on the Roof, 1954), are more reminiscent of the realistic tradition of Stendhal than of the poetic/mystical vein of the earlier Giono. Joy of Man’s Desiring is thus a crucial book in Giono’s canon.
Bibliography
Goodrich, Norma. Giono: Master of Fictional Modes, 1973.
Nadeau, Maurice. The French Novel Since the War, 1967.
Peyre, Henri. “Jean Giono,” in French Novelists of Today, 1967.
Redfern, W.D. The Private World of Jean Giono, 1967.
Smith, Maxwell A. Jean Giono, 1966.