SOURCE: O'Brien, Mari H. “Cross-gendering the Hero, Cross-gendering the Reader: The (m)Othering of Antonio in Jean Giono's Le chant du monde.” Dalhousie French Studies 48 (fall 1999): 75-86.

In the following essay, O'Brien presents a feminist, deconstructive reading of Giono's Le chant du monde, countering Giono's own self-criticism that the book did not have a sufficiently pacifist message.

As Pierre Citron reveals in his 1990 biography, Jean Giono was never pleased with his best-selling, critically acclaimed novel Le chant du monde. Giono's own words, in a letter to a friend, attest to his dissatisfaction with this 1934 novel, his sixth, which he called “un livre raté”: “Le chant du monde a un petit côté imbécile et couillon en réalité” (qtd in Citron 195). Perhaps the novel's resemblance to a Hollywood western seemed, upon reflection, too frivolous for such serious times, or its “happy ending” too facile to the increasingly...