In this novel, the stage is set quickly with little fuss. The story opens at a village council meeting in an unnamed Swiss alpine community where the members have gathered to discuss the shortage of available grazing land for their cattle. The situation is acute and the answer seems obvious to some and ominous to others. High on the mountain lies the verdant Sasseneire pasture, abandoned for many years after an event so terrifying that the elders dare not speak of it, warning that to go back would be to invite evil to return once more. But the young, who don’t remember that time, put little stock in what seems more folklore than fact. As the Chairman argues:
“Those are just stories. No one ever really found out what happened up there. It’s been twenty years since then, all that’s in the past. To my mind, the long and the short of it is that for twenty years now we’ve been making no use of that fine grass, which could feed seventy animals all summer long; if you think the village can afford to be extravagant, then say it; myself, I don’t think so, and I’m the one who’s responsible . . .”
The debate is short; the younger folk win the vote. And so begins the process of securing the site, repairing the chalet, and, most challenging of all, finding enough men willing to spend the summer up on the mountain with the herd.
Great Fear on the Mountain, the 1926 novel by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, is a bucolic tale that takes place in the looming shadow of mystery and death with a hint of the supernatural. Ramuz (1878 – 1947) was a Swiss-French writer who, although he spent his adult years in Paris where he counted Igor Stravinsky among his close friends, continued to look to Switzerland for his fictional landscapes. He set his stories in rural communities, writing of farmers, villagers, and mountaineers often confronting disaster and tragedy. His distinctive style would later influence Jean Giono and Céline. And, it is this style, with its shifting, almost omnipresent, narrative voice, vivid depictions of nature, and the ominous repetition of key phrases, that manages to build the intensely claustrophobic atmosphere of dread that gives this spare novel its power.
Seven men ultimately come forward to go up to Sasseneire. They include the leaser of the land, Crittin, generally referred to as the master and his nephew, a young man named Joseph who hopes the extra money earned will allow him to marry his beloved sweetheart, and old Barthélemy, a survivor of the last summer on Sasseneire who wears, as a protective talisman, a bag containing a piece of paper on a rope around his neck. Along with an adolescent and another townsman, the team is rounded out with the strange, physically deformed Clou—an odd man who seems to have his own agenda.
Once they are up on the mountain with the herd, a sense of unease quickly settles over the men, becoming especially palpable once night falls:
Outside, it must have been thoroughly dark, and perhaps there were stars, perhaps there were not; they couldn’t know. Nothing could be heard. Listening did no good, nothing at all could be heard: it was like at the beginning of the world, before there were humans, or, at the end of the world after humans had retreated from the surface of the earth—nothing was moving anymore, anywhere, there was no longer anybody, nothing but air, stone, and water, things that do not smell, things that do not think, things that do not speak.
Before long, disease begins to appear among the animals. Just like the last time. The boy comes home shaking with fear, soon followed by another man. The villagers react to news of the sick cattle with alarm. They establish an armed guard on the access road to prevent anyone else from returning and spreading this mysterious illness. The remaining men and their slowly diminishing herd are essentially trapped and only Clou, who disappears each day, shows no concern about being unable to return to the village. As the men try to cope with increasingly dire circumstances, various shades of despondency and madness begin to take hold.
As the details of the events that originally led to the abandonment of the Sasseniere pasture are alluded to yet never fleshed out, the happenings this time around are equally ambiguous. And potentially much more devastating. A steady sense of dread builds and spreads, up on the mountain and down below, while around them all nature seems to be at once ambivalent and mildly malevolent. It’s a delicate balance:
It was perhaps midday. The sky was arranging itself, without paying any attention to us. At the chalet, they’d tried once again to look into the mouths of suspected animals, grasping their pink muzzle in one hand, introducing the fingers of the other between their teeth, while the animals lowed; up above them, the sky was arranging itself. It was covering itself, was turning gray, with an array of small clouds, lined up evenly spaced from one another, all around the combe, some of them capping the peaks, at such moments they’re said to be putting their hats on, others lying flat on the ridges. There was no wind.
The omniscient third person narrative occasionally shifts perspective, into second and more commonly first person plural. Bill Johnston’s translation traverses this shifting narrative terrain with ease. Great Fear on the Mountain is presented as an allegorical tale that has become part of a larger consciousness, and one that is made more suspenseful by the intentional, almost jarring, repetition of phrases and images, and the depiction of natural phenomena, such as the light and shadows on mountain peaks, as portents of ill fate. You know it can’t end well, but like all the members of this little community, you cannot see what is coming.
Great Fear on the Mountain by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz is translated from the French by Bill Johnston and published by Archipelago Books
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