David Davis 45, part 4

a book without sex scenes

In Jean Giono’s The Song of the World, men live in rivers, women know the height of trees by their scent, avalanches are personalities, and bulls can speak to humans. There is nothing about this transcendent French novel that feels like fantasy, yet it embeds its characters in the textures of the world around them so deeply and beautifully that everything—the quickening of sap, the hunting of boar, the melting of glaciers, the burning of buildings—has an undeniably magical quality.

If magical rubs you the wrong way, some other words to orient you to this wonderful book might be pagan, primordial, or sybaritic¹. To give you a better idea of what I’m talking about, here is part of Giono’s description of the “sparkling season” of winter in the fictional region of Rebeillard:

Daylight no longer came from the sun only, out of a corner of the sky, with each thing carrying its own shadow; light bounded from all parts of the glistening snow and ice, in every direction, and the shadows were thin and sickly, bestrewn with golden dots. It seemed as if the earth had swallowed the sun and was now the sole light-maker.

Or take this autumn rainstorm:

Now they were alone on the road. Flights of dead leaves were swept off by the rain. The woods were being stripped bare. Huge water-polished oaks emerged from the downpour with their gigantic black hands clenched in the rain. The muffled breath of the larch forests; the solemn chant of the fir-groves, whose dark corridors were stirred by the slightest wind; the hiccups of new springs gushing out amidst the pastures; the brooks licking the weeds with their greedy lapping tongues; the creaking of sick trees already bare and slowly cracking in two; the hollow rumbling the big river swelling down below in the shadows of the valley—all spoke of wilderness and solitude. The rain was strong and heavy.

The New York Times Book Review described the medievally modern Song, originally published in 1934, as an epic, “in the true sense of a much-abused word.” The inspiration Giono took from the Iliad and Walt Whitman is clear². This gets at the ways in which setting and style provide the scaffolding for a Song’s riveting story: Antonio travels away from his beloved river, and the woman he can’t stop thinking about, to save a friend’s son from a powerful man’s vendetta³. It also gets at the ways in which Song is as much about Antonio as it is every other character, the rivers and forests and towns in which they find themselves, and the time before and after the action takes place.

I think it goes without saying that I recommend this book to you, but I’m writing about it for this series on the sex scene, specifically, because it doesn’t have any. The only lovemaking we see in in Song is brief, metaphorical, and not even entirely human, taking place during a fertility celebration in which a Wicker Man-style effigy is burned in the town square:

A drover had taken a lavender torch. He tucked up the skirts of the mother of wheat. He began to make love to her underneath with his blazing torch, and suddenly she took fire.

When they’re not tasked with advancing the plot, sex scenes are often relied upon to create eroticism, but Giono accomplishes this with a cast characters whose lives, while at times violent or precarious, foreground the sensuality of human (and interspecies) relations. Antonio enjoys stroking his own “velvety” body, feeling the muscles, bones, and scars under his fingers; women characters travel alone, breastfeed, give birth, have autonomy over their sex lives, and spend time with men without fearing for their safety—even while nude, as in a scene where Antonio and his friend come upon a barnful of men and women partaking in a kind of sauna situation; and violence, injury, illness, dying, and death are neither avoided nor fetishized, but experienced as natural and inevitable, if also terrible, confusing, and frightening.

I don’t mean to say that suffering or patriarchy are prerequisites for the sex scene. But I do mean to say that the sex scene is often rendered and understood as distinct from real life in literature and on the screen⁴. Song is different. Its sensual world of purpose, desire, and connection is so lush on the page that, as much as I love a good sex scene, I don’t miss it here at all.

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1. I have not seen the Marcel Camus film on which The Song of the World is based (see image up top), but the screenshots I’m finding bring to mind Old/New Hollywood bridges Dr. Zhivago (1965) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972).

2. Other comparisons I would make, some contemporary, some not: William Faulkner (/McCarthy), Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ernest Hemingway.

3. In light of a very long and intense jacket quote from Giono, a famous pacifist who was twice imprisoned (though not charged) as a Nazi sympathizer, I found myself second-guessing that effect. Here’s some of the quote:

“I have tried to make a story of adventure in which there should be absolutely nothing ‘timely.’ The present time disgusts me, even to describe…At this very time when Paris flourishes—and that is nothing to be proud of—there are people in the world who know nothing of the horrible mediocrity into which civilization, philosophers, public speakers and gossips have plunged the human race. Men who are healthy, clean and strong. They live their lives of adventure. They alone know the world’s joy and sorrow.”

It’s giving reactionary! But I know little about this author, and his Wikipedia page is spare. An interesting complication, at any rate.

4. And for this we can thank patriarchy, specifically censorship, but certainly in other expressions, too.