Asymptote, 2025
On Melville: A Novel by Jean Giono,
in Asymptote, translated by Tobias Ryan (initially in the Giono catalog, Gallimard-Mucem, 2019)
« … And here I am several years later. I have also confronted a strange monster, and felt my body delivered to this vassal of the sun which loomed from the depths of my fate. I escaped from that terror. I came back, but not completely. I was also caressed by the angel. This time I was ready. I obeyed. Since then I have written several books. And can set myself down as in other times on the low wall next to the lavoir—out of season—greeting Melville and Giono together, thanking those men because of whom I feel less alone all at sea. I came to venerate that essay which slipped slowly into a novel, becoming a wizard’s tale, which leads us to the immaterial line broken with an imperceptible sound, taking us to the other side, close to the great whale, in peacetime calm, a lover of the beauty that allows us to live better, a whale as white as the one which terrifies, but which above all else leads you to yourself. I wrote the books I had to write, and I wait for those that I should start. Am I seeking violent threats to bring the abyss closer yet? Symbols have their lure. Those who have brushed up against death know it well. Those who have survived are wary of hope and its promises. Those who have encountered death are lame before the world’s signs. Lame and light, too, no longer having to bear the meticulous carapace of certitude. But sitting astride the wall, I wait for the wings of imperative to beat within me, as happened to Melville before he wrote Moby Dick, said Giono, to push him toward another voyage, a hunt other than for the bestselling book he had just published, an adventure more grandiose than those in his past. No longer to go on writing the kind of insignificant books he knows how to write because [a] life’s work is of no interest unless it’s a relentless struggle with the great unknown. It’s on him to construct his compass and his rigging: In this game, you always set out to win it all or lose everything. Yes, I too am waiting for the gaping book which is stirring. On the brink of adventure, I am about to plunge into the new, toward that which swirls around me like an almost ripe cicada nymph who has yet to reach the daylight. And with fear in the belly, like Melville, to attain the deepest sleep of the bulb for the flower soon to wither. We never know when we’re writing a book whether we are the young, melancholic Ishmael or the furious Ahab. We are both, no doubt. So perhaps a brief and powerful love, like that offered to Melville (Giono, at least, transposed such), will come to break our moorings. Or some other earthquake, or, on the contrary, nothing, if not the quiet peace of uneventful days. Giono seems to be warning us that that angel has great expectations, and that we must abandon all complicity, all love, to go home, where we will sit at our desks and look at the mountain through the window, in Pittsfield, in Manosque, wherever; whatever the names of the trees, of the hills or the country set out before us. The only thing that will count is the work, hard graft, into which you can dive and in which, who knows, die. Every book costs heavily. Each one of mine has extracted a piece of my body. A pound of flesh. But so what? I’m away to befriend the guiltless birds of the high seas. I already know that, on uncertain waters, I’ll need a great wingspan and the great form of those who inhabit the tumult and the cold; I will need worldly eyes, which know how to contemplate the heavens beyond the stars, and the raft of prose on which we survive in bleak expanse, in the desert, in front of that great other. Even if, there, in the depths of the sea inside me, I know that the lavoir and wisteria live on, the faded flowers on the water, the humming insects, the wild boar which feed on grapes at night, digging up worms, the beetles and the legions of flies on the fruit and sweet blossoms, the rain and the sparkling springs, the mud again and again, and those forgotten graves covered in quiet earth.
I believe that, in this adventure, the abyss will have joined the stormy surface of the hills. The angel didn’t betray me. And the body whole has slipped into the mouth of my new book, where the formidable battles in which we engage alone and whose tumult passes silently to the rest of the world rumbles. I was finally able to speak in the language of the jays and rainbow wrasse, those of silver and of the waves, those above all of cicadas emerging from the mouths of the dead so as to fête the joy of a sunlit peace. »
2025