The Poetics of Fire in Jean Giono’s Le Chant du Monde

Abstract

Much has been written on the power of fire. Fire imagery can be traced as far back as prehistoric times. Bachelard notes that “in our conscious lives, we have broken off direct contact with the original etymologies. But the prehistoric mind, and a fortiori the unconscious, does not detach the word from the thing. If we speak of man as full of fire, it wills something to the burning within him.”¹ Fire, for example, apart from its kindling, burning and metamorphic quality has been associated by the imagination, as Northrop Frye suggests, to the internal fire: “its sparks are analogous to seeds, the unity of life; its flickering movement is analogous to vitality; its flames are phallic symbols, providing a further analogy to the sexual act, as the ambiguity of the word ‘consummation’ indicates, its transforming power is analogous to purgation.”²